1820s: The Murder Olympics
September 5, 2019
By AHNZ
The Olympics (Winter or otherwise) are a good way to think about the New Zealand Musket Wars. It occurred to me that the incentives are similar and both groups of competitors access performance enhancing drugs (often illegal) so they will not get knocked out of their competition. The pre-Colonial Maori’s substance was iron and muskets, the modern athlete augment themselves with steroids and hormones etc.
“To get muskets they impoverish themselves, neglecting their agriculture in order to gather flax to buy them with, and literally starving themselves.”- The Boy Travellers in Australia (1888)
In both cases, there is temporarily enhanced ability at the cost of long-range happiness and health. Culture and character are sacrificed to the now and those who throw away their educational opportunities and personal development with the greatest vigour will out-compete their peers leaving them wounded or perhaps dead.
These ‘victors’ survive their ‘Olympics’ but as old junkies lack life skills to thrive in what remains of their life. The Maori forgot how to cultivate crops, how to parent, how to build villages, how to establish long-term settlements; The Olympians forgot to study professions anymore or learn to read and write well.
“Disruption of the Maoris’ habitual patterns of diet added to the numbers who died early. They abandoned kumara gardening, fern grubbing, fowling and fishing in favour of flour, sugar and rotten maize and potatoes.”- Cumberland
The Olympians are willing victims of state programmes to glorify and bankroll the gladiatorial contests in which they are the primary sacrificial victims. Government and media trick them into it! For pre-Colonial Maoris the Chiefly noble class and their media witchdoctors played the same role. In both cases a minority of privileged persons brainwashes populations into tribal identity politics in order to prosecute turf wars of their own with little or no care as to how many pawns it costs.
“Colonial New Zealand dawn broke over the wretched ‘dying race’ of survivors (can we really say winners?) of the Murder Olympics.The population was defined by being best able to reject sustainable culture and wreak genocide on their fellows who could not or would not.” – The Musket Junkie Wars; AHNZ
No wonder the Europeans were amazed at the proficiency in trench warfare of the Maoris in the Maori Wars; This was the event they had trained for and sacrificed so much to be able to do well. And what is more temporary and useless than an old pa site? What is more of a pointless and forgotten wasteland after it is used and abandoned? The only thing similar is one of the many Olympic villages and eventing grounds derelict and scattered around the face of the earth. Broken monuments to statism!
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Ref. Landmarks; Cumberland (1981)
Ref. 1820s: The Musket Junkie Wars
Ref. 1821: The Auckland Kill Box
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