THE INDIA-NEW ZEALAND FREE TRADE AGREEMENT STINKS

June 7, 2026
, , , , , India Trade Agreement, New Zealand Government

By John McLean

In April, 2010, the leader of the Maori Party, Peter Sharples, very quietly sneaked out of New Zealand to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This was done at the behest of the race-based Maori Party which at the time had five seats in Parliament (representing a mere 2.39% of the New Zealand population) but they supported John Key’s National government and so, as a result of Key’s cowardice and treason, this Maori Party tail was allowed to wag the National dog.

The word “treason” is used with care as the Declaration (known for short as UNDRIP) states that “indigenous people” have a right to “self-determination, autonomy and self-government of their local and internal affairs” and the recognition of customary law, etc. In other words, the breaking up of our unitary and sovereign state, which can fairly be described as “treason”. The signing of this Declaration, that is so hostile to our rights and the traditional strengths of our nation, did not go through Parliament or apparently even through Cabinet. Just a decision by Sharples, Key and Treaty Minister Christopher Finlayson, all of whom are noted for their arrogance and deceit.

None of these men had the wit or the honesty to admit that the special, race-based rights that UNDRIP gives to so-called “indigenous” people are incompatible with Article 3 of the Treaty of Waitangi which gave the Maoris all the rights of British subjects. Therefore, like any others, they are equal before the law and not entitled to superior rights by any tinpot Declaration by the United Nations which did not even exist until a century after the Treaty of Waitangi.

The previous Labour government of Helen Clark refused to sign the Declaration on the grounds that it is “fundamentally incompatible with New Zealand’s constitutional and legal arrangements” – as indeed it is .”Labour was particularly concerned about clauses which a) would guarantee Maori rights to ‘lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned’ – in other words, the entire country; b) required that all lands “taken” be replaced by others of equal size and quality – which is impossible because it ignored the legitimate claims of everyone else, and also ignores full and final settlement of historic claims; c) would effectively grant Maori a veto over all laws and decisions which might affect them, including plans for national resource management”, wrote David Round in the book, Twisting the Treaty.

At the time John Key declared in his usual smarmy way that this Declaration, violating equality and liberal democracy, was only “an expression of aspiration” that “does not alter New Zealand’s domestic law” But he was wrong – as National’s current Free Trade Agreement with India proves.

To sign our wonderful country up to UNDRIP was a fraud as it was based on the lie that the Maoris of 2010 are indigenous – which they are not since they arrived here in their canoes only about 300 years before Abel Tasman. As David Round further wrote in Twisting the Treaty, The Declaration “is not compatible with the integrity of the state of New Zealand…..If, in our own country, the descendants of Maori might run their own affairs according to their own customary law and develop their lands and laws as they please, and the Crown must seek their consent before doing anything which affects them, then at once we have separate racially defined communities on their own territories and exempt from the ordinary laws of the land”.

UNDRIP declares that certain human beings, simply because of their (undefined) status as “indigenous”, have special rights over and above those enjoyed by other citizens – just because they happened to arrive in New Zealand a few generations before the settlers from Britain, which latter were the ones who actually built the country by their sweat, toil and imagination.

Even the Maoris know that they are not indigenous as they erected a signpost at Cape Reinga saying that that was the place from which the spirits of dead Maoris leave New Zealand to return to their native land. “They then continue on their journey to Hawaiki, the spiritual home”, states the sign. Since “indigenous” means that one has always been in a place since time immemorial and so has not knowingly come from anywhere else, it is a fraud to call Maoris “indigenous” as no definition of the word could ever apply to them in respect of New Zealand.

Further evidence of fraud is that, even if, just for the sake of argument, Maoris were deemed to be indigenous at any time in the past, they are certainly not indigenous to-day. The last full blooded Maori died in the 1950s and in the twenty-first century there are apparently not even any half-bloods – just a successor race of part-Maoris with more European blood in them than Maori. This situation has been caused by their preference over the years to mate with Europeans rather than with their own people. Sharples himself has a white father of British born parents and a part-Maori mother.

Genetically there are to-day no Maoris – only part-Maori who, with less than 50% Maori blood, could not realistically be said to come within the Declaration. There is no definition of “indigenous” in the Declaration. As David Round wrote, “without such a definition the number of opportunists on a very lucrative gravy train will only continue to increase”.

Now it is another National government that, contrary to John Key’s guarantee that the Declaration is “aspirational” only without altering New Zealand’s domestic law, is for the first time going to entrench this wretched and racist Declaration into New Zealand law by including it in the Free Trade Agreement with India that Christopher Luxon and dumb little Todd McLay have master-minded in yet another National Party betrayal of the rights of New Zealanders and the sovereignty of the nation.

They have deviously sneaked into what is meant to be a free trade agreement a clause (13.2.2 a) which AFFIRMS the UNDRIP in the proposed Agreement which is the exact opposite of what we were told when Sharples and Key signed the Declaration in the first place. This gives it a binding status since a treaty is an instrument of international law. The effect of affirming the Declaration is that opportunist lawyers acting for the tribal elite will be able to cite this fact in their court cases seeking more dosh and resources for “Maori”. In the words of that perceptive lawyer, Gary Judd K.C., “New Zealand’s acceptance that UNDRIP is binding such that its principles may be utilised in the interpretation of legislation and as influencing the common law”.

Why did the National government do this? The utterly unnecessary insertion of Article 13 (2) does not improve market access for our exports to India, nor does it reduce tariffs, assist exporters or grant any clear benefit to New Zealand. It is inappropriate to bung a constitutional issue into a trade agreement and one is reminded of Stop Co-governance’s Julian Batchelor’s constant refrain that Luxon is an activist who is enthusiastically pursuing the interests of the tribal elite at the expense of ordinary New Zealanders. Constitutional matters should never be included in a free trade agreement and nor should immigration matters – and here Luxon is the Double Offender or, if you like, Double Traitor.

In addition to tens of thousands of Indians pouring into New Zealand each year by existing immigration pathways the Free Trade Agreement allows IN ADDITION the immigration of thousands more each year by three new avenues: temporary employment, a working holiday scheme, and the right of entry for specific “iconic occupations” – presumably curry cooking.

New Zealand employers are particularly happy with the “temporary employment scheme” which will wave an extra 5,000 Indians annually into New Zealand, each of them being allowed to stay here for three years, after which they can apply for (and almost certainly get) permanent New Zealand citizenship. If experience is anything to go by, these workers will undercut local wages and take jobs away from New Zealanders at a time of growing unemployment, as well as putting further pressure on the housing market. Quite a few recent cases of exploitation of labour in New Zealand have involved local Indian employers.

The “working holiday scheme” will allow an additional 1,000 Indians into New Zealand for a period of twelve months, thus providing further opportunities for exploitation of cheap labour.

India is a country with a poor human rights record. Besides the current BJP Hindu government stirring up communal violence and persecuting “dissidents” and journalists, there is also much family violence – especially against women as well as against the lower castes and religious minorities such as Sikhs, Muslims and Christians. The victims are unlikely to get any protection from government authorities in India but guess what! When they arrive in New Zealand under Liuxon’s open immigration scheme they can claim refugee status on the grounds that in India they are subject to violence and/or persecution and so gullible New Zealand will almost certainly take them in as permanent residents on the grounds that they are “persecuted refugees”.

The number of ethnic Indians already in New Zealand is around 350,000 with most of them living in Auckland. By 2023 they constituted the largest group of Asians in New Zealand and were 5.8% of the New Zealand population. About half of them are Hindus but there are also turbaned Sikhs and Christians.

In 2011 there were only 155,000 of them and so more than half of the present Indian population of New Zealand have arrived in the last fifteen years. In Australia in 2025 Indian born people made up the largest proportion of those born overseas, displacing British people for the first time. None of this is surprising as it is the Indian government’s policy to send as many Indians as possible to Western countries so as to bend those countries’ policies India’s way. All this fits in with the Great Replacement theory, which seeks to swamp white countries with Third World immigrants and “refugees” so as to displace the European population. And how they are succeeding! One only has to look at Britain – once the greatest and richest country on earth and now not much more than a repository for cunning Third World chancers.

This trick is always played in the name of “multi-culturalism” to the applause of the Western heritage-hating “liberals” in the public service, the teaching profession and our increasingly corrupt and biased media. However, the experience of multi-culturalism shows that they are wrong. In the words of Angela Merkel, former Chancellor of Germany, speaking in 2004, “We always knew the idea of a multi-cultural society cannot succeed. It is doomed to failure”. And the distinguished Canadian psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson: “Multi-culturalism is unlikely to succeed due to differing characteristics of different cultures. If you think you can import a multitude of cultures without a unifying rubric and not import the problem of interpersonal and social conflict, you’re either blind or stupid or both”.

By its very nature a multi-cultural society cannot be as safe, as trusting or as stable as a largely homogenous one, and New Zealand has already gone quite far enough down that perilous path. We have more than enough people in New Zealand of Third World extraction who have difficulty fitting into a modern Western society and we neither need nor want any more. It is time to stop all further immigration from the Third World. Diversity is not strength as the multi-culturalists so mindlessly chant. It is an inherent source of weakness. And yet by the India-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement the National government is unnecessarily exacerbating the apparent problem of “too many Indians”. And there are millions more of them to come. As already stated, their numbers have already doubled since 2011 and the rising curve is becoming ever more acute.

The population of Indian is 1.48 billion. They live in filthy cities and villages that stink of cow dung due to the fact that the Hindus regard the cow as sacred and so these beasts are free to walk the streets and do their droppings wherever they like.

Indian cities have poor infrastructure, endless traffic jams with hundreds of horns being blown by impatient drivers, millions of homeless sleeping on the streets, and pollution smothering virtually every city. In 2024 the hundred most polluted cities in the world were in Asia; eighty-three of them were in India, shaving off between three and six years of people’s lives. Why wouldn’t millions of them want to exchange all this filth, poverty and misery for a clean and spacious country like New Zealand?

India is a very corrupt country where bribery is part of daily life and there have been several recent court cases in New Zealand – often involving Indian real estate agents in Auckland – to suggest that this cultural habit does not disappear when they land at Auckland airport from the sub-continent.

India is more corrupt to-day – especially under the BJP nationalist government of Mr. Modi – than it ever was under the British Raj. The explanation is quite simple. The Englishmen of the Indian Civil Service during the Raj were well-paid professional administrators who could give their all to the task of governing India and dealing with its problems. The thought of acting so as to secure a personal financial advantage in some way or another was never part of their ethos. Since Independence the prime aim of the political/administrative class that has governed India has been to secure their own self-advantage – to feather their own nests – and therefore trying to improve the lot of the people has fallen down the priority list.

According to an Indian commentator, Jayant Bhandari, the Indian mind cannot comprehend fairness or morality or impartiality since these are European concepts that are alien to India. He claimed that human rights, especially respect for the individual (as opposed to caste groups), are a Western concept that in India are not understood.

Indian elections are rife with voting fraud and this is something that we don’t want to see introduced to New Zealand. Dajlit Singh, the President of the New Zealand Central Sikh Association, was found guilty of registering ineligible voters in Auckland in 2010 and of dealing with forged documents. Of course, he complained of “anti-immigration rhetoric”. Such behaviour is alien to New Zealand and undermines our electoral integrity and democracy.

In the local body elections of 2025 there was a team of Indians who stood as the Papatoetoe-Otara Action Team for a District Board in Auckland. None of them had been on the Board before but all were elected, with long established Board members losing their seats. At least 79 voting papers were cast without their rightful owners’ knowledge. The population of Papatoetoe is 40% Indian. For the first time in New Zealand history the High Court quashed the election result and ordered a re-election.

Indians have made a big enough mess of their own country and it is a risk too far to allow them into New Zealand in the numbers that Luxon and McLay are aiming for. So far the only political party in Parliament that has had the courage and the patriotism to speak out against this wretched Free Trade Agreement has been New Zealand First and all credit to them for doing so. The party leader, Winston Peters, has correctly described this economy sapping trade agreement as “a disgraceful sell-out”.

Indians bring to New Zealand not our common heritage from the British Isles but an alien culture, heritage and religion that, in the numbers in which they are being waved in, will erode not only our own culture and heritage but our very identity as New Zealanders as well. In the words of the former New Zealand Prime Minister, Mike Moore, writing in 2006, “We reject the historic memories of core European values and law at our peril, because these are the values and institutions that have taken us from a primitive, lonely, lovely group of islands to the front rank of nations in regard to all those things nations aspire to. In recent years we have followed the politically correct principles defined elsewhere as post-modernism and relativism. These deeply embedded theories claim that all truths are relative….Post-modernism argues the decline of absolute truths.

All values are not equal. There are modern and universal values that reflect the memories of our European history. Western societies do better in the main because of the lessons from the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment when human rights, freedom from religion and of religion, equal rights under the law, and, eventually, democracy were born….All these ideas make up modern and successful New Zealand. To get First World results, you need First World policies…..That’s why it’s chilling to see Third World values creeping into New Zealand, often done in a sense of goodwill toward cultural sensitivity”.

One of the most menacing features of a multi-cultural nation is the reduction of free speech so as not to “offend” minorities. To take a recent example, in May, 2026, Mr. Dries van Langenhove, an ex M.P. In Belgium, was convicted of “inciting hate speech” and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment as well as a fine arising out of a lecture that he gave about mass migration and changing demographics at a university in Leuven, Belgium, in February, 2024.

Using statistics and scientific data he showed that mass immigration from the Third World was linked to the rise in crime, declining school standards, prison overcrowding and was bringing strain to the social security budget. He claimed that inequality was caused by group differences rather than structural racism. All this is true. Even the judge admitted the truth of what he is alleged to have said. However, the judge pointed out that he was not being charged with spreading false information but with “presenting FACTS in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law”. The court did not even bother to say how or against whom he incited the so-called “hatred”.

The introduction of “multi-culturalism” without any democratic mandate from the people is such an unnatural and dangerous development that it is only to be expected that the native born would be opposed to it and yet people like Mr. van Langenhove, who speak the truth about it, are hounded by the courts for the terrible crime of daring to oppose the official narrative. “If you live in a country that still has free speech, never let them touch it however noble they make the motives sound because this is where it leads to”, he warned. Shades of Jacinda Ardern and her continuing war against free speech!!

The undermining of our traditional right of free speech that goes hand in hand with increased immigration  has already reared its ugly head in respect of this India Free Trade Agreement; a small immigrant activist group called Remigration New Zealand claims that it was attacked by the police in a nation wide operation with armed officers, arrests and seizures of phones, laptops and other electronic devices. Why? Because they exercised their traditional right of free speech by advocating the remigration back to India of some who are already in New Zealand.

The police action was apparently the result of a complaint made by the New Zealand Indian Central Association, the national organisation of Indians in New Zealand. This attack on free speech by an immigrant organisation is not the only mischief of this Association as one of its officials has been reported as calling for a New Zealand government apology and a formal recognition of historic racism in New Zealand against Indians, such “apology” obviously being the first step towards a demand for monetary compensation from the New Zealand taxpayer for imagined grievances dating back a century or more.

The Indians of New Zealand also have their own race-based, national newspaper called The Indian Week-ender which was granted $705,000 of taxpayers’ money via Ardern’s Public Interest Journalism Fund for no other reason than to buy the Indian vote for the Labour Party.

Instead of making themselves unpopular in New Zealand by their endless complaints, these people should be thankful to be living in a free, prosperous and comfortable country where they can make more money than in India and live in a clean environment which is so unlike the dirt of the country they come from.

It could be argued that Indians are more likely to be hostile to our heritage than other Third World immigrants since in their education system they are brought up on the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most sinister enemies that Western countries have ever had. This insufferable fraud, liar and hypocrite spent his entire working life in an anti-British campaign, whipping his excitable followers into such a frenzy of hysteria and hatred that they would then go on the rampage, burning down police stations, looting shops and attacking perceived opponents, including at Chauri Chaura where they beat to death twenty-two Indian policemen and burned their bodies.

Gandhi had little or no care for the lives of his fellow Indians. In his backward way he urged them not to get injections against smallpox and he was responsible for the death of his wife, Kasturba, because he forbade her to have an injection that would have saved her life because injections were against HIS principles. This chauvinistic treatment of his wife as a chattel shows the difference between the Hindu and Western attitudes to marriage.

Gandhi’s hatred of our British heritage and interests was so extreme that in 1942, as the Japanese enemy was preparing to invade India from Burma, he started his massive “Quit India” campaign whereby he and his followers tried to sabotage the Allied war effort by destroying 1,318 government buildings in India, 208 police stations and 332 railway stations as well as digging up rail tracks and destroying signal boxes. Fifty-seven battalions had to be deployed to deal with the internal enemy and this emasculated or delayed training, troop movements and airfield construction. At the time some 2,500,000 million Indians of the Indian Army were fighting against the Japanese – mainly in Burma – and they did not need Gandhi to put the knife into them in this way.

New Zealanders were also fighting for the British Empire and the Allied cause and so Gandhi was also an enemy of our country, its values and its interests. And yet not so long ago a statue of him was erected outside Wellington Railway Station, with Mayor Kerry Prendergast supporting it so as to secure the local Indian vote at the forthcoming council elections. One may as well have erected a statue of Hitler or Mussolini. Wellingtonians are forced to look at this insult to our servicemen of the Second World War every day when they catch the train. And this is the man whose teachings modern Indians have indoctrinated into them in their education system! Hardly likely to make them sympathetic to our British and Western ways.

We need to maintain the nation that our ancestors created and defended so that it may be recognisably the nation of their descendants. If we fail to maintain the identity of the nation, it will cease to exist in any meaningful sense and so the hopes and labours of our pioneer forebears would have been in vain.

In the words of Sir Charles Dilke, a Radical M.P. at Westminster in the time of Gladstone, “Unrestricted immigration may destroy the literature, the traditions, the nationality itself of the invaded country….A country in which Free Trade principles have been carried to their utmost logical development must be cosmopolitan and nationless”.

Multi-culturalism is intended to provide a substitute national identity. But it can’t since it is not in itself an identity and by its very nature dilutes and will ultimately destroy our existing character. This will harm both the nation and individuals since the ability to identify with one’s ancestors, with their history and culture, anchors the individual in time and place. It gives him a pride in his blood and a heritage and context for his life. From these comes an inner strength that is a shield against rootlessness and demoralisation.

Therefore, if we are to have a future as free and as good as our past, we must say No to any further immigration from the Third World – be it from Luxon’s beloved India or anywhere else. New Zealand belongs to its existing people. It is OUR country and nobody else’s. It’s not a matter of disliking Indians and others from the Third World; it’s just that we don’t want to be swamped by them and lose our culture, traditions, freedoms and identity in the process. If (probably “when”) that happens, New Zealand will be changed forever – from our own magnificent Western civilisation which has made us the fortunate country that we are – to something that is alien and far less attractive.

As part of this process the India-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement is our enemy and not our friend – as the lies of the government are trying to tell us. Any M.P. who votes for it when it comes before Parliament is unworthy of a single patriotic vote at the forthcoming General Election in November. As per the title of this article, this “Free Trade” agreement with India absolutely stinks.

IS AMERICA’S 250th “BIRTHDAY” WORTH CELEBRATING?

June 1, 2026
, , , , United States of America

By John McLean

On 4th July, 2026, is the United States 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence in 1776. It is being celebrated in America and around the world with a whole lot of ra-ra-ra, coloured balloons, silly hats and endless entertainment in Washington’s National Mall by various Z-List performers. Should we celebrate?

Over the years there has been much to admire in America – its economic advance, the energy of its people, their successful work practices, the excellent service in their hotels and restaurants, the kindness and hospitality of individual Americans, and their wonderfully entrenched free speech by virtue of the First Amendment to their Constitution.

After the Second World War, in which so much of London had been destroyed in the Blitz and subsequent bombings, groups of Americans came together and demonstrated their goodwill by paying for some of the reconstruction – members of the U.S. Air Force and their families paying for the new organ in the bombed out church of St . Clement Danes, the American Bar Association giving generously to the restoration of the bomb-damaged Halls of two of the Inns of Court (Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn), the Wesley Chapel in the City of London which bears a plaque stating for “The generous assistance given by the Methodists of the United States of America through the Council of Bishops toward the restoration of this Mother Church of World Methodism after the War of 1939-45” while the restoration of the church of All-Hallows-by-the-Tower was financed almost entirely with American donations.

At the official level the American government gave large amounts of grants and loans to Britain and to other European countries. However, this was not entirely altruistic as in the post-war chaos there was a growing support for the Communist Party in elections in Western Europe – especially in France and Italy. As a result of Roosevelt’s unfortunate behaviour at the Yalta conference Stalin was already occupying eastern and central Europe and the new administration of President Truman did not share Roosevelt’s softness towards communism. It realised that it must not allow any further extension of communism in what remained of Western Europe and so the purpose of the Marshall Plan was to boost the economies and societies of Western Europe so as to keep communism at bay and that purpose was achieved.

These are some of the positives of America and Americans; the other side of the coin is not so attractive – a superficial education system, organised crime and corruption, a tacky entertainment industry, garish fashions, the loud and domineering American wife and the pathetic, docile husband, all the boasting and the prevalence of PR over substance, an unhealthy obsession with “law enforcement” both within their borders and beyond, a crass republican system of government, and an ugly streak of intolerance that has manifested itself in such things as the Salem witchcraft trials, Prohibition in the 1920s, the “anti-smoking” crusade and the “war against drugs” which has generated so much violence and organised crime.

Theoretically New Zealanders, Australians, Canadians (and British) should have a lot in common with the English speaking United States which, like our own countries, was founded and developed by British people with a sound love of freedom and individual rights. However, as we shall see, while on a social level we have always been able to get along with Americans, the dealings by their government over the years with the other English speaking countries have not been sufficiently friendly or trustworthy to justify us in getting excited about their much vaunted “250th Birthday”.

To start with we need to go back to the 1700s and understand why they chose to rebel against the lawful authority of constitutional monarchy under which they had lived and prospered for 170 years and which still serves so well the people of the other English speaking countries.

As I wrote in my recently published book, The British Empire; A Force for Good, “A pre-condition for a successful uprising by the colonists was the removal of the French threat to their colonies and particularly to their desired expansion to the west, which was blocked by the French occupation of the Mississippi Valley. French power in North America was ended by General Wolfe’s famous victory on the Plains of Abraham at Quebec in 1759. This was followed by the Treaty of Paris 1763 by which all French territory in North America east of the Mississippi was ceded to Great Britain.”

The most serious issue between Britain and the colonists was their differing views on the Indians and of western expansion. In 1763 several of the Indian tribes collaborated and raided frontier forts and even houses from north to south. This was the most serious and destructive Indian uprising in the whole of the eighteenth century, with more than 200 settlers being killed. It was put down by regular British troops with very little assistance from the colonists themselves, thus creating a debt of gratitude which the colonists repaid just over a decade later by rising up in rebellion and fighting the very soldiers who had protected them, their families and their properties from the Indian raids.

The British authorities were faced with a dilemma; they needed to look after the Indians’ interests on the one hand but also to face the colonists’ natural desire to extend their settlements westwards into the huge and largely empty centre of the continent which was inhabited by only a few Indian tribes as well the buffaloes on which these tribes depended for their food.

More land was needed as the generations passed, large families being the norm. They did not want to be hemmed in forever along the Atlantic seaboard. In their eyes the British authorities showed too much consideration for Indian interests and not enough for those of the settlers.

Their fears were realised in 1763, the same year as the Indian raids, when the British authorities issued the Great Proclamation. This delineated a boundary (where there was not one before) to separate the settled colonies from the wild lands further west, which were reserved for the Indians. There were colonists who had already established farms and other operations west of this new line and naturally they had no intention of obeying that part of the Proclamation that required them to vacate their properties and move back east of the new line.

In the eyes of the colonists who, by their numbers as well as their economic importance, were the most important factor in the equation, it seemed that London preferred and would continue to prefer the rights of wandering natives over those of the hard working and productive settlers.

In deciding to take up arms in rebellion the colonists were motivated not only by their calculation that, with the removal of the British power, they would have a free run to chase the Indians as far west as they liked, but also by their fear that the growing anti-slavery movement in Britain would soon outlaw slavery in its American colonies. In 1772 the case of Somerset v Stewart prohibited slavery in Britain. The very next year the “war of independence” began with the Boston Tea Party. If the colonists could throw off British rule, they would be able to keep their slaves – which is exactly what they did until the Civil War of the 1860s. Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, 41 of them were slave owners, including Washington and Jefferson. This was their power grab.

Of course, they never put it like that. Instead they fought this war to give them the power to chase Indians and keep slavery in the name of “freedom”
 and “democracy”. The Declaration of Independence by this nation of slave owners and slaves stating that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” is one of the greatest absurdities and most extreme instances of hypocrisy that history has yet recorded. As the famous Doctor Johnson put it: “How is it that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of Negroes?” And this is what everyone is being expected to celebrate on 4 July!!

The founding of the United States as a haven of liberty and democracy has always been a hoax. That the fraud has survived for so long is due to the greatest propaganda exercise of all time: the 200 year plus history curriculum of America’s education system which has produced generations of misinformed, biased, anti-British people. The truth is that the founding of the American republic by means of revolution and war was not one of the more noble or uplifting instances in the human story.

The rebels’ main professed gripe was that they were being taxed while being unrepresented in the legislature at Westminster. For many years the British Exchequer had been paying for the protection of their lives and properties against the French while British soldiers were still providing them with their security from Indian raids. Despite this considerable expenditure the colonists were less heavily taxed than people of similar means in England while under their local legislatures – especially those of Connecticut and Rhode Island – they had more rights over a broad area than people in any country in Europe. The contentious taxes were not onerous. Nor were the colonists so unbearably oppressed as to justify an armed rebellion against the lawful authority and subsequent war that killed so many people on both sides.

The taxes that they allegedly felt so bitter about were relatively minor impositions. The fees imposed by the Stamp Act 1765 and the Townshend Act 1767 taxed imported glass, paper, tea and one or two other commodities and were lower than the overall taxes paid by people in Britain. As a result of the colonists’ complaints Britain revoked the taxes of the Townshend Act on all commodities except for tea. The tax on tea was kept solely to maintain the precedent for the principle that the Parliament at Westminster had the legal right to tax the colonists.

However, even this single tax on tea was unacceptable to the excitable and easily manipulated colonists who raided the shipping in Boston harbour, destroying 92,000 pounds (weight) of tea worth about 10,000 pounds belonging to the East India Company. Benjamin Franklin and others said that the perpetrators should compensate the East India Company for this act of theft – but they didn’t. In America’s education system this event, glorified as the “Boston Tea Party” stealing and destroying such a cargo, is taught as the ultimate in courage and nobility!!! With this sort of indoctrination over the centuries it is not surprising that United States governments have been applauded by their voters for stealing other countries’ property – and often their territory as well.

In the words of Paul Johnson in his masterly book, A History of the American People, “The mainland colonies were the least taxed territories on earth. Indeed, it is probably true to say that colonial America was the least taxed country in recorded history. Government was extremely small, limited in its powers, and cheap. Often it could be paid for by court fines, revenue from loan offices, or sale of lands.

New Jersey and Pennsylvania governments collected no statutory taxes at all for several decades….Until the 1760s at any rate, most mainland colonists were rarely, if ever, conscious of a tax burden. It is the closest the world has ever come to a no-tax society”. So, since the Revolution was obviously not about taxation – whether with “representation” or without – it must have been about something bigger and that “something” was the colonists’ determination to keep their millions of slaves unaffected by the growing anti-slavery movement in Britain. The decision in the 1772 case of Somerset v Stewart scared the living daylights out of the slave owners of America who regarded it as the harbinger of the destruction of their own property rights in their slaves. Much of this might be understandable but not the hypocrisy of posing forever more as the champions of “freedom” and “democracy”.

William Pitt the Elder was one of the few politicians in London who could see things clearly and he urged that all the colonists’ demands be met with the sole exception of full independence and separation from the Mother Country. It was a tragedy for humanity that this course was not followed for, if the Thirteen Colonies (and their later extended territories to the Pacific) had remained in a constitutional link with Great Britain and its empire (as Canada, Australia and New Zealand did at a later stage and still do satisfactorily), the two world wars of the twentieth century would never have taken place since Germany would never have dared to go to war with such a powerful entity as a Britain permanently linked to the entire North American continent.

Had the trans-Atlantic union held, the one great Anglo-Saxon country (along with all the other British settler colonies) under a single sovereign could have directed the affairs of the world for the betterment of mankind for the rest of time, Britain’s unique achievement of individual freedom within an orderly society being the highest point of civilisation that the deeply flawed human race has yet achieved.

Despite the post-World War Two mantra of the United States and Britain having a “special relationship” of trust and friendship the record of history shows the opposite. It began in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War when the victorious rebels were anything but gracious and magnanimous to those who had fought on the losing side or had expressed support for the established British order in any way at all; many of these were persecuted, stripped of their properties and forced to flee elsewhere – mainly to Canada. “Many left because their activities against the rebels or their outspoken opinions made it impossible for them to continue in a country where they were hated and despised as traitors…..All were victims of persecution at the hands of the rebels. Their properties were confiscated, debts owing to them were cancelled, some were tarred and feathered, a few were hanged. Small wonder that their preference for British forms of government developed into a bitter hatred of things republican”, wrote G.G. Campbell in his book, A History of Nova Scotia. (P. 168)

This was an early instance of what Paul Johnson wrote in his A History of the American People: “a utopian, intolerant, and fundamentalist streak which leaped at any opportunity to crusade and impose its creeds. It was that streak which had brought about the Civil War and then waged it with relentless ferocity”. (P. 536) President Woodrow Wilson pointed out: “Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there was ever such a thing as tolerance….The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fibre of our national life”. (Ibid)

This was also noticed by Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister in the 1890s, who wrote: “As soon as real danger touches her, the surface gloss of liberty falls off, and the latent image of despotism develops itself with startling directness”. (Victorian Titan, Andrew Roberts, P. 49) For example, during the Civil War President Lincoln arrested his political opponents, closed down opposition newspapers and suspended habeas corpus, which resulted in the internment without trial of 14,000 persons.

In the nineteenth century Britain had no more committed or troublesome enemy than the United States. “Wherever on the ocean the British merchantmen sailed, thither the American privateers followed…..They swarmed in the West Indies, where they landed and burnt small towns, leaving behind them proclamations that they had avenged the burning of Washington”.  (The Royal Navy; history of the earliest times to the present, William Laird Cowes, P. 153)

Britain was the country that ended the trans-Atlantic slave trade, starting in 1807 and ending in 1861 by which time the Royal Navy had captured or destroyed approximately 1,600 slave ships and had freed around 150.000 slaves at sea. This involved working with other nations, the least co-operative and most obstructive of which was the United States. In 1841 the U.S. Secretary of State, John Forsyth, told Congress that the “persistence” of British cruisers of the anti-slavery patrol was “unwarranted….destructive to private interests” and would “inevitably destroy the harmony of the two countries”.

From the very beginning the United States was a lawless and aggressive nation, fighting its neighbours to grab more territory – Mexico in the south-east and Spain in the Caribbean. All this was done in the name of “manifest destiny” – the ideology that the republican United States had the right to grab ALL of the North American continent – not unlike Hitler’s Lebensraum policy – invading other nations in southern and eastern Europe so as to grab “living room” for Germans to settle in.

President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, was typical of these aggressor types when he declared: “Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these 36 states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American Union”. (as quoted in Heaven’s Command, J, Morris, P. 360) The individual British colonies in Canada were particularly attractive to American greed and would have been incorporated against their will into the American republic but for the continuing presence of protective British troops.

In 1812 the United States declared war on Britain. As in the Revolutionary War it was over a minor matter that should never have led to war. During the Napoleonic War Britain put a blockade on all French and French occupied ports in Europe, insisting that neutral vessels such as American ones must first call at British ports and pay duties. Britain was also stopping United States ships at sea and taking off deserters from the Royal Navy. But Britain was fighting for her life and – as in 1940 – for the world cause of freedom from aggression. For the United States government to declare war over such relatively minor matters, which could have been resolved diplomatically, showed its immaturity as well as its greed for Canada, which latter was the main cause of the war.

On 12 July, 1812, an American force commanded by William Hull invaded Upper Canada to “free” its people from the “tyranny” of British rule. He said that he would give them “the liberty, security and wealth” that the United States enjoyed unless they preferred “war, slavery and destruction”. He was laughed back to the other side of the Detroit River by the colonists who preferred the “tyranny” of British rule to anything that the United States had on offer. Hull surrendered to British forces on 16 August.

On the eastern end of Lake Erie another American cowboy, General Stephen van Rensselaer, tried another invasion across the Niagara River but was defeated in the Battle of Queenston Heights. In 1813 a U.S. force of 5,700 troops advancing on Montreal was stopped by about 400 Canadian militia men and Indians at Chateauguay.

This was not the end of what the British called “the American Difficulty” as in 1859 a heavily armed American force under Captain George Pickett invaded the small islands of San Juan, near Vancouver Island; these islands were inhabited by British people and were regarded as part of Canada. To try to defuse the situation Captain Hornby of HMS Tribune invited Pickett on board for a discussion. Captain Hornby described him as “more quiet than most of his countrymen but he seems to have just the notion they all have of getting a name by some audacious act” – a common judgement of the typical American of the time – brash, barbaric and brutal in pursuit of their interests.

The United States has always been primarily devoted to the Almighty Dollar, and the constant chant from Washington about “freedom” and “democracy” is nothing more than window dressing as a mask for their territorial aggrandisement and exploitation of resources.

This was noticed by Charles Dickens when he visited the United States in the mid nineteenth century. He described Americans as “vulgar and insensitive, braggarts, hypocrites and acquisitive beyond all imaginings”. The country he described as “a vast counting-house full of nothing but humbugs and bores” while the leaders in Washington were “the lice of God’s creation” with their “despicable trickery at elections, under-handed tampering with public officers, and cowardly attacks upon opponents”. So, what has changed?

And Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria’s last Prime Minister: “Money lust prevails universally and operates to the exclusion not only of literature and refinement but to the destruction of good faith, honour, gentlemanliness, and high feeling”. (Victorian Titan, Andrew Roberts, P. 46)

Never was America’s love of money on display more clearly than in both world wars when, completely ignoring the rights and wrongs of the issue, they refused to come in on the side of the Allies, preferring to make money out of trading with both sides. This was in contrast to the British Empire where both Britain and the dominions declared war against the German aggressor as soon as it invaded Belgium in the First World War and Poland in the Second. In other words, we went to war for a principle – that a small nation should not have its sovereignty violated by a larger one such as the Kaiser’s Germany and Nazi Germany.

However, for all their fine words and eternal boasting about their supposed virtues, America and its people were not motivated by such a noble principle. In the First World War the U.S. government of the Democrats depended very much on the bloc votes of the Germans and the English-hating Irish and it seems that this political factor overrode all others. For some weird reason Irish-Americans have always hated England much more than the Irish in Ireland ever did.

Despite German submarines sinking American shipping the government of President Woodrow Wilson stayed out of the fighting until almost the very end
when it looked as if the British and French were going to win and so Wilson wanted a place at the eventual Peace Conference so as to be in a position to advance the interests of America’s large corporations in the post-war rebuilding.

It was on 6 April, 1917, that the United States finally declared war on Germany. It did so more out of compulsion than choice as three months earlier Germany had declared unrestricted submarine warfare against all shipping in the Atlantic, including American ships.

Despite having had nearly three years’ warning “the United States was not prepared for war, and the build-up of its forces across the Atlantic was slow”, wrote Encyclopedia Britannica in 1985. However, towards the end of the fighting they played a valuable role in reducing the salients and contributing to the Allied victory. By the time of the Armistice, signed on 11 November, 1918, some 112,432 Americans had paid the ultimate price with their young lives. This was a mere fraction of the French and British losses.

The United States might have been our ally in the later stages of the war but it was never our friend – as was shown by their attitude to war reparations. While refusing to take a cent of reparations from Germany, the aggressor that caused all the trouble, the American government and its Congress insisted that its allies, especially Britain and France, pay their war debts to America in full and with interest.

“The British government had proposed at the Peace Conference that all inter-Allied debts be canceled on the principle that money lent during the war was a contribution to the common victory. The French, heavily in debt to both Britain and America agreed. President Wilson rejected the very idea,” wrote the American author, Willliam Shirer, in his book, The Collapse of the Third Republic. (P. 151) “Britain and France during the war had both ‘hired’ money and lent it. The British government had borrowed $4 billion from the United States and lent its allies, chiefly France, nearly twice that amount. When, in 1922, being pressed by Washington for repayment, Britain announced that she would ask only enough from her Allied debtors and from German reparations to cover her payments to the United States, this was equivalent to canceling three quarters of the total amount due her. France had borrowed $3.5 billion from the United States and had lent HER allies over $5 billion….The French felt that their own sacrifices in human life, so much greater than those suffered by the Americans, to achieve Allied victory might be somewhat compensated for by the sacrifice of Yankee dollars.

But Washington was adamant. It demanded that its former allies pay up. By 1929 most of them had reluctantly agreed; the British to pay over 62 years some $11 billion on their $4 billion debt (the accrued interest nearly trebling the original debt) and the French $6.75 billion on their original debt of half that amount. Cries of Uncle Shylock!” (P. 151)

In 1939-40, as the Nazis invaded Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France, the United States clung to its “neutrality” and looked on with a mix of both amusement and horror. France had traditionally been the United States’ “oldest friend”. However, when France was fighting for its life and eventually fell to defeat in 1940, the United States sent neither a single gun nor even a spade to help its “oldest friend”.

At the same time the United States was such a “friend” to Britain that, when the latter was being bombed every night by the Luftwaffe and was on the verge of being defeated, the U.S. government required that Britain’s purchases of planes and other war equipment from America had to be paid in cash on an adverse exchange rate. If Britain required expanded purchases, they had to pay cash up front for the construction costs of expanding American factories where these things were to be made – to cover “structural and equipment costs”. The Americans drained every ounce of gold out of Britain and it was only when Britain’s foreign exchange and gold reserves were utterly empty that the Americans came in with trumpets blowing and announced “Lend-Lease” – they would pass us equipment but in return would take 99 year leases on military and naval bases in British colonies such as Bermuda and some Caribbean colonies. Under this scheme they flogged Britain outdated military equipment with loans that Britain was still repaying as late as 2006.

The United States came into the Second World War only because it was so treacherously attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbour on 8 December, 1941. Had that not occurred, it is speculative as to whether it would have lent any assistance against Japan’s aggressive moves down East Asia and into the Pacific with Australia and New Zealand as potential targets. After all, it had not done anything to help Britain and France in 1940. Of course, Australians and New Zealanders are and should always be eternally grateful to the U.S. Marines and other brave American servicemen who turned the tide at Midway and Guadalcanal and so saved our country from enemy invasion. However, this was done not out of any affection for our two countries but to win the war that the United States was at last engaged in.

In 1956, when Egypt’s quasi-communist dictator, Nasser, seized by force the largely British owned Suez Canal, Britain and France invaded the Canal Zone in order to retrieve what had been stolen. Because a presidential election was about to be held in America and Eisenhower did not want any trouble on the world stage to distract the voters, he sided with the Soviet Union to support this act of international piracy against such a vital Western interest. No different from Woodrow Wilson being reluctant to come into the First World War because of the wretched German and Irish votes.

“Millions of Britons and Frenchmen will never forget that America turned upon them and joined with the Russians to humiliate them….Since Suez it has been impossible to discuss world affairs in France without the inevitable interjection: ‘Et Suez?’….Nothing that de Gaulle has done has had a greater impact on allied relations than America’s application of power against Eden to force him to retreat from Suez”, wrote the American author, David Schoenbrun in his book, The Three Lives of Charles de Gaulle. (P. 207) As U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, later said, “To be America’s enemy may be dangerous, but to be its friend is fatal”. (Daily Telegraph, 17 January, 2024, article by Madeline Grant)

Over the 250 years since it declared its Independence the government of the United States has not often been our friend and in this third decade of the 21st century is so corrupt, greedy and untrustworthy that it is less the friend of Western interests than it has been since 1945. On its 250th “birthday” it is run by a crass and corrupt president who has sold out the United States’ true interests to foreign governments such as those of Israel and Russia and so even America has very little to celebrate.

Since the government represents the country it can be said that the United States as a nation is not our friend and never will be unless it should so suit itself in any particular circumstance such as the Second World war after Pearl Harbour. However, the grubbiness of its government should not detract from the friendliness and honesty of so many American people, many of whom would secretly agree with the words of Lee Cohen, the founder of the U.S. Congressional U.K. Caucus, writing in London’s Daily Telegraph on 15 November, 2023: “The British are deeply fortunate in having the monarchy as well as elected politicians. We did away with all that in 1776 when we chose to become a constitutional republic. But in the process we lost something precious. No matter how divisive or turbulent the state of politics, in the monarchy Britons have a symbol of national identity that reminds them of their shared values, their history and their way of life….and we Americans have nothing like it.”

John McLean is the author of the recently published book, “The British Empire; A Force For Good”. Available from: www.trosspublishing.com

WHY THE WORD AOTEAROA SHOULD BE DISCARDED

May 28, 2026
, , , , Maori Language, New Zealand History

Fellow New Zealanders,

I want to say about something far greater than politics. I speak about identity, history, truth, and the name of our nation — the name by which the world has known us for generations: that is “New Zealand”.

Names matter.

A country’s name is not simply a word on a map. It is the banner under which generations have lived, worked, fought, sacrificed, built families, built communities, and built a nation. It is the name carried by our soldiers, our sports teams, our exporters, our passports, and our people across every corner of the world.

And that name is New Zealand.

For 383 years, since 1643, this land has been internationally recognised as New Zealand. When Abel Tasman and Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu reported this discovery back to the States General — the Parliament of Holland — this land was given the name “New Zealand.” Since that time, through every generation, every law, every treaty, every map, and every international relationship, this country has been known as New Zealand.

That is not opinion.
That is historical fact.

Before European arrival, there was no single united Māori nation governing all the land, foreshore, offshore islands, and seabed of what we now know as New Zealand. Māori society was tribal in structure — iwi and hapū, each with their own territories, traditions, and identities.

There was no single nationwide Māori name that collectively described the entire landmass and surrounding territories of modern New Zealand.

That reality should not diminish Māori history or culture. Māori heritage is an important and treasured part of our nation. But respecting history also means being truthful about history.

The claim that “Aotearoa” has always been the name of the whole country is not supported by historical evidence.

The term “Aotearoa” gained wider use much later and was popularised in the late 19th century by S. Percy Smith, a European writer, through retellings and interpretations connected to his story of Kupe. It was not historically established as a unified national name covering all of modern New Zealand in pre-European times.

And so I say this clearly:
New Zealand is not a colonial insult.
New Zealand is not something to be ashamed of.
New Zealand is the name under which this nation was built.

It is the name under which Māori, European, Pacific peoples, Asians, and countless migrants from around the world came together to create one of the finest countries on Earth.

We are New Zealanders.

Not because of race.
Not because of ancestry.
But because we share a nation, a history, a future, and a common identity.

Changing or replacing our country’s name is not a small symbolic gesture. It risks dividing people where unity is needed most. It risks rewriting history instead of understanding it. And it risks disconnecting future generations from the name that has united this country for centuries.

A mature nation does not erase its past.
A mature nation acknowledges all parts of its history honestly and proudly.

We can honour Māori culture without rewriting historical fact.
We can celebrate te reo Māori without abandoning the internationally recognised name of our nation.
We can walk together as one people without pretending history was something it was not.

This country belongs to every New Zealander equally.

And the name that unites us — the name recognised throughout the world — the name carried through war, peace, hardship, triumph, and generations of shared endeavour — is New Zealand.

Let us protect it.
Let us preserve it.
Let us proudly stand beneath it.

Not divided.
Not rewritten.
But united as one people, under one enduring name:

New Zealand.

By Alfred Johns

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