It's easy to distort historical and political truths
Ihave great respect for Napier’s Pat Magill (The Whole Truth, May 10 letters) and his opinion regarding the role of truth would be widely shared by others, including myself.
Historical and political truths, however are notorious for the distortions that can be applied to them to serve particular ends.
A ‘white lie’ is a whole lie, and so is a ‘half truth’, and balanced views can be difficult to achieve when what we want to believe gets in the way.
After all, millions of Americans believe Trump when he says the presidential election was ‘stolen’, and to call the horror in Ukraine a ‘war’ is a criminal offence in Russia.
Unfortunately Tamatea principal
Robin Fabish’s address at the dawn parade in Napier fell far short of the appropriateness and fairness that a large crowd of people who had dragged themselves out of bed to honour our fallen might have expected, with the sadness of our unrestored War Memorial within sight along the beachfront.
Anzac Day honours those who fell or were war-crippled away from these shores; Māori, Pākehā, people of different tribes, ethnicities, religions; people like each or us and all of us who call this land home went and faced mortal danger.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the war situation, and regardless of whether they fully understood the reasons, they went together and paid the price under the one flag of nationhood.
Too many were buried under that, far from family or homeland. Yes, we had our own earlier conflicts here, inter-tribal, and inter-ethnic, worthy of acknowledgement certainly, but these were more about the disunity of civil war than the unity of Anzac commemorations.
When Robin Fabish challenged the use of McLean and Whitmore names locally, men after whom Napier parks have been named, and men who were associated with the Battle of Omarunui in 1866 on the grounds they caused ‘significant suffering for Māori’, his so-called ‘careful choice of words’ failed him as completely as did his sense of historical accuracy or fairness.
The 1866 attack on Hauhau Māori when they had arrived in the area and displaced Ngati Kahungunu Māori at Omarunui occurred when the suspicion that they were preparing to attack Napier was not answered by Hauhau prophet Panapa when the question was put to him by Donald McLean.
Two hundred militiamen led by
Colonel Whitmore were joined by an equal number of Kahungunu warriors to deal with this potential Hauhau threat in a short but decisive attack at Omarunui.
Robin Fabish’s presentation was in my view inappropriate for the occasion, unbalanced and unfair.
The 1800s were very damaging for the tribal Māori world, both economically and culturally, but the first half of the century was particularly brutal, with the marriage of cultural customs of utu, meaning reciprocation, and the musket.
The resultant grievance-settling intertribal warfare is estimated to have killed somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 Māori with old grievances leading to new, and prisoners being enslaved, killed and eaten, and even smoked human heads becoming tradeables for the purchase of ever more muskets.
Massacres and battles were numerous, and the number who died is estimated to exceed the number of dead in either World War I or II.
The Battle of Matakitaki in 1822 has been estimated to have cost 2000 Māori lives, almost as many who died in all of the later New Zealand Wars.
The horrors and insecurities of the Musket Wars were borne by Māori people themselves, and their desire for peace was a pathway that led to the Treaty of Waitangi itself in 1840, with its hope that the rule of law would replace the rule of violence.
The second half of the century saw the rise of the New Zealand Wars, where Māori rose up against land confiscations and what they saw as other Treaty breaches, and the rights and wrongs of this post-1840 period are the subject of legal, and other actions today.
It is important to acknowledge the place of the New Zealand Land Wars in our national history, but it is also important to acknowledge the earlier Musket Wars and their devastating effect on Māori tribal society.
Truth and honesty are interlinked. In the United States these bonds are being shattered by people who believe that lies repeated often enough become truth; the election was stolen, the assault on the Capitol was a patriotic protest.
With the disease of shameless misrepresentation taking root with millions there, the constitution and democracy itself are being challenged. Nor is our multi-ethnic society immune from these processes.