Truth this week. (Lies last week.)

After reading the above opinion in last week’s Truth, I phoned editor Cameron (Whaleoil) Slater to say I was surprised he’d be party to smearing as a racist a person who advocates racial equality.

As a result, the following twice-as-spacious alternative opinion dominates page 2 of this week’s issue:

Ah, that feels better.

It’s not so much that Willie Jackson lies with impunity (and immunity, judging by the years of free airtime and column inches he’s had to spout his filth) — it’s that, on Treaty matters, he hardly ever tells the truth.

He doesn’t tell it mainly, I suspect, because he doesn’t know it.

(With no pushback, he’s never had to learn.)

So if we’re going to teach the public what really happened in the past — and how they don’t need to feel nearly as guilty as they’ve been told — we’ve got to push back against every one-eyed con artist like Willie.

Thanks to Cam Slater for giving me the right of reply.

WILLIE JACKSON IS A CHRONIC LIAR

WHO FOOLS NO ONE

Maori bully boys and extortionists like Willie Jackson like to get down in the sewer and call critics like me ‘racist’.

It’s just a trick. And it doesn’t work on me.

So why does Jackson throw mud instead of facts?

Because he knows he can’t compete on the history.

He hasn’t got a clue about what happened between the Crown and Maori in the nineteenth century.

So he just spits out an endless stream of half-truths and lies. And hopes you’ll believe him.

He’s a chronic liar.

There is, of course, a big difference between criticism and racism.

I’ve never said anything racist. That’s not me.

But I’m very critical of Maori leaders who have a financial interest in keeping their people at the bottom of all the bad stats.

That way they can keep claiming the big bucks — most of which they keep for themselves.

Jackson wants you to believe that I don’t acknowledge the Maori Tiriti.

I do.

Like Governor Hobson, I believe it’s the only Treaty that matters.

But unlike Jackson, I believe the Maori Tiriti makes it clear that the chiefs ceded sovereignty.

The Treatygate fraudsters would have you believe that the word ‘kawanatanga’ (governorship) was used in that Tiriti to mean some lesser thing than sovereignty.

They expect you to fall for the absurd notion that the chiefs were simply hiring the British government to run the country for them on some sort of management contract.

The Treaty translator, Rev. Henry Williams, was quite right to translate the word ‘sovereignty’ from Hobson’s final draft into ‘kawanatanga’ in the Maori Tiriti.

To see why, we have to go back to the 1835 Declaration of Independence, which Williams also translated.

In that document, he used a different word for ‘sovereignty’– ‘kingitanga’ (kingship).

Why the change five years later?

Simply because the sovereign had changed.

In 1835, the British sovereign was a king. And New Zealand had no governor.

But by 1840, the king had been succeeded by a queen. So Williams could hardly use the word ‘kingitanga’.

Yes, ‘kuinitanga’ might have served the purpose.

But by this stage, the queen had appointed a governor — or ‘kawana’. And the chiefs knew him personally.

(They also  knew the governor of New South Wales as the ultimate authority there. And they’d read in their Maori Bibles that the Roman bosses in Judea were also called ‘kawana’.)

So it made perfect sense for Williams to translate ‘sovereignty’ as ‘kawanatanga’.

Jackson said that I said that ‘taonga’ meant ‘spear’ in 1840.

As usual he wasn’t listening properly — or just lying.

What I said was that, according to the dictionary of the time — whose linguistic consultant was none other than Ngapuhi chief Hongi Hika — ‘taonga’ was defined as ‘property procured by the spear’.

(‘Tao’ meant ‘spear’.)

In other words, Hongi was saying his ‘taonga’ was his plunder from battle.

It was his stuff.

I doubt whether he had any plans to go spearing radio frequencies or wind farms.

Willie said I shouldn’t make a big deal of the many cruel atrocities committed by his supposedly hard-done-by Maori, because anything goes in times of war.

He ignored the fact that all too often the murderers were not at war — they were just massively overreacting to some perceived minor slight.

Marion du Fresne and his crew were butchered and eaten for fishing in the wrong bay.

The crew of the Boyd were massacred because one man was mistreated.

The Lavin children, murdered along with 70 other innocents at Matawhero, were thrown in the air and impaled on bayonets. All because Te Kooti thought he’d been wrongly imprisoned.

And, of course, the Taranaki tribes attacked, butchered and all but annihilated the welcoming, peace-loving Moriori.

That wasn’t war, Willie, that was unconscionable barbarism.

Willie also didn’t like it when I pointed out that the most revered Maori statesman of all time, Sir Apirana Ngata, acknowledged that Maori chiefs had breached the Treaty, and had only themselves to blame for having their land confiscated.

(As was the Maori custom too.)

The tragedy for Maori is that wise, honest leaders like Ngata, Buck, Carroll and Pomare are now a distant memory.

Today, the whole race is getting a bad name from the rantings of ignorant, loud-mouthed bully boys and extortionists like Hone Harawira and Willie Jackson.

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