The Island of Slave-Keeping Cannibal Saints: Neglected History and Anti-White Ideology in New Zealand

I love islands. Real ones, metaphorical ones. I’ve spent happy holidays on Iceland, Malta, and Hawaii. I’m fascinated by linguistic isolates like Basque and Sumerian, which are islands in a sea of unrelated languages (“isolate” is from Latin insula, meaning “island”). And part of my interest in groups like Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals comes from the way that they too are like islands. They’re minorities in a sea of majorities.

The birth of the Moriori

Given all that, how could I not be interested in the Moriori? They were a minority of a minority living on islands off the coast of an island. Their homeland was the Chatham Islands, which lie in the Pacific about 800 kilometers east of New Zealand’s South Island. The Chathams were uninhabited until about 1500 A.D., when they were settled by tribes of New Zealand’s indigenous Māori. As the Māori settlers adapted to the colder climate and harsher living of their new home, they developed a distinct identity and language, those of the Moriori, and adopted what would prove a very dangerous new code of ethics. Sometime in the first century after their arrival, their chief Nunuku-whenau “outlawed bloodshed” and the Moriori abandoned three great traditions of their Māori ancestors: warfare, slavery, and cannibalism.

The Chatham Islands, homeland of the pacifist Moriori (image from Wikipedia)

In a word, the Moriori became pacifists. And there were an estimated 2000 of them when Whites first discovered their islands in 1791. If leftist lies about Whites were correct, it would have been a fatal encounter for the pacifist Moriori. Cruel Whites would have enslaved this gentle brown-skinned race, slaughtering the men, raping the women, and erasing a unique culture on the very site of its birth. But leftist lies about Whites aren’t correct and that didn’t happen. The White newcomers had no hostile intentions and although they did some harm to the Moriori by introducing European diseases like influenza and by competing with them for natural resources, the Moriori still numbered about 1600 by the 1830s.

The death of the Moriori

No, the pacifism of the Moriori was exploited by a group from much closer home: their own Māori kinsfolk. In 1835 a hijacked European ship brought 900 members of the Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama iwi, or tribes, to the Chatham Islands from mainland New Zealand. They were in effect refugees from the so-called Musket Wars, in which new European weapons allowed the martial traditions of the Māori to burst forth in an orgy of bloodshed and cannibal feasting:

In December, 1831, a taua [war-party] of nearly 4000 Waikatos made a descent on Waitara, inhabited by Ngatiawa. Several small parties of these latter fell into the hands of the enemy, and were killed and eaten; while the bulk took refuge in the strong pa, Pukerangiora. There they held out for twelve days, and then, overcome by famine, the wretched garrison tried to break out and escape. Unfortunately this was attempted in the day time. The Waikatos perceiving this, pursued and captured numbers of half-famished wretches. Mothers threw their children over the precipice which surmounts here the Waitara River, and leaped after them to avoid a more dreadful fate at the hands of their sanguinary foes. The captives were driven into whares [wooden huts], and guarded by sentries armed with sharp tomahawks. On that day the Waikatos glutted themselves with the flesh of the slain, and on the following morning nearly 200 prisoners were brought out. Those who were well tattooed were beheaded on a block for the sake of their heads; some of the remainder were slain by a blow or cut on the skull; on others every refinement of cruelty was practised, particularly the thrusting of a red-hot ramrod up the bowels. Children and youths were cut open, eviscerated, spitted, and roasted over fires made from the defences of the dismantled pa. In the afternoon a similar massacre took place, and so greedily did some of these monsters gorge, that they died from the effects of their gluttony. The feast was graced with the tattooed heads of the slain, which were stuck on short poles and placed vis-a-vis to their captors, who would at times pause in their feasting to address them with the most insulting expressions. (From a 19th-century European text on Maori cannibalism)

The same orgy of bloodshed took place on the Chatham Islands after the hijacked ship arrived. The Moriori greeted the Māori with goodwill and friendship; the Māori greeted the Moriori by killing a 12-year-old girl and hanging her butchered flesh on posts. They then embarked on what is today called the Moriori Genocide, which “included staking out women and children on the beach and leaving them to die in great pain over several days.” The Moriori outnumbered the invaders and might have fought them off, but it was decided in a council that Nunuku-whenau’s prohibition on bloodshed could not be overturned.

The same council provoked the full genocide, because the Māori invaders naturally enough assumed, from their own bloodthirsty culture, that it was a council of war and that the Moriori would now begin resisting the invasion. After the slaughter was over, the enslavement and colonialism followed. The Māoris systematically crushed Moriori culture and nationhood. As even leftist Wikipedia admits: “the Māori invaders forbade the speaking of the Moriori language. They forced Moriori to desecrate their sacred sites by urinating and defecating on them. Moriori were forbidden to marry Moriori or Māori or to have children.” By the 1860s, there were only about 100 Moriori left alive. Today there are effectively none: Tommy Solomon, the last known full-blooded member of the tribe, died in 1933. Pacifism in the face of Māori aggression resulted in extinction. And that is the sad story of the Moriori. It’s also a little-known story, because it doesn’t conform to leftist lies about the uniquely evil and destructive nature of Whites and Western civilization.

Māoris fail: Whites to blame

Contact with Whites was harmful but not fatal for the pacifist Moriori. What proved fatal was contact with their own kinsfolk, the Māori. If those Māori tribes had never gone to the Chatham Islands, the Moriori people and language would still exist today. The harm done to them by Whites was unintentional and Whites did not exploit the pacifism of the Moriori, let alone slaughter and enslave them. Nor did Whites follow Māori codes of war on the New Zealand mainland. When Whites arrived there, the Māoris were living in the Stone Age and had never seen weapons like the musket. It was the Māoris themselves who eagerly adopted White technology to attack and oppress Māoris — or rather, to attack and oppress other tribes, because there was no unified Māori identity before the arrival of Whites. Yes, there was a shared language and culture, but you can say the same of the mutually hostile Blood and Crip Black gangs in America. Māoris are in effect the Blacks of the South Pacific: primitive, violent, and woefully unequipped to succeed in an advanced industrial civilization.

For example, although Māoris are 16% of New Zealand’s population, they are 53% of those in jail there. And their crimes are disproportionately violent and sexual in nature. New Zealand has a Māori equivalent of the remarkable Black Jamaican Delroy Easton Grant, who committed dozens of rapes against elderly White women in the British capital of London. The Māori Joseph Thompson committed dozens of rapes against White women and girls in the New Zealand capital of Auckland. But the mainstream media don’t mention his race or discuss the possibility that he was practising the rape-culture of the American Black Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998), who boasted like this in 1968:

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women — and this point, I believe was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spreads outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of of consternation throughout the white race.

But the mainstream media in New Zealand do, of course, endlessly discuss the over-representation of Māoris in jail and the failure of Māoris in education and employment: “once you disaggregate the PISA scores, Pakeha [White] students are second in the world and Māori are 34th.” The media blame these Māori pathologies on White racism. After all, what else could be to blame? Nothing else, according to leftism. If there is only one human race, all groups are equally capable of high achievement and there’s no reason a Māori shouldn’t one day follow in the footsteps of the great White New Zealander Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), who won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908. In fact, contra the lies and fantasies of leftism, there’s a big obstacle to anyone with substantial Māori ancestry winning a Nobel Prize for science. Pure-blooded Māoris have low average IQ and an evolutionary history that has selected for physical prowess, not for intellectual endeavor.

Conquering the Pacific

The Māoris reached New Zealand after about 1250 A.D. as one of the last acts of a truly remarkable diaspora, which saw the prehistoric non-Chinese inhabitants of Taiwan spread their genetics and languages to islands separated by vast stretches of featureless ocean, from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east. The greatest Taiwanese-descended sailors of all were the Polynesians, who used their hard-won knowledge of night skies, ocean currents, and other natural phenomena to conquer the Pacific. The Māoris are Polynesians, like the Tongans and Samoans who also swell New Zealand’s prison population while remaining stubbornly absent from cognitively demanding fields like science and mathematics.

James Cook witnesses human sacrifice in Tahiti, c. 1773 (image from Wikipedia)

But who would expect Polynesians to succeed at science and flourish in an advanced industrial civilization? They were all still in the Stone Age when White Europeans began their even more remarkable diaspora, navigating all of the world’s oceans and literally putting Polynesia on the map. The Dutchman Abel Tasman (1603–59) discovered New Zealand in 1642, naming the islands after the Dutch province of Zeeland. Then came the great Briton James Cook (1728-79), who was once celebrated as one of the greatest explorers and self-made men in history. He rose from humble origins in north Yorkshire to become an expert navigator and favorite in the Royal Navy. By the time of his murder in Hawaii at the age of 50, he had made three astonishing voyages in the Pacific, gathering invaluable scientific and ethnographic data and creating maps that were still being used in the twentieth century.

Ruling the ruins

But it’s precisely because Cook achieved great things that he now is a prime target in the leftist war on the West. As Nietzsche sardonically explained, envy and resentment are at the heart of leftism. So is the drive to create guilt and self-doubt in those who are capable of high achievement and noble deeds. Leftists can’t add to the greatness of Western civilization, but they can do what is, in their minds, the next best thing: rule the ruins. In Pacific nations, Cook is now denounced as an instigator and agent of White colonialism, which cruelly oppressed and exploited the Māoris and other Indigenous peoples. As the Guardian put it in 2019: “Cook’s arrival was a disaster for Māori.” But nowhere near as big a disaster as the arrival of the Māori was for the Moriori. The Māori invasion of the Chatham Islands refutes leftist lies about White villainy and non-White virtue.

Victims of Maori ecocide: four species of moa compared with a human being (image from Wikipedia)

The Māori invasion would also be a highly teachable moment if leftists were sincere about their dogma of “Only one race — the human race.” Leftists claim that humans are all the same under the skin, which means that all groups can ascend the same heights of achievement — and plumb the same depths of evil. Māoris and other Polynesians were practising slavery, cannibalism, and human sacrifice long before any contact with Whites. Māoris were also energetic practitioners of the horrible modern sin of ecocide. When they arrived in New Zealand, they found a flourishing population of giant flightless birds which they called moa. Now those birds are gone: the Māoris slaughtered them even more effectively than they would later slaughter the Moriori. I greatly regret the disappearance of both the moas and the Moriori, but I don’t blame the Māoris for what they did. They were true to their own standards and pursued their own interests in a hostile world. Nevertheless, it is solid history that all the so-called sins of the West, from slavery to genocide to colonialism to ecocide, existed in microcosm among the Māori. If leftists were sincere about the oneness of humanity, they would stress that the genuinely great achievements of the Māori — the dangerous and daring discovery and settlement of a new landmass — are accompanied by some genuinely horrible misdeeds.

Whites are an island too

But leftists aren’t sincere about their pious dogmas. If they taught that Māoris and other non-Whites can also be villains, they would frustrate the real aim of their ideology: to denigrate Whites, overthrow Western civilization, and rule the ruins. That’s why leftist propaganda portrays pre-colonial New Zealand as what you might call a land of slave-keeping cannibal saints. Māoris are non-Whites, which renders them innately virtuous in leftist eyes and superior to innately villainous Whites. That leftist fantasy of innate White villainy and innate non-White virtue contradicts the leftist dogma of absolute human equality, but so what? Leftists are pursuing power, not principle, when they elevate melanin-enriched Māoris over stale pale Pākehas (as Whites are called in New Zealand). But there’s an even deeper level to leftist duplicity, because their supposedly pro-minority policies do great harm to the Māoris whom they claim to be so concerned about. Like all Western nations, New Zealand is ruled by traitors who have opened the borders to mass immigration against the wishes of the White majority.

This means that New Zealand is filling with groups like Asians, Blacks, and Muslims, who are not susceptible to guilt about the supposed colonial sins committed against the Māoris. Open borders are bad for Māoris in New Zealand just as they’re bad for Blacks in America. But leftists don’t care. What matters to them is that open borders are bad for Whites and Western civilization. The sad story of the Moriori is also a prophecy of what will happen to Whites if they remain passive in the face of non-White invasion. I said at the beginning of this article that part of my interest in minorities like Jews and Gypsies came from the way that they are metaphorical islands, minorities in a sea of goyim or gorjas (the Gypsy word for non-Gypsies). Whites are now an island in the same sense, a minority in a sea of non-Whites. Whites are also an island of unique achievement and unique potential. Leftists want to see the island of Whites invaded, conquered, and destroyed.

Moriori as memento mori

But that won’t happen. The iron law of leftism will apply to the ideology itself. And what is the iron law of leftism? Simple: the law states that leftists always most harm what they claim to care about most. Leftists in America claim to care deeply about Blacks and their welfare. Sure enough, as Steve Sailer has tirelessly and irrefutably demonstrated, leftist policies have been responsible for a horrible rise in the number of Blacks murdered and maimed by other Blacks. And also in Blacks killed by dangerous Black driving.

That’s the iron law of leftism at work. It’s also at work in the way the self-proclaimed Labour party in Britain has overseen the impoverishment and ethnic cleansing of the White working class, including the mass rape of White working-class girls in staunch Labour constituencies like Rotherham. But the same law will destroy leftism itself in the end. In the meantime, the Moriori are a gruesome memento mori of what happens to those who are passive in the face of invasion.