Hager: The Right Killed Rod Donald

I haven’t blogged at all on Rod Donald’s death. I have said to some that I detested everything that he stood for, and to suddenly claim some sudden grief at his passing would be hypocritical and self-centred.

I have said before that the most dangerous movement in New Zealand right now is the Green Party, and their duplicitous, envious approach to prosperity and wealth-creation in this country. They are not an environmental movement: they are a socialist brand that tries to hide its real agenda behind the caring, sharing, friendly face of conservation and protection of resources. To that end, I had no respect for what Rod Donald stood for.

Green Party members are the absolute dregs of society: anarchists, Marxists, and greedy little pinkos who want the State to capture yet more of the prosperity that individuals create. They will not be content until they have turned New Zealand back to a nirvanic ice age. When Rod Donald died, they were quite happy to manipulate the occasion so that everybody would feel a little happier about a key member of the Green movement.

But now some of them have come back out of their cages, and unhappy with the amount of glory they received, want just a little more, by politicising Donald’s death even further.

In this morning’s Herald, Nicky Hager is reported as criticizing the hypocrisy of Donald’s lifetime enemies, who praised Donald’s achievements in death. Here I don’t expect to have it both ways—people are free to mourn whomever one chooses, but I didn’t feel comfortable mourning him. I didn’t know Donald well, and didn’t have much to do with him personally. Nor did I want to. Yet Hager would have been the first to cry foul if Helen Clark, Don Brash, or Winston Peters had remained silent on Donald’s death.

But here is the clincher. At the memorial service for Donald in Wellington yesterday, Hager lands another new conspiracy: that the Right were responsible for Donald’s death. At the service, Hager said:

“He said Mr Donald had to endure taunts of "nutty" and "loony" designed to marginalise him and what he stood for. "I'm sure those years of personal attacks and put-downs were a constant strain that took their toll."

Wrong, Nicky. Rod Donald was a nut. People who told him so were just stating facts. You too are a loon. If you’re going to jump into the political arena and throw smear at others because of their ideas—as Rod Donald did, and you have always done, then you can expect people to bite back.

The reality is that the Green movement in New Zealand has not received anything like the exposure it deserves. The soft image of the Green Party—led by Jeanette and Rod—masked the fringe lunacy of ending all further electricity generation, doubling petrol taxes, having Nandor promoting cannabis use outside secondary schools, releasing violent offenders from prisons, make roading construction prohibitive, slashing defence expenditure, and the minimization of private property rights. In short, the very claims that the Exclusive Brethren made during the election campaign, which, despite the Greens’ ire and rage, were largely accurate. Yet did the media focus on the actual claims the EB’s made? No. They focused on the messenger.

That was a classic Rod Donald tactic. To shift attention away from the shoddiness and undesirability of its own policy platforms, and instead create a culture of envy against those who work to create economic prosperity. They are inherently manipulators of truth. They fight the game hard. And for all the contempt I had for Rod Donald, he was pretty good at withstanding the attacks that he got. But he didn’t get attacked nearly as often as he deserved.

But it’s a nice try, Nicky. You should write a book about it. There’s definitely a conspiracy story in there somewhere.

It is, of course, part of an attempt to lionise Rod Donald: he is no longer able to actively strategise for them, but those who are left behind can use his memory to manipulate and carry on the sordid Green agenda. It is a disgraceful claim from Hager, but somehow one that Donald probably would have approved, if only because he, more than anybody else of the Left, lived by the principle that the end justifies the means.