I expect this trend to continue. I'll be re-posting, or at least linking to them, on FIghting Talk, so if you're afraid of indy media don't stress.

And no doubt I'll supplement them with more personal or pointy-headed FT exclusives. Not that I'm making promises about the future content of a weblog, because that would be foolishness verging on hubris.

For those who missed the last two...

The Member of Tamaki Makaurau
Some time ago, on the discount table at Cash Converters, I came across a handwritten manuscript of great age (unfortunately I've lost the receipt). Looking over what was still legible - the paper has unfortunately been chewed over continuously by a variety of creatures - it became obvious that I was looking at one of the lost plays of William Shakespeare, titled 'The Member of Tamaki Makaurau' ...

How Transpower Ended Up In The Caymans
From: usaattorneyfirm@webmail.ru
To: parliament@govt.nz
Subject: Urgent business proposal

Surely there should be a question mark in there somewhere.

Anyway, as a description of what's so bad about the holocaust and why offhand comments about it tend to rile people, the article that follows is pretty good.

So it's odd that I'm bitching. I don't want people to think I have a crush on McLoughlin.

My beef is this: there are exactly two sentences on the whole page mentioning that anyone other than Jews were mudered.

The Nazis began rounding up Jews as well as political dissidents, homosexuals, gypsies and other groups and sending them to concentration camps.

The type of person who complains about this kind of omission usually goes on to imply that dark forces are deliberately distorting our vision of history. I believe I could hear letters to the editor being scribbled all over Wellington all weekend.

There's no conspiracy. While I'm a more than a little bemused that this particular article turned out as it did (the range of the victims was one of the first things that struck me when I looked into the subject), I see it more as what's called a 'cock-up'. Or maybe just lazy.

Perhaps because of its sheer enormity, societies tend to concentrate on the part of the Holocaust that applies most to them. The Polish have tended to thing of it as a Polish tragedy. Jewish groups concentrate on the Jewish aspect (which, let's face it, is a hell of a big aspect). And when citing Martin Niemoller's famous quotation which begins ...

First the came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist - so I did nothing...

Another example of this effect is the Spanish Inquisition. This was very much something that happened to Jews; my impression is that people who are aware of this are mostly Jewish.

Anyhow, New Zealand doesn't really have it's own angle, and as it happens that Jewish element of the Holocaust has primacy, not least because of the relative scale and the sense it was the core around which everything else was built. But we should strive for the fullest awareness of the Holocaust's victims as we can, and for a number of reasons.

Firstly for historical understanding; every lesson that can be learned should be. For instance, it may well be the most glaring instance of Homosexuality being persecuted and then that persecution being written out of history.

Secondly, for people who aren't deep enough thinkers to work it out anyway, it shows that the Holocaust wasn't just something that happened to Jews, it was something that happened to people. The same generalisation should also be drawn from the perpetrators: the holocaust was a human tragedy.

Thirdly, for a variety of reasons, it will surely annoy the Holocaust deniers, who no doubt imagine a holocaust that only kills Jewish people something of a soft target. For one thing, with the admission of all that additional evidence, they go from having no case to having less than no case.

I think that's something we can all get behind.

But first, some background.

Such research as I've done into the Holocaust - or more particularly, into holocaust denial - has left me with little patience for people who don't want to talk about it. There are still lessons to be learned, and these days we seem to be mostly forgetting.

I'm aware that other, less charismatic genocides don't get as much press time. That's not a reason to stop talking about this one. I'm aware that lots of people who weren't Jewish died in the Holocaust. That's not a reason to stop talking about the Jewish dead.

I'll also take this opportunity to encourage the letter-to-the-editor-writers that I'm sure avidly read this blog to learn to differentiate a the various Jewish organisations from each other and also actual Jewish people. And, if you're getting the hang of that, from Israel.

And that there are people living in this country who lost their families and/or nearly died themselves. I can accept both that Tamihere didn't expect his comments to be made public and that this one was peripheral to what he was talking about. Not a great excuse, but a lot of the people coming out of the woodwork don't even have that.

Perhaps the only silver lining in the whole affair is that, in the process of semi-coherently supporting Tamihere, Kyle Chapman acknowledged the reality of the Holocaust. I'd been wondering.

What I took the guy from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to be getting at - and I agree - is that political leaders need to know about the Holocaust in much the same way that space flight engineers should be interested in what happened to Challenger.

I'm not entirely sure it's a hanging offense in and of itself, though. If willful ignorance of important matters disqualified a candidate from parliament, we'd have trouble filling all those seats. It's just nasty and stupid, much like everything else he said.

The rhetorical question I have in mind arises from the way Tamihere's turn of phrase seems, like a biased survey question, to have set the terms of the whole debate. I refer to the guilt thing.

As it happens, the Allies do have some blood on their hands, both from refusing refugees early in the piece and, depending on your morals, not bombing the death camps out of operation as soon as they could. That's not what I'm talking about, though.

So here it is: when someone tells him how many Jews died in the gas chambers, why in the name of all that's holy does he think he's being made to feel guilty?

Generally, what bothers me isn't so much that I entirely disagree with their ideas or that they're noisy about promoting them, but that they seem to be taken seriously by the Phil Goffs of this world.

But they do appear to actually be a trust and so far they have mainly been concerned with sentencing.

Now the Dom Post (April 2) reports that the trust will be campaigning in support of Paul Kingi, who was convicted in March of the manslaughter of his uncle. While Garth McVicar's press release on the subject is dated as the first of the month, it doesn't seem to be an April Fools joke.

That said, the only other evidence that it's for real is the way that according to Google's cache Paul Kingi used to be in the Trust's offender database and now he isn't. Not that their database is famous for its accurate details anyway.

The press release is more helpful than the article about what's going on in McVicar's head (and apparently that of Dermot Nottingham, last seen advocating that the cop who shot Steven Wallace should got to trial). Looks like he's not saying that getting involved in a dispute over a bull which ends with you hitting the other guy so he cracks his head on the concrete floor and dies is always okay, or proposing the establishment of a new 'I was angry' defense.

It's just that this case was "in reality no more than self-defense".

This line was actually tried in front of that jury in March, but our campaigners claim to have "hard evidence" of perjury by Crown witnesses. They're just holding off until the sentencing later this week. The implication is that if Kingi gets prison time they will lay their cards on the table.

It's hard to imagine how much difference it could make. The jury presumably knew the (60 year-old) uncle had hit a farmhand earlier in the day and, if he wasn't actually attacking Paul Kingi, was sure riled. What they found was that the accused used, in the Post's words "excessive force". Given that he's a 33 year-old professional kickboxer once titled the strongest man in the country, that's easy to imagine.

Incidentally, both these guys are apparently Mormons. Just goes to show, I guess.

Anyway, the temperature of the argument was no doubt taken into account by the jury (who would also have assesed the credibility of the witnesses). If they'd thought he used reckless force and was deliberately trying to injure his uncle, they could probably have found him guilty of murder.

It's not actually okay to kill someone in a fight. If McVicar wants to change that bit of the system, it would mean releasing some of his most-cited felons.

And there has to be some kind of proportion even to pure self-defense. To take an extreme example, someone bitchslapping you isn't permission to get out your Uzi. Even then, if there's uncertainty as to whether you were really defending yourself, it needs to go to trial.

Still, they might have something earth-shattering that I'm overlooking. We can but wait and see.

What I'm vaguely hoping is that acting to clear a convicted criminal is outside the official scope of the Trust. With a bit of creativity it could probably be jimmied into their goals and policy, but I wistfully imagine the Companies Office came down on McVicar's ass.

At the very least, he's diluting his brand. I suppose that's all good.