Who's to blame for John Wanoa?

John Wanoa was all over newspapers and television news bulletins last week, after he and a group of uniformed men raided an office in downtown Auckland and forced the men and women working there outside. After he posted footage of this 'eviction' online, Wanoa was quickly arrested and charged with trespass, forcible entry, and assault. 

Wanoa's been described in the media as a 'Maori rights protester' pursuing some sort of Treaty claim, but he is actually a paranoid eccentric who has borrowed conspiracy theories about ancient civilisations from the far right of Pakeha politics. 

When I encountered John Wanoa back in 2009 he was claiming to be Moriori rather than Maori, and was busy recycling a set of myths and stereotypes that had been the stock in trade of Pakeha rednecks for a century. I wrote this post about Wanoa's attempts to appropriate Moriori history. Wanoa responded with a series of decreasingly coherent messages. He told me about his plans to build a tidal power generator, and informed me that the famous stone statues of Rapa Nui are able to levitate and move about that island. 

More recently, Wanoa has taken to claiming descent from a technologically sophisticated civilisation that supposedly existed on Rapa Nui and in Africa thousands of years ago. He has also suggested that the Treaty of Waitangi historians and lawyers acknowledge is a fake document. According to Wanoa, a secret, long-suppressed version of the Treaty confirms his worldview and entitles him to political and economic control over New Zealand. Wanoa currently claims to be the king of New Zealand and Britain, and has somehow attracted followers in both countries (here's a surreal statement by a supporter in Brighton). 

I don't think it is a coincidence that right-wing Pakeha conspiracy theorists like Martin Doutre like to talk about elaborate and forgotten ancient civilisations on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, as they invariably call it, and that Doutre and co insist that the true version of the Treaty of Waitangi has been hidden from New Zealanders. 

Wanoa may soon find himself moving from prison to the Mason clinic, or some other psychiatric facility. When Clare Swinney, another New Zealand author of elaborate conspiracy theories, was committed to a psychiatric ward a few years ago, she condemned her treatment as politically motivated. In an interview with an American conspiracy theorist, Swinney described the hospital where she was treated as a 'communist' institution, and complained that the New Zealand government was attempting to brainwash her. Wanoa's supporters would probably be credulous enough to accept a similar claim from him.

John Wanoa has no more to do with Maori activism than Clare Swinney. Like Swinney, he's the victim of a subculture of conspiracy theory and paranoia that has flourished in New Zealand like some exotic and noxious weed.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]