Fran versus The Standard

As we blogged earlier in the week, The Standard took a nasty swipe at Fran O'Sullivan last week. Her crime? Daring to have an opinion that they disagreed with.

Well; it's warming up; Fran responds in her Herald column this morning (with our emphasis added):

At various functions I have been to in Auckland this week to celebrate Chinese New Year, there has been much talk of reactionary feelings towards Chinese.

Some told me they were frightened by the vehemence and the violent language used on websites and talkback radio shows as commentators damned the Crafar sale. Some Chinese said they felt this palpable racism is also aimed at them.

There is talk about this within their own Chinese language media.

I experienced a bit of this myself last week when the website, thestandard.org.nz, branded me an "enemy of the people" for supporting the sale.

To my mind the deal provides much greater upside for New Zealand than many of the other farms sales which have gone to foreign interests in recent years.

The Standard is reputed to have been started by a bunch of Labour Party activists. Most posters won't sign their names to their comments because they are frightened they will be held responsible. They are frankly cowards.

I finally branded them the "Ku Klux Klan" of the internet world on Twitter. A bunch of lily-livered word jocks who hide behind their virtual cloaks of anonymity.

But I would have engaged them directly in the argument if they had signed their names.

The website's policy is to retain anonymity because they are frightened their commenters will be persecuted by employers or landlords - whoever - if their identities are made known.

Then there were the emailers who threatened they would blockade the Crafar farms; that Landcorp would need protection from the Diplomatic Protection Squad while they managed them for the Chinese owner. That John Key (a "traitor") should step up his own protection. So it went on.

Clearly this is an issue that needs to be addressed if we are to go forward in a unified way as a multicultural nation. And as a nation of grown-ups that forges personal and commercial ties with the new growth engines of Asia such as China and India.

Naturally, it hasn't taken long for the The Standard to respond:

Every time some rightwing ideologue calls 80% of New Zealanders racist or xenophobic because we don’t want to lose control of our future and sell our strategic assets to fall into the hands of a foreign dictatorship that is going around the world buying up key resources to secure their own supply chains at the cost of our sovereignty, and reminds us that National is letting this happen, I smile. Keep it up, Fran.

On a personal note, Fran, I thought that my fellow Standardista Redlogix’s branding you ‘enemy of the people’ was a bit off, what with its Stalinist connotations. But then I dropped the connotations and read the words: ‘enemy of the people’ – a person who works against the interests of the bulk of the population in favour of the interests an elite. In this case, in favour of military dictatorship called the Communist Party of China. Describes you pretty well, Fran.

Calling us the Klu Klux Klan though, Fran, displays a shocking level of historical ignorance and is pretty offensive to the actual victims of that group of elitists who attempted to preserve their privilege through the exercise of instituational power and violence.

Well, maybe not too shocking – you are a neoliberal after all. In the wake of the global financial crisis, still being a neoliberal demands a complete ignorance of history.

By the way, about half our regular posters use their real names these days.

I myself come from a long and proud line of Zetetics.

It seems that this battle will continue to play out for some time, and we'll watch it with some interest. In the meantime and on the question of anonymity, we still maintain that anonymity is fine if that's what the blogger chooses.

But battlelines have been drawn; this could be fun!