On a par with the (not quite serious) idea that the Illiad and Oddyseus were actually set in the Dutch province of Zeeland is the belief that New Zealand wasn’t actually settled by the Maori, but had been discovered thousands of years before their arrival by a race of Celts. You might think that something like that would be pretty noticable when the first European explorers came aknocking, but unfortunately the wicked, wicked Maori suppsoedly ate the men and raped the women, which is why there’s no trace of them left in modern day New Zealand. That and the fact that “a conspiracy of government officials, academics, museum workers, and Maori” is busily suppressing the truth.
A bog standard paranoid fantasy of the kind beloved by ancient astronaut believers everywhere. Pretty harmless really, even if incredibly annoying and more than borderline racist. But as Scott Hamilton of Reading the Maps fame explains, the kind of people
pushing these theories are far from harmless…
Doutre thinks that the same conspiracy is at work in New Zealand, suppressing the history of the Celts who supposedly settled here thousands of years ago. In an article called ‘Forbidden History – Covered Up!’, Doutre claims that ‘ancient control freak’ organisations run this conspiracy. (4) ‘Forbidden History – Covered Up!’ was published on a website called 100777.com, which identifies conspiracies by Jews and Jewish-owned banks and businesses as the cause of many of the world’s problems.
Doutre himself has enjoyed warm relations with two well-known neo-Nazis. He has maintained a friendly correspondence with David Irving, the neo-Nazi pseudo-historian whom courts in Britain and Austria have found guilty of denying the Holocaust. In a letter which is reproduced on Irving’s personal website, Martin Doutre offered the disgraced neo-Nazi help with his ‘research’ into World War Two. (5)
Doutre also maintains a friendship with Kerry Bolton, who is perhaps New Zealand’s best-known neo-Nazi. Bolton joined the fascist Nationalist Workers Party in 1977, and has been active in extreme right-wing politics ever since. In 1980 he founded the Church of Odin, a group which blended far right politics with bastardised versions of the pre-Christian Norse and Celtic religions. Jews were forbidden to join the church. More recently Bolton has been involved with the Nationalist Alliance, a coalition of neo-Nazis created to contest this year’s elections. Members of the Nationalist Alliance have convictions for assaulting Somali New Zealanders and firebombing a marae.
As a Nazi, Bolton considers that whites are superior to other races, including Maori. It was Bolton who invented the theory of a white indigenous population in a series of writings including his self-published book Lords of the Soil: the story of Turehu, the White Tangata Whenua. (6) Much of the material on the Celtic New Zealand website seems to have been either inspired by or taken directly from Bolton.
Bolton and Doutre have worked together on several projects besides the Celtic New Zealand website. Bolton has written for the website of the One New Zealand Foundation, an extreme right-wing group which Martin Doutre helps to run. The One New Zealand Foundation claims that the Treaty of Waitangi is racist, that whites are an oppressed group in New Zealand, and that the United Nations is preparing to take over the country. In an article written in 2000 called ‘Who Will Look After Them When the Pakehas Have Gone?’, One New Zealand Foundation leader Ross Baker wrote ‘thank God I’m not a Maori’, and predicted that whites would soon leave New Zealand en masse to escape their oppression. (7)