Posted by alexandra_k on May 29, 2022, at 2:52:32
In reply to Re: most hated woman in nz, posted by alexandra_k on May 29, 2022, at 1:38:35
My grandfather was a methodist minister in New Zealand. He was a pacifist. I guess they liked the pacifists to start with, anyway, because they got the Maaori to lay down arms.
I don't know that my grandfather was involved in any of that. There were quite a few photographs of methodist camps and the like. He was very very involved in all that stuff. My grandmother was very trained to become a methodist ministers wife. She played the organ and sang and the like. Cross-stitch. You get the idea. Photos of them with the methodist camp. It seemed like a relatively large and well organised organisation.
Apparently he was the secretary at some point... Driver. Would drive teh big wigs around...
Then war came. And there was a Reverand Ormond... Who used to preach pacifism in Wellington. And he was imprisoned. And apparently grandfather was based around Petone then, near Wellington... And he was asking for permission to return to his parents farm. He wanted to set up a camp facility there. For men who were pacifists who did not want to go to the draft.
And he got permission from the Church to go back to the farm in teh King Country (just south of Waikato). But the Labor government or whatever was not supportive of allowing the men to opt out. It wanted them punished in camps... Camps with barbed wire around the fence peremeter to keep them in... Camps like that were built. Not labor camps where they were building houses or developing the farmland or doing some kind of community improvement project. They wanted to put them in detention camps. They wanted to treat them badly and make examples of them so that people would go off to war when they were told. They wanted them to comply with the government orders.
And he was imprisoned for a time. After they found men hiding on the farm. He was harboring men who wouldn't fight.
I guess he had a problem. Reverend Ormond.. I don't think he had a family. But my grandfather had a young family. He had a wife. He had 3 young kids. My mother and her two brothers.
It was a dairy farm mostly... Apparently some of the land was taken and given to a neighbour or something. Blocks of the land were carved off. My uncle was saying something about how the farm used to go across the road, as well...
But there were a few pigs.
I seem to remember a warehouse... Kind of a building. A large indoor space. Not sure... Not sure if the pigs were in there.. I don't know.
I suppose now, I think there likely was something really ratehr ominous.
My mother was very f*ck*d up. Very f*ck*d up. Very very. Very very very f*ck*d up. She says she doesn't really remember her childhood.. But just remembers a lot of fighting about politics and religion.
Grandmother was very very unhappy because she married a minister. She worked to be a ministers wife. That role in the community. Playing the organ and singing and so on.
And grandfather was unhappy because he was a pacifist. And he was trying to do what he believed was right according to the bible. ANd the labor government wasn't allowing him to... Function. I guess. Was imprisoning the congregation. Was imprisoning him.
And so then the story goes he was a pig farmer. Just a pig farmer. I think he kept writing letters... Trying to get things done...
I don't know if there was anything more sinister.
I suppose I think, now, I wonder if the cars came in the nights and if the bodies were fed to the pigs. The bodies of the objectors, or whatever. Whoever the government wanted to get rid of. Whoever was convenient.
That would kind of make sense, I suppose. I don't know whose idea it was for him to keep pigs. If it was grandfathers idea or if that was what he was required to do to not be imprisoned or go that way himself. I don't know.
But that's the thing of it, yeah? That's how you dispose of bodies. NOt hair or teeth. But everything else. If you keep a pig at 80 per cent of their body weight or similar... Then it will eat anything anything anything anything anything anything. Right?
And then there's things about him being an award winning pig farmer! Long white pigs or whatever. A large breed. A large variety. Best in class from ham to hock or something... Apparently he was renowened in the community for hte quality of the pigs.
That sounds like just the sort of thing...
The psychological torture sort of a thing that New Zealand excels in.
I don't know.
I relatively recently started trying to talk a bit to my uncle. But he was younger than mum and he doesn't remember anything. He is very obsessed with family history but he likes to talk and he doesn't even hear questions. So I asked him about things and he would sort of frown a bit and not really have anything to say... He sort of spoke from a script or a schema... He was very young. The older son died a while back.
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Power and control. Hey.
Some people want to have control over their own lives... And some other people want to have control over other people's lives...
I don't know why people want to keep people in New Zealand so poorly.
They don't see them as people much of the time, I suppose there is that.
And this hatred of where they have come from. With new money. There is a thing about that. John Key growing up in a State House. So now he's super horrible to poor people. I mean... He pulled himself up by his bootstraps it isn't that hard anybody who wants to can if you can't then you deserve to stay in the muck...
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Just the horrible horrible horrible bullying and abuse.
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I don't understand why they saw fit to ostracise me from the University.
I don't understand.
I don't understand why the people were so mean to me. Why they didn't want me to finish my Degree and so on.
I don't know why they thought it was a competition and that somehow life wasn't worth it to them or for them if I had a quality of life.
I don't know...
What the hell...
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poster:alexandra_k
thread:1119619
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20220419/msgs/1119786.html