When I saw a headline about Peter “Uncle Fester” Dutton condemning the left for trying to rewrite history, I immediately thought it was the forerunner to a leadership challenge. While I personally wouldn’t call our PM leftwing, I do realise that I’m not Peter Dutton who would probably consider Albert Speer, a bleeding heart. But no, it wasn’t about Morrison’s suggestion that we didn’t have slavery in Australia, it was the actual left who keep insisting that history is subject to re-interpretation as new information comes to light, such as the idea that there were people living here before Captain Cook’s circumnavigation… Whoops, that was another one from Morrison.
Lord of Mt George, Alexander “A Real” Downer instructed us via Twitter: “Blackbirding may have been awful by today’s standards but it wasn’t slavery. Slavery abolished in the British Empire in 1833. Blackbirding began in 1863.” This is an interesting concept. Blackbirding involved kidnapping or coercing people to work for nothing (or occasionally very little), but this wasn’t slavery because… well, the British Empire had abolished it, so we couldn’t have been doing slavery, could we? Blackbirding is different from slavery in ways that escape a commoner like me, but I’m sure that the former High Commissioner will be able to explain. Whatever, the next time the police pull me over I’m using the Downer defence, and saying that I couldn’t possibly been speeding because Australia has had speed limits for over a hundred years…
Consistency is a hard thing to achieve. I know. It’s hard to establish a general set of principles that can be applied in all situations but when I look at the state of political debate, I wonder why the politicians believe that the general public have the memory of a goldfish. (Yes, before some pedantic person points out that goldfish actually do have more than three-second memory span, I do know that but I was allowing myself a little poetic licence in order to make a point.)
At least when Scomosa Morrison counted on our collective amnesia with the black lives matter protests, many were quick to point out that when people were protesting the lockdown, Bill Gates and 5G he didn’t condemn the protest but rather argued that it was a free country. The difference, argued some, was that the earlier protest only attracted a handful of people while black lives matter protests attracted thousands. This would be a reasonable argument were it not for the fact that Morrison condemned the BLM protests and urged people to stay away before they happened. It’s almost like he expected people to disobey him, rather than do what I did and follow the suggestion to stay home and protest like a good, quiet Australian…
This, of course, means that we have a very confusing scenario. Often, when a protest attracts a large crowd, a politician will try to argue that there were more people not protesting so, therefore, the majority supports the alternative position. For these protests, we were told to stay home to reduce the risk of COVID-19 so when faced with the argument that these were a mob of leftist, AntiFa anarchists intent on causing damage, one can’t immediately dismiss them as a noisy minority. Even though I support their aims, I like millions of my fellow citizens, followed the advice of the PM and stayed home to protest.
Get out of that one, Scottie!
Of course one of the terrible things about statements like “Black lives matter” is that they have people saying stupid things like “All lives matter” or “It’s OK to be white”! Why I say they’re stupid is not because they’re not true, but because they demonstrate the very lack of awareness that anti-racists are trying to combat. If we reduce this to the personal, image the following exchange between a couple:
“I feel like you don’t care about my feelings and that my views are unimportant.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“My views are important and I think you just ignore what I’m saying sometimes.”
“No, all views are important. My views are important too. By telling me about your views, I feel that you’re ignoring my views so let’s stop this silly discussion and move on because we shouldn’t dwell on the past.”
If I’ve offended anybody by that, I’ll apologise for my bourgeois oversimplification of an issue that’s much more complex than a discussion between a couple, but I’ll only apologise if someone tells me they’re offended because that’s what old, white males do. And to be fair to myself, I am trying to make things simple enough for stupid old white males to actually grasp.
I guess the thing that makes people like that have a better understanding of the whole thing is the recent response to the Cover-19 crisis by a few politicians and some of the more rational economists. (I am using “rational” in an economic sense, which means I’m using it like the “liberal” in “Liberal Party” or the “public” in IPA.) Apparently, “All Lives Matter” but not if your life is one that stands in the way of the economy.
No, if you’re old or ill, it’s just bad luck. We need to get growth happening, so while all lives matter, some just don’t matter enough to worry about.
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