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ANZAC Day and Welcome to Country
Anzac Day is an Australian national holiday on 25th April each year, devised to honour the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought in WW1. Gallipoli is one of the great national myths of Australia, at the start of the the transition from colony to real country. There’s a myth of ‘lions led by donkeys’ in that the British were too slow to secure their beachhead, their officers were having tea on the beach and then we got stuck in trench warfare. This is confected but helped solidify Australia as a nation distinct from Britain.
There are Anzac values like bravery, mateship, camaraderie and ingenuity: William Scurry’s self-firing ‘drip rifle’ that was used to mask the retreat. If you went to school in Australia you’d have memories of a student mangling The Last Post on a bugle while in Assembly, everyone saying ‘lest we forget’ and speeches about sacrifice and duty and values.
More recently, there has been booing during a Welcome to Country ceremony conducted in the Melbourne Dawn Service for Anzac Day A transcript of the Welcome to Country, from Bunurong Elder and Senior Cultural Heritage Officer Mark Brown:
‘Welcome to Country’ is a new myth-building rite that’s conducted at just about all major and minor public occasions in Australia these days, where an Aboriginal comes and gives an address and affirms, in some more or less nebulous way, that his people are the real owners of the land. Maybe they're traditional custodians. Or perhaps 'sovereignty was never ceded'. Sometimes they're really small and quick, when it's just white people reading out a script in a monotone as a preamble to some trivial meeting, even zoom meetings sometimes.
One thing that I observe is this interchangeable use of the first person. He uses ‘my people’, ‘my indigenous brothers’ and also ‘our rivers’, ‘islands are ours’. Yet he also says how ‘we pay our respects to all of my elders’. He’s switching from being ‘I am here as part of all Australians present’ to ‘I am one of the true landowners, with a continuous and unbroken connection to my country’ as he sees fit. He’s paying respect as an Australian, on behalf of all others present, to himself as an indigenous elder and presenting it as an opportunity.
Maybe he adlibs too, trying to be more aggressive in the face of booing. It’s visible that he’s sad and upset about being booed.
War
Then there’s the reference to fighting Gunditijmara.
In essence, whites crushed Aboriginals wherever they came into conflict during colonization. Aboriginals largely lacked the martial culture and organization of Native Americans, who managed to inflict occasional defeats on white troops and massacre civilians with more success. The Comanche launched huge raids into Mexico and depopulated the north, did a lot of damage to Texas. None of that ever happened in Australia, it was one-sided in the extreme.
“It's believed that around 80 settlers died; while the Gunditjmara suffered the loss of 6,500 of their people, from a total of 7000.”
The SBS (state-run Australian ethnic media outlet) attribute the crushing defeat in this war of resistance partially to the Native Police, aboriginal troops with white officers. It seems that is one of the few kinds of multiculturalism that the SBS doesn’t favour:
The whole article is full of cope really, glorifying sheep-stealing raids as an epic struggle of resistance, which brings me back to my main point.
The aboriginal tribes of Australia lost incredibly badly in warfare, it was possibly the most crushing and one-sided defeat in history, largely inflicted by adhoc militias and settlers rather than troops.
Peace
Then the aboriginals won a series of incredible political victories, despite being generally hopeless.
Today they get about $6 billion AUD a year in indigenous specific services, targeted exclusively at them, in addition to regular spending. Their tax input is minimal. Expenditure per person for aboriginals is roughly twice that for non-indigenous people (in large part due to how they live out in remote locations where it’s hard to provide goods and services) and also because they’re incredibly dysfunctional, requiring welfare and adult supervision.
They get partial native title over 70% of Australia's landmass, albeit mostly the desolate parts and block development.
Petrol in remote areas needs additives put in it to stop them sniffing it and suffering brain damage.
Indigenous youth make up 55% of those in youth detention despite being only 7% of the youth. Adults, despite being only 3% of the national population, represent 33% of the prison population. They are the most incarcerated people in the world because they commit enormous amounts of crime, mostly against eachother.
There are aboriginal towns in Australia 30x more violent than the US, even more violent than the nastier American cities.
They commit 30-80x more domestic violence against women than the Australian average.
Alice Springs at one point had the world’s highest stabbing rate, mostly aboriginal women being stabbed. It hasn't significantly improved.
There are occasional ‘interventions’ when white politicians get appalled by how violent and brutal their remote towns are and decide to ban alcohol and pornography. Australian politicians love banning things. But the situation was bad, there was and remains an epidemic of abuse and child rape in Aboriginal areas, children getting STDs:
90% of school age children in some places suffering abuse.
There’s a cycle where the situation gets really bad, then the government cracks down, left-wingers and NGOs decry it as racist and authoritarian and eventually the crackdown ends. There’s no positive long term change, only expenditure of money. The only thing that’s long-term is white people being blamed, somehow white colonization is said to have caused all this pedophilia and domestic violence, general incompetence. In truth they were already doing that when whites got here, they had ancient traditions of infanticide, ritual cannibalism, scarification and intertribal warfare. I don’t see how British colonization made the aboriginals horrifically violent and rapey to eachother but Ireland remains fine despite centuries of colonization and harsh treatment. Who loses their land and decides to become a pedophile or beat their wife to a pulp?
More realistically they were just inherently stupid to begin with, which is why they never got around to agriculture or more advanced social organization. How much time and effort needs to be expended trying to make these people meet the standards of others? Why expend effort trying to make them act like white people, while also encouraging and valorizing them for their indigeneity, for sitting on Australia for 60,000 years with little to show for it? Where is the value in this? Why even try? A billion dollars represents hundreds of lifetimes of labour, taken away by the state.
Some of my friends worked with the failed referendum to give Aboriginals a Voice to Parliament (a great tool for hectoring whites and asking for more money, more privileges). The ‘real’ black aboriginal elders, the ones who aren’t cherrypicked speakers, the ones they brought in from the bush to provide a more authentic perspective, they had no conceptual understanding of legislation or abstract concepts generally, consulting them was impossible. It was like they were drunk, my politically correct friends said. Maybe they were drunk. The elite aboriginal activists weren’t that much better, constantly trying to do crazy self-defeating things. This brings me to Lydia Thorpe.
A left-leaning Melbourne seat elected a partially aboriginal woman, Lydia Thorpe, to the Senate who made a complete embarrassment of herself and the Greens Party. She was in a relationship with an outlawed bikie gang ex-president while serving on the parliamentary law enforcement committee. She applauded an arson attack of the Old Parliament House as the colonial system burning down.
In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land.
She heckled King Charles III at Parliament House and claimed she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II’s ‘hairs’ rather than ‘heirs’. She then walked it back when it was pointed out that she’d signed a document for her oath and the document was spelled correctly.
She got into an altercation outside a Melbourne strip club, approaching white patrons and telling them they had small penises and had stolen her land. She’s since been permanently banned from that strip club.
In short, she’s a racist stereotype given flesh, a single mother at 17. An idiot who thinks she’s smarter than she is and still in the Senate.
Democracy is not a suicide pact, why would any normal people tolerate wreckers who are openly trying to undermine and destroy the country that they think is illegitimate, who clearly hold their oaths in total contempt? If this woman had any actual power, it is overwhelmingly clear that she'd use it solely for her co-ethnics and to extract from whites, which was my problem with the Voice to Parliament. Ironically, she opposed that, instead demanding a treaty where various aboriginal tribes would be considered like independent states.
As a group, Aboriginals make Sub-Saharan Africans look like paragons of civilization. Some did at least develop kingdoms, metalworking and agriculture. Aboriginals did not develop Australia in any way recognizable to civilized peoples. One can only take their word for it that they have a deep, invisible, spiritual connection to the land.
And yet despite all this dysfunction and incompetence, it’s fashionable and useful to have indigenous heritage. Sometimes universities boast on social media over their blue eyed, white-faced ‘indigenous’ medical graduates, who exploit the extra help given to nominally aboriginal students and their higher IQs, less dysfunctional family upbringings to get ahead. If they’re even aboriginal at all and not just lying.
Aboriginals get their customary law partially applied in some cases, they get more lenient treatment in the real courts, with judges and police incentivized informally to reduce their incarceration, find non-punitive ways of managing their dysfunction.
They get another $AUD billion a year in preferential govt contracting.
They can even be brought in to make Anzac Day speeches where about 85% of the content is them personally claiming the country that the fallen, overwhelmingly white, soldiers fought and died for. ANZACs were not mentioned at all in Brown’s speech, only affirmations to his people's claim to the country and these unsubtle implications that he's the authority who decides who other people pay respect to. Then they take a speaking fee for that. Meanwhile, war memorials are vandalized with graffiti such as ‘the colony will fall’…
It’s as if they won a war and are enjoying the spoils from the conquered people. Isn't this world-historically bizarre?
Yet there’s been booing from the audience, organized by younger and more radical rightwingers presumably. Naturally the booing was condemned by the state premiers and those who actually run the country as disrespectful to the war dead - though none of the soldiers who spoke about the war dead were booed. Some of the more rightwing senators are taking easier potshots like ‘it’s inappropriate to have a hat on while making a speech in a Dawn Service’ or denying that veterans need to be welcomed back to their country. They don't deny the central case generally, that whites need to pay respects and pay tribute to a conquered people. Just not on Anzac Day.
Here’s a twitter topic if you want to look at some other perspectives.
Why is there only booing about this? In 1870 Bismarck edited a single letter to make the tone a little curt, like Wilhelm had abruptly rebuffed the French ambassador and sent a low-ranked officer to convey the message. Bismarck had it leaked on Bastille day and that started a major war with France. Bismarck is considered the aggressor, people generally accepted at the time the French couldn’t accept an insult like that! Hundreds of thousands died over national honour.
The conquered are giving laws to the conquerors.
This is a microcosm of the key trend of the last 100 years, whites who forcibly conquered 90% of the world bending over backwards to be nice and get forgiveness from the peoples they conquered. The conquered peoples quickly organized to take maximum possible advantage of this bizarre blunder, organizing more or less adeptly to demand treaties, land rights, welfare payments, reparations and special ceremonies to further legitimize and expand this political superiority.
Despite the passivity, it is what war is all about: obtaining land and obtaining wealth or labour from others. Political and social status. Securing these things from challengers. That is what wars are fought for, only the means are non-kinetic.
There seems to be a concept that after enough of these political ceremonies, apologies, reparations (formal or just via progressive taxation), criminal justice reforms and affirmative action black people (or blak as they sometimes call themselves in Australia) are going to be happy and we’ll all dance together in harmony. Some day the Gap will be Closed, that's the ostensible plan that Australia pursues.
If you give people money and status because you conquered them, they’re going to use this and try to get more wealth from you. If you pay for something, you get more of it. It creates incentives for professional political workers like Elder Brown to show up and hone rabblerousing, rhetorical, guilt-tripping skills. It creates incentives to be more strident and demanding to prove ideological purity and righteousness. And there’s also a massive sunk cost fallacy amongst white people. Many officials, taxpayers and donors don’t want to believe that they’ve spent billions, hundreds of billions, trillions paying subsidies, apologising to and working for low-performers who aren’t going to get their act together anytime soon and certainly aren’t going to be grateful for it. It would be incredibly embarrassing to change course now. In fact, after paying all this lip service to colonial sins and a couple trillion in foreign aid to Africa, the Global Majority of black and brown people are multiplying and migrating over to Europe, America, Australia as ‘climate refugees’, looking for more money, welfare and special privileges. Ireland never colonized anyone, yet isn't escaping diversity.
The Israelis don’t make this mistake, there aren’t any Palestinian land acknowledgements in the West Bank. They make good use of language and ritual, as did the Australians of old. In the 19th century, Australian newspapers would report on how colonists would eagerly ‘disperse’ or ‘duly and efficiently pound’ aboriginals. The Native Police would ‘give them a dressing down’, a ‘thumping’ or ‘a shaking up’.
In Israel there’s all this talk about security zones, neutralizing, mowing the lawn, suspected militants, human shields, Dahiya doctrine. This is a kind of political warfare, on the other side there are words like Holocaust, Nazi and genocide, for Australia ‘Invasion Day’ rather than Australia Day.
We obsess far too much about physical weapons, hypersonic missiles, tanks and drones. They are important in conflicts where both sides are politically strong and united: traditional interstate wars. But political weapons are more important, they control that unity and self-conception. What good is it winning wars if you lose the peace?
Better not to fight at all, especially if hopelessly outgunned and outmatched. Better to just take wealth and land slowly through legal means, engineer new rites to legitimize authority and status and national self-concept. Even traditional warfare is a contest of willpower, the capacity to endure pain and fight on for a given reward, it’s a test of political strength.
AI
No post of mine would be complete without a digression on AI... Bunurong Elder Mark Brown has an AI-written website hawking his services:
He even made an AI-written statement decrying how he was booed on linkedin:
Along with some AI jeers at Charlie Kirk too:
My assumption is that a default ChatGPT wouldn’t quite outright say ‘Charlie Kirk deserved his fate’ even though it’s inclined in that direction. I think Brown just left the memory feature on by default and it acclimated itself to his views. I imagine it would refuse his rightwing equivalent. I haven’t tested this though and don’t use ChatGPT, I’m interested in any thoughts others have with that, or other things mentioned.
I observe also that the culture war is global and only getting more global with automated cheap translation and the primacy of US media, especially social media. And AI acts as a force multiplier. I doubt Brown would’ve bothered to make a statement on Kirk if he had to write it out himself.
One wonders whether Brown is a real person or just a mouth reading out AI speeches. After all, you can’t hear an em dash as easily as you can read it. Beneath all these high-minded words, there’s this perpetual search for cash: $770 AUD for a Welcome to Country, $4500 for a keynote speech, $90 for AI designed t-shirts and hoodies. Art created by AI (made by whites and Asians), printed on T-shirts (made in America from global parts, so whites and Asians), justified by a synthetic social status.
I don't have too much to add to what you said, but I think it's interesting to note that Prince Philip's comments in 2002 about Australian aboriginals, specifically him asking if they still threw spears at each other, were vindicated entirely. Even though the Australian media generally still considers him racist over the question, "reality has a rightwing bias" it would seem. I present to you a gang fight in a rural Australian town between two aboriginal gangs, where they literally throw spears at each other (and at a cop car): https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/1gpmasx/brawl_breaks_out_in_remote_aboriginal_community/
Like, I really don't want to be uncharitable to aboriginals, but they have a dysfunction that seems to be on a whole different level than the dysfunction we see in other comparable subcultures. I've been to several Native American reservations throughout the US and gone to school and worked with several natives, I've been in ghetto black parts of cities like Oakland and LA and Baltimore, and I taught several Gypsy families as a missionary in Eastern Europe. All of these groups are doing immeasurably better than Australian aboriginals. Even if you believe that the issues these groups face are due to colonization/slavery/racism/whatever, I don't see how you can argue that Australian aboriginals got treated worse than black chattel slaves in the US. But even blacks the first generation after being freed from slavery seemed to have more civilized behavior than aboriginals centuries after being colonized.
The point I'm trying to make is that blaming colonization for the ills of aboriginals doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Similar to how people point to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the San Francisco Councils of Vigilance Act as proof that historical discrimination isn't keeping present day Asians from succeeding in America, with Australian aboriginals you can point to almost any other aboriginal or otherwise mistreated population across the world and they'll have better results despite often having been treated much worse. Whether that's the Ainu in Japan or the Kurds in the Middle East or the Navajo in America. I just don't see how continuing to lay all the blame on Europeans can continue to hold up to intellectual rigor (though I don't believe my opponents are actually trying to apply intellectual rigor here in the first place).
As a final bonus story about aboriginal dysfunction, because it's simply so absurd that it's hard to believe it's real. Truth really is stranger than fiction:
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-10784597/Wadeye-Northern-Territory-burns-22-clans-war-brutal-tribal-rivalry-violence.html
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