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Notes -
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.
Actually that's not totally true. Arab citizens of Israel enjoy some degree of affirmative action and Leftists in Israel are constantly pushing for the same sort of suicidal policies Leftists push for in every advanced nation.
The main differences are
(1) there are lots of Arabs in and around Israel that want to slaughter every last Jew and are aggressive, organized, and relentless about it; and
(2) the world is full of Jew-haters who inevitably blame all of this on the Israelis themselves; who twist everything in order to falsely accuse Israel of villainy; and who dismiss or ignore or defend the evil deeds of those who terrorize the Israeli people.
The ironic upshot of this persecution is that your typical Israeli is very conscious of the consequences of Leftist policies. So it's hard for the Left to get much purchase. Even so, Israel made the mistake of leaving Gaza -- with disasterous results.
Another factor is that Israel is the first advanced nation where a growing subpopulation of conservative religious types is starting to have real, general influence over internal politics. I would expect that the US is next in line to encounter such a phenomenon.
As a side note, it's worth pointing out that you yourself are one of the Jew-haters who, in effect, undermines the Left in Israel. For example, when a girl's school was blown up in Iran, I am pretty sure you were the person who was "confident" it was Israel that was responsible for the bombing. It's difficult to square this kind of arrogant and foolhardy rush to judgment with anything other than raw anti-Semitism. So probably conservatives in Israel owe you some degree of thanks.
OK, so it wasn't an Israeli bomb, it was an American bomb. But the American attack was justified as defence of Israel both informally by Rubio and formally in America's justification... in a war that Israel was very keen on and has been encouraging for decades. Netanyahu has been telling tales of Iran being weeks or months away from a nuclear bomb since the 90s. Israel has been working proficiently to bring the US into this war and keep America in the war. It serves their strategic goals if America wrecks Iran.
Blaming Israel for an American airstrike in an Israeli war, that's arrogant and foolhardy anti-semitism.
There's no phrase in common use that efficiently encapsulates the waging of a war on dubious pretences with impractical goals, wrecking the world energy system, dragging in other countries to do the serious fighting via cajoling, bribery and relentless nuclear fearmongering.
This is my point about language and political weapons, anti-semitism is up there in the top tier, albeit somewhat strained with the workload resting upon it these days.
You are weaseling here. If you had said that possibly America had dropped the bomb but even if it was the US, Israel still has some degree of responsibility, that would have been one thing. But what you said was something else. Of course, everyone makes mistakes but this one was revealing of the thought processes in your head. And it's pretty obvious that you are consumed by hatred for Israel. And it's pretty obvious why.
But I'm sort of curious: Do you think Jewish people bear any blame or responsibility for Australia's policy towards Aboriginal Australians?
You were the one insinuating that it was the Iranians that blew up their own school, which I said was debunked and silly, then you asked for a source for it being debunked, I provided it, then you said something like 'oh well even though it makes little sense to blow up their own school, Iran is such an awful country they might well do that kind of thing anyway'... What does that say about your thought process, I wonder? You imagine that your enemies are so comically evil they'll blow up their own schools just to make Israel look bad...
The US and Israel are peas in a pod with regard to this war. The US has adopted the Israeli stance of zero enrichment, an unverifiable demand. All of this in a war for Israel, since the US (if we look at a map) is not threatened by a nuclear Iran. The US is nowhere near Iran.
An American bomb or an Israeli bomb, does it really matter, in context? To you, perhaps. To the point I was making, about how this war has greatly angered the Iranians and provided strong incentives for heightened militarization? It doesn't matter at all. Do you think the Iranians see much distinction between the US and Israel at this point?
https://www.australianjewishnews.com/exploring-the-relationship-between-jewish-and-first-nations-people/
https://nswjbd.org.au/indigenous-and-jewish-australians-working-together/
Mabo's QC was Jewish, Spiegelman on the Freedom Rides and much else besides... there's abundant evidence of Jewish involvement in the aboriginal cause, such that they boast about it freely.
Unfortunately for you, it's not too hard to go back and check the actual exchange. Unsurprisingly, your account is completely false.
Here's what happened:
Me:
You:
Me:
You:
Me:
You:
Me:
You:
+++++++++++++++++++
So I was open to all possibilities, including the possibility that this was an Iranian missile that fell short. I didn't "insinuate" that Iran was (directly) responsible because I didn't know. But if I had accused Iran, I would own it. I wouldn't say something like "Well, akshually Iran was responsible for the missile because they provoked this war."
Of course I didn't rush to judgment against Iran, because I didn't know either way. You, on the other hand, arrogantly rushed to judgment against Israel even though I reminded you that the US was also involved in the war. Rather than own it, you now try to weasel out of your words.
In the grand scheme of things, perhaps not. But that's not the point. The point is that your heart is so full of hatred for Jewish people, it didn't even occur to you that it might have been an American missile. You really wanted it to be true that Jews are so evil and so bloodthirsty that they targeted a girl's school.
So that means "yes," right? You genuinely believe that Jewish people -- as a group -- bear significant responsibility and blame for Australia's policy towards Aboriginal Australians. Right?
Your obsession with the identity of the missile is bizarre, I'm not going to go into this anymore. Your main argument was silly and wrong. Bombing countries does in fact inspire hatred towards those who do bombing.
Here's what I said before this pathetic outburst of nitpicking:
And here's what you said:
You said Iran was already maximally hateful towards Israel, maximally committed to nuclear weapons. Quite clearly they were not, for they would've acquired nuclear weapons over the last 30 years of breathless Israeli fearmongering and nuked Israel with them. They haven't done this because they just aren't as vengeful and hateful as Israel. Iran doesn't have any religious anniversaries to slaughtering Jews, like Jews have in Purim. Iraq invaded their country, gassed them, fought viciously all within living memory... they didn't nuke Iraq. But you say they'd nuke Israel, they just mysteriously have all this hate in their hearts and so they need to be destroyed in escalatory strikes, the Chicago Way...
It is obvious that blowing up refineries in Tehran and making thick toxic smog is going to make Iranians upset with Israel. Along with assassinating leaders. Along with blowing up schools, whether it's Israel or America that does it. This is basic, kindergarten-tier psychology that seemingly escapes you since you classified them all as jew-haters against whom escalation has only gains, not costs. The same goes the other way around, for what it's worth. Israelis aren't going to be thrilled with Iran making them cower in bomb shelters, interrupting their sleep.
Constantly calling everyone else liars isn't going to work out forever, not when people can see the results of these wars over imaginary WMDs for themselves. Forget about me, think about all the tens, hundreds of millions who are going to be developing anti-semitism when they try to buy some petrol.
Duh, obviously they are. They boast about it. They did all kinds of agitating and lobbying and legal work, even write little children's books about Reconciliation, they write whole articles (these are just a few) talking about how their Jewish values led them in that direction, tikkun olam and all that. Are you saying I should disbelieve all these Jewish sources, call them liars? Or is the Mabo case a bit of a nothingburger, not very important? Who's the anti-semite here?
You're the one who is obsessed with the identity of the missile. Or rather, you were obsessed until it turned out the situation couldn't be twisted into a blood libel against Israel. I wish I could say that your obsession is bizarre, but unfortunately Jew hatred is all too common.
Anyway, the fact is that you misrepresented our exchange. I NEVER "insinuated" that Iran was responsible for the school situation; rather, I kept an open mind. See, I'm not a big fan of Iran but I'm not so consumed by hate that I can't think rationally.
I don't think this claim will stand up to scrutiny. Here's what I asked you last go-round. I would appreciate answers:
Well do you agree that
(1) enriching Uranium requires large amounts of specialized equipment, such as centrifuges;
(2) the Iranians did actually construct a facility with such centrifuges;
(3) those centrifuge facilities have been sabotaged and/or bombed?
Well what do you think Iran is going to do against Israel now that it wouldn't otherwise have done, given that now they are REALLY pissed off?
Lol, you are. If any lurkers are still reading, it seems /u/randomranger has provided an excellent example of my point. Is it a coincidence that (1) he aggressively criticizes Israel to the point of rushing to judgment; (2) he believes Jewish people are collectively responsible (to a significant extent) for policies of the Australian government with which he disagrees; and (3) as far as I can tell, he doesn't seriously deny that he hates Jewish people?
The question on the table is whether (1) the accusation of anti-Semitism is just a rhetorical ploy to blunt criticism of Israel or if (2) it has actual merit. It seems pretty clear to me that, at least in this situation, it's the second possibility.
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