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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27809 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Following on from the defeat of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum (seriously can we just include Torres Strait Islanders in the definition of "Aboriginal"? The whole phrase is too many words) Aboriginal leaders declared a week of silence to mourn the result.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the silence is now over. The leaders of the Yes campaign have published an open letter to the Parliament, and it is salty. So salty that reportedly some people refused to sign on to it - and perhaps that is why it appears without any names attached.

It opens by describing Australia's decision to vote no as "appalling and mean-spirited". It asserts that "It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around." It says that "the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act". So on and so forth.

In short, it is very much filled with the sort of resentment and hostility that turns people off, hard. Even on the normally far left /r/australia subreddit, posters are tearing strips off it.

This is of course a terrible time for the Yes campaigners to be acting in this way. With the failure of the Voice, indigenous policy is in a state of flux. The government is licking its wounds and weighing how to respond. These activists could not have made a better argument for why they should be sidelined in those deliberations.

We know that the No campaign was funded and resourced by conservative and international interests who have no stake or genuine interest in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We know this funding supported multiple No campaigns that intentionally argued in varying directions to create doubt and fear in both non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities.

AFAICT 'yes' outspent 'no' by orders of magnitude. Another nail in the coffin for those who think that you can just buy any election.

There has always been racism against First Nations people in Australia. It increased with multiple daily instances during the campaign and was a powerful driver for the No campaign. But this campaign went beyond just racism. ‘If you don't know - Vote No’ gave expression to ignorance and licensed the abandonment of civic responsibility on the part of many voters who voted No. This shameful victory belongs to the Institute of Public Affairs, the Centre for Independent Studies and mainstream media.

It's funny because lots of people across the spectrum follow "if you don't know vote no" when it comes to referendums where I live. It caught me totally off guard to see that this was such a vehement point of contention in the Australian referendum.

AFAICT 'yes' outspent 'no' by orders of magnitude. Another nail in the coffin for those who think that you can just buy any election.

I'd be very tentative with this. 'Yes' might not have bought this election in particular but the fact there's money being thrown at it means they can continue bargaining. Who knows, maybe one day, unbeknownst to most, this particular issue might go on sale and if one side happens to have money in the pocket it's an easy buy.

I think this is a problem with the right in general where they don't have a positive affirmational stance to rally behind. Instead they lean on the implicit racism of the public. With how hands off the right is with cultural institutions it's just a waiting game until the Overton Window shifts far enough along that the publics implicit racism doesn't cut it. Or, of course, the demographics shift in such a way that the Abbo rallying cry gets carried along in a coalition of ascendent minority groups.

Or, of course, the demographics shift in such a way that the Abbo rallying cry gets carried along in a coalition of ascendent minority groups

Australia not being majority white anymore will not be caused by aborigines, it will be caused by Asian immigrants who don’t care about the aborigines, don’t understand why they should be given more power, and don’t see them as impressive coalition partners.

I can't find solid figures showing how Asian-Australians voted - there's some evidence that Chinese-Australians intended to vote Yes at a higher-rate than Anglos, but there's also lots of grief about them not supporting it enough.

Anecdotally, when I talk to Australians of Asian background, the message I get ranges from "Why are you asking us? We didn't do anything wrong" to "Lol the Aboriginals were lucky we weren't the ones who conquered them", but I rarely hear a lot of sympathy for them.

I remember speaking to a woman from Hong Kong after we were told the usual (in my opinion inadequately-defined, meaningless) claim that Aboriginals are the world's "oldest continuous civilisation", and have "sixty thousand years of civilisation". She confessed to me afterwards that she doesn't believe that's true, because you need to have writing to be a civilisation. To be civilised, you need to be recording and reflecting on your history. In that light she had always been taught - and she continued to believe - that China was the world's oldest civilisation.

(Technically if you date by the invention of writing, well, it depends a lot on exactly what you count as 'writing' as opposed to pictures, pictographs, and so on, but it is a lot more debatable. China is running, but it's not the obvious leader.)

I mention that story just to note that the narratives that take hold among Anglo communities do not necessarily have much resonance for other people.

I wonder if this woman from Hong Kong’s opinion was straight ethnonarcisism or if she would be consistent- eg would she have been impressed with the knowledge that the cherokees are the only people who invented writing by imitation without having been taught it?

I think she'd be consistent, knowing her.

I just remember finding that conversation interesting in terms of the way we frame history and what we choose to value. She described learning history as a civilisational cycle, the narrative of unification and division that we see epitomised in the first line of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Human history goes out from and then returns to a centre, over and over. This seems like a very traditional Chinese way of thinking about it, and the influence of Marxism hasn't been able to fully change that yet.

By contrast, the way I feel I learned history as an Anglo, Western person was basically this - the story of a linear ascent, Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome to Europe to Britain to America and eventually to space. Arguments about how a linear, progressive view of history is an Abrahamic innovation may be overstated but they're still at least partly true. Of the world's great civilisational or religious cultures, certainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have clear beginnings, middles, and conclusions in the way they perceive history. This is much less the case in pre-Western-contact China or India. It likely also shaped Hegelian and thus Marxist historical narratives.

At the time I talked to this woman, we were finishing up a several-days-long workshop on Aboriginal culture, and one of the things the first Aboriginal teacher we met tried to impress upon us was that time is not seen like this in Australian Aboriginal culture. Maybe for Westerners it's a gradual rise, and maybe for East Asians it's an oscillation, but for pre-contact Aboriginal people it's flat. Time is flat. Nothing changes. The breadth of the land swallows you up. It's not so much that the same incidents play out over and over repetitively, but that there is just one incident and it never stops happening, and any appearance of change is merely incidental.

Now I do take that with a grain of salt, not least because I am intensely skeptical that anybody in the world actually knows how pre-contact Aboriginals saw anything, and at any rate Aboriginal worldviews have been profoundly altered by colonisation anyway. A lot of them I honestly suspect that most Aboriginal advocates of Aboriginal culture learnt that culture from Western, noble savage type stereotypes. Whatever traditional culture they had would have been passed down through oral tradition and community practice, and when those communities were split up and most of the oral tradition lost, so was the culture. So even Aboriginal people are probably bullshitting a lot.

But even so, I assign some credence to his perspective, even if only a little, and it makes sense to me to say that culture and perception of time influences how people see the world and thus how they behave. For instance, it seems intuitively reasonably that you need some notion of progression and the possibility of upwards change (whether you fit that into a linear or cyclical narrative, they both have this possibility) in order for things like long-term planning and innovation to make sense. Meanwhile if you think that your actions can't really change things, then it seems like it makes a lot more sense to be impulsive and act only for short-term reward.

I'm not really sure about any of this, and I'm just spitballing, but it would not surprise me if there are some cultural effects like this.

Your framing is basically backwards. People can be marginally swayed by advertising. The diminishing returns set in early. The issue will not "come up for sale" but people indeed may change their minds for exogenous reasons, at which point spending billions will still be a waste.

Of course, it benefits nobody in the political machine to notice that campaign spending is largely wasted.

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