Australian History X
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ well,what a vicious, divisive, sneering, embittered little article that was, from someone granted opportunities in Australia which she would never have been granted in Cairo. Eventually this stuff will make us as racially divided and violent as that beacon of racial harmony and human development, the US. One reads this level of snarling vitriol, and unprovoked venom, and wonders whether civilized engagement can resolve the crisis these people wish to provoke, presumably so they can rule among the ruins. Fortunately I suspect most ordinary people have a far higher level of civilization than the warped over-taught and under-educated sociology of this individual, or it might become very ugly.
It’s normal for adolescents to want to bite the hand that feeds them, so long as it will keep them safe as they do so. It’s actually rather creepy to see a grown woman with worldly experience do so. _________________ Two more flags before I die! |
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thesoretoothsayer
Joined: 26 Apr 2017
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Pies4shaw wrote: | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/28/go-ahead-white-australia-eat-your-kebabs-while-you-remind-us-of-your-values |
Your father is a stateless Palestinian man who is invited to Australia on a Sydney University scholarship.
Your mother escapes Nasser's Egypt to come to a properous, stable country.
Which way will you look at the country that has given your family so much?
Your options are:
a) Australia is a wonderful place that has given my family safety, opportunity and wealth.
Even better, it has allowed me, the child of muslim immigrants, to become a lawyer, sociologist and successful author.
b) Australia is a racist hellhole run by evil crackas.
If you choose option (b) please feel free to buy a ticket, get on a plane and f**k off. |
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KenH
Joined: 24 Jan 2010
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I would've thought that he could answer A and still understand that B can be close to be being correct as well? I prefer he stays! _________________ Cheers big ears |
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thesoretoothsayer
Joined: 26 Apr 2017
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Fair point. But the article was pretty much all (b). |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Location: Andromeda
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thesoretoothsayer wrote: | Pies4shaw wrote: | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/28/go-ahead-white-australia-eat-your-kebabs-while-you-remind-us-of-your-values |
Your father is a stateless Palestinian man who is invited to Australia on a Sydney University scholarship.
Your mother escapes Nasser's Egypt to come to a properous, stable country.
Which way will you look at the country that has given your family so much?
Your options are:
a) Australia is a wonderful place that has given my family safety, opportunity and wealth.
Even better, it has allowed me, the child of muslim immigrants, to become a lawyer, sociologist and successful author.
b) Australia is a racist hellhole run by evil crackas.
If you choose option (b) please feel free to buy a ticket, get on a plane and f**k off. |
Such a reactionary response: immigrants and children of immigrants should STFU and accept whatever bad stuff comes their way, because they now live in a country that, mostly through historical accident and the wide-scale theft of colonialism, happens to have a better standard of living. Why can’t they just be grateful? (Unlike white Australians, who I guess earned their birthright or something). What you’re saying is this: Don’t dare criticise us, or we’ll put you in your place and tell you to f%#^ off back to where you came from. I guess you’ve demonstrated her point perfectly. _________________ All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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thesoretoothsayer
Joined: 26 Apr 2017
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Um, why are you assuming that I'm one of the "us" and not one of the "immigrants and children of immigrants". |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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Welcome. We need more Palestinians. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Location: Between London and Melbourne
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David wrote: | thesoretoothsayer wrote: | Pies4shaw wrote: | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/28/go-ahead-white-australia-eat-your-kebabs-while-you-remind-us-of-your-values |
Your father is a stateless Palestinian man who is invited to Australia on a Sydney University scholarship.
Your mother escapes Nasser's Egypt to come to a properous, stable country.
Which way will you look at the country that has given your family so much?
Your options are:
a) Australia is a wonderful place that has given my family safety, opportunity and wealth.
Even better, it has allowed me, the child of muslim immigrants, to become a lawyer, sociologist and successful author.
b) Australia is a racist hellhole run by evil crackas.
If you choose option (b) please feel free to buy a ticket, get on a plane and f**k off. |
Such a reactionary response: immigrants and children of immigrants should STFU and accept whatever bad stuff comes their way, because they now live in a country that, mostly through historical accident and the wide-scale theft of colonialism, happens to have a better standard of living. Why can’t they just be grateful? (Unlike white Australians, who I guess earned their birthright or something). What you’re saying is this: Don’t dare criticise us, or we’ll put you in your place and tell you to f%#^ off back to where you came from. I guess you’ve demonstrated her point perfectly. |
“Mostly through historical accident and the theft of colonialism....”. So in your eyes there was negligible input from the people who built the country, established the institutions, fought and suffered for it ? How terribly narrow-minded this post is, displaying an underlying sense of entitlement that can only grow in unearned peace, security and freedom. Historical accident and colonialism were part of it. But you do your own intellect and history itself a tragic disservice to reduce it so. A nation without any pride will die soon enough. _________________ Two more flags before I die!
Last edited by Mugwump on Sun Jul 29, 2018 7:04 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Location: Andromeda
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And those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. To feel the quickening heartbeat and stirring passions of patriotism inevitably requires some degree of self-deception.
I’m not ashamed to be Australian, and I have no time for people with performative guilt complexes, but I’m clear-eyed enough to recognise that ours is a bloody history (perhaps no more or less than most other countries – but bloody nonetheless). We can recognise our achievements, too, and there are many reasons for which I am glad to be living in Australia and not elsewhere in the world; but I think Horne was on to something when he referred to us as “the lucky country” – it’s certainly hard to think of a nation that has done less to earn its wealth and freedoms, and which has been as simultaneously selfish and small-minded about it. _________________ All watched over by machines of loving grace
Last edited by David on Tue Jul 31, 2018 11:31 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Location: Between London and Melbourne
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David wrote: |
I am clear-eyed enough to recognise that ours is a bloody history (perhaps no more or less than most other countries – but bloody nonetheless). |
How easily this slips off the tongue, after the years of casual, unexamined indoctrination ! And yet it is, of course, deeply untrue : very, very few countries have seen less bloodshed across their history. Where are the civil wars, the armed invasions of neighboring countries, the enslavement, the genocide, the mass graves, the extermination through labour, the secret police? There are none.
Unless you refer to Gallipoli and Kokoda et al, the sole justification for this hyperbolic statement is presumably the white settlement of Australia. This took place two hundred and thirty years ago, in an age where race-based slavery was practised almost universally across the world, and genocide thought of as a prerogative of conquest.....Yet there was no enslavement or genocide in Australia. The technological superiority of the British over Aboriginal Australia was so complete that genocide could have been achieved very easily, had that choice been made.
What actually happened ? Finding a people who seemed to have no settled form of land tenure, the colonial governments indeed declared that the land was (conveniently) empty, and proceeded to settle it. Then, far from exterminating them, they sought to bring Aboriginal people under British law as citizens. It was an incongruous endeavour, and there were numerous sporadic conflicts and murders, especially in Queensland, but elsewhere too. Through all of the chaos of that unruly history, however, there was a persistent official (and often ecclesiastical) attempt to protect aboriginal people under government and the law. There was dispossession, disease and displacement, as there has been throughout history in many places and times. It was tragic for the Aboriginal people, who suffered something like a takeover by aliens with unthinkable technology advantages and scant sympathy for their values. No doubt the trauma lingers, and we should try to help aboriginal communities repair it where they have the genuine will to do so.
But the level of bloodshed and the governing intent in Australia was at worst patchy by historic or comparative standards, and there were many good or ameliorative intentions as well as exploitative ones. Your statement of comparison with “most nations” cannot reasonably be justified. Unfortunately, since Gramscian missionaries took over the teaching profession, we know little real history, only politics ; so our children have been taught to recite this grotesquely-unbalanced and simplistic blood-libel against our country.
On another (related) note regarding your post above, “patriotism”, like (say) parental love, can drive people to do passionate and even bad things. For most, however, it is a healthy source of identity, security and love of place. Without it, no nation will survive long. Patriotic supremacism is typically called nationalism, and that is a dangerous thing, I agree.
Just as you can love your own family without hating others, there is nothing wrong (indeed it is positively healthy) to love your country as long as you do not hate others. _________________ Two more flags before I die!
Last edited by Mugwump on Mon Jul 30, 2018 9:38 am; edited 3 times in total |
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roar
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
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Mugwump wrote: | Where are the genocide, the mass graves? There are none. |
You don't count Tasmania as part of Australia?
Even on the mainland, there has been many a massacre of indigenous people. _________________ kill for collingwood! |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005 Location: In flagrante delicto
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Mugwump wrote: | David wrote: |
I am clear-eyed enough to recognise that ours is a bloody history (perhaps no more or less than most other countries – but bloody nonetheless). |
How easily this slips off the tongue, after the years of casual, unexamined indoctrination ! And yet it is, of course, deeply untrue : very, very few countries have seen less bloodshed across their history. Where are the civil wars, the armed invasions of neighboring countries, the enslavement, the genocide, the mass graves, the extermination through labour, the secret police? There are none.
Unless you refer to Gallipoli and Kokoda et al, the sole justification for this hyperbolic statement is presumably the white settlement of Australia. This took place two hundred and thirty years ago, in an age where race-based slavery was practised almost universally across the world, and genocide thought of as a prerogative of conquest.....Yet there was no enslavement or genocide in Australia. The technological superiority of the British over Aboriginal Australia was so complete that genocide could have been achieved very easily, had that choice been made.
What actually happened ? Finding a people who seemed to have no settled form of land tenure, the colonial governments indeed declared that the land was (conveniently) empty, and proceeded to settle it. Then, far from exterminating them, they sought to bring Aboriginal people under British law as citizens. It was an incongruous endeavour, and there were numerous sporadic conflicts and murders, especially in Queensland, but elsewhere too. Through all of the chaos of that unruly history, however, there was a persistent official (and often ecclesiastical) attempt to protect aboriginal people under government and the law. There was dispossession, disease and displacement, as there has been throughout history in many places and times. It was tragic for the Aboriginal people, who suffered something like a takeover by aliens with unthinkable technology advantages and scant sympathy for their values. No doubt the trauma lingers, and we should try to help aboriginal communities repair it where they have the genuine will to do so.
But the level of bloodshed and the governing intent in Australia was at worst patchy by historic or comparative standards, and there were many good or ameliorative intentions as well as exploitative ones. Your statement of comparison with “most nations” cannot reasonably be justified. Unfortunately, since Gramscian missionaries took over the teaching profession, we know little real history, only politics ; so our children have been taught to recite this grotesquely-unbalanced and simplistic blood-libel against our country.
On another (related) note regarding your post above, “patriotism”, like (say) parental love, can drive people to do passionate and even bad things. For most, however, it is a healthy source of identity, security and love of place. Without it, no nation will survive long. Patriotic supremacism is typically called nationalism, and that is a dangerous thing, I agree.
Just as you can love your own family without hating others, there is nothing wrong (indeed it is positively healthy) to love your country as long as you do not hate others. |
I reckon that's a pretty damn good summary. _________________ Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Location: Between London and Melbourne
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roar wrote: | Mugwump wrote: | Where are the genocide, the mass graves? There are none. |
You don't count Tasmania as part of Australia?
Even on the mainland, there has been many a massacre of indigenous people. |
Of course. The last time I read about it, I seem to recall that Tasmanian aboriginals were about 1% of the total indigenous population estimated at about 700,000. Disease killed many, and it is a matter of record that some organized killings undoubtedly took place. That is entirely consistent with my post. It does not trivialise it to say that by world standards the organized bloodshed was not large. History is everywhere full of people who did not act as we think we would act now. But Australia’s history, taken as a whole, was at worst chequered by the standards of the time, or indeed any time. _________________ Two more flags before I die!
Last edited by Mugwump on Mon Jul 30, 2018 5:29 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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What does trivilialise it to say that by world standards the organized bloodshed was not large ? |
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