The contemporary left are tantrum-throwing toddlers whose sole moral compass is infantile resentment. Resentment mostly at the giants who founded the very liberal democracy that allows them to have their little hissy-fits without being summarily put against the wall and shot.
Burning flags and smashing statues is getting old. Defacing churches is passe (besides, they might inadvertently burn down one that’s already been converted to a mosque).
So what more sacred monuments could they find to defile than our monuments to the fallen?
They tried to misappropriate the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, but the plan to light it up with gay pride colours drew such a furious reaction that even Dictator Dan backed down.
So, now they’re coming for the Australian War Memorial.
The War Memorial chair, former Howard government minister Brendan Nelson, revealed the Memorial’s governing council had decided they would have a ‘much broader, a much deeper depiction and presentation of the violence committed against Indigenous people, initially by British, then by pastoralists, then by police, and then by Aboriginal militia’.
An ABC RN Breakfast story by Patricia Karvelas reported:
Filmmaker Rachel Perkins, the director and producer of the ground-breaking documentary series The Australian Wars, which chronicles the battles fought on Australian soil, told me the announcement was a ‘watershed moment’. The long-running issue, she said, has at times been divisive, polarising, and politicised.
“At times”? It’s inherently divisive, polarising, and politicised. Because that’s what the left does to everything they can get their hooks on: turn it into yet another hobby horse for their dreary, nasty culture wars.
Let me set Karvelas straight on one point. The primary purpose of the Memorial is not ‘telling stories of war’. It is to honour those thousands of men and women who have given their lives in defence of this country and its values.
The so-called “frontier wars” took place long before this nation — the Commonwealth of Australia — existed. If Indigenous people fought — as they indeed did, at times — it was not in “defence of this country and its values”: it was in defence of their own, tribal, country and values.
There can be no doubt that atrocities were committed against Aborigines. But they were isolated incidents. Many of them were in reprisal for killing settlers or their stock – and no less reprehensible for that. Where atrocities were committed, they were crimes according to British law. We can argue about how effectively, or not, colonial governments dealt with them but the War Memorial is not the place to do it. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the defence of the nation, they do not form part of our military history and therefore have no place in the Australian War Memorial.
That’s not even the start of the lies that Perkins’ “documentary” peddles as “historical facts”.
But what about the ‘Colonial Wars’? There is a new myth that has emerged in the last decade or so, and that is that the Aborigines fought a series of sustained wars of resistance. Rachel Perkins, the daughter of Charles Perkins, has produced a documentary film, The Australian Wars, in which she claims that up to 100,000 Aborigines were killed in these wars. If that were true it might provide a basis for inclusion in the AWM. At least I can understand why some people might think so.
But this story is demonstrably not true.
The idea that 100,000 Aborigines were killed in “military actions” is as ludicrous as Bruce Pascoe’s moonstruck claims of sprawling Aboriginal towns and farms. Even the wildly fantastical “massacre database” is sober enough to count barely 1/10th of that nonsensical claim.
Yet even the University of Newcastle’s “massacre database” and its 11,000 deaths have been exposed as grossly exaggerated.
Keith Windschuttle, Michael Connor, Scott Seymour, George Brown, Roger Karge, Rod Moran, and myself (amongst others) have conducted audits of this database and we have all identified serious discrepancies. In most of the incidents reported, the number of Aboriginal deaths has been based on estimates and they almost always err on the high side.
Others never even happened or were based on distorted, third-hand, decades-removed, accounts.
To include, in the AWM museum, any mention of ‘colonial wars’ involving the deaths of 100,000 Aborigines would not only be an insult to those whom the Memorial is supposed to honour, it would also be a travesty of rational and rigorous thinking.
What next? The “tomb of the unknown Aborigine” shoe-horned next to the Unknown Soldier in the Hall of Remembrance? If you think that’s a ridiculous overreach-too-far for even the black-armband left, you’re sadly behind the times.
Because that’s exactly what they’re demanding.
Activist historian Henry Reynolds, one of the main architects of this obscene proposal, said in last weekend’s Canberra Times:
The most significant symbolic act would be placing a tomb for the unknown warrior next to the grave of the unknown soldier.
The woke left is determined to foster racial division in everything—even the most sacred secular monuments in the country.
Especially if there’s a buck to be made from it — and the Long March on the War Memorial is asking for a cool half-billion in taxpayer’s money.
If this proposal goes ahead it will add to the growing and tiresome collection of concessions we already make to Aborigines – the flags outside every public building in the land (and in our Parliaments), the grating and contrived ‘welcome to country’ ceremonies at every public event, the renaming of our towns and landmarks (particularly by the ABC), the grandstanding in Parliament by the odious, and mockery of the oath by ‘Senator’ Lidia Thorpe etc…
Once it’s in, it will be impossible to remove.
Spectator Australia
You can make a small contribution to saving the Australian War Memorial from wokeist grievance-mongering by signing the Hands off the Australian War Memorial petition.
