“The myth of Aboriginal Exceptionalism”, xyz.com, November 26, 2016:
Unless perhaps you live in the Mesolithic Period in an outback Aboriginal community, you will no doubt have heard of the City of Fremantle’s recent decision to move Australia Day and rename it to One Day to make it a ‘culturally-inclusive alternative’.
Unless you’re insane, you probably spat out your cornflakes upon hearing about this.
Just what is going on over there?
Now I love Fremantle. The prison tour was great, the markets and al fresco café vibe is charming and the blazing sun is quintessentially Australian. Lovely place. Obviously though, we may have to invade it and kill some people.
Rather than wax lyrical about the insanity of the Cultural Marxist elites on the City Council wanting to virtue-signal to each other, about the angry backlash this will inevitably generate and the totalitarian nature of the phrase ‘One Day’, I’m going to look instead at the larger philosophical issue we have with how Australians in the twenty-first century think about our natives.
In Australia in the current year you are not allowed at all to speak plainly or accurately about anything to do with Aboriginal people. This is because of the myth of Aboriginal exceptionalism. The way you must speak is roughly as follows:
Aboriginal people represent the longest continuous culture on the planet and were masters of land management and living in harmony with the environment. They are a deeply spiritual people, and have strong kinship networks which are impossible for privileged white Australians to ever really understand. They have been brutalised by the white occupation, and the tragic social problems we see in those communities are the result of this brutalisation. We must work hard to Close the Gap by privileging and foregrounding Aboriginal ways of being to maintain this beautifully diverse culture.
Bullshit.
Calling things by their real names and speaking plainly about reality is the first step to solving any problem. Just ask a former junkie. So let’s translate the above paragraph into something more representative of the truth.
Aborigines were really good at camping and orienteering. They killed off the megafauna when they arrived here through unsustainable hunting practices. They never achieved civilisation. It also seems that the groups that were here when whites arrived had taken the place from earlier groups anyway. In other words, they invaded it.
Aboriginal ideas of marriage were more like our idea of sexual slavery. They practised child marriage. Like all prehistoric groups, they lived their lives in constant fear of spiritual entities. While they had developed a remarkable knowledge of how to live off the land, their diet was extremely unhealthy and life expectancy was tragically short. By the standards of modern Western civilisation, their kinship obligations and collectivist mentality trashed the rights of the individual and created pathological relationship dynamics. Life in prehistoric Australia before 1788 was extremely nasty, brutish and short.
A culture being ‘continuous’ means it never developed. That’s a synonym then for ‘failure’.
Things were looking up for the natives, though, when Europeans arrived. Much ink has been shed regarding how much blood was shed and why, and I’m not going to cover that well-worn terrain here. The way the left talks about the topic it is as though no people had ever invaded any other people before. This is a manifestation of the myth of Aboriginal exceptionalism that I’m critiquing. Sooner or later, everyone gets invaded. To go 40000 years without it happening is a pretty good run.
When the barbarians invaded the Roman Empire through mass immigration over several decades (sound familiar?), the standard of living declined in many areas. It took the Muslim raids on the coasts of southern Europe, though, to bring in the Dark Age, and it was a millennium before things got humming in Europe again. When the Mongols invaded China, the Middle East and India, civilisation took a hit for a while before it bounced back. A few centuries later they had their high points.
The British settlement of Australia provided the natives with the greatest civilisational leap ever experienced in history. They went from Mesolithic to Industrial Era in an instant. Of course this was a painful process, but not as painful as it was for the 300 generations of Europeans and Middle Easterners who made the process gradually. It was a free gift. What bounty the First Fleet brought to the indigenes! No more bloody witchety grubs!
Why is it then that the Cultural Marxist elites on the Fremantle City Council are so against Australia Day?
The root of this insanity goes back to around the time that Australia was being liberated from the Stone Age and to that nasty cretin Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What Marx was to the Russian Revolution of 1917, Rousseau was to the French Revolution of the 1790’s. Like Marx, he was a parasite who never worked an honest day in his life. He was an expert at leeching off his aristocratic buddies, and wrote a series of treatises which blamed the evils of property and civilisation for the corruption of man. He wrote these while living in the lap of luxury with the aristocratic women he seduced.
Rousseau’s main thesis was a corruption of the Christian Biblical narrative. Original Sin in Rousseau’s mythology was the development of property. This alienated man from each other and began our corruption. The natives of the Americas were therefore morally superior because they had not developed this corrupting concept of property. This myth has been called the idea of the ‘noble savage’.
It also provided a philosophical basis for the belief that the poor are morally superior to the rich just by virtue of being poor. Marx later built upon this basis to develop his revolutionary dialectical philosophy. Thanks for nothing, Jean.
The white Cultural Marxists today who believe in the myth of Aboriginal exceptionalism, that Aboriginal people are a unique category of humanity that should not have the same moral standards applied to them, are adherents to this nonsense of the noble savage. It’s a stupid and toxic belief which has created untold suffering in the lives of Aboriginal people in this country.
When blackfellas beat their wives, it’s because of the ‘Stolen Generations’. When black women ignore and neglect their kids, it’s a ‘cultural practice’. When a horde of shoeless Aboriginal children spend all day running around the hovels their community inhabits, it’s a ‘kinship network’. This is the racism of low expectations that is the result of the leftist elite believing fanatically in the myth of Aboriginal exceptionalism.
Have you ever wondered why Aboriginal children dye their hair blonde? I did. Whenever you see one of those horrid outback communities in an ABC segment in which they are praising some march or some protest somewhere, the kids have blonde streaks.
It’s not hair dye. It’s because they’re malnourished. Why don’t the journalists ever ask questions about that?
Why do urban Aborigines receive scholarships and government funding out the wazzoo? Did they have some land taken from them? Are they considered intellectually deficient? I would be offended if the Marxist bureaucrats who run our country decided I was so stupid or incompetent that I needed special government grants just to get anywhere. It would cheapen any sense of achievement I could have if I did succeed.
One of the main reasons, however, that we cannot criticise the myth of Aboriginal exceptionalism is that there is an entire class of professional parasites who rely upon this myth for their careers and their social status. It’s a rockin’ gravy train baby; all you need to do is just not say anything true about Aboriginal people. If you happen to be Aboriginal, and even better a woman or transgender or something even weirder, you’re going places. You could be the CEO of an allied health initiative or a consultant for an advisory body working for the improvement of Aboriginal educational outcomes. Just don’t rock the boat by not lying and you’ll be fine.
The real victims of all this intellectual dishonesty by the leftist elites are the Aboriginal children who are forced to grow up crushed between a Stone Age culture which has died and a postmodern culture which treats them like ornaments of its own righteousness. Until the 1960s, things were getting slowly better for Aboriginal people. They were being integrated into the mainstream culture, educated at boarding schools and adopted by Australian families. Of course there was prejudice; that’s life. Try being Irish 200 years ago. But at least there was hope for these people that they could join the rest of humanity in enjoying the fruits of modernity and contributing to the advancement of civilisation.
Since the Cultural Marxists took over, however, and began preaching the myth of Aboriginal exceptionalism in every school and university in the country, things have gone backwards. It’s horrible out there. The police, health workers and educators who are not brainwashed Marxists can’t say anything about what they encounter for fear of professional reprisals. Everything becomes an ideological struggle for the Marxists who profiteer upon the suffering of the natives. These are the people who are condemning Aboriginal children to lives of hopelessness, dysfunction and despair.
Perhaps Freo should crack open that prison again and put the Cultural Marxists inside for a while. Then the rest of us can celebrate Australia Day together and get to work bringing Aboriginal Australians back into the civilisation they deserve to be a part of.
Another idea to bear in mind is that Indigenous Australians are a natural political ally of Natural Conservatives and moderate Christians. They share ALL of our essential values:
– self-modesty
– material modesty
– respect for women
– respect for nature
– present sacrifice for future benefit
– external permanent objective law
– brotherhood
– charity
We should be savaging the Marxists all the way, but do not throw out the baby with the bathwater!
Christians in particular should focus on building cultural bridges with Indigenous Australians with particular regard to looking after the Garden of Eden (Dreamtime), lest the Marxist secular progressives make off with yet another disenfranchised group by employing our values against our institutions because we are too proud to see the error of our ways or the hypocrisy that we do not walk our talk.
There are similarities with conservatives. But the ‘black armband’ view of history, the incredible reliance on government handouts, make current thinking of much of the ‘Indigenous establishment’, heavily slanted to the left.
I would have to suggest that you have opened a rather large can of worms here. I would also suggest you separate the Cultural Marxists keen to exploit yet another group from the group whose legacy is in question.
I cannot consider myself an ‘expert’ on Aboriginal Australian history, but the first thing I would suggest is that the word ‘Aboriginal’ should be struck from the English language, as it is a sneaky way of suggesting these people are not indigenous to Australia, which relative to Europeans they most certainly are. The prefix “ab” in front of original is a most clever linguistic device.
“Voices of the First Day” Lawlor, is a book I would highly recommend for a detailed understanding of Indigenous cultural practices and kinship laws.
“Aboriginal people represent the longest continuous culture on the planet and were masters of land management and living in harmony with the environment. They are a deeply spiritual people, and have strong kinship networks which are impossible for privileged white Australians to ever really understand. They have been brutalised by the white occupation, and the tragic social problems we see in those communities are the result of this brutalisation.” There is much truth to this assertion, and it is likely troubling to any number of white Europeans (of which I am one) to contemplate that perhaps despite their civilization they don’t have it all figured and don’t have all the answers, and that yes, they may have indeed caused and still cause problems for which they don’t want to be held accountable.
“Black Emu” Bruce Pascoe is another quite detailed book on Indigenous land management practices and most of it is culled from the journals and diaries of the first Europeans, who inherited a well tended and managed landscape. Modern land use techniques are not perfect by any means and we could learn a thing or two from these supposedly primitive people.
“Aboriginal ideas of marriage were more like our idea of sexual slavery. They practised child marriage.” They did not practice child marriage in the tradition of Islam, they did however line up their marriages when children were young to preserve family lines they could trace back to the Dreamtime (Creation). You might be informed that our royal families have done exactly the same until very recently. This is an unfair assault on Indigneous Australians and your real target should be the Marxists who will use this as fuel for their claims of racism.
“Like all prehistoric groups, they lived their lives in constant fear of spiritual entities.” Take a look around, you can dress things up by any fancy name you like but most people today are still doing the same thing and much of the Christian experience has had a quality of such nature to it as well. I live in Byron Bay and I can guarantee you people here are totally out of their minds for the Gods of Climate Change, Gaia, and all of that. When a big storm comes I can hear them beating their drums. Not much has changed but the names I’m afraid.
“While they had developed a remarkable knowledge of how to live off the land, their diet was extremely unhealthy and life expectancy was tragically short.” The quality of their diet is a subject we could debate, but I am pretty confident it was a much more healthy diet (and lifestyle) than the processed food diet (and 9 to 5 office grind) most people are on today (and you might yourself be on). Look at our health care system and disease rates – are you really suggesting we have hit some pinnacle of health in the modern world and harmony with God’s creation??? You might like Witchety grubs and Kangaroo. Don’t knock it until you try it.
“By the standards of modern Western civilisation, their kinship obligations and collectivist mentality trashed the rights of the individual and created pathological relationship dynamics.” Modern marketing and consumerism has driven individualism to completely destructive ends; we are (hopefully) at the apotheosis of narcissism taken to the extreme with millions living entirely for themselves (think baby boomers with thoroughly repugnant Arab values), to the detriment of family and community, not to mention rapacious consumption and waste of resources sought in vain perhaps to fill a spiritual void no amount of materialism will ever fill, to bolster egos totally out of control. Where does that void come from? In the estimation of this author it comes from being cut off from nature (God) by our religion, which spent thousands of years persecuting pagans and Earth worship forcing people into a complex meaning system where status is dependent upon wealth. At the very least, Indigenous Australians did not need some complex mumbo-jumbo called religion to access God and God’s creation, they lived in it, not cut off from it, and could find fulfillment in it as opposed to seeking approval through material and personal status.
“Life in prehistoric Australia before 1788 was extremely nasty, brutish and short.” Yes they lived a hard life, by comparison we are all completely soft in this modern push-button convenience oriented society. To call Australia pre-1788 prehistoric is to conflate terms that make no sense and to suggest anything pre-European civilization was prehistoric. Sounds like typical European elitism to me, the kind of thing we are trying to dispense with in Brexit and with Trump rule by elites. That their life was brutish, nasty and short is a common attack on all things prior to the modern age, and maybe in some respects it was but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t without its own depth, meaning, joys and fulfillment.
None of this is to excuse cultural Marxism, but this argument hardly seems fair to Indigneous Australians, and unnecessarily harsh, and at times disingenuous. As stated at the outset this is a rather large can of worms, but if you intend to attack the Marxists, stay on target.
What a profound and well written expose on political correctness run amok. I don’t know much about the history of the aborigine, but I have read extensively on the American Indian. It is the same here. The current diatribe from the left is how horrible we were to the “Native Americans” and how we stole their land.
First of all, no one was as cruel to the Indians as they were to themselves. Their barbarism toward each other is well documented in many books, not the least of which is James Michener,s “Centennial.” The warring among tribes was continuous and their methods of torture of captives could make even the most hardened heart cringe. Even their rituals for becoming a “brave” could result in the death of the life they were celebrating.
As is apparently the case there in Australia, these “original” inhabitants took the land from some ancestral population and then constantly from each other. The fact that the white settlers took over the same lands was just another chapter in the bloodletting that had been going for for hundreds of years before that. And again, as in Australia, civilization never evolved from either the eastern or western tribes. They didn’t know about taming and riding horses until the Spanish introduced them to it. They never developed the wheel. They never had a common language, a must to developing any kind of peaceful civilization. And while I won’t argue that they did have a better sense of mother earth and a more spiritual “bond” with all animals, it didn’t stop them from killing them to provide food , shelter and clothing. Whether Marxists want to believe it or not there is such a thing as manifest destiny and it means the strong shall prevail over the weak. If that were not the case, civilization would eventually die out. As it is now, it’s the strong that support the weak. They should be thankful.
Thankyou for your support on this post. Yes I’m not aiming to denigrate aboriginal people, I’m just sharing some truths about what actually happen as opposed to what the media/ academia teaches. Thankyou!