Hi everyone, I hope you’re all well.
So, the 26th of January was Australia Day; an annual public holiday to celebrate all
things Aussie.
It’s a day characterised by barbeques, tennis, cricket, trips to the pool and the beach,
as well as that quintessentially Australian spirit
of “She’ll be right, mate!”
Despite its charming traditions, the origins of Australia Day have coined a lot of controversy
over the years, especially in our current era of identity politics and Marxist resurgence.
For all you foreigners out there, Australia Day is held on January 26th every year to
commemorate the arrival of the First Fleet of British settlers to Port Jackson, New South
Wales, and the raising of the Flag of Great Britain at Sydney Cove by Governor Arthur
Phillip.
In other words, the day is one of the markers of British colonization of Australia, which
activists largely on the left consistently remind us.
And look, understandably so; the Indigenous Australians did not have a very nice time
at the hands of the early settlers, to say the least.
However, after two hundred and thirty-ish years of social progression and civil rights
advances, I would like to think that we as a nation could move beyond the day’s perceivably
contentious beginnings, and use it as a day to celebrate our wonderfully rich society
of people from all corners of the globe.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
Nevertheless, these largely left-wing activists persist, every year, in screaming that we
should hashtag change the date.
And I call it screaming because it has gone far beyond the realms of sensible debate or
political rallies.
Nicknames such as “Survival Day” and “Invasion Day” have sprung up over the last couple
of years, pushed largely by white progressives to signal what good hashtag allies they are
to Indigenous Australians, and some local councils refuse to hold citizenship ceremonies
on Australia Day, which is the most popular day to hold them.
Also, infamously, in 2017, radio station Triple J moved it’s Hottest 100 countdown, an iconic
fixture of Australia Day, to January 27th instead of the 26th, as a show of solidarity
to Indigenous Australians.
Too bad January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but, hey, the Triple J peeps
felt good about themselves, and that’s all that matters.
Doncha love it when people try to be woke and wind up stepping on themselves?
It in this way, the left in Australia is attempting to…I don’t know whether it’s to ignore
or erase history, but either way, there is some serious denial going on there about Australia’s
past, both the good and the bad.
They also attempt this kind of history sanitisation with their attempts to either remove or deface
monuments to historical figures such as Captain Cook, Arthur Philip, Governor Macquarie, and
all the other explorers who helped inaugurate modern Australia.
As if shielding the public from reminders of the past will somehow undo it.
The same is true in the USA, with the constant pushing to remove Confederate statues, flags
and monuments.
Now, the history and politics of Confederate symbols is very complex.
On the one hand, you can argue that they are symbols of racism and oppression; the remnants
of the reverence of slavery.
On the other hand, you can argue that the Civil War was about more than just slavery,
and that many good men fought and died to protect their families from what they perceived
as an invasion from the north.
Remember, the majority of Confederate soldiers weren’t actually slave owners.
They were not rich men; they were fighting a war they may or may not have believed in,
with their first and foremost purpose being to preserve the lives of their loved ones.
Slave ownership would have been the last thing on the minds of those men and their families.
It’s a tale as old as time; wars are the battles of the rich, fought by the poor.
As such, you could argue that their suffering should be acknowledged, and their sacrifice
for their homes and families respected, rather than tearing down monuments and demonizing
them as the oppressors, when they didn’t actually have any stake in slavery itself.
Statues and Confederate flags aside, war monuments specifically are about people, not ideology.
But then, again, the argument continues; it’s important to remember that the vast majority
of Confederate commemorative stuff didn’t go up straight after the Civil War ended in
1865.
That was when memorials to wounded and dead soldiers were erected, to acknowledge their
suffering and sacrifice.
Statues of Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee, however, primarily started being constructed
decades later, with a huge spike in Confederate symbols creation between about 1890 and 1920,
according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre.
Which, eerily enough, coincided with the instigation of Jim Crow laws; that is, state and local
laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.
As such, you could argue that the erection of these monuments through that specific time
period was to express resistance to Black American civil rights advances, not as a commemoration
of Southern heritage or soldiers.
The same could be said of the Confederate flag, considering it had a resurgence in the
mid-twentieth century through the civil rights movement.
Now, since this was a time of much-needed social progression for black people in America,
it would seem a bit of a contradiction in terms that a symbol that represents people
who wished to keep them enslaved popped up at the same time, unless it was a way for
those who opposed equality between blacks and whites to express their feelings on the
matter.
Side note; I am fully aware I am giving a very very basic rundown of American history
here, so please don’t sue me if I’m skimming stuff, or representing things in a way you
don’t agree with.
It’s a complicated topic, it’s very involved, and I can’t make like a five-hour video,
you’d all get bored.
But please; have it out in the comments section, I’d love to hear from you.
Anyway, long story short, and like I said before, the history and politics of Confederate
statues, monuments and flags is very complex, much more complex that the erecting of statues
to early British colonisers in Australia.
That’s an ideological cake walk compared to the ideological cesspool that is the putting
up/tearing down of Confederate stuff.
Holy wow.
So, what to do with it all?
Should statues of Captain Cook and Arthur Philip and General Lee be torn down lest they
offend the eyes and sensibilities of innocent passers-by?
Do we change the date of Australia Day because January 26th is always going to be tarnished
by the sins of our Anglo ancestors?
Well, to answer that question, you have to ask another question; how would that help?
How would changing dates, or removing statues actually help racial minorities in Australia
and the USA?
Certainly, in Australia, a lot of Indigenous communities have much, much bigger problems
than a date or the presence of a statue.
Indigenous children have a school attendance rate of about 10% lower than non-Indigenous
children, which is setting them back right from the get-go.
Fatherlessness is also a massive problem, as is alcoholism and drug addiction.
Indigenous women are 34 to 80 times more likely to be victims of DV, and according to a study
by the Australian Institute of Criminology in 2019, both Indigenous men and women are
overrepresented in nationwide DV statistics as perpetrators.
Even the life expectancy of Indigenous people in Australia is lower.
The life expectancy gap between Indigenous non-Indigenous males is 8.6 years, and 7.8
years between Indigenous non-Indigenous females.
So I ask you…how on earth is changing a date, or removing a statue or two, going to
help…all of that?
It’s not.
Of course; it’s not.
This silly push to change dates and hide history by the left is simply a distraction from the
actual terrible problems facing some Indigenous communities.
It’s a way of making leftists feel better about themselves while not risking being called
racist for pointing out the disproportionate problems I have just mentioned that afflict
Indigenous people.
In the case of white leftists, they get to smile, and go to rallies, and be a good little
social media activist, without having to go out on a limb and admit there are more serious
problems at hand.
In fact, it’s its own form of bigotry; the bigotry of low expectations.
It’s as if these white leftists think we shouldn’t actually expect anything better
from indigenous communities.
It’s like they feel Indigenous people should be coddled rather than motivated, and anyone
who says otherwise is a disgusting racist.
Oh, the projection is strong with that group, lemme tell ya.
The only thing changing the date of Australia Day affects is people’s feelings, and a
minority of people at that.
Most Australians actually don’t want the date changed.
Poll after poll has come out every year for the last several years to indicate that a
large majority of Aussies, this year according to the Institute for Public Affairs it’s
71%, want Australia Day to be celebrated on January 26th.
There is not what you would call a huge societal demand to change the date, despite what the
mainstream media and social media activists would have you believe.
The other issue with this left-wing campaign of the condoned vandalism of statues is that
you can’t actually rewrite history.
Nor can you really judge people historically through the lens of today.
Hiding monuments to periods of time that were, by today’s Western standards, very much
less than pleasant, does absolutely nothing other than keep it out of sight, out of mind
for future generations.
This is a bad thing, because we desperately need to continue to learn from history.
If we don’t learn from it, we are doomed to repeat it.
Those Confederate/British colonial statues are a stark but necessary reminder of what
not to do.
While they may have been erected as a commemoration of values we no longer live by, that does
not mean that today they are viewed in the same way.
Very few people in Australia, for instance, would look at a monument to Arthur Phillip,
and think, “Gosh, what a good job he did with those early Aboriginals.
That’s absolutely how we should treat them now.”
As for the USA; well, it’s no wonder the left, and to be more specific, Democrat voters,
are so keen to get rid of Confederate memorabilia.
They are playing historical catchup.
As we know, it was the Republicans, not the Democrats who freed the slaves.
The Democrats effectively ran the Confederacy, and created the Confederate flag.
The Southern Democrats instituted the Jim Crow laws, and voted against just about every
single piece of civil rights legislation from 1866 to 1966.
That’s a hundred years of voting against equality.
This includes Democrats opposing the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, which were the
abolition of slavery, the granting of citizenship to slaves, and granting slaves the right to
vote respectively.
They also created a certain militant supremacist group that is very fond of the Confederate
flag whose name is three letters rhyming with AAA, which I can’t name specifically in
this video because YouTube wouldn’t like it, but you all know what I mean.
Considering all of that, it’s no wonder Democrats have such a vested interest in hiding
history.
They are so keen on themselves as the allegedly anti-racist party that it just doesn’t do
to have all those nasty little reminders hanging around of just how horrid they were until
only about fifty years ago.
It’s all very Soviet, isn’t it; this revision of history to make themselves look better.
And in any case, if we do start moving statues we deem offensive in the USA and Australia,
where do we stop?
Do we tear down the pyramids because they were built by slaves?
Do we destroy Roman monuments because Roman emperors and mobs persecuted Christians?
Where do you draw the line?
History is inherently bloody.
History is inherently immoral.
History is befouled with the stains of unimaginable horror and extraordinary evil.
You can never underestimate the cruelty of human beings.
We need constant reminders of just how bad things can get, so we don’t do it again.
And trust me, we could do it again.
Human nature doesn’t change; only human knowledge does.
And in the case of Australia Day; my hope is that we can bypass the divisive identity
politics pushed by the left regarding its historical semantics, and as a nation, reclaim
our history by acknowledging January 26th as a day to celebrate how flipping great is
actually is to live in Australia.