That was a simultaneously hilarious, sad, outrageous, and FRIGHTENING blog entry indeed, posted by Mr. Auster on what really has been an incredible plague of Australian PC nonsense.

Anyone ready for yet more PC insanity from The Land of Down-Under? Blog entries documenting still more of it keep coming out it seems like every five minutes. (Thank God The Force is with us — this stuff gets known almost exclusively through the blessing of the conservative portion of the internet/blogosphere, what I call The Force. May The Force be with you!) How’s this, just gleaned from the blog-site “Gene Expression”?: an Australian federal judge has, in effect, just outlawed free speech.

Apparently it is now against the law in Australia to say or write this statement: “Aboriginal people in their native state are the most primitive people on earth.”

Gee … but won’t that put the kabosh on more or less the whole field of anthropology, not to mention around ninety percent of articles in “National Geographic”? No matter. When the Left is on the march, nothing counts other than their idiotic pipe-dreams.

Here’s the blog entry in “Gene Expression,” at www.gnxp.blogspot.com , posted by Jason Soon (a non-white in Australia … I’m not sure but I think he’s Chinese) under the entries for Nov. 26th (third entry down under that date), entitled, “$10,000 for your thoughts”:

“Alex Robson reproduces an amazing AAP dispatch reporting from down here in the land of the free, Australia (no link cited).

“Justice Christopher Carr said the West Australian Senator had breached the Racial Discrimination Act with his comments to a journalist in May 1997. He ordered Senator Lightfoot to pay costs of up to $10,000.

“Perth woman Hannah McGlade had taken civil action in the Federal Court, seeking an order that Senator Lightfoot admit his comments vilified Aborigines, that he pay her costs and that he make a donation to the Aboriginal Advancement Council (AAC).

“Justice Carr granted Ms McGlade’s request for a declaration that Senator Lightfoot’s comments vilified Aborigines.

” ‘I think that it would be fit to grant the declaration sought,’ he said. ‘It is a useful and appropriate way of recording publicly the unlawfulness of the making by the respondent of comments which received considerable publicity and were reasonably likely to offend and insult,’ Justice Carr said.
He also ordered Senator Lightfoot to pay most of Ms McGlade’s [lawyer’s] costs.

“However Justice Carr rejected Ms McGlade’s request that the Senator be ordered to make a donation to the AAC. ‘I take into account also the fact that the order that the respondent pay the applicant’s costs will result in a payment by him of several thousand dollars, possibly in the order of about $10,000,’ Justice Carr said.

“Today’s decision came five years after Ms McGlade first complained about Senator Lightfoot’s remarks to an Australian Financial Review journalist that: ‘Aboriginal people in their native state are the most primitive people on earth.’ ”

[Here’s the original Alex Robson link:

http://alexrobson.blogspot.com/2002_11_24_alexrobson_archive.html#85720686 ]

Don’t you get tired of phrases like, “Offending minorities, offensive speech.” Or, “I am offended.”

It’s interesting that the moves to ban Santa haven’t come from the state government or from ethnic groups or from the media, but instead from Anglo-Australian pre-school workers and parents’ groups.

There is an almost hypersensitivity to giving offence from some of these people. For instance, one pre-school banned Santa because there was a single Muslim family and “we didn’t want to offend them”.

Similarly Kindergarten Parents Victoria is talking of banning Christmas celebrations altogether for fear of offending families which are ordinarily “too poor” to celebrate Christmas at home. (A very small percentage of families in Melbourne I would suggest.) They also want to ban Mothers Day and Fathers Day events due to “diverse family structures.”

One Santa agency has noted that bookings are down “tremendously”, so the trend seems to be general.

There is an article on this at http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5579613%255E2862,00.html

Unadorned is right to point to the seriousness of the Senator Lightfoot case.

Free speech on Aboriginal issues has long been compromised in Australia by the traditional liberal means of using media influence to ridicule and vilify anyone taking the “wrong” line. (And by indirectly threatening the jobs of academics who did the same thing.)

This is the first time in Australia, though, in which someone has been found guilty of a criminal offence for saying something about Aborigines that is demonstrably true. It really does mark the death of free speech in this country.

By the way, you may not have heard in America of another astonishing case involving Aborigines which occurred here recently.

An Aboriginal man had “bought” a baby girl from her mother to be a future wife. When the girl turned 15 she was handed over to the older man (now in his 50s?). She resisted the process, but was bashed and raped.

The man was charged with having sex with a minor, but even this was too much for the white magistrate, who claimed that the girl “knew what was expected of her” and that the Aboriginal man should never have been brought to court.

There was not a peep about this from feminists, just as civil libertarians have been remarkably quiet on Senator Lightfoot case.

Mark Richardson notes, “There is an almost hypersensitivity to giving offence from some of these people. For instance, one pre-school banned Santa because there was a single Muslim family, and ‘we didn’t want to offend them.’ “

Mark, when imbecilic judges like His Honor (or should that be His Disgrace?) Christopher Carr stand ready to slap you with heavy fines plus lawyers’ costs for “hurting the feelings” of so much as a single Muslim (or other) family, that does tend to make you, shall we say, a bit hypersensitive.

But you do make an excellent point, and your post raises, as do so many other posts, the question: Why … WHY? … are so many people taking all this crap lying down?

“Why … WHY? … are so many people taking all this crap lying down?”

The answer is that they either actively believe in liberalism or they have no alternative world view with which to oppose liberalism. Liberalism says there is no transcendent moral value above us and no particular collective value about us. There is only the equality and freedom of individuals and the advance of disadvantaged groups that our guilty culture has oppressed.

Liberalism is a mixed bag, a schizophrenic phenomenon. People living under a liberal order seem to have normal and healthy values; they value their lives, their happiness, their material possessions and enjoyments, their families, even their country. Therefore you assume that they are valueing beings, and therefore their failure to defend the values of our civilization when they come under serious attack seems bizarre, unaccountable. In fact the people living under a liberal order only value subjective values, not objective values. They appreciate their own marriages and families, but they don’t value marriage and family as such (gay marriage, why not?). They appreciate having wealth and prosperity, but they don’t value the objective values that make wealth and prosperity possible. They value the nation as the provider of their rights and wealth, but not as an entity that transcends its members, so it’s difficult or impossible for them to defend the nation as a nation (rather than as a collection of hurt and threatened individuals requiring protection) when it is attacked. They appreciate the fact that they are alive, but they don’t value life as such; so murder arouses no outrage (only some sad sense of victimhood combined with the barely suppressed vengeful feeling that as long as our society fosters so much inequality we must expect these things). These so-called relativist (but really nihilist) attitudes are captured in contemporary expressions such as: “I believe in right and wrong, but I don’t want to impose my values on others.” Or, “I had a good marriage and children, all that is great, but if a young woman wants to have have children without a husband, that’s fine too.” Or, “Of course Hitler was terrible—if you were Jewish.” To such people, their values are only subjective preferences, not based in objective truth; therefore they have no desire to defend those things when they are attacked.

As long as we assume our society is “mainstream” rather than radical, it confuses us. As long as we assume that our fellow citizens basically believe in the same values we believe in, such as our nation, our culture, the rule of law, human life itself, their lack of moral outrage when those things are transgressed seems inexplicable. But once we realize that they do not believe in those things as objective values, but only as personal preferences lacking any transcendent basis, then we understand why they “take all this crap lying down.” It’s not crap to them. It’s only crap if you believe that the values being violated by the crap are real. But since they don’t believe in real values, to them the crap is not crap but something acceptable and normal or (the further leftward you go) even of great value. Such people look at, say, the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain which resembles a gigantic pile of turds, and they think it’s the greatest thing they ever saw. Once people have rejected the idea of objective truth, objective morality, and objective beauty, then they are required to go along with the transgression of those things, if they are not actively celebrating it.

I saw a great example of what Lawrence Auster is talking about the other night. A former Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, was being interviewed about his political career and he was very proud of the changes he made to family law in the early 1970s (which ushered in a still record number of divorces) and to women in the workplace. But at the end of the interview he became very emotional talking about how the best thing in his life had been his successful marriage, and how he couldn’t have been successful without his wife’s support and so on. I could have reached into the TV set and shaken him: neither he nor his interviewer recognised any discordance between his pride at having helped to deconstruct family life in Australia and the importance to him personally of his own family.