ARE OPPONENTS OF CANCEL CULTURE SIMPLY ARROGANT AND ETHNOCENTRIC?

One of the most arrogant things I ever heard was the former right-hand man to a right-wing crackpot telling a First Nations Australian on First Contact to forget his native language, that was centuries old. People say, “Oh, we speak English in Australia,” but what we really do is speak a language that is comprised of Norman French (think William of Normandy: William the Conqueror) , Germanic, Greek, Latin Old English and a bit of Arabic that was introduced by the colonizers.

The buffoon who embarrassed Australia for 726 days lamented moves to cancel Captain Cook, and I remember, one night, watching a TV show whereby people were asked a question in a competition of “Who discovered Australia?” The answer they were looking for was Captain James Cook. But was this correct? No. The Dutch explorers Torrens, Jansz, Hartog and Tasman had sighted the land mass and some described it as “wild country with hostile natives.” The first Englishman to sight the land was William Dampier, and he wasn’t taken by it. Captain James Cook chartered the East Coast of Australia, and named it New South Wales. Whether or not Captain Cook was a Quaker and whether or not he admired the ways of the First Nations Peoples is beside the point. The point is, the land was taken possession of without a treaty.

Captain Cook might have been an admirer of the ways of the First Nations Peoples, and some settlers, such as Edward Ogilvie, attempted and succeeded at living in harmony with them, but that does not eliminate the fact that many did not, and that John Howard didn’t know what he was talking about when he denied the genocide of the First Nations Peoples. Okay, this country might not have put people on trains and stopped and said, “We’re just letting you out to have a shower,” before sending gas through the shower roses and killing them, but it poisoned waterholes, gave them tuberculosis infected blankets (they had no resistance to TB) and children were removed from their parents under questionable circumstances.

There is a saying that “No man is a hero to his valet,” and no man is a hero to the historian for very long, either! Why? Because research frequently reveals that people held up as heroes, once official papers were declassified, were not who they were painted as. Some people bank on the fact that by the time those papers are released, the person may be dead, so they cannot be brought to justice, or that it won’t matter. What could be further from the truth?

Daryl Somers, who was to lament the cancel culture, was born Daryl Schulz, only six years after the Allies defeated Nazi Germany. In the First World War, anti-German sentiment was taken to obsequious levels by the press and the public, to the extent that German Australians changed their names.

The Stolen Generation of First Nations Peoples wasn’t about protecting children, it was about cancelling the culture to forcibly assimilate them into a dominant culture!

The right-wing has a disgusting habit of wanting what it wants to be the dominant culture revered without question and cancelling everybody else.