racism

Yesterday, on 8 December 2023, Miko Peled, spoke at a public meeting about Israel's murderous war against Gaza, which commenced over two months ago on 7 October and the broader context of the history of the Palestine/Israel conflict going back more than 75 years. Much of what he said from his own personal experience. The meeting was held in the public library of Bethlehem in the US state of New York.

On Thursday 2 November, staff, students and alumni of The University of Melbourne published an open letter in Overland Literary Journal addressed to Vice-Chancellor of The University of Melbourne, Duncan Maskell.

Labor MP, Anne Aly, has been widely publicised objecting to immigration and population being mentioned together by Kristina Keneally, Shadow minister for immigration and citizenship, and NSW Premier from 2009 to 2011. Aly's tired cliches have predictably summoned up a dog-pack of growthists claiming to hear dog-whistles and to see Pauline Hanson look-a-likes. The growth lobby and its spokespeople are panicking, because the chickens of their land-speculation are coming home to roost, as COVID-19 dries up immigration. The more Anne Aly supports them, the more publicity she will get - always useful for an aspiring politician - and damn the consequences for Australians.

Kenneally's 'offending words':

"As a result of COVID-19, Australia will soon have an opportunity to do something we have never done before: restart a migration program. When we do, we must understand that migration is a key economic policy lever that can help or harm Australian workers during the economic recovery and beyond.

We must make sure that Australians get a fair go and a first go at jobs. Our post-COVID-19 economic recovery must ensure that Australia shifts away from its increasing reliance on a cheap supply of overseas, temporary labour that undercuts wages for Australian workers and takes jobs Australians could do." (Kristina Keneally, "Advancing Australia," Sunday Age, 3 May 2020.)

Anne Aly's 'indignant' response:

Showing woeful or feigned ignorance of the components of population growth in Australia, to the acclaim of the big end of town, Labor MP Anne Aly has objected to immigration and population being mentioned together by Kristina Keneally.[1]

In fact immigration has, until a recent pause due to COVID-19, composed more than 60 per cent of Australia's shockingly rapid population growth for nigh on a decade. So, what's Anne Aly's problem with the truth, that she thinks gives her licence to attack Kristina Keneally (or by implication anyone else) for voicing it? Worse, Aly, who is supposed to be representing Australians, has criticised Keneally for wanting to put Australians first. If not Australians first, then who, Ms Aly?

Aly is not the only one doing service for the growth lobby in the ALP, which is known for its massive investments in property finance and development. (See, for instance, /node/1781.)

The Drum

The ABC's The Drum ran an item on this on Monday 4 May 2020. The clip starts around the 30 min mark on the ABC podcast. Geoff Gallop and the rest of the panel, including Abdul Rizvi (ex immigration public servant from 1990s to 2007), uncritically recited the usual propaganda about how immigration creates jobs, Australians don't want to do some jobs, Australia needs it to cope with ageing (they must be pleased with COVID-19's lethal effect on the elderly), falling natural increase, etc. A union representative did mention the problem of exploitation through the short-term work visa system. Rizvi acknowledged this is a problem. As an incorrigible immigration advocate, however, he claimed it is solvable. Whilst it might theoretically be solvable, like world hunger, it has actually been getting much worse, due to legal and constitutional changes. As we have come to expect from the ABC, unfortunately, there was no sign of an articulate representative of an opposing view.

Fran Kelly

Kristina Keneally was interviewed by Fran Kelly on Tuesday morning (5 May 2020) on ABC RN. Kelly basically accused Keneally of dog whistling and undertones of racism in her weekend article. (This was also articulated by Australian Director at Human Rights Watch, Elaine Pearson, in a punishing tone last night on Q and A, egged on by the presenter of course.) I thought Keneally held her position very well in the face of Fran Kelly's interrogation, and came across as coherent and reasonable. She also put her position in a human context, with her call for temporary migrants who are stuck here due to Covid 19, being given government assistance, as are Australian workers. The part of what Keneally wrote, that Kelly latched onto, was that Keneally advocated Australians being catered for first in the post COVID-19 job market before importing workers from overseas.

This was supposedly sounding like Pauline Hanson and that is bad because Pauline Hanson said it (!). Furthermore Pauline Hanson has thrown the spotlight on it as something she's been saying for years.

Seems we are still stuck in a closed circuit where anyone who raises the issue of immigration in any form will be hammered back in the media with accusations of racism. It has worked so well that those who benefit from it will never tire of it.

Jobs and growth

The Financial Review editorial for 4 May 2020 would have the reader think that Australia and Australians have been prospering over the last three decades. Ordinary Australians have lost heavily and continue to.

"Hansonite populism on migration won't restore jobs and growth," Financial Review Editorial for 4 May 2020.

Jobs and growth have not brought prosperity. In fact "jobs" has meant overwork for some and underemployment stress for others. "Growth" has meant overcrowding, housing stress and reduced quality of life, including destruction of the environment. What's growing is just the number of people partaking in this!

The Financial Review editorial criticises the need to even talk about immigration numbers policy in Australia, since the numbers have dropped with the closing of our borders due to COVID-19. But this is precisely when we should talk about it, because, to a certain extent, the pressure from the growth lobby has to relent during this pause. Or you would think so, however, they are coming out in force, as we can see from the above.

Sometimes you hear the other side, as in this SBS article:

'Industry professor Warren Hogan, an economist from the University of Technology, Sydney,has said now was a good time to have the debate about migration levels. “There is no doubt that Australia is probably the highest immigration nation in the world. This is a chance to think about if that’s the right strategy going forward,” he said.' (Source: Jarni Blakkarly, "Reimagining a new Australia': Experts back calls for a debate about Australia's migrant numbers post-coronavirus," SBS News, updated on 4 May 2020.https://www.sbs.com.au/news/reimagining-a-new-australia-experts-back-calls-for-a-debate-about-australia-s-migrant-numbers-post-coronavirus)

But if you read the whole article, Professor Hogan is outnumbered, two to one, by pro-immigration 'experts', with their mass-produced cliches.

"University of Sydney Associate Professor Anna Boucher agreed it was an opportunity to examine Australia's migration program, she said it was important to acknowledge migrants have an important role to play in the recovery."

(Source: Jarni Blakkarly, "Reimagining a new Australia': Experts back calls for a debate about Australia's migrant numbers post-coronavirus," SBS News, updated on 4 May 2020.https://www.sbs.com.au/news/reimagining-a-new-australia-experts-back-calls-for-a-debate-about-australia-s-migrant-numbers-post-coronavirus.)

"Associate professor of human geography Alan Gamlen from Monash University said migration levels would need to stabilise at around the same rate as pre-coronavirus in order for Australia to return to the same level of economic growth." (Source: Jarni Blakkarly, "Reimagining a new Australia': Experts back calls for a debate about Australia's migrant numbers post-coronavirus," SBS News, updated on 4 May 2020.https://www.sbs.com.au/news/reimagining-a-new-australia-experts-back-calls-for-a-debate-about-australia-s-migrant-numbers-post-coronavirus.)

The real problem is that greedy land-speculators who have been running the country for years and who have borrowed to build apartments to sell to new migrants, are now looking at financial collapse, while the rest of us are looking at a lower cost of living as population-pressure on housing-prices finally falls.

But the growth lobby knows how to put the wind up the powerful, and the Australian Prime Minister knows which side his bread is buttered on:

"Cutting immigration would hurt the economy and communities: Morrison." Sydney Morning Herald, 5 May 2020.)

Hallelujah! It didn't take him long. But what about COVID-19? It hasn't gone away. The Prime Minister also said he was going to a football match despite the pandemic, then backed down, shortly before we all went into lock-down.

Panic among the growthists

The growth lobby and its spokespeople are panicking. Maybe because they don't want Australians or those living here to realise they enjoy aspects of their lives now, not tearing around, having some time for themselves off the work-commute treadmill. They (the growth lobby) are saying, "Don't get used to it. You must take The Economy's medicine, even though you don't like it. You all understand why chickens are raised in crowded conditions. It's good for the bottom line. Likewise, when you are more crowded in, it is better for the bottom line - not yours exactly, but that of your owners - just like the chickens. You just have to believe that what is good for someone else's bottom line is good for yours. It takes a certain way of thinking. You have to believe.

NOTES

[1] "Coronavirus: Aussies-first rhetoric must stop in immigration debate, says Anne Aly," The Australian, 4 May 2020.

This book aims to talk truth to power, using intersectionalist feminist concepts, within the strange paradigm of the corporate newsmedia [1] and US-NATO foreign policy. Power is identified as whiteness. White women are enjoined to stand with women of colour against male whiteness, which they are charged with propping up for their own benefit.

Whiteness is defined as non-brown and non-blackness. But brown-ness can include whites who are not the ‘right kind of pale’.

“Whiteness is more than skin colour. It is, as race scholar Paul Kivel describes, ‘a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence [are] justified by their not being white.’” [2]

Hamad accuses white women in Australia today of endorsing non-white slavery and colonialism now and through the ages because they benefited and benefit from it. She writes as if the accused white women are conscious that their attitudes condone such slavery. I would say, however, that the class that endorses these things that are decided by their ‘betters’ does so because its members believe the government and corporate media spin that justifies war, colonialism and exploitation of peoples far away. The women (and men) in the classes the system still works for, or who believe it still works for them, are obedient and unquestioning of authorities anointed by these. Such people erupt in defence of media-anointed authorities they believe to be pillars of virtue. They will also hotly defend the ideas and values they receive from these classes.

Of course, various forms of psychopathic entitlement underlie the public rationales of our leaders for colonialism and wars. These include xenophobic assumptions or just contempt for anyone standing against what empire builders and weapons lobbies want. You would think that anyone could see through these, but they don’t. Obedient Australians respond viscerally to their masters, on whom they depend, like good dogs conditioned by rewards and punishments. Hence they easily fall for the suspicious perpetual recurrence of ‘mad and brutal dictators’ in the Middle East, whom the west must get rid of through regime change. As Dr Jeremy Salt, Middle-East scholar says to cartoonist Bruce Petty (who visited Syria in 2011) in the video below (which I made), "There always has to be a madman in the Middle East" [so that the west can have an excuse to invade.]

The greater basis for their credulity is apparently the idea that the Middle East has not ‘developed’ sufficiently to achieve lawful societies, in part because it is religiously divided and lacks the separation of church and state. No relevant history is provided by the newsmedia as to how these things came about in formerly very stable societies.

Additionally, the newsmedia seems to report on overseas 'interventions' in the most confusing manner possible, as it also does with Australian politics. This leaves the Australian classes that rely for information on the newsmedia with the idea that domestic and foreign politics are incredibly complicated and hard to follow. Bored and helpless, they see no choice but to place their faith in the imagined greater intellects of the journalists and politicians involved in producing this atrocious spin.

I find it difficult, however, to agree with the assumption in Hamad’s argument that all white women (and men) in Australia accept the doctrine of the newsmedia. There seem to be plenty of men and women in Australia who question war, invasion, mass population movements, Julian Assange's imprisonment for exposing war-criminals, and think that sovereignty should be respected, but they don't find any clear echo in the newsmedia, except sometimes in masses of negative comments on line, especially on articles promoting population growth. Those commenters cannot, however, get in touch with each other to organise. Constant demographic, employment, and land-use changes have also interrupted traditional family and neighbourhood networks, and big business has taken over the universities, as the newsmedia has taken over the public talking stick. So, if you believe that the newsmedia represents the opinions of most Australians, as Hamad seems to, I think you would be wrong.

There is still an anti-war movement, but it is very disorganised, almost certainly because the mainstream media ceased to report its point of view leading up to and after the invasion of Iraq. [3] The anti-war movement exists in the alternative media, both Australian and overseas. (See IPAN (and here) for instance.) Unfortunately, spontaneous voluntary movements using independent and big tech media resources still do not have nearly the same publicity reach of the newsmedia nor the power to authoritatively self-anoint. The Facebook tech-machine geographically limits Australians to Australia when using its promotion system (ads) for criticism of corporate newsmedia talking points and government policies (especially those of the US). They thus continue to be drowned out by the internationally syndicated newsmedia. The greater public, whose smart screens and phones are still commercially tuned to the corporate newsmedia are thus not aware of these other views. They are only aware of them if they use independent search engines, since smart phones and screens have licence restrictions on what they can show. Whilst it is easy to simply put a URL in a browser, most people don’t know this and children are not even taught it. They might use search engines to look for alternative reports, but they are not aware that the license restrictions of the commercial software associated with their ‘smart’ electronic hardware, keep their information sources nearly as narrow as the pre-internet era.

But Hamad is a professional newsmedia journalist. Not only is she a newsmedia journalist, but she refers to what passes for Australian cultural belief and 'leftist' values in the newsmedia as if these were actual reflections of most of Australian society, rather than a sort of echo-chamber for the classes that read and write in them. Does she really believe in the cultural matrix that she refers to, or is she merely using its own language to question it?

SYRIA

Of particular interest to me was Hamad's experience in questioning Australia's support for US-NATO military intervention in Syria. If you weren't already aware of the shocking wrongness of our policy towards Syria, then you might wonder what Hamad is talking about here.

Hamad, who comes from a Lebanese and Syrian background (Greater Syria), and who still has relatives in Syria, describes how she was rebuffed when she tried to express her disapproval of a US intervention in Syria to her feminist white colleagues.

"[Syria] is such a fraught issue that genuine discussion is impossible while smears and misplaced outrage are the norm. On this occasion in early 2018, I felt compelled to say something as it was the day after US president Donald Trump launched strikes on Damascus following an alleged chemical attack on a rebel-held town. Anna [her Anglo-Australian friend] expressed support for the strikes in a post, which I found jarring, and I told her - calmly - that I was confused given that the United States' act signalled a possible escalation of the conflict and further suffering. I was rebuffed as an aggressor who was hurting her and had to be publicly humiliated for it: the damsel requires her retribution. Merely by letting Anna know that although I understood she cared for Syrian civilians, her stance was disappointing to me, I inadvertently unleashed a demonstration of strategic White Womanhood that brushed aside the actual issue - the air strikes - and turned it into a supposed attack by me on her 'just for being white'. The result was a torrent of abuse hurled at me on a Facebook thread." (Pp105.)

Hamad’s analysis of this exchange is that, rather than deal with the political issue of bombing Syria and the atrocious consequences of war, [Anglo-Australian] Anna seemed to interpret the questioning of Hamad’s views on foreign policy as an attack on Anna for being 'white'.

Hamad sees this as a way of avoiding the issue. She thinks that the motive for avoiding the issue is to preserve the status quo from which White Womanhood benefits.

I think this analysis would work better if we substituted the word 'consequence' for motive, because it is hard for me to believe that most Australians who defend US-NATO policy towards Syria do this with a conscious understanding of the issues. Unless they are actually heads of government/ selling weapons, of course.

Where would they acquire such an understanding? Only by venturing beyond the Anglosphere and Eurosphere mainstream, but they have been repeatedly and explicitly conditioned to avoid alternative perspectives like RT and Presstv Iran, and the many independent blogs, in various languages, as ‘fake news’ by that very mainstream. It’s effective wedge politics; middle class Australians hardly dare look over at the other side of the fence on any issues. And, as mentioned, their smart screens have licensing issues.

It is true, however, that by blindly defending official policies, the obedient classes defend that tiny power-elite that pursues those policies consciously and pollutes our public messaging system with false reasons for war.

But, you see, I have encountered just the same kind of reaction when I have criticised military intervention in Syria. My friend’s father expostulated that we were ‘extremists’ and accused his son of falling for ‘fake news’. Mainstream journalists regard you with horror and abhorrence. On-line such views are treated as highly eccentric and laughed at, except when sympathisers find them. Most people you meet have no idea whatsoever about what you are referring to.

Politicians claim not to know anything about foreign affairs or they ignore you. I would have liked it if Hamad had gone to the role of Australia's then foreign policy minister, a [white] woman - Julie Bishop - in officially supporting US policy in Syria. Along with others, I wrote to Bishop about this, but received absolutely no response. And I wrote an article about the absurdity of it all: "Can Trump dodge his deep state destiny by acting absurdly?" Now it is quite possible that Julie Bishop had no idea of the consequences of what she was supporting, but she had direct responsibility, and a duty to inform herself. The reason I would like Hamad to address the role of a successful white female politician on Syria is because such people are elected and propped up via the false rhetoric of the newsmedia. That is how the normalisation of aggression against Syria takes place.

I know also that Syrians who hold the same attitude as me often don’t dare express it in public, and sometimes among Syrian acquaintances. Why is this? One reason is that refugees from Syria are more likely to receive encouragement from the Australian government if they say that the Syrian Government is a brutal dictatorship, even if they don’t really think so, since that is the official opinion of the Australian Government. And I have been told that quite a few Syrians in Australia actually do sympathise with the so-called Rebel armies in Syria, and so you might think twice about denouncing them or even disagreeing with them. New Zealand, our close neighbour, has settled some members of what many believe is a fake Syrian rescue group, with ISIS sympathies,the White Helmets. [4] Whilst I agree with Hamad that bombing Syria was a terrible idea, note that I am not saying that Hamad holds the same views on Syria as me. She does not actually disclose her views in her book.

It also sounds as if ‘Anglo-Australian’ Anna was out of her depth and was responding to a loss of ‘face’ on Facebook. That Anna then accused Hamad of being racist towards her is for me a symptom of Australia’s contamination with US race-baggage, not surprisingly, because of massive syndication of Australian newsmedia with US newsmedia, which virtually blots out Australia itself.

Whilst it is true that Australia was founded on the dispossession and genocide of non-white hunter gatherers, with some enslaved, others religiously indoctrinated, its initial principle labour source was convicts from the Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English lower classes. Most of these people would, however, meet Hamad’s definition of non-white, because land-tenure and inheritance law disqualified them from white power. They came from a country of severe class division. People there stole in order not to starve. As an example, the numbers of Irish transported soared with the Irish potato famine, due to crimes committed from hunger. [5]

Numerous convicts were charged with sedition and similar crimes and sent here as punishment for agitating for democratic government. [6] Many Irish were transported for insurrection due to their participation in revolts against the English. Convicts had no rights and could die in brutal conditions. [7]

Transportation of revolutionaries and protesters to the ends of the earth was an extreme form of demographic and political atomisation in Britain. Australia was Britain’s gulag and she sent a lot of people there who might otherwise have made a greater difference to British politics. Many recent Australians and mainstream journalists seem to have no knowledge of this or of the biophysical limitations of this continent. [8]

We do Australia a disservice if we fail to remember that people in this country initiated the Eight Hour Day, and stopped the beginnings of a slave-trade in Pacific Islanders and outlawed that of other ‘non-white’ peoples.

Australian workers at the turn of the 19th century, having ended transportation of forced ‘white’ labour, noting the kidnapping of Pacific Islanders, also rejected ‘non-white’ slavery through the White Australia policy, which was a trade-off for allowing manufacturers to import foreign goods. [9] Worker reasons for this would have been economic, since unpaid work presents unfair competition to free people. Unsurprisingly, just as today, we have little record of what ordinary people had to say on the matter, however. The rhetoric that we retain from the time is, of course, only from elites. Even among the elites, there was a fair amount of abolitionism, especially regarding the cessation of convict labour. The lack of contemporary documentation has made it easy to promote a view of the White Australia policy as a kind of Nazi doctrine, but it is dishonest to omit the anti-slavery and industrial relations aspects.

Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch of 1970, galvanised the Australian and international feminist movements, completely redefining how women saw themselves. Yet today Greer is hardly mentioned in the revisiting of feminism. Between 1972 and 1975 the Whitlam Government promoted multiculturalism, birth control, and feminism in the general population. These values were widely adopted in the generation now called ‘baby boomers’. Bizarrely and unfairly, recent anti-racist and mainstream feminist promotions fail to recognise, let alone build, on these well-established Australian values.

It might achieve more if articulate people like Hamad would look, beyond the mainstream representation of Australia, for similarities, rather than differences with their fellow citizens. She writes of the battle for land-rights (p.216). We need her help, because the colonisation is ongoing here. The fight for land-rights is being lost in Australia to the ultra-rich. Other Australians are fighting many different battles to resist our leaders’ addiction to war and growthism, and to preserve this beautiful country and its beleaguered ecology against land-speculation, overdevelopment and overpopulation. But they are being drowned out by the massive volume of the mainstream corporate media, which assails us all with growthist propaganda day and night, and also accuses us of racism, with the effect of shutting up criticism of absurdly high rates of immigration. As well, by appearing to champion or demonise refugees and asylum-seekers, it takes the public debate away from the regime-change wars that generate these.

Hamad argues within what I see as an anthropocentric, black-white, pseudo-‘progressive’ paradigm, without biophysical reference points. Although, at the end, she questions the idea of chronological progress, she still seems to accept the paradigm that we are all ‘going forward’, although no “progress is ever assured”. The points of reference in her universe are largely human-notional, generalised and global, whereas I look at how humans interact with their biophysical environments within specific land-tenure and inheritance systems. Along the same lines as Walter Youngquist’s paradigm in Geodestinies, I see material wealth, war, and colonisation, as a reflection of geology and geography.

I have a land-tenure and inheritance system explanation for the British class system and its production of great quantities of landless labour, which fed into a fossil-fueled coal and iron industrial revolution that permitted Britain’s industrial-scale exploitation of other countries. (See Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law 2: Land-tenure and the origins of capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press, 2014.)

In Europe one tribe enslaved another. The Romans enslaved the British. Six hundred years later, the Normans reduced much of the British population to serfdom. They imposed almost universal male primogeniture in England, which meant that English women relied on men due to their inability to inherit land, and the bulk of children were effectively disinherited.

The British practised colonisation, mass migration, and genocide of Catholic whites in Ireland, and despoiled that land, with Henry VIII and Elizabeth I egging on the removal of nearly every tree for wood. Cromwell awarded Irish land to his English soldiers.

Many times the Irish Catholics tried to free themselves from the English, finally rising in revolt in 1798, causing civil war.

The civil war was dogged by savage sectarian differences which added their own violence to the government’s ghastly atrocities. Many Irish Ulster Protestants sided with the British. [10]

Irish Revolutionary leader, Wolfe Tone, described a landscape “on fire every night” (from burning houses), echoing with ‘shrieks of torture’, where neither sex nor age were spared, and men, women, and children, were herded naked before the points of bayonets to ‘starve in bogs and fastnesses’. He said that dragoons slaughtered those who attempted to give themselves up as they put down their weapons, and, finally, he talked about the spies who had brought the Irish Revolution down.

“And no citizen, no matter how innocent and inoffensive, could deem himself secure from informers.” [11]

I think that Hamad’s lack of recognition of inter-white racism/classism prevents her from realising that Australia is being recolonised, with ‘diversity’ as the excuse and induced racial schisms as the mechanism to alienate the ‘diverse’ from the incumbent population, the better to over-rule democracy. Australians, despite multicultural policy from Whitlam's time, are stigmatised as white and racist. There is a token nod to Aborigines, whose defining culture can in no way benefit from mass immigration or the 'developed' economy.[12] Hamad is not alone in this complacency because the mass-media constantly massages high immigration and renormalises terra nullius. Hamad has some recognition of this ‘irony’, however.

“I’d be lying if I said I knew how to reconcile all of this. I’m well aware that whatever our own experiences of colonisation and racism-induced intergenerational trauma, non-Indigenous people of colour in Australia are also the beneficiaries of indigenous dispossession. We too live on and appropriate stolen land.” (p.195)

Much of the foreign intervention in Syria has been in order to force it to accept globalisation, privatisation, and leaders sympathetic to these. The same thing is being forced on Australia, but without the need for overt violence so far because, unlike Syria, Australian leaders have not resisted this. And the newsmedia has given no voice to those who are trying to resist it, so they appear invisible.

Frizzy hair

On a more personal note, I sympathise with Hamad’s experience dealing with frizzy hair during her teenage years (p.180). I had the same problem. I had a different method, which did the same job. I didn’t brush my hair dry for hours, I wound it round my head tightly and fixed it painfully with bobby pins and other clamps, waiting hours for it to dry. I gave up swimming for years, although prior to becoming aware of my appearance, I had swum daily. This was a great sacrifice. Although I was also trying to meet the prevailing standards, which seemed to me to be straight hair, unlike Hamad, I did not identify straight hair with being ‘white’. I was ‘white’ if you like, although descended from Irish, Scottish, and Welsh stock, just not in the ‘in’-crowd as regards hair – or many other things.

A theme in Hamad’s book is that White Women get cross if you challenge their cultural ideas. They shut you out. Hamad has shown that some of these cultural ideas are probably immoral, and she wonders why she is shut out for exposing them. The thing is that all cultures want to control their ideas from the inside and they reject outside challenges. That’s poesis. Basically, to be one of them, you have to embrace their ideology.

Then, within that culture, there are sub-cultures, and cliques. In Australia’s hard new society where seniority and local labour have been dropped and ‘meritocracy’ prevails in an increasingly precarious employment market, women tend to form groups led by the woman closest to power – often a male boss. One of the ways for the dominant women to keep order and stay at the top is to punish anyone who looks like getting close to power by pretending to have been victimised. Another way is to harp on differences, of which ‘race’, ethnicity, religion, hair-type, weight, dress, and opinion, etc are all signs that can be used to define their possessor as a member of the out-group.

This kind of behaviour is also called ‘bullying’. And it is getting worse, unfortunately. Maybe it is a reflection of the way our leaders behave and the economic rationalist anti-society they have forced on us. There is competition out there for food and power. And we are apes.

NOTES

[2] Ruby Hamad in her Author’s note, p.xiii.

[3] “After the enormous demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the anti-war movement disappeared almost as suddenly as it began, with some even openly declaring it dead. Critics noted the long-term absence of significant protests against those wars, a lack of political will in Congress to deal with them, and ultimately, apathy on matters of war and peace when compared to issues like health care, gun control, or recently even climate change.” Source: Harpootlian, Allegra, US Wars and military action: The New Anti-War Movement, https://www.thenation.com/article/tom-dispatch-new-anti-war-movement-iraq-iran/.

“Criticism of the news media’s performance in the months before the 2003 Iraq War has been profuse. Scholars, commentators, and journalists themselves have argued that the media aided the Bush administration in its march to war by failing to air a wide-ranging debate that offered analysis and commentary from diverse perspectives. As a result, critics say, the public was denied the opportunity to weigh the claims of those arguing both for and against military action in Iraq. We report the results of a systematic analysis of every ABC, CBS, and NBC Iraq-related evening news story—1,434 in all—in the 8 months before the invasion (August 1, 2002, through March 19, 2003). We find that news coverage conformed in some ways to the conventional wisdom: Bush administration officials were the most frequently quoted sources, the voices of anti-war
groups and opposition Democrats were barely audible, and the overall thrust of coverage favored a pro-war perspective. But while domestic dissent on the war was minimal, opposition from abroad—in particular, from Iraq and officials from countries such as France, who argued for a diplomatic solution to the standoff—was commonly reported on the networks. Our findings suggest that media researchers should further examine the inclusion of non-U.S. views on high-profile foreign policy debates, and they also raise important questions about how the news filters the communications of political actors and refracts—rather than merely reflects—the contours of debate.” Source: Hayes, Danny and Guardino, Matt, Whose Views Made the News? Media Coverage and the March to War in Iraq, Political Communication, Vol. 27, No. 1, Dec 2009, p59. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10584600903502615
“As the [Iraq] war dragged on, and as reporting got better and better, the real problem with news from Iraq would turn out to be how little of it most Americans ever saw or heard. Across the board, as documented by Pew and others, the percentage of the news hole devoted to the war declined steeply.” Source: Murphy, Cullen, The Press at War, From Vietnam to Iraq, Atlantic Monthly, March 20, 2018.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/iraq-war-anniversary/555989/

[4] Independent journalists who have criticised this US and UK-funded and Hollywood-iconified group have been vilified by the mainstream, but the evidence is out there. See, for instance, Rick Sterling, “The ‘White Helmets’ Controversy,” Consortium News,
July 22, 2018”https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/22/the-white-helmets-controversy/

[5] Lohan, Rena, Archivist, ‘Sources in the National Archives for research into the
transportation of Irish convicts to Australia (1791–1853)’ National Archives, Journal of the Irish Society for Archives, Spring 1996 https://www.nationalarchives.ie/topics/transportation/Ireland_Australia_transportation.pdf

[6] Convict Records, British Convict transportation register made available by the State Library of Queensland, Various crimes were assigned to revolutionaries, including sedition and insurrection which included many Irish who participated in rebellions. I08 are listed in the Convict Records simply as ‘Irish Rebels’: https://convictrecords.com.au/crimes/sedition https://convictrecords.com.au/crimes/irish-rebel

[7] “During the first 80 years of white settlement, from 1788 to 1868, 165,000 convicts were transported from England to Australia. Convict discipline was invariably harsh and often quite arbitrary. One of the main forms of punishment was a thrashing with the cat o’ nine tails, a multi-tailed whip that often also contained lead weights. Fifty lashes was a standard punishment, which was enough to strip the skin from someone’s back, but this could be increased to more than 100. Just as dreadful as the cat o' nine tails was a long stint on a chain gang, where convicts were employed to build roads in the colony. The work was backbreaking, and was made difficult and painful as convicts were shackled together around their ankles with irons or chains weighing 4.5kg or more. During the day, the prisoners were supervised by a military guard assisted by brutal convict overseers , convicts who were given the task of disciplining their fellows. At night, they were locked up in small wooden huts behind stockades. Worse than the cat or chain gangs was transportation to harsher and more remote penal settlements in Norfolk Island, Port Macquarie and Moreton Bay.” Source: State Library New South Wales, https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/convict-experience

[8] Recently an Australian Review journalist, Laura Tingle, suggested that convicts seemed almost more inclined to die of starvation than to try to feed themselves by farming. She obviously knew nothing of the difficulties experienced by the early settlers, even with the help of convicts, in producing food in this country, well-documented by Watkin Tench, (e.g. Ed Tim Flannery), Watkin Tench, 1788, 2012. Tingle, in Laura Tingle, "Great Expectations" in Quarterly Essay, Issue 46, June 2012, opines that Australian government began by administering a dependent population in a patronising way. Australians became passive recipients of government benefits - to the extent, Tingle believes, that convicts seemed almost more inclined to die of starvation than to try to feed themselves by farming. Moreover, after the gold rush, Australian men got the vote and could run for parliament whether or not they had property and the quality of politicians declined compared to that when only people with property could vote. In these circumstances, politicians with poor manners came to dominate parliament and Australians therefore lost respect for their politicians. See Sheila Newman, “Tingle shoots blanks despite Great Expectations - review of Quarterly Essay,” 8 July 2012, http://candobetter.net/node/3003

[9] An ammendment to the Masters and Servants Act August 1847 forbade the transportation of ‘Natives of any Savage or uncivilized tribe inhabiting any Island or Country in the Pacific Ocean’. Masters and Servants Act 1847 (NSW) No 9a. No.IX., 16 August 1847. Six weeks later a Legislative Council motion disapproved the prospect of introducing Pacific Island workers into the colony, because it “May, if not checked, degenerate into a traffic in slaves.” https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/july/1561989600/alex-mckinnon/blackbirds-australia-s-hidden-slave-trade-history.
[10] Wilkes, Sue. Regency Spies: Secret Histories of Britain's Rebels & Revolutionaries . Pen and Sword. Kindle Edition. Location 1014.
[11] Theobald Wolfe Tone, The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone 1763-98, Volume 3: France, the Rhine, Lough Swilly and death of Tone, Janurary 1797 to November 1798, Eds. T.W. Moody, R.B. McDowell and C.J. Woods, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007, p516.
[12] I have mixed with Australian Aborigines from most parts of Australia and can tell you that those I got to know well have expressed strong resentment of mass immigration (black or white), for obvious reasons. Yet, again, the newsmedia conflates mass immigration with multiculturalism and creates the impression that Australian Aborigines have nothing to say against being made an ever smaller part of Australia's demography and land-tenure. This is particularly evident with the Australian ABC. It was demonstrated in the Q&A ABC program of 9 July 2018 on Immigration which included the Indigenous lawyer, Teela Reid. Unusually, The Guardian actually noticed this: ‘Reed, a Wiradjuri and Wailwan woman, appeared to find the whole discussion baffling. “Don’t get me started, the whole bloody country has immigrated or invaded,” she said. “It’s crazy to sit and watch the conversation unfold.” ’ How confusing to be forced to use the rhetoric of multiculturalism as a counter to discrimination against Aborigines, while aware that all these Anglo and multicultural groups are uninvited invaders, not necessarily colonising, but moving relentlessly, and as if by right, onto once-Aboriginal lands and resources.

'Immigration debate is just left wing racism', according to the headline of Joe Hildebrand's latest article at news.com.au http://www.news.com.au/national/politics/immigration-debate-is-just-leftwing-racism/news-story/ee5a958fe3447e9cc247f59fdae8d344. He then goes on to assert that questioning our rate of immigration is an ideology confined only to the far right and the far left. Really? I would like to take this opportunity to re-assure readers that it is in fact a concern for Australians from all political backgrounds and walks of life and we ignore this at our peril.

This is why it was actually the duty of every media outlet from the Herald Sun to the 'quintessential progressive media double act of Fairfax and the ABC' to bring this conversation into the public realm. Bearing in mind that our cities will need to have a further 1.5 trillion dollars of infrastructure investment by 2045 just to keep up, this sudden interest from the ABC was, in fairness, a bit late in coming. Even Tony Jones acknowledged the sheer amount of concern that there is on this issue during a Q&A special on whether or not we are ready for a Big Australia.

So comparing all lefties who question our current rate of immigration with the kind of mindset that sparked the Cronulla riots is very problematic. The truth is that unless you are an advocate of open borders, there comes a point whereby everyone has a limit to what they think our annual rate of migration should be. In other words, according to Hildebrand, there comes a point whereby everyone becomes a racist.

Then there are those who do want to see a policy of open borders but that would do absolutely nothing to resolve the very issues that are pushing people to leave their homeland in the first place. In other words it does nothing to help the vast majority of people who, for one reason or another, would be left behind.

This is why a proactive measure such as foreign aid as opposed to a reactive measure such as unlimited migration can help communities on the ground to better manage their environment while providing increased access to education and family planning. That, in combination with much improved urban and regional planning at home, is the ONLY way that we can collectively reduce habitat loss and stabilise populations across the world.

So although Hildebrand is correct in saying that 'cutting the immigration rate to Australia does little to reduce the global population' it is nevertheless a massive oversimplification of a much more complex issue. When you consider that the world's population is growing by 80 million a year, immigration really is the least effective way of dealing with global population pressures.

Of course this is not to say that we shouldn't have immigration. Australia has a proud history of people moving to our shores from overseas and it really is something that we should be proud of. The good news is that we can continue to have a sizeable rate of migration because as Joe sort of points out, if we had no migration at all, our population would eventually start to decrease.

So at the very least we can have an annual migration intake of around 70,000 a year (which happened to be our long term average before John Howard came to power) and this would allow our population to start to level off over time. This means that we can continue to not only maintain our current rate of refugee intake but also be in a position to increase it if we ever decide to go down that path.

It would also buy us the time to play catch-up in terms of getting decent public transport infrastructure in place and crucially it would buy us the time to achieve the slower rate of development that comes with an increased focus on urban regeneration as opposed to mostly relying upon land releases on the urban fringes of our cities.

We are more than capable of innovating new ways to grow the economy without relying on population growth and it is simply untrue to assume that reducing migration will leave us with a skills shortage. As recently as March 18, Caroline Winter reported on the ABC that 'there are calls from the multicultural community for an internship program to be adopted to help skilled migrants get local experience, and a chance at work in their chosen field'. So it is clear that many migrants are not simply walking straight into jobs.

Make no mistake, the main reason why we have a high rate of immigration is not because we have a massive skills shortage, it is not because we are rescuing people from poverty, and it is not because we have an ageing population (we can easily innovate our way through that). It is because it boosts GDP and in the words of Joe Hockey, it is a lazy way of doing it. So it really is crucial that we keep this conversation going and resist the urge to label those who disagree with us with sweeping statements. Instead we all need to work collectively to find solutions that benefit Australia and the world as a whole.

The author, Mark Allen, is an environmental activist who has worked as a town planner. He is a member of Sustainable Population Australia.

The other day whilst walking on a quiet bush track with a friend, we came across a magpie standing on some grass surveying the scene, including the pair of us. My friend said rather scornfully "I don't like those birds!" People who would never dream of vilifying a group of people on the basis of their race seem to have no compunction in vilifying members of an entire species often on the basis of nothing. Comments may seem harmless enough at first but on further reflection one realises they can be an incitement to harm. Is there a moral difference between racism and "species-ism"?

Magpie maligned!

The other day whilst walking on a quiet bush track with a friend, we came across a magpie standing on some grass surveying the scene, including the pair of us. My friend said rather scornfully "I don't like those birds!" I felt anger rising and I asked her why she didn't like them. She said "because they are big. I like little birds" Then she added "They're everywhere!" (We had seen 4 in about half an hour.) I felt really troubled. Someone who says this about a creature and all the other members of the species will shoo the birds from her garden with impunity. I felt that her dislike threatened the birds. I tried to educate her, alerting her to the magpie song, telling her who it belonged to as we heard it amongst numerous bird calls. She was not interested. She was looking for a rare wildflower, not s creature that was "everywhere". I was annoyed and worried by her prejudice.

...and the wattle birds!

Similarly I feel very irritated when I hear people saying that they don't like wattle birds because of the sound, one which is hard to describe but which I hear only rarely where i live. I would love to have wattle birds in the garden and have tried to grow flowering native plants without much success due to insufficient sunlight.

..and the black swans!

Strolling in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens recently I could not see any of gardens' signature black swans. Instead I saw punts on the lake with people aboard. The gardens were extremely busy with functions, picnic-ers and a new kind of sport looking a bit like croquet with square hoops embedded in the lawn. I said to the people I was with "Can't see any swans!" "No" one of them said "perhaps they've got rid of them" adding,as if to justify what may have happened "They can be aggressive!" Once again my blood boiled. I have been visiting the Botanic Gardens since I was a child and the swans have always been there. Sometimes they are on the water and sometimes they stand on the grassy banks of the pond. I have never seen a swan attack a person. Maybe someone's unsupervised child teased a swan and it defended itself or its young, not knowing that the small aggressor was someone's precious offspring? I felt affronted at the swans being described as "aggressive". To attribute them thus justifies any measures that humans may take against them.

....and of course kangaroos...

Kangaroos are another species that get bad press. Their supposed "crimes " are that "they jump out in front of cars" (thus committing suicide - just to annoy motorists I suppose), and they are accused of being in "plague proportions" ! When an animal is accused of being over plentiful, it is in grave danger, and the kangaroo is. They are just slaughtered, for a mixture of "reasons" - "for their own good as they are eating themselves out of house and home," "there are too many of them," "they are competing with farm animals for pasture," "they are a good healthy source of of protein and can form an export industry". These animals now live a hazardous life on the fringes of golf courses taking their lives in their paws as the white missiles fly off the gold clubs or they inhabit the edges of the ever growing city as their habitat is swallowed up with roads and housing.

Thylacine highly valued now extinct!

I'm sure the Thylacine had similar bad press up until it was too late to save the species. Of course the Thylacine committed the added sin of being a predator . Now people so want to see a Thylacine that they imagine they have detected those hallmark stripes flashing past in the under- storey of the Tasmanian forests. Discrimination against an animal on the basis of its species is in my opinion a prejudice which I will call "species-ism" , surely a displacement attitude to the forbidden attitude "racism".

Motivations and origins of attitudes

What motivates species-ism and what motivates racism? What do these attitudes have in common? The first motivation that comes to mind is the desire for the loathed group to be anihilated. Why would we want a people or members of s species to be annihilated? The obvious answer is that they are in the way. If you want to take over their land you put them in an inferior or undesirable category, or a category where they and their welfare don't count, where it is pragmatic for them to be dismissed as a consideration. On having gained the upper hand and having taken over, further excuse to keep killing or marginalising is so that the takeover can continue and expand with no real challenge. Just as racism is unfair and really dangerous for members of its target group, species-ism is unfair and dangerous for members of the target species. Racism and species-ism both serve to vilify a group or groups and making their members not matter. Both come from the same place in the human psyche. The objects of their enmity are innocent.

During the US presidential inauguration ceremonies Trump's elegant and disciplined clan members appeared brave in the face of multiple violent threats, fanned by a jilted mainstream press, for example, CNN's, "Disaster could put Obama cabinet member in oval office." Beside their chubbier leader, beaming like John Candy, the females of the Trump clan, with their gazelle-like legs and long hair, flawless skin and physiques, seemed like avatars from another world.

A correspondent commented to me this morning on her perception that the Age and the ABC underreported aspects of President Trump's inauguration. "Melania really did look stunning, but there was a lack of positive comment re Melania’s dress, a lack of any sympathetic camera work on her. This was in contrast to the gushing over Michelle Obama eight years ago. It is to do with the level of warmth. I felt that, with the Trumps, the commentary and footage were overly cold and objective compared with the same event eight years ago. In fact, I found this article, which bore out my feelings: #10;http://fashionista.com/2016/11/melania-trump-fashion"> "How we plan on covering (or not covering) Melania Trump's fashion choices". It shows that there has even been a politicisation of reporting on fashion with regard to the Trumps."

Indeed, the New York Times, which does gives some quite interesting fashion details on who dresses the Trump entourage and the semiotics of their costumes, also reports in the embedded video, on how a number of fashion publications have snubbed the Trumps because of a perception that Donald Trump is racist. This is based on his attitude to protecting jobs for Americans, illegal immigrated violent offenders and immigration from source countries for ISIS - all defensible positions even if you don't happen to agree with them. They do not make Trump racist.

But the fight is really nationalist vs globalist. The globalist open-borders exiting US regime pursued the most racist of wars in the Middle East and now it is going after Trump, the anti-Soros. The out-going regime and the press that supports them are heavily sponsored by Soros who also has succeeded in diverting many organisations from their original agendas and getting them to push for open borders, an agenda that runs against civil rights and assists globalisation. We can see this in the Women's marches today, 22 January 2017, where feminism has apparently been coopted to incoherently support globalism as well as protest more reasonably on behalf of abortion-rights. (See "George Soros big loser in US elections funds hi-jacking of feminism for globalist agenda."

New York Times video

Witty, charismatic and politically incorrect

Am I the only one whom Trump's goofy smile reminds of John Candy, the charming Canadian comedian who died in March 1994 and who played many eccentric characters? There is something in the eyes and the mouth and a way of moving, but perhaps it is mostly that Trump appears larger than life and is funny and outrageous, like Candy. "If I was elected, you would be in jail, Hillary!"[1]

Admittedly, if you don't think there is anything funny about politics, and particularly about Donald Trump, you might not see the humour and you might hate the charisma, but you still might agree that the 2017 US election had elements of a National Lampoon comedy that Candy might have played in. The statuesque wife, who looks half her age, the lanky daughters displayed on stage like two legged-giraffes in designer gowns and the pizza-gate-lolita-island scandals surrounding the departing US regime and Donald, larger than life, prevailing, assisted by his unforgettable hair.

NOTES

[1] Second Presidential debate dialogue:
HILLARY CLINTON: “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Mrs. Clinton observed.
TRUMP: “Because you’d be in jail.”

In this video, Trump repeatedly denounces and denies KKK endorsement, as he is asked again and again, day after day, in a demonstration of truly absurd press behaviour. The KKK leader, David Duke, also states here that he never endorsed Trump. Despite the slurs, Donald Trump has denounced KKK hate groups and not said anything racist or bigoted. Yet Whoopi Goldberg, political opponents and main stream media types continue to perpetuate the lie.

When it comes to hypocrisy, the pro-war Western ‘liberal’ is in a class of his own. While professing opposition to racism, the pro-war liberal is cheerleader for the most dangerous and deadly form of racism in the world today - contemporary US/Western imperialism. Article by Neil Clark, first published at https://www.rt.com/op-edge/362533-racism-war-west-imperialist/

A racism that is scarcely reported, but which has laid waste to entire countries and killed millions - and which now threatens to drag us into potentially catastrophic military confrontation with Russia.

Republished from the Australian investigative program, 4Corners: Slaving Away By Caro Meldrum-Hanna and Ali Russell, a program about slavery in Australia today. Although the program focuses on the abuse of backpackers on 457 visas and tourists working illegally in the fruit picking and chicken meat packaging industry, this is just the tip of an iceberg of exploitation that has arisen in Australia with massive increases in immigration at the same time as our industrial law protection has been wrecked. At the same time, cheap imports have made it impossible for many honest and worthwhile businesses to survive, whilst the loss of industrial protection has created an opportunity for corporations to exploit people to the max. The program also reflects another effect of globalisation and mass immigration - the high cost of housing. The enslaved temporary or illegal immigrants in this documentary are usually packed into unsavory premises for which they pay rent. Some might argue that since these people are paid wages - albeit slave wages - they are not slaves. However when you do not actually get paid on time and are kept in debt to your employer for rent and other charges, and when you do not speak English and have no idea where you are, and so cannot begin to extricate yourself - this amounts not only to slavery, but to illegal detention. Apparently Australian authorities claimed that it was too difficult to find these abusive enterprises, yet 4Corners was easily able to uncover this frightening industry, with the cooperation of the exploited and trapped workers. It looks like government is complicit at all levels.

Updated May 4, 2015 22:47:00

Slaving Away

Monday 4th May 2015

Slaving away: The dirty secrets behind Australia's fresh food.

It's in your fridge and on your table: the fresh food that we take for granted.

But there's a dirty secret behind it.

Much of it is picked and packed by a hidden army of migrant workers who are ruthlessly exploited.

"There is slave labour in this country." - Queensland grower

A Four Corners investigation has uncovered gangs of black market workers run by unscrupulous labour hire contractors operating on farms and in factories around the country.

The produce they supply ends up in our major supermarkets and fast food chains.

"Almost every fresh product that you pick up... will have passed through the hands of workers who have been fundamentally exploited." - Union official

These labour hire contractors prey upon highly vulnerable young foreigners, many with very limited English, who have come to Australia with dreams of working in a fair country.

They're subjected to brutal working hours, degrading living conditions and the massive underpayment of wages.

Reporter Caro Meldrum-Hanna has obtained undercover footage and on-camera accounts of this dark world. One migrant worker told her:

"I felt like we were going back in time... the way we were being treated was inhumane."

And another:

"It made me question Australia as a country."

Female workers are particularly at risk with women coming forward to make allegations of harassment and assault.

From farmers' fields to factory floors, the program tells the story of those workers who slave away to produce the food we buy and eat on a daily basis.

SLAVING AWAY, reported by Caro Meldrum-Hanna and presented by Kerry O'Brien, goes to air on Monday 4th May at 8.30pm. It is replayed on Tuesday 5th May at 10.00am and Wednesday 6th at midnight. It can also be seen on ABC News 24 on Saturday at 8.00pm, ABC iview and at abc.net.au/4corners.

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First posted May 4, 2015 16:51:00

End Immigration - it sux resources away from Australia's homeless, unemployed and growing underclass. Migrants by plane rob locals of affordable housing, jobs, you name it. State infrastructure can't cope with 200,000 immigrants a year. The Green Foreign Labor Coalition is imposing upon Australians what British colonists did to Aborigines - taking over, marginalising, deculturing. National television programmes that antagonise Australians, pit immigrants against locals, that stir up racism like Joe Hildebrand's 'Dumb, Drunk and Racist' do not help.

End Immigration - it sux resources away from Australia's homeless, unemployed and growing underclass.

Immigrants by plane, arrive in Australia by lifestyle choice, and so rob locals of affordable housing, jobs, you name it. State infrastructure can't cope with 200,000 immigrants a year.

The Green Foreign Labor Coalition is imposing upon Australians what British colonists did to Aborigines - taking over, marginalising, deculturing.
The only difference is that instead of proud Aboriginals standing up for their rights and getting physically shot down for doing so, proud traditional Australians standing up for their rights are getting socially shot down by 'politically corrupt' media by being branded 'racist'.

Crap! Any traditional people in any country who are concerned about excessive foreign immigration impinging upon their way of life have a right to express their concern. It's called local resistance when seeing what was valuable in one's own home is being usurped by foreigners. No foreigner has any right to invade another's homeland, but to only arrive with permission and with conditional rights of a host people.

Gillard's Green Foreign Labor and her One-Worldist mandate have undemocratically abused electoral power over Australians. Gillard's 200,000 immigrants a year and passive accomodation of illegal boat arrivals (beyond the croc-o-political tears) have denied Australians their rights to democratic social preservation and self determination. Gillard is beholden to the dangerous New Greens dictation of Sarah Hanson-Young.

Joe Hildebrand (pictured) is playing into the One-Worldists agenda.

Hildebrand's nationwide programme 'Dumb, Drunk and Racist' not only denigrates Australia's tolerant society, but fuels xenophobia and local unrest by teasing out racism and by playing the race card about traditional Australians on ABC's current affairs programme 'Dumb, Drunk and Racist. Why did Hildebrand not run his programme insightfully in Cronulla? Hildebrand is idealistic in his puritan One Worldist vision. He fails to appreciate Australian natural insecurity and that resistance to the statistically recent overwhelming number of foreigners is but a mild and admirably tolerant resistance. Still naive Hildebrand eggs on anyone he can find in the street to say at least something racist while they are intoxicated and so prove his unjust prejudice against ordinary Australians.

Such prejudiced content is more akin to an SBS mission statement, rather than coming from the respected ABC.

If Hildebrand is to be impartial and wants to sample REAL racism then he needs to do a follow up programme in:

Compare Racism in India:
Read More"Most Indians think racism exists only in the West and see themselves as victims. It's time they examined their own attitudes towards people from the country's North-East."

Compare Racism in China:
Read More"The daughter of a Chinese mother and an absent African-American father, 20-year-old Lou caused a media storm when she was named one of Shanghai's five finalists for Let's Go! Oriental Angel, an American Idol-style show. But her fame has been for all of the wrong reasons, after her appearance provoked a vigorous and often vicious nationwide debate on whether she was even fit to be on Chinese television because of the colour of her skin."

Compare Racism in Israel:
Read More"Civil rights group: Israel has reached new heights of racism - New report indicates 26% rise in anti-Arab racist incidents; 74% of Jewish youths call Arabs 'unclean.'"

These are just to name a few. Australians are exceedingly tolerant by international standards. Our post World War II history proves it.
It is Hildebrand who is dumb for unnecessarily inciting racist sentiments that can exist below the surface in any society. Australia does not need this programme. He needs to be fair and cover the same subject overseas. He will be lucky to get back to lucky Australia, alive.

John Marlowe

© Tandberg

Australia's alternating Liberal/Labor (Laboral) governments accept all comers because they have become conditioned to be fearful of the racist slur automatically cast by immigrant lobby groups like the Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils of Australia.

Australia's mass media is constantly bombarded by propaganda condemning any criticism of immigrants or any calls to reduce immigration. And guess who's driving the propaganda - the immigrants who want more of their country folk arriving, and who protest 'stuff assimilation' - we'll retain our nationality in Australia!

Take the emotive propaganda in a recent article by the Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils of Australia which it had published in Fairfax's Sydney Morning Herald on 21st October 2010:

So Migliorino claims that assimilation is 'walking backwards', that 'equality of all cultures...is the soul of a truly multicultural vision.'

Look at the divisiveness of multiculturalism, where ethnic enclaves thrive in our capital cities - with no intention to integrate with the Australian mainstream population! A more 'cohesive nation' is one with common values, ways of life, culture and social mores.

Government polices across Australia have mandated into law acceptance of 'cultural diversity' while not accepting into law recognitionj of Australian cultural values. Why?
Such immigration favouritism has indeed 'disempowered and marginalised' traditional and ancestral Australians and our traditional cultural values.

Anyone dare critical of 'cultural diversity' is conveniently branded 'racist'.

Australia has continually had a 'national multicultural policy' since Whitlam went on his politically correct high horse introducing multiculturalism in 1972 and Fraser and subsequent Laboral governments have perpetuated it ever since!

Such is the guilt-inciting crafted language being reinforced in the mass media to ensure any anti-immigrant sentiment by free thinkers remains taboo.

Colonist invasion of Australia and the persecution of Aboriginals is not a justification for more immigration!

Following Migliorino's article and heading up Fairfax's typical 'COMMENTS ARE NOW CLOSED' list, is a gem response by reader, John Williams who comments...

"I have never heard such bull...t in my life.

People come to Australia because of our values and lifestyle which has been created based on our 200 year history of English beliefs and principles.

These values that have been instilled in the Australian way of life since settlement and enshrine the notion of fairness, equality and giving people a go no matter their background, religious beliefs, financial status, etc.

Some of the migrants that come to Australia appear disinterested in every aspect of Australian life. They appear intent on setting up their own small country, bringing with them their own countries beliefs, prejudices, principles and rules and setting up in Australia which leads to enclaves being established and exclusion of all things Australian.

I have no problem with people being proud of their heritage and cultural background, but when you hear Australian born children and grandchildren of Immigrants referring to themselves as Turkish, Lebanese, etc, then it makes you wonder why we even bother.

These people need to embrace an Australian culture first and foremost, otherwise get the hell out of Australia because we dont need you or want you.
We want people to be embrace Australia first, becomes Australians and be proud of their adopted Country - Australia. Not some distant war torn, undemocratic, 3rd world ghetto from where they came, otherwise just dont bother coming here in the first place.
Forget all the political speak and correctness. It is about time for politicians to ask

Australians the kind of Australia they want and the kind of migrants that they would like to see and the answers may shock you Mr Migliorino."

by John Williams | Kensington - October 22, 2010, 8:05AM

Then there's another piece of immigrant propaganda from Migliorino:

'ETHNIC COMMUNITIES WARN THAT ANTI-BOAT PEOPLE RHETORIC WILL FEED RACISM', 9 August, 2010

'Laboral'* invitation of hoards of foreign populations from 'contra-cultural' societies is directly displacing the lesser numbers of traditional Australians (those born here and with traditional ancestral origins in Australia). It is a repeat of British colonisation of Australia that directly displaced Australia's Aboriginal people. It is what the Dutch immigrants did to the native South Africans under Apartheid. It is what the Chinese immigrants have done to the indigenous Fijians.

It is immigration history repeated!

The Laboral policy of immigrant favouritism is 'reverse racism'. It is discriminatory against local people and their traditional way of life, their values and their rights. It is a form of 'cultural treason' against the incumbent population.

Then when an immigrant gets into a position of influence (management, politics) favouritism to the immigrant's countrymen and women is ignored by Australia's anti-discrimination laws. Australia has one rule for immigrants, another rule for traditional Australians who feel unjustly targeted by the various laws that favour immigrants. These laws treat traditional Australians as if we are inherently racist. But by such favouritising and by immunising immigrants from racism rules, Australia's anti-discrimination laws have become a passive form of reverse racism.

The tragedy to all parties (locals and immigrants alike) is that the unjust discrimination felt by traditional Australians is causing local disaffection, understandably. But what conveniently goes unmentioned by supporters of cultural immigrants to Australia, is the aggressive intolerance of foreigner cultures by the countries of origin of many Australian immigrants cultures - Indian intolerance of Christians and China's intolerance of Falun Gong are classic examples.

Traditional Australian are feeling marginalised in their own native country. That disaffection and sense of injustice is steadily converting tolerant easy-going Australians, like myself, into angry resentful protectionists. The vocal outrage is perceived as racist, but it is an early cry for justice by disaffected locals. Reverse racism risks inciting reactionary racism. It throws civilised tolerance out the window and descend humanity into its primitive mode of protecting its own clan. It is a slippery slope.

Once reactionary discrimination takes a cultural hold amongst a local population united against a perceived threat of invading immigrant culture, local attitudes become entrenched. Human history has many stories of such and many quite recent and close to home.

One shouldn't have to sign a declaration of accepting cultural diversity of foreigners if that cultural diversity is open ended without parameters and that policy does provide for Australian cultural values and standards to prevail. Yet it has become standard policy for Local and State governments to mandate all public servants comply with accepting cultural diversity - willy nilly!

I shouldn't have to speak Mandarin to get a job in North Ryde. Immigrants should though have to accept Australian values and social standards by living in Australia - equality of women, free speech, reward based on merit (no chronyism), fair pay for a fair day's work (no slavery), highs standards of hygiene, etc.

Australian social values and standards were once common sense and taken for granted, but with so many arriving with different values and standards, Australia has got to the point of needing its social values and standards protected in legislation - an Australian Values Act.

Cronulla in 2005 was a warning to governments. Heed it and curb the immigration and listen to us locals! Yet in the government of our modern society, especially across Australia, members of parliament are naive, and untravelled idealists who invariable tow their Party's line and whom hold no experience or qualifications in sociology. We are ruled by incompetents of dangerous naivety.

For too long the immigration program has been out of public control and run purely for the interests of an elite number of business groups and portions of a pro-ethnic lobby who are both quick to throw the term "racist" or "nimby" when their their interests aren't pandered to.

Housing prices are at levels that can only be called unaffordable, cruel and family hostile. We used to be a country famously known for our rate of home-ownership! Now we have rising homelessness, mortgage stress and "shortage" of land and housing.

Companies no longer bother to run traineeships and apprenticeship programs because they prefer to import skills. Universities aren't training sufficient Australian doctors, so we have "skills shortages". They are poached from overseas to save on education costs, and create another justification for immigration.

Universities aren't funded sufficiently, so they must rely on foreign students.

Roads are congested, water and electricity costs are accelerating as fresh food prices inflate due to market becoming high density housing and as water is rationed to farms. Freeways costing billions must be built, in denial of peak oil, to keep up with traffic demands.

The growth lobby never admit that their population growth doesn't improve GDP per capita but only the overall size of the economy, or that the infrastructure shortfall makes everything more expensive.

You don't have to know that 35 per cent of Sydney's population was born overseas. Some areas are even higher. The ethnic diversity is overwhelming!

The elite business interests, the ethnic lobby, and the pampered property developers have their own selfish interests at heart not that of the general population.

http://www.fecca.org.au/

There appears to be another group of people that just enjoy screaming "racist" as a way of feeling superior! Secular humanitarian ideologies have become a major force, and keep promoting "equality" and a "one world" approach to everyone instead of patriotism.

Racism is more prevalent in poorer areas, and where third- and fourth-generation Australians live in ethnic enclaves, feeling like minorities. All this "diversity" and "multiculturalism" that we are supposed to embrace is the result of mass immigration, something we have no say about.

Immigration lobbies' selfish arguments have created their own myths for too long to justify our ongoing population growth. However, ideologies, economies and ideals are infinite, but not our land, our ecosystems, our limited fertile "green belt", our natural resources, our water, energy and our hip-pockets.

The Australian Growth Lobby has only a couple of primitive weapons - calling the PM a racist and misrepresenting the figures. The other side has all the good arguments, as well as truth on its side. This article analyses the childish statistical misrepresentation and social innuendo in the Australian Financial Review editorial, "PM's own goal on population," 5 July 2010, p.54.

Who's afraid of Julia Gillard?

Fears about what Gillard's population policy statements mean are coming from the commercial growth lobby and, to a lesser extent, from the NGO sustainable population lobby. The first fears that Gillard is serious about not wanting a big Australia and beyond their control. The second fears that Gillard, too, will let democracy down and fall in line with the depraved agenda of the growth lobbyists, like so many Australian prime ministers. Using the commercial media, the Growth Lobby has prevailed over this country since Captain Cook brought over the first political prisoners, known then as convicts, later as colonists, never really as citizens with rights.

The apparent fear in the hearts (do they have them?) ... well, minds ... what about small, reptilian brains? (Oh, dang it, that's disrespectful to snakes)... of the growth lobbyists is therefore encouraging, because unless they are playing a truly elaborate farce, they really are worried that they have lost control of the P.M.

A few more intelligent ones may realise that it is the economic situation over which they have lost control, but the multitude are dimmer witted fundamentalists who still believe they can control the economic situation by controlling the P.M.

They only have a couple of primitive weapons to do this with - calling the PM a racist and misrepresenting the immigration and economic figures. All the good arguments are on their opponents' side. However the Growth Lobby does control the mainstream media still.

Silly numbers

"PM's own goal on population" (Australian Financial Review, Editorial, p. 5 July 2010, p. 54) misrepresents the immigration figures by presenting them as percentiles of population growth. By stretching an average over 40 years between 1971 and a projected 2011 they manage to get a figure of 0.6% risk of being an immigrant per 100 people in Australia. What they don't say is that that percentage steadily declined over that time because the actual numbers of immigrants stayed the same at around 80,000 per annum. What changed was the total population numbers, as immigration and natural increase added to them.

See, if you start out with 13,177,000 people in 1972, 80,000 represents about 0.6%. Added to the baby-boom, that 0.6% grew the population at quite a clip, until, in 2000, Australia had a total population of 19,169,083. The actual number of immigrants, averaging around 80,000, now only represented 0.41% of the total population. [1] By the time the population reached 21,180,632 in 2007, 80,000 would only have represented 0.3% and the growth rate would have have been slowing continually (on average, although there were spikes, notably around the time of Tianamen Square under Bob Hawke and a negative number under Gough Whitlam, during the first oil shock).

But, as the anonymous author of the Australian Financial Review editorial says, in 2007, 2008 and 2009, the numbers of immigrants did not stay around the average. They more than doubled, to about 180,000. He or she also does not say that 180,000 represented 0.85% of the total population in 2007 instead of 0.3%. That's quite a leap.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which really is where the expert demographers are, doesn't talk in terms of immigration as a percentage of the total population because it is actually far more usual and more relevant to say what per cent of the total annual increase immigration represents.

This more usual measurement of immigration, however, wouldn't help The Australian's anonymous writer to fudge the facts.

In fact, in 2007 the ABS sent out media releases to tell Australians that the population had just increased by the most people ever and that net immigration had contributed 54% of that increase. This was the first time that immigrants minus emigrants had outnumbered births minus deaths in Australia.

ABS MEDIA RELEASE September 24, 2007

"Largest population increase ever: ABS

"Australia recorded its largest annual population increase ever, according to figures released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Australia grew by an estimated 307,100 people for the year ended March 2007, the largest increase since record keeping began in 1789. The increase gave Australia an annual growth rate of 1.5% (the highest rate since 1990), and brings the population to an estimated 20.9 million.

Net overseas migration contributed 54% (162,600 people) to this growth, which was more than the natural increase of 46% (138,100 people or 273,500 births minus 135,400 deaths).

Queensland again recorded the highest growth rate of all the states and territories, at 2.3%, followed by Western Australia at 2.2%, the Northern Territory 2%, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory 1.5 %, South Australia and New South Wales 1% and Tasmania 0.6%. "

On 30 June 2010, the ABS put out another headline, which said that immigration was now contributing to two thirds of the annual population increase!

"Population growth

There were 22.2 million people resident in Australia in December 2009, with 432,600 people added in the year to December 2009. Despite recent increases in the fertility rate, nearly two-thirds of the gain was from net overseas migration. In the year to June 2008, there was a doubling in the net gain of people on student visas (to 109,000). ABS projections show, depending on assumptions about migration and fertility, that Australia's population may be between 34 and 40 million in 2051."

The editorial in the Australian Financial Review also describes the intakes as if they had occurred accidentally or naturally, when in fact the growth lobby organs played a role in forcing those figures up.

Growth Lobby scapegoats PM to avoid its own responsibility

But the Growth Lobby doesn't want to be identified with its actions, let alone take responsibility for them. It would rather imply that the Prime Minister - an immigrant - is a racist or an immigrant turn-coat, in as contrived a manner as it has used in its 'explanation' of immigration statistics.

See what you make of this concluding statement in the anonymous editorial:

"Ms Gillard is Australia's first foreign-born prime minister since Billy Hughes. It will be a sad irony if the first word of her premiership becomes the final word of historians on her time in office: the leader who diverted the country from a future open to the ideas, creativity and effort of tomorrow's equivalents of her own parents, into a cul de sac of stagnation, insularity and rapid ageing."

Rather than a 'sad irony', many Australians would see Gillard's attitude as comforting in its loyalty to her new country and a sign of courage. Courage in the face of a low kind of blackmail which has seen fainter-hearted immigrants shut up about the dangers of over population simply because they are afraid of being accused of shutting the door behind them. Such immigrants are a liability in a time when the growth lobby has forced us to pay through the nose for desalination plants, when the supply of cheap oil upon which the unprecedented population numbers of the 20th and 21st century rely upon, is dwindling, and food and water are looming as scarcities.

These costs of population growth are never weighed up against the paltry gains of those who directly invest in it, in the narrow and false economic arguments which are the final weak links in the Growth Lobby's chain that binds us.

NOTES

Just to complicate things, that meant that the population growth rate was slowing. Because the population was so much bigger, however, the smaller rate of increase still represented a much greater number of people.

When violence is reported in the Australian mainstream media, rarely is ethnicity mentioned, due to a self-policing media code of conduct that is premised on claims the reporting of ethnicity risks inciting racism. The Australian Journalists Association code of conduct on this reads:

"2. Do not place unnecessary emphasis on personal characteristics, including race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, sexual orientation, family relationships, religious belief, or physical or intellectual disability."

This seems sensible in order to prevent prejudiced reporting and inciting racism. However, this code has been recently abandoned by the mainstream media in the cases of recent violence against Indian students, probably in an attempt to highlight the particular racial problem. But indeed, the media highlighting of this problem has snowballed into an international political hot potato, resulting in Australia's Prime Minister flying to India and consequential increased policing in Melbourne and funding to deal with the problem. As a result, there has been a notable reduction in reported violence against Indian students in Melbourne. Politicians were embarrased into dealing with the problem, that the Department of Immigration had left to fester.

But otherwise reporting of ethnicity and race is suppressed. Read any report in an Australian newspaper about a violent incident and find mention of ethnicity or race obvious by omission. This is not to say that most violence in Australia has ethnic causes, but there is a lot that is yet remains suppressed from the mainstream public. the frequency of the problem is of course known to police and to the locals that live in what have become 'psuedo' ethnic ghettos.

And so Australia's problem of ethnic tension is suppressed and allowed to fester until someone dies. The death last night of a man at Mirrabooka in Perth's inner north is a case in point.

The news item in The Australian Newspaper today reads:

What the newspaper does not report is the fact that it was a fight between recent migrants from war torn countries. A Sudanese man was stabbed to death during a brawl between ethnic groups. Police and the Tactical Reponse Group later raided a house in nearby suburb of Ballajura and arrested five men, believed to be from Afghanistan.

Mirrabooka is a low socio-economic suburb in Perth's north. It has long had an high Aboriginal population, but recently many east African migrants, mainly from Somalia, Sudan and more recently Afghanistan have settled there. Why, is a matter for social research.

The following non-mainstream media sources reveals somne insight into the social problems at Mirrabooka:

Immigration does not stop at the international arrival gate. Australia's policy of immigration needs to extend well into assimilation after many years and subsequent generations, else we will see more ghettos like Mirrabooka, and more ethnic tension and violence, fuelled by a policy of media news suppression.

Why suppress ethnic tension and violence when to do so does nothing but allow it to fester into murder and social division?

Rudd living in a gated community remains blissfully ignorant at Australia's expense. he has become an arrogant social menace undermining Australia's security.

My website: www.somethingfunnygoingon.com ~ My Book: Agent Provocateur: the backlash against the anti-smoking campaign ~ is concerned with Civil Rights, Over Population & Pollution

Origins and explanation of illustration [1]
Just so we understand one and other, I have some (not all!) - definitions of the words Patriot; Traitorous, and Bigot; they are derived from a thesaurus, and as such, become somewhat diluted as one progresses through the synonyms, however, I believe that essentially, the following words are best described as follows:

The thesaurus definition & synonyms of a patriot are: devoted; dedicated, dutiful, faithful, fervid, jingoistic, loyal, nationalistic, statesmanlike, zealous.

The antonyms of patriot are: antisocial, misanthropic, traitorous.

The Thesaurus definition of traitorous are: unpatriotic; double-crossing, double-dealing, ,betraying,

Outside legal spheres, the word "traitor" may also be used to describe a person who betrays (or is accused of betraying) their own political party, nation, family, friends, ethnic group, team, religion, social class, or other group to which they may belong.

The main definition of a racist is bigot: and a bigot is describes as being an intolerant, prejudiced person.

... And so, I would like to reiterate what many of us quite well understand, and that is, that further populating of Australia by means of Immigrants is unsustainable.

I hope not to be 'read' as a bigot, but rather as a patriot, wanting to preserve for current and future (made in Australia) - generations, a sustainable Australia.

From http://www.biosensitivefutures.org.au/overviews/overviews-1/major-ecological-issues-in-australia-today

- I have understood this:

All sustainability of our community requires adequate, clean water and housing. Neither of these requirements is commensurate with burgeoning populations who require more than an adequate supply of water.

Equally devastating to sustainability is the increasing requirement to find land suitable for housing (using arable land) and infrastructure, within the newly built ‘communities’, to enable them to function as a robust, productive society.

None of us wants to see our quality of life reduced – we all want to be able to use water when we want to, and a comfortable, affordable home – and jobs to fund our standard of living.

None of what I am saying is news ~ but I put forward the notion that it is patriotic to feel this way, and not a bigoted, antisocial motivation that drives me to write here, in this blog.

Further more, it should be noted that there is unlikely to be a reciprocity in the countries from whence our immigrants arrive; i.e. I would almost be certain that amongst other nations there would be a legal instrument to prevent advantage being taken of the nationals of those countries by international arrivals, intending to 'set up house'.

I believe that, as expected of us, we would fight, as patriots, for our Country - if we were at war ~ why are we not expected to feel the same way to keep our standard of living - to keep the peace? .. to maintain and keep our way of life, our valuable resources?

I believe that all Australians have a right to keep Australia safe, viable, and sustainable.

... Singapore has to buy water from its neighbor - Malaysia... do Australians want to... be in the same boat?

By the way, hands up those of you who feel betrayed by successive governments who have 'sold us out' to an unsustainable 'ideology' of populate or perish? I, at least feel, that successive governments in Australia have been treasonous - have been traitorous - to the Great Australian Dream.

Notes

Candobetter Editor:

Nation and Citizenship

Agent Provocateur has hit the nail on the head in defense of patriotism. There have been attempts recently to massage 'Nationalism' into a politically incorrect term. Whilst nationalism can get out of hand, as in National Socialism, and whilst Marx made good points about international workers' rights, the location of human rights and rights of citizens has always resided in the concept of the nation - first in Roman law, and later in French law. (To contrast: in Ancient Rome about 2% of people were citizens with full rights (women could be citizens but did not have full rights. ). By the end of the Roman Empire about 9% of people were citizens. A theory is that the rulers began to sell citizenship in order to increase their tax-base. [Sources: It has been estimated by William Scheidel, "Population & Demography" (Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics, 2006, that, towards the end of the empire, about 9% of the Roman Empire of about 70 million were citizens. This was after the rules of citizenship had been considerably relaxed. Bruce Bartlett, “How Excessive government killed the Roman economy, The Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-7.html. David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 2006, pp 166]

Nationhood and citizenship within it was the basis of the French revolution, which substituted a code of rights to property, shelter and self-government (i.e. the rights of 'free'-men for feudal subjection where only a very limited number of people in a polity had the right to own property and their own persons. If we abandon the concept of citizenship and the rights of citizens we abandon our rights to self-government. Then we risk becoming plastic entities in small power-bases where rights must constantly be negotiated. This was the situation during the medieval era in Europe. Because of the very poorly defined rights of citizens in most anglophone government systems, this constant renegotiation is a feature of our struggle to control national assets and resources.

[1] Origins and Explanation of Illustration. The illustration is of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, dated 1789, and the chief document of the first democratic French Parliament, 1789. Called a 'revolutionary' parliament, it was actually a legal parliament, formed with the King's consent, and based on legal rights of subjects which were carried principally by representatives of the low clergy and the ordinary people of Britanny, who were soon joined by people from all over France. The first violent act of the Revolution was when the king, in an attempt to rescind his authorisation of this document, surrounded Paris with royal troops under his command, with the intention of intimidating the people there. This prompted the famous 'storming of the Bastille', which has often been severely misinterpreted by anglophone sources as a strange attempt to liberate a few disreputable nobles from a debtors' prison by ignorant and misguided 'commoners'. The Bastille was, in fact, broken into by the frightened people of Paris in order to obtain gunpowder and weapons to defend themselves against the King's army.

The king backed down on this occasion, but monarchists in Europe constantly attempted to give him support to bring down the revolution. The French revolution did not end until 1846, and there were three restorations of monarchy. Napoleon's role was very interesting and important and represented France's war against a coalition of European monarchies, plus fascinating trade wars with England using this coalition. I

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens 26 August 1789was passed by the Assembly on 26 August 1789.

Passed by the National Constituent Assembly.

"All men are created and remain free and have equal rights.
That the natural rights of man are liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression.
That the principle of sovereignty resides in the nation.
That the law is an expression of the general will and that all are equal before it.
That every man has the right to be presumed innocent.
That everyone has the right to liberty of expression and that no-one may be harassed because of their opinions, including religious ones.
That the Constitution rests on the separation of powers.
That Property is an inviolable and inalienable right."

Under the Roman Law structure of French (and most European government) which Napoleon reinforced, it is difficult for private individuals to control more property and power than the state. The key to democracy here is citizens' rights as members of the state. In British law it is more easy for private individuals to gain control of property and power, which we seen in the rise of massive international corporations, which began in the era of coal-and iron based colonialism from Britain. The interpretation of the inviolability of property within the british structure of US government has had a problematic and undemocratic outcome in the US system. The Australian system also lends itself to this distortion, whereby it is possible to aggregate enormous amounts of land and resources under private ownership. Then the owners can form a private power-base, such as we see in The Property Council of Australia. Such a base has the power to influence government well beyond democratic control and there is always the danger that Government will merge with such power bases, which has happened in Australia.

Right to Vote

In France and Britain, women did not acquire full citizenship with voting rights until the 20th century. (British women 1928, with some property restrictions, and French women in 1944, with no property restrictions) However, France was way ahead of Britain and the rest of the world, in granting qualified (i.e. with exceptions) ‘universal’ male suffrage in 1792. Although this suffrage excluded women, the clergy, soldiers and Algerian French, it did not exclude the poor and landless (as long as they were men, of course). Universal male suffrage in Britain did not occur until 1918. Prior to the granting of universal male suffrage in France and Britain, voting rights depended on the possession of landed estate.

Interactions between microbes and human hosts can range from a benign, even symbiotic collaboration to a competition that may turn fatal — resulting in death of the host, the microbe or both.  What could seem benign could be a threat to existing host cultures.

Rome Scenario:

British Military strategist Rear Admiral Chris Parry pointed to the mass migration which disaster in the Third World could unleash. "The diaspora issue is one of my biggest current concerns," he said. "Globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned due to the Internet and communications..."  Europe, including Britain, could be undermined by large immigrant groups with little allegiance to their host countries — a "reverse colonisation" as Parry described it.

Parry stressed that these mass population movements could lead to the “Rome scenario” – a reference to the collapse of the western Roman empire in the 4th and 5th centuries under repeated blows from groups such as Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Suevi, Huns and Vandals surging over its borders.
"In my view," concluded historian Peter Heather, "it is impossible to escape the fact that the western Empire broke up because too many outside groups established themselves on its territories." In the end, the Roman Empire, built by controlled immigration, perished under an onslaught of uncontrollable barbarian migration.

Rear Admiral Parry went on to say he was not labelling any particular group as threatening stability , but observed that there were already more than 70 diaspora groups in Britain.

More white families are moving from London to the regions while many immigrants arrive in the capital from overseas, the think-tank
Migrationwatch says.

The change in 10 years has been "extraordinarily rapid'', with 606,000 more people moving out of London than arrived from elsewhere in the country. In the same period, a net 726,000 immigrants arrived in the capital.

The recent referendum in Switzerland that saw 57.5 per cent of the population voting to ban the construction of minarets.  This is extreme tolerance considering Christians in many Muslim-background countries are being evacuated, persecuted and even martyred for refusing to conform.

Denmark now has a law preventing citizens under the age of 24 from securing residence rights for their foreign spouses. In September this year, the Flemish city of Antwerp joined France in banning the headscarf in schools.  This is hardly "ethnic cleansing" or persecution but a protection of the host's skyline, religions and cultural identity.

Weapon of “racism”:

The weapon of choice for the political elite, against any members of the indigenous population who show dissent against loss of their homeland, is the charge of 'racism'.  The pursuance of 'racism' as the ultimate taboo is the means to a political end. This is about changing the face of a nation.

The best estimate of the First Fleet, that we celebrate on Australia Day, is 1373 people.  Today the numbers of permanent and long-term migrants arriving in Australia to more than 500,000 a year. 

A 50 year 'visionary' migration plan for Australia is being developed to take into consideration such things as climate change, water availability, security and labour demands.  There is nothing about preserving our identity, or assimilation, wildlife, or the greater challenges of climate change and the higher costs of living with more people here. 

It is all so easy to come to Australia and apply to stay here.  Students can do "post graduate" studies without having completed their first degree.  Students numbers who successfully apply to live here are a hidden number.

Ad hoc population growth is colonisation:

Immigration Minister Chris Evans may have branded Mr Andrews as hypocritical in saying that our intake of migrants to Australia is too high when the Howard government welcomed more than 1 million migrants during its tenure.  (#10;http://www.theage.com.au/national/andrews-call-for-debate-on-slashing-immigration-20091210-km93.html"> Andrews call for debate on slashing immigration, )
However, Kevin Rudd has increased the number of permanent and long-term migrants arriving in Australia to more than 500,000 a year!  John Howard was Prime Minster from 1996 to 2007, and this means his government's increase happened over more than eleven years!

Australia is already under stress from population. We are losing Ramsar wetlands, record numbers of native species, even flagship species, our coastlines are under threat from oceans rising, the Great Barrier Reef, the Murray Darling food bowl and our rivers are being choked by dams and drying. The projections for Australia’s climate make it clear that farmers and other Australians should be prepared for a hotter, drier future. Higher temperatures, less rainfall, and extreme events will affect water availability, water and soil quality, fire risk, loss of wildlife and the proliferation of pests and weeds. Despite the warnings, food producing fertile land, is under threat from urban sprawl.

Ad hoc population growth, without a population policy or scientific assessment of our carrying capacity, is reckless and potentially disastrous!

In fact 'immigration',  at Australia's rate of half a million new people a year,  is an incorrect description for a process that is, to all intents and purpose, that of colonization.

Racism is:

1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race, and that one’s own race is superior, and has the right to rule others.

2 : racial prejudice or discrimination, hatred or intolerance of another race or races

3: a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.

(photo: from Wikimedia commons: Australian Government poster — "The Southern Cross, the call of the stars to British Men & Women" issued by the Overseas Settlement Office to attract immigrants).

Racism is a global phenomenon which is influenced by a range of historical, social, political and economic factors.

It takes different forms in different contexts and as a result has been defined in many different ways. In Australia, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1998) defines it as:
Racism is an ideology that gives expression to myths about other racial and ethnic groups that devalues and renders inferior those groups that reflects and is perpetuated by deeply rooted historical, social, cultural and power inequalities in society.

Institutional racism (or systemic racism) describes forms of racism which are structured into political and social institutions. It occurs when organisations, institutions or governments discriminate, either deliberately or indirectly, against certain groups of people to limit their rights.

Historical perspective

In May 1901, the Australian parliament met for the first time. Its first major act was to pass the Immigration Restriction Act. Under this policy, people from Asia and other "non-white" people were systematically kept out of Australia. The "White Australia" policy was the product of decades of racist agitation against Chinese immigration.

Henry Parkes, now venerated as the "father of Federation", was often at the head of anti-Chinese laws restricting where they could live. In 1857 his newspaper Empire railed: "Total exclusion of the Chinese from the goldfields should be the law”.

The first identified threat by white settlers was from thieving, dispossessed Aborigines, who were placed in the same category as Australian fauna. Racism included the removal of Indigenous children from their families and the denial of full citizenship rights to Indigenous people.

People with similar backgrounds naturally like to be together. The ideals of multiculturalism were welcome here in Australia when most people were Anglo background, and Prime Minister Bob Hawke promoted it well. Most people embraced it, and we have benefited from immigration both economically and culturally. However, in recent years, the numbers of immigrants has risen so high, a twist of racism has seeped in.

Immigration today

The Australian government, acting on behalf of their mates in the real estate industry, is effectively inviting foreign populations to move in and colonise parts of the country.
Australians are forced to carry the costs. They have to compete with rich foreigners for housing in a country already facing a chronic housing shortage. They have to pay their taxes just so that wealthy foreigners can simply move in and make use of Australia's public services and infrastructure.
(Eye on Immigration: selling Australia)

The Howard government left behind a robust immigration program of more than 120,000 net immigrants a year. The Rudd Government set a target of 190,000 migration places in 2008-09, a 20 per cent increase over the previous year's target. It increased the working visa program to double its size four years earlier. Not a word was said about this during the 2007 election campaign.

Racism phobia

Are we so terrified of the R-word, racism, so brainwashed by the thought police, that no dares mention skin colour any more? Not even the cops when seeking a
crime suspect?
Surely skin colour is just as objective as hair colour?

Hey Hey It’s Saturday ratings success has been marred by accusations of racism after a skit on the Red Faces talent segment featured a group of doctors in black face paint re-enacting a Jackson 5 song. Would a similar skit about ABBA have been racist if they painted their faces white?

Racism today

In the UK, Pakistanis are twice as likely as Indians to be unemployed. Two years ago, their government’s research showed almost half of British Asians and blacks arguing that there are too many immigrants.

Particularly following the September 11 attacks, both Muslim and Arab Australians have experienced a significant rise in Islamophobia and racism.

More recently we have witnessed race-based confrontations in Cronulla and now fears have grown over the perceived violence and gang culture of Sudanese immigrants.

There was a backlash against Sudanese immigrants and a move by our Government to attempt to justify a freeze on our African refugee intake.

Kevin Rudd scrapped the "Pacific Solution", abolished temporary protection visas, and let illegal arrivals get more lawyers. The Federal Police warned that this may increase the number of attempted arrivals to Australia. The dismantling of the Howard government's border protection policies has led to a surge in boats. 255 Sri Lankans asylum seekers, now bobbing off Java, are refusing to leave their boat. They now face detention in Sumatra rather than Nauru. Is it not surprising that Australia is their choice of refuge, knowing that we have the highest migrant intake in the developed world?

Our heavy intake of well-educated and well-off immigrants is a stark contrast to those that are turned away or places in detention.

The recent attacks on Indian students have thrust the issue of racism in Australia into the mainstream news bulletins.

Over populating Australia

Australia's population is forecast to surge from 22 million to well over 35 million in 40 years. . Our population this year grew by 439,000, or 2.1 per cent, the highest in the developed world.

In the past anyone questioning immigration to Australia risked being labeled racist. But now there's a new accusation leveled against anyone speaking against the massive surge in immigration to Australia. Now debate is being shut down by economic and political ‘correctness'.

Modeling by the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University shows each additional one million people adds 25 million tonnes of pollution to Australia’s greenhouse accounts.

“An increase in population to 35 million by 2050 would mean 325 million tonnes of additional pollution, costing us at least $10 billion a year in extra carbon pollution costs alone,” Mr Berger of Australian Conservation Foundation said.

GDP ignores the cost of the environmental damage done by immigration. Head hunting skilled workers from developing countries roughly doubles their greenhouse gas emissions, in the process making it all the harder for us to achieve the necessary reduction in our emissions. Our greenhouse gas emissions are rising, contrary to Kevin Rudd’s climate change commitments.

Immigration-fed growth in the economy is good only if it raises the real average incomes of the existing population. If it doesn't, we're running a high immigration policy mainly for the benefit of the immigrants who are able to earn more in our country than they were in their own country. Sharing finite resources means an erosion of the quality of life.

The
ABC's Four Corners program recently ran a piece on the 'new homeless'; families that couldn't find an affordable house to rent.
What do you do when you've lost your job, lost your home and you have three kids to feed? You end up in a motel cooking, eating and sleeping in one room at the taxpayer's expense. These are Australia's new homeless.

The narrator failed to mention one of the causes of the homelessness - the increased demand for housing fueled by high immigration levels.

Time for debate on immigration

It's time to drop the political correctness that for years has meant anybody who questioned immigration levels was labeled racist, or a supporter of Pauline Hanson!

One Nation was anti-immigration, anti-economic liberalization party. According to their web site, “One Nation is not, nor has ever been, a racist party. We are however a fiercely nationalistic party that puts the well being of Australia and it's people before anything else. It is obvious by the tens of thousands that came out to support us that there is a ground swell of ordinary people in this country who are sick of the self serving, on both sides of politics, that has been passed off as leadership for so many decades.”

There was no hint of racism, just a questioning of our high immigration and how it serves the interests of Australians. Racism was muddied by an immigration debate!
The issue now is not about race.
This is about numbers, and the future. (Herald Sun)

Capitalist leaders have always known immigration was a great way to permanently weaken unions and culture in favour of economics. Are our leaders deliberately diluting Australian-ism, patriotism, so we are accommodated into a global market? Already our real estate, many industries, tertiary education, job markets, consumer items and our population are being quietly globalised.

THE Rudd government must urgently rein in migration or tens of thousands more young Australians will miss out on their first jobs , a new report warns. (The Australian)

Already, 15- to 24-year-old Australians are bearing the brunt of burgeoning migration levels, their unemployment rate rising from 8.8 per cent to 11.7 per cent in the year to September, the study by Monash University academic Ernest Healy reveals.
Cut migrants to aid jobless:

India as a nation is faced with massive problem of unemployment. Unemployment rates for women are higher than those for men. The incidence of unemployment among the educated is much higher than the overall unemployment. If our definition of unemployment is defined to include any job which does not move an individual to living wages within one year, then India’s unemployment is not the official 7-9% but about 26%!

If our unemployed, or underemployed, or students went to India to access their tertiary education system and raided their limited casual or professional job opportunities, surely there would be a "racist" backlash!

Let's get back to some basic good old-fashioned Australian patriotism instead of all the globalisation that is being inflicted on us. Tertiary educational institutions should be funded to educate primarily Australian citizens, not internationals, and jobs should be for Australians, not outsourced overseas or for opportunist students hoping to stay here.

Australia’s population growth has been historically driven by immigration. Now we need to be stabilized and established as a distinct but multicultural entity.

The abuse of the word “racist” is manipulating us into silence and being used to enforce policies that were appropriate and beneficial in past decades, but are not appropriate for Australia in the 21st century.

Painting: John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark (1777)

The nationally publicized assault of a 38 year old black man

The nationally publicized assault of a 38 year old black man in Courtenay, BC by three young white thugs was predictably amplified by a media eager to sound the siren of politically correct paranoia. There was racism under every bed! White racism that is. The other kind, of “black on white” assaults, which statistically is much the more common event in America, is not the subject of polite conversation. It is, after all, socially outrageous to speak the truth in Canada. Best to ban the publication of ethnic crime data to smother bigotry in its cradle. Then again, statistical profiling may very well do the opposite by revealing that crime is not the trademark of any ethnic community but only of a tiny and troubled minority within it. And that culture, not skin pigmentation, is a relevant factor, among many.

When the Mayor of Courtenay, Greg Phelps, failed to comply with a PC injunction to support a “feel good” anti-discrimination ‘protocol’ he found substantially meaningless, to address a problem too over-blown to warrant panic, an activist of self-righteous disgust raised the specter of rampant subterranean racism. You may not see it, but trust me, it’s here, there and everywhere! Courtenay may project the image of placid tolerance, but scratch the surface, and it’s a town in the Jim Crow South. “The mayor,” he said, was “just the tip of the iceberg. And it’s not about the three young white men either. There’s got to be a large peer group who shares their racist views. And don’t forget racism begins at home. These men obviously have parents. And these parents have peers too…” Implication? Let’s find them and root them out! I wonder if Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” is included by the school board in the canon of student texts, along with the slogans of intolerant tolerance that the Ministry of Education mandates.

How inconvenient it was then, when it was later learned that apparently, the three aggressors subsequently attacked a Caucasian man. One wonders would words they applied to taunt him. Was it “fatso”, “gimp”, “four eyes”, “baldy” or “fag”? If so, would it indicate that they were motivated by a hatred of obese, handicapped, bespectacled, hairless or gay people? Or would it reveal that their despicable aggression was more accurately the result of three young punks spoiling for a fight and looking for any handle or epithet to goad their victim and get under his skin?

Media alarmism and rent-a-crowd fury

This media alarmism and rent-a-crowd fury recalls the outrageous claim made by the then Minister for Multiculturalism, Hedy Fry, that racism had reached such a fever pitch that ‘they were burning crosses in Prince George (BC).” That too was a ridiculous hyperbole and a blatant lie. Prince George was no more a racist hotbed than Courtenay is today. Nevertheless, these kind of charges serve a purpose. And what purpose do they serve? They stoke up a hyper-sensitivity not only about racism, but issues about that are peripheral to it, but not necessarily connected.

The bogeyman of rampant white racism creates an atmosphere of social intimidation that already greets anyone who dares to criticize the state policies of mass immigration and official multiculturalism. And as we have seen here and elsewhere, racial vilification laws and the revision of history are the logical complement to it. The need to suppress and punish odious views is thought necessary to smother any nascent challenge to the corporate agenda of growing the economy by growing the population. Hysteria inflates the constituency for more restrictions on contrarian speech and the ethnic cleansing of textbooks. Since Canada’s immigration selection criteria, in tandem with the second highest per capita immigration intake in the world, ensures that the country will evolve as Courtenay is evolving, into “a growing community increasing in diversity”, ethnic harmony must come at any cost.

Given that imperative, free speech can no longer be regarded as the very condition and pre-requisite of all other rights, but in the classic Canadian light, of merely one right to be weighed against others in determining the public interest.

"Cultural diversity" a sweet-sounding syrup to coat the bitter pill of naked profit and greed

“Cultural diversity” is the clarion call of the liberal-left, but it is also the mask of the corporate elite, a sweet-sounding syrup to coat the bitter pill of naked profit and greed---and the environmental degradation that comes with it. Big banks, developers and cheap labour employers fly its banner as a smokescreen to obscure their efforts to widen the labour pool and recruit more homebuyers. Immigration is openly promoted as a life-preserver for the shipwrecked home mortgage and home building industry by the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotia Bank and other credit institutions. Cultural diversity is the flavour of the month for an agenda that has no sincere interest in ethnic folk dances and exotic cuisines, but only in the making of money, and the fragmentation of a once cohesive society so that united opposition to its aims become less and less likely as the process unfolds. It is a kind of diversity that comes at the cost of both biological diversity---the staggering loss of species from human population growth in Canada----and intellectual diversity. A nation where people of different origins and hues can co-exist only if they sing the same tune, and the old slogans of “white” nationalism are supplanted by the cant of fake “diversity”. It is the ideology of current convenience, like the “Manifest Destiny” or “White Australia” of times past, to camouflage and disguise the continuing quest to dispossess whom ever happens to be the native population of its share of the economic pie.

For good measure, school textbooks, and history itself, has been revised to advance the new state religion of “Multiculturalism”—Canada’s Ingsoc. The falsehoods of the past have been replaced with politically correct falsehoods of the present. The Chinese head tax and the Exclusion Act, together with the Komagata Maru incident, now form the centerpiece of White Guilt 101, which never looks at the historical context of these events, but assigns retroactive blame on working people and politicians whose main objective was simply to defend wages and living standards from cheap imported labour. No mention is made, for example, that “Chinese exclusion” did not apply to students, diplomats or Chinese business men and their families. Some kind of ‘racism’ that.

Don't play into the PC game-plan

But making the foregoing case plays right into the PC game-plan. That is, draw us into a verbal maelstrom on race, away from the critical issue of sustainability. Away from what should be our primary concern, which is not about how people in our lifeboat treat each other, where they are from or how they look, but how many damn passengers the boat can carry sustainably past the tumultuous storms of peak oil, peak water and peak everything that loom over the horizon. The relationship between humans is secondary to the relationship of humans to nature and the resources it provides. HMCS Canada is a lifeboat, not an aircraft carrier. It is not a vast and boundless land begging for more people to unlock a treasure trove of limitless resources, but a big “little’ land in ecological terms. A nation of frozen tundra, short growing seasons, mined out and marginal soil where 20% of its best farmland is paved over and the rest is under threat from continuing sprawl and the impending loss of oil-based fertilizers. A ship hurtling toward the iceberg of overshoot with politicians on the bridge who want to stop to pick up more passengers and encourage those already on board to have more children.

It is in this context that the crusade of “anti-racism” must be seen. It is the sand that is thrown in our face to get us off our game----stopping growth. And growth is no bogeyman. It is here and it is killing us.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
July 14/09

Source of illustration http://awliya.wordpress.com/

Progress ideology and colonial racism in 19th, 20th and 21st century US politics

Margaret Sanger, nurse, feminist, and family planning pioneer, has been accused of a racist agenda to reduce the black population of the US, but this is to single her out unfairly among her peers. Her project was really a neo-malthusian one which attempted to empower poor women, black or white. Her most strongly held policy was that it was up to the woman to decide whether she wanted a child or not.

She has been quoted as if she were advocating eugenics for the black population of the US but that case: "We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten that idea out if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members," [Source:Robert Marshall and Charles Donovan, Blessed Are The Barren; The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood, Ignatius Press, 1991, pp. 17-18.] relies on misinterpretation. It seems pretty clear that Sanger, despite her upper social-class blinkers, was attempting to empower black women by appealing to black spokespeople so that US blacks would not mistaken her efforts as eugenicist. She succeeded and one of her spokespersons was Martin Luther King.

Right to Life and similar associations have often mis-used the above quote as a political tool against contraception, abortion and feminism, but pro-life banning of abortion and contraception has been misused in turn to promote large populations of labourers among the dispossessed for centuries. They have also been used to promote war - for instance by Hitler and Petain. In these cases, rather than look at racism in pro-lifers or in neo-malthusians, it would be better to ask the question, "Who benefits?"

Racist ideology then and now

The ruling classes of the 19th and 20th century colonial world used racist ideology to justify as progress the empire's oppression of the peoples it dispossessed. Most people accepted this ideology without question, because they learned it from the newspapers, from schools, and in universities. How could millions of immigrants have justified the massive dispossession of Indian nationals, Indian Americans, Black Africans and Aboriginal Australians and the disempowerment and political disruption of Chinese and Japanese, Pacific Islanders and so many others - in any other way? Otherwise intelligent people rarely had occasion to question this view of the world, without which so-called 'economic progress' could not and cannot continue. Humanitarians among the upper classes saw it as their duty to assist the unfortunate or the oppressed to rise somehow out of what was seen as their natural and historical state. Most of the time they would not have had any idea of the depths to which their own governments sank. See for instance this record of experiments on Africans by the US government until 1972.

The Celts as backward peoples

Malthus himself evolved his political theory in a society where the Irish were deemed congenitally stupid and recalcitrant and this had been used as an excuse from Elizabeth 1's time to dispossess them violently, destroy their forests for wood, and force them to labour for Anglo-settlers. A reading of Chrétien de Troyes' Le Conte du Graal (written in 1179) will show that, in Roman times on the continent, Celts were treated as hapless fools as well by their Roman dispossessors,

"Sire, sachiez tot entresait
Que Galois sont tuit par nature
Plus fol que bestes en pasture."

["Sire, everyone knows that Celts are all by nature sillier than grazing cattle"]

( Source: Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal[1179], ed. Charles Mela, Livre de Poche ( Lettres Gothiques 14 ), Paris, 1990v. 236-238 )".

Depending on the sectarian perspective, in the past and today, 'improvement' might be brought by 'bringing civilisation' as the Romans called it, preaching Christian or other religions, through education, through the provision of 'jobs' and industry, through hygiene and mechanised agriculture. Anything but returning land to people and getting out of their countries. Anything, even promoting larger populations of the dispossessed and the new possessors, which can only, of course, make things worse for all.

There is little difference between colonial ideology and corporate ideology in globalism, as we can observe in so many examples - from the ongoing calvary of 'free' Nigerians living near Nigerian oil-fields or of Australians in Australia (which remains a British possession), as land-prices and population are inflated to please property developers and mainstream press (which markets property), contributing to the re-dispossession of black and white Australians alike.

Racism and counter-racism arguments focus away from land-rights and dispossession

Obviously new methods of birth control are a poor second to not stuffing up the original steady-state societies of exploited countries. Malthusian and neomalthusian approaches, however, whilst usually not recognising the original damage and fault, nor restoring land-rights, nonetheless attempt to empower those who, through dispossession and authoritarian population-boosting, are exploited through their numbers and vulnerability.

Most of us swallow culturally vectored political stupidities whole

With any political program, it is necessary to always to look at the pieces that make up the whole, and discard the bits that don't make sense.

Sanger was born in 1879 and died in 1966. Although she had an enlightened attitude to women's rights, which was reflected in support from women who appreciated her efforts on their behalf, like many of her educated fellows, Margaret misinterpreted Darwin's theory in Spencerian terms. Here, for example are her ideas about human development, in which she says ghastly things about Australian Aborigines.

"It is said that a fish as large as a man has a brain no larger than the kernel of an almond. In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets." Source: Sanger, What Every Girl Should Know, 1920, p. 47

Ironic in a neo-malthusian, if you know that Malthus's first work was inspired by Joseph Banks's observations about the low birth-rate and small population of Australian aboriginals, whose lot he compared favorably to that of the overpopulous British of the late 18th century. See: "Thomas Malthus and Australian Thought"

Sanger, like most doctors and nurses of her time, was also frightened by masturbation:

In my experience as a trained nurse while attending persons afflicted with various and often revolting diseases, no matter what their ailments, I have never found any one so repulsive as the chronic masturbator. It would be difficult not to fill page upon page of heartrending confessions made by young girls, whose lives were blighted by this pernicious habit, always begun so innocently, for even after they have ceased the habit, they find themselves incapable of any relief in the natural act. [...] Perhaps the greatest physical danger to the chronic masturbator is the inability to perform the sexual act naturally.

Source: Sanger, What Every Girl Should Know, 1920, p. 47

At least she had moved on from the general belief that siphilis was caused by masturbation. In fact she was persecuted for her militant attempts to educate people in how to avoid infection from siphilis and other venereal diseases. Siphilis, in common with HIV, has a long, virtually silent lead-up time. In the pre-antibiotic era it was a leading reason for long-term institutionalisation in physical and mental hospitals, but also for many still-births and congenital malformities. In mental hospitals it was known as 'General paralysis of the insane', cause, 'masturbation'. [Interestingly for Australians, in the first volume of the Australian 3 novel work by Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, writing as Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (1930) we read of how the narrator's father, a doctor, was ferried across the Yarra River to the psychiatric hospital ('round the bend') because he had succumbed to general paralysis of the insane.]

Faked photograph

This photograph is faked for ideological purposes; it is a mock-up from Jill Stanek's Pro-life Pulse. There is a website that holds a contest each year for the best PhotoShopped creation depicting the event.
http://margaretsanger.blogspot.com/2008/12/winner-of-2008-margaret-sanger-at-ku.html It looks like they have expanded to video this year.

There is no real information about the event, no copy of invitations, her speech, or her motivations to talk to the Klan meeting. At the time, the American Birth Control League was trying to organize birth control leagues in NJ and gather support for legislative bills.

Sanger's account of her trip to talk to the Klu Klux Klan

Source:Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger An Autobiography 1971 reprint by Dover Publications, Inc. of the 1938 original published by W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 366-367.

"All the world over, in Penang and Skagway, in El Paso and Helsingfors, I have found women's psychology in the matter of childbearing essentially the same, no matter what the class, religion, or economic status. Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.

My letter of instruction told me what train to take, to walk from the station two blocks straight ahead, then two to the left. I would see a sedan parked in front of a restaurant. If I wished I could have ten minutes for a cup of coffee or bite to eat, because no supper would be served later.

I obeyed orders implicitly, walked the blocks, saw the car, found the restaurant, went in and ordered some cocoa, stayed my allotted ten minutes, then approached the car hesitatingly and spoke to the driver. I received no reply. She might have been totally deaf as far as I was 1 concerned. Mustering up my courage, I climbed in and settled back. Without a turn of the head, a smile, or a word to let me know I was right, she stepped on the self-starter. For fifteen minutes we wound around the streets. It must have been towards six in the afternoon. We took this lonely lane and that through the woods, and an hour later pulled up in a vacant space near a body of water beside a large, unpainted, barnish building.

My driver got out, talked with several other women, then said to me severely, "Wait here. We will come for you." She disappeared. More cars buzzed up the dusty road into the parking place. Occasionally men dropped wives who walked hurriedly and silently within. This went on mystically until night closed down and I was alone in the dark. A few gleams came through chinks in the window curtains. Even though it was May, I grew chillier and chillier.

After three hours I was summoned at last and entered a bright corridor filled with wraps. As someone came out of the hall I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses. I waited another twenty minutes. It was warmer and I did not mind so much. Eventually the lights were switched on, the audience seated itself, and I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak.

Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand.

In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York. Under a curfew law everything in Silver Lake shut at nine o'clock. I could not even send a telegram to let my family know whether I had been thrown in the river or was being held incommunicado. It was nearly one before I reached Trenton, and I spent the night in a hotel."

Sanger can be seen as an imperfect human being like all human beings, but who rose above most of her fellows and did great good with great courage. This document and others available about the context and personages in the history of family planning and population policy are of great importance for human beings to understand the political systems we live in today. They contain both inspirations and cautions.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project is a historical editing project sponsored by the Department of History at New York University. The Project was formed by Dr. Esther Katz in 1985 to locate, arrange, edit, research, and publish the papers of the noted birth control pioneer.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project has published a two-series microfilm edition, the Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition Smith College Collections and the Collected Documents Series. Work on the Smith College Collections entailed the rearrangement and organization of over 50,000 Sanger documents in the Margaret Sanger collection and seventeen other collections at the Sophia Smith Collection and Smith College Archives. Work on the Collected Documents Series included a ten-year international search of over 1,500 archives and private collections, photocopying material and organizing over 9,000 documents for publication. Both series have been published with a printed reel guide that includes an item-level index by University Publications of America, a division of Lexis-Nexis.

The Project is currently working on a four-volume book edition of Sanger's Papers, to be published by the University of Illinois Press. The first two volumes, subtitled The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928 and Birth Control Comes of Age, 1928-1939 have been published.

The Project also published an electronic edition of a small sample of documents related to Sanger's Woman Rebel and is working on a larger electronic edition of Sanger's speeches and articles.