Privileged black man threatens violence
Mick Dodson is a very privileged person. He has qualifications most Australians could never aspire to, and he has reaped the benefit with largesse and a public profile almost all Australians will never enjoy. For all that, though, his stock-in-trade is sour grapes.
Thomas Sowell wrote, in Academics and Race, that there is a common pattern in modern history where minority intellectuals, rather than advocating practical means for minorities to advance, have instead “resented having to advance”, preferring to adopt an attitude of perpetual grievance. Instead of adopting those norms and practices which have enabled the success of the majority culture, resentful intellectuals – almost always educated in the “soft“ fields, rather than say engineering or the sciences, become obsessed with promoting minority languages and culture. The result is almost always social fragmentation and ethnic polarisation.
Instead of leading their peoples to success and social harmony, agrees academic Donald L. Horowitz, ethnic “elites…were commonly found to be in the forefront of ethnic conflict”.
“The intelligentsia in many countries around the world,” says Sowell. “Have played a central role in promoting intergroup and international animosities and atrocities”
In Australia, Aboriginal academics likewise stoke the fires of resentment and division. Quote:
Simmering anger in indigenous Australia over a failure to make good for past wrongs could easily turn into organised armed resistance, Aboriginal academic Mick Dodson has warned.
In launching a new thriller by former journalist and political staffer Peter Cotton, Professor Dodson said the book’s central premise — Aboriginal activist gangs working to topple the state and seize back the land stolen from them — was “fiction but let’s not be negligent and one day it becomes reality”.End of quote.
Sounds like a veiled threat, to me: hand over your money, whitefella, or else … Quote:
Professor Dodson, a former Australian of the Year, was struck on reading the book by the thought “I know these characters, I’ve met them — the blackfellas and the whitefellas”, and felt it captured the “unsatisfied anger” of indigenous Australia over historical and ongoing dispossession, and the lack of an adequate place at the modern political table.
“Unsatisfied anger is something throughout history that’s caused conflict; generally speaking, anger as an emotion is in most instances justified (and) in Dead Heat I see such a plausible scenario,” he said. End of quote.
This is reckless, divisive nonsense. “Anger as an emotion” is justified? This is a blatant effort to condone violence. This is the same argument made by jihadists blowing up teenage girls at pop concerts. It’s the same argument made by violent demagogues everywhere: we’re resentful, and someone deserves to get hurt.
But, as Albert Camus wrote, those who “take up arms in the name of justice […] take a step toward injustice”.
The claim that Aboriginal Australians “lack […] an adequate place at the modern political table” is also bunkum. Federal MPs claiming to be Aboriginal, or with Aboriginal ancestry, easily outnumber their non-Aboriginal peers on a per capita basis. In some jurisdictions, such as the Northern Territory or the ACT, the number of Aboriginal MPs per head of population is almost double that of non-Aboriginals.
Australia also spends more than twice as much per person on Aboriginal Australians than it does on non-Aborigines. Australia spends $45000 on every Aboriginal Australian. By contrast, non-Aboriginal spending is just $18000.
Dodson also peddles the lie that everything that every Australian enjoys was somehow directly stolen from Aborigines. Quote:
“The benefits that we enjoy today come from the dispossession of the indigenous people of this country — dispossession of land and language and culture, our kids and our resources. End of quote.
This is nonsense. The benefits we all enjoy today come in large part from the ingenuity and hard work of the people, non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal alike, who worked to build the nation. The culture that Dodson laments not only did little for the material prosperity of Aboriginal Australians, it also perpetuated millennia of violence against women and children particularly.
Dodson also persists with peddling the racist hobby-horse, the so-called “Indigenous voice to parliament”. Quote:
“We try and say ‘Well (Malcolm) Turnbull, here’s a way forward with the Uluru Statement from the Heart’ and the door is slammed in your face. End of quote.
As well it should. Aboriginal Australians have a voice to parliament: it’s called a “vote”. The numbers show that Aboriginal Australians get more bang for their vote than the rest of us. As Warren Mundine argues, “once you start putting race into it, have you still got a democracy? Don’t you have to have people treated as equal?”
Demanding extra privileges solely on the basis of race is not only, well, racist, it’s divisive and dangerous. Demanding them with veiled threats of violence is unconscionable.
A very worthwhile read of this article by Lushington D. Brady on August 3, 2018
Who is Lushington D. Brady?
Well, a pseudonym. Obviously.
But the name Lushington Dalrymple Brady has been chosen carefully. Not only for the sum of its overall mien of seedy gentility, reminiscent perhaps of a slightly disreputable gentlemen of letters, but also for its parts, each of which borrows from the name of a Vandemonian of more-or-less fame (or notoriety) who represents some admirable quality which will hopefully animate the persona of Lushington D. Brady.
