SYDNEY ACADEMIC ENDORSES THE RHETORIC THAT VEILS AUSTRALIA’S RACISM

Yesterday I wrote about how Australians had surrendered their compassion with regard to boatpeople. I showed how they had become convinced by the rhetoric and propaganda of the right-wing of the commentariat and the right-wing of both major political parties that stopping the boats was imperative in order to ‘stop the drownings’ of refugees seeking asylum in Australia by boat. I showed how the ‘stop the drownings’ meme had become a useful catchcry to cover for the real reason for many Australians not wanting to allow non-European non-white foreigners into Australia and that racism was the unspoken real reason behind Australia’s attitude toward boatpeople.

I suggested that by the simple expediency of providing seaworthy boats to those seeking refuge or even just flying them in would solve the problem of deaths at sea. I suggested that quick and efficient on-shore processing based on humanitarian principles would extinguish the angst refugees currently are force to endure during detention prior to processing.

Today, Dr. Gordon Menzies of the University of Technology in Sydney in an op-ed piece in ABC News Online perpetuates the nonsensical myth of the government’s policies being for the boatpeople’s own good. He writes:

The driving force of the current policy regarding refugees emerges directly from consequentialism: tough treatment now will deter future arrivals down the track.

It is important to realise, too, that this line of thought can be compassionate, which is why it has penetrated some notably left-leaning political minds. Stopping people from risking their lives is surely a compassionate goal?

In reality, no self-respecting ‘left-leaning political mind’ would be falling into that trap.

Menzies also demonstrates the point about how the lies embedded in the rhetoric and propaganda of the right-wing about boatpeople have become entrenched in the psyche of many an Australian voter. Menzies writes: 

It has taken a while, but it now appears that both the major parties, and a good deal of their support base, have reached agreement in principle on a tough stance towards boat people. The majority of voters, assailed by the twin fears of terrorism and the "wrong kind of person" entering the country, are broadly supportive of a "whatever it takes" approach to dissuading asylum seekers from coming to our shores.

The ‘fear of terrorism’ and ‘the wrong kind of person’ notions were both introduced into the boatpeople narrative by the extreme right-wing commentariat. While the ‘wrong kind of person’ rhetoric transparently attempts to disguise outright racism, ‘the fear of terrorism’ idea is not supported by any actual evidence.

Menzies avoids asking the unasked question: Why do we want to stop asylum seekers arriving here by boat? He parrots the same old line about wanting to ‘stop the drownings’. But we know this is nonsense because there have always been Australians who have wanted to stop boatpeople coming to Australia even before any of them actually drowned and, besides, as I’ve already mentioned, the problem of stopping the drownings is very easily solved without having to send thousands off to places they don’t want to be housed in concentration camp-like conditions for indefinite periods of time and without any certainty of their future and where they still risk life and limb anyway.

The tone of Dr. Menzies piece is vague and the reader is left wondering if he’s just being cynical about government policies by parodying the right-wing view about boatpeople or if his words reflect his own thinking about the issue. Either way, he’s been unable to face the real test that determines an individual’s stance on the subject; he’s failed to face the reality of Australia’s racism and, in doing so, has conceded his own racism by virtue of perpetuating the myths about boatpeople.

THE BOATPEOPLE CRISIS: THE UNSPOKEN REASONS FOR IT

This piece in The Drum the other day demonstrates clearly how democracy has been eroded and usurped by a media dedicated to manipulating public opinion with spin, half truths and outright lies.

It seems that most people who answered the question referred to in the article about whether or not they believed 'most of the refugees were genuine’ said they were not, whereas the reality is that the vast majority of them in fact actually are genuine refugees.

One needs to ask then; where are those people getting their information from that led them to making a factually incorrect decision? Clearly, these opinions are not informed and yet there is a tendency for politicians to formulate policy based on this uninformed opinion.

Furthermore, as the example shows, not only are their responses ill-informed, but they are based on their political allegiance.

Real democracy based on a properly enlightened people armed with facts has become obsolete. ‘Democracy’ today seems to revolve around those that have the means to successfully manipulate public opinion – and are able to do so with total disregard to the facts and, increasingly, with total disregard to any sense of morality or even reference to or respect for international law.

We have become a poll-driven ‘democracy’ that is dominated by the political commentariat in the employ of influential right-wing media barons for the benefit of their friends and associates in business and politics which, by its nature, is also predominately right-wing.

In the build up to the present refugee crisis, right-wing commentators have succeeded in developing an anxiety among the community based on xenophobic and Islamophobic fears bordering on paranoia. In the run-up to the last election this led to both sides of politics scrambling to pander to those fears in order to secure the votes of an electorate that had become misinformed about the realities of the boatpeople situation.

Australia’s responsibilities to asylum seeking refugees was overlooked in this scramble by both sides of politics to placate an electorate that had been whipped into a frenzy by the rightwing who had discovered that the ‘preventing deaths from drowning’ meme was a suitable vehicle to drive the anti-boatpeople propaganda.

Today, Jonathan Green in another article at The Drum takes a look at what the alternatives are to what is increasingly being seen as an entirely inappropriate system of dealing with boatpeople. He writes:

The compassion now shown to the miserable victims of circumstance and people smugglers is of course opportunistic and politically inspired. It is as genuine as the tears that flowed when Liberal members howled down the Malaysian people swap promoted by the Gillard government, only to sit back, smug and happily certain when more recent policy left people beaten to death, bloodied or shot while within the not-so-protective custody of a detention camp administered in our name. Camps, it should be said, established specifically to promote hopelessness, psychological trauma, degeneration and despair; the sum of these parts being deterrence.

Green sees the problem but, sadly, is unable to provide an adequate answer to it. Instead, he handballs the problem to Labor though he acknowledges that Labor’s initial answer to the problem of boatpeople was more or less the same as the Coalition’s. Green says that it is Labor that must rethink the problem and provide alternatives.

The main reason that both Green and the Labor opposition are unable to provide an alternative to deal with the problem is because of the way both define what the problem is. For them the problem is how to deter refugee boatpeople from attempting to sail to Australia to seek asylum yet, at the same time, deal with those that do turn up on our shores with compassion and with respect to their human rights.

Ignored is the real problem that has yet to be addressed and that is: why do we need to deter asylum seeking refugees from coming to Australia? For those on both sides of mainstream politics the answer has been to ‘stop the drownings’. For many this has become the whole reason for the entire off-shore processing exercise, but what if there had never been any drownings? What excuse then would there have been to lock people up in places they didn’t want to be for indefinite periods of time in the most appalling conditions? If there had been no drownings, would there then be no need to deter asylum seekers from coming to Australia by boat?

‘Stopping the drownings’ is just an excuse to cover the real reasons for deterring boatpeople from coming to Australia.

The unspoken bottom line lies in Australia’s innate fear and loathing of non-European foreigners coming to Australia. It is this that lies at the heart of the boatpeople problem. Everyone knows it but everyone denies it. Australians have put forward every excuse under the sun as to why boatpeople shouldn’t be allowed to come to Australia. They range from faux compassion over the drownings, to them not being real refugees, to them being queue jumpers or just rich country shoppers. It is with a certain irony that the only people being honest about their reasons for not wanting them in Australia are those monoculturalists on the extreme right who quite gleefully exclaim that they don’t want non-European non-white foreigners in Australia to dilute or change our existing culture – in other words, straight out racists the likes of which one will find commenting at blogs everywhere especially those run by Murdoch journalists like Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, et al.

The answer to the drowning problem is simple: provide seaworthy boats – something the navy is now actually doing – but instead of sending them back to Indonesia, allow them to come to Australia. Alternatively, fly them in. Once they are here they can be quickly processed and dealt with accordingly. Those that are genuine are then released into the community and allowed to work, and those that don’t meet the requirements are then detained in humane conditions until alternative arrangements are made for them.

But before any of this or any other alternative answers to the problem can be considered, the Australian people need to either own up to being racists or do the right thing and meet the obligations we signed up for with regard to refugees because this ‘tough to be kind’ nonsense simply isn’t fooling anyone.

Australia must declare itself: we are either a nation of out and out racists or we are a compassionate fair-go nation willing to give anyone a chance.

We cannot be one while pretending to be the other. Australians need to face its racist demons and drive them out.

There needs to be honesty in the media and the propagandists need to be exposed and shut down. There needs to be penalties for lying in the media. The Australian Press Council needs its powers strengthened to ensure the media tells us the truth. And, finally, we need to look to the long term future of a compassionate Australia – and that starts with education.

BOLT’S GONE INTO PANIC MODE AS THE LEFT MAKES HEADWAY AGAINST ABBOTT…

The reaction of ordinary Australian’s to the death and violence in Abbott’s concentration camps for asylum seekers has come as a blow to the Right and, as a result, Bolt’s column today is filled with posts that defend Abbott and the government. Bolt does this in the only way he knows how; insult, lie and demean the Left by cherry-picking the aggressive antics of those that are angry. In doing so, Bolt all but ignores the past aggression the Right-wing had for Gillard. He writes: “Once in a crowd a person held up a sign calling Julia Gillard a witch,” as though that was a one off occasion and calling Gillard a witch was all there was.

Bolt, as usual, lies. The Right-wingers holding up those signs (plural) appeared at numerous anti-Labor rallies where Abbott spoke not just calling Gillard a witch but with signs saying ‘Burn the Witch’ and ‘Hang the Witch’.

Bolt also conveniently forgets to mention Alan Jones’ call for Gillard to be ‘put in a chaff bag and dumped out to sea’.

Talk about hypocrisy.

Of course, all this nonsense from Bolt is just to distract and deflect the concerns of ordinary Australians from the real issues of the day; the question of the disgusting way the Abbott government treats those who seek asylum in Australia.

The backlash from the ordinary folk of Australia and led by the Left against the cruel and demeaning treatment of asylum seeking boatpeople is beginning to take effect. Bolt’s desperate foaming at the mouth rhetoric suggests that the message is finally getting through to the people of Australia that something is terribly wrong with the Abbott government.

ORIGINALITY IS NOT BOLT’S BEST TALENT…

It seems Bolt is going to introduce a new segment to his ‘Bolt Report’ show on Channel Ten. It will be called NewsWatch; a direct take on the ABCs Media Watch program.

It highlights once again Bolt’s inability to dream up anything original to push his propaganda. This is the second time Bolt has stolen or modified Left-wing tags to further what Bolt’s employers euphemistically call ‘journalism’.

Last September I wrote of how Bolt had stolen the academic Robert Manne’s tag, ‘New Racism’ for his own perverse racist propaganda purposes. Now he’s done it again.

In his column today, Bolt says that the ‘ABC lacks the balance of Fox News’ and implies that his new NewsWatch segment will be some kind of Australian free-to-air version of Fox News.

Originality is not one of Bolt’s finer traits, a fact demonstrated by his extensive use of cut and pasted articles from elsewhere, so one has to wonder what it is that makes him employable. The answer, I think, lays in the demographics of his audience who hang on to his every word – even if originally they belonged to someone from the Left.

BOLT USES DEATHS OF ASYLUM SEEKERS FOR POLITICAL POINT SCORING - LITERALLY

Today Bolt continues his relentless tirade attempting to whitewash Scott Morrison’s responsibilities to immigration detainees held in Coalition concentration camps. In a piece at his blog this morning, Bolt uses the deaths of asylum seeking refugees for political point scoring – literally. He infers that one death under Abbott is better than a 1000 deaths under Labor; never mind that Bolt is outrageously suggesting here that Labor was directly responsible for the deaths by drowning of boatpeople seeking asylum in Australia.

Bolt’s assertion is pure rhetoric.

The difference, of course, is that Labor were not crewing the boats that sank killing over a thousand asylum seekers, whereas Scott Morrison was in direct command of the camps in which a detainee was killed and some 77 others injured.

Regardless of how Bolt cares to spin it, Morrison is responsible for the death of the inmate and the injuries to 77 other inmates on Manus Island. It was Morrison who put them there when they didn’t want to be there – unlike the victims of the drownings who ultimately died as a result of a decision they made out of desperation.

BOLT CLAIMS BOATPEOPLE GIVEN ASYLUM BY LABOR GOVERNMENT ARE ILLEGAL

Bolt today shifted the goalposts to realign the propaganda against asylum seeking refugees. Not only is he railing against those in Australia’s concentration camps as ‘illegals’, now Bolt has set his sights on earlier arrivals that had been processed and resettled in Australia during the years of the Labor government. In his post this morning Bolt writes:

In six years of Labor Government, the Human Rights Commission held just one inquiry into the policies which had lured 50,000 boat people to Australia, drowned at least 1100 of them, crammed our detention centres to overflowing and had thousands of boat people released into the community without proper vetting or permission to work.

In the past the word ‘lured’ was used in the context of having been ‘lured to their deaths’ referring to the drownings at sea of asylum seeking refugees attempting to come to Australia by boat. Now Bolt is attempting to change the context by suggesting that it was the Labor government that had ‘lured 50,000 boatpeople to Australia’.

Bolt is now also trying to suggest that those boatpeople who had been granted asylum in Australia and released into the community during Labor’s time in government were somehow done so illegally due to not having been vetted properly or without proper permission to work.

The fact that Australia is a signatory of the various refugee conventions and therefore obliged to accept those who arrive here seeking asylum can hardly be labelled a ‘lure’; it is merely doing what we are obliged to do.

One wonders if the next step for Bolt is to begin calling for the deportation of boatpeople who were granted asylum during the Labor government.

BOLT PUSHES SCOTT MORRISON FOR TURNBULL’S JOB TO GET AT A.B.C.

In a post at his blog today, Andrew Bolt pushes Scott Morrison’s barrow by praising Morrison’s ‘successes’ in ‘stopping the boats’ (code for stopping non-white foreigners from entering Australia). Bolt suggests that, once the boats have been stopped for good, Abbott might consider replacing Malcolm Turnbull with Morrison as Minister of Communications, a portfolio that has responsibility for the funding of and dealings with the ABC. Bolt also suggest that Morrison be groomed for leadership behind Joe Hockey.

Bolt says: “I look at the ABC and cannot help thinking what tremendous good a Morrison could achieve that a Malcolm Turnbull won’t....”

I look at what Bolt’s saying and cannot help thinking that he’s sucking up to Morrison with an eye on actually being appointed to the ABC board himself… May whatever Deity you believe in help all of us if that ever happens!

And, as for Scott Morrison ever becoming Prime Minister of Australia… there is no Deity able to help us then!

BOLT OBSESSED OVER A.B.C. OBSESSION ABOUT BOATPEOPLE CONCERNS

The convicted racist and extreme Right-wing propagandist, Andrew Bolt, in his column today has claimed that the ABC is ignoring the Abbott government’s ‘success’ in ‘stopping the boats and the drownings’. He claims that: “The new Abbott Government’s policies to stop the boats, stop the drownings and gradually empty the detention centres are clearly working.”

Well, if one happens to be a xenophobic racist who is anxious to keep non-white foreigners out of Australia then the policies of the closet thing Australia has ever got to a fascist government are, indeed, working. But, what needs really to be asked is; are the government’s policies morally the right policies?

Bolt and the extreme Right of Australia like to argue that it’s all about stopping the drownings at sea as though they actually care that foreigners they hate are dying in their attempts to find their way to Australia. If it were just about preventing the drownings at sea then it would have been a simple task of providing either a far more efficient system of detecting refugee boats and then ensuring their safe arrival in Australia or, alternatively, providing them with seaworthy boats – as they are now doing. But, rather than forcing them back to Indonesia, which in itself puts the passengers in extreme danger, they could have been escorted to Australia in safety.

Bolt is attempting to implicate the ABC in the tragedies of the past and at the same time asking why the ABC is not supporting the government’s inhuman treatment of desperate asylum seeking refugees. Bolt has in his recent columns inferred that the ABC’s reports of asylum seekers being mistreated and abused by both the Australian Navy and by Australian authorities in the governments concentration camps on Manus Island and elsewhere are somehow ‘un-Australian’.

Bolt insists the ‘government’s policies are working’ and for xenophobic racists of Australia they are.

The problem is they are the wrong policies. They do not reflect Australia’s refugee obligations and they show Australia as a nation of unsympathetic racists, bigots, liars and hypocrites.

It is the Abbott government and the likes of Bolt that are being un-Australian by promoting their xenophobic hatreds of boatpeople under the pretence of caring about them.

We should be thanking the ABC for exposing the truth about what the government is doing in our name.

BOLT’S OBSESSION WITH RACE AND CRIME

As part of Bolt’s program of promoting racism and perpetuating race hatred in Australia, he very frequently cherry-picks violent crime events committed by black or Islamic immigrants or their descendents to support his argument that African and Islamic peoples should not be allowed into Australia – especially if they are refugees.

In his column today Bolt has picked on the brutal alleged pack rape of a 14-year-old Sydney girl apparently by a ‘group of men of African appearance’. It seems the police and some media outlets were reluctant to describe the alleged offenders as such. Bolt, of course, says they should because in doing so, some ‘99% of the population will be excluded’.

In fact, providing racial descriptions of any perpetrator of any crime is about as useful as describing the DNA that a perpetrator had left behind at the crime scene – it’s completely valueless as far as any potential witness is concerned. If anyone had witnessed a pack rape they would be reporting it to the police regardless of what race the perpetrators were.

And, even if there were some merit in providing a racial descriptions, one can rest assured that Bolt’s reasons for appearing so concerned lies, not in his interest in apprehending the perpetrators but, rather, in using the crime to propagandise the demonisation of, in this case, African people.

Bolt is not a crime writer; he’s a racist propagandist. His sole interest in the case is that it provides him with yet another opportunity to peddle his hate of anyone non-white and non-European.

BOLT’S BLOGGIES: THE IGNORANT AND THE CONFUSED

Yesterday, in response to an Andrew Bolt’s post titled ‘Clarence Thomas: The worst Abuse came from the Left’, I wrote:

Most from the Left dislike hard Right conservatives. The Left dislike Clarence Thomas because he is a hard Right conservative; not because he is black. The Left’s dislike of him has nothing to do with his colour. American white supremacists (right-wing) dislike Clarence Thomas because he’s black. Democrats, who have a very long history of racism, are mostly not ‘Left-wing’ as you infer; they’re just not as Right-wing as Republicans. It was Southern Democrats that were pro-slavery to the point they wanted to secede from the Union, a position that brought on the American Civil War.

Your simplistic and primitive attempt to fit up the Left as ‘racists’ is blatantly transparent.

The response from Bolt’s Bloggies displayed a level of ignorance that highlighted the madness of the right-wing due to Bolt’s influence. As well as plain ignorance, confusion about the differences between the Left and the Right are also exposed.

Here are two examples of the responses to my comment. The first from ‘KB worrier’ who writes:

“Your simplistic and primitive attempt to fit up the Left as ‘racists’ is blatantly transparent.”

Far less so than your confusion regards ‘conservatives” and “far right”. “Far right” is what you left extremists exhibit with your entrenched bigotry and intolerance of any viewpoint which does not Kowtow to your gods of whatever is your bleat-de-jour is (usually something that comes from a conservative regardless of the benefit to the community as it must be opposed and collateral damage be damned )

Another response came from ‘Blair’ (though I don’t think it was Tim Bair) who wrote:

Damien, [sic] your simplistic and primitive [sic] to rewrite and ignore history is blatantly transparent.

 
Democrats created, funded and have belonged to the KKK throughout it’s [sic] history in the USA (remember Senator Robert Bird) and attempts to protray [sic] them as right wing is simply absurd.

For ‘Blair’, so it would seem, the Ku Klux Klan is Left–wing.

The level of ignorance of Bolt’s Bloggies is astounding but what’s really disturbing is the way Bolt has almost succeeded in convincing the more extremist elements of the intellectually bereft Right that ‘the Left is Right’.

It’s all part of a program whereby Bolt has set out to convince the Right-wing that they are not really Right-wing but just ‘conservatives’ and that the Left are really Right-wing and that speaking up for minorities and the underprivileged and supporting the rights of Indigenous people to identify as they wish is some kind of ‘New Racism’.

EXTREME RIGHT MAKE NEUTRAL A.B.C. LOOK LEFT WING

Extreme right-wing commentator Andrew Bolt, together with many of his fellow Murdoch-employed propagandists and the Abbott government, have spent the last few weeks trying to convince themselves and the Australian people that Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, is ‘biased toward the Left’.

The problem is that it’s only the right-wing of Australia that thinks the ABC is biased. According to a ReachTEL poll taken on Thursday, 30 January 2014, 67.8% of those polled did not think the ABC was biased toward the Left. 59.6% of them thought the ABC was unbiased while 8.2% thought the ABC was biased toward the Right.

The Right-wing of both politics and the commentariat traditionally are contemptuous of negative news relating to Right-wing policies – especially news that exposes the government’s shortcomings.

The ABC is charged with providing information to Australians that is honest and unbiased – even if it contradicts the policies and statements of the government and its propagandists in the Right-wing media.

Of late, the ABC has been charged by the government and Right-wing commentators as being ‘unpatriotic and unsupportive of the Australian side’.

The reality is that the ABC is not biased toward the Left but that, as far as the Right-wing is concerned, the ABC is not biased toward the Right-wing. Since the ABC is financed by taxpayers, the extreme Right-wing like Quadrant magazine and the neoconservative Australian think tank Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) have for some time been demanding that the ABC be privatised in order to ‘stop the bias’.

Not all conservatives, however, are so keen to privatise the ABC as the Right-wing extremists. The Coalition’s Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, came out in defence of the ABC after Abbott’s attack on it.  

Any serious move to privatise the ABC is likely to be met with strong resistance from the Left, ordinary Australians and many conservatives who, even if they think the ABC is biased toward the Left, would likely strongly oppose privatisation.

The bottom line is this: to the extreme Right, even the ABC’s neutral reporting seems ‘Left-wing’. However, the extreme Right has influence. All Australians must be prepared to resist any interference with the ABC, let alone privatisation.