The hell? What memorial?
I doubt it’s the Frontier Wars…
(Wikipedia should be read with a grain of salt. Better to pick up a book such as Blood on the Wattle.)
List of massacres of Indigenous Australians
A $500m upgrade to Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The announcement coincides with the centenary of the end of world war I. Never mind the fact that 82 returned servicemen and women committed suicide last year, what they needed was a bigger memorial. The frontier wars? I doubt many believe they happened.
Here’s a nice piece from Paul Daley, putting the plan into perspective.
You might appreciate the work being put into this interactive map of massacres.
https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
Visually disturbing.
These people were murdered, massacred, because of their skin pigment and culture. Their descendants come together, because of their skin pigment and culture, to demand recognition, not just of the past, but also for the violence and disadvantage that their skin pigment and culture is still subject to.
But that is identity politics, Marxist postmodernism, it just divides us. No, no, we can’t have that, we should ignore skin pigment, be blind to it. (Except when we use it to disadvantage people and murder them, but that’s ok, that’s just business as usual).
1 Like
That is a disgusting mischaracterisation of positions I have advocated, but I guess that’s the sort of thing you do when you’re into identity politics. Like, you’re either with us or against us and need to be smeared.
Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.
Nuance, like not being blind to biology?
I’m referring to the validity and power contained in identity based movements, as i have been this whole thread. There is no one in this nation more apposed to identity movements than the political demographic that is directly responsible for our own homegrown genocide. This is what i am referring to and it is this group that very often characterises identity movements as ‘postmodern’ and marxist.
I’m not inferring you, or any specific individual disadvantages or murders people, Andrew, if that’s the source of your disgust.
Biology matters. It’s real. And it causes disadvantage and prejudice and sometimes even murder. We cannot put an end to it without recognising it and recognition is diffused through society via the lived experience of disadvantage of shared identities. The aim is not to divide, the aim is too unite in justice. See the gains of feminism, civil rights and marriage equality as examples. All began as identity movements.
2 Likes
Can you envisage more options than just adversarial power struggles?
This topic has been flogged to death.
2 Likes
yea, these guys need to take a break.
@John_Wilson and @LMK, you may be right.
I am weary of the discussion, but I persist because it seems to me that there is a great schism in the political left, across most western nations, with this very subject right at its core.
In one form or another, it has raised its head repeatedly, but never resolved. It usually ends with someone saying “that’s enough”, just like now.
We can end this conversation, but the issue won’t go away.
Andrew. I ain’t trying to close you guys down, not at all. But be dammed if I would put this much energy into this political genre.
My IRA friends would say … the less said … the more understood…
That’s all.
It is not a struggle for power, it is a struggle for recognition of injustice, as i have said multiple times, and it is not the only ‘option’ for making progressive change but one of many and a crucially important and effective one.
Clearly the forum is bored with our banter though, Andrew. I’m happy to call it a day on this topic for a bit. Clear the forum air, so to speak. We could probably go back and forward interminably so i’ll rack my cue and take a break from it.
2 Likes
Did someone say theres going to be a flogging?
Well I guess, it you do it alone, in the privacy of your own home. 