THE AMAZING LIES OF AUSTRALIA'S LEFT-LEANING ACADEMIC HISTORIANS

Keith Windschuttle has a long and detailed article on Australia's history derived from the original documents. Below I grab just a few excerpts

Unless they have taken a course in history in recent decades, most Australians would be surprised to learn they inhabit one of the world's most shamefully racist countries. The historical consensus today is that the White Australia Policy -- a series of restrictions on non-white immigrants dating from the gold rushes of the 1850s, culminating in the Commonwealth's Immigration Restriction Bill of 1901 -- made this country the moral equivalent of South Africa under apartheid. Some historians even label Australia at Federation one of the 'herrenvolk democracies'. 'Herrenvolk' is the German term for 'master race', so those historians who use it are making a direct comparison between Australian attitudes and the racial nationalism of Nazi Germany.

Apart from two incidents on the goldfields in 1857 and 1861, there was no serious mob violence in Australia perpetrated by whites against non-whites. In both of the goldfields cases, colonial governments defended the Chinese victims, compensated them for their losses and took action against the white perpetrators.

The greatest enthusiasts for White Australia, and the genuine racists of the time, were the members of the late nineteenth century republican Left, especially its writers, artists and other intellectuals. Their strongest opponents were traditional liberals, the purported reactionaries of their era who supported free enterprise against the growing power of the state.

Social Darwinism, rather than being a widely-accepted theory as claimed by historians, was something few Australians at the time had even heard of. Its adherents were a small group of intellectuals at the extremes of opinion. In the 1880s, they were the followers of the theories of political economy of Herbert Spencer. In the 1910s and 1920s, the theory was most strongly advocated by members of the Victorian Socialist Party.

I found one of the biggest single inventions in all Australian historiography. It was made by Henry Reynolds in his book The Other Side of the Frontier. He claimed that, before Federation in 1901, a total of 10,000 Aborigines had been killed by white settlers in Queensland. The source he provided as evidence of this was an article of his own called 'The Unrecorded Battlefields of Queensland', which he wrote in 1978. But if you look up the article you find something very strange. It is not about Aboriginal deaths at all. It is a tally of the number of whites killed by Aborigines. Nowhere does it mention an Aboriginal death toll of 10,000. Reynolds invented this figure and then gave a false citation to disguise what he had done.

Lyndall Ryan says the so-called 'Black War' of Tasmania began in the winter of 1824 with the Big River tribe launching patriotic attacks on the invaders. However, the assaults on whites that winter were made by a small gang of detribalized blacks led by a man named Musquito, who was not defending his tribal lands. He was an Aborigine originally from Sydney who had worked in Hobart for ten years before becoming a bushranger. He had no Tasmanian tribal lands to defend

Lyndall Ryan cites the Hobart Town Courier as a source for several stories about atrocities against Aborigines in 1826. However, that newspaper did not begin publication until October 1827 and the other two newspapers of the day made no mention of these alleged killings.

Lloyd Robson claims the settler James Hobbs in 1815 witnessed Aborigines killing 300 sheep at Oyster Bay and the next day the 48th Regiment killed 22 Aborigines in retribution. It would have been difficult for Hobbs to have witnessed this in 1815 because at the time he was living in India. Moreover, the first sheep did not arrive at Oyster Bay until 1821

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ELSEWHERE

LOL: Some Leftist site must have linked to me recently as I have had an upsurge of hate mail. All abuse, of course. Not a shred of rational argument. Here is my favourite so far (from perryloganclone@yahoo.com of http://www.perrylogan.org) -- Leftist elitism at its arrogant and self-defeating best: "A conservative trying to understand a liberal is like a dog trying to understand its master. Your website betrays the usual right-wing thought disorder of believing you can read minds. Every other phrase is "they don't care" or "they hate" or other confident assurances about what the left feels & thinks. Your site is a collection of bigoted slams against the left--all based on your remarkable ability to read our minds. I promise you, you cannot read the minds of people more intelligent than yourself, no matter how much you may hate them. Unless you can tell me what number I'm thinking, I'll have to conclude you're just another loony."

GWB's Iraq policy is normal for America: "In fact, as John Lewis Gaddis points out in his elegant essay on American foreign policy, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, the national-security policy of President Bush is in fact the traditional American response to external threats. If, in John Quincy Adams�s famous phrase, America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, America nonetheless has never hesitated to send bayonets against monsters that might someday pose a threat".

There is a rather amazing article here about French pandering to Muslim bigotry. The article is in German but what it says is that in French schools, Muslim pupils and their parents have demanded and got separate toilets and dining tables because they do not want to mix with the "unclean" other children. Muslim pupils also refuse to go into churches (on sightseeing tours with other pupils), and have even refused to have lessons about the mediaeval age when the big cathedrals where built. They refuse to dance, sing or make music in school. They reject the theory of evolution in favor of creationism, and (get this) refuse to draw anything that looks even remotely like a Christian cross in the math class. And of course, there is rabid antisemitism. As the report states, Jewish children who can only avoid harassment when they hide their Jewish identity. The article is based on an official French government report under the aegis of Jean-Pierre Obin, General Inspector of the Education Ministry. Unlike other official reports, however, the French have not put this one up on their Education Ministry website. More here (in German). There is an English comment on the report here.

The empty-headedness of cultural relativism: "Too often, cultural relativists cannot get beyond drawing this one conclusion, which they use as ammunition against traditionalists: "The traditions you think of as having an absolute claim on the human race are merely those that happened to have come down to us, and which we have blindly accepted." While this objection does follow logically from the cultural relativists' premise, so too - and just as logically - does this conclusion: If we cannot use our traditional ethos to attack another's, it is equally illegitimate for him to use his to attack ours. If our cultural relativists must forgive those who sacrifice their infants to Moloch, they must also forgive members of their own society who wish to abide by their own traditions. The cultural relativist's position, practiced consistently, collapses into reactionary obscurantism: All cultures, including his own, are incommensurable, so it is impossible to judge any of them by higher standards than those offered by the cultures themselves. The appeal to enlightened reason rings hollow, for if enlightened reason can guide us to condemn characteristics of our own culture by offering us a higher standard by which to judge them, the same standard may also be used to judge other cultures as well. The cultural relativist must make up his mind: Either there is a higher standard or there isn't. If there isn't, it is impossible to judge among competing traditions, as the cultural relativist argues; if there is, it is possible to judge tradition A to be superior to tradition B, provided A meets the higher standard and B does not."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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