World gone mad

Thanks Andrew; for your excellent realistic writings over the years.

By Andrew Bolt at the www.heraldsun.com


14apr06


Countries such as our own are more than ever home to people who say they don't belong and don't really want to.
IT being a Saturday, I sat under the oak with a coffee to read a newspaper.

And on one scary page after another I discovered a lot of influential people really had given up on defending us and this rotten society.
Sure, you wouldn't have had to borrow my paper to have guessed already that the West was in strife.

Countries such as our own are more than ever home to people who say they don't belong, and don't really want to, either. Brrrr, no.
Right here in Melbourne, we have Aboriginal protesters in the Botanic Gardens who say this is their land -- not anyone else's -- and our laws do not apply.

In Sydney we have Muslim preachers who warn their followers our democracy is not for them, and they owe their loyalty to Allah, not Australia. (See my other column today: Muslims here who say democracy is a no, no)

We also now have as many as 50,000 Italian Australians voting this month to send two of our citizens to represent them in the Italian -- not Australian -- parliament.

We're not alone in seeing loyalties dissolved in a Googley stew of hyperlinks, cheap travel, mass immigration and poor-me race resentment.

A month after the September 11 attacks, thousands of French Muslims booed their national anthem at a soccer match between France and Algeria, and last year thousands more of France's five million Muslims went on a week-long, stuff-you, orgy of smash and burn.

In London, meanwhile, imams have called for a jihad on the West and British-born Muslims mounted two suicide attacks on their fellow citizens, peaceably going to work in trains and busses.

Even in the United States this past month, almost one million Mexicans marched against proposed laws to send back some 12 million illegal workers, with thousands waving Mexican and Puerto Rican flags and carrying signs such as, "This is stolen land", "I'm in my homeland" and "Honkies are illegal immigrants, too".

America's Hispanics are a challenge to the very idea of the US not just because they now outnumber blacks, but because they are far more likely to have divided loyalties.

When Mexico's soccer team played the US in Los Angeles in 1998, many of the 90,000 fans flew Mexican flags, pelted the American players with rubbish and booed the American anthem.

These are not healthy trends. After all, people won't look after things that they don't feel are theirs -- whether it's a Housing Commission flat or a country. And even a country can fall apart with neglect.

Of course, immigrant nations such as Australia and the US have overcome such challenges before, absorbing millions of immigrants who became useful and loyal citizens.

How well the more ethnic-based Europe can do that is the frightening question, and the signs so far aren't great. The Muslim riots against the Danish cartoons, and the failure of so many European intellectuals and politicians -- weakened by doubt and fear -- to defend the Western glory of free speech is a warning.

But even we in Australia should now worry.

As I flicked with mounting alarm through that Saturday paper -- The Age, incidentally -- it seemed clear to me that we're in trouble, too.

Sure, I still trust in the good sense of most Australians, but it's clear we can no longer count on our cultural elite to defend our civilisation, if I may put it that grandly. Just flick with me through this one paper, and you'll see how hard it is for many of them to make their country seem worth joining, loving and defending.

Flick. Here already is an article by Guy Rundle, the former ABC producer and magazine editor, calling our flag a "piss poor" and "dismal bit of bunting" flown by a country created by a century of "slaughter".

Flick. Here's arts writer Raymond Gill, dismissing Advance Australia Fair as the "national jingle", sung in a way that "borders on the creepy Tomorrow Belongs to Me anthem from Cabaret.
Did that reference go over your head? He's referring to a song sung by a Nazi.

Flick. Here's columnist Traceeee Hutchison, fresh from being "smoked" in a "sacred" fire of Aboriginal protesters, insisting between coughs that there's a "national disquiet on sovereignty", as if many of us really doubt whose country this is.

Flick. Here's book reviewer Steven Carroll, urging us to consider whether "true democracy can only exist when institutions that justify the dominance of one group over any other -- such as prisons -- are abolished".

Damn. So Australia isn't a democracy, after all, but a prison camp. And who'd want to belong to that?

Flick. Here's now arts vulture Peter Craven, suggesting that Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America, a paranoid anti-American rant by Sydney playwright Stephen Sewell, is held by some as "the most sophisticated dramatisation of the new age of terrorism that has been done anywhere". Sigh.

Flick. Here is theatre director Neil Armfield, saying our society is doomed because "capitalism is based on a myth of unlimited resources" and "money has the ability to destroy every human bond".

Armfield (who must sadly work for nothing to preserve his human bonds) is now directing a play warning that our gas-belching society has us "dancing around in a kind of endgame". Hurry and see it before you choke. Or see it and choke -- I'm not sure.

Flick. Here, now, is a reviewer praising a film he says exposes "the racist underbelly of modern urban life".

Flick. Here is author Peter Carey, claiming the world's greatest democracy is led by a "coward" and "creep" in charge of a "criminal government", while our own Prime Minister is another of our usual "toadies".

Flick. Susan Provan, head of Melbourne's taxpayer-funded Comedy Festival, has banned comedians who tell jokes about violent Muslims, but includes this year Christian-baiting acts such as Michael Chamberlin and the 10 Commandments, Pastor Michael brings you Manna from Heaven and Son of a Preacher Man.

This is what you might expect from a woman whose grip on foreign affairs has her now gushing: "Iran is the most fascinating, beautiful, engaging country and I hate reading about the Americans' determination to wage war upon Iran . . ."
Fancy, those wicked Americans being so hell-bent on bombing such a sweet country for no reason, or none that Provan chooses to give.

But perhaps she truly has never heard that her sweet Iranians are whipped into line by a theocracy led by a bigot who funds terror groups, runs Holocaust-mocking competitions and says he wants Israel destroyed. If the US does one day bomb Iran, it will be because this regime is working on a secret nuclear project and won't heed the pleas of many frightened European countries to stop.

All this I read in just one edition of just one paper.

All this hate-ourselves we now read and hear -- just when we need to make our place seem more like a home worth having, to sullen strangers who want only to rent the sorry thing instead.