RUTHFULLY YOURS

Karl Marx is the superstar lead in the blockbuster movie of anti-Western productions. Marxists focus their critique on economics. They insist that capitalism is both cruel and doomed by ineluctable historical forces. Marx has many supporting players, many totally unaware that they are extras in the anti-Western project. Many of these supporting players wear gauzy fabrics in pastel hues, shop at stores lulled by piped-in windchime music, and smell like patchouli. They believe themselves to be apolitical, peace-and-love flower children. They insist that their ideology, unlike that of the big, bad West, has never hurt anyone. In fact political convictions as impervious to fact, as destructive and as rigidly intolerant as that of any extremist undergird their flowing tie-dye.

One of the most powerful anti-Western myths runs like this. Rape, war, and environmental degradation are Western, Judeo-Christian monopolies. Before the Jews, those reliable villains of so many lurid and hate-fueled fabrications, humanity worshipped a nurturing mother goddess. Men and women were equal. It was the Jews and their disastrously influential offspring, the Christians, who introduced inequality, domestic violence, and competition. Western man, steeped in the Bible, was single-handedly responsible for the rape of the planet. Go to any New Age bookstore, read any Facebook post by someone who identifies as “spiritual-but-not-religious,” chat with anyone wearing an ankh, greeting you with “Namaste,” or self-identifying as a Wiccan, and you will encounter some version of this ideology.

My Facebook friend Bea is an anti-Brexit, open-borders leftist. Bea denounces Trump supporters as a threat to world peace. She’s the type of person who, if she overheard a Salvation Army band playing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” would petition the UN to send in peacekeeping troops to her street corner.

Bea posted a YouTube video of a haka she especially liked. Haka are the war chants of Maori, indigenous people of New Zealand. I noted the disconnect between Bea’s peace-love-coexistence Facebook persona and her endorsement of war chants. I posted a very brief message. “Haka are traditional Maori war chants. They were designed to pump warriors up for battle, and to intimidate opponents.”

Bea’s one-world friends attacked. How dare I label haka “war chants?” Haka are a lovely art form of traditional people!

I responded with a notorious passage from Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond described Maori warriors invading the territory of their neighbors, the Moriori, and committing a genocide.

Maori warriors, no doubt fueled from chanting haka, “killed hundreds of Moriori, cooked and ate many of the bodies, and enslaved all the others … A Moriori survivor recalled ‘The Maori commenced to kill us like sheep … We were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed – men, women, and children, indiscriminately.’ A Maori conqueror explained. ‘We took possession… in accordance with our customs and we killed all the people. Not one escaped … What of that? It was in accordance with our customs.'”

Maori kept the preserved heads of their enemies. They would taunt these heads. One Maori said to one of his preserved heads, “You wanted to run away didn’t you? But my greenstone club overtook you! And after you were cooked you were made food for me! And where is your father? He is cooked. And where is your brother? He is eaten. And where is your wife? There she sits, a wife for me. And where are your children? The loads on their backs they carry as my slaves.”

My reference to objective reality in the form of historical fact ignited a firestorm. An African American male Facebook user posted a lengthy message “correcting” and “educating” me. He pointed out that before white Europeans arrived, Maori were peaceful, traditional people of color. Only the presence of white people pushed them over the edge into genocidal violence. If I did not affirm this, I was clearly a white supremacist. Bea “liked” this man’s posts.

Facts do not support the Noble Savage fantasy. Ten thousand years ago, archeologists report, nomadic hunter-gatherers massacred twenty-seven people at what is now Lake Turkana, Kenya. A heavily pregnant woman, bound hand and foot, was murdered with a blow to the head. Humans, tens of thousands of years before the Bible, contributed to the worldwide extinction of megafauna. Prehistoric humans also contributed to desertification. Australian Aborigines’ hunting and burning practices may have altered that landmass’ climate dramatically, according to University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Gifford Miller. Humans armed only with flint-knapped obsidian blades and fire kits proved quite expert at “raping the planet.”

Male and female equality are in short supply in non-Judeo-Christian societies, even goddess-worshipping ones. In India Kali, the goddess of destruction, Laxmi, the goddess of wealth, and Sita, consort of Ram, are invoked millions of times daily. Even so, India aborts and murders its daughters at historic levels, as Indian economist Amartya Sen has pointed out.

Valerie Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer’s 2005 MIT book Bare Branches provides a shocking and necessary look at female infanticide. In remote, tribal New Guinea, a woman gave birth. Her husband asked the baby’s gender. When informed he had fathered a girl, he responded, “Break it and throw it away.” “It” was his daughter. Bare Branches provides many traditional methods used to destroy female infants. Shove uncooked rice down their throats. Expose them. Poison them with oleander. Sell them to sex traffickers.

In China the corpses of discarded females clogged waterways. New Agers advance witchcraft as a woman-friendly alternative to the Judeo-Christian tradition. In modern China, The Christian Science Monitor reports, witches stand at the ready to destroy female children. “In the suburbs of Canton, there are even witches and sorcerers who cheat and undermine birth control by holding feudalistic and superstitious ceremonies after killing girl babies, alleging that by so doing they can get the wretched parents to produce boy babies … a basin full of water is placed in the room where the mother is giving birth so that if the baby is a girl, it may be drowned immediately.”

Australian Aborigines are one of the most remote populations on earth. Outside of Africa, Aborigines can claim the longest inhabitation of a landmass of any human population. Aborigines may have left Africa 75,000 years ago, and they have inhabited Australia for tens of thousands of years. They were not colonized by Europeans until 1788. Given their remoteness, the ancientness of their culture, and their relatively recent exposure to the evil West, many New Agers prize Aboriginals as exemplars of a pure humanity, uncorrupted by the West’s ills.

Bare Branches offers a less romantic view. When Europeans arrived, it reports, they found one hundred fifty Aboriginal men for each one hundred Aboriginal women. Of course one does not accept this statistic without skepticism; colonizers had agendas. At the same time, it would be foolish to pretend that this number has no significance whatsoever. Given that traditional Aboriginal culture left few artifacts that we can study, no law books, figurative art, play scripts, etc, how can we know how Aboriginal men treated Aboriginal women before contact?

Journalist Tony Thomas, in a 2013 Quadrant Online article, cites paleopathologist Stephen Webb’s 1995 Cambridge University Press book, Palaeopathology of Aboriginal Australians. Webb analyzed 4,500 individuals’ bones covering 50,000 years. “Webb found highly disproportionate rates of injuries and fractures to women’s skulls, with the injuries suggesting deliberate attack and often attacks from behind, perhaps in domestic squabbles.”

The gruesome tale told by ancient bones is reinforced in first contact accounts. “We have seen some of these unfortunate beings with more scars upon their shorn heads, cut in every direction, than could be well distinguished or counted,” reported one European of Aboriginal women. There are many other quotes offering similar testimony. Traditional Aboriginal culture was no Noble Savage paradise for Aboriginal women. Thomas also quotes numerous early contact Europeans describing genocidal tribal warfare.

Colonized Aborigines suffered abuses as do all colonized people. My own ancestors, Polish peasants, were colonized by Russia, Prussia, and Austria between 1772 and 1918, and occupied by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, beginning in 1939. Aborigines have higher alcoholism, diabetes, depression, suicide, and death rates than do white Australians. This is wrong and every decent person wants these numbers to change. As someone whose immediate family members, friends, and loved ones have been plagued by alcoholism, domestic abuse, prejudice and negative stereotyping, chronic, stress- and poverty-related illness, whose loved ones have been lynched, gang-raped by Red Army soldiers and imprisoned in concentration camps, I empathize with Aborigines.

The problem is this. Leftists want badly to use Aborigines to prove their own fantasies. Aborigines must be made out to be superhuman in order to prove that remote, once primitive people are peaceful and egalitarian – and that the West is bad and must be overthrown. Too, leftists want to use Aborigines to signal their own, that is leftists’, virtue. Leftists insist on clinging to cultural relativism beyond any rational justification.

Franz Boas, the “father of American anthropology,” advanced cultural relativism in a measured way. Boas insisted, for example, that stylized art produced by Native American Kwakiutls, the art that one might see on a totem pole or a carved canoe, was every bit as worthy as a Rembrandt painting. Leftists take cultural relativism to an destructive degree when confronted with child sex abuse in the Aborigine community. What’s that you say? You have never heard of child sex abuse in the Aborigine community? Why am I not surprised?

Sex abuse of children is a crisis in the Aborigine population in Australia. It made international headlines in 2007. Queensland District Court Judge Sarah Bradley declined to jail nine Aboriginal males who admitted to gang raping a ten-year-old Aboriginal girl. The judge said the girl “probably agreed” to intercourse. The attackers were from more “prominent” families; the girl was from a “less privileged” family. This notorious case would have been bad enough had it been unique. It wasn’t.

In 2003, Janet Stanley published “Child Sexual Abuse in Indigenous Communities.” The reader immediately notes that Stanley’s paper opens thus, “I first want to start with an apology. You only have me presenting this paper – a white person talking about Indigenous issues.” Seriously. Seriously. Stanley is writing about child sex abuse and her first focus is on “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I am white and I have no right to say anything critical about anyone with more melanin than I.” Stanley rushes to insist that she has partnered with Aboriginal co-researchers. She quotes a 1999 report, “Violence is now overt; murders, bashings and rapes, including sexual violence against children, have reached epidemic proportions.” Her laser focus should be, unapologetically, on protecting children from rape.

In 2007, prominent playwright Louis Nowra published Bad Dreaming. He was inspired to write a book critical of Aboriginal abuse of women and children by real-life encounters. “I met a couple of guys in central Australia who were boasting that they were going off to buy some plastic toy dinosaurs in order that both men would actually have sex with a 12-year-old girl at the same time … when I was in hospital, you saw these women who were viciously beaten by their partners, their husbands and other relatives and I thought to myself, I can pretend this doesn’t exist and I can just go off and maybe, you know, write about something else.”

Nowra noted that cultural relativism was used to excuse the abuse of women and children. “I was fascinated in the 1980s, you started to get reports in newspapers about customary law being used as a defence when a man had kind of killed a woman or had severely brutalised her.” Nowra said that white guilt, benign racism, a sense that Aboriginal women and children didn’t experience rape and battery as white women do, and Aboriginal customs of kidnapping and gang-raping women all played a role in facilitating abuse.

Also in 2007, the Northern Territory government published Little Children are Sacred, a 316-page outline of the Aboriginal child sex abuse crisis. That report cites numerous previous studies and warns that unless drastic action is taken, another generation will be lost. The mechanism by which that generation would be lost is suggested in one case study.

“HG was born in a remote community in 1960. In 1972, he was twice anally raped by an older Aboriginal man … He never told anyone about it until 2006 when he was seeking release from prison where he had been confined for many years as a dangerous sex offender. In 1980 and 1990, he had attempted to have sex with young girls. In 1993, he anally raped a 10-year-old girl and, in 1997, an eight-year-old boy, ZH. In 2004, ZH anally raped a five-year-old boy in the same community. That little boy complained: ‘ZH f—ed me.’ Who will ensure that in years to come that little boy will not himself become an offender?”

“Little Children are Sacred” burns with urgency. Its authors want things to change. Have things changed? In 2017, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse published Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Child Sexual Abuse in Institutional Contexts. Here’s the first full paragraph of this report, “The authors acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia and traditional custodians of the land and waters of the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island nations of Australia. We would like to pay our respects to the Stolen Generations and their families. We celebrate the diverse cultures and customs that have nurtured, and continue to nurture this land and its peoples. We honour the Elders past and present and thank them for their wisdom and guidance in this endeavor.”

It’s a pity that the first full paragraph does not address sexually abused Aboriginal children. Virtue signaling trumps protecting children. The report goes on to state, “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures are protective of children. There is no documented evidence to indicate child sexual abuse was a problem in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities before colonisation. It is important to understand that any heightened risk that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children face today is ‘not part of Aboriginal tradition or culture’ … Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples ‘have no cultural traditions based on humiliation, degradation and violation.'”

The myth of non-Western cultures as egalitarian paradises is advanced. “Prior to European contact, when an Aboriginal ‘state’ was maintained, families with their multiple roles practiced the age-old Indigenous practices of bringing up children. Work, safety, shelter and food, culture, pride in being black and Aboriginal, truthfulness and honour were all vital parts of growing up. It also included sharing responsibility for the caring of each precious child which was cherished as a significant experience.”

One must ask, how did Aborigines know, “prior to European contact,” that they should feel “pride in being black and Aboriginal”? That that faux pas made it past the editor is just another sign of how much pressure the authors felt to maintain identity politics, not child protection, as the primary focus.

From the report: sexually abused children should be educated as to “which clan’s they are connected to; stories associated with their country and their totem.” Note the incorrect use of “clan’s” rather than the correct “clans.” The report goes on to state that being conversant in an Aboriginal language will increase the likelihood that caregivers will be able to protect children from sex abuse. The report bemoans past attempts to “inculcate children into European values and … Christian moral values.” Ask yourself, which of the following would be more likely to help children? Fluency in an Aboriginal language or the sobriety of the child’s parents, and the loving presence of the child’s father in the home? Knowing what “clan’s” the child descends from and what those “clan’s” totem animal is, or having a criminal justice system unafraid to prosecute child rapists, no matter their ethnicity? If “European” or “Christian” moral values can be interpreted to mean, “child rape is bad,” why not inculcate the child in those values? The report acknowledges that parental alcohol use is correlated with child sexual abuse. Unless I missed it, the report does not focus on that as it does on language. I found the word “father” only twice in the report. Words like “racism” and “racist” appear almost fifty times.

If a society can’t acknowledge its own failings, it can’t correct its own failings. This report offers scant hope that Australians of any color will name, confront, and change their failings vis-à-vis their abused children.

In December 2016, ABC (Australia) reported that a fourteen-year-old boy was gang-raped by drunken men who put a bag over his head. The boy later committed suicide. A five-year-old girl tested positive for gonorrhea. Child protection workers described grim scenes.

In one family, “Five children were found to have the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea. The mother is a drinker … she told us she didn’t know who had abused her daughter. The child wouldn’t say … When we brought the child back to the family after getting treatment, she went over to her mum and the mum said “F*** off and go play!”‘

“‘That little girl was picked up about two weeks later and we found the mum and her partner and a whole lot of other people in the house, all rotten drunk. This is how kids get sexually abused, everyone gets drunk and passes out — without making sure that their kids are in a safe house. So anyone can do anything to these kids, because nobody is protecting them or caring for them.'”

An ambulance paramedic reported, “When we entered the house there was gambling going on and someone was breastfeeding a baby while drinking from a bottle of Jim Beam. Two intoxicated adults were having sex and there was a little kid sitting right beside them.”

In 2002, a fifteen-year-old Aboriginal girl was “married” to Jackie Pascoe Jamilmira, a fifty-year-old man who had killed his first wife. The girl’s parents had sold their daughter to the man in exchange for a percent of his monthly government allowance. The girl resisted the man’s attempts to have sex with her, so he punched her, stepped on her neck, and raped her.

Women’s News reports that, “Expert testimony submitted by an anthropologist in the case called the man’s arrangement with the girl ‘traditional’ and therefore ‘morally correct’ … Several high-ranking government officials nodded with approval when the appeal judge upheld Pascoe’s defense, explaining that while Pascoe knew he had done something wrong in the eyes of Western law, his conduct was ‘Aboriginal custom’ and part of his culture.”

Some argued that Aboriginal customary law should supersede Western law. If Aboriginal customary law said that the girl had to submit, she had to submit. The raped girl got lost in the shuffle.

On August 11, 2005, in excruciating detail, Chief Justice Brian Martin described the selling and rape of a fourteen-year-old Aboriginal girl. Her assailant was a fifty-five-year-old Aboriginal man. The judge called the case “extremely difficult.” One must ask what was difficult about finding guilty a fifty-five-year-old-man who used battery sexually to penetrate a fourteen-year-old girl. The answer is cultural relativism. The judge felt constrained from bringing the full weight of Western law down on an Aboriginal man, who believed that his culture sanctioned battery and rape of a child. The judge said as much, “You are a 55-year old traditional Aboriginal man. You believed that traditional law permitted you to strike the child and to have intercourse with her.”

The unnamed girl had been given to the man by her family when she was four years old. Ten years later, when she was fourteen, her grandmother lead her to the man. The man beat the girl with two boomerangs. The grandmother beat the girl with a large stick. The girl was forced to enter the man’s house, where his other wife and children lived. The man grabbed the shaking and crying child by the leg. She kicked and screamed. He dragged her into his bedroom, where he again beat the child, threatened her with the boomerang, and anally raped her. “You caused a deep laceration at the edge of her anus. The child was later seen by a doctor and the examination also revealed painful areas over the child’s body.” Nevertheless, the judge stated, “The Crown accepts that you believed that intercourse with the child was acceptable because she had been promised to you … your fundamental beliefs, based on your traditional laws, prevailed in your thinking … I have no choice but to sentence you on that basis … I am not sentencing you for the crime of rape … In accepting that evidence I also accept that your traditional law regarded your striking of the child as justified in the circumstances. From your perspective, and the perspective of your traditional law, the child had done the wrong thing, and the punishment by striking her was permissible and justified … You have had a strong ceremonial life across widespread communities. You are regarded by the Yarralin Community as an important person in the ceremonial life of the community. You are responsible for teaching young men the traditional ways …  a number of members of the community are here in support of you and those members of the community who support you believe that you have not done anything wrong … I have a great deal of sympathy for you and the difficulties attached to transition from traditional Aboriginal culture and laws as you understood them to be, to obeying the Northern Territory Law.”

Reading the judge’s entire statement, one sees the judge attempting to dance a ballet atop eggshells. He says he wants to protect women and children, but he devotes a far greater amount of verbiage to exculpating factors for the violent child rapist. The judge advised that the rapist serve only one month behind bars.

In May, 2018, one twenty-five-year-old man and one twenty-four-year-old man were charged with raping a two-year-old Aboriginal girl from Tennant Creek in February, 2018. Before the rape allegedly occurred, the family had racked up thirty-five recorded incidences of domestic violence, eight aggravated assault convictions against one parent, more than one hundred fifty recorded interactions with police, and fifty-two child protection notifications involving all children, with allegations of physical and sexual abuse. Northern Territory Children’s Commissioner Colleen Gwynne said, “In terms of child sexual abuse I think we’ve taken our foot off to a certain extent, particularly about what happens in remote communities.”

The alleged victim’s mother spoke to the media in June, 2018. The primary thrust of an article covering the mother’s statements is that the mother does not want to be blamed. “It’s not my fault,” she said. “The media is saying that I’m an alcoholic. I’m not. I’m a social drinker.” If it were not for the laws making it harder to drink alcohol in her community – laws put in place at least partly to curb child sex abuse – perhaps the rape never would have taken place, she insisted.

In March, 2018, Federal Children’s Minister Dr. David Gillespie insisted that laws should be changed so that whites could adopt Aboriginal children. “His comments were ‘incredibly offensive,’ said Tim Ireland, the chief executive of AbSec, the peak body for Aboriginal child protection in New South Wales … Mr Ireland said Aboriginal child-protection organisations opposed the adoption of Indigenous children because it took away safeguards to connect a child with their wider family and culture.”

In a May, 25, 2018 Guardian article, Dr. Terri Libesman and Hannah McGlade talk about racism, reparations, “loss of culture,” past sins and colonization. These were all bad things, and therefore Aboriginal children should not be removed from Aboriginal families. Again, identity politics trumps child welfare.

At least one Aboriginal leader has publicly stated a contrary view, a view that puts abused kids first. On March 5, 2018, the Herald Sun published “To Protect Kids, We Need to Be Fearless.” The title is accurate and unambiguous. The article’s author is Warren Mundine, a man of mixed Aboriginal and Irish heritage.

“I say the only way to lift Indigenous people out of poverty is a job; that chronic welfare dependency destroys families, communities and culture; and that not sending kids to school is child abuse,” he wrote. “There’s a particularly strong response when I say that Indigenous kids at risk should be put in safe homes and that their safety must come before anything, including culture and kin … None of these statements is racist … People abuse me with racist slurs like ‘Uncle Tom’ or ‘coconut.'”

Mundine went on to outline how his attackers make use of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. “Here’s Rule 13: ‘Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it’ … Abusing people as ‘racist’ for opinions that aren’t actually racist is straight from Alinsky’s playbook. So is calling black people ‘Uncle Tom’ or ‘race traitor.’ What that does is punish people for not sticking to socialist-left dogma that promotes the welfare state as a legitimate way of life and which hides the deep, social dysfunction caused by chronic welfare dependency … A leaked 2015 report into the Northern Territory’s child protection systems said that fear of being accused of racism … was interfering with child protection agencies doing their job. It said child protection staff believe culture should have ‘unmoderated priority over child protection concerns’ … Stick to the facts. Facts can never be racist.”

Clearly, the Aboriginal child sex abuse crisis has been exacerbated by leftist ideology, just as the U.K.’s grooming gang crisis has been, as covered in the August 20, 2018 FrontPageMag piece, “Leftists Own the UK’s Grooming Gang Crisis.” Children were not helped because helping children would violate leftist ideology.

I care about abused Aboriginal children because I was an abused kid myself. My abusers, just like those abusing Aboriginal children, were also history’s victims. Their history of victimization in no way minimizes or excuses what they did to me. Once, when I was a little kid, I went to the house next door. My neighbor saw that I had an untreated wound. She tenderly washed it and placed a Band-Aid on it. I had never seen a Band-Aid before. TLC and medical supplies were inaccessible luxuries in my childhood. To this day I associate Band-Aids with the care my neighbor showed me when I was a child, care I wanted to cling to. My neighbor was Pat Gibbs, and she was not an immigrant Slavic peasant like my own people. In fact, she was black. I embrace and honor her memory. Abused Aboriginal children need such care, from anyone, of any skin color. Leftists have distorted the difference between right and wrong. Abusing children and beating women are both wrong. Cultural relativism cannot erase that. Morality matters. Kids matter. And kids are more important than leftist ideology.