RUTHFULLY YOURS

Like all zealots, those who peddle the notion of group identity as the paramount measure of the individual’s worth are determined to make everyone else talk and think as they do. As with communism, for which it is a posthumous surrogate, identity politics is underscored by the authoritarian urge.

They tramp in mateship side by side—
The Protestant and “Roman”—
They call no biped lord or “sir”
And touch their hats to no man!
—Henry Lawson, “The Shearers”, 1906

Almost from its beginnings in 1788, Australian society was marked by an absence of deference. This was long recognised as something that distinguished the Australian colonies from their parent culture in England, where deference from the lower classes to those above them was deeply rooted. In contrast, nineteenth-century Australia quickly became an egalitarian society. This did not mean that it dispensed with ranks and titles or that the pursuit of wealth was any less important. Rather, Australian egalitarianism originated in the many opportunities the country provided for those on the lowest rungs of society to rise in the world. At the same time, most colonials, whether they advanced their status or not, had a low opinion of those who inherited wealth rather than made it through their own efforts.

As a result, the first attempt to establish a closed system of privilege in our political system found popular opinion its most formidable opponent. In 1853, when William Charles Wentworth tried to emulate the British House of Lords by inserting clauses in the New South Wales constitution that would effectively create a hereditary political class, he was laughed out of the debate by Daniel Deniehy, who derided his proposal as an attempt to give Australia a “bunyip aristocracy”.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Henry Lawson and other bush poets helped create a popular form of Australian nationalism based on a romantic view of the common people, especially those who worked in the pastoral industry. Historian John Hirst has written that in this time, when employers and employees from the top to the bottom of the status hierarchy toiled in the same enterprise, English and Continental habits of status were quickly abandoned. In the pastoral industry:

Gentlemen worked with their hands; they worked alongside their men; and in pioneering days at least wore the same clothes as their men. An age-old inequality disappeared as employees took to horses and met their masters eye to eye.

Never missing an opportunity to confuse, disappoint, and demoralize the Catholic faithful, Pope Francis, according to the Latin American Herald Tribune, said on Good Friday that “Christians ought to express shame for the actions of those who are leaving future generations a world ‘fractured by divisions and wars.’”

Speaking to Jesus, the Pope said that “our gaze upon you is full of shame, repentance and hope. Before your supreme love, shame pervades us for having left you alone to suffer for our sins … shame for having chosen Barabbas and not you, power and not you, appearance and not you, the god of money and not you, worldliness and not eternity.”

The Pope added that Christians should also feel shame for those who “allowed themselves to be deceived by ambition and vainglory, losing sight of their dignity and first love,” leaving behind a world “fractured by divisions and wars” and “consumed by selfishness.”

In speaking of those who have left the world “fractured by divisions and wars,” Pope Francis doesn’t seem to have said a word about the religion that actually teaches that believers should wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. But of course, about that religion he has said, “Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

So it is the Christians who should feel shame for the strife in the world, not anyone else.

This is nothing new. Pope Francis last September met in the Vatican with Dr. Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, the secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a group that has been linked to the financing of jihad terror. During the meeting, al-Issa thanked the Pope for his “fair positions” on what he called the “false claims that link extremism and violence to Islam.”