The Assimilation of Aborigines compared to the War on Boys

From the 1930s until the 1960s and even into the early 1970s successive Australian governments had a policy of assimilation. It was believed that aborigines were going to die out. Under assimilation policies the incomes of aboriginal people were garnished and held by the Protector of Aborigines. Pocket money change was paid to the aborigines. Major expenditures like travel or to buy a car needed the approval of the Protector of Aborigines. In recent decades the monies kept in trust is unaccounted for. Additionally their wages were lower and there was segregation in the use of public facilities. In Perth aborigines needed to vacate the city before the evening. The people lived on missions looked after by religious missionaries or government bureaucrats.

A part of the policy was removing half caste children, that is children of mixed European and aboriginal parentage, away from missions and families and putting the children up for adoption. The workers in the church, on the missions, in government departments were certain that “it was all for the best”, “think of the child.”, “a mission is no place for a child”. The heartbreak involved formed part of the tragedy of what was called the Stolen Generation.  The child removalists believed themselves to be noble and righteous. They cared for the welfare of the aboriginal peoples. But they were absolutely certain of their cause to the extent that that they were blind to their own humanity as well as being blind to the plight of the heartbreak left in their wake. These do gooders prided themselves on being more morally upright than those who brought atrocities including mass killings in conflict between European settlers and aborigines in the 19th century. These do gooders social worker analogues sawed themselves as giving palliative care to a dying people. At the base of this kind palliative care for a dying people was a chauvinism about the “advanced” peoples, social Darwinism, sometimes eugenics and an absolute certainty that what they were doing was the right thing. It goes without saying that there was no need to listen to the aboriginal people themselves. “You’ve got to be cruel to be kind” and “tough love”.

This is the same absolute certainty which is seen today in the treatment of men and boys. When Erza Klein asserts “spike of fear” in a Breitbart article Ezra Klein: Men Need ‘Spike of Fear’ with Sex to Prevent Rape or when Catherine Comins asserts that “Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience.” we are seeing people who really honestly believe that it’s “for their own good” and if a few eggs have to be broken to broken to make scrambled eggs then so be it. In this and in the Stolen Generation one’s won humanity is put to one side in service to a high ideal. One outs aside empathy and compassion. This is the effect of being blinded by the light of an ideology. In the USA countless cases of male students having their college studies terminated and their lives ruined because of the abuse of Title IX for minor, silly or actually fabricated cases of harassment. The same logic of Klein and Comins could be used to justify miscarriages of justice of say black men in the Jim Crow south because sending a “spike of fear” into those scumbags will improve public safety. There is a ruthlessness in Comins and Klein which would be rightfully condemned if made in any other circumstance. In fact there is the cold efficiency of fascism echoing with no regard to the consequences and the only reaction if any is usually laughter at the plight of unlucky males.

That brings us to the unpleasant potential for escalating the cruelty against men and boys. There is laughter at the abuse of men by women and an impatience with their pain, even as feminism complain that “men need to learn to express their feelings” (so that we can shut you up again). One thinks of what it took to get ordinary Germans to commit extraordinary abuses on others. We can gain a clue to what motivates other people by observing ourselves. Insight into ourselves. Something feminists avoid by projecting on to others that which they fear exists in themselves. There is a certain point in the slide into hate where no appeal to logic or common sense can help and will not be allowed to help and where the mere reluctance to join the hate movement makes one a suspect. The “spike of fear”. Erza Klein may wish to live in such a society but I do not.

Not all men will be treated unfairly, they will only fear that they may be so mistreated. Basically men can be “protectors” of the paranoid delusions of extreme feminists or they can look forward to be persecuted by those men who are. To be one of the “protectors” or one of the persecuted at the hands to a “protector”. If you’re one not one you must automaticly be the other, the hated other. This is the utopia that feminists want to deliver all of us to but I get the sense that we have been there and done it all before in lessons of history we have now all forgotten.

I will end this post with an image meme which speaks for itself.

Julie Burchill2