“The Aborigines must be integrated into the new Australia; the old Australia is never coming back.” This statement is the antithesis of a referendum soon to be before the Australian people, the “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.” The question on the ballot later this year will be, “A Proposed Law: To alter the Constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
Regardless of whether the referendum passes, anyone dismissing the effort with the “integrated into the new Australia” comment would be immediately canceled. This won’t happen, though, for a simple reason: No one actually uttered that line. But here’s what was said, by Swedish politician and multiculturalist Mona Sahlin in 2001:
“The Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back.”
Sahlin was talking about how newcomers — Muslim immigrants, in particular — were irrevocably changing Sweden and there wasn’t a darn thing “indigenous” Swedes could do about it. Suck it up, Sven!
Funny thing, though, she was never canceled; in fact, she went on to have a successful political career.
Of course, Sahlin didn’t actually use the term “indigenous.” It’s never applied when the “right” indigenous culture is being destroyed.
This brings us to a Monday article by British politician Dan Hannan in which he writes, “Does being the first to reach a piece of land give you special rights? And are those rights collective and inherited?” And, if this is so, he asks in his title, “If we give indigenous Australians special rights, how about indigenous Germans?”
Hannan was, of course, commenting on the Australian referendum, which would, he relates, give indigenous Australians “a formal representative body, alongside Australia’s existing democratic structures, called the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.”
Not surprisingly, leftist entities swear up and down that the referendum doesn’t afford “special rights.” Fine. But it certainly would provide special representation, as Aborigines would still be able to vote for representatives as other Australians do — and in addition would have their extra “representative body.”
Yet it’s “worth noting,” Hannan points out, that such discrimination “is not an internationally transferable principle. The people who strongly support giving extra rights to indigenous peoples in Australia, the United States, and Canada would, by and large, be horrified at the concept of giving additional rights to indigenous Germans over descendants of postwar guest workers, or indigenous Scots over more recent Commonwealth arrivals.” So much for equality.
Hannan goes on to say that these people “would be right to be horrified” because a “successful multiethnic polity rests on the understanding that all adult citizens of sound mind are equal before the law.”
Elaborating, Hannan cites historian Victor Davis Hanson as explaining “that free and rational societies rest on the idea that citizenship is our primary political identity, that citizenship must matter more than our identity as, say, rich people, or black people, or Presbyterians.”
In other words, leftists should make up their minds: Do they want to live under constitutional government and enjoy the equal application of just law on the basis of citizenship?
Or do they desire a “nation” in the sense of being an extension of the tribe, which itself is an extension of the family, as in the Sioux Nation? If the latter, we’re then going to have to completely reorder the world, moving populations around to achieve ethnically and racially “pure” states.
Hannan makes a good point, writing that “the notion of ‘we were here first’ is not easily eradicated. It governs human relations in many private contexts: ‘I was already sitting here,’ ‘That was my place in the line,’ etc.” Yet as already illustrated, this common instinct is wholly ignored when at issue are Western countries; in fact, the “here first” argument is then impugned as bigotry and nativism.
Also instinctive for man is tribalism, “in-group” preference. For a diverse republic to work, this must be mitigated and minimized. Part of how this is accomplished was reflected in an episode of the old Western series The Rifleman, one that portrayed the problems and prejudices encountered by a Chinese father and son. Long story short, the program had a happy ending, and the closing scene showed the young son having traded his traditional hairstyle for a short Western one, and he and everyone else were beaming — he was becoming American.
That was the 1950s. Today assimilation is still effected — but selectively. Absolut Sweden author Mikael Jalving pointed out in 2014 that in his country, pseudo-elites “laugh about the word assimilation.” “[It] is a Nazi word in Sweden,” he added.
That is, except when the Swedes are expected to “be integrated into the new Sweden.”
So it’s non-Western countries for their “indigenous people”; Western countries for everyone. Not only are immigrants to the West not expected to assimilate, but Westerners must assimilate and respect foreign cultures on their own soil.
Getting back to the Land Down Under, the irony is that, mirroring what I’ve pointed out regarding the U.S., Europeans were the first Australians in the sense that “Australia” is a European term (from the Latin Terra Australis), concept, and creation. Moreover, all peoples within Western lands relish the lifestyle, technology, and luxury the West has birthed. They’ve no desire to live as their pre-Western ancestors did.
The tragedy here is that it’s only assimilation-born unity that breeds cohesiveness, that ensures people will want to remain in the national “family.” As “identity politics” (i.e., tribalism) is pursued and balkanization ensues, the family becomes fractious, and members — the “nations” within the nation — are more likely to want to go their separate ways. At this point, tyranny then becomes necessary to hold them together.
Of course, some might suspect that inviting tyranny is precisely the point.
