If you ever feel like trying something new, pop on over to the Communist Party of Australia webpage. Aside from the fact that they proudly display the hammer and sickle, which (given that Communists in the 20th Century killed more people than the national socialists) is more offensive than the national socialist Swastika, you will find this incredible Quote of the Week (have they been reading XYZ?):
“Australia was Communist for 60,000 years before invasion with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living with respect for the environment and each other.”
Such a statement, from Paul McAleer, from the Maritime Union of Australia (if ever you needed a reminder of just who runs unions in Australia, and just who funds the Labor Party) cannot go unchallenged.
ElvenPegasister points out:
Communism works fine on a small scale, when there is no significant collective property to steal. Once it gets to anything larger than (generously speaking) a tribe, all of a sudden, one group has to fight to protect their rights. Respect for the land and for each other was based on how easily said land and others could kill them if they didn’t show respect.
If you want serious examples of what respect means (or doesn’t mean) to Aboriginals, just look at their treatment of women. They were married around the age of 13 to probably 30-year-old men, who paid well for them because they, as the gatherer half of the hunter-gatherer society, were a food source. Regarding Aboriginal humour, one reason they’d laugh at white men was that white men would carry things when there were women who could do the carrying.
So comparing the way Aboriginals lived in Australia before European settlement with attempts to create Communism in the modern world is not going to work. Although there was plenty of land and food to go around – no food queues, a staple of life under Communism – population was kept low on account of short life expectancies, due to a complete lack of modern medicine. (Admittedly, this is something usually achieved in Communist societies too, by way of famine caused by “land redistribution” ie theft, and the genocide of the middle and upper classes.) Furthermore, if, as one defence of the failures of Russian and Chinese Communism asserts, Communism can only be achieved in an already industrialised economy, the claim that Aboriginals lived under Communism in the first place is spurious.
We should also treat the use of the word “invasion” with regard to European settlement with the highest of scepticism. It could be argued that it was an invasion, but this is not a neutral statement, and lacks context. The settlement of Australia occurred at a time when technology and people were spreading very rapidly around the world. It is reasonable to say that if the British hadn’t made a serious and successful attempt at settling Australia, another European power would have so (of course, some did indeed try).
Given the proximity of Chinese and Islamic empires to Australia, it is conceivable that they knew of the great south land’s existence for centuries before European settlement (indeed there is evidence to support this). One must consider then the difference between European and other mindsets – the Chinese and the Caliphates committed more than their fair share of invasion and conquest: perhaps they saw nothing worth taking, while the British saw the opportunity to create something new.
Regardless, to simply use the word “invasion” is a simplistic slogan. Importantly, this slogan is employed by Communists/socialists/Cultural Marxists, etc., to propagate the lie to people of European heritage who live in “settler societies” that everything they have, everything they are, is based on a crime: theft. It thus makes it easier for Communists and the like to steal from said people: hence why the narrative of indigenous displacement, and of it being a deliberate act of genocide on the part of the Europeans (again, patently false) is so prevalent in Australia and the USA in particular, and why socialist policies and big government have been able to become more and more prevalent, and supported by both sides of politics.
If I am to nitpick, wasn’t it 40,000 years? I guess inflation is rampant, after all, in Communist societies…
I’ll give the last word to Keating:
Ironically, Aboriginals had no jobs, and lost control of their immigration policy, so their culture withered away, lost between outdated tradition and the modern world. The unions and socialists want to reverse that – bring the modern world back to the 7th century.
With credit to Keating and ElvenPegasister.
