Alan Jones: Leaders letting cultural revolutionaries trample over society
History has much to teach us, but will we listen? Not likely, given the craven way our leaders have let the next generation of cultural revolutionaries take over society, writes Alan Jones
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
It’s easy for so-called political leaders to keep changing the rules every day, in relation to coronavirus, as to where we can go and what we can do.
Apart from confusing most Australians, if not angering them, it enables politicians to avoid the greater virus enveloping us, the cultural revolution that threatens to overtake us in the wake of abysmal political leadership.
Since when was vandalism not vandalism?
Since when did wanton destruction of public property remain unpunished?
Since when was taxpayers’ money necessary to surround our monuments because lawmakers won’t stand up to law breakers?
In John Milton’s poem of 1638, Lycidas, Milton wrote of the widening gap between those in power and those without power, or without means, what he believed were the poverty-stricken “hungry sheep”.
Milton wrote, “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed / but, swoll’n with wind and the rank mist they draw / rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread …”.
How else do we describe the foul contagion that is taking place before us now, ignored by political leadership?
Do leaders lack the scholarship to identify the crisis in education that has led to this — universities across the country and, indeed, our schools, trot out this “foul contagion” every other day.
The media make great play of a statue of Christopher Columbus being beheaded in Boston — no one reminds the vandals that Columbus was one of the greatest explorers in history, the discoverer of the New World.
Abraham Lincoln’s statue in London is targeted. He actually fought a war to end slavery.
Or does the fact that he is white, and American, just make him a target of these deranged, ignorant and violent assaults?
Brendan O’Neill, writing in The Australian newspaper at the weekend said what should be said by our political leaders, who seem to want to pretend this will all go away.
Wrote O’Neill: “The west is in the grip of a Cultural Revolution. Modern day Red Guards have declared war on the past. The Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in response to the police killing of George Floyd have morphed, with staggering speed, into a frenzied assault on history, liberty and reason … no statue, no monument, no bust is safe from the woke mob’s frantic urge to purify the public square and erase all trace of people they disapprove of.”
The real crisis is Western political leadership, impotent, ignorant and silent in the face of these remorseless, cultural attacks.
The youths who are throwing paint and insults at historical monuments, what O’Neill has called “the foot soldiers of a new ideology that is profoundly anti-Western, which views Western history as little more than a litany of crimes” — why wouldn’t they prosper when what they say or do remains unchallenged by those elected to represent us?
Every year we have Clean Up Australia Day.
We express concern about the garbage and pollution we find in our harbour and in our rivers; but no one worries about the garbage and the intellectual pollution fed into the minds of young people every day.
The editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer is forced out of his job for using the headline “Buildings matter, too” in response to the wanton destruction of buildings.
Middle class whites are on their knees, begging forgiveness for a past in which they have played no role.
The problem is not just with the young and ideologically biased, albeit a minority, the problem is with us and our institutions, who fail at every level, especially at the highest political level, to address these historical untruths.
Is there a political leader who can do a bit of homework and provide some perspective.
In 89.5 per cent of the murders of black or African-Americans, the offender was black or African-American.
Cancelling ugly history is no way to learn from history.
As one letter writer observed this week: “Who is going to tell the Chinese they should pull down the statues of Mao Zedong, who was responsible for the deaths of millions?”
This has now given further impetus to militant indigenous Australians.
Many legitimately believe they have a grievance.
But that intellectual field is left unoccupied by our leaders and large sections of the media.
We hear about indigenous deaths in custody; but the Royal Commission into black deaths in custody found that indigenous people are not more likely to die in custody than other Australians.
And on the issue of police violence being the primary cause for deaths in custody, the Royal Commission also found that not to be the case.
Natural causes, it found, were the leading factor.
And as is the case in America, Aboriginal Australians, as Jacinta Price argued last week in this newspaper, “are far more likely to die at the hands of other Aboriginal Australians than at the hands of white people or in custody”.
Are we frightened to make these points calmly and truthfully?
We also must note, calmly and truthfully, that prison deaths do cause concern among the Aboriginal public.
As Professor Geoffrey Blainey has written: “Many of their relatives die in prisons, far from home and close relatives. Many commit suicide”.
But as Blainey also makes the point, money alone has failed to solve the problem.
But you sure as hell won’t solve the problem by ignoring it or by failing to marshal the facts, which is the responsibility of political leaders.
When the Archbishop of Canterbury starts telling White Christians to “repent for their racial sins” there surely is proof that a cultural war, from within our institutions is upon us.
We either participate in that war or get run over.
We can’t eradicate our past, but we can learn from it and make sure we don’t return to it.
The real crisis is Western political leadership.
We are entitled to ask why such leadership is silent on this, the most critical virus among us.
It was Sir Thomas More who argued, “silence betokens consent”.
Perhaps even our leaders are on the side of the politically correct and the woke.
My advice to them is, work out what side you are on and do something about it.