Andrew Bolt: Flags at Australia House in London show how divided we’ve become

The message sent by our top diplomatic post was clear: Australia is fracturing into tribes focused on what divides us – race and gender.

The High Commission is currently flying more than a dozen flags at Australia House in London. Picture: Getty Images

I am just back from Europe, where I saw Australia’s future. Dear God, can we learn the lessons from this toxic madness and pull up?

True, it may be too late. Australia’s High Commission in London is already telling the world we’re far gone, too.

Our top diplomatic post was flying 13 flags outside its handsome building on the Strand when I walked past last week, and Greens leader Adam Bandt, who has banned our Australian flag as offensive, would be pleased.

Just one of those 13 flags was of the Australian nation that’s paying for the diplomats inside to represent us all.

It was outnumbered by two Ukrainian flags, two Aboriginal flags and two Torres Strait Islander flags.

There were also two Pride flags for everyone who isn’t heterosexual, and plus four for various states.

The message was clear and, alas, accurate: Australia is fracturing into tribes. We’re focused on what divides us – race and gender. We’re embarrassed by the Western heritage that makes us free, democratic, rich, rational and, supposedly, one.

In solidarity with the people of Ukraine, Australia House is proudly flying 🇺🇦flag.

We are all Ukrainians now. #StandWithUkraine️pic.twitter.com/UfciDpAIvO

— Australia in the United Kingdom (@AusHCUK) March 4, 2022

Our obsession with racial division and supposed white guilt is bizarre. On Saturday, before its game against England, Australia’s rugby union team sang our national anthem in one of the more than 150 Aboriginal languages rather than in English, our national language.

Meanwhile, the ABC, our allegedly national broadcaster, broadcast a suggestion – unchallenged – that white Australians apologise to any Aborigines they meet: “When I meet a First Nations person I apologise to them for the land theft and genocide that my forebears benefited from in the 1800s.”

But our cultural self-abnegation is as nothing to what I saw in visiting Britain and the Netherlands.

In Australia, I must submit to endless “welcomes to country” or acknowledgments of traditional owners, as if I were a stranger in my own country. I thought I’d at least be spared that delegitimising of my presence or my race in Holland, the homeland of my parents.

There was no Qantas-style acknowledgment as I landed of the traditional owners of Holland, of elders past or present. Instead, wherever I turned at the top cultural sights there was grovelling over white sins.

Not even Night Watch by Rembrandt was spared from racial division and supposed white guilt.

Next to Holland’s most famous painting, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is now an apologetic sign: “This painting depicts only white people, as in most 17th century works.”

Excuse me? What else would you expect of a painting commissioned by the militia of Amsterdam in 1642? Does this really need comment?

Last year, the Dutch king even opened an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum of 140 objects highlighting Dutch slavery, including two Rembrandt portraits of rich people who’d owned black slaves.

The rainbow flag at Australia House in 2017, after the same-sex marriage plebiscite.

Now Amsterdam’s city council wants to build a national slavery museum focused only on Dutch guilt.

A friend, plain-speaking politician Annabel Nanninga, asked the council to at least include exhibits on modern slavery such as China’s use of Uighur slave labour to make batteries for electric cars, but was told no. It didn’t fit the anti-white agenda.

In Britain’s top museum of modern art, the Tate Modern, it was the same story.

Its bookshop is stocked like the library of a communist revolutionary movement run by anti-white racists.

Titles include Against White Feminists, White Fragility, The Slave Ship, Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, How to Argue with a Racist, The New Age of Empire – How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World, Back to Black – Black Radicalism for the 21st Century, and They Can’t Kill Us All.

Even the Fashion Museum in Bath can’t show a costume of a countess from the 18th century without a reminder that she’d inherited slaves.

You’d think Britain – where just three per cent of people are black – had been built on white racism and was still riddled with it, even now that most of the strongest candidates campaigning to replace Boris Johnson as Conservative leader and Prime Minister are of Indian or Pakistani background.

Tellingly, white racism is sniffed out everywhere, but the natural affinity of any other people for their own is accepted – even advertised.

London’s Underground now features this ad from a dating agency: “One million Muslims in London and you’re still single? You need Muzz … where Muslims meet.”

How is this to end – harping on racial resentments and demanding whites feel collective guilt for ancient sins they themselves never committed? Where they are treated like racists in their homelands and intruders abroad?

I fear an explosion. Can’t we please remind ourselves of what unites, not exploit what divides?