Vicious loathing can’t end well
IFLEW back into Australia last week from a holiday and thought again: what a brilliant country. Europe was great. But, boy, there’s a reason so many people are so frantic to join us here that thousands just jumped in a boat.
They sure didn’t sail here because we’re racist, sexist, mean and violent.
No, even the poorest boat person seems to understand this country better than the university-educated sneerers here now howling down their own civilisation – this Western civilisation.
I’m talking about people like Lily, who bobbed up on the ABC’s Q&A on Monday.
She’s an education officer of Sydney University’s student union and on Q&A attacked a plan by the Ramsay Centre to donate $2 million a year to teach Western civilisation.
That offer has already been rejected by the Australian National University and Lily, a Socialist Alternative activist, was outraged that her own university might accept it instead.
“In the words of Ramsay Centre board director and infamous racist Tony Abbott, the proposed course is not merely about Western civilisation – it’s in favour of it,” she protested.
“Sydney University academics … have described the centre as purely European supremacy … The Ramsay Centre billionaires seek to whitewash colonialism and promote racism and war.”
Abbott is, of course, not a racist.
Socialists trade in such hatred and smears to cut greater people to their own bitter size.
But focus instead on Lily’s other hatred – her claim that Western civilisation is an evil that just promotes racism, war and oppression, rather than a miracle that produced democracy, the rule of law, respect for the individual and free speech.
Yes, Lily is young, so blame adults – including academics – for teaching her this contempt.
And blame adults on the Q&A panel last Monday for refusing to challenge it.
Take Michael Spence, Sydney University’s vicechancellor. Universities are a glory of Western civilisation, so you’d expect Spence to tell Lily to respect it.
But no. He instead assured her he was leery about taking the Ramsay Centre’s money: “We don’t think a course that evaluates the contribution of Western civilisation makes sense.”
Panellist Aubrey Blanche, head of “Diversity and Belonging” at the software company Atlassian, also wasn’t keen on this Western civilisation stuff – apparently a product of thugs.
“Is what we actually need more looking at the lens of the world through the Western canon?” she sighed.
“The majority of history has been written by the colonisers and the conquerors, right?”
Labor MP Tim Watts, at least, was “in favour of Western civilisation”, but even he said he’d rather focus on its flaws.
This suicidal self-loathing wasn’t just contained to that ABC studio, either.
The National Tertiary Education Union – representing the people who teach your children – has savaged the Ramsay Centre’s plan as a sinister attempt “to demonstrate and promulgate the alleged superiority of Western culture and civilisation”.
ANU student association president Eleanor Kay was just as angry: “Western civilisation is often used as a rhetorical tool to continue the racist prioritisation of Western history over other cultures.”
Pardon? It hardly seems racist for people in a Western society like ours to want to understand the history that created this miracle.
Yet how casually our elite trashes a civilisation that has produced one of the safest, richest and free societies.
Just last weekend, ABC newsreader Juanita Phillips tweeted: “Perhaps any study of Western Civilisation could examine how and why violence against women is such an integral and accepted part of it.”
We “accept” violence against women?
False. Women are freer in our society than probably anywhere else at any time.
But Phillips didn’t stop there. She last week also presented a news report about an Islamic man arrested trying to allegedly commit an act of Islamic terrorism, yet not once did that report mention Islam.
How often Islamic civilisation – or China’s – is spared the stick our elites use to beat our own.
For instance, our universities reject a grant to teach Western civilisation, yet 13 gladly took cash from Communist China for Confucius centres to promote Chinese language and culture.
Others take money from authoritarian Muslim countries.
These universities will now produce a new elite, even quicker to smear Western civilisation.
Can this end well? Watch Andrew Bolt on LIVE 7pm week nights