Tuesday, October 11, 2005

A SHORT HISTORY OF TWO ACTS OF INTERNATIONAL BASTARDRY

I grew up with Melanesians (Greek for "black islanders") around and rather like them. They originate from the island of New Guinea, which is much larger than Britain and is in fact the world's second largest island. It is located immediately to the North of Australia. Melanesians (or TIs, as we called them) are generally in my observation a people of excellent physique, good-natured and not afraid of hard work. They have one large fault however: They cannot get on with one-another. More precisely, there are at least 400 different tribes of them, all speaking different, though related, languages. And what governs their relationship with one-another is whether you are a "wantok" (Pidgin for "one talk" -- i.e. same tribe) or not. You have great obligations towards your wantoks but all others are totally fair game for anything. So when people of different "wantoks" mix -- as they do in the city of Port Moresby, the level of crime and violence is incredible. Which is why Port Moresby was recently rated as the world's worst city to live in.

At war's end in 1945, the Western half of New Guinea was a Dutch colony and the Eastern half was an Australian colony (Yes. Australian, not British). And that is when the first act of international bastardry occurred. The Dutch had been kicked out by the Japanese during World War 2 and nobody much wanted them back, so all the wiseheads of the world decided that W. New Guinea should be "given" to Indonesia, a huge, mostly Muslim archipelago immediately to the West of New Guinea, which was at the time ruled by a Left-leaning despot -- Sukarno. Sukarno was doing a bit of saber-rattling over Indonesia's "claim" to the place and the Melanesian population was still pretty much in the stone age. The fact that Sukarno's Javanese could hardly be a more different race to the Melanesians (both genetically and culturally) was not of course considered. There was a farcical "act of free choice" wherein the Melanesians were supposedly "consulted" but it consisted mainly of rounding up a few Melanesians for the newsreel cameras who would mumble something vaguely approving. And the Melanesians have been fighting the Indonesians ever since in an effort to get them out -- but with no international support and virtually no technology, they've got Buckley's. And the Indonesians have behaved as you would expect Muslims to behave.

So we come to the second act. When Australia got its first Leftist postwar government under Gough Whitlam in 1972, Whitlam promptly "gave" Eastern New Guinea its independence (translation: said "f*** off. The only help you will get from us in future will be money") even though there was no visible agitation for it and even though many foresaw the anarchy that would result. Eastern New Guinea (or Papua New Guinea as it is now known) had been making steady progress under Australian administration and tribal warfare had been pretty-well eliminated. And it was foreseeable that when educational levels had risen to something approaching Western standards, there could be a peaceful and orderly transition to self-government. But Whitlam wanted to play the big Leftist hero so he cast the Melanesians off to sink or swim. And they mostly sunk.

And how do we know that they would have done better with a longer period of Australian administration? We know because one part of Melanesia is still under Australian administration: The Torres Straits Islands -- only a few miles South of Papua New Guinea. And they are perfectly peaceful and prosperous, have considerable local self-government and the same voting rights as any other Australian. And I have actually been there to look around so I am not exactly talking through my hat. They show what might have been in New Guinea if it had not been for an arrogant show-off Leftist bastard.

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ELSEWHERE

Even alcoholism is substantially genetic: "Alcoholism is a major health concern and genetic factors play an important role in the development and maintenance of alcohol drinking behaviors. In a new study appearing on October 3 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Subhash Pandey and colleagues from The University of Illinois show that decreased function of the CREB gene transcription factor in an area of the brain called the central amygdala is involved in anxiety and excessive alcohol drinking behavior."

Taiwan shows the way: "Since the late 1980s, the Chinese government in Taipei has gone from martial law to free-wheeling elections, as the 23 million people on Taiwan have created China's first full democracy. In recent decades, they have also leapt from deep poverty to the ranks of the world's wealthier polities. The usual U.N. databases do not include Taiwan, but according to the CIA World Factbook, Taiwan's per capita income these days is about $25,000--which in U.N. rankings would place it in the neighborhood of such highly developed nations as Italy and New Zealand, with almost 20 times the per capita income of Red China. Taiwan has achieved this despite being evicted from the U.N. in the 1970s, to be replaced by the communist government. For Taiwan, there has been no place at the perennial U.N. conferencing on "sustainable development." Taiwan was cut out of the U.N. picture years before the U.N. began its drumbeat for global taxation to support U.N. "millennium development goals." And lo! Taiwan has blossomed beyond the wildest dreams of the U.N. aidocrats"

FDR's affirmative action ...for whites: "A large case in point cited by Katznelson was the GI Bill of Rights, which, properly celebrated for its educational benefits, low-cost mortgages, and business loans, substantially bypassed black veterans. According to Katznelson, Southern Democrats in Congress also saw to it that some of FDR's New-Deal legislation would simply not apply to blacks. He returns repeatedly to the fact that in the 1930's and 40's, maids and farm workers accounted for the great bulk of black employees. Yet the Wagner Act and other labor laws failed to protect union-organizing efforts in these occupations, which also went uncovered by Social Security or the new minimum-wage laws. By the late 40's, white America was receiving an avalanche of benefits from the New Deal and veterans' programs, while black America, which needed far more, got far fewer".

Instapundit has already mentioned this but in case you missed it, there is an interesting and detailed story here of how the Left-leaning media edit photographs to create a false impression. Excerpt: "The Chronicle did not print an inaccuracy, nor did it doctor a photograph to misrepresent the facts. Instead, the Chronicle committed the sin of omission: it told you the truth, but it didn't tell you the whole truth. Because the whole truth -- that the girl was part of a group of naive teenagers recruited by Communist activists to wear terrorist-style bandannas and carry Palestinian flags and obscene placards -- is disturbing, and doesn't conform to the narrative that the Chronicle is trying to promote. By presenting the photo out of context, and only showing the one image that suits its purpose, the Chronicle is intentionally manipulating the reader's impression of the rally, and the rally's intent. Such tactics -- in the no-man's-land between ethical and unethical -- are commonplace in the media, and have been for decades. It is only now, with the advent of citizen journalism, that we can at last begin to see the whole story and realize that the public has been manipulated like this all along".

The latest ratings of "world's best cities to live in" are of course rather arbitrary but it is pleasing (and in my view perfectly correct) that Australia has four cities in the top 10. And I have no problem with their finding that 9 out of 10 of the worst cities are either African or Muslim either.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)


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