Racial prejudice attributed to Labor's Bob Katter MP

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It seems there are a great many people being fooled by a hoax - at least on some level. There is a speech being passed around Australia which is attributed to Bob Katter MP, the sitting member for Kennedy in Queensland. Clearly people want to celebrate him as a beacon of nationalistic pride. On many levels he might represent nationalists, but he did not write the following speech - it was a plagiarism attributed to him according to this article.

We cannot however dismiss the speech simply because it was not written by an MP. More worrisome perhaps is that:

1. A person thought so much of it to propagate it

2. A great many other people thought so much of it to celebrate it, whether they posted it on their blog or pass it round as a chain email.

I think so little of it - that I'm going to repudiate its shallow premises. Firstly - the speech WRONGLY attributed to Bob Katter is:

“My great, great, great grandfather watched as his friends died in the Boer War. My grandfather watched and bled as his friends died in World Wars 1&2. My grandfather watched as his friends & brothers died in the Depression of 32. My father watched as his friends died in Korea. I watched as my friends died in Vietnam, East Timor & Desert Storm. Our sons and daughters watched & bled as their friends died in Afghanistan and Iraq. None of them died for the Afghanistan and Iraq Flag. Every Australian died for the Australian flag.

At a Victorian high school foreign students raised a Middle East flag on a school flag pole. Australian students took it down. Guess who was expelled...the students who took it down.
West Australian high school students were sent home, because they wore T-shirts with the Australian flag printed on them.

Enough is enough.

This message needs to be viewed by every Australian; and every Australian needs to stand up for Australia. We've bent over to appease the Aussie-haters long enough. I'm taking a stand.

I'm standing up because of the hundreds of thousands who died fighting in wars for this country, and for the Australian flag.

And shame on anyone who tries to make this a racist message.

AUSTRALIANS, stop giving away Your RIGHTS!

THIS IS OUR COUNTRY!

This statement DOES NOT mean I'm against immigration!

YOU ARE WELCOME HERE, IN MY COUNTRY, welcome to come legally:

1. Get a sponsor!

2. Learn the LANGUAGE, as immigrants have in the past!

3. Live by OUR rules! Dress as we Australians Do

4. Get a job!

5. Pay YOUR Taxes!

6. No Social Security until you have earned it and Paid for it!

7. NOW find a place to lay your head!

If you don't want to forward this for fear of offending someone, then YOU'RE PART OF THE PROBLEM!

We've gone so far the other way...bent over backwards not to offend anyone.

Only AUSTRALIANS seem to care when Australian Citizens are being offended!

WAKE UP AUSTRALIA!!!

If you do not Pass this on, may your fingers cramp!

Made in AUSTRALIA & DAMN PROUD OF IT! AMEN

There are so many problems with this speech. Here is MY REPLY!!

Australians did not die for the Australian flag, the flag is just a symbol of the values embodied by (some of) the nation's people and its institutions. If you actually critically review those values, you realise how little has been learnt in the last 100 years in the realm of ethics and political philosophy. Go to your local war memorial and you often see the expression 'Service before self" or "They died for their country". This of course is the values of our past enemies - the Japanese and Germans. Consider the famed 'kamakasi' Japanese pilots - or a quote from Adolf Hitler 'You are nothing, your nation is everything".

You think you have more freedom today because you have a Bill of Rights. This is a facade, for if you realised that the govt has no interest in killing you, but in enslaving you, you'd realise that you have 'political rights' but no 'economic rights' (i.e. taxation is expropriation with no discretion). The reason they give you political rights is because now the majority have wealth, they are scared to lose. Two hundred years ago the majority had no wealth, that is they have nothing to lose but their lives. So, what did your grandpas die for? Political freedoms right? Well, far from living or dying for economic freedoms, every year you confront chronically deprave political values - yet every year you pony up - and vote for Labor (heads you lose), or Liberals (tails - you lose).

We might have won the battles in WWI & II, but we lost the war. In the wake of WWII, the West adopted the welfare state. Far from the enfranchisement of the poor, landless class being a development, it was a shift to a broader based of extortion, i.e. We diversified the foundation for extortion. The coalition of MPs into the 2 main parties is a framework for extortion. Ultimately however, it is representative democracy, and substitution of 'numbers' for 'reasons' that is destined to retain or entrenches the slavery system. Until you are treated as sovereign individuals with the right to choose the system which you join - you remain a slave. Impractical you say? That implies that you have no interest in accountability/reconciliation of ideas, or do not believe rationality, objectivity is possible. Might that be because you were never trained to think - only to memorise? Might it because you never had the discretion to make terribly profound philosophical choices; spared the responsibility by our political system. Spared the choice in the early years because you were not educated or wealthy enough; today for the sake of efficiency or harmony.

The article suggests Australians are giving away their rights by appeasing 'foreign values'. If such people actually understood their values, they would realise that the mindless, nationalism/collectivism (i.e. repudiation of self) is exactly the values celebrated in Australia by Christians, socialists and liberals. Christianity and Islam are very close in terms of their values; understandably so, since Islam was derived from Judaism as well. Islam might be a more violent expression; but that has more to do with the dynamics of ancient Europe and the Middle East.

Anyway, we have established that anyone who supports this guy is associating themselves with a 'school of thought' which embraces lying, nationalism, and possibly racial prejudice. Perhaps it was advanced by some white supremacist, nationalist political group who want to advance Katter as some great 'white hope'. Sadly, not the case.

So what are the rights under threat? The right to impose your values upon others, since there is an implied act of coercion. Or do they simply want to restrict who comes into their country. Well, I can understand that because there does need to be regulation of borders in the current context. But this guy is advancing a race-based distinction, as opposed to vetting people on the basis of their political motives for coming to Australia. He is also disparaging Arabs who came to Australia legitimately, and why not other races? Cheap populism to be sure.

The guy purports to impose rules on how to live, how to dress, and what language to speak! If I'm not mistaken, this guy would assimilate very well in Syria; unfortunately they don't want him either. It goes to show that nationalist bigots do not fit anywhere; which is probably why you find them mostly in rural areas, where they can be sure they have maximised the practicable distance between themselves. Basically his message is 'obey' his rules.

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Author

Andrew Sheldon

Resource Rent Tax

Applied Critical Thinking | www.SheldonThinks.com