There is nothing quite like a woke, sporting sponsorship farrago to get people bleating platitudes and hypocrisy and avoiding the real issue. If you thought the netball nonsense was put to bed following Gina Rhinehart’s brilliant decision to flip the bird at Netball Australia, think again. You see, in these culture wars, the woke progressives cannot stand for opponents to have the last word.
Hence the inevitable interventions of Lisa Wilkinson (a minor television personality), Andrew Gaze (an ex-basketballer) and, utterly unsurprisingly, Anthony (the bad) Mundine. For Gaze, Lang Hancock’s comments made about Aborigines nearly half a century ago were “vile”.
The Australian basketball great has ripped into billionaire mining magnate Rinehart, after her company, Hancock Prospecting, withdrew from the deal after concerns were raised by Donnell Wallam, the third Indigenous player in Diamonds history.
Comments made by Lang Hancock, the founder of the company and Rinehart's father, in which he suggested the government 'dope up' the water in Indigenous communities as a method of sterilisation, are believed to be at the centre of Wallam's concerns.
One of the twitter brigade (someone called Rohan Smith) joined in:
Great man Andrew Gaze on SEN just now says that if his dad had said what Gina Rinehart's dad said he would publicly denounce and tell him "that is vile". "It you can't come to the conclusion that sterilising a race of people is a bad thing then we are not friends."
The only surprise is that Lang Hancock hasn’t been compared to Hitler. (Perhaps he has). The gas ovens, and so on.
The Brits – courtesy of Toby Young and others – have an expression for what has occurred. It is called offence archeology, that is, digging up things someone said decades ago to get him or her cancelled. It would seem to be a first, though, to go digging into the past of one’s forebears. Though, if you blame us all today (whitey) for colonialism, I suppose that a little forebear offence archeology is quite okay.
Irrespective of whether apologies are needed or even recommended, were Hancock’s comments “vile”? No one is digging here. This is unfortunate, because there is more to be said. Everyone just assumes vileness, a little like people assume “homophobia” and “climate emergency”. Simply saying it is sufficient to shut down further debate. Sterilising “a race” is vile. But what about sterilising, per se? In other words, Eugenics 101. Now, I have written on this matter elsewhere.
http://chestertonaustralia.com/article/chesterton-eugenics-and-covid/
It turns out that the Andrew Gaze class has a fair bit of form in relation to eugenics. And not just in today’s “enlightened” times, where we willing to allow old or sick people to do away with themselves and “mothers” to do away with their unwanted unborn. And where we are prepared to force billions of people to take experimental, unsafe, unnecessary, dangerous, ineffective State injectables. Without blinking. Probably most people don’t know what Julia Gillard’s current job is. She chairs the Wellcome Trust in Britain, whose predecessor organisations were the Galton Institute and the Eugenics Society. This Trust is a pro-vaxx outfit linked to Bill Gates and to gain-of-function (aka bioweapons) research, with an unargued history of eugenics support. It has funded other very nasty things, too.
https://www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/1/560/we-ve-just-legalised-eugenics
Every member of the Greens Party that you could find would argue for a much smaller global population. Next time you meet one, ask him or her how they plan to achieve this widely agreed goal. Does it involve encouraging Africans – you know what colour these people are – to self-sterilise in order to cull their own population? And who is the world’s leading advocate of African self-sterilisation? One Bill Gates, of course. I would call support for depopulation of a largely black continent through abortion and contraception “sterilising a race”. Comments, Andrew Gaze and Rohan Smith?
Back in the day, leftist heroes like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, thought it was fine to do a little culling on the side, even if it was directed at particular, err, groups. Sanger was a bit of a racist as well.
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2020/07/28/margaret-sangers-extreme-brand-eugenics
Eugenics were once quite widely supported in society at all levels. Churchill himself has been mentioned in this context. And he wasn’t alone. Some of GK Chesterton’s contemporaries were in the frame and the subject of his acerbic, rapier-like prose. Often eugenics had a racist element, or were indeed driven by the desire to breed out particular races. A little like breeding out Down Syndrome today. Every would-be parent that decides to abort a baby known to have physical defects is a latter-day Lang Hancock. Makes you think about cognitive dissonance, n’est pas? It would not be surprising if many of Hancock’s generation shared his views. Indeed, those lamenting the stolen generations and other colonial era policies towards Aborigines have explicitly made the charge. The surprise with Hancock is that he said it and allowed his comments to be placed on public record.
Bill Gates’ father and Rupert Murdoch’s father were both adherents of eugenics. Gates Senior (Bill Gates the Second) even ran Planned Parenthood for a time. I assume that it is just a coincidence that two famous sones of well-known eugenicists are fervently religious in their ongoing support of the virtually compulsory injection of gene therapy drugs that are known to have killed probably millions of people. Of all races. I was recently sickened to have witnessed billboard advertising in North Queensland for Covid vaccinations for Indigenous people, on the basis of Covid State propaganda and lies.
But it isn’t just a matter of hypocrisy we are talking about here. These twitter goons simply have no comprehension, no moral compass, no sense of history or of comparative ethics. They are clueless across the whole spectrum of human understanding. The second-raters involving in the Gina Rhinehart slanging match, with their demands of apologies and “distancing”, do not get what sterilisation is really about, nor that it is an embedded part of high culture in the Woke West. They probably wouldn’t know what eugenics are.
No, it is the group being spoken of in the context of eugenics that people get upset about, not the notion of eugenics itself and sterilisation itself. Sterilisation is a core part of today’s ruling class abortifacient ideology. There is nothing wrong with a little cleansing per se, so long as we don’t do it to a preferred victim group. This is very odd, when you think about it. As someone famous once said, before you comment about the splinter in another’s eye, take the plank out of your own (Matthew Chapter 7, verse 5). I suspect that these subtleties are well and truly beyond the wit of ex-basketballers and minor TV personalities.
One final irony. Perhaps the greatest exponents of Aboriginal cleansing have been practised by Indigenous people themselves, knowingly or not, through inter-marriage and sexual congress with whitey. Totally natural and to be expected. The outcome of all this was a radical diminution of the Aboriginal “race” as it was originally conceived. Until the recent, massive uptick in the Indigenous population. Now you just have to “identify” as black in order to be able to join the team. Like men who want to be, err, women. So, a very different form of sterilisation has taken place. With absolutely no policy and no eugenics involved.
But we know that the woke class doesn’t do irony. Just hypocrisy and moral ignorance. Virtue signalling really can be absurd.
Paul Collits
27 October 2022
Incredible great post. We are immersed so profoundly in the deadly, mind numbing power of the Woke agenda right now. We need the steely knives of logic to continue to dissect and reveal the existence. Accurate mental models help wake people from their Snow White Woke Slumber.
If we are going to censor the speech of people who are well dead, then how many of them are driving a Ford? Henry Ford was a great supporter of Adolf Hitler, but we don't hear about them boycotting his cars for that or Geelong AFL club denying Ford motors from sponsoring them.
The inconsistency in all these Woke arguments is totally defeating their arguments.
I suppose if we looked back into the past we could ban every company from sponsoring every sporting enterprise. I doubt any sport is free from the same criticism. I know of many players who have said things they would not agree with in years past.