Lowering the Flag

Nation states like Australia are built around a national identity and nothing symbolizes that identity more than the national anthem. Inevitably, that makes it a primary target for those radical leftists, progressivists, and special interest groups intent on undermining our national identity and systematically deconstructing our society.

In contrast, Islam is built upon a transnational identity, symbolized by the adulation the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed. Nowhere in Islam is there an imperative to place allegiance to a national identity over one’s faith; quite the contrary in fact, one’s Muslim allegiance is regarded as having absolute primacy. Inevitably, that makes it a primary vehicle to be exploited by radicals and Islamists alike.

It is therefore no surprise that the latest attack in the culture wars over Australia’s national identity should be mounted at a Victorian primary school, where around 40 Muslim students were recently allowed to walk out of the singing of the national anthem for allegedly religious reasons. Let there be no mistake, this attack was mounted deliberately to set a precedent that can now be followed by other Muslim students in other schools, in both Victoria and interstate.

The attack also conveniently occurred at the same time that Tony Abbott was delivering the Margaret Thatcher lecture in London pointing out the potentially catastrophic implications for nation states of allowing a massive insurgency of Muslim immigrants – “a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever”.  Local advocates of civilizational suicide like Bill Shorten, Richard Di Natale, and Sarah Hanson-Young were mobilized to denounce Abbott (who unfortunately waited until he was deposed before he took a strong stance) and distract attention from the local implications of his speech. However, the British media noticed the coincidence and TheTelegraph conducted a poll on the issue, which showed that 87% of 7380 respondents supported the view that the Muslim students should observe the national anthem.

While Treasurer Scott Morrison (but not the new federal education minister!), denounced the decision, he appeared to think the attack was merely a silly decision by school staff, who deserved the “muppet of the year” award. However, the Victorian education minister, James Merlino, immediately came out to support the decision and gave the action his official sanction, declaring that the walk-out was acceptable for Muslim students and indicating that it could happen again in the future. Similarly, the spokesman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, Kuranda Seyit, sanctioned the walk-out and declared that Mr Morrison’s reaction was “disappointing”, especially as the federal government under Malcolm Turnbull was trying so hard to mend its relations with Muslim community. Apparently, the federal government and mainstream Australia are still expected to be on their best behaviour with respect to Muslim separatism inside our wider Australian country.

Nevertheless, Mr Seyit said it, confirming that the students’ Muslim identity trumped their Australian identity: “They’re in a state of mourning [for the death of Mohammed’s grandson, Husein ibn Ali, 1335 years ago] during which they’re not allowed to sing or dance”. Therefore, if they have to choose between disrespecting Australia and observing Muslim conventions, they are expected to disrespect Australia.

It’s not surprising that this attack was mounted in this fashion. Firstly, it occurred in Victoria, which has slipped in four decades from being the jewel in the Liberal crown to the jewel in the pommel of the sword of the barbarians, led by a Socialist Left government beholden to the unions and other corrupt bodies, and where the population has become accustomed to comprehensive statist intervention and social engineering. Secondly, it was at a primary school, where the crucial early years of socialisation are undertaken and the future worldview of children is shaped. Progressivists know it’s vital to undermine any developing sense of national identity at this early age. Thirdly, the attack involves teachers who are taught in the most politically radical faculties in the country, supported by the most extreme unions, and endowed with a fierce anti-Western animus, along with a deep sense of ideological purity and moral self-righteousness.

Some commentators have noticed the significant role that teachers play in such assaults on our national identity and emphasized the radical nature of their university training. I described it years ago to a Senate Inquiry as a stultifying intellectual monoculture that dominates academia and applies a radical template of class, race and gender to every conceivable issue, with entirely predictable results. Consequently, as Jennifer Oriel laments in connection with the attack on the national anthem, “the problem does not begin with schools but in universities where budding educators are encouraged to embrace profound antipathy towards the West”. (“Uni courses teach hostility to West” The Australian, 30/10). She indicts neo-Marxists and other Sixties’ radicals like Herbert Marcuse, Paulo Freire, and Frantz Fanon for the ideological role they are still playing in teacher education in our universities. She especially focuses on Fanon, who “celebrated Islamism as a revolutionary activity [and pursued] the destruction of Western civilization by a sustained attack on its core values”.

Indeed, Fanon is a pivotal figure in the Islamist assault on the West. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon advocated terroristic violence because it provides a cathartic and cleansing experience for the perpetrators, as they destroy their enemies and everyone linked to them. It overcomes their sense of alienation and fuses them together as a collective force. According to Fanon:

The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards.

As David Caute explained in Fanon (1970), he was “a revolutionary, a Jacobin committed to violence”, while Randall Law points out in Terrorism: A History (2009), that Fanon’s “rationale for violence has figured prominently in most terrorist movements of the past fifty years”, influencing many terrorists, including Che Guevara in Cuba, who was particularly interested in his theory of violence, along with the Palestinians, the IRA, Black Panthers, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Tamils, Iranians, and many other terrorist and other insurgency groups.

Fanon is a central figure taught in postcolonial studies, a major growth area at Australian universities, as Oriel points out. Between 2004 and 2014 the number of universities teaching it grew from 15 to 21. Amongst Australia’s 34 universities it is the third most frequently offered history subject, to say nothing of its extremely high profile in English and other literature subjects.

Possibly, Oriel could also have mentioned the absolutely pivotal role played by Edward Said and his extremely influential tome, Orientalism (1978), generally regarded as the foundational text of postcolonial studies. In this, Said falsely claimed that all Western scholarship was perverted by its ‘Orientalism’, which allegedly viewed non-Western cultures as undeveloped and inferior. He also introduced the notion that the West is inherently hostile to other cultures, which it sees as ‘The Other’. This primitive type of dualistic pseudo-psychology has become a central premise of progressivists and Islamists, who use it as a term of abuse to discredit all critics of their values and activities, not only in postcolonial studies but in virtually every field of social interaction. It is closely related to the contrived thought-crime of ‘Islamophobia’, which is the standard accusation made against anyone who queries or criticises Islam or government policy on the Muslim insurgency in the West.

Civilizational conflict is the principal feature of our era, and it was the leading neoconservative political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, who spelt this out with his epoch-defining text, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). Huntington correctly forecast that after the Cold War global conflict would be based on culture and especially religious identity, and that central to this would be the rise of Islamist violence, particularly along the civilizational ‘fault lines’ where Muslim societies abutted the West (e.g., the Balkans, the Middle-East, Eastern Europe, Chechnya, Central Asia, India and Pakistan, Iberia, North Africa, etc.):

World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural. Civilizations – the highest cultural groupings of people – are differentiated from each other by religion, history, language and tradition. These divisions are deep and increasing in importance. [They are] the fault lines of civilizations [and] the battle lines of the future.

Crucially, these fault lines run not only between nations but, in many cases right through them, e.g., India. It was this danger to which Abbott was alluding: core components of Western civilization, like Europe but also Australia, have to face the crucial question of whether they will accept the presence of an aggressive insurgent civilization in their heartlands, or will they effectively articulate, defend, and convey an integrative sense of their own indigenous national and civilizational identity to which migrants and refugees must ultimately defer.

Governments cannot fail to make a choice on this issue. Do we assert our national identity or do we allow it to be undermined and deconstructed, as progressivists are seeking relentlessly to do? If our governments capitulate and the Islamists, progressivists, and other internal enemies are allowed to be successful then the result will not be their utopian fantasy of cultural diversity or a Caliphate, but only a future of ever-intensifying civilizational conflict and social disharmony