“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
~ George Orwell ~
Last week in Australia multicultural intolerance won a decisive battle over freedom of speech ~
The assumed right of unfettered freedom of speech was trumped by laws protecting against racial vilification this morning after the Federal Court delivered its decision on the controversial “white Aborigines” case.
On Sept. 28th, a federal court in Melbourne ruled that Andrew Bolt, a prominent Aussie columnist, was in violation of the Racial Discrimination Act. His “crime” was to suggest that there are some Australians of mixed ancestry who self-identify as “Aboriginal” purely for personal advantage. Mark Steyn recaps:
…Andrew Bolt is Oz’s leading political columnist, in print, radio, TV (think George Will) and he commented on the striking number of extremely light-skinned Aboriginal activists of mainly Caucasian descent and appearance who choose to identify as Aboriginal for the purpose of accessing lucrative identity-politics gigs.
[Kind of like – hypothetically of course – a presidential candidate, with a white mother, deciding that he’s “black” – to boost his chances of getting elected.]
Bolt, the Herald Sun, and the Weekly Times were sued by 9 Aboriginals who claimed racial vilifiication over two articles Bolt had written back in 2009. The court’s judgement for the plaintiffs is essentially criminalizing open cultural debate, and will only lead to more divisiveness.
As Steyn had written prior to the verdict:
If the state creates a human right to be offended and extends it only to members of certain interest groups, it is quite naturally incentivizing membership in those membership groups…
…(Bolt) was struck by the very noticeable non-blackness of so many prominent Aussie “blacks”, and wrote a couple of columns on the theme of identity-group opportunism. He’s now been dragged into court and denounced as a “racist” – “racism” having degenerated into a term for anyone who so much as broaches the subject. But, if the law confers particular privileges on members of approved identity groups, how we define the criteria for membership of those groups is surely a legitimate subject for public debate.
Bolt’s written response to the court’s decision was published in the Herald the day after the verdict came down: Silencing me impedes unity, says Andrew Bolt.
Justice Bromberg also said I’d used “derisive” comments “that have little or no legitimate forensic purpose to the argument”.
His Honour cited a long list of these bad comments of mine, such as “seeking power and reassurance in a racial identity is not just weak” and “it is also divisive, feeding a new movement to stress pointless or even invented racial differences”.
FOR expressing such views, in such language, I have lost my freedom to put my argument as I did.
And be warned: use such phrases as those yourself, and you too may lose your right to speak…
…I feel that writing frankly about multiculturalism, and especially Aboriginal identity, yesterday became too dangerous for any conservative. It’s simply safer to stay silent, or write about fluffy puppies instead.
And so the multiculturalists win. They win, because no one now dares object for fear of what it will cost them in court.
Once a society starts to shut people up because they’ve violated someone’s mythical right not to be offended, where does it end? Nowhere good Comrade.
Chilling.
