Sobering Figures On Abuse

CRISIS MAGAZINE

Sins of Omission: The Abusive PA Clergy Abuse Report

PAUL KENGOR

Back in August, after a special solemnity Mass in my parish in the Diocese of Erie, Pennsylvania, I came home and read the grand jury report on clergy sex abuse in six Pennsylvania Catholic dioceses, including my own.

I read the 884-page online version. I saw allegations against priests in my diocese and the Pittsburgh diocese where I was baptized. I saw names of priests I know or have met. I was, of course, mortified. The behavior described wasn’t merely twisted, perverse, and psychologically warped, but diabolical.

I felt sick. I struggled for the best invectives to hurl at my screen but was left speechless. None seemed adequate. Making me angrier was the fact that so many abusers got away with their deeds. At least in this world.

If there was a degree of reassurance, however, it was this: in many cases, a good priest or bishop stepped in to stop the abuser or remove him from ministry. This even included some cases with the much-maligned and understandably criticized then-Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh.

And yet, as I worked backward to the report’s introduction, I was assaulted by this summary statement, which instantly became the most quoted passage in the media: “Priests were raping little boys and girls and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing: they hid it all.”

That hit me like a brick. Whoa, I snapped at my computer screen, now that’s not true. They did nothing and hid it all?

This isn’t what I saw. The very report itself contradicted that explosive charge. In fact, I found the name of my previous priest (a longtime friend) in the report. He’s no abuser, quite the contrary. I was gratified to see Father Mark listed for reporting an accused abuser based on just one allegation. He is one of many men of God who did something. And yet, good men like Father Mark endure nasty looks when wearing their collar in public out of suspicion they’re child molesters.

Look at the line again: “Priests were raping little boys and girls and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing: they hid it all.”

Such hyperbole is outrageous and damaging. Worse, I feared it was intentional. I suspected from the language, including remarks by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the report’s front man, who condemned a “sophisticated” and “systematic cover up” aimed at protecting “the institution at all costs,” that the actual target is the institutional Catholic Church.

All of which brings me to a remarkable article published in Commonweal, written by Peter Steinfels, longtime editor of Commonweal and religion reporter for the New York Times. Steinfels and I no doubt have political disagreements and a few cultural and spiritual ones as well. Nonetheless, I stand in admiration of this superb piece of thoughtful, thorough reporting that ought to be read in every course on journalism and media (and legal) ethics.

Steinfels’s nearly 12,000-word piece is titled “Vehemently Misleading: The Pennsylvania Grand-Jury Report Is Not What It Seems.” If you have any opinion whatsoever on the Pennsylvania abuse report or the wider issue of clergy abuse, you have an obligation to sit and read this article. Steinfels has more than confirmed my worst suspicions about this report back in August. He has also confirmed in my mind that certain public officials in Pennsylvania need to be held accountable.

Steinfels begins by laying out the enormous influence of the Pennsylvania abuse report, which has prompted numerous additional states to follow suit. He then quickly zeroes in on what is indeed the most “vehemently misleading” passage, the one that has had the greatest reverberations:

“All” of these victims, the report declares, “were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institutions above all.” Or as the introduction to the report sums it up, “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all.”

Steinfels gets right to the heart of the matter, asking: “Is that true?” The answer, of course, is no, as is clear to anyone who reads beyond the irresponsible introduction. Steinfels answers his question:

On the basis of reading the report’s vast bulk, on the basis of reviewing one by one the handling of hundreds of cases, on the basis of trying to match diocesan replies with the grand jury’s charges, and on the basis of examining other court documents and speaking with people familiar with the grand jury’s work, including the attorney general’s office, my conclusion is that this second charge is in fact grossly misleading, irresponsible, inaccurate, and unjust. It is contradicted by material found in the report itself—if one actually reads it carefully. It is contradicted by testimony submitted to the grand jury but ignored—and, I believe, by evidence that the grand jury never pursued.

These conclusions are dramatically at odds with the public perception and reception of the report….

[T]here is the hard reality that not many people have actually read the report, let alone read it critically…. It includes, I can pretty safely add, the journalists on whose news accounts most of these people relied. Almost every media story of the grand jury report that I eventually read or viewed was based on its twelve-page introduction and a dozen or so sickening examples the introduction and the report highlight, written in a language that Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court later called “incendiary.”

That was my takeaway, too. Journalists did a shabby job with the report, clearly skimming the introduction as the basis for the nastiest headlines. Then again, in their defense, they surely figured they could safely rely on the report’s own summary introduction. A reasonable assumption.

I will not here summarize Steinfels’s exhaustive review, but a few of his conclusions are worth noting.

First, the report alleged that clergy abuses occurred regularly and routinely “everywhere.” Really? I can name a half dozen parishes off the top of my head with no reported cases. Does the report substantiate this charge? No.

In a particularly jaw-dropping statistic, contrary to the claim that the “men of God” hid everything, Steinfels estimates that “perhaps 90 percent or more of offenders the report lists were identified not by the police but by those ‘deficient’ diocesan investigations.”

Whoa! What’s that?

Yes, 90 percent. That’s in contrast to the, well, zero percent the report effectively claimed (contrary to information provided in the report itself) by asserting that “all” cases were covered up.

This is the height of irresponsibility. Shame on the authors.

Second, the online version of the report ends at page 884. It chops off the more than 450 pages that followed. These pages, as Steinfels notes, consist of photocopied responses from dioceses, bishops, diocesan officials, and certain priests protesting their innocence. They were guillotined.

Further, the grand jury report offered no comparative data or historical context. As I read it, I banged my fist pleading with the anonymous authors for a general percentage of priests involved in abuse. I’m sure the number is in the single digits. Unfortunately, no such analysis was offered. The report evokes a pandemic. I badly wanted to know how many of the guilty priests are dead or alive. One priest highlighted was born the year Ulysses S. Grant became president. There’s one allegation against him. We have no idea if it’s legitimate.

And what about the good clergy who manned up and did their due diligence? This includes the retired bishop of my Erie diocese, Donald Trautman, who is treated very unjustly by the grand jury report. Steinfels, in his analysis, shows that Trautman acted strongly, nobly, compassionately, prudently, and even rapidly—a view backed by an independent analysis done by the Pittsburgh firm K&L Gates. (The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania would have served taxpayers far better had it hired K&L.)

Steinfels’s review makes clear that the bad apples did their ugly work primarily in that notorious period I refer to as the Dark Ages of the Church: the 1970s. Two bishops stand out as potentially ignoring serious cases during that time: the late Bishop Alfred Watson of Erie and Bishop William G. Connare of Greensburg.

Moreover, after reading the report in August, and then doing several talk shows on the subject, I had many people ask me how the Catholic Church and its clergy compares to Protestant denominations, public schools, juvenile detention centers, prisons, nursing homes, the Boy Scouts, coaches, physicians, psychiatrists, stepfathers, live-in boyfriends, USA Gymnastics, Jerry Sandusky, and on and on. A friend of mine is a state trooper who investigates sex-abuse crimes against minors. He told me that teachers and coaches are the most common offenders. He has had seven cases of clergy abusers. When I asked him how many of those seven were Catholic priests, he said, “Zero. All of them were Protestant pastors.” He noted that he has a colleague in the eastern part of the state who has arrested priests, but he personally has had no cases involving Catholic priests.

That’s an anecdotal example. Still, such comparative data with other professions is not only valuable but necessary. This report, however, clearly had no such interest. It wasn’t the goal. So what was the goal?

Steinfels concludes that “the real objective” of the Pennsylvania report is that it was intended as a “weapon” by those wielding it:

In Pennsylvania, the criminal statute of limitations for the sexual abuse of minors has been repeatedly extended; the first of the grand jury’s recommendations is to remove it altogether….

The radioactive recommendation is one that has been implemented in four states (California, Minnesota, Hawaii, and Delaware) and proposed in many more. The grand jury calls for a “civil window” of two years during which victims can sue dioceses for abuse not just if accusers are under thirty, as Pennsylvania law now provides, but no matter their age. Pennsylvania’s bishops have previously opposed similar legislation on the grounds that it would expose dioceses, parishes, and charities to huge losses, even bankruptcies, for misdeeds committed by others many decades ago. Who would be penalized for these crimes? Not the actual predators and negligent or culpable church officials, in most cases dead or without assets, but Catholics who had nothing to do with those deeds…. The Pennsylvania bishops’ conference, like its counterparts in many other states, has argued the unfairness of lifting the statute of limitations for such suits against the Church and other nonprofits while barring them, under the doctrine of “state sovereignty,” against public schools, juvenile-detention centers, or other state agencies, where far more abuse occurs.

All this is debatable…. But the critical point regarding the Pennsylvania report is that it has been designed to be a weapon in the debate….

Whether that objective is a good or bad thing is open to debate. But the tool that the attorney general’s office has constructed to achieve it is an inaccurate, unfair, and fundamentally misleading instrument.

That being the case, I have my own conclusions, which will not get anywhere near a scintilla of the publicity the grand jury report received. Here they are:

For starters, the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office and governor’s office should disclose to the public the authors of this report, particularly the inflammatory introduction. Who wrote it? Who’s responsible?

If we can’t be informed of the authors, how about the overseers? Did Attorney General Josh Shapiro pause to review the report before it went to press? Did Governor Tom Wolf?

As for Shapiro, I wonder if calls have been privately made for his resignation over this. He needs to clarify and apologize for the rank hyperbole and gross misperceptions. To that end, Governor Wolf should do the same.

Wolf’s role deserves special consideration for this reason: Tom Wolf is a cultural radical. Pennsylvania is a pro-life state where even Democrat governors (e.g., the late Bob Casey Sr.) were staunch pro-lifers. Wolf is so extreme on abortion that Planned Parenthood boasts that he’s the first and only governor who served as an “escort” for Planned Parenthood. Wolf’s radicalism on issues from abortion to same-sex “marriage” to the most fringe elements of the “LGBTQ” agenda is striking. Those Wolf positions are starkly at odds with the teachings of the Catholic Church, Pennsylvania’s bishops, and, yes, Pope Francis. I’m sure that Wolf harbors a strong dislike for these teachings. I bet that Wolf was pleased to see his attorney general deliver this take down of the Church in Pennsylvania as well as unleash the wider assault that has now begun by other states eagerly following suit.

Third, the Catholic Church, particularly in Pennsylvania—whether via the bishops’ conference or another organization—ought to fight back. The entire Church was broad-bushed by this report that grossly mischaracterized countless priests and bishops. Some bishops, like Donald Trautman, have taken a severe hit. Gannon University has removed Trautman’s name from its campus. Reputations are being maligned, tarnished, and ruined. Some of these men might have a legal case against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, particularly if material they supplied to the grand jury was deliberately omitted in order for the attorney general’s office to paint a dark picture that shades the full truth.

The Pennsylvania bishops ought to respond, not only as a moral-ethical duty to clear names, but also because they might have no other recourse out of financial necessity, especially if (as Steinfels suggests) this report opens the floodgate for a litigation bonanza that will bankrupt innocent parishes. Moreover, they ought to consider responding as a signal to other states to be more judicious (and not so reckless) as they prepare reports.

Obviously, this report has put the bishops on the defensive, and people in the pews are understandably fuming. So am I. They want heads on a platter. But the innocent need not suffer silent martyrdom. The guilty should be punished fully, but the innocent need not accept injustice.

Do we want to see predatory priests held accountable? Of course. I can’t say that enough. Surely a special circle in Dante’s inferno awaits the worst of them.

But government officials also must be held accountable. Certainly, Pennsylvania officials have done nothing approaching the horrors of the worst abusers exposed in the grand jury report. I commend any sincere effort to shine the spotlight and seek genuine justice. And yet, they have caused damage in their own way. They now need to take steps to rectify what they’ve done wrong with this report.

The grand jury report has its own sins; they are sins of omission. An abuse report of this kind should not itself be an occasion for abuse.

crisis magazine

ANUARY 15, 2019

Who Would Have Known…?

ANTHONY ESOLEN

Snip...................!

Here are some things I did not know thirty years ago when I could still entertain the idea that a man with a man is no different in emotion and behavior than a man with a woman:

I did not know then about libertine priests abusing boys and girls. I did not know that the minority of priests in my Church who were attracted to males were abusing boys at a rate ten to twenty times that of those who abused girls. (You have to put two rates together: the 85 percent of victims who were male, and whatever percentage of the priesthood was homosexual.) I did not know that such a thing could prey upon a boy and ruin his life. I do not mean to make light of the harm done to girls. It is just that that does not bear upon the matter here, i.e., the drag queen as a model for boys.

I did not know—no one knew—that there would be Gay Pride parades in cities everywhere, in all their sad hideousness, with public nudity and simulated sex. I did not know that parents would take their children to see them. I did not know that the media would celebrate it. I did not foresee that newspapers would, all of them, become pom-pom girls in the movement. I did not foresee that all the public schools would do so, too.

I did not understand that the syndrome as it shows up in males is caused by trauma, terrible neglect, loneliness, or the use of porn, and that there is nothing natural about its etiology. I did not understand that the etiology would make sense of its being correlated with other pathologies, such as compulsive sex, obsession with death, “bug chasing,” pedophilia, transvestitism, exhibitionism, group sex, and drug abuse.

I did not foresee that the marriage rate would sink through the basement floor. I did not foresee that four out of ten children in the United States would be born out of wedlock. I did not foresee, no one could have foreseen, the unrelieved suspicion and animosity that now blacken relations between the sexes.

I never expected that gay men would want to recruit in the schools or that they would have anything to do with the education of other people’s children. I did not expect, if what they said about their suffering was true, that they would be eager for others to share it.

I did not foresee “Queer Studies” or the “queering” of arts and letters.

I did not foresee the four-alarm fire of unreality that is the “transgender” movement. I did not expect, and no one could have expected, that mere children could “discover” what their inner dream gender really was, and that a corrupt medical profession would be happy to oblige them with irreversible surgeries and a lifetime of tissue-growing, and therefore carcinogenic, pharmaceutical cocktails.

I did not foresee that churches would all go rainbow, even while their denominations were dwindling to nothing.

I did not know that bishops were sticking their hands down the pants of seminarians. I knew nothing about the creepers of influence peddling, threats, and evil compromises that grew out of those hothouses.

I did not know at the time that homosexual men who engaged in the mirage of a wedding would have no intention of keeping themselves exclusively to one another. “Monogamish” is what the gay activist Dan Savage, a celebrity in public schools, calls it. I had supposed in my foolishness that they would conform to the Christian heterosexual norm. Pause for much laughter, and weeping.

I did not foresee a time when ladies’ magazines would chirp about new forms of marriage, which are either old and primitive forms of marriage, or just new forms of debauchery. The United States made Utah’s admission to the union conditional upon the Mormon rejection of bigamy; it had been under severe scrutiny for decades. But now bigamy is returning.

Nobody cares overmuch, because serial polygamy is everywhere. We are supposed to “accompany” the person who dumps the spouse and latches on to somebody else. The abandoned spouse can go hang.

I certainly did not foresee the manufacture of children to please the sexual vanities of adults. I did not foresee that ghastly thing with the ghastly name, that crime against creation and the Creator: reproductive technology.

I did not foresee a time, and nobody could, when almost every teenage boy in the country would be an habitual user of pornography, and not just of pictures but videos, staggering in their inhumanity and wickedness, and that people would shrug about it. But then, I also did not foresee the all-out “War on Boys,” amply catalogued by the courageous feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers.

I did not expect the Boy Scouts of America to capitulate to the madness, and then to find that it had won them nothing but bankruptcy. I did not expect that liberal-run cities, whose mayors must know how miserable are the expectations for boys growing up without fathers, would prefer to please well-to-do gay men rather than allow the Boy Scouts to use city facilities. In Philadelphia, this included a park that the Boy Scouts themselves had made and donated to the city.

I did not foresee a time when masculinity itself would be sneered at and called “toxic.” I would never have supposed that young men would one day say that no one but a secular psychologist in Canada had ever told them that they should be proud of their manhood.

As rotten as mass entertainment at the time already was, I could not have foreseen the coarseness and filth of today’s popular culture. I did not expect that girls one day would swear like sailors, but not aboard ship.

I did not foresee the sheer despotism that the gay movement would inevitably engender. I did not foresee that ordinary shop owners could be sued into submission lest they dare to decline, politely, to assist in the celebration of sodomy. But of course, when you have what is radically unnatural, or logically, biologically, and anthropologically incoherent, as if a man could give birth to a child, or a woman beget one, the only way to get everybody to agree is by sheer force. I had no idea that a man could lose his job when in a moment of confusion and frustration he unintentionally gave the pronoun “she” to a girl pretending to be a boy.

I did not foresee “twerking,” i.e., dirty dancing for little kids. I could never have predicted that women would pimp their own sons, getting them up in drag for the delight of gay men.

I’ve learned a lot in thirty years. I was never in any doubt that people of bad sexual habits might be morally decent in other ways, such as paying taxes, or keeping their dogs off your lawn. I am sure that even criminals may be morally decent in some ways. Pornographers may be very nice people, outside of their sewers. Very niceness and a smile or two can send any one of us on the primrose path to hell.

And only the promise of Jesus Christ has kept our Church from going on that same pleasant pilgrimage, because our leaders have mainly been silent, while some have been passing out the banners.

Wake up, O leaders. You don’t have the excuse of ignorance.

Aboriginal Culture Today

The Weekend Australian

A CULTURE LEFT BEHIND

JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE

As whites champion the Me Too movement, traditional Aboriginal women continue to live in violence
Like most traditional cultures around the world, Warlpiri culture is deeply patriarchal; men are superior to women and more privileged, and the collective quashes the rights of the individual. These principles, thousands of years old, come together to oppress women now. If I misbehaved as a young girl, some well-intentioned family member might threaten me with forced marriage to a much older “promised husband”. I would obey out of terror.

Aboriginal children are rarely punished physically but are controlled psychologically. I recall when I was a little girl my female kin playing cards at Yuendumu. A Japangardi, one of my potential husbands, walked past. The women pretended he was coming to take me away. They teased me and huddled around, pretending to protect me from his clutches. He played along, pretending to grab for me. I was terrified. Everyone burst into laughter. Japangardi signalled it was all a joke and handed me a $20 note to compensate for the terror he caused me.

Girls are trained to be submissive from birth and their fear is laughed at. My mother was expected to join her middle-aged promised husband as his second wife at 13. She would have gone to her big sister’s household as her co-wife. Mum rebelled. Her father and promised husband relented and told her she could finish school first. They were good and thoughtful men who knew the law but also knew when not to enforce it and that the world was changing. Others of my mother’s age weren’t so lucky and were beaten senseless for daring to rebel.

My parents were determined I would be able to choose my husband. There are still some not granted that right. In customary law, a man is entitled to have sex with his promised wife without her consent. This has been used in court to defend men who had violently and sexually assaulted their teenaged promised wives. In 2002 a 50-year-old Aboriginal man faced court over the abduction and rape of his 15-year-old promised wife. He had already killed one wife. Despite this, his new wife’s family had promised her to him. She was held against her will at his outstation and repeatedly raped. When she attempted to leave with relatives, he fired his shotgun to scare them off. His lawyers argued he was acting within the parameters of his law and fulfilling obligations to the victim’s family.

This was true. The initial charge of rape was reduced. He received 24 hours’ imprisonment for unlawful intercourse with a minor and 14 days’ imprisonment for the firearm offences. When the details were published in a national paper there was outrage and a successful appeal.

I know of many other cases like that: stories of rape, domestic violence and murder; stories belonging to women in my family and many other Aboriginal families. Stories that never reach the ears of the wider public. My close family regularly contributes to the hideous statistics relating to family violence. My Aboriginal sisters, aunts, mothers, nieces and daughters live this crisis every day. There is not a woman in my family who has not experienced some kind of physical or sexual abuse at some time in her life. And none of the perpetrators were white. One of my aunts had her childhood violently stolen from her at the age of 14. Her promised husband, a much older man, held her captive. She was bound with rope “like a kangaroo”, as it was described to me, and repeatedly raped. No one reported the incident. Everyone went about their lives as if nothing had happened. My aunt — one of the most loving, caring and, as I’ve come to learn, resilient women I know — lived on in silence. She lost the ability to bear children. She was left to deal with her scarred womb and tormented psyche while her perpetrator lived on to die as an elder and law man, revered by both the Aboriginal and the wider community.

I was told of another relative who had also been promised to a much older man who, again, had been convicted of killing his first wife. She was terrified she’d suffer the same fate. Her female relatives tried to protect her. I was told her promised husband and other male relatives took her out bush with the connivance of her own father who had also caused the death of his wife. No one has seen her since. That was more than 30 years ago when I was a baby. No complaint was made to the police. These are the kinds of women’s stories I’ve grown up with, told to me in whispers by aunts, grandmothers, mothers. They were also warnings of what can happen when a girl breaks the law.

As an Aboriginal woman I have grown up knowing never to travel on certain roads during “business” time for fear of accidentally coming across a men’s ceremonial party. Like all Aboriginal women, I am at risk of being killed as punishment for making such a simple mistake. This was, and still is, the rule for Aboriginal women in central Australia.

In January 2009 a police car drove on to a ceremonial ground in a remote community. They were pursuing a man who had assaulted his wife. There was a female police officer in the car. That evening the ABC news reported that white police had shown no respect for Aboriginal law. The fact they were pursuing a man who had perpetrated violence against his wife wasn’t mentioned.

Interviewed for the evening news, the late Mr Bookie, former chairman of the Central Land Council, said: “It’s against our law for people like that, breaking the law, they shouldn’t be there. Aboriginal ladies, they’re not allowed to go anywhere near that. If they had been caught — a woman, Aboriginal lady, got caught — she would be killed. Simple as that!” He knew the law and he told the truth.

There was great anger in June this year when Victoria Police issued a statement cautioning women to have “situational awareness” and be “mindful of their surroundings” after the terrible rape and murder of a young Melbourne woman in a Carlton park at night. Aboriginal women in remote Australia must be acutely aware of their situation and surroundings all the time during Aboriginal men’s ceremony. They are taught this from birth. This is the way it is and has always been.

A few years ago I was contacted by a female family member who told me that because of feuding between her family and her inlaws she was wrongly accused of insulting a man in a culturally sensitive way relating to sacred men’s business. As a result she and her daughter were told they had to strip naked publicly in their community to be humiliated. Women know insulting a man with reference to men’s sacred ceremony can result in severe punishment. An accusation is usually believed and supported by the accuser’s female kin. Denial is useless.

A son-in-law can do whatever he likes and his mother-in-law will blame her daughter. In traditional communities in the Northern Territory, the patriarchal and kinbased society is so deeply embedded it’s common for female relatives of even violent offenders to support them against the victim. The obligation to male kin is so strong it can be crippling.

Premature death and lifethreatening illness are blamed on sorcery. Misfortune falling on a family can be blamed on the misbehaviour of women who have attracted the attention of sorcerers. They may be blamed for the death of their children or husbands. Mothers and widows in mourning are sometimes badly beaten after attracting blame. They usually accept punishment because they share the belief system that imposes the penalty. As long as the belief that women can be blamed for the bad behaviour of men, or for accidents and illness, exists in the hearts and minds of Aboriginal people, we will never progress in the fight against physical and sexual violence against women. It is heartbreaking but true.

Ironically, in my experience many of those most horrified by the idea of Aboriginal people questioning the old ways or adapting to the new are people who fully embrace modernity themselves. They are often well-educated and employed, fluent and articulate in English. They live safely in suburbs, have access to the media and the world’s best health services. They don’t die young and they stay out of prison. They have their own culture, don’t live by our customary law, perhaps don’t know what it is. To me, it’s never clear what it is they’re so keen for us to hold on to. Or why we should.

In a small-scale society without prisons and without material wealth, incarceration or fining weren’t available as penalties for law-breaking. Physical punishments such as wounding by spear, beatings or death were the only ones available. Once the punishment had been carried out, conflict could be resolved and everyone could carry on with life. With no defence services or police, everybody, male and female, was trained to fight to defend themselves and their families when called upon. Communities haven’t fully shed these ancient practices.

But they don’t work in a complex, modern society, especially one suffering from high levels of alcohol and drug abuse; a world where we have all of these old traditions plus internet connection to the world, pornography and poker machines — new things that can kill, none of which existed when our culture and laws were formed.

This is the point at which traditional culture and the modern world collide to tear each other apart. My peaceful childhood days in the bush were a stark contrast to town, where members of my family lived in town camps. There, alcohol-fuelled violence took a stranglehold on their lives. I watched as my uncles, whom I loved dearly — men who loved their families — became addicted to grog because they no longer knew where they stood in society. I’ve witnessed alcohol-fuelled rage from men and women towards each other and inflicted on themselves. The principles of traditional and modern economies also clash.

Traditionally we couldn’t preserve or transport food in a harsh climate. Food had to be consumed immediately and shared with those present; and it could be demanded. That was the only way we could survive. But the only things my ancestors possessed that could be shared were food, water and firewood. The principle of demand-share cannot coexist with money, with the need to save, invest and budget. It cannot coexist with addiction. Now, in the cash economy, demand-share and immediate consumption applied to money, clothing, vehicles and houses cause poverty. You can’t say no to kin. They have unrestricted access to your income and all of your assets under the old rules. Some kin will be addicted to alcohol, drugs and gambling.

The addicted are allowed, under the rules of traditional culture, to demand their kin fund their addiction. It is the single biggest barrier to beneficial participation in the modern economy. If you are obliged to give, with no questions asked, you can’t budget, you can’t save, you can’t invest. It strips away your incentive to work. I have had to live with this and cope with it all of my life. Sharing reinforces kin relationships and the status of the sharer.

Men have higher status than women and are less obliged than women to share. This system further subjugates women. To avoid the pain of saying no, my mother insists her white husband won’t let her share. My father is happy to take on this role and use the “male privilege” given him by his wife’s culture to protect his Aboriginal loved ones from poverty.

These problematic attitudes and practices I’ve described did not arrive on the Australian continent with white people in 1788. They are millennia old and fundamentally rooted in a deeply patriarchal culture.

James Massing is a senior minister in the Sarawak state government in Malaysia. His people are the indigenous Iban. His greatgrandfather was a headhunter. He has a simple message for other indigenous peoples: “If you don’t adapt, you die.” He knows the traditional culture of his people and speaks their language. He has a PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University. He no longer hunts human heads. He has kept the best of the old ways, and taken the best of what the world has to offer now, to lead his people out of poverty and marginalisation. He knows how his people must adapt to survive.

Recently I was helping my 33-year-old niece to cope with endstage renal failure and her 11-yearold daughter to attend to an ongoing battle with rheumatic fever; we have the highest rates in the world. Their mother and grandmother, my sister-in-law, is in her 40s. She walks with a limp and has permanent damage to her sight and hearing resulting from assaults by Aboriginal male partners and a Warlpiri man who bashed her in the head with a rock because she had no grog or cigarettes to give him. Not long before that I helped ambulance and police officers to place the body of my aunt in a body bag. She had died of a massive heart attack following a drinking binge. She was one of my favourites. Not long before that I identified the body of my young cousin killed in a car crash caused by alcohol abuse. None of these, my female loved ones, had the English skills, confidence or competence to deal with the wider world effectively when crises hit. They all spoke their traditional languages. They were all traditional owners under the Land Rights Act. They knew their Jukurrpa and could name the sacred sites in their country. The old rules of traditional culture simply do not give them, the most marginalised of our communities, the tools they need to deal with contemporary problems and challenges; challenges that the old ones, elders past, couldn’t have imagined.

Massing is correct. We need to adapt to survive and we can do it our way. I have spoken of the need for cultural reform. I have called on Aboriginal people to question long-held beliefs, to challenge that which contributes to violence in our culture and to hold ourselves to account for the part our culture and attitudes play in our communities’ problems. Just as European women have challenged the treatment of women in their cultures to bring about change, I am doing the same in mine.

My message is too much for many people to hear. When I or others relate stories like the ones I’ve told here, we attract labels like “coconut” and “sell out”, and obscene, misogynist, violent abuse. If white people do so, of course, the label is “racist”, “assimilationist” and “white supremacist”. Truth can be threatening and offensive. Truth can be too much for some. Aboriginal women and children are Australian citizens and they must be able to make the same choices as other citizens. Aboriginal activists campaigned for decades for my people to have the full rights of citizens. Now we have them. We also won the responsibilities of citizenship. They can’t be separated. If Australian citizens are in danger of abuse and neglect, they deserve to be protected, not on the basis of their culture but on the basis of their human rights. We cannot sacrifice their lives on the altar of culture.

Thirty per cent of us in the Northern Territory are of indigenous descent. We are determined to hold on to the best of traditional values. We need to let go of the ones that no longer work. My kinsmen, who suffer through these crises, haven’t been taught the best of Western, indeed world, culture to help them cope with the problems whitefellas have brought to us. Many haven’t even been taught to speak, read or write the national language. Our traditional culture simply doesn’t provide all the tools they need for a modern world.

The West has progressed so far because constructive criticism is embraced. Progress cannot be made if long-held beliefs cannot be challenged or if we cannot be honest. My people are intelligent, pragmatic and resilient. We’re not delicate or weak but clever, funny and strong, like our language.

And just as our language has adapted to a new world, I have faith our culture can be adapted and improved. And it will still be our culture.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is a Warlpiri-Celtic woman from central Australia. She is a fierce campaigner for the rights of Aboriginal women and children
against family violence, an elected member on Alice Springs Town
Council and a cross-cultural educator. This is an edited extract from the December issue of Meanjin, out on Monday.
In traditional communities in the Northern Territory, the patriarchal and kin-based society is so deeply embedded it’s common for female relatives of even violent offenders to support them against the victim

Post WW1

Great War’s shockwave resounded through the decades

GEOFFREY BLAINEY

Starvation, poverty and yet further fighting darkened the world despite the hopes of many

They called it the Great War and hoped it had changed the world. But the world was not so easily hammered into a new shape or infused with a new spirit.

On the day when the war officially ended — the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 — the news sped to Australia along the Pacific Ocean cable. Melbourne, then the nation’s capital, received the message that Monday evening at 7.20.

There were no radio stations and most homes lacked a telephone, but the news item — initially pasted on the outside walls of the newspaper offices spread like magic. That night the cheering crowds eventually filled the main streets of every big city. Many other families stayed at home. Having lost a son or father, brother or uncle, they wondered whether it was an occasion for celebrating.

Next day, in the federal parliament, “Willy” Watt as acting prime minister honoured the more than 60,000 men who had died and then turned to the nation’s women. He wished to pay “in feeble words, a special tribute to their courage, fortitude, and self-sacrifice”. There was widespread pride in how the nation had performed.

Most members of the huge Australian army were still overseas, in France and Belgium and Palestine. Ships had to be found to bring them home but the wartime loss of shipping even in neutral nations had been enormous. General Sir John Monash, moving from the quiet battlefields to London, skilfully organised the homewards voyage for 160,000 soldiers He himself did not step ashore in his home city of Melbourne until nearly 14 months after the war had ended. Perhaps nobody in the nation was more respected.

For a time it was called the war to end war. Watt assured his parliament that Australia “for many a generation will remain a safer and a happier place to live in”. In various nations, a host of people joined peace movements or thought of joining them. When the League of Nations (forerunner of the UN) was formed in 1920, with Australia as an inaugural member, the faith was widespread that it would prevent or limit future wars.

Eventually a sobering fact became clear. The peace movement, dynamic in England but pitifully weak in Hitler’s Germany, unwittingly increased the likelihood of a second world war. In the crucial years of the 1930s, it inhibited Britain from rearming quickly at a time when Britain ought to have rearmed to confront a militant Nazi Germany.

Even the armistice of 1918 had no peaceful effects on many lands, especially during the following three years. There was fighting — virtually a civil war — in Ireland. International and civil wars broke out in Russia. Finland and Poland each fought the Russians, and the Bolsheviks and the White Russians fought each other. A small British army was shipped to the shores of the White Sea in northwest Russia. One of its soldiers was Arthur Sullivan, a shy bank clerk who, enlisting in South Australia in 1918, arrived in Europe too late to serve in the war. In the following year, fighting the Russians in a swamp near Archangel, he was awarded the Victoria Cross for an act of remarkable bravery while facing the enemy’s intense firepower.

In eastern Europe the Polish army fought the Czechs, and Romanians fought Hungarians. On the Baltic shores, little Latvia declared war on Germany. Greeks fought Turks in a deadly war in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and in 1922 our prime minister Billy Hughes was invited — and was tempted — to send troops from Australia to intervene in that war. One year later, Italian forces, now under Mussolini’s command, bombarded and briefly occupied the Greek Island of Corfu.

In East Asia, violence erupted in the region where the Japanese and the Russian spheres of influence collided. In March 1920 came a Bolshevik campaign of terror and torture along the River Amur. In one small Russian city, more than 700 Japanese residents were killed, the women and children too. Even the Japanese consul and his family were tortured and killed. Japan responded by dispatching troops here and there.

To many citizens of the world, these were disturbing events. But they were thought to be minor compared with the ultimate fate of the defeated Germany. If Germany could be permanently tamed, perhaps Great Wars would be no more.

It was impossible to foresee in 1918 that the armistice would be followed, 21 years later, by an even longer and deadlier war. Initially the victors, especially France and Britain, were determined to keep Germany in a state of military weakness. They soon disarmed Germany, disbanded nearly all its army, sunk its submarines and confiscated its mightiest war ships.

They took away all its colonies, including German New Guinea, which Australia claimed. They redrew Germany’s home boundaries so that its area was smaller, its population and its resources fewer. Such a series of penalties, such punishments, surely would keep Germany from ever again becoming a military threat.

How then did Germany rearm? It is now widely contended that the peace treaty imposed on Germany at the Versailles peace conference in 1919 was too harsh, thus provoking it to seize the chance to rearm and eventually retaliate.

In fact, the Treaty of Versailles had punished Germany no more harshly than the Germans had punished the defeated Russia in 1917-18. And the Allies’ punishment of Germany at the end of World War II was even harsher than that imposed after the previous war. The humiliation imposed by the Allies in 1945, after the death of Hitler, actually kept the peace decade after decade.

The immediate aftermath of war was spiced with reassuring sights that daily life in Australia would soon become normal.

But there were occasional shocks. The economy still suffered from inflation. Between 1914 and 1919 prices doubled, but people’s wages and salaries lagged far behind. Even while the great battles had raged in France, economic unrest stoked industrial troubles on the Australian coalfields, railways and wharves. In 1919, yet again, more days were lost through strikes than in any previous year. In 1920 in Western Australia a teachers’ strike disrupted family life. In Broken Hill, the miners were already engaged in a strike that lasted for a year and a half: they were called “the spuds and onion days”.

The far outback suffered heavily, because many of its biggest employers — the goldmines — had to close. The price of gold did not change during the war but the cost of mining soared. Nearly all gold towns erected a war memorial but most families whose surnames were inscribed had left the district. In the typical city, the unemployment rate was as high in the 10 years after the war than in the 10 years before.

Meanwhile, an epidemic arrived by sea. Called the Spanish flu, though perhaps a product of US military camps and deplorable conditions on the European battlefields, it created near-panic as it spread across the globe. In February 1919 the premier of NSW issued an order closing churches. He banned race meetings and shut down cinemas, libraries, auction rooms and other places where crowds might assemble.

The malady infected the ablebodied more than the old. In all, 12,000 Australians died: that was more lives than Gallipoli had snatched away.

Many of the illnesses of wartime were not initially acknowledged. Tens of thousands of returned Australians suffered from trauma. Only in the past 20 years have historians detected how numerous were those who suffered from what was called “shell shock”. When the most popular of generals, “Pompey” Elliott, died in 1931, the news that he had committed suicide was at first hidden from a public that so respected or admired him. Mental illnesses, caused by the stress of war, were not yet socially acceptable. Few doctors were capable of handling them.

It seems likely that far more soldiers were wounded physically rather than mentally. Of the 333,000 Australians who served overseas in the war, half were wounded in action or gassed. Caring for the wounded, the widows, and the orphans called for a massive increase in the postwar federal budgets.

Another uncountable loss was in talent, wasted talent. So many of those Australians who were killed in action or died prematurely in the following decade showed qualities of leadership. They would have been prime ministers, premiers, judges, leaders of the trade unions and churches, university professors and the principals of schools, poets and musicians, goahead farmers and pastoralists, surgeons and scientists, and the pacesetters in many professions and trades.

For more than a century, Australia had been a man’s land; within the adult population the women were far out-numbered. Then came World War I and the departure of an army of men for overseas war zones. For the first time since the arrival of the First Fleet, this country held more females than males. Even after the war, the scarcity of young men prevailed. In the 20s, the unmarried young woman became a reminder of the war.

After the armistice came a collision of ideas and political movements. Russia’s victorious Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 — itself one effect of the war — preached radical ideas in Australian workplaces. In 1920, the newborn local Communist Party called for the overthrow of parliaments, the police forces, army and navy.

In the following 20 years, farleft ideas gained a toehold in universities and creative writers’ groups and in some Protestant pulpits. They won a strong foothold in the trade union movement. They created divisions in the Labor Party, already divided.

The traditional tensions between Catholics and Protestants were temporarily heightened by World War I and the accompanying insurrection in Ireland.

In 1916, the thorny question of whether Australia should compel young men to fight a war in Europe began to split the Labor Party. The articulate Catholic orator, Bishop Daniel Mannix, fresh from Ireland, became the most ardent opponent of conscription. Not perhaps since the 1850s had an Australian political figure — one holding no seat in parliament — so shaped and sharpened a major public debate.

The Australian people, by a narrow majority, twice voted against their government’s proposal to conscript and compel fit men to join their fellow countrymen at the battlefields. So enormous were the number of casualties on the Western Front that Britain and New Zealand were already conscripting soldiers, but Australia refused. The refusal became part of the long-term policy of the Labor Party.

The prime minister who declared war on Mannix was Hughes, a Sydney Protestant of Welsh ancestry. As Labor’s leader he became prime minister in 1915, ardently supported the war against Germany, and believed that Australia should — come what may — send more soldiers to France in the dark days of the following year. He aroused such fierce opposition that he had to leave the Labor Party.

A wily politician, Hughes remained prime minister, thanks to the support he now received from his former non-Labor opponents. At the peace conferences in France in 1919 he made his international name, appearing as the outspoken leader from Australia and the scorner of US president Woodrow Wilson.

He, more than any other leader within the British Empire, predicted Japan would become a first-rate military power and a special danger to Australia.

An astonishing episode in 1920 was the expulsion from the federal parliament of Irish-born Hugh Mahon. An ally of Mannix, Mahon was a longstanding Labor politician from the West Australian goldfields.

Addressing a Melbourne outdoors rally in favour of independence for Ireland, he expressed the fervent wish that “the foundations of this bloody and accursed British Empire would be rocked — if God dispensed true justice”.

As a result of his rather wild and anti-British outburst he was not simply suspended from parliament but expelled, by 34 votes to

17. His seat in parliament was declared to be vacant.

The Mahon episode — ironically it was debated on Armistice Day, 1920 — was a sign of a troubled nation. Surely parliament justifies its existence partly because it serves as a vital channel for discontent. To block that channel worried many loyal citizens. After the Hughes Split, the Labor Party became more a Catholic party. In the following half-century, Labor did not often win office. In that period it produced only three prime ministers — James Scullin, John Curtin and Ben Chifley — each of whom was reared in Catholic families of Irish descent.

Perhaps we now have a tendency to exaggerate religious rivalries and tensions in old-time Australia. There it was much easier than in modern Britain and in the US for a Catholic to attain high office. While it has long been the custom to view the wartime debates and divisions that centred on conscription as primarily Protestant versus Catholic, these debates also reflected clashing viewpoints that existed inside every church.

A large and influential minority of Australians of that era acquired a distaste for war. In the next war they hoped their nation would be neutral, not taking into account that it could be neutral only if the potential enemy gave its consent. Japan in 1941 was to give no such consent.

In some ways World War I seriously hurt Australia. But that war would have been more devastating if we, like France and Belgium, Russia and Turkey and Romania, had been invaded by a foreign army. We were saved partly by our isolation, a factor that was to work against us in World War II.

We would have suffered even more severely if our sea lanes had been endangered often by enemy cruisers and submarines. Most of the European nations suffered from a shortage of food as the war went on. Even bread was rationed in many European countries. On Armistice Day in 1918, millions of Germans were close to starvation. Indeed, their nation surrendered partly because civilian morale was collapsing. Here, in contrast, there was no shortage of food.

Australia gained enormously because it was on the winning side. It is curious that the word armistice, with its peaceful connotations, can dominate our memory of the war. As a nation, we too often forget that we were victorious. Anzac Day is the nation’s abiding and commanding memory of World War I, and because Gallipoli is widely but mistakenly viewed as a disastrous defeat, we forget that the war as whole ended in a decisive victory. Most people who had a part in that victory were proud of their country, vowing it was the best in a turbulent world.

What would have happened if Australia was on the losing side?

If Germany had won the war decisively, it would have imposed a harsh peace treaty on Britain, France, Australia and other defeated nations. Germany would have demanded a huge sum in reparations, and Australia would have been a payer. Germany if victorious would have sunk or taken over the British navy and, of course, the small Australian navy. It probably would have confiscated most of the British cargo fleet, which was still the largest in the world.

Berlin, if victorious, certainly would have reclaimed German New Guinea, which had been captured by Australia in 1914. It might have annexed Papua, too, and occupied Thursday Island, thus giving it control of Torres Strait. It is likely that German banks, shipping lines and manufacturers would have acquired a leading role in our commerce.

In May 1917, when Germany’s leaders were still confident of winning the war, Kaiser Wilhelm II set down his own wish list. He would demand the vital British island of Malta in the Mediterranean; he sought Madeira and other islands in the North Atlantic as German naval bases; and he resolved that the Belgian Congo and French West Africa would become German possessions. And many strategic resources, he insisted, should be under Germany’s direct or indirect control, including Australia’s wool and Russia’s manganese.

Armistice Day is certainly a celebration of peace. It is also a celebration of victory and of all those Australians, who through bravery and determination, gave us that victory.

Geoffrey Blainey’s latest work is

The Story of Australia’s People, in two volumes

.

Demise of the conservatives

Conservatives world over lose winning culture

GREG SHERIDAN
FOREIGN EDITOR

Trump’s mid-term success obscures right-wing losses
What do the US mid-term elections tell us about the future of conservative politics, and the conservative cultural movement, in the US, in Britain, in Australia and in the West generally? They actually tell us a great deal, and mostly it’s pretty bad news.

But first, make no mistake. These results were a good outcome for Donald Trump. Elected by the mechanics of the electoral college with three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016, and relentlessly attacked and vilified by everyone but conservatives ever since, Trump proved that he is neither an aberration nor an illegitimate president.

This election definitively disproves the idea that an overwhelming majority of Americans bitterly oppose Trump and all his works, and that those who did vote for him are suffering grave buyer’s remorse. Trump nationalised the elections as far as possible, made himself the centre of the debate and held Republican losses in the House of Representatives to well within the normal mid-term setback for the party in office.

Much more spectacularly, he gained several Senate seats. When there is a big anti-incumbency vote the party in power typically loses Senate seats. All of this reflects Trump’s tactical agility and effective aggression. It also reflects the fact the Republicans, much more than the Liberals in Australia or the Conservatives in Britain, are very good at the technical side of electoral politics. They get out their votes, they raise money, they leave as little as possible to chance.

But let’s try to take a couple of steps back. Trump’s tactical effectiveness and the Republicans’ technical virtuosity together tend to conceal the fact that, overall, the conservatives are losing in America and across the West.

Here is a central reality. Politics is downstream of culture. The West’s political crisis of today reflects and is caused by the antecedent cultural crisis. Whether you call them the culture wars or something else, conservatives are broadly losing the arguments about the meaning of life, the purpose of society, the manner of politics and the nature of the good life. As they lose the culture, they will surely in time lose the politics.

That doesn’t mean the Left will be forever triumphant. I have often quoted the insight of Ross Douthat: if you don’t like the religious Right, wait until you meet the non-religious Right. The sterility of the contemporary Left’s view of the human condition will lead to reaction. But that reaction may not come in the civilised tones of a Robert Menzies or a John Howard. It may have about it the tone of voice of an angry mob. It will be anger untempered by grace. It is most likely to be ultranationalist.

It is a grave mistake to demonise Trump, but there are traces of all this in Trump.

The old and previously enduring consensus of modern liberalism has broken down. On the Left it has been replaced by the febrile and insane, and ultimately destructive, doctrines of postmodernism. On the Right it is challenged by a pre-modern outlook, some of which is a retreat to tradition, some of which is an ugly indulgence of anger and an answer of minority identity politics with white identity politics.

How, specifically, do the US mid-term elections bear on this? The turnout was unusually high at 47 per cent, or about 110 million voters. In the Senate, perhaps 12 million more people voted for Democrats than for Republicans. Each state has an equal number of senators — two. So Wyoming, with fewer than 600,000, people has two senators — just like California, with 40 million people.

Rural people are more conservative than city people, so the Republicans get a lot more senators. Similarly, Democrats were defending many more “safe” Senate seats than were Republicans, so naturally their vote was higher.

However, in the House of Representatives, all 435 districts were up for election. Democrats won the popular vote by more than 7 per cent, or nearly eight million votes. Although a direct comparison is not strictly possible, to put it in its nearest Australian terms, that would mean a two-party-preferred vote for the Democrats of 53.5 per cent against 46.5 per cent for the Republicans. In Australia, this would produce a landslide for the Democrats.

The reason it doesn’t in the US is because state legislatures control federal congressional districts and fiercely gerrymander them. But in time this gerrymander will work its way out of the system.

Politics is downstream of culture. The West’s political crisis of today reflects and is caused by the antecedent cultural crisis

Australia, like the US and many Western societies, used to have a pro-rural gerrymander in its electoral system. This meant that conservatives were falsely reassured that they still had strong majority support while they had in fact lost it. In 1972 Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party won only eight seats from the Liberal-National coalition of Billy McMahon to secure a majority of 67 to 58, even though Whitlam’s Labor won 52.7 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, a result that today would give a government a landslide.

Once British Conservatives enjoyed a similar advantage. Modern politics is wiping those old pro-rural and pro-conservative gerrymanders out of the system everywhere. Although the US Senate, like the Australian Senate, will always have a bias for small states, in time the Democratic voter majority will yield Democratic election victories.

Trump remains entirely competitive for the next presidential election in 2020, especially if the Democrats choose a left-wing candidate, but three critical midwest states that Trump won narrowly in 2016, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all went decisively Democrat. He could not possibly win re-election without those states.

Moreover, culturally as well as politically, the Republicans dominate only one big state, Texas. They narrowly won Florida but it’s always lineball. California and New York are profoundly and pervasively Democrat. So is Illinois mostly. These long-term trends are very difficult for Republicans.

In Australia, the conservative government of Scott Morrison is by no means defeated and will certainly fight hard, but in truth it probably has a 15 to 20 per cent chance of re-election. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the most leftwing Labour leader in modern British history, with a long record of supporting communists and terrorists, stands on the brink of government, supported by an even more left-wing party in the Scottish Nationalists, whose chief mission is to tear apart the United Kingdom.

A decent, conservative woman, Theresa May, daughter of the manse, devoutly Anglo-Catholic, the picture of modest personal behaviour and irreproachable decency in her own life, is a dead woman walking, who at last year’s election transformed a safe majority government into a minority government forever teetering on the edge of the abyss.

Why are conservatives losing the big arguments in the West?

There are structural and strategic reasons, and tactical reasons. Consider a few.

All over the West, the Left is dedicated and systematic in capturing institutions. This is especially evident in big universities. Conservative academics have been all but cleaned out of humanities departments in mainstream universities. In Australia we have a Monty Python satire situation in which the Ramsay Foundation cannot give away tens of millions of dollars to a public university to teach a degree in Western civilisation, because Western civilisation in the Western academy is considered to be a synonym for genocide, rape, torture, sexism, colonialism, imperialism and all the rest.

At Oxford University last year, the student body at Balliol College banned the Christian Union from participating in “freshers’ fair” because this might threaten, intimidate or “harm” students, because Christianity is associated with Western civilisation, and Western civilisation is synonymous with genocide, rape, torture, etc.

The madness of the modern Left is truly breathtaking and completely beyond parody. For may years it has been left-wing dogma that children are not harmed by divorce, that pornography does not lead to sexual crime, that violence on film and television and social media does not lead to imitative violence in the real world. And yet at the same time the Left holds that a Christian Union stall would be intimidating to freshers and that the study of Shakespeare’s Othello needs trigger warnings because of the treatment of characters of colour.

But while it is easy to lampoon this madness, conservatives have found it impossible to counter it effectively.

The US is better at the creation of conservative culture than Britain or Australia, partly because it is much more dynamic about creating new institutions. So there are many liberal arts colleges in the US that focus on the great books of Western civilisation. There is just one in Australia, Campion College, although there are a number of Protestant Bible colleges and the like in the process of transforming themselves into general higher education institutions. They don’t have the scale to challenge the Left’s cultural hegemony but they will keep the torch burning. Only in the US do such initiatives operate at scale.

Then there is the sheer technical and political incompetence of much of conservative politics. Conservatives don’t believe in identity politics and they don’t believe in quotas. This is because they have a profound, doctrinal and sound belief in the universalist principles of citizenship and indeed of humanity. Conservatives do, however, believe in diversity. But they are not very good — in fact they’re bloody awful — at practising diversity.

It was perhaps the worst mistake of the Abbott government to begin its first cabinet with one female minister. Those forces who tried valiantly to reform the offensive provisions of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act were incompetent fools not to find, recruit and prioritise champions of this reform of Chinese and Indian and other minority backgrounds. This is the merest common sense.

Throughout Britain, the US and Australia conservatives are riven over immigration. In truth, immigration is a wholly conservative policy. Run properly, it builds up the nation, it develops the economy, it lifts living standards, it enhances national security and it gives life and meaning to the universalism at the heart of all decent conservatism.

But all conservatives are rightly opposed to illegal immigration. That is a popular position, even with most immigrants. But conservatives are often so clumsy in their arguments, and sometimes tacitly want the support of the genuinely prejudiced, that they seem often to be arguing against people on the basis of their ethnicity. Trump is particularly prone to this, even though opposing illegal immigration is sound in principle and an electoral winner.

However, this issue can provide false hope. A Republican governor of California in the 1990s, Pete Wilson, won one election by opposing Hispanic immigration. He mobilised white voters against Hispanic immigration. But he also convinced Hispanics that the Republican Party was their enemy and after he left office Republicans have never recovered in California.

Good political leadership, of course, can affect culture, both by encouraging institutions and by shaping debate.

The frightening lure of white nationalism that remains only a small minority of Trump’s support is inherently wrong in principle, against conservatism and extremely dangerous for conservatives. Because older folks are much more conservative than younger folks, winning tactical victories by appealing to mass wisdom against popular foolishness may work for a time but does not build a long-term movement.

But the real elephant in the room of conservative defeat is the decline of religious belief. Britain is already a majority atheist nation. Only 15 per cent of Brits identify as Anglicans. Only 3 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds identify as Anglicans.

In the US, religious belief is stronger but in similar decline. In 2007, 78 per cent of Americans described themselves as Christians, while 16 per cent said they had no religious belief. Seven years later, 23 per cent had no religious belief and 70 per cent said they were Christians, a radical decline off a large base.

In Australia, in 2006, 64 per cent were Christian and 19 per cent had no belief. A decade later, only 52 per cent were Christian and 30 per cent had no religious belief.

In all three societies, it is the older cohorts who believe. Younger cohorts have a majority of nonbelievers and they are not acquiring belief as they age.

Here is a bitter truth. In the end you cannot sustain a conservative culture in the face of the collapse of transcendent belief.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of signs of hope. The best strategic approach is the Irish one: situation desperate, advance on all fronts.

Conservatives believe in diversity. But they are not very good at practising diversity

The demise of Men

THEY ARE OUT TO SHEAR AWAY MASCULINITY

DIMITRI GONIS

Years ago they used a knife, now they neuter boys with language
The castrati were boys deprived of their masculinity in the name of a sublime, sonic effeminacy so that others could celebrate the higher registers of culture. Eunuchs also were castrated before they reached puberty so that they became more submissive and servile to their masters. In both cases, the mutilation of manhood drastically reduced their testosterone levels, with boys developing highpitched voices and more effeminate characteristics.

The literal castration of boys may be a practice of bygone eras, but psycho-cultural castration is very real and happening throughout the Western world.

Today’s boys are being psychologically and culturally neutered in the early stages of their cognitive and affective development through a subliminal conditioning aimed at the gradual rejection of their masculinity to ensure their development along the lines of fluid identities.

Gone are the days of “man” and “woman”, “strong” and “weak”. Introducing our children to this fluidity is a crime against their humanity, in that it is deliberately engineering their personalities, sense of gender, even sex. A sinister agenda driven by political correctness and rabid misandry.

Throughout the Western world children are being inoculated against the inherent “toxicity” of masculinity. They are taught that it is an evil social construct, and part of a trans-historical male despotism; that it has long been the source of injustice for billions of society’s more vulnerable.

The unspoken aim of this “humanism” is to reduce masculinity to an ailment that must be cured via collective psycho-cultural emasculation. This involves nipping it in the bud before boys discover the advantages of their testosterone, and by altering their reality. This means changing the cultural grammar required to articulate their existential predicaments — thus transforming them into passive acolytes of the new, effeminised vision of humankind; a place where the primal brutishness of males has been subdued and everyone is judged on their merit, on a level playing field.

The truth is that nothing in the entire history of the world has ever been fought on a level playing field due to our inherent differences. Of course, there will always be those who are offended by such premises. Their offence, however, cannot erase the manner in which nature selects to distribute its gifts, and the fact it does so without caring about who may be offended.

What we have is a movement intent on resetting the natural laws/odds in the name of a utopian level playing field, where the unfair advantages of testosterone have been eliminated. To achieve this bizarre societal equilibrium half the players must be “castrated” so that there is no unfairness coming from those who have been endowed with much higher levels of androgen. One would never expect a rugby coach to select his players on the basis of human emotions rather than physical capacity. Yet men, today, are expected to reject their masculinity to avoid offending those who are always offended.

And since one cannot contend or reason with nature, then it must be circumvented by creating political, linguistic and psychological categories that rationalise its randomness and “unfairness” — which explain differences between male and female as misconceptions rather than a fact of nature. They claim there is no such thing as difference; each person is what he or she wants to be. For those men insulted, there is a solution — get used to it. Society must be refashioned so that it more equitably represents our modern needs and those whom toxic masculinity has marginalised and oppressed for so long.

Hence, we are all suddenly being ordered to accept that men and women are exactly the same when they are not. They are intrinsically different beings with different qualities, needs and perceptions of the world. Societies throughout history have been driven by the virility of masculinity and nurturing femininity.

Women are innately more nurturing. They are also, generally, better with children, the elderly and the infirm. Most do not aspire to become generals, CEOs or heads of state. They are also not interested in the man-hating mantra of those who have recently infected society with a venomous contempt that far exceeds the misogyny and chauvinism they have supposedly sought to combat. Yet their misandry somehow seems acceptable because of its “humanism”, which purports to dignify the vulnerable while reducing the domineering male to a state of helplessness, a pathetic groveller finally getting a taste of his own medicine.

Medicine is indeed needed for a being relegated to the margins of modern society, forced into roles that are not congruent with his essential nature. The diminution of masculinity and the skyrocketing suicide rates among men are directly related. That is not to say that men should remain on the couch and women in the kitchen. There is, however, an elephant in the room that everyone is ignoring: the blatant emasculation of 21st-century men.

Control language and you control everything. It is only a matter of time before punitive legislation

— aimed at facilitating the wholesale emasculation of our societies through the mandatory application of specific vocabulary and concepts — is introduced. Our social justice warriors may be celebrating their nomenclatorial victories, but they are relinquishing more than they know. The barbarism once inflicted on the castrati and on eunuchs continues in the name of an effeminised vision of humanity. It’s no surprise that male testosterone levels are diving at an unprecedented rate
— everything is against them. Most of what maleness once found expression in is slowly vanishing. The one-time hunter has lost his hunting ground, the warrior his battleground, the lover his virility, the husband his purpose.
Dimitri Gonis is a Melbournebased writer.
The truth is that nothing in the entire history of the world has ever been fought on a level playing field