From: Phil Shannon [Email him]

Two weeks ago, during a match between Australia’s two most fanatical rugby league states (News South Wales and Queensland), at least four players, all of them Aboriginal, refused to sing the national anthem (Advance Australia Fair) because, they claim, the lyric portraying the nation as "young and free” disrespects 60,000 years of Aboriginal occupation prior to white settlement [NSW and Queensland players boycott Australian anthem, News.com.au, June 6, 2019] and that Aboriginal people are not and have never been “free”. Several players also chose not to sing the national anthem when the Australian Indigenous All Stars played the New Zealand Maori Kiwis earlier this year. Diversity-compliant politicians felt obligated to lend token in-principle support. 

Less ostentatious than their NFL counterparts “taking a knee” during the American national anthem, the Australian Blacks’ sullen protest was similar in the triumph of narcissistic grievance-mongering over facts such as that 60,000 years of Aboriginal presence in Australia had not elicited any freedom from illiteracy, scientific ignorance, cultural backwardness or truncated life expectancy. Nor that the white descendants of the Britons, Celts and others who settled Australia are also ancient peoples. Nor that the many, often warring, pre-settlement Aboriginal tribes had never formed a nation-state, a task which was left to the federation of the six British colonies to form an independent Australia in 1901. 

Outside of New South Wales and Queensland, hardly any Australians care about rugby league. As the rapid subsidence of this little eruption of Black identity politics indicates, they care even less about self-indulgent black sports stars guilt-tripping white Australians and disrespecting the nation which provides them with all the benefits of Western civilization, which rewards them with financial leg-ups for the virtue of being Indigenous (or just Indigenous-lite, as Steve Sailer wryly observes) and which exalts them with special, Indigenous–themed sporting events.

Phil Shannon is a veteran Australian working class socialist and, since 2016, a VDARE.com supporter. See earlier letters from him here.

James Fulford writes: A video from News.com.Au showed an Aboriginal rapper saying that Aborigines were the "most incarcerated people on earth", with a screenshot of a Vice.com story saying that. It's not something I'd boast about, if it were me, because I know that it's the result of an Aboriginal crime rate that, as Lance Welton put it, makes African Americans look like a Model Minority