Friday, February 03, 2012

What is Charlie Teo's solution for Australia?

Charlie Teo, a leading neurosurgeon, gave the Australia Day speech this year. Teo was born in Australia to Singaporean Chinese parents. His speech caused a bit of controversy because it touched on issues of racism in Australia.

I recently saw a TV interview he did as a follow up. For the first four minutes things went much as I expected. Teo himself comes across in the interview as calm and well-spoken.

But then Teo claimed that assimilation went much better in America than Australia. The interviewer then asked "Why doesn't that happen here and what should we do?" What, in other words, is the solution to race issues in Australia?

Teo's reply hit me with some force:

If you go to New York you'll barely see a group of white Caucasians, whereas when you came here, 50 years ago, almost everyone was white and there was a very small minority group. I think things have changed in the last 50 years - the minority groups are almost the majority and I think people have to have a completely different mindset about that. You know the absolute typical Australian is no longer the white fella who's wearing a pair of boardies.

As I listened to this from a well-educated, thoughtful, Asian-Australian, I felt that I was being dehumanised. Teo, despite everything Australia has given him, looks to the future as one without white men like myself. He sees this melting away of whites as a positive development in New York and he wants the same here. And he said it not with venom, or as an emotional outburst, but casually, as if it could simply be assumed that white people did not count and that a world without white people would be better.

Which led me to another thought. It's possible, I think, that one of the reasons for the growth of a men's movement has been a similar sense amongst men of being dehumanised in modern society. Here is one example of such a view:

Men, argue McGill University professor Paul Nathanson and his colleague Katherine Young, suffer from the myth that they are the gender with the power and therefore cannot be damaged by criticism and ridicule. The physical, political and economic power that a small percentage of men do wield renders women, they believe, "either unwilling or unable to see men as fully human beings, people who can indeed be hurt both individually and collectively."

I think that helps to explain some of the sensitivities of the men's movement. For instance, many men's rights activists (MRAs) took the view in the case of the Italian liner that sank that men should not be expected to give up seats in the lifeboats for women. In particular, the argument was that women should not simply feel entitled as women that men should put themselves in harm's way for them.

My own view is that chivalry can be a higher part of a man's nature and so I'm less likely to attack it. But it does make sense, if you are reacting against dehumanisation, that you might kick back hard against the idea of male expendability.

Similarly, all this helps to explain why some MRAs pick on traditionalist critics of feminism. You would think that MRAs would identify feminism as the source of dehumanisation of men and focus their criticisms there. But often it is those traditionalists who are most opposed to feminism who get scrutinised negatively by MRAs.

Often, that's simply because many MRAs are liberals of some stripe who are taking the opportunity to marginalise conservatives in the movement. But I don't think that's always the case. Traditionalists see men as providers and protectors, and that can mean men making sacrifices for women. The danger is if traditionalists take the attitude that men should make those sacrifices regardless of circumstances.

There are some MRAs who are rightly critical of pastors who believe that men should be the fall guys, no matter what women have chosen to do. There are MRAs who are critical of conservative women who take it as a given, as an entitlement, that men will go on making sacrifices simply because they are men.

I'm not at all suggesting that traditionalists should give up on the idea of men as being protectors and providers. I do think that's significant in how men fulfil themselves as men. But we have to be aware that we are operating in a climate in which men are registering a sense of their dehumanisation. Such men will react negatively to anything that smacks of "men matter less" or "women get a free pass" or "women deserve benefits from men just for being women".

We need to be able to say clearly "no deal" when men are being asked to make one-sided arrangements with women, or when women are unwilling to contribute in a just and balanced way to relationships.

At the same time, we have to remind MRAs that it was clearly modernists, and not traditionalists, who brought about the changes to society which have dehumanised men. It was modernists who argued that men held an unearned privilege in society which had to be deconstructed. It was modernists who, seeing men as privileged, believed that all legislative efforts should be to the advantage of women.

MRAs might hear a conservative woman say "I want a man to go out to work for me" and react viscerally, but they should understand that what is added to this in a traditional arrangement is "and I will have his children, respect him as a husband and father, and work in a committed way as a mother and wife for our family".

Feminists might offer something blander "Men and women can do the same thing" and this might not hit the same MRA triggers, but behind this is the assumption that fathers are expendable within the family (no distinctly paternal role); that men won't get kudos as a breadwinner in the family; and that the aim is to deconstruct sex distinctions not to help men but because such distinctions are thought to uphold a male privilege which the state should deconstruct through legislation always favouring women over men.

23 comments:

  1. Excellent post.

    I feel sick at what Tao said, and kudos for relating it back to feminism. Both groups/ideologies want to destroy the white male.

    All I can say to all of the white men who read this blog...We're with you and we're going to beat these people and win.

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  2. "as if it could simply be assumed that white people did not count and that a world without white people would be better."

    But why have we allowed this to happen? What does this say about us? Why the enfeeblement?

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  3. If you go to New York you'll barely see a group of white Caucasians, whereas when you came here, 50 years ago, almost everyone was white and there was a very small minority group. I think things have changed in the last 50 years - the minority groups are almost the majority and I think people have to have a completely different mindset about that. You know the absolute typical Australian is no longer the white fella who's wearing a pair of boardies.

    If you go to Hong Kong you'll barely see a group of yellow Asians, whereas when you came here, 50 years ago, almost everyone was yellow and there was a very small minority group. I think things have changed in the last 50 years - the minority groups are almost the majority and I think people have to have a completely different mindset about that. You know the absolute typical Singaporean is no longer the yellow fella who's wearing a coolie's hat.

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  4. Teo's comments are infuriating and constitute a slap in the face to this country's historic white majority.

    Teo has the attitude of an invader. He wants to see white Australians marginalized and minoritized so that recently-arrived non-white immigrants like himself can feel more at home. While white Australians are expected to forgo their own group interests and be "race blind", non-white immigrants like Teo are free to openly champion their racial interests and push to see Australia transformed into a minority-white country.

    It just show that such people do not come to this country to become like us but instead replace us.

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  5. Charlie Teo was manifesting eliminationist anti-Whiteism, which is an increasingly common and dominant attitude.

    That we submit to the eliminationist agenda says things about us that are bad in a practical but not a moral sense. We're inclined to be fascinated by ideas, and we're inclined to trust, individualism and civilization. That makes us vulnerable to elites that we accept as "us" but that promote poisonous ideas, abuse our trust, exploit our individualism by playing as a team against individuals, and malform the basics of our civilization in very fundamental ways.

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  6. Thanks for the comments.

    First anon, your spirited response is part of any solution. Thanks for leading in this.

    Second anon, that's such a big question. The general answer is that the philosophy of the political class lacked any principle on which to uphold a distinct national existence.

    The right-wing of the political class believed in "progress via the individual in the market".

    Henry Bolte, for instance, was a long-serving premier here in Victoria (1955-1972). He was thought to be very right-wing. But he said that he was proud to be part of the "progressive Liberal Party" rather than "an old-fashioned conservative mob". He approved of open borders, seeing it as a policy of "attracting capital, in migrants and investment to Australia".

    There is little in such a market-based right-liberalism to foster the value of a communal identity and existence.

    The Australian left was once more open to the value of national feeling than it is today. But by the 1940s it had taken a sharp turn toward more radically internationalist politics.

    Left-liberals may not be so keen on free market solutions, but they have a vision of "equal freedom" in which the individual is unimpeded in his autonomous life choices by predetermined qualities like ethnicity or gender.

    So, far from valuing an older ethnic nationalism the modern left has seen it as a source of discrimination based on an illegitimate factor of race/ethnicity.

    For the past 50 years Australian politics has been contested between a left-liberalism and a right-liberalism, neither of which had any principled basis for defending Australians as a distinct people. Business and the commercial classes were a source of support for the right-liberals; the trade unions and much of the intellectual classs supported the left-liberals.

    There was nowhere for rank and file discontent to go. The white working-class did begin to break with the ALP, but their support then went to the Liberal Party which was not going to be much better.

    The media didn't help; the newspapers in particular were able to control what was thought to be acceptable popular opinion - and there was no outlet in the internet for alternative opinions back the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

    I'm not a fan of Noam Chomsky but I think he was right when he said of the way the system works:

    "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

    That's what the political class managed to do: they had passionate debate between left and right, but both left and right were limited to an "acceptably" liberal outlook.

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  7. As demonstrated in Warsaw Pact countries cleansed after the USSR instilled typical Marxist-Leninist political governments unto the populaces of Eastern Europe after WWII, the mindsets and agendas of the citizens were socially experimented - through means of State government influencing aural, visual and written media and destabalising the citizen through relinquishment of methods to rob his autonomic oppourtunity. The people were promised by lofty sales points of Leftism: "equality", "common good", "fairness". Collectivism is chasing a mirage.

    As comrade Vlad Lenin used to say, “The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.”

    So Charlie, around the time Thomas Raffles established Singapore for British East India Company, the ruling Malay populace were not first outwitted by only a few dozen Chinese - which drastically increased through few decades. Why should your 'solution' validate you more or less if Red China or Taiwan ever accepted waves of Europeans en masse?

    There's nothing about being a Leftist that requires anybody to develop an understanding of Human Nature. Marxists think "racism" is a behavioural genetic attitude they disagree with since the Lefties themselves embark on self-righteous ego trips if someone don't adhere to their cultural ideology brought onset by new redefinitions to liberate Western Civilisation which the Frankfurt School theorised. In all histories of 'racism', you'll not find 'racist theory' composed by such peoples documented in their points of view, but from non-Europeans critically deconstructive of anything past. It is a straw-man terminology invented by Marxist cultural theorists - who then proceed to attack the dissidents who 'practice it' as they oppose the multicultural utopia... merely the battle can be transformed to 'race' warfare; the evil is the Christian European of the ruling classes.

    Non-Europeans like Charlie are members of the Vanguard of Superior Virtue and Knowledge who 'sees' what other plebes cannot - condescendingly lambasts the 'ruling majority' - inflating his ego trip - whose non-Europeans have inealiable rights over the ruling class but chauvinism if claimed by a majority - but as “ethnic” pride if claimed by his people. Thus for this ideology, Australia is crippled by political correctness, nevertheless not like to the extent Leftists inflict in Western Europe and Scandinavia through media - big Leftist followings. Dissidents are in for a soft totalitarian politically correct tyranny, meaning that counterrevolutionaries against political bodies therefore government should punish you in accord with e.g. Racial Discrimination Act or Anti Discrimination Act 1977. They risk social exclusion or, at worst, by losing their job and income. Lefties disguise this through the diversion that there is no direct persecution by the state like in the Soviet bloc during the 'Cold War'. Dissidents are neither sentenced to forced labor nor committed to mental hospitals like they used to be in the Soviet Union... but they may face 'cultural training centres'. Leftists are such bottom-feeders.

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  8. "Teo has the attitude of an invader. He wants to see white Australians marginalized and minoritized so that recently-arrived non-white immigrants like himself can feel more at home."

    Charlie can't get off his stupid ego trip. Arrogant and presumptuous, the Leftists!

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  9. http://www.amazon.com/Making-Europe-People-Politics-Culture/dp/0618004793/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328328738&sr=1-4

    This is what we are dealing with.

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  10. Well the more the Charlie invaders spout this rhetoric the more European decent people will wake up.

    Who knows what the future holds, a recalibration could come sooner rather then later.

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  11. Striking post, Mark, thanks.

    I spent Christmas eve with my family this past year and Christmas day in downtown Chicago to help out some foreign volunteers with our church.

    I had never been to downtown Chicago before, and I'm not sure I'd go again. It was depressing. I barely saw a white face, and the few I did see were often foreign. Now I know that it was Christmas and most real American families were at home. Still, in an American city, no matter what time of year, you'd expect to see some Americans. And I didn't there. Mexicans (who are supposed to be be Christian ands therefore at home too, right?), Arabs, Chinese (tons), but hardly anyone like myself. I felt like I was the foreigner.

    And the Christmas day church service I went to was hardly better: there were only a few whites. Most were black, Chinese, Hispanic and other foreigners whose origin I didn't even try to determine.

    I suppose right liberal Christians would say that I should be happy to see so many Christians (and I am) and I should be indifferent that there were so few of my own people among them (but why?).

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  12. i am not sure how many of the regulars on this blog live in australia and how many live in the usa

    I have to say that as an american i find this window in to traditionalist australia to be very interesting

    here in the usa, different geographic places offer a different degree of traditionalism.

    At one end of the extreme, if an american wants to live an exceptionally deviant and non traditional lifestyle they can live in parts of San Francisco.

    At the other end, if an american wants to live in the most traditionalist way possible, South Utah offers plenty of counties that are made up entirely of "founding stock" or "colonial stock" americans who are religious, get married young and have large families.

    So in america traditionalists have a place to live, and extreme non traditionalists have another place to live.

    is there something similar in australia, are there cities or counties that an ultra traditionalist can move to in order to live the traditional way?

    I would also cite Orania as a place where some traditionalists move to.

    My point is there are enclaves of traditionalism in places other than australia but are there ones in australia ?

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  13. He sees this melting away of whites as a positive development in New York and he wants the same here.

    New York is a typical representation of a world class American city, but it doesn't represent the entire American country (for now that is).

    At the same time, we have to remind MRAs that it was clearly modernists, and not traditionalists, who brought about the changes to society which have dehumanised men. It was modernists who argued that men held an unearned privilege in society which had to be deconstructed. It was modernists who, seeing men as privileged, believed that all legislative efforts should be to the advantage of women.

    Some MRAs who go against traditional conservatives do so, not because they feel that traditional conservatives are in power and have brought the changes, but because their ideology restricts what MRAs believe. That is why some of them get all bonkers when sex distinctions, modesty, chastity, traditional marriage and whatnot is brought up and criticize people with views such as yourself more than feminists.

    They feel that this goes against their belief for autonomy and that it is oppressive. They want to have the same freedom that feminism provides and feel cut short that it hasn't been extended to them. To these men.

    A couple of MRAs are reactionary and want to move against the modern liberal order, but others simply want the male version of feminism. I think this split in their camp is about 50/50 but I may be wrong.

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  14. I propose a name for our opposition:
    The Genocide Side.

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  15. So in america traditionalists have a place to live, and extreme non traditionalists have another place to live.

    Interesting set of events.

    I myself have noticed the relative segregation that many American neighborhoods possess (e.g. Christians here, seculars there, traditional conservatives here, liberals there). In fact a noted liberal US academic, whose name escapes me now, has written about this and he expresses sorrow about this phenomenon.

    What are the probabilities that in the future that some US states will secede and form their own union?

    I can see it happen in America but not in other parts of the Western world like Europe. The biggest problem though is that the elite in America will never allow it. In most of the Western world there is an alliance between the high (e.g. academics, politicians) and the low (e.g. minorities, welfare recipients) as Steve Sailer put it (and Mencious Moldbug has also written something similar). In essence a parasite will do everything in its power to never leave its host.

    Possibly if cultural and spiritual change is to be brought on successfully it must attack both the high and the low (preferably simultaneously) but it must start with the high.

    Still it seems that we are stuck in something that will carry on until its destruction. We should try our best in fixing the ship here and there but remember that the ship is sinking and that we should focus on getting on as many life-boats as possible because the path may have to run its course.

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  16. My point is there are enclaves of traditionalism in places other than australia but are there ones in australia?

    Not really. There are places that have been less affected, so far, by immigration inflows. And there are places that are either more or less influenced by a trendy left-liberalism.

    But to assert something more traditional, something that might hold, you'd need a more formal way to assert your own values, say, a school or a church or local media or a local political branch or a youth group.

    As far as I know that doesn't really exist yet.

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  17. Some MRAs who go against traditional conservatives do so, not because they feel that traditional conservatives are in power and have brought the changes, but because their ideology restricts what MRAs believe. That is why some of them get all bonkers when sex distinctions, modesty, chastity, traditional marriage and whatnot is brought up

    That's definitely the case, and sometimes when you press them, such MRAs admit that they are radical leftists.

    But I do believe that there is a current within the men's movement which is running off a visceral reaction to a sense of being dehumanised.

    And that makes them acutely sensitive to anything which hints at male expendability, or of men being held to harsher standards than women, or of women feeling entitled to male sacrifice.

    And, unfair as it might be, because traditionalists do defend a male protector role and sex distinctions, the MRA radar can sometimes pick up more signals from us - again at a visceral level - than from the feminists who are actually doing the damage.

    That doesn't mean we just have to accept being unfairly targeted. It's a way of understanding that the visceral is what is pushing the men's movement in a particular direction.

    And there are ways for us to respond. The first way is to make it clear that we don't think that women deserve or can expect male commitments regardless of circumstances. Women have to do their bit to make those masculine commitments make sense both within a relationship and within society.

    We need to ask the question of what women are willing to bring to relationships. If women expect men to act in a strongly masculine way on their behalf, cannot men expect women to model attractively feminine qualities and roles in society?

    And if women expect men to commit to a provider role, then are women willing to make that role work, for instance, by not usurping that role within the family?

    The second thing we need to do is to counterstrike when it comes to appeals to the visceral.

    After all, the MGTOW (men going their own way) current in the men's movement doesn't offer what men at a visceral level seek.

    Most 25-year-old men do not want to be a childless bachelor hanging around younger men at nightclubs when they're 40.

    Traditionalists can offer a much better picture of life: of being loved and respected as a husband and father, of pride in supporting a family through one's work, of working to give your own tradition a future, of guiding your son to manhood, of having a feminine daughter to cherish and so on.

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  18. I myself have noticed the relative segregation that many American neighborhoods possess (e.g. Christians here, seculars there, traditional conservatives here, liberals there). In fact a noted liberal US academic, whose name escapes me now, has written about this and he expresses sorrow about this phenomenon.

    Perhaps you mean Robert Putnam?

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  19. Well if this is what's happening to Australia then its time for the white people to wake up. The days or partying, accumulation and righteous self criticism must come to an end.

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  20. This is the feeling that Mark Richardson is talking about: an Instapundit reader comments on the priority on breast cancer research, and Instapundit agrees:

    "But I am male, and I seem to recall that men die of cancer quite a lot more than women do (I’m not an expert on this subject, so I could be wrong about this.) It seems to me that there is a limited pie available for cancer research, and that quite a lot of that pie is already going to breast cancer research. I think that advocating that more dollars ought to go to breast cancer research _should_ be controversial. The message sent, otherwise, is that men are expendable. I don’t see big blue-ribbon prostate cancer campaigns all that often. Maybe it’s just that the prostate is not as sexy as the boob…."

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  21. As men are supposed to be tougher than women they don't need their feelings constantly massaged, or do they? As men have more nobility than women they shouldn't be encouraged to sit around all day and cry about their prostates, or should they? As men are the people that make everything work they shouldn't be encouraged to engage in idiotic selfishness, or maybe they should?

    A woman on a car sticker makes a crack about men and this is a war crime? Men do it and ...? What should happen if men make a crack about women? Please tell me what degree of emotional harm gets inflicted? Try not to sound like a leftie if you can.

    This "men's" movement seems to be for women who happen to be men. "Oh I'm so hard done by", "I'm a casualty on the treadmill etc etc". Its your society that is being hard done by right now, because of individual selfishness, and on this matter every man's priority should lie. We didn't get to be top of the heap, and yes Western Civilisation was and possibly still is top of the heap, by whining, individual selfishness and looking for an out.

    For everyone who says I'm using shaming language, you're gay. For everyone who just wants a hot piece of tail to do what they want and never question and will chuck in their concern for society if they don't immediately get it, you're a danger. Men are the only people who can lead a civilisation and conservatives are the only people who can do it effectively. I would expect better than this and would like to see some conservative values encouraged. Such as ... what are they again? Hard work, self discipline as well as general discipline, regard for the whole of community, resilience and an ability to overcome as well as an awareness of what we're all here on earth for, not just feeding our bellies and appetites.

    Unfortunately a self focused attitude is all too common among men, however, once you start going down that route you circle the drain and nothing is ever good enough. What got us into this mess again? Everyone doing what was immediately convenient for themselves without regard for the consequences.

    Yes many women hate men, yes women receive many benefits from the state men don't get, yes divorce favors women. Sympathy for this position, which is increasingly becoming well known, and not just because of the men's movement, shouldn't lead us down the road of endless self pity and female imitation whining, with the addition of a tough male edge of course.

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  22. @Jesse_7 said...
    Most men don't even know they have a prostate.
    We all know about breast cancer though.
    That's the problem.

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  23. Alright obviously its an important men's health issue and I'm sure every older man who's racing to the toilet knows about it.

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