Art, Politics, Culture, Values, STatues

Some people will forewarn you that art and politics don’t mix, and to stay out of politics if you can help it.

Well I went into it anyway, mixed the two worlds up and have come out the other side. I was a Libertarian political activist with a solid civic-nationalist bent.

My increasing sense is that art and culture is to some degree always political, in that it will reflect the values that may either be in support or in opposition to the prevailing regime, and even if all you want to do is paint flowers then you will express some value-set in some way.

Here in Victoria, and more generally Australia, we have had a prevailing leftist cultural regime for my entire life. It manifests as post-modernism, cultural self-loathing and sinophilia.

You can try and ignore it and look away, but it will chase you wherever you go. It will be the ads you see, the products you buy, the news reports, the customers you serve, the entertainment you are allowed to consume, where you get to live, how much money you are allowed to make, how successful you are permitted to be.

As it happens, this alliance between the modern left and the Chinese has conspired to damage and harm me as much as possible, and obstruct my pathway through life. They’ve done it through lies, imperialism and arrogance. In fact I distinctly recall being rejected for a student share-flat in Melbourne Australia because I wasn’t Chinese (“the Chinese woman was nodding and smiling and saying “No Chinee, (you) No Chinee”

Even if you go to art school, and try to enter a world of self-absorbed detachment from the political agendas of the day, they’ll still shove it down your throat. Even if you listen to a radio station with an explicit non-political charter it supposedly pledges to abide by, it will still seep its way in. Even if you just drive to work in silence, the ads will still be on the billboards. This is what the culture war is.

Today I saw an ad for a Frida Khalo biopic. I’ve got nothing wrong against Frida Khalo as a person, or her work, but it’s never been of great interest to me. But it’s been marketed very heavily. Without even needing to look any further into it I already know the fundamental underlying premise: Straight white man bad. Right wing bad. Left wing good. That’s basically it. (Btw, I was planning to write an article about her husband Diego Rivera and Mexican murals sometime in the future).

I know this because of the sleekness of the marketing, the amount of money behind it, the look on the face of the lead actress, the fact that Khalo shunned feminine beauty standards, thus reinforcing leftist anti-fashipn and anti-beauty aesthetics.

Overnight I caught a story about an Indian festival in a central Melbourne park where paint was thrown on a statue of Australain War Hero Sir Edward Weary Dunlop. Whoever did it probably thought they were vandalising another white imperialist coloniser. But it’s very unlikely they’ll be caught so we won’t ever know if it was intentional or accidental. But even if it was accidental it shows a profound disregard from a very large migrant group toward the idols of the host society. Ironically, Dunlop has always been celebrated because he displayed humanitarian charity, not martial valour. He’s mainly famous for his work as a surgeon while being a Japanese POW. Another war-hero, John Simpson Kirkpatrick, was celebrated for being a battlefield stretcher-bearer (ie an ambulance) to help rescue wounded soldiers during the WW1 campaigns against the Ottoman Empire. Australia does not celebrate war in the way nations typically would.

Moreover, Australia wasn’t a colonizer, Australia was a colony. As Australia emerged as an independent nation in the 20th Century, it demonstrated a character that was really more about self-preservation and survival as a nation-state in a hostile part of the world than as an arrogant imperialist empire in its own right (unlike its northern neighbour, the loathsome Chinese). Australia has never celebrated glory on the battlefield, nor foreign conquest, nor even local slavery. Yet Australians still get guilted as though they did. This includes how it relates to the experience of Indigenous Australia, where the black-armband self-loathing view deliberately omits any tales of early humanitarianism towards Aboriginal Australians, lest it disempower the grievance industry and those who profit by it.

Much like how BLM activists assaulted the statue of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, an American revolutionary general and Polish patriot who opposed the slave trade, who refused to partake in it, who lobbied his friend Thomas Jefferson in letters to get rid of his slaves (to no avail) and who set aside money in his will to free slaves (which was never carried out), you get a sense that the narrative is more important than the truth. And that values and principles are irrelevant compared to power, conquest and revenge, which seems to be about greed and arrogance. Captain Cook is a similar case: his own diary records indicate that he was more complex than a simplistic colonizer along the lines of Cecil Rhodes. Cook expressed skepticism to many assumptions of European superiority and requested his crew deal with natives respectfully (which you have to accept for what it is: the potential for failings and misunderstandings abounded everywhere and ultimately cost him his life). You wonder what is the point of persisting with liberal democratic and humanitarian ideals, or even the quest for tolerance and understanding, when the figures who most embody those ideals and who are the historic foundation for those collective ideals are treated like garbage.

For anyone with a passing familiarity of 20th century history, it should come as no surprise that there is now a vibrant and highly-active reactionary neo-nazi scene in Australia. Action: meet consequences…. and no doubt, ill be accused of being a neo-nazi for even writing about this. I don’t care, just about anyone and everyone is looking for a reason to shut you up, exile you, put you in jail or kill you now. All I do is work, eat, sleep and stick to my own turf.

Weary Dunlop riding Simpsons Donkey in an assertive call for Australians to take more pride in their history and their intergalactic destiny.

I pre-emptively apologise if I offended anyone, take a ticket and get in line.