Vilifying Australia

Also published in the September 2005 edition of Quadrant.

Windschuttle sayeth:

IOW, in the lefty view of the world, if "the people" support someone else's political nominees, it is the people, not their off-target lefty nomination that is "wrong". That mentality is the common thread yielding a definition of "socialism" in which Stalin is as much at home as the horny but luckless student who's idea of socialism is everyone being required to pile naked into the one big bed and anyone who doesn't concur with this idea of paradise getting pelted with rotten guavas until they do. Finally he finds his niche by butturing (eg) feminists that all men apart from himself are "rapists" - or some equivalent strategm doubling as venegeance against those able to perceive with more clarity the ideological corner he has painted himself into.

So exactly who are we talking about here?:

IOW the New Clbutt nudged the labourers out of the Labor Party's decision-making apparatus and can't figure out why ordinary Aussie workers, after a time-lag lasting decades, finally worked out they no longer have a party as loyal to them as they had been to it. An equivalent situation would be the New Clbutt elitists, finding themselves cold in a life-boat, chopping up the hull for firewood, then feeling discriminated against when, suddenly, it gets even colder.

To see the review of sorts I contributed when that book first came out in 1999:

See above.

An earlier terminology for the same phenomenon was "the cultural cringe" which certain types displayed when expressing their embarrbuttment about Aussie culture to their then mostly imaginary "international" peers. For a while it became a popular form of entertainment to poke fun at Aussie culture to other Australians, but it was mostly light hearted. Very few imagined the deadly ernestness with which a few pathogenic personalities would adopt the embryonic iconoclasm as a kind of Holy Crusade. More committed sabateurs of our society included Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes. Less psychologically dependent were Barry Humphries and David Williamson. Initially their wit was probably as incisive as the more psychologically dependent enemies of the society that spawned them; Ordinary RSL types enjoyed having their own and their friends foibles drawn attention to on stage and screen (a la Kath and Kim today). However Humphries and Williamson eventually recanted when they saw the harm the trend they had unwittingly helped establish was doing to the host society whose survival their own work depended on for its very point and meaning.

concurs precisely with my own observations above.

Try not to notice the self-satisfied sneer next time they butture you straight-faced it is YOUR ABC.