Gideon Polya, “Book Review - “On Rage” by Germaine Greer ”, MWC News, 27 June 2009
Book Review - “On Rage” by Germaine Greer, Exposing Aboriginal Genocide & Racism of Apartheid Australia
“On Rage” by Germaine Greer is a powerful indictment of entrenched Australian racism and myopia that permit appalling and deadly social conditions for its 0.5 million Indigenous (Aboriginal, Aborigine) inhabitants of whom 9,000 die avoidably every year.
“On Rage” by major feminist scholar Dr Germaine Greer (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2008) is more a booklet (108 pocket-sized pages) than a book but illustrates the power of the succinct polemic. Germaine Greer (the author of the seminal feminist book “The Female Eunuch”) is perhaps Australia’s most famous female intellectual and is a favourite target of right-wing intellectual yahoos in extreme right-wing, politically correct racist (PC racist) White Australia (aka Oz or the Land of Oz).
The primitive Australian response to Germaine Greer’s “On Rage” was no exception to the typical, knee-jerk yahoo response to sensible ideas in ignorant, “look the other way”, racist White Australia, the Land of Flies, Lies and Slies (spin-based untruths).
In short, Germaine Greer argues that over 2 centuries of disempowerment, dispossession, discrimination, defamation, sexual abuse, marginalization and active and passive murder – a huge burden of violent White Australian racism that continues to this day - has left many disempowered Indigenous Australian males helpless and angry and that this has contributed to substance abuse (alcohol, petrol sniffing, drugs) and violence (notably violence to women and children) in impoverished Aboriginal communities.
The abuse of Aboriginal men by White Australia was compounded by the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women by white Australians that continues to this day. Aboriginal men were not only disempowered in their own land but also in their own social groups through White sexual enslavement of aboriginal women – noting that Indigenous Australians had evolved the most elaborate partner selection systems in a remarkable adaptation to the need to minimize in-breeding in small tribal groups.
Some relevant current statistics are quoted by Dr Germaine Grreer in her well-referenced book, thus (p74):”Fewer than half of the self-identified Aboriginal and Torres Straights Islander families are likely to be headed by an Aboriginal or Islander male. According to the 1996 census, Aboriginal women were almost as likely to be married to or cohabiting with a non-Aboriginal man as with an Aboriginal man”
Germaine Greer asks (p20) “”Where were the Aboriginal men? … Certainly, many of them are in prison. On any one day 6 per cent of Australian Aboriginal men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty are in prison. In any year a quarter of all Aboriginal men will be involved with the correctional services; 22 per cent of the Australian prison population is aboriginal; 42 per cent of juveniles in the justice system are Aboriginal. In North Queensland 90 percent of juveniles in custody are Aboriginal. In 1995 there were twenty-one deaths of Aboriginal men in custody, one-and-a-half times the number reported for the previous year, and almost two-and-a-half times the number reported in 1992. Though the trend has since been downward [notably due to the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission 1988-1991], in 2004, fourteen indigenous Australians died in custody.
Germaine Greer opines (p21) that “The poor are always more likely to be arrested, found guilty and given a custodial sentence than the affluent, but the frequency with which Aboriginal men find themselves in prison is not simply the effect of poverty. Flagrantly transgressive behaviour is a form of last-ditch resistance to alien authority” and further states (p23) “A woman who expresses rage is a man-woman, a virago, because rage is masculine” and (p80) “Aboriginal communities now exhibit one of the highest suicide rates in the world. A caged animal will reject its young and even kill them, A man prevented from defending his rights and dignity may attack his wife, his children and himself”– the Male Rage Hypothesis.
Aboriginal women in the colonizer culture of Australia – and even today – have more options than Aboriginal males. Thus historically they could become the sexual partners or house-keepers of empowered White males. By way of example, in the “forgotten” Bengali Holocaust in which the British deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death in 1943-1945, there was a huge accompanying civilian and military sexual servitude of an estimated 0.3 million starving Bengali women who chose sexual submission as an alternative to starvation for themselves or for themselves and their children (see my book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 1998 and 2008).
I think from personal experience that Germaine Greer’s Male Rage Hypothesis may well be correct. I am a comfortably well-off, temperate, non-Indigenous Australian but I am reduced to helpless anger when I see the appalling injustices that continue to be variously inflicted on Indigenous People (e.g. Aborigines, and Occupied Iraqis, Somalis, Haitians, Diego Garcians, Iraqis, Afghans, NW Pakistan Pashtuns …) by the Anglo-American Alliance, including White Australia, around the world. Indeed the countries that refused to sign up to the recent UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights were – you guessed it – the Anglo colonizer countries of the US, Australia , Canada and Apartheid Australia.
Thus in January I was eating my dinner while watching the news on TV and broke a tooth by grinding too hard while watching racist Zionist (RZ) Apartheid Israelis dropping phosphorous bombs on Gaza (50% of the population children, 75% women and children; 1,400 Gazans killed in December-January in retaliation for zero Israeli deaths from rockets in the previous year). The next day I made an appointment 1 day hence with my dentist (I have medical insurance but ordinary Australians, including Indigenous Australians, would have to wait several years before getting such treatment). That night I was again unwisely eating in front of the TV and broke another tooth – this time on the other side of my jaw – in the same circumstances. My medical insurance paid all but about $1,000 of the bill for the very expensive double crown dental job and I told a Jewish friend that I should send the bill to the Israeli Embassy.
Dear non-Aboriginal reader, you can judge for yourself how angry the following recently reported story makes you feel. The Australian taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Four Corners investigative journalism team recently devoted a whole program to the death in custody of a highly respected Aboriginal elder, Mr Ward, in Western Australia (and similar other incidents) as summarized in this media report: “The Coroner found that Mr Ward has died a "ghastly" death and essentially cooked in the police van he was being transported in. This case shows up both institutionalized racism and the flaws in the privatization of correctional services. Justice needs to be served in yet another Aboriginal Death in Custody. [Aboriginal elder] Mr Ward was arrested on Australia Day 2008 (what a sad irony) for driving under the influence. He was placed in the back of a police van and driven 570 kilometers to a courthouse, remanded in custody and driven a further 352 kilometers to a prison. He was given a 600ml bottle of water on a hot day and placed in a van with no working air conditioner. The air in the van was as hot as 50 degrees. When he eventually collapsed from heat stress, the temperature of the metal floor was 56 degrees Centigrade and he essentially was "cooked" to death. He was found to have 3rd degree burns on his body after his death. I understand that nobody has been prosecuted for this crime.
Are you angry? The following statistics on how Apartheid Australia is murderously maltreating its Indigenous Subjects at home and abroad may make you angrier still.
In the 18th-19th century Aboriginal Genocide the Indigenous Aboriginal population dropped from about 1 million to 0.1 million in the first century after invasion in 1788. In the Tasmanian Aboriginal Genocide the “full-blood” Indigenous population dropped from 6,000 to zero in 1803-1876 ( however there are several thousand “mixed race” descendants of Tasmanian and Mainland Aborigines still living in Tasmania today). In the 20th century Aboriginal Genocide continued with total excess deaths clearly of the order of 1 million. About 0.1 million Stolen Generations Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their Mothers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Until after the 1967 Referendum Aborigines were counted under the Fauna Act and were excluded from voting. The excess deaths in the 11 years of the Bush-ite Coalition Government totalled 90,000 for 1996-2007 (see “Aboriginal Genocide”: http://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/ ).
Ongoing Aboriginal Genocide under the extreme right-wing, pro-coal, pro-war Rudd Labor Government involves 9,000 Indigenous excess deaths annually – the Australian Government has alternative priorities to funding grossly under-funded Aboriginal health e.g. funding illegal, war criminal and genocidal US wars and lavishly subsidizing terracidal, climate criminal greenhouse gas polluters . The Rudd Labor Government is persisting with race-based exclusion of Northern Territory Aborigines from the protection of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act – NT aborigines are prohibited from buying selling, transporting, reading, seeing or consuming things available to all other Australians. In the latest impositions it appears that the Australia Government is compulsorily taking over Aboriginal land and now plans to force remote communities to leave their residual Sacred Lands by denying them medical and other services.
Pro-Zionist Apartheid Australia is essentially doing to its Indigenous subjects what Apartheid Australia-backed Apartheid Israel is doing to the Indigenous Palestinians – but with the big difference that the PC racist Australians endlessly declare their “love” for Indigenous Australians whereas racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel endlessly promotes vituperative and violent anti-Arab anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. It is no accident that Australia has been warmly praised by Apartheid Israel during the current visit to racist Zionist-occupied Occupied Palestine by Australian Deputy PM Julia Gillard and other Australian MPs.
The following statistics of “annual death rate” are expressed as units of “persons dying per million per year”: 0.5 (Israelis killed by Gaza missiles 2000-2009); 0.5 (Western rapist husbands killed by raped wives); 1.0 (violent Western husbands murdered by battered wives); 15 (Israelis killed by Israelis; Australians killed by Australians); 56 (Americans murdered); 100 (Americans killed by guns); 164 (Palestinians killed violently by Israelis); 200 (African-Americans murdered); 233 (Australians from coal burning pollutants); 257 (Australians from fossil fuel burning pollutants); 473 (citizens murdered in Detroit, Michigan, USA); 790 (Australians from smoking); 902 (Palestinian non-violent deaths from war criminal, Geneva Convention-violating Israeli-imposed deprivation); 2,600 (World excess deaths); 2,800 (non-European World excess deaths); 6,000 (Occupied Palestine infants); 9,000 (Occupied Iraqi under-5 year old infants); 12,300 (Occupied Iraqi excess deaths); 18,000 (Indigenous Australian avoidable deaths); 20,000 (Indigenous avoidable deaths in the Northern Territory); 18,800-28,000 (Occupied Afghan excess deaths); 22,000 (Indigenous Australian deaths); 24,000 (Indigenous Australian deaths in the Northern Territory); and 70,000 (Occupied Afghan under-5 year old infants) (see my submission to the Australian Senate Inquiry into Men’s Health: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:ivCV7YrKdF4J:https://senate.aph.gov.au/submissions/comittees/viewdocument.aspx%3Fid%3Ddc4f1a82-89c2-4e72-986d-6a597444f39f+polya+%22men%27s+health%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au ).
Angry? How awful does it have to get before you get angry?
Perhaps you have trouble visualizing the deaths involved. Accordingly, another way of presenting these statistics by comparing them with situations for which we have searingly remembered images e.g. of the skeletal inmates of Buchenwald and Auschwitz or the skeletal Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in WW2. Thus the “annual death rate” is 2.2% (for Indigenous Australians) and 2.4% (Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory) – as compared to 2.5% (for Australian sheep), 2.9% (inmates of the Nazi German Buchenwald Concentration Camp), 7.0% (Australian-occupied Occupied Afghan under-5 year old infants), 10.1% (Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in WW2) and 17% (Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, 1941-1945).
No doubt having now got you really angry, let me urge of you to “don’t get mad, get even”. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Tell everyone you can about these black crimes of White Australia, Apartheid Israel and the genocidal US Alliance. Tell everyone you can to eschew any avoidable dealings with Apartheid Australia, Apartheid Israel and their like US Alliance allies.
Of course, there is hope - we can readily envisage a decent world in which “all men are created equal and have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, a world in which, as advocated by Australia-based 300.org: “There must be a safe and sustainable existence for all peoples and all species on our warming-threatened Planet and this requires a rapid reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to about 300 parts per million” (see “300.org”).
Indeed the wonderful, humane, fearless, outspoken Dr Germaine Greer concludes her powerful essay with this profound message of hope: “ Australians are now becoming aware of the dire plight of their island continent, and the utter bleakness of its future [from man-made global warming]. If they are to master the discipline that enabled hunter-gatherer peoples to live off that same land for 60,000 years, they need to learn a new set of priorities and a new way of life. We need a hunter-gatherer presence in Australian politics every bit as much as the black man needs a political structure that will enable him to focus and direct his rage towards something other than himself and his people.”