Saturday 30th of March 2024

a virus called terra nullius...

cookcook

Author and activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied has weighed into the debate over a controversial tweet posted by Victoria’s Deputy Chief Health Officer comparing Captain Cook to the coronavirus, warning “history need not repeat”.

Dr Annaliese van Diemen is facing calls to resign after likening the British explorer to the coronavirus on the 250th anniversary of his arrival into Botany Bay. 

“Sudden arrival of an invader from another land, decimating populations, creating terror. Forces the population to make enormous sacrifices and completely change how they live in order to survive,” tweeted on Wednesday.

“COVID-19 or Cook 1770?” she asked.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told Today on Friday that Dr van Diemen should be stood down.

“I think she should go. I think it’s pretty obvious in the middle of a pandemic the second highest medical officer in the state of Victoria should be concentrating on the people of Victoria and the crisis associated with COVID-19,” he said.

“Instead she is off running culture war debates. I think she is unfit for that office and she should go.”

But Abdel-Magied said she hoped Dr van Diemen would not be bullied in the same way she was, when in 2017 she tweeted “Lest. We. Forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine …)” in reference to Anzac Day.

While the former Queensland Australian of the Year had quickly retracted the comment and apologised “unreservedly” for the “disrespectful” post, she endured months of backlash and online bullying.

 

Read more:

https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/politics/coronavirus-victorian-health-officers-captain-cook-or-virus-tweet-sparks-outrage/news-story/

revisionism...

 

From Rod Dreher:

 

Some commenters on this blog think I’m way out of line saying that the totalitarian threat in the US comes much more from the left than the right. Didn’t I see the men with rifles in the Michigan statehouse? (Yes, I did — and I criticized them.) Those men, however out of line they were, are nothing compared with the power of liberals in academia and media to change the narrative of American history. This is what totalitarianism does. It not only tries to control your actions — that’s what authoritarianism is — but it tries to control the way you think. It does so by demolishing established cultural memory, seeking to replace it with new, ideologized ones — and demonizing anyone who disagrees with the official story, however falsified it is.

Here’s an important example. In 2019, The New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper, launched “The 1619 Project,” a massive attempt to “reframe” (the Times’s word) American history by displacing the 1776 Declaration of Independence as the traditional founding of the United States, replacing it with the year the first African slaves arrived in North America. Let’s be crystal-clear here: The most powerful media source in the world decided that Americans should stop believing that the Declaration of Independence represents the nation’s founding, and instead accept that the real birth of American happened in 1619, when the first African slave arrived in North America.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/1619-project-woke-totalit...

 

History is a bitch, always depending on the way the winners and the vanquished look at it. Which end of the looking glass is most important? Invasion, colonialisation or Sovereignty? Should the history of America start when the "Indians" — the descendants of people who crossed the land between Russia and America more than 10,000 years ago? Should the history of "Australia" start with the Aboriginal traditions going back more than 50,000 years? 

 

Terra nullius is a Latin expression meaning "nobody's land". It was a principle sometimes used in international law to justify claims that territory may be acquired by a state's occupation of it. It denotes land that has never been a part of a sovereign nation...