Unsettlered

For the AO tennis this past week and a half I have been fairly permanently connected to my Melbourne VPN so that we can watch Channel 9 not ESPN in Spanish, and this means I have also been seeing the Aussie version of the Guardian, and this has been a true eye-opener.

On some levels it’s more demented than the British one. You have to ask yourself, why is this big island right down there at the bottom of the APAC region with serious regional strategic issues of its own to confront, so totally obsessed with the Levant?

It’s long been clear to me that this obsession is fed, in several rather obvious instances (Australia, Norway and Nordics in general, Ireland etc.) — not in the first instance by antisemitism — though that eventually kicks in as the fuel to keep it going in the face of factual rebuttal — but by a form of projection coupled with a diversion. For, these are white people who want you to understand that they are not that sort of white people, e.g. colonial oppressors.

The phenomenon is especially intense down under where parts of the popular culture possess a surface patina of proletarian coarseness. I suppose the general idea is that nobody will take you for ‘The Man’ if you go about performing the cheeky/chippy pleb routine, and they have always had us stuck up Poms to project onto long before Israel turned up.

In the latter context, of course, this is a nation for whom the term ‘settler colonist’ might be a more obviously domestic sore point, and that might explain the intensity of the convictions that one sees being performed in the Aussie Grauniad. (The ‘look away’ element to the Irish obsession with the Levant is undoubtedly their own history of religious sectarianism, intolerance and violent gangster terrorism.)

Meanwhile, Trump’s covetous approach to Greenland has suddenly (re-)raised awareness that Scandinavians don’t actually deserve the free pass they have generally been getting when it comes to colonisation, enslavement and ‘oppression’ in general — as in the map below which suggests that they have always been downstream of the main problem.

In the USA there has been a veritable race to adopt more 'progressive' white identities cherry-picked from the Old World, with Irish still the favourite as it comes with permission for a certain amount of charming over-indulgence.

It is usually the case that the more affluent the individual, the more frantic the need to project with certain postures becomes.

Elsewhere, anti-Americanism or anti-Westernism seems to replace white guilt as the main driver, but this is just another manifestation of chippiness, either inverted or straight-up.