A Pseudo-Filipino named “Sir” Roger O’Neil
I can well understand why some Canadians knocked Captain Cook’s statue of its perch into a harbour in British Columbia.
The only reason the Canadian PM has given a token apology about colonial crimes against indigenous peoples in Canada is because Canada has just been caught with its hands in the cookie jar with the discovery of mass graves. The Canadian government pursued a genocidal policy against indigenous peoples for 150 years — depriving them of language, forbidding the use of their indigenous birth names, medical neglect, sexual abuse, to name a few of their crimes. The government knew of it and were responsible for it for 150 years.
Look at China. The colonial crimes and genocide committed by Britain during the Opium wars, and the destruction of Yuanmingyuan – the Chinese royal palace city at the time in 1860 – and other crimes that went on with British and Americans in China for many decades…. a history Britain and the US want to forget, have never been apologised for, never secured reparation, and now in the present world circumstances the Western bloc have the gall to accuse China of genocide based on political fabrication. It is a tale of disgusting hypocrisy. One British Lord Elgin tried to explain these colonial crimes in China away by saying “yes, we [the British] could have done things differently “, which displays absolute arrogance.
Then there is the Kingdom of Benin in present day Nigeria — a kingdom destroyed by the British with all of its art treasures, bronze sculptures, looted in 1897 and sold to museums around the world for profit – a colonial crime the British have not paid reparations or acknowledged any wrongdoing. And those museums, including some in Australia, have not return their looted art to Nigeria.
And then there is India…. from the time the British took control of India, their rule resulted in frequent periodic famines killing millions, including the Bengal famine in WW2 when the British diverted food supplies away from Bengal to feed British troops. How many Indians died in that famine? It is a colonial crime and one of many such crimes committed by the British during their rule.
Did the British make reparations? They never do.
So, I am not impressed when I read the drivel in The Australian newspaper, which represents a nation that regards Captain Cook as its patron saint. Cook was the Age of Discovery for Europeans, but for indigenous peoples from Canada to Australia, he represents The Age of Genocide.
Curiously, the ASPI [aka the Australian Strategic Policy Institute] does not write reports about this legacy of genocide and colonial crimes.
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