Adam Goodes case reveals bad case of historical amnesia

Nisha Thapliyal writes that the Adam Goodes case reveals bad case of historical amnesia.

In short, booing Goodes becomes possible when we separate the football player from his family, community, culture and history. What this debate underlines is a form of historical amnesia that marks societies where nation-building has occurred on the foundations of colonisation, exploitation and outright destruction of indigenous peoples.

It strikes me that part of what is revealed by the Goodes saga is a fierce and enduring struggle over remembering and forgetting. In this debate about sportsmanship and invisible spears, whose histories are being remembered and whose are we distancing ourselves from? Whose histories are we avoiding taking responsibility for?

The subtext in the Goodes debate is about acknowledging or denying Aboriginal accounts of what it means to be Australian today — and what it has meant since 1770. If we recognise this, then, to paraphrase historian Chris Healey, Goodes’ actions are simply and steadfastly a refusal to allow himself and his people to be “erased” yet again from Australian history and contemporary culture.

Emphasis Mine

Remembering is resistance.

Remembering that we are humans first, Australians second, challenges the Capitalist dogma that we live under.

Remembering that we are workers united in toil is the basis of a new society.

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What It Means When You Kill People On the Other Side of the Planet and No One Notices

Tom Engelhardt asks What It Means When You Kill People On the Other Side of the Planet and No One Notices?

And this just scratches the surface of Washington's long “global war on terror.”  Yet without an antiwar movement, the spectacle of mayhem and slaughter that has been at the heart of that war has passed largely unnoticed here.  Unlike in the Vietnam years, it’s never really come home.  In an era in which successes have been in short supply for two administrations, consider this a major one.  War without an antiwar movement turns out to mean war without pause, war without end.

Admittedly, American children can no longer catch the twenty-first-century equivalents of the movies of my childhood.  Such films couldn’t be made.  After all, few are the movies that are likely to end with the Marines advancing amid a pile of nonwhite bodies, the wagon train heading for the horizon, or the cowboy galloping off on his horse with his girl.  Think of this as onscreen evidence of American imperial decline.

In the badlands and backlands of the planet, however, the spectacle of slaughter never ends, even if the only Americans watching are sometimes unnerved drone video analysts.  Could there be a sadder tale of a demobilized citizenry than that?

Emphasis Mine

The ghost of the Vietnam War haunts the anti-war movement as well. All we hear about are the sucesses. We have forgotten the long, dark years of obscurity and irrelevence.

The confidence of the working-class in a better world has also gone. We are weighed down by the unresolved GFC, the weakening of unions, the rapid advance of automation, the insecurity of life and work.

The great anti-war demonstrations of 2003 were deflated by the deafness of the governments around the world. They knew they were in no danger of being overthrown.

We have forgotten that the movements of the 1960s were about overthrowing the existing system. That was the real danger of those movements.

Today, what are people are going to do? Vote the bastards out. Our electoral system offers a choice between two groups of warmongers. This is no different in the UK or USA.

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