In this Australia Day edition*: John Howard claims victory in the culture war; in his personal aircraft-carrier-off-the-Californian-coast moment, Australia's conservative Prime Minister has asserted that the forces of relativism, debates about Australian national identity and the Marxist-Keatingist "black armband" view of history have been decisively vanquished; consequently, Australians are free to feel no guilt over the past, to not apologise for anything, and gleefully ignore the fact that effete, garlic-eating Euroweenies and latte-sipping traitors in their own ranks see them increasingly as ugly, gormless redneck cowboys. Howard also called for a "coalition of the willing" to fundamentally change how Australian history is to be taught; his view is basically centred on the Western cultural tradition, with, as one would expect, a lot of emphasis on "Judaeo-Christian values" and other things conservatives fawn over, as opposed to, for example, the post-Enlightenment liberal-secularist tradition or pluralism.

Another sign that, in Australia, the conservatives may have won the culture war: sales of Australian flags have increased by 300% in the past five years; perhaps Howard's campaign to socially engineer a US-style culture of flag-waving jingoism in Australia (witness the recent federal requirement for schools to have flagpoles and flag-waving ceremonies) has borne fruit?

* referring to it by other names, such as "Inv*si*n Day", may be seditious under Australian law.

Posted by: El Bizarro | http://bizarro.typepad.com | Fri Jan 27 19:06:01 2006

No, we have been secretly buying up supplies of Australian flags in order to hold a massive flag burning when the revolution comes.

Oh, wait, that was a dream, Australians are actually racist redneck turds after all...

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