As America itself chokes to death on debt, drugs, and deep-fried Oreos, as its military trades war-fighting for wokeness, its culture still spreads across the globe inexorably. In years past, complaints about American culture dominance focused on its music, its movies, its fast food and its hyper-capitalist economics. But America has now adopted a radical new ideology that it is exporting worldwide with vigor. Belgium has Black Lives Matter riots. Romania has church vandalism in the name of progress. And now, Australia has America’s particularly malignant approach to sexual disharmony.
Last Wednesday, Brauer College in rural Victoria forced its male pupils, some only 12 years old, to stand at a school assembly, face the girls and apologize for rape, sexual harassment and all the other facets of male wickedness. All this was apparently some ghastly effort to promote gender reconciliation through gender self-incrimination.
‘I had girls behind me crying,’ one student said. ‘We had to apologize for stuff we didn’t actually do.’
‘I don’t think it’s OK to be sexually assaulted. I felt a bit under pressure to stand up and if I didn’t I felt like I was a bad person,’ said another.
But like the Zulus at Isandlwana or the Mahdi Army at Khartoum, the natives are not quite ready to submit to American cultural hegemony. In the United States, anybody who objected to the Big Rape Assembly, and who argued for treating people as individuals rather than groups locked in perpetual Hobbesian struggle, would risk losing their job. The Australians, on the other hand, are not so easily cowed. Parents protested, with one mother rather implausibly claiming that her 12-year-old boy didn’t know about sex yet, and the school principal actually apologized.
‘As part of this discussion boys were asked to stand as a symbolic gesture of apology for the behaviors of their gender that have hurt or offended girls and women,’ the principal said. ‘In retrospect, while well-intended, we recognize that this part of the assembly was inappropriate.’
In an ideal world, this would be a harbinger that America’s cultural imperialism is as shoddy and ineffective as its military imperialism in Afghanistan or Iraq. But Cockburn is skeptical. In Afghanistan America’s rulers simply want to perpetuate the war indefinitely, so that contractors can grow fat and congressmen can look tough on…well, whatever we’re fighting there at this point.
But when it comes to wokeness, America’s elites really want to win. And while it is economically bullied by China, Australia remains an English-speaking country. That means it has no antibodies at all against American memes and cultural power, and presents a succulent target. So make no mistake, there will be more schools like Brauer College, and soon. If it’s not about sex, it will be about race, or the new favorite, transgenderism. Wokeism was already happy to wreck California, Harvard, the Marine Corps and children’s literature for the sake of ideology. Why would it spare Australia?
