Article about the PETA request for Hunters and Collectors to change their name.

Author:  Jack the Insider, The Australian.

Date: 3 March 2017.

Original URL: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/blogs/jack-the-insider-hunters-and-collectives/news-story/91f32108efb8d482e2541c3c409ae978

Article Text

It is fair to say the Right has been feeling the ideological pinch lately. While the fussing and feuding has been going on, the Hard Left in Australia continues its moral decay at an impressive clip with hardly a mention.

Take the animal liberationist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Usually PETA spends the bulk of its energy and time routinely supplying the ABC’s Four Corners with free footage, allowing the current affairs program to work within its budget. It’s a win-win, provided you’re a card-carrying member of PETA or a journo with an insatiable thirst for a gold Walkley.

Yesterday it surfaced PETA had written to the management of Hunters and Collectors urging the band to change its name to something less violent and antagonistic. The thought being the band, first formed in 1981, might now be inadvertently encouraging young kiddies to load up the shotties, the pig dogs and several cartons of Emu Bitter and go out blasting away at ecosystems various in a frivolous manner.

Hunters and Collectors’ management were too shocked to comment. When I suggested a compromise band name, the New New Seekers, they hung up.

PETA Asia @PETAAsia
PETA Aus asks band ‘Hunters & Collectors’ to make compassionate name change: http://ow.ly/DxsZ309v2Q3 . @_hcofficial, do it for the birds! 🐤🐤🐤
12:58 PM – 2 Mar 2017
Photo published for PETA Asks Band ‘Hunters & Collectors’ to Make Compassionate Name Change

PETA Asks Band ‘Hunters & Collectors’ to Make Compassionate Name Change
To help raise awareness of the plight of waterbirds threatened by hunters, PETA is asking Aussie rock band Hunters & Collectors to change its name.
peta.org.au
25 Retweets 42 likes

This brouhaha reminds me of a fabulous joke told by a former member of the band who I won’t name to protect his guilt. What’s the difference between a buffalo and Hunters & Collectors? A buffalo has the horns up the front and an arsehole up the back…”. Boom tish.

Suffice it to say, the PETA gang is going to fall into deep despair when they find out about the paleo diet.

No response: Hunters & Collectors.

While the Right is fixed on the grim business of tearing itself into teensy-weensy little pieces, the Hard Left is full steam ahead on a range of forlorn political enterprises reeking of hollow symbolism. Hollow symbolism is the cornerstone of the Hard Left.

In January, the Greens proposed to block Donald Trump’s entry to Australia. In this instance, the hollow symbolism stems from the fact President Trump has no plans to come to Australia. He may at some point but there is nothing on the calendar. But if at some stage he does decide to traverse the Pacific Ocean there would be no earthly reason to decline his visa application.

Besides, he’s got his own plane. In fact quite a few of them, some packed to the gunwales with weapons that can strip the paint off your house and give your kids permanent orange afros.

Are the Greens going to leave it to some put-upon member of Border Force to decline to stamp the President’s passport? Admittedly it would make wonderful viewing on the commonwealth funded Border Patrol program but the Donald’s tweets afterwards would send us all into deep self-loathing.

Earlier this year, a faction within the Greens emerged known as Left Renewal, led by NSW senator Lee Rhiannon. Only in the Greens could a faction exist that has just two parliamentary members. Where would they meet now that phone boxes are a thing of the past, under a doona?

The brief history of the Left Renewal faction of the Greens features a manifesto. Most political representatives issue press statements. Left Renewal issues manifestos.

The manifesto includes this purler of quasi-Marxist nonsense:

That a rejection of class antagonism, and capitalism, also depends on a rejection of the state’s legitimacy and the right of it, and its apparatuses, to impose oppression upon the working class and oppressed people in order to liberate the working class and all oppressed people. We further rejected state mediated oppression in all of its forms, and recognise that violent apparatuses like the police do not share an interest with the working class.

Damn those violent apparatuses always oppressing us. If only we lived in a collective controlled by a benign Citizens’ Commissariat who reported directly to the Supreme Soviet Council. I have just one question. If the oppressed people rose up to dismantle the violent apparatuses of the state, how long before the looting starts? If the experience of the Victoria Police Strike of 1923 is anything to go by, it’s somewhere between six and eight hours.

What Left Renewal members have in common is an almost pathological refusal to accept the 20th century happened. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Kims in North Korea. Let’s not forget the recently departed Uncle Fidel, who famously telegraphed Nikita Kruschev during the Cuban missile crisis, urging the Soviet boss to launch a first strike on the US, knowing full well that would mean Cuba would be turned into a radioactive puddle in the space of about 10 minutes. Throw this lot and a handful of murderous African tyrants into your Pol Pot and stir repeatedly.

As reported yesterday by Kylar Loussikian, just two months in, cracks have emerged in the solidarity of Left Renewal when a couple of young Greens’ activists, Dexter Duckett and Vanamali Hermans jumped on the faction describing it as “pseudo-vanguardist”.

In a rambling missive to no one in particular Duckett and Vanamali described Left Renewal as a hegemony (a word much loved by older folk who pine for the days of the old USSR) designed to support the status quo.

Could it just be this shiny new faction of the Greens is little more than a mechanism to ensure the preselections of NSW senator Lee Rhiannon and NSW MLC David Shoebridge? Heaven forfend.

Duckett and Hermans are young and should be forgiven their nonsense. Many of us have held political affiliations in our youths we now regard with deep embarrassment. Rhiannon and Shoebridge, however, are old enough to know better.

The Hard Left as reflected in the Greens’ Left Renewal faction basically falls into two camps. One group believes Stalin did great work and the 30-odd million people he had killed was deeply regrettable while the other group believes Stalin did great work and any examination of his excesses is little more than nitpicking. In other words, you can’t make an omelette without giving Lavrenty Beria a turn with the whisk. Throw another gulag on the barbie.

Like the fruit loops on the extreme Right, the Hard Left routinely splinters into fragments and bitter ideological disputes become if not hobbies then obsessive pastimes.

Think of it as a sort of reverse McCarthyism where both camps claim, “I am now and always have been a better communist than you.”

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