The full Peter Sartorius horror show
By overwhelming popular demand (four people asked for this) here is the
full can of garbage, the “Sartorius Horror Show, ” that aired
on TV here in Germany the other day. Appreciate it by hammering him – I
spent hours putting it together. See my Recoznet posting of
19 September. Bits in square brackets [like this] are my explanations
The bits highlighted red like this are what I consider to be the major
clangers. No doubt others will find equally bad or worse ones – it’s all
in the eyes of the beholder.
[Graphics]
PRIME TIME Late
Edition
Interviewer:228 years ago European settlement of Australia began with
the arrival of the First Fleet.
For 60,000 years indigenous people, the Aborigines, had lived there.
The aggressive taking possession of the continent cut the Aborigines off
from their roots worst of all by the Europeans enforcing the
assimilation of their children in the 20th century.
Peter Sartorius, a senior journalist with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, [a
left-liberal leading German daily newspaper, read nationally,
based in Munich] reports.
[Graphics]
ROBBED SOULS, BURNT LIFE
About the fate of Australia’s
indigenous people
Question: What was the First Fleet?
Sartorius: The First Fleet, that was the first small fleet that left
England to take convicts to Australia. That was in 1772.
Q: In reality the continent was settled by the Aborigines. What sort of
people are these? They immigrated 40 to 60,000 years
previously.
S: 40 to 60,000 years, or even earlier, nobody quite knows exactly, and
they came from Asia….
Q:….over a land bridge that still existed then….
S:…it probably has to be defined what a land bridge is. The absence of
many mammals allows the conclusion that there was a water
barrier somewhere. But I believe you didn’t have to be a mariner to
overcome this barrier, so that one can speak of a land bridge in the
broadest sense. But these Aborigines who came are not what we imagine
Asians to be these days, but rather what we perceive as
Africans, in their whole appearance, in the colour of their skin.
Q: So, part of early humankind, probably also in the region of Kenya in
Africa, where humans originally came into being, wandering
through Asia, getting very far, and then via a few island groups
probably settling in Australia, people of the kind who settled in the
early Stone Age. Is that how one can say it, that these are inhabitants
from that early time? [He was even more incoherent than here.]
S: Yes, certainly so. Whether they developed the same cultures, as we in
Europe, in the ?Ramanjou? [Could he mean those ancient
caves in France, where Aborigines are said to have been able to decipher
at first glance the meaning of wall hieroglyphics that had
mystified western researchers until someone had the brilliant idea to
ask Aborigines?] is certainly not known, but it was a relatively small
group, a small Volk, if it even had the nature of a Volk, that settled
in Australia, this gigantic landscape, even though it is a small
continent, on this gigantic land mass.
Q: It is inhospitable, in a certain way, a lot of desert….
S: It’s only really fit for life at the edges.
Q: They settled everywhere, or wandered everywhere….
S: Human beings settle anywhere where there is something for them to
survive on, including in the deserts. There’s water in the deserts,
too, there are springs, there is something to eat…
Q: Now you write [that suggests he’s had an article in the paper as
such, which I haven’t seen or looked for] that these Aborigines
had rituals to prevent themselves reproducing excessively, bgut to adapt
their population, the mass of people who had to be fed, to the
poverty of the land. Is that right? A strategy…?
S: Yes, that was simply necessary for survival. I don’t know, nobody
knows whether something like that is a conscious
strategy….[interviewer kept butting in, not letting Sartorius finish a
train of thought]
Q: An evolutionary one, that is those are left, the tribes, the peoples,
who have made an intelligent adaptation….
S: ….but all the fertility rites were directed at not increasing the
population….
Q: ….just a few, selected, proficient specimens[German word used was
“Exemplare”, examples, which might not be as clinically harsh
as specimens] …..
Q: ….it was also in other places in the South Seas, it was like this,
that they had rituals that every second or third child was killed, also
with the purpose – although it was argued differently – but the
underlying purpose was to keep the population small.
Q: The Aborigines appear to have links between the generations reaching
far back into the depths of time.
S: Yes, they’ve created themselves a world of their own, which is linked
with the concept of “Dreaming “ [English word used], with
dreaming. They have their vision that this earth is one level and that
in their dreams past and present flow together. And that is, of
course, the connection to the ancestors that exists very strongly here.
It was also interesting when the First Fleet arrived, the Aborigines
went up to the sailors and probably also the convicts – they probably
didn’t differentiate – with respect because they saw in these strange
white figures the return of their ancestors…
Q: …like with the earliest Indians in Mexico?…
S: True, quite a similar phenomenon.
[Graphic]
AUSTRALIA
Terra Nullius
Australia was regarded as terra nullius, as a no-man’s land that
belonged to nobody. The Aborigines who now encountered the whites
with their clubs and spears and also boomerangs, were such a small
number that the whites, the Britons then, I think quite honestly
assumed this is an empty country.
Q: Now a process starts that you have headlined “Robbed souls, burnt
life.” That means that something or other in them is now
destroyed in the form of this dispersal and the attempts to assimilate
the young Aborigines. The young ones are taken away.
S: Yes, and this in the 20th century. This is not a 19th century
phenomenon, but one of the 20th century, when the colonies developed
into a country….
Q:….English law no longer protects the indigenous people….
S: …certainly protects them less than it did originally right in the
beginning, under the governors of the various colonies, and that was
really catastrophic for the Aborigines because one was so fixated on the
white culture that one said, we can’t afford it, either, to
legitimise a second culture in the country….
Q: ….They’re supposed to adjust…
S:…..they should assimilate, they’re just to be absorbed [German:
aufgesogen, sucked up]….
Q:….education, clergy who give them Christian instruction and so on…
S:….Not all children, but just a certain category of children, all the
children who somewhere in their ancestry had some white blood and
because of that were also slightly lighter-skinned, they were ruthlessly
and mercilessly taken away from their parents and now brought
up in mission schools or on police stations [Polizeistationen]and they
did, indeed, in parts receive quite outstanding educations. Actually,
for a very long time, the white society of Australia did not grasp what
they perpetrated on the Aborigines, and it is to this day a huge
controversial subject in Australia whether white society as such is
accountable for what happened to the Aborigines. Prime Minister John
Howard is representative of this conservative view that guilt….
Q:….that guilt is not inheritable….
S: ….that guilt is not inheritable, ‘we have nothing to do with it, we
regret what happened to the Aborigines, but there’s nothing we can
change about it anymore,’ so scrub it out.
Q: Can one change anything, could one make good anything?
S: It is, of course, speculation, and it’s not just speculation, it’s a
process. Since the end of this White Policy [English used], this white
policy, quite a bit has happened for the Aborigines, in fact very much
has happened. For the first time they were given civic rights, that
they simply hadn’t had, they had no civic rights atll. They had no
contracts with the whites – like the Maoris on New Zealand, they had
treaties with the whites, also the Indians in America had treaties, even
though they were slipshod [liederliche] treaties, with the whites…..
Q:…treaties can be broken, but it is a right…..
S:…..it is a right. The Aborigines had nothing at all, they were not at
all accepted as human beings. But successively from the 70s on
they were given civic rights and then land again. I don’t believe that
the central issue can now be that they are accorded further land
rights. That will probably be possible in the individual case, but it is
not the great question. The great question is, whether the white
society accepts that it has perpetrated a crime against the Aborigines,
who are entitled to the special public welfare services [Fürsorge,
which also translates as “a mother’s loving care,” or generally
“caretaking”] of the prospering white society. That is the one thing.
The
other is that Aborigines are given the awareness, that they are not
themselves to blame for their desolate situation. That is what very
many Aborigines have confirmed to me again and again: that is the most
important thing.
[Black and white photograph of
Charles Perkins shown]
Q: You describe a man here, a fighter for the Aborigines, Mr. Perkins.
Could you describe him here?
S: Charles Perkins is a very amazing man. He is a classical case. He
belongs to this robbed generation. Although he wasn’t taken away
from his parents like others were, his parents were taken to a police
station[Polizeistation]. Polizeistation, police area one has to call it,
it
was in other words the police headquarters in a large inland district of
Australia and he grew up there….
Q:…a reserve one could say….
S:.... a reserve. He was sent to a boarding school [Internat] there,
grew up there, but at 14, because he was cut off from his roots, from
his whole culture, he landed on the street. He was thrown out of the
school and then for years scuffled around [rumgebalgt] with the
police and then more and more became an activist for the concerns of the
Aborigines, already at a very young age, but he would surely
have ended up in the gutter if he hadn’t had enormous football talent…..
Q:….that he had, and he went to England….
S: ….that he had, and he then played football and immigrant groups
noticed him, and since he’s proper intelligent [ordentlich intelligent],
through that he was able to catch up on his education, was able to
study…..
Q:….now he’s one of the representatives of the Aborigines…
S: ….now he’s one of the Aborigines….
Q: ….but his father is not an Aborigine?….
S: Yes, he is….
Q: Really, from both sides?….
S: Yes, but somewhere he’s got white ancestors in him, too. The
Aborigines who have no white ancestors…..
[And here Sartorius is abruptly faded out, without finishing the
sentence. Logo. Ads. Total disrespect for him, the topic and the
viewers.
A lesson in how not to do TV.
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