PERFIDIOUS ALBION - A DECADE A MILLENNIA

P A G E 3 4 - P E R F I D I O U S A L B I O N pERFIDIOUS aLBION - a dECADE FOR THE mILLEnNIA

- mATT jEFFREY

“I was born on a Dublin street where the Royal drums do beat And the loving English feet they went all over us… Come tell us how you slew them old Arabs two by two Like the Zulus they had spears, bows and arrows How bravely you faced one with your 16pounder gun! And you frightened them natives to their marrow… ” -- Come Out Ye Black and Tans, Wolfe Tones.

“'Twas better to die

' neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud-El-Bar… While Britannia ' s Huns, with their long range guns sailed in through the foggy dew… 'Twas England bade our ‘wild geese go’ , that " small nations might be free!" But their lonely graves are by Suvla ' s waves or the fringe of the great North Sea! …Oh the night fell black, and the rifles ' crack, made perfidious Albion reel In the leaden rain, seven tongues of flame did shine o ' er the lines of steel… And the world did gaze, in deep amaze, at those fearless men, but few, Who bore the fight that freedom ' s light might shine through the foggy dew As back through the glen I rode again and my heart with grief was sore…

For slavery fled, O glorious dead, when you fell in the foggy dew. ” --The Foggy Dew, Wolfe Tones. INTRODUCTION:

Perfidious Albion is a term that has been commonly used by all different nations around the world. It refers to the uniquely and uncanny ability for British Statesmenand-women, and Monarchs to lie. It is usually attributed firstly to the French, in 1600s, but in actuality has been a commonstatement in regards to Albion Brittany, since at least 14th century. Its first known deployment then, is closer to the height of the Eastern Roman Empire in the 10th century, than today in 2022. (not discounting also that the ‘Western’ Roman Empire had conquered the British Isles earlier). (Schmidt, 1943)

The reason I have employed this term is to understand the layers of lies in the imperialism that has befallen certain landmasses and groups of peoples from the deliberaite design and obfuscation at the hands of British ruling classes. This too has befallen Britain ' s own people, and the peoples of the wider United Kingdom – to uncover stark and new possible realities –and to understand what has befallen our continent and surrounding isles of Australia.

The first uses of this term being closer to the Eastern Roman Empires’ zenith, should give one time to reflect on what it actually means for our education today. It has been deployed by the French, by the Scottish, by the Irish (including the song at the cover page of this essay), by South American countries and African nations, and other European Nations. Whilst it hasn’t entered common parlance yet for what the United Kingdom has done and did with the Continent of Australia - it fits the pattern. In fact the height of the British Empire, was only 1 century ago

Let us reflect for a moment. Indigenous populations have maintained continued Sovereignty with these lands and waters for at least 650 centuries, compared to the 40odd centuries we are beamed with, that is our realities’ foundation in our schooling and subsequent media reflections. The recent transplantation of imperial and extinction modes of accumulation via dispossesion has occurred in a second compared to hours of Governance hitherto unwavering.

To break it down further, for we can understand, as Lawson said (as much as he was a racist and a sexist), that “all the dustcovered-customs of England remain in the middle-ages, where she belongs. ‘Class distinctions - and class warfare’

-‘Poverty’

--

‘Landlordism’ ‘ -’Royal Regalia and Titles” --

“Domination by Commercial means” .

“They all belong to the Middle-Ages” , according to Lawson in 1887, before the Federation of Australia. Here is a Republican that understands what it means we are to get rid of, should we wish to become a truly independent republic. It should be noted, that it has all unravelled for the United Kingdom in 100 years, every single lie, even the lies that they tried to cover up for the erstwhile Her Majesty the Queens’ benefit in Operation: Legacy, where thousands of documents deemed to be embarrassing to the notional decolonisation the Queen is admired for, were ordered to be burned or destroyed. (Novara Media, 2021)

But of course, the great lie, and the great lies that have befallen our Nation, stem from Classification. From definition, from the power to define what is and what isn’t: 1.Science 2.Rational 3.Legal 4.Economic 5. “In the National Interest”

It is important to note that for the last 45 years commercial oligipolists, cartels, and monopolists have had a resurgence in acquiring all that the “national interests” line contains. In the late 70s there were was a meeting point between the powers of workers organisations and commercial entities. Since then, there has much gone to the wayside for the worker ' s organisations. We may be seeing small glimpses for those workers now in 2022, but I encourage you to continue with me on this track.

In just a Century Britain has lost its Empire, notionally, and nominally, although it is has left behind its economic and social systems, its value-systems of acceptability, as well as corporate behemoths, as Kojo Koram explores in his seminal work, Uncommonwealth. (2021)

It is a great tragedy for Australia, because the Irish, Welsh and Scottish radical influence upon this nation has been vast in its imprint. For we had the first ‘socialist’ Government in the world, nationalisation of all sources of wealth creations as early as 1887. 25 years before the Revolutionary Bolsheviks in Russia It would make sense that Australia as a commercial and imperial project of the British in the South East Asia region was much about protecting and enhancing the commercial interests and profitability, above all else. In fact, this is why Queensland laid ‘claim’ to Papua and New Guinea, before our British maesters even gave us a mandate to. “An imperial motive had begun from the Continent” (Fitzpatrick, 1939, p. 45)

So with these transplantations of societies only 2-point-3 centuries ago by Perfidious Albion, and we outnumbered the First Fleet 25-1 by continental ratio of people – now the role is reversed today, with 1 million Indigenous Australians, to the 25 million people immigrants or descendants. People like to say “Oh I’m 6th generation British, or 8th Generation Scottish” . That may be true. But what our individual life-spans and our family circumstances sometimes fail to take account of, what we are trained and educated to think of what a generation is, (that being 15-25 years), we miss the actual scale of the project of Federated Australia. Two sixty-year olds next to each other. In fact, one Dexter, had lived in every single decade of Federation, apart from the first. He passed away at 111 in 2021.

Ireland, in this decade, looks set to reunify. Scotland looks set to become independent for the first time in 4 centuries. The nation-state still holds importance, and its rallying clarion calls, and too as a bulwark against multinational corporate fiefdoms. These places share the same languages and landmass continuums, not in the least Ireland as an Island Community. They are not just nation-states, they are now national communities. Correspondingly, Indigenous peoples have had to adopt here, European notions of nation-states, in the term First Nations itself, in order to make sure that our Sovereignty is respected and recognised more deeply and further by the Palatial Implant.

This has profound impacts for the State Education, and education set by the State. In Australia State Public Education has been one of the biggest promoters of upward mobility, but upward mobility (Davey and Miller, 1988, p. 23), at the expense of changing the system itself. An upward mobility on a Continent that has most recently been exposed to violent forms of class formation as a process. And yet too, an upward mobility in an Australia that switch from a confined-producer capitalist society after the 1980s, to financialised extractivism proper, and ‘non-real’ economies propping up like Derivatives markets. It has occured from the 80' s onwards, heightened rentierism, property-marketisation, and a services economy that didn’t introduce enough services to replace the diversification the previous ‘real’ economy had in place. This includes too our gig platform fiasco creating a 3-speed money wages economy and decades educating ourselves to be about the arse-end of what we call supply chains. Are we at war with ourselves? Not only are the impacts of making ourselves rely upon vessels, of which 99 percent are owned by foreign entities acting as oligopolies holding the powers of cartel price-fixing over us, (and not just because the Co2 emitted from such vessels that contributes to our Environmental Heating and destroys our Tourism industry) – we educated ourselves, and our experts that the ‘freemarket’ was where it was all at. And we educated ourselves that services alone, not free from swings to feudalism as Liberal Hawley pointed out in 1891 in his economic treatise, Capital and Population – would provide our society with a steady-base.

In fact, what has happened instead is a ladder-effect of economies. Where only certain people can access the ‘conceptual’ “economies” , that extract wealth from people and planet extortionately to the point of bio-ecological collapse. Only a select few can enter these markets and economies, they are cordoned off, for the vast majority of Australians by what they are paid by the hour or the project, we have created and allowed a system, unequal in its exchange, in the extreme, not just at home, but overseas too. Our Australia has sat at the apex of the two largest Empires the world has ever seen, the British and the United States. We have been straddling their switch in the 20th century, and our ‘forward’ thinking labour movement leaders also recognised the “pivot to Asia” , produced “The Asian Century” report by the Labor Party in the 1990s, which saw us extend our Trade Relationship to the point of which much of our economic growth was reliant upon their populations staying in poor labour conditions from exploitative corporations on their shores. Now they are pulling themselves out of poverty, we expect them to the “stay in the dirt” as Keating said? Preposterous.

So, here, this little, big, nation of 26 million, sits ready geo-politically to perhaps straddle the 3 largest Empire projects of all-time. That it is fair to call China an imperial project, for much of its wealth generation is done by extractivist means, though its distribution may be improving in its fairness.

These all point to our own confusion Australia faces in the aftermath of the perfidy on the scale of continental invasion. It not only has over 120 First Nations subjugated within its NationConstruct, the construct has confilicting ideas about itself. Is British, or is it American? Is it Australian? Is it a multicultural society? (It is a multi-cultural society because of the many different peoples of different backgrounds that live here. But is woven into its identity, its power structures and parliaments, into the fabric of the nation-states functions and modes of wealth generation, accumulation and distribution, ideas represented by many peoples of different experience? No.) In fact, that is the cultural revolution, the calls for the Indigenous Voice example.

MAPS OF IMPERIAL FRUITS FOR THE BRITISH MALE INVESTOR: The Harmsworth Atlas and its Tellings About Genocidal Capitalism

Here I must tell a brief story. In my travels to Sydney Town one day, I stumbled into Sapphos Book Store in Glebe. I knew I was looking for something. Almost like a spidertingle one gets – in regards to reading material awaiting you. I started scanning “the highest shelves of the store until I saw the huge book, the Harmsworth Atlas. I saved up money for a few weeks, so that I could come back and take it home. And, might I say, it provided me with clear conscience to some of the claims I make here more widely in the essay. That is the personal nature, it hit me like a tonne of bricks. It is something I would very much to journey and yarn to you about.

This first image is of the preface – where it states that “in this world of competition, the businessman must be prepared” . It essentially is the Scientific Atlas of the Time, mass-produced they say, so that each Middle-Class to higher investor of the British Isles may be up-to-date on Commercial Interests in Reference to the World. The preface perfectly encapsulates the political-geographical story it is telling of all these places of the world.

“Climate in Relation to Commercial Products” – this imbibed motive is self-writing. It tells plainly that only what is conceivable is to talk about the Climate in relation to an extracted good – be it diamonds by slaves or sheeps wool by Australian Indigenous serfs, or Melanesian slaves in Australian sugar plantations. Super scientific and rational.

This third image is quite literally the first with maps and icons in the Atlas. Note, the scientific rationalisation of sexually segregated work-arrangements, still too “Diagrams of the Worlds’ Commerce” .

The fourth image of the Atlas hit my heart and soul something wicked when first sighted in that book-store, months ago. Australia, still legally a Realm under the Crown, there effaced our Country described variously as “wastes” and “Not Yet Settled” , and so inscribed as a “Principal British Possession” . This Atlas was recently after Australia Federated as a Nation – in 1911.

“The Tyranny of our Powerlessness” , is not just attributed to First Nations (The Uluru Statement, 2017), but also to our fledgling Australian nation-state it seems. At least we were nominally a Commonwealth, fancy being outright a Dominion in name! Oh, but we were and are functionally, according to Evatt, with his work in “The King and His Dominion Governors” . Harps out for that towering Gough, cut down for the tall-poppy he was.

This second-to-last-image, tells plainly the Anglo-Saxon wish to be the world' s dominator – by extincting languages or attempting to, like Welsh, Gaelige, and First Nations Australians – by supplanting theirs as the lingua franca of a trade-systems built on immiseration, “vast commercial activity” would become available to the “Anglo-Saxon” race. Justifications, justifications.

Well, what can be said about this last one. That Britain viewed the few remaining nations not-conquered by European powers as “natives” that are merely hanging on due to intraeuropean rivalries. At least there is a hint here that having an Empire in name.... of Government and mode of Government is not preferable anymore – perhaps best to change the name fellow European travellers, and add a peoples’ assembly or something minimal. A real “glimmer” of hope in a book that contains pages too “scientifically” detailing the “Chief Races of the Family of Mankind” , where the Anglo-Saxon reigns supreme.

Sounds inspiredly Nazi. Or maybe this frenzy about Race inspired the Nazi’s? The Power of Education in action. Thanks for yarning with me on the Harmsworth.

CONTENDING WITH THE POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND CULTURAL FUNCTIONS OF EDUCATION AGAINST WIDER MOTIVATIONS: Connexions between Commerce, Education and Disposession

For “in the context of (British) social policy, the role of the education system is perhaps the most obvious example of the creation and cultivation of ideology… a framework which presents the existing structure of society as both natural and inevitable” . (Jones, C. & Novak, T. 1980)

To make perfectly clear the connexions to Education, we but only have to look over our shoulder, to the University sector. I recently attended, kind of by accident, the UTS Innovation Showcase, on Thursday 3/11/22. Although grateful for the ad-hoc invite, the questions we all have to ask ourselves and others in these spaces, amidst rising hunger, destitution, homelessness, among other ills like deforestation, is what exactly have our innovations, done for the People and Country? Who is our innovation really serving? Who is our commercialisation, so often tied to innovation, serving?

What was made apparent from that night was disconnectedness, stark. There you had, people talking of ‘ecosystems’ , as the actual ecosystems that support these parasitic elementals are dying, chiefly by a representative of the NSW Government Precincts Ecosystems Committee. Wowee! What inspired innovation!

On the panel too, were the UTS Vice Chancellor, and Ed Husic, the Federal Industry and Science Minister. And Husic made his pithy remarks about including First Nations Knowledges in the innovation spaces, and ‘translating’ university... start-ups to commercial entities, and to ‘’relegitimise’’ First Nations knowledge, after it was almost genocided. These remarks he made in direct opposition to principles so many Indigenous Australians have expressed, like Janke in her book “True Tracks” . That the kinds of commercialisation that exist are not fit at all, for the platforming of Indigenous Knowledges, especially the types these folks go for, even discounting cooperative structures (which are a better option). Then, what is the nations educational identity, functions, and aims? Shoddy Aristocracy?

It currently believes the Education “Culture Wars” in the classrooms are over and the new Federal Education Minister, Jason Clare believes it a lot. But they cannot be. And not when, least of all, Judeo-Christian entities and corporations protecting “Western Values” , organised to spam submissions... to ACARA in March to obliterate 50 percent of the History Curriculum. (Morton, 2022)

Not while, in the least, our Schools act as panopticons with teacher wardens; as holding pens. Just maybe “making people before making workers” . Yeah, that is a nice thing to do. Making people before making cogs. What pedagogy! Without really stopping to ask – for what work purposes are we working them for?

Add to this, the education most Australians are being beamed by the ‘’information specialists” in the media. Do you know, a man once said, decades ago in the presence of Whitlam, that the oligarch Murdoch is “a great Australian – much like Attila was a Great Hun. ” These people in media are educating Australians how to think, and we honestly expect an end to the “Culture-Wars” in the classroom? What small-L liberal tendencies have...

...you fallen into or adopted, “great labour

man” Jason Clare? (ABC, 1987)

So pretending that Education is separated from the ‘job market’ , from the national identity, from the community’s identity, and is separated from the economy and legal structure - is baloney. Because these elite types at these Showcases are arguing for specific educational functions and specific economic functions to their direction.

I remember one man on the panel raised the work of AMWU on the Transition Authorities. Mr Husic said in his keynote that he invited “community involvement” . So when I asked him in private, “what was his idea for “national coordinates” for these innovations in democratising local transitions from Hunter to La Trobe?” , his response was “I don’t like it, I don’t like setting up bearuacracies” . A charitable interpretation (Jeffrey, 2022) of his response would be that he just was not taking the time to appreciate that whilst maybe under a statute of State Government, these bodies maybe are not just bureaucracies, but more democratic local structures that ensure that the people in these places making the biggest transition in Energy Generation our Nation has seen – are community made, shared and led. But I really wonder, for Husic, that man that “loves community consultation” , was frozen, until I mentioned, “well what about their devolved nature?” , where he reverted to saying “Oh yeah, I appreciate community participation” . (Jeffrey, 2022) I am not in the game of pinning people for the sake of it - it serves no one. I was more saying to the Minister, that if there is the possibility that these Authorities will exist, and you cannot stop them, is it not worth your while to create a national coordinate to make sure the Transition Authorities across the Country are working in concert to larger goals?

This lack of vision is something that seemingly is slipping the minds of Minister Clare and Minister Husic, who have, “upon seeing the stately-car” , “undergone some mental transformation” in the Labor Ranks. (Childe, 1922, p.17) They take a Keating Mantra seriously, from his “radical-centrist” position, that we must “find a conciliation point between Labour and Capital” , not realising that the emancipation of labour and knowledge, is not going to lay with these showcases and groups who are only listening to self-anointed “captains of industry” , and “captains of the knowledgeeconomy” . For not one on that panel was of Indigenous descent, or a potential resident of a community affected, or an educators perspective. All in all of the audience, perhaps only one avow’d socialist, not myself. Not entirely representative of the Australian community -- the showcase felt like a macabre exaggeration of disconnectedness.

A SUGGESTED ‘RADICAL’ PROGRAMME FOR FIRST NATIONS PRIORITIES TO BENEFIT ALL AUSTRALIANS

What must be found out, is if there is an actual way to have co-sponsored Sovereignty of Country, to allow people to think about what the Educational System actually is for, and to give them the opportunity to say it? I am not scared, like those who are willy nilly dipping their hearts into the poisoned liberal tendencies of the Labor Party these days - that the people will demand us not teach anything Indigenous or anything deemed ‘woke’ in our Schools.

I have a belief that the majority of Australians, on basic principles, if they had their opportunity, to have their actual input heard on what the Educational System is for, over the next 10-20 years, we could setup a system layer that works for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

IF you get people thinking about long-term functions of society and education, the continuing sovereignty, and the lock-out that happened with the Framers Coup of a dead-Constitution on arrival in the 1890s –which saw not one representing the Labour movement, not one representing the First Nations, and not a single woman a party.

IF you get the people the thinking about the 13th and and 14th decade of Australia before us, it is the time to start the actual evidences of practical reconciliation.

"Abrisked by the ocean, I contemplate the destruction of Perfidious Albion... and this misguided notion that the colonial Australia is no longer here... "

We are told we cannot have the Voice because it does not advance practical reconciliation. Practical reconciliation, originally a term popularised by the perfidious Howard. It won’t be advanced unless we acknowledge the system of relations here is hurting us and making us sick, and that our Constitution and our Educational System are sick.

For what trite aims our Education System has in making sure Highschool Kids achieve well in standardised testing, we have been falling behind dozens of nations in maths, science and English for the last 15 years. What could this say about us, except that we have been sleepwalking, as human communities on this Continent? It is not simply a matter of Indigenous qua NonIndigenous. There are many streams within one, within many, that flow into the river system and flow out of it.

Abrisked by the ocean, I contemplate the destruction of Perfidious Albion, where a recent Prime Minister tried to tell us “slavery wasn’t real” , and this misguided notion that the colonial Australia is no longer here. We have all its hallmark champions. Including the systems of convict prisons for for profit private companies...

...embedded with private prisons, working almost exactly as the British set-up, for as little as 3 dollars a day, and we are educated to see it as not-ongoing. We are educated our landscapes as nothing, but property to exploit. We are educated in our schools, more and more about Indigenous Customs, and yet not alerting people to the dispossesive motivations embedded in their social-economic-and-cultural frameworks to disposses communities, as they work as hard as they can to keep afloat and living.

The problem cannot be supply. The problem must be distribution and generation. Especially in the highly concentrated producer and consumer markets that national capitalist economies have overlaid on the Continent of Australia. Our education does not explore the economies within our locales, within Australia, our region and the World, that are not accorded to the imperial capitalistic principles and value-sets. The economies that embody other value-sets, still, even not in the capitalist realms we are not educated the more redistributive avenues, unless we go deeply looking through literature.

When we talk about Makarrata, the coming together, where Treaties have not been yet signed, we must avoid a Framers Coup here at all costs. Practical reconciliation for all humans on the Continent with their land will be setback for hundreds of years if we allow Framers Coups to occur. So the opportunities there for Voice, Treaty, Truth, and Republic across the next two decades,

Therein, a First Nations priority must ensure that our Educational Systems prepare our next generations, all of our children, to live in harmony, sustained and regeneratively, with their communities diaspora differences, and their land, for all the generations to come. Let me make this clearer, the essential problem is that we haven’t yet the belief we can do it! That we obfuscate it to the next day, and to the next-week, and to the nextyear. That we pour the responsibility all onto the Teachers and Kids themselves. With Perfidious Albion on their last legs, that any and all Indigenous Priorities and NonIndigenous priorities reflect all the micro and macro cultures in Australia.

"It' s time to walk out of the ' shades of history ' , "

It is all well and good to have the panopticons and the wardens, but when the “brighter day comes” , and “waters become one” again, will we say that the “Teacher did not teach us nonsense”? (Yothu Yindi, 1991, & Fela Kuti, 1980)

Will we say that we finally sat in a circle, and gave our national-community the space to fashion and envision, educational structures that will found a system of generational-knowledge transfer worthy of ten millenia or more?

It is time for a Constitutional Covention Series on the Educational System, its functions, its aims, that hears out the Australian People.

It' s time to walk out of the ' shades of history ' , and to

lean into the present moment. (Contact Matt at mattwithourbloc@gmail.com for the reference list if required.)