As a descendent of Australian slaves, I’m grateful for white missionaries

Kanaka “slave trade” memorial Hervey Bay, Queensland, Australia

The piece below and accompanying video about what was often the forced indentured labour — and hence temporary enslavement — of South Pacific islanders transported to Australia to toil as sugar cane workers, though far harsher than any treatment ever received by the indigenous people of Canada in what was the most benign and peaceful conquest of people and land the modern world has every known, will easily tell readers that their socio-economic outcomes are eerily similar.

John Sandeman, a descendant of these forced migrant workers — who were “blackbirded” in Vanuata, his ancestral homeland — calls himself a descendant of slaves, a bit hyperbolic from a formal semantic perspective. What is much more important is his rejection of the victimization narrative this is automatically supposed to provoke.

Readers will immediately be reminded that cries of past and present victimization underpin the never-ending demand for reparations by Canada’s indigenous activists, a demand that requires that their very own people remain in a perpetual state of dependency.

Without encouraging the dependency of their people, the reparations these already wealthy and privileged rent-seeking propagandists are expropriating from the Canadian people would soon disappear.

Such everlasting dependency is rejected by John Sandeman on various grounds, including his strong Christian belief in the equality of all human beings. But a love for personal and collective freedom long predates Christianity in many places even if the latter can give this desire to be free ample spiritual support.

I make this point because I want non-Christians or lapsed ones to still read this compelling piece and watch the associated video: its message will ring true regardless of your religious beliefs.