Joanes Leizarraga y su traducción al eus...

From insulabaranaria.wordpress.com - December 2, 2012 5:52 PM

Terms of Condescension: The Language of Australia’s ‘Pacific Family’

"In an address to Asialink prior to attending the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Osaka, Morrison was again found talking about the Indo-Pacific, which “embraces our Pacific family with whom we have special relationships and duties, our close neighbours, our major trading partners, our alliance partners, and the world’s fastest-growing economies.”

Such language had all the resonances of white European paternalism, ever watchful over the savage dark races who would only ever advance with the aid, and management, of civilised powers. It was a sentiment reflected in the views of British explorer and anthropologist William Winwood Reade, who opined in his 1872 work The Martyrdom of Man that, “Children are ruled and schooled by force, and it is not an empty metaphor to say that savages are children.” While he accepted slavery as “happily extinct,” he thought it wise for a European government “to introduce compulsory labour among the barbarous races that acknowledge its sovereignty and occupy its land.”

The language of the family imputes the existence of stern, guiding parents and wayward, mischievous children who might dare show some disobedience. The parents, in the “Pacific family,” are never assumed to be any of the Pacific Island states, who are seen as merely squabbling siblings in need of control.

Morrison’s coining of the expression had the benefit of unmasking a Freudian truth. Pacific Island states had long been considered charity cases and laggards in development, useful only as a labour source for Australian markets or security outposts. Concerns about climate change had barely been acknowledged. When needed, Australian police and military forces had also intervened to arrest any supposed sliding into instability.

The term became even more problematic in the wake of independent security decisions made by Pacific Island states with China. A central premise of the charity-child relationship between Canberra and its smaller neighbours has been of one compliant behaviour. We give you money and largesse from the aid budget; you stay loyal and consistent to Australian interests. Of particular concern, even terror, was the Solomon Islands-China security pact which had, on the face of it, the potential to facilitate the establishment of a Chinese military base."

#metaglossia mundus