AUSTRALIA IS HAVING its own problems with gollywogs. Remember in 2009 when Carol Thatcher was grassed up in the BBC’s Green Room by Adrian Chiles after she made a reference to a tennis player looking like one of the dolls?
Well , now shops in Queensland are being attacked by the chairman of the Centre for Indigenous Cultural Policy (of course…who else). Mr Bob Weatherall is the centre’s chairman and has become irate over the sale of these inoffensive dolls. He deems them ‘offensive’ and demands they be banned. ‘It doesn’t bring unity within a community,’ and, ‘It doesn’t bring back equity.’
Apparently however, the gollywogs are proving popular with shoppers – many of whom (if they are of my vintage) remember them, not from Enid Blyton, but from jars of Robertson’s jam. Each jar had a gollywog impressed upon it which could be peeled off and collected toward one of a set of gollywog badges that many school children wore proudly on their school uniforms without any thought for causing offence, because there was none to cause, and none meant. They wore them perhaps, because they had had at one time owned a gollywog doll. At the time almost every child in the country either owned one in one form or another, or at least had heard of the gollywog.
Gollywogs were part of our popular culture. I say were, because today if a child was seen to be embracing such a rag doll their parents would be questioned by the likes Australia’s Mr Weatherall, on information received by the likes of Adrian Chiles. Yet the gollywogs posed no threat, the children embracing them were not destined to become racists. As far as cultural practices are concerned, ownership of a gollywog pales into insignificance when we are talking about arranged marriages, honour killings, genital mutilations, child exorcism, and the raping of white children by Muslim men.
I presume that it is not golly but wog that causes such fits of outrage by the PC arbiters of acceptable words and images.
WOG, I am told, is an acronym that stands for Wiley Oriental Gentlemen. It was never a reference to the colour of a person’s skin and had nothing to do with black people, but rather the trading skills of middle and far eastern market traders who would go overboard to sell a trinket, or what we would call today a souvenir to British soldiers stationed in the Middle and Far East. Of course it also meant that, in particular, the Arab could not be trusted.
In other words, it was a reference to a specific character of a specific race, and not to the whole compendium of a race. In any case it does deserve the interpretation that the politically correct has put upon it. The gollywog is a much loved character once enjoyed by my generation but vilified by the sinister sounding PC purists who, like their puritanical Victorian predecessors, seek to change previously acceptable language and custom in order to, in the modern version, foster a multicultural dystopia.
The politically correct are the modern puritans; the vanguards of what they deem an acceptable uses of the English language. They have in their armoury laws which they can take advantage of, if they deem a particular offence has been committed toward a minority through the wrong use of language. These people are trustees of the ‘hate crime’ and what they say goes.
THE GOLLYWOG MUST NOW BECOME the emblem that we must use to fight back against the new puritans. I suggest a cross of Saint George with a gollywog emblazoned within one of the crosses quarters to suggest the idiocy of those who take themselves seriously enough to want to crush such a display through the use of the courtroom.
We are in the midst of a new Puritanism, the Puritanism of multiculturalism, and we had better start to fight back or retreat into acceptance of its gruel-like strictures and live in abeyance to their inanities, for fear of whatever they hold in store for those who reject multiculturalism.
A simple doll has caused outrage, not by the people, but by those who seek to protect all forms of minority culture. Which means diminishing the host culture to the level of those allowed citizenship, as in the UK.
Multiculturalism should fail, but its promoters strive to rid the country of people like myself who are embarking upon the last few laps of their lives, and who are, they believe, the one obstacle that stands between them and the realisation of their dystopian vision.
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