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Deconstructing the 1960s and 1970s
An open letter to Keith and Liz Windschuttle

(Once again, with apologies to E.P. Thompson and Leszek Kolokowski)

Dear Liz and Keith,

I have known you both since we were young together in the creative and liberating turmoil of the sixties. Keith was my editor for a period when Keith Windschuttle, Liz Windschuttle, Hall Greenland and Rowan Cahill, amongst others, were the editorial collective of the Old Mole and I was a contributor. Hall and Rowan, both of whom are still firmly on the left, were your close personal friends, as well as your political associates, and Hall was the best man at your wedding. In the 1970s, my first wife Mairi, and my daughter, Natalie, lived close to your home in the Eastern Suburbs, and my daughter, who was older than your daughter Ruby, was sometimes her babysitter. Small human connections like this create bonds that often continue to exist even when deep political and ideological differences develop.

In more recent times I owe an intellectual debt to Keith. I found his comprehensive and useful book, The Killing of History extremely effective in demystifying the postmodernist pest that has, for the moment, devastated serious discourse in the humanities. As you know, I am a fan of Keith’s book and have sold many copies of it, and I take none of that back, even in the light of the fact that Keith has more recently shifted over to the neo-conservative right.

I am prompted to write this piece after reading a number of articles by Keith in the new, ultra-conservative Quadrant, edited by Paddy McGuiness. I take these articles as "conversion" statements, intended to register Keith’s formal allegiance to neo-conservatism. Keith has been, in the past, a significant intellectual figure on the left in Australia, and Liz an important personality in the development of modern Australian feminism, one of the major organisers of the early Women and Labor conferences, and also the editor of the important, ground-breaking Australian socialist feminist text, Women, Class and History (Fontana, 1980)./P>

Keith’s very striking demonstration of allegiance to the McGuiness version of Australian and international reaction is not a minor matter. Two years ago a palace coup took place at Quadrant, in which Robert Manne was purged from editorship because of an insufficiency of neo-conservative "political correctness". Since then McGuiness’s two roles have merged. He writes quirky and ponderous ultra-conservative editorials in Quadrant and they then reappear as his columns in the Sydney Morning Herald or vice versa./P>

In the Herald he plays the role of political commissar for extremely right-wing views. These influential merged roles for McGuiness, along with the powerful presence of columnists like Paul Sheehan in the Sydney Morning Herald, and Ackerman, Duffy and Devine in the tabloid The Telegraph, the paper directed at people who have less tertiary education, seem to me to register a significant leap in power for the conservative right in Australian cultural life. In this context, constant assertions of allegiance to this new, more extreme Australian conservatism by someone like Keith Windschuttle just can’t be ignored.

Something that I find puzzling is the lack of any public explanation as to why such a dramatic transformation of intellectual outlook has taken place. All we get is that Keith, when young, was corrupted by reading too many "left wing" American novels, and throwaway asides to the effect that no one of intellectual importance adheres to Marxism any more.

The American journalist, David Horowitz, once the editor of the enormously influential radical magazine, Ramparts, was the author of the definitive text about the post war rise of American imperialism to global power, From Yalta to Vietnam, which influenced us so much in the 1960s. In the 1980s Horowitz, a bit like Keith now, was converted to the neo-conservative right. He felt obliged to write a series of books of autobiography, almost a mini publishing industry in themselves, attempting to explain his earlier intellectual development on the left, and his subsequent disillusionment.

While I didn’t find his justification of his renegacy from the left persuasive, nevertheless, it exists in the public record and I found the detailed description of the reasons for his change of mind pretty interesting, although unconvincing. Horowitz obviously felt the need to explain himself to the hundreds of thousands of students he helped radicalise in the 1960s.

Keith Windschuttle’s and Justus Weiner’s hatchet job on Edward Said

In the absence of any serious personal explanation like Horowitz has offered, of how Keith came to change his mind on the major political questions of the 20th century, what I have to work with is Keith’s recent journalism, mainly in Quadrant, on a wide range of cultural, ideological and political matters.

The immediate impulse for this response is reading Keith’s Quadrant article, the hatchet job on Edward Said, in the January-February 2000 issue. Keith repeats almost literally, with a few additions of his own, the attack made in the September 1999 issue of the right-wing US magazine Commentary, by Justus Reid Weiner, of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, on Edward Said personally.

He accuses Edward Said of being a kind of fake Palestinian, and he ridicules Said’s useful and intellectually influential concept of "Orientalism". The Commentary charge is that Said is camping it up a bit by proclaiming himself a Palestinian. According to Weiner, Edward Said’s family, like some other affluent Arab families, had properties in Lebanon and Egypt as well as Palestine, and Said grew up and got part of his education in Lebanon, Egypt and overseas, and not much of it in Palestine. Therefore he is accused of intellectual fraud in proclaiming his Palestinianness and identification with Palestine, which accusation is buttressed by a panting, tabloid news-television-like investigation of where he is alleged to have grown up, studied and lived.

This is then posed against Said’s own account of his life. What a tendentious heap of nonsense! It’s worth noting that many people who achieve literary prominence, and part of whose literary work is based on their own life, cop that sort of literary deconstruction. Witness the experience of several Australian writers who assert Aboriginal identity, and who are accused by some of not being real Aboriginals; Frank Hardy, who is accused of pinching most of the material for Power Without Glory, and The Dead Are Many from other people; and Frank McCourt, who is accused of falsifying his account of life in Limerick when he was growing up.

"Rootless cosmopolitans", in this case the Palestinians and Edward Said

"Deconstruction", attacking the character of the writer, is peculiarly the device of conservatives in undermining literary and public figures who identify with the oppressed and the underdog. In relation to Edward Said and Palestinianness, and the Palestinian diaspora, it is particularly malicious, and obviously politically driven.

The right-wing Zionist argument justifying the dispossession of the Palestinians includes the proposition that they don’t really exist as a nationality, because after the beginnings of modern development and Jewish settlement, many Arabs moved into Palestine from other areas, and anyway, "there was no distinct Palestinian nationality before 1918".

There is a certain amount of superficial verisimilitude in this argument. It is true that in Ottoman times the Arabs of Palestine were intertwined with the Arabs of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, which is why many Palestinians, including Edward Said, have family connections with other places, but surely this can’t reasonably be used to deprive the Palestinians of the right to a national identity, any more than the overseas origins of many Israelis can be used to deny them a national identity.

It is particularly sad and amnesic for anybody conscious of the long-lived, vicious European anti-Semitism, which chronically attacked Jewish people as "rootless cosmopolitans" and had such a terrible and monstrous culmination in the Holocaust, to now adopt a similarly scapegoating, prejudiced attitude to the Palestinian diaspora, with all this propaganda about Palestinians being "rootless Arab cosmopolitans".

Edward Said’s determined lifelong public identification with Palestine and Palestinianness, is a matter of a serious intellectual taking his stand with his own oppressed nationality, the underdog of all nationalities. What’s wrong with that! As for the details of where he grew up, where he lived and studied, etc, I have a predisposition to believe Edward Said’s own account of his life, rather than the prejudiced deconstruction of one of his political opponents, a neo-conservative right-wing Zionist of the Jabotinsky-Begin variety.

Keith rather cutely doesn’t name the journalist or mention his association with the right-wing Zionist think-tank in Jerusalem. Obviously, to mention this would underline the way this kind of attack on Edward Said is linked with the attempt to deny the Palestinians their nationality and their right to national self-determination.

The powerful anti-Palestinian political intent of Weiner’s attack on Said is made absolutely clear by a section of the Commentary article that Keith did not mention, which I reprint here from a letter attacking Weiner, and defending Said, by the Israeli writer Amos Elon, in the New York Review of Books of February 24, 2000:

after this attempt to expose Edward Said as a fraud, Weiner went on to try to discredit the cause of the "Palestinian people" as a similar myth. He wrote this explicitly in the concluding part of his strange article. For Edward Said, he asked the reader, "now substitute the Palestinian people ... and one begins to gain some apprehension of the myth-driven passions that have animated the revanchist program of so many Palestinian nationalists whose expanding political ambitions often seem, even to sympathetic observers, permanently insusceptible of being satisfied through the normal processes of politics".

Keith, unless he has changed his widely known practice of monitoring the overseas intellectual press, would be well aware of the devastating reply to Weiner’s attack on Said made by the always entertaining, encyclopaedic and serious Christopher Hitchens in a recent issue of the US magazine Nation. One of the features of Keith’s book on postmodernism, The Killing of History that appealed to me so much, was the way that Keith carefully assembled significant arguments, pro and con, on questions in dispute, before giving his own, considered opinion.

As he has shifted to the right, it seems to me that his standards have also dropped significantly, and these days he often only seems to give one side of the story. This is a pretty sad evolution for someone who used to be so careful and thorough.

Keith’s own modest addition to the assault on Said is indignation that a man who has been "so privileged as to live and work as an academic in the United States", should bite the hand that feeds him by attacking US imperialism. From where I sit, the assault on US imperialism from within the monster itself, by people like Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, gives me great heart that the critical role of intellectuals is not yet quite dead in American academe.

The attempt to destroy Said’s concept of orientalism

Like Windschuttle, I am extremely sceptical about the overuse of postmodernist rhetoric about "discourse". Unlike Keith, I believe that a serious examination of the way other cultures, particularly those of the Middle East and Asia have historically been viewed by the Western intelligentsia, and how this has slotted in with the interests of Western imperialism, is entirely reasonable, and very useful.

Said’s careful and ingenious development of the idea of orientalism in relation to the Western intelligentsia and the East, seems to me extraordinarily apt. Ever since Edward Said first elaborated the general notion of orientalism, all the intellectual stooges of all these imperialisms have been smarting under the great effectiveness of this concept in demystifying the justifications and defences of all imperialisms.

I am still a quite unreconstructed Marxist in relation to imperialism. Said’s ingenious concept of orientalism contains some truthful narrative and is also of great political use in the struggle against all the said imperialisms. It stands forthrightly and effectively on its own legs and needs little defence from me. The attempts of Keith and Weiner to destroy it are feeble and ineffective and they tell us more about the two writers, particularly now that US imperialism, for the moment, rules the world, than they do about Edward Said and orientalism.

The Grapes of Wrath as a communist conspiracy

The previous article by Windschuttle in Quadrant, in November 1999, is very strange indeed. It contains a gee-whiz reproduction by Keith of a number of the main lines of argument from a new book by Hilton Kramer, The Twilight of the Intellectuals, published by Ivan R. Dee in the USA.

The core argument of this book, which is a collection of Kramer’s New Criterion essays over a number of years, is that American intellectual culture has been completely corrupted by a kind of "progressivism" that allegedly, having developed earlier in the century, merged into Stalinism in the 1930s. Apparently American intellectual life can only be saved by the current counter-revolution being mounted by neo-conservatives.

Keith starts his own article in confessional mode, quoting another recent book Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination by Ivan R. Shindo, that attempts to prove that John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath is a kind of Stalinist confection because it was written when Steinbeck’s wife was briefly a member of the Communist Party, and that the Grapes of Wrath view of the Depression has corrupted intellectual life in the United States and the world for many years.

This is backed up by learned assertions that some of the details about where the Okies came from, and went to, in The Grapes of Wrath are not historically accurate. Keith says of himself:

As an adolescent in Sydney during the 1950s, I read The Grapes of Wrath with a sense of great excitement. At the time, our English teachers at high school were trying to enthuse us with studies of eighteenth-century English essayists and Victorian romantic poets. Those of us with literary inclinations, however, found this curriculum tedious and irrelevant and instead became furtive devotees of American novels, especially, in my own case, the works of Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. We had come to their writings via the Hollywood movies based on their books. It was not until decades later that I discovered that these writers and several other Americans I admired had been Marxists and Communist Party sympathisers ...

However, in retrospect, it seems clear that our covert passion for American novels had given us a very thorough grounding in Marxist thought, a grounding, moreover, that was all the more effective for being theoretically innocent. The notion that our society was governed by a system based on the greed and avarice of the rich, an oppressive and coercive state, and the exploitation and degradation of ordinary people was something we had learnt not from theorists or politicians but had discovered for ourselves, so we thought, from the experience of the world we had gained through literature. When we went to university in the 1960s it was not surprising we were enthusiasts for the Marxist revival that accompanied the protest movement against the war in Vietnam, a movement that itself gave prominent display to a new line-up of American literary lions.

Is Keith Windschuttle perpetrating a spoof on Quadrant?

On first reading the slightly odd paragraphs above, my first instinct was that Keith was perpetrating on Quadrant the sort of brilliant spoof that the American physicist, Alan Sokal, played on the postmodernist magazine Social Text, and also not unlike the much earlier, extremely effective Angry Penguins deception here in Australia. Attractive though this notion of Keith in spoof mode is to me, I’ve had to reluctantly conclude that he is serious. Which is a great worry!

Give us a break, mate! "Covert passion for American novels", indeed. Even the language is loopy. Keith paints a picture of a young, naive, innocent abroad, Childe Harold Windschuttle, being hopelessly corrupted by the "progressivism" of the American novels of Steinbeck and Hemingway, and, as a result, being subborned into an apparently misguided opposition to the Vietnam War.

By these illicit means he is further drawn into a Marxist revival, the ultimate cause of which was that the students of his generation had imbibed too much Marxism from American novels!

This rather strange, self-serving reconstruction of the 1960s is bizarre. It obviously suits a new, entirely artificial intellectual construction by Hilton Kramer and Keith Windschuttle, which aims to reduce the history of the enormous intellectual, social and political upheavals of the 1960s to a kind of Stalinist intellectual conspiracy.

The only problem with this picture is that it isn’t a complete, truthful, or in any way balanced, description of the period. As we both know, all narratives are not equal, and some narratives are much more accurate than others. This particular new narrative is an eccentric right-wing distortion (deconstruction, if you will) of those times. You may choose to remember it like that now, but many thousands of us were there as well as you. The majority of us remember that period completely differently, and I contend that our recollections are more truthful, as I will demonstrate.

Even the form of this neo-conservative literary deconstruction of The Grapes of Wrath is rather weird. For a start, it implies the necessity for a kind of exotic right-wing Proletcult in literature, particularly the novel. Apparently, to some obsessive right-wingers, no literary licence is allowable at all.

Novels and other works should almost literally reproduce history, but only in the version written by neo-conservatives. The spectacular collision of this view with any useful notion of the novel and literature, in their real human development, is striking. Even Stalin’s "socialist realist" Proletcult didn’t use such mechanical and rigid criteria as those required by this new neo-conservative school of Proletcult.

Marxist literary "deconstruction" actually has a lot of merit

It is worth noting a certain hypocrisy on Keith’s part, in relation to critical "deconstruction" of literature. In an article in the July-August, 1999, Quadrant, Civil Society and the Academic Left, he has this to say in relation to Marxist and postmodernist literary criticism, and "deconstruction":

The immediate outcomes of calls of this kind are now fairly well known. They have led, for example, to The Tempest being widely read as an allegory about imperial conquest and Paradise Lost being regarded as a feminist tragedy, not to mention a whole range of other major works, such as Mansfield Park, Great Expectations and Aida, being identified as complicit in furthering the white, male, Western imperialist hegemony. Kimball argues that what is involved is not just the interpretation of particular texts, but an undermining of the cultural position of literature and art. What threatens to be lost is not only the integrity of the individual text - bad enough though that is - but the whole idea of literature as a distinctive realm of expression and experience with its own concerns, values and goals. The whole realm of literary-aesthetic experience exercises an important claim on us only to the extent that it transcends the vagaries of contemporary political squabbles. If everything 'in the last analysis" is political', this raises the question of whether academics can discover objective truths.

Windschuttle’s position here is designed to reinforce a totally reactionary stance in relation to literature. The area of culture is the area where critical deconstruction, taking into account class interests and economic factors, is in fact very useful. The examples he mentions are, in my view, reasonable attempts at critical literary analysis, although a couple of them are rather exotic.

Such analysis does not necessarily invalidate the worth of the works examined, but it does draw our attention to the class and economic context in which they were written. For instance, Karl Marx noted the fact that the novelist Balzac was a reactionary royalist, and often discussed his novels in that framework, but nevertheless he regarded Balzac as the greatest novelist who ever lived, valued his books, and read them many times.

When I was a young bloke working in the NSW Public Library in the 1950s, I used to grab a little bit of time browsing, maybe 10 minutes out of every hour or so, when I was shelving books, down in the deep stack. I stumbled upon a piece in the Modern Quarterly, the old British Stalinist cultural journal, That Paralysing Apparition Beauty: Timon of Athens and the Cash Nexus, a persuasive article analysing the class relations in Shakespeares’s plays from a Marxist point of view, by George Paloczi-Horvath.That article was my introduction to Marxist literary criticism. Young and impressionable as I was, I found it blindingly illuminating and I’ll never forget the excitement caused by my first reading of it. I reread it the other day and I still think it’s brilliant and informative.

Apparently Hemingway and Steinbeck are fair game for the Windschuttle school of deconstruction, but Jane Austen, Dickens and Aida must be left alone

According to the Windschuttle-Kramer-Kimball school of literary criticism, class and economic analysis of the great works of the Western canon is impermissible, maybe it’s too disturbing to the masses, but of course Keith and company have the privilege of digging out alleged Stalinist undertones in Steinbeck. What ideologically driven literary humbug!

The Kramer-Windschuttle school of deconstruction is about one step removed, really, from the exotic right-wing conspiracy theories that blame the alleged "decline of Western culture" on the influence of the "illuminati" and the Freemasons, and only about two steps removed from the views of obsessive religious conservatives who painstakingly try to document a thesis that Karl Marx was a practicing Satanist.

Joe McCarthy "deconstructed" the American film and American literature in a neo-conservative way with a vengeance in the 1950s. The result of this was that quite a few creative artists ended up in jail for not naming names

In grabbing hold of Kramer’s and Shindo’s work so enthusiastically, Keith displays a certain historical amnesia, or maybe there are more articles by Keith in the works that may tell us there was a good side to Joe McCarthy, in something like the way he casually tosses into one of his articles a semi-defence of the CIA funding of the Congress of Cultural Freedom. (Apparently the CIA funding might have been more acceptable to the literary world if it had been a little more public.)

The climate of fear created by the widespread blacklisting of left-wingers working in the media and arts, and the imprisonment of some of them, was spearheaded by the McCarthy committee’s relentless pursuit of the "thin red line" in books, plays and movies -- a pursuit not unlike Shindo’s pursuit of the same "thin red line" in Steinbeck.

The immediate pro-capitalist political function of this kind of neoconservative deconstruction

The rewrite of Windschuttle’s article in the Financial Review of December 21, 1999, had the following banner headline: Rural Myth About Unbridled Capitalism, and the following subhead: "John Steinbeck’s story about the exploited Okies in the bush is devoid of historical reality, reveals Keith Windschuttle. The Left should realise this before condemning the free-market agenda for rural Australia."

This solicited article is a rather tabloid rewrite of Keith’s Quadrant article. It contains the following:

It is true that police intervened on the side of employers during some highly publicised union disputes. But this was because the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Union had perfected the lightning strike and strong-arm picket line to prevent crops being harvested on any but their own terms.

The tactic held to ransom farmers whose crops were ripe and would ruin if left for more than several days on the trees or vines ... In fact, almost every component of the accepted story of the Okies was an invention of Marxist intellectuals. Dorothea Lange was a member of the Communist Party when she went on the road with her camera. Steinbeck was not a party member, but his first wife, Carol Henning, was a Marxist who took him on a political pilgrimage to the USSR in 1937 and to party meetings in San Francisco at the time he wrote The Grapes of Wrath.

As an afterword, and as a more credible moral to draw from this tale, it is worth noting what eventually happened to the Okies. Instead of being consigned to destitution, they emerged after World War II as prosperous members of the West Coast middle-classes. By the 1960s, they had become an important part of the conservative coalition that twice elected Ronald Reagan Governor of California.

Well, there you have quite a lot of Keith’s apparent new outlook, pithily reproduced in tabloid style for one of the major house organs of the employers. Keith’s initial lesson is that Steinbeck’s picture of the cruelties of capitalism in rural life in the Depression was a Stalinist falsification, and therefore it is illegitimate to oppose the Costello economic program for rural Australia. A rather big conceptual leap, one might think, that one. Very similar to the views of his editor, McGuiness, who constantly has a refrain in his columns in the Herald that while it’s sad what’s happening to rural Australia, such economic rationalism is inevitable and necessary, and will be even quite good for the rural people in the end.

Keith Windschuttle’s attack on trade unionism

The ostensibly throwaway comment about the agricultural workers union in California is, from my point of view, the saddest thing that Keith has written anywhere. Apparently, for Keith now, these reasonably normal tactics for a beleaguered agricultural workers' union are totally illegitimate! What is an agricultural workers union supposed to do in the way of industrial action except withdraw its labour at the most strategic moments? Many unions do that kind of thing from time to time. These are fairly normal industrial tactics.

This statement attacking unions is particularly significant in the context of modern Australian industrial relations. In the Quadrant article it is just a statement in the body of a very long article. In the Financial Review it is featured more forcefully and dramatically, in a shorter article.

The most notable struggle of that sort in recent years was the waterfront dispute. After a protracted and complex industrial confrontation, which involved overseas unions black-banning vessels coming from Australian ports, and very wide public support at mass pickets in Australia, the unions successfully retained the right to collective bargaining on the waterfront.

A very important current battle is the defensive campaign of the workers in the Pilbara in Western Australia to retain the basic human right to collective bargaining, and not have individual contracts forced on them. Like the wharfies' dispute, this is an absolutely critical dispute in the constant battle to maintain the right of unions to continue their collective bargaining role in difficult new conditions.

In recent times nurses and other health workers all over NSW have been engaged in industrial action, not basically for wages, but to defend the health system from cuts and closures to services. These health workers are constantly attacked with the argument that they should not worry about such things, and that they should not in any circumstances take industrial action over these matters.

In Victoria, metal unions, the Electrical Trades Union, workers in the airline industry and many others are engaging in normal industrial activity, including strikes, over the whole range of issues that affect trade unionists. The building unions have just achieved a long-overdue reform, the reduction of the working week to 36 hours, by the judicious and effective use of industrial action.

Right now, NSW teachers and other government-sector workers like firemen are engaged in a very public battle over the entirely normal negotiations for wages and conditions for the next four years. The intransigence of the government has forced them to take industrial action. As one might predict, the tabloid media, including the unspeakable Telegraph are putting the boot into the teachers wholesale, particularly because they have held out for a better outcome than that accepted by the leadership of several other unions (in some cases without the prior endorsement of their members).

In all these conflicts my whole instinct is to side with the unions and the workers. Some of my closest friends in the world are involved in these struggles, as union members and important union activists in some of these industrial situations.

Ditching Marxism as an ideology is an important question. From my point of view, for Keith Windschuttle to abandon Marxism as a tool of literary or social analysis, is an odd and even rather inexplicable development at his stage in life.

The rise of Marxism in the 19th century was no conspiracy. It was the product of the work of Marx and Engels intersecting with the rise of the modern proletariat

The ebb and flow of Marxism in the 20th century is a complex question. The awful and disorienting phenomenon of Stalinism had a considerable affect on the fortunes of Marxism as a popular ideology. From the time of the entrenchment of Stalin’s counter revolution in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, until the late 1940s, the Stalinist deformation of Marxism was enormously influential, although socialist opponents and critics of Stalinism contested this deformation with increasing effect throughout the black night of high Stalinism. The peak of this agony, which was dubbed by Victor Serge, one of its Trotskyist victims, Midnight in the Century, was 1937 (the year I was born), the year of the main murderous Moscow Trial, and of Stalin’s murder of about half a million communists and socialists, including most of the leaders of the Russian Revolution.

After the Second World War, the cumulative experiences of many individuals, and even whole peoples, including many individual Communists and socialists, in the Stalinist world and Stalin’s camps, began to undermine Stalinist "Marxism" on a mass scale. Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech about Stalin’s crimes, particularly accelerated Stalinism’s rapid decline.

Bob Gould’s transition to Marxism was much more the "fault" of the Christian Brothers than it was of any alleged "concealed Stalinist message" in the novels of Steinbeck and Hemingway. However, most of those radicalised in the 1960s, including Windschuttle and Gould, were mainly driven by the direct catalyst for major changes, the Vietnam War and conscription, graphically brought into our lounge rooms by television, the first imperialist war to be made so immediate

To ascribe the revival of Marxism in the 1960s mainly to disguised Stalinist conspiracy is eccentric, simplistic, opinionated nonsense. I’m not joking when I say that in my own case, my interest in Marxism was partly the "fault" of my Christian Brothers Catholic education.

In the history parts of religion lessons, the ever-resourceful Christian Brothers taught us a kind of "countercourse" to the establishment British history that we were required to study for the external exams. This countercourse focussed on the superiority of Catholic civilization in Medieval times, and also on the crimes of British Imperialism particularly, in relation to Ireland and Australia, and on the evils of modern "irreligious secular capitalism".

In her recent, rather bleak, book, The Imaginary Australian Miriam Dixson blames the hostile attitude that modern Australian intellectuals often have to the history of Imperialist "British" Australia, on a certain "splitness" she discerns in the psyche of Irish Catholic Australians. There is a certain amount of truth in this, though Dixson’s view is jaundiced and prejudiced.

The Australian generation of the 1960s were primarily radicalised by Vietnam

Our subsequent evolution did not have a great deal to do with any "Stalinist undertones" in American novels, although American novels did influence us. The overwhelming factor in the radicalisation of the 1960s was the Vietnam War itself, and particularly the associated introduction of conscription for this rotten war, which made the issue very personal for that whole generation of youth.

The generation of the 1960s was the Koestler-Orwell generation, as well as the Steinbeck-Hemingway generation

Keith simplifies things far too much, for his own purposes, by focusing on Hemingway and Steinbeck. To frame up Steinbeck in the way he does, implying that his point of view was essentially Stalinist, is pretty exotic. The charge of Stalinism against Hemingway, to whom curiously he devotes much less detailed attention, has a great deal more justification.

Viewed with any kind of objectivity, the radicalisation of the 1960s was a very major flowering of modernism. It unfolded in the context of the intense political and social stresses produced by the vast extension of tertiary education in most advanced countries. The catalyst for this ferment was, in most capitalist countries, the Vietnam War, and also in France, the aftermath of the Algerian Revolution against French imperialism.

The New York intellectuals

Keith’s Australian rewrite of Kramer and Shindo is sharpened by his own folksy spin on the "sinister corrupting role of Marxism in American novels" on himself and other "naive and innocent youth" in a retrospectively idealised and remote sylvan suburban Australia in the 1960s. This gives a radical new dimension to the ongoing American neo-conservative mythologising about how the 1960s are supposed to have corrupted and undermined the previously unshaken eternal values of American life.

One can imagine the horror of modern North American neo-conservatives when they read a reprint of Keith’s article in the New Criterion and discover his important new evidence that not only was "progressivism" corrupting American values, it was also by a kind of cultural osmosis, corrupting the innocent youth of a pristine and god-fearing isolated suburban Australia, via the aforesaid Marxism in The Grapes of Wrath.

For his own literary and cultural purposes, Keith has thus sharpened and exaggerated the impact of Daniel Kramer’s arguments, and he has also left out of his own article a considerable number of the nuances and complexities in Kramer’s book. What Keith’s Australian version most sharpens and exaggerates is the tendency of Kramer to regard all the New York intellectuals who continued as leftists as pretty much the same in their essential "progressivism", despite the fact that some were Stalinists and some were anti-Stalinists, and that they were bitterly opposed to each other.

To this end, Windschuttle proceeds with an account of Kramer’s description of the development of the "New York intellectuals". He proceeds by way of a rather deceptive conflating of the Stalinist and the anti-Stalinist currents among the New York intellectuals of the 1930s and the 1940s. He quite promiscuously merges the Stalinists and the anti-Stalinists.

Further on he recounts some of Kramer’s material about some of the differences among them, but his initial juxtaposition of "Lillian Hellman, Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Irving Howe and the blacklisted Hollywood Ten", in that order, is very significant. What Windschuttle does here is make an amalgam, just a little bit reminiscent in fact, of the notorious amalgams that Stalin made in the Moscow Trials.

Keith’s amalgam here is between the notoriously unrepentant Stalinists such as Lillian Hellman and most of the Hollywood Ten, and those anti-Stalinist intellectuals of the 1930s who publicly retained and defended some aspect of radical and leftist views into the 1960s and 1970s.

It is intellectually misleading to imply that the unrepentant Stalinists, and those of their courageous leftist opponents from the 1930s, who had remained radicals, were essentially the same. This is only possible if you view the world from the point of view of Reaganite-Thatcherite-McGuinessite neo-conservatism.

Three of the recalcitrant radicals that Kramer so slanders happen to rate highly amongst my own personal intellectual icons. The eminent literary critic Irving Howe, for instance, became a quite consistent left-wing social democrat in later life. I did not agree with all his views, particularly his scepticism about the student radicalisation of the 1960s. Nevertheless, his life retained an honest logic and a unity and to summarily dismiss him as a corrupting "progressive influence" like the Stalinists, shows a cavalier attitude to serious intellectual history.

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson has had a considerable influence on anybody on the left who is even semi-literate. The breadth of Wilson’s interests, everything from New England literary history, the American Civil War, through to the history of Marxism and even to religion and the Dead Sea Scrolls, is recognised by most people who are acquainted in even the smallest way with literary modernism.

In particular, his erudite and intelligently sceptical book about the development of Marxism as an ideology, To the Finland Station, gave many of my generation a very useful introduction to the basic ideas of Marxism, while inoculating us a little bit, along the way, against Stalinism.

Mary McCarthy

My greatest personal heroine amongst the three is the redoubtable novelist Mary McCarthy. Her wonderful memoirs of intellectual life in the 1930s and in particular, her witty and amusing description of her encounters with Stalinism, were part of almost every leftist’s education in the 1960s. This veteran anti-Stalinist radical vigorously and intelligently opposed the Vietnam War, and even demonstratively visited North Vietnam at the height of the conflict, which was very encouraging to the Vietnamese and certainly gave great impetus to our antiwar campaign in the imperialist countries, including Australia.

Who can forget her widely publicised conflict with the Stalinist Lillian Hellman. In the 1980s, on the Dick Cavett Show, on American television, she flung at Hellman the wonderful throw-away thunderbolt, "Everything she writes or says, is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."

The subsequent libel case brought by Hellman against Mary McCarthy, and the publicity it generated, familiarised a new generation of radicals and literate people with the visceral and vital nature of the conflict between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists on the left in the 1930s.

To promiscuously merge people like McCarthy, Howe and Wilson with the unrepentant Stalinists like Lillian Hellman and John Howard Lawson, in order to artificially construct a picture of a "progressivism" that has "corrupted Western intellectual life", is a forced, inaccurate and totally unconvincing piece of neo-conservative intellectual deconstruction.

Kramer is particularly hostile to Mary McCarthy. He dislikes the fact that her determined battles against Stalinism did not shift her over to the right in politics. His heroes are those New York intellectuals like Diana and Lionel Trilling who became neo-conservatives. Another subtext in his animosity to McCarthy is in the sphere of sexual politics.

Mary McCarthy was a kind of early feminist, a vigorously, serially heterosexual woman, who however, took no shit from men, and became a famously successful, gossipy and interesting novelist, using material out of her own tempestuous and colourful life. The men with whom she collided and cohabited and loved and fought, appeared in her novels warts and all, which was one of the secrets of her enormous success as a writer.

She was the exact opposite of the neo-conservative ideal woman. As Caroline See points out in a recent Washington Post review of an important and monumental recent literary biography of McCarthy, Seeing Mary Plain, by Frances Kiernan, her novels frequently changed people's lives, and had enormous influence on such subsequent feminist writers as Alison Lurie, Diane Johnson, Alice Adams, Anita Shreve and Marge Piercy. No wonder Hilton Kramer loathes Mary McCarthy.

Windschuttle gives you Hilton Kramer’s carefully constructed, rather biased version of the history of the "New York intellectuals", using Kramer, the most polemical neo-conservative commentator, as his only source. There is actually a very large and significant and diverse literature on this important 20th century intellectual influence, and just about all of it disagrees with Kramer’s viewpoint. You don’t get much hint of this from Keith’s article.

The major early overview of the phenomenon of the "New York intellectuals" was Daniel Aron’s Writers on the Left, published in the early 1960s, which was widely available in Australia as an Avon paperback. More recently, Alan Wald’s two thorough and comprehensive books, James T. Farrell (New York University Press, 1978) and The New York Intellectuals (University of Nth Carolina Press, 1987), are very useful. Also important are: William L. O’Neill, A Better World, A Great Schism. Stalinism and American Intellectuals (Simon and Schuster 1982); Neill Jamonville, Critical Crossings. The New York Intellectuals and Post-war America (University of California Press 1991); Terry Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Allan Bloom, Prodigal Sons. The New York Intellectuals and their World (Oxford University Press, New York, 1986); Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously. Mary McCarthy and her World (Clarkson Potter, 1992); and, finally, the most recent and in some ways the most useful, The Long War. The Intellectual Peoples’ Front and Anti-Stalinism 1930-1940, by Judy Kutulas (Duke University Press 1995). In addition to this, something like 50 of the participants in these important intellectual battles have written their own memoirs.

Most of the major historical commentators on the period have quite opposed versions to Kramer of the events discussed, and the intellectual influence of the "New York intellectuals" in American life. Daniel Kramer’s narrative is a quite artificial construct, which is driven by the obvious political aim of building and reinforcing an ultra-conservative view of the needs of culture and civilisation.

That Keith Windschuttle should now share this view is not particularly startling. Quite a few neo-conservatives have these views. Left-wingers like me have quite different views on these historical events and the cultural imperatives that flow from them. Nothing is wrong with such conflicts between us, and even if there were, who could prevent them anyway!

What I find intellectually unacceptable is to belt out Kramer’s tendentious version without giving anyone very much hint of the wide diversity of views that exist on the topic, as if this ultra-conservative narrative is the only one that a civilised person can now reasonably consider. Such an approach seems to me thoroughly flawed in a field in which such a wealth and variety of documentation is available.

What did we really do in the 1960s? Were the 1960s a humanising, radical sea change, in Australia and the world, or were they the Beginning of the End for Western Civilization?

Attacking the radicalisation of the 1960s has become a major growth industry in right-wing journalism. McGuiness, Duffy, Sheehan, Devine (tabloid version), Michael Thompson, Ackerman, the historian Miriam Dixson, Max Teichman and now Keith Windschuttle spend an awful lot of time blaming the ills of modern society on the "chaos and corruption" that they claim set in as a result of the radicalisation of the 1960s and the 1970s.

Some of this reactionary journalism is rather wacky, for instance, when Paddy McGuiness abuses the social category of "baby boomers" -- who are, after all these days, the core readers of the Herald, which prints his column -- as "Inner-Western suburbs thieves".

Some of it is nasty and sad, when people who themselves benefited from the free tertiary education of the Whitlam period bitterly denounce it and campaign to withdraw educational subsidies from the current generation of students.

Much of the assault on the 1960s is quite mad, but it has extremely reactionary intentions, which involve the attempt to roll back many of the important progressive social changes that started in the 1960s. It seems to me that insofar as Keith has joined this reactionary campaign against the 1960s, it might be useful for all of us to recollect in what activities we jointly or separately engaged, in this magical period of the 1960s and the 1970s.

In the 1960s, I was a little older than most of the youth who were radicalised in the period. I turned 30 in 1967. Keith Windschuttle was also a bit older than most of the students. He was about 24 in 1967, and he became a student at Sydney University after having had an earlier career as a working journalist, which gave him a broader experience and culture than most undergraduates who had gone to the university straight from school.

He was already a rather confident man of the world, a handsome and self-possessed kind of bloke. He became a charismatic figure in the student radicalisation of the period. When Hall Greenland went overseas in early 1968, Windschuttle was elected editor of the Sydney University newspaper, Honi Soit and Keith’s 1968 Honi was a masterpiece of radical journalism.

Rowan Cahill, who worked on Honi with Keith in 1968 remembers Keith particularly for his extraordinary creative energy and enthusiasm as the leading student journalist. A thing that sticks particularly in Rowan’s mind is the way Keith became rapidly enthused with overseas radical journalism, and almost effortlessly transformed ideas, articles and images he got from overseas sources, into effective, idiomatic, Australian student journalism in Honi.

It is fascinating that Keith now singles out a major radical presence in the New York Review of Books of that period, Susan Sontag, as a significant bad influence in modern Western civilisation, and quotes with approval an attack on her by Roger Kimball. Windschuttle ought to know! He helped introduce many of us to the biting and wide ranging ideas in the New York Review of Books, including Susan Sontag’s work, in his Honis.

The year 1968 was the year of the amazing student upheaval in Paris and France and the year of Tet, the major Viet Cong offensive in Vietnam, which so dented the imperialist aims of the Pentagon. It was also the year of the Prague Spring, which was so brutally crushed by the Soviet tanks in September.

Keith’s Honi covered all the political events, at home and abroad, with radical enthusiasm, verve and colour, and a lot of journalistic flair and expertise. It covered all our Sydney antiwar demonstrations, and promoted them. This was the year when the major sea change in public opinion against the Vietnam War, that really gathered momentum the following year, 1969, began shyly to emerge from underneath the conservatism dominant in Australia for the previous 20 years, like mushrooms after rain at the end of a long drought. Keith was not only in the thick of it, he was a very significant leader in this process.

The Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia

Windschuttle’s retrospective view of us of the Vietnam protest generation, as mainly corrupted by Stalinism, just isn’t true. For instance, he must remember the day the Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. Despite the fact that it was a weekday, by the afternoon of that day, Resistance and the Students for a Democratic Society had succeeded in organising a very substantial, thousand strong, radically ecumenical, largely Sydney University based demonstration against the invasion.

This amazed the burghers of the Eastern Suburbs, looking on from the windows of their flats, as we marched past them down to the Polish Consulate at Double Bay. (The Polish Consulate was the Stalinist consulate closest to Sydney in that period when the Russians had no diplomatic relations with Australia.)

As was my habit in those days, as one of the organisers of the protest, at its height I scrambled up a tree in the moat of the Consulate. I then climbed on to the roof of the building from the tree and planted a red flag embossed with Che Guevara’s head, on the highest point of the structure, as a protest against the invasion. (I was reasonably agile when I was 31.) After an hour or so, I was dragged down and arrested by the Cliff Rescue Squad, who were probably a bit sick of me as they had had to drag me down from several other high places during Vietnam protests.

Next morning I had to front a completely bemused, notoriously right-wing magistrate at Paddington Court. He had great difficulty in comprehending the phenomenon of a leading leftist and agitator like myself getting arrested in a vigorous protest against the Russians. I was convicted, and fined. (For "entering enclosed lands" and resisting arrest.)

As I remember, Keith was at that demonstration. He certainly covered it in Honi, which editorialised strongly against the Stalinist invasion. To infer that we were mainly influenced by Stalinism in 1968 is just rubbish. Even the Communist Party, the main traditional Stalinist formation, was thrown into a deep crisis, and the majority condemned the invasion, bringing to a head the tensions in the organisation and precipitating a series of splits which contributed later to the final political demise of the CP in the 1990s.

The year 1969

The year 1969 was the moment of the great sea change. That year the Liberals almost lost the federal election, with a substantial swing to Labor, that was in large part the result of increasing disenchantment with the war in Vietnam. This was the year when the broad social and cultural radicalisation of the younger generation really gathered momentum, and reached a kind of king tide in many countries.

It was also the year of a very significant radicalisation in the industrial working class in Australia, encapsulated in the O’Shea struggle. The popular Secretary of the Melbourne Tramways Union, the personally courageous Maoist, the late Clarrie O’Shea, decided to bring to a head the long-festering struggle over the "penal clauses" against unions in the Arbitration Act.

These "penal clauses" had hamstrung the unions for the previous 35 years. O’Shea refused to pay a draconian fine inflicted under the penal clauses, on his union, over a legitimate industrial dispute. This refusal was supported by the left-wing bloc of unions that had broken away from the Melbourne Trades Hall Council (then right-wing controlled). O’Shea was immediately imprisoned in Pentridge jail.

The mood of the times was such that there was an enormous wave of industrial action all over Australia against the jailing. This industrial upheaval gathered considerable nationwide momentum in a very few days. The Tory political class became very worried by these developments. Quickly, some smart people on the ruling class side of politics arranged for his fine to be paid. (The $11,000 fine, a large amount in those days, was paid by a retired accountant. "For the good of the country", he said, and he claimed that it was his own piece of personal charity. Few people believed him.)

The old penal clauses were never used thereafter and the effective defeat of the penal clauses opened a new period of industrial militancy in Australia, that lasted effectively for the next 12 years or so, until it was killed off by the Accord in 1982.

How the capitalist state attempted to deal with us

Our activities against the Vietnam War, and in other spheres of radical activity, were carefully monitored, and frequently physically combated, by the two intimidatory policing instruments of the capitalist state, ASIO and the police Special Branches in each state. These two bodies usually collaborated in their activities against us, although there were occasional tensions between them.

In 1969 your current Quadrant colleague, Peter Coleman, then a Liberal member of the NSW parliament, launched a colourful witch-hunt against student radicals and antiwar activists, including myself. The following extract from David McKnight’s book, Australia’s Spies and their Secrets, Allen and Unwin (1994) tells the story.

In the "Mayne affair" two politicians had played a role. One was Henry Sullivan, a country newspaper proprietor and member of the NSW Upper House. The other was Peter Coleman then a Liberal backbencher. The idea of a magazine to ‘expose’ left-wingers had been put to Mayne by a wealthy businessman and heir to a coal-mining fortune, Peter Warren, who said that ASIO information would be made available. Mayne told the Hope Royal Commission later that he found this "intriguing" and came to a lunch at the American Club in September 1971 where he met Coleman and Redford whom he was told had "flown from Melbourne that day to be present". "The other three were quite familiar with each other and Warren and Coleman left me with the impression that they knew a number of senior ASIO men and saw them regularly. At one stage Warren said he had dined in Melbourne recently with the Director General of ASIO – I think it was Barbour at that time ..." During discussion of the proposal to produce a magazine "Coleman indicated he had seen ASIO files and I got the impression that this had been going on for some years". Indeed Mayne himself had had contact with ASIO officers over the years, being briefed "on background" and occasionally joining them at their pub at Milsons Point. While Mayne worked on the Sun Herald ASIO had contacted him to "fish for dirt" on visiting antiwar campaigner and pediatrician, Dr Benjamin Spock ...

Coleman’s defence that he saw nothing secret was later attacked by fellow parliamentarian, the independent member for the South Coast, John Hatton. Hatton obtained one of the files which Mayne said was given to him by Coleman and was to be used for the magazine they were to produce. It covered the activities of CPA member, Denis Freney, and, Hatton noted, contained no newspaper cuttings nor did it all come from public sources. It included some 28 staccato observations such as: "Participated in demonstration in Sydney Stock Exchange on 2-6-70"; "Member of a sit-in demonstration at Nabalco offices, Sydney, 3-5-71 (over Gove Peninsula situation)"; "Member of anti-apartheid demonstration at Milner Field, Eastwood, 27-6/71". Hatton asked "Would anyone dare to suggest that every one of those incidents is reported in some public document, no matter how obscure and available it is in the public arena? Who would deny that what I have read does not constitute a dossier?"

Hatton went on to describe Coleman’s actions as ‘defaming and discrediting of people’. He pointed out that Coleman had attacked Freney in Parliament in June 1967. Research by the writer uncovered two other attacks on Freney by Coleman in 1969 and 1970. Another person on a file Coleman had given to Mayne in 1972 was bookseller Bob Gould who had featured in a Coleman-authored pamphlet School Power which ‘exposed’ the anti-Vietnam War movement and student revolt in high schools. School Power had been produced by the Moree Champion newspaper, owned by none other than Henry Sullivan who popped up in Mayne’s account of the lunch with Redford, Warren and Coleman. Hatton concluded: ‘For a member of this Parliament to be associated with ASIO materials and individuals, to deny it and to be caught out on it, and to be involved in an untruth – is this something that this Parliament accepts?

These facts put a slightly different spin on the concern Coleman and other neo-conservatives of his ilk show about the fact that some Stalinists in Australia collaborated with the Soviet espionage system. Peter Coleman is a kind of expert on these matters, obviously based on his own life experience. You are undoubtedly aware of the weird witch-hunting attacks on the life work and reputation of Manning Clark by many in your stable of neo-conservative colleagues, including Coleman.

One doesn’t have to be overly given to conspiracy theories to infer that Australian state intelligence agencies may have an ongoing interest in such things as Manning Clark’s life and influence. It’s fascinating how the main bizarre accusation against Clark, that he was "a Soviet agent in place" who had "secretly received the very important Order of Lenin for his services to the KGB", has totally collapsed.

I recently went to a meeting at the Sydney Institute to hear Peter Charlton, editor of the Brisbane Courier Mail, the main vehicle for weird witch-hunts against Clark. He had to shamefacedly admit that the researchers they had sent to Russia to dig into the now accessible Soviet archives, had come up with the embarrassing evidence that their main assertion was false, and that the medal Clark had received in the Soviet Union was a minor Lenin medal, awarded to everybody who had addressed the public conference in which Clark had participated, which was what Clark’s family said all along. Nevertheless, Charlton put a brave face on this disaster, and no doubt the witch-hunt against Clark’s memory will continue, despite the actual facts of the case.

A curious, but pleasant aspect of this affair is that the Courier Mail paid a small fortune to bring back to this country 18,000 further items of Comintern archives pertaining to Australia. The documents were deposited at the National Library, and the Courier Mail has engaged a rather conservative, but extremely meticulous and energetic academic, David Lovell, to translate interesting selections and produce a book on the archives.

So, in a way, quite useful things can emerge from malicious intentions. Nevertheless, on the basis of all this, you must understand why, although through gritted teeth, I am always reasonably courteous to your Tory colleague, Coleman, when I run into him from time to time, but that nevertheless, I observe him and his activities very carefully, taking into account his past close relationship with the instruments of the capitalist state, directed against working class and radical activities, which I have no particular reason to believe may not continue to this day.

I was elected to the ALP Federal Conference in 1971 as the one delegate of the NSW Socialist Left. At that conference I moved for the abolition of ASIO, which was carried, almost accidentally, partly because Gough Whitlam voted for it as he walked into the room during the vote, looked around, and not knowing exactly what the issue was, cast his vote on the basis of his observation of who was voting which way.

When he discovered that his vote had contributed to committing a Labor government to the effective abolition of ASIO, Whitlam and others went into a bit of a flap and insisted that the matter be recommitted to conference. After heated debate, my abolition motion was replaced by Lionel Murphy’s motion calling for the reform of ASIO.

I take a certain amount of pride in the fact that my motion almost succeeded in abolishing this repressive institution, with which your new friend Coleman collaborated, and that the fact that certain restraints were placed on the spooks by the Whitlam Government, was a result of the agitation of myself and others against ASIO.

The intense preoccupation of Peter Coleman and others with the involvement of some Australian Stalinists in the spying activities of the KGB seems obviously to be closely related to their own embarrassment about the exposure of some of their own connections with the Australian security forces, and of the CIA funding for the Australian Congress for Cultural Freedom, and through this channel, for Quadrant in the early days.

Frances Stonor’s recent book about the CIA funding is of enormous interest in this respect. It’s hardly surprising that Coleman is so apoplectic in his attack on Cassandra Pybus’s extremely well-researched and interesting new Australian book about James Macauley and Quadrant and the Australian Congress for Cultural Freedom, in which she has included such fascinating new material, particularly about the religious demons haunting Macauley, his probable sexual confusions, and the inevitable religious guilt flowing from those confusions.

Unlike Coleman, what struck me about Pybus’s book is the warm and sensitive way she examined these aspects of Macauley’s life, trying to understand what drove him, and discussing these questions in a way that actually tends to increase Macauley’s significance as an important modern Australian poet, and certainly in no way detracts from his literary significance.

It seems to me that the complexities of Macauley’s life are the reasonable terrain for a serious biographer, and for Coleman to be so angry about this examination, is over-sensitive, from a historical and literary point of view.

What I find rather fascinating about the whole business of the CIA financing Quadrant is that from my point of view, without resiling at all from my leftist standpoint, the paradox is that Quadrant was a much better and more interesting magazine in Krygier’s time, when the CIA money was around, than it is today, under McGuiness’s editorship. Paddy has unleashed on the magazine even worse and more unpleasant demons, particularly the demon of right-wing populism. Possibly there are even worse things out there on the right than the CIA!

Keith will be aware that the newly released Cabinet Papers for 1969 disclose that the government was seriously considering legislation to effectively ban all antiwar demonstrations, which would have given them considerable legal leverage to lock us all up. Happily for us, and also for Australian democracy, the Liberal government suffered a failure of nerve in these matters, as the opposition to the Vietnam War deepened and broadened.

My own Special Branch file shows Special Branch informants inventing incidents in which I and others in the Resistance organisation were alleged to be "planning violence". The significance of this frame-up material suddenly falls into place in the context of the newly released Cabinet Papers. The verbal fit-ups in my file were never used publicly, because of the government’s failure of nerve, in that they did not proceed with the legislation to ban demonstrations.

Nevertheless, the malicious intent was clearly there. This was the era of the famous "Chicago conspiracy trial" in the USA. One can imagine the scenario for potential conspiracy trials here based on this frame-up material, if the ruling class had not, happily for Australian democracy, become demoralised so quickly.

I advise Keith to go and get his own file from Special Branch. It is easily available thanks to Bob Carr and Michael Whelan initiating the release of the files. He may even find similar frame-up material in his own file, as he was a significant figure on the left. This goes to the point of the nature of the capitalist state.

In Keith’s newfound romance with capitalism, he forgets what he used to understand so well -- the potential brutality of a threatened capitalist state apparatus, when under serious challenge from any rapidly developing social movement.

The Old Mole

As the radicalisation continued to broaden and deepen in 1970 and 1971, leading up to the election in Australia in 1972 of the Whitlam Labor government, Hall Greenland and Keith Windschuttle got the very useful idea of starting a radical, independent tabloid newspaper, and they threw their considerable talents into this project.

The Old Mole only lasted a few months, about 12 issues, but it well and truly caught the radical and diverse political, social, and cultural atmosphere of the period. (The name chosen comes from the name of a Jacobin paper in England in the early 19th century. The Old Mole is the mole of social revolution that keeps creeping out from hibernation after long cold winters. The name and the notion are still powerful images today for the resilient little beast of social revolution.)

The paper contained political argument and polemic, along with a lot of cultural, social, musical and literary criticism and inquiry. Competing radical political strategies contended, as did different schools of thought in cultural matters. The diversity and vigour of the Old Mole was a modest journalistic highpoint of the youth and student radicalisation in Australia.

Sydney University in the 1960s

A number of incidents during that period come easily to mind. Do you remember the spectacular confrontation at a Sydney University student meeting, called by supporters of the Vietnam intervention, at a very late stage of the war, June 1971, just before the Australian troops were withdrawn in August 1971 by the McMahon Liberal government?

The star speaker at this meeting was the First Secretary of the South Vietnamese Embassy. He was heckled rather vigorously by most of the audience and, after he had finished speaking, your then colleague, Hall Greenland, grabbed the microphone off the chairman, Professor David Armstrong, and started putting to the meeting the point of view opposed to the war, and got rapturous applause. Armstrong rushed forward and, after colliding awkwardly with Lyn Regan, took a spectacular swing in the direction of his student opponents with his fist, which they managed to evade. In the middle of this melee, Rowan Cahill climbed up on a desk and addressed the thousand students cramming the auditorium.

A Sydney Morning Herald photographer present seized the moment, and got a rather extraordinary action photograph of Armstrong apparently taking a spectacular swing at the students. This photograph was published in the Herald the next morning, and a number of times thereafter around the University.

During the ideological and political conflict that culminated in the split in the Philosophy Department, this photo was often enlarged and put on walls by Armstrong’s opponents, and Armstrong was dubbed "the beast" by his enemies. In your association with Quadrant, of which Armstrong is now one of the Editorial Board members, I wonder whether you and David ever discuss old times, like the day he took a swing at the radical students.

You may also remember that other rather extraordinary day when protesters against the Vietnam War staged a sit-down to disrupt a parade of the University Regiment. Ordered to march over the protesters, some of the Regiment members wavered, and the redoubtable Gavin Gatenby, who was then an officer in the Regiment, deserted on the spot and joined the protesters lying on the road, thereby ending quite a long and serious association with the Regiment, and commencing a complex and interesting trajectory on the political left.¹

The most colourful event of all on the campus is described in the following way, in the chapter about the professional life of Fred Longbottom, the long time boss of the NSW Special Branch, by Andrew Moore, in the book All Her Labours, edited by John Shields.

On 2 August 1968 a demonstration took place on the front lawn outside Fisher Library. Parked nearby was a police Mini Minor containing the familiar figure of Detective Sergeant Longbottom and one of his colleagues. The policemen, it seemed, were in the process of taping the speakers at the meeting.

None too impressed with this manifest display of police surveillance, the students surrounded the police vehicle and immobilised it by deflating its tyres and placing sugar cubes in its petrol tank. Sergeant Longbottom was instructed to play the tape. He agreed to do so, but then insisted that he did not know how to operate the tape recorder. The tape was seized and played back, whereby it transpired, according to several students (but not to Longbottom) that the Special Branch head had confused the identity of several activists.

By this time police headquarters had been alerted to Longbottom’s plight. Yet, when reinforcements arrived en masse, they confronted hastily erected barricades which blocked their path. Thus began the two-and-a-half-hour stand off or "siege"; an event sufficiently lurid to be reported internationally. The impasse was resolved after Longbottom agreed to submit to a "self-criticism session" and Acting Metropolitan Superintendent Fred Hanson signed an entirely meaningless statement that police would never again attend a political meeting on campus.

Only then were Longbottom and his somewhat battered Mini, bedecked in NLF (National Liberation Front) stickers, allowed to leave. There was one final twist to this bizarre day in the working life of this particular secret policeman. As Longbottom recalls the sequence of events, eight or 10 hefty students were about to push the police vehicle off campus to Parramatta Road:

"... and then I said ‘Just a minute. I might as well be like Nero. You can carry me out’. So I hopped in the car and they started to abuse me. So I said, ‘Get another three or four blokes. I’m not that heavy’. So they got some more blokes and carried us out."

The memory of those days, when NSW detectives used Mini Minors, still makes me smile. I’ll retain until my dying day the image of the late Fred Longbottom, who was a distinguished looking copper, almost seven feet tall, with a mane of white hair, a military bearing, and even a certain sense of humour, squashed into that Mini Minor, with his extremely taciturn offsider, Whitelaw, also pretty long.

Your then colleague, Rowan Cahill, who was one of the main student organisers of that very effective demonstration, is still convinced that the implacable way the NSW Police persisted for years with an action against him over a Honi Soit that he had authorised as Director of Student Publications, that they claimed to be obscene, was payback for that demonstration.

You must also remember the tension and excitement on Sydney University campus when pretty well the whole campus community participated in the open conspiracy, hiding the draft resister, Michael Matteson, on university grounds for a number of weeks. This colourful and effective campaign, which came very close to the end of the Vietnam involvement and conscription, contributed greatly to underlining the obvious fact that the overwhelming majority of Australians had, by that time, come around to a position of opposition to the war and conscription.

The reason I mention these four incidents is to highlight the significance of the opposition to the Vietnam War and conscription for our whole generation. The war was the primary focus of most of our activities, and the seven year mobilisation against the Vietnam intervention transformed us Vietnam protestors, in public estimation, from a smallish "ratbag minority" in Australian society, to being the "far-sighted representatives" of the overwhelming majority.

By August 1971, the clear majority of Australians were totally disillusioned with the war and conscription. When the Whitlam Labor Government was elected in December 1972, and withdrew the last Australian military personnel, we had an enormous collective feeling of relief and triumph.

Whatever other political differences existed among political activists at the time, we were all united by opposition to the Vietnam War, and a powerful conviction of the rightness of our cause gave a fierce cutting edge to our stand on the question, and often sustained us in the many difficulties that emerged during the long period of this agitation.

These events radicalised our whole generation and tended to create powerful bonds of solidarity between those of us who were involved in that struggle from the beginning. That seven year period from 1965 to 1972 was, and still remains, the last period to date of a widespread social, political and cultural movement that affected all levels of Australian society.

Nothing has approached that period in terms of major social upheavals since, and the only other events that compare with it in Australian history are the successful battle of the labour movement and Irish Australians against conscription during the First World War, and the political turmoil and radicalisation that culminated in Langism, at the commencement of the Depression of the 1930s.

The English poet Wordsworth, looking back in later life on the period of the great French Revolution of the 1790s, said:

Happy it was in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!

That is exactly how I still feel about the 1960s and the early 1970s. In the context of your current, almost religious, conversion to the tenets of neo-conservatism, you really are morally obliged to make some kind of overall balance sheet on whether our common activities in this period were justified, and whether they had good results.

Your current neo-conservative associates were almost all diehard supporters of the Vietnam War, and they regard the radicalisation of the 1960s as the primary source of a fundamental demoralisation and corruption in the Australian social fabric, in a similar way that your North American neo-conservative allies regard the 1960s as the commencement of the rot in the USA.

Gertrude Himelfarb

Your US neo-conservative colleague, the redoubtable right-wing cultural critic Gertrude Himelfarb, has just published a new book One Nation. Two Cultures. This book is a wholesale attack on the impact of the sixties radicalisation on American life.

Ms Himelfarb is no friend of the Western Enlightenment. She clearly regards the Enlightenment as the beginning of major cultural problems in Western society. Her particular bete noir is everything to do with the 1960s. She laments the advent of the Pill. In her view the physical removal of the danger of pregnancy resulting from the availability of the Pill, led to a terrible spread of moral decay, and it would be better that the pre-Pill situation still prevailed, so the threat of pregnancy naturally curtailed sexual promiscuity.

She is fiercely hostile to all multiculturalism, which she regards as disrupting the unity of American society. She is in love with the allegedly stabilising and civilising influence of Mid-western and Southern evangelical religion, and she regards the decline of the grip of religion on the educated section of society as a terrible thing. She favours censorship. She is deeply hostile to the public celebration of homosexual sexual identity.

She is angered by the decline of what she calls "respect" for religious institutions, the capitalist social order, the Anglophone Western culture, the armed forces, US patriotism, the narrowly defined nuclear family etc. She says that there are, in the US, two cultural traditions, the good one that embodies all the above values, and the bad one that became more or less hegemonic in the corrupting radicalisation of the 1960s. (As I write this, I am struck by how similar her views are to those of Miriam Dixson, and I am amused by the way your Quadrant editor, McGuiness has suddenly got excited and accused Australian teachers of not teaching children proper "respect", as part of one of his usual diatribes attacking their union’s industrial activities.

McGuiness wrote recently in his column in the Herald: "Who can learn from teachers who seem to dress out of the St Vincent de Paul clothing box, cannot handle English spelling and grammar, and who train their pupils to address their elders with familiar disrespect?"

Ms Himelfarb’s book is getting a lot of attention in the US, particularly in the context of the current US presidential election, in which she is obviously a Bush Republican, in the sense that her emphasis on the importance of "core American religious values" is similar to Bush’s in mobilising the racist and bigotted anti-Catholic religious conservatives who run Bob Jones University, in support of his Presidential nomination.

I confidently predict that your American neo-conservative allies will all line up behind Bush, and will regard even McCain as too leftist to be trusted with the Presidency. Consideration of Ms Himelfarb’s book and the fascinating cultural questions raised in the current US Presidential contest lead me to raise with you the need for a careful scrutiny of what we collectively did here in Australia in the 1960s and the 1970s, and whether its general impact has been good or bad.

The Vietnam War and conscription

First of all, the Vietnam War and conscription, the core political issue and the major catalyst of the 1960s social, political and cultural radicalisation in Australia, as in the United States. Were we right to oppose the war and conscription? I believe we were, and I would be interested in your view.

Was the effect of our opposition to the war good or bad? I believe it was good. It produced a climate of opinion in Australia, among a large section of the population, sceptical and critical of militarism, and this sceptical and critical stance has subsequently blocked the desire of conservative forces in Australian society to re-establish the mad, patriotic, my-country-right-or-wrong military attitudes of the old "British" Australia.

Out of a certain cultural tension between a large part of the Vietnam generation and some older Australians who celebrate Anzac Day as the central focus of Australian identity has arisen a kind of cultural equilibrium in relation to military matters. It is inconceivable in modern Australia that an Australian government could commit Australian troops to such a clear intervention against a popular revolution in another country, as the Vietnam War was, and get away with it.

On the other hand, both the more traditional Anzac Day-oriented section of Australian society, and the Vietnam anitwar generation, were recently united in supporting Australian military intervention to help the people of East Timor, with almost no dissent, except perhaps that of Paddy McGuiness, who was a noted neo-conservative peacemonger in relation to Timor.

To summarise my view on Vietnam and conscription, we were right and David Armstrong and company were wrong, and the consequences of the radicalisation over Vietnam and conscription have been entirely healthy in relation to military matters. What is your current view?

Women’s rights

The radicalisation of the 1960s and the 1970s produced a massive, popular rebirth of feminism and the assertion of female equality and women’s rights. Notwithstanding some absurdities, particularly in the kind of cultural criticism practiced by Elizabeth Grosz, taken as a whole the radicalisation of women that started in the 1960s and the 1970s has produced an essentially progressive extension and entrenchment of the rights of women.

I notice that a few years after his death you have become intellectually infatuated with that pretentious old conservative humbug, David Stove. To refresh my memory about Stove, I just reread the collection of essays, Cricket Versus Republicanism, which is so reverently referred to in neo-conservative circles. I had forgotten just quite how stupid is Stove’s essay attempting to demonstrate the natural inferiority of women.

His argument that the lack of public presence of women historically in the arts and sciences demonstrated that in some sense women were genuinely inferior, sounded good to all the dimwits who felt that way anyway, when he wrote the essay 10 years or so ago. That argument does not travel at all well in the current sociological circumstances.

The removal of many of the institutional obstacles to women’s education and development has produced a rather startling reversal, if you adhere to Stove’s misogynist point of view. Females are beginning to predominate in most areas of secondary and tertiary education, and they are comprehensively beating males in almost all areas of competitive examination these days.

I was speaking to a friend who teaches industrial relations at Sydney University recently. In the first-year course, which used to be an almost exclusively male preserve, about two-thirds of the 800 students or so are now women. This female predominance now prevails in many other areas of education.

There is now a widespread educational discussion of the problem of male education, and of devices that might be used to bring up young males to the higher level of education now being established by women. That raises the question: if Stove’s view was right and women were in some sense objectively inferior, are men now objectively inferior, and what new evolutionary force has brought about such a spectacular reversal in the educational position of men and women? These current developments make total nonsense of Stove’s dopey theoretical-historical construction attempting to argue that women are naturally inferior.

For myself, I am strongly of the view that the general impact of the struggle for women’s rights in the 1960s and the 1970s, and the feminism associated with that struggle, has had a totally favourable impact on the quality of life for all Australians, despite some contradictions and even absurdities thrown up in the course of that development. I would be interested in your view and Liz’s view on these matters.

Abortion law reform

You will remember the vigorous campaign that commenced in the 1960s, and was more or less completed in the 1970s, for the access of women to legalised abortion. First of all the Levine legal decision achieved that necessary reform de facto, and the efforts of the late George Petersen and others in the NSW parliament led ultimately to legalised abortion.

I regard that development as enormously humane and important for the quality of life of all Australians. I wonder whether you agree or whether you share Gertrude Himelfarb’s misgivings about legalised abortion.

Homosexual rights

The 1960s and the 1970s witnessed an explosive assertion of rights by gay people, and a more or less completely successful campaign to eliminate the institutional and legal oppression of homosexuals. In 1977, a cultural-political event defending the rights of gay people, and proclaiming gay cultural identity, the Gay Mardi Gras, commenced in Sydney. This cultural event has grown to a point that about half the adult population, mainly heterosexuals, watch it in the flesh, or on television.

It has become one of Sydney’s defining cultural events, and a great tourist attraction, without leading to the terrible promiscuity feared by Fred Nile and others. It has contributed greatly to tolerance and respect among Australians of all sexual orientations.

Again, the social and cultural results of the "coming out" of homosexual people, and the recognition and significant entrenchment of their human rights, has been an unambiguously good thing. I’d be interested to know what your views are on these developments.

Aboriginal affairs, and racism in South Africa

In the 1960s and the 1970s there were the Freedom Rides in outback NSW, the struggle for land rights in the Northern Territory associated with the strike at Wattie Creek, and the 1967 Referendum recognising the basic rights of Aboriginals and establishing their right to vote in elections.

Subsequently in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s there has been a very considerable and expanded assertion of Aboriginal cultural and political identity. This included the dramatic growth of the Aboriginal Health Service, spearheaded by Aboriginals themselves, with the redoubtable leadership and support of the amazing eye doctor Fred Hollows.

Despite teething problems and organisational mistakes, organs of Aboriginal self-determination such as land councils and ATSIC have become a permanent part of Aboriginal life.

Despite resistance from the ruling class, Eddie Mabo’s successful prosecution of his land claim has opened the way for a large number of other entirely reasonable Aboriginal land claims.

In the 1970s the enormous mobilisation against apartheid in South Africa culminated in massive national demonstrations against the Springbok tour. Associated with those developments in Australia was a certain fascination among radicalised youth with Black Power in the United States, and cultural icons such as Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Angela Davis and Jimi Hendrix.

Taken as a whole, this aspect of the 1960s was humane and righteous. Despite the obvious fact that Australian society must do a great deal more to remove Aboriginal disadvantage, the improvements for Aboriginal Australians that started in the 1960s have been significant.

Also, the changed moral climate, in which it is no longer acceptable among most Australians to tolerate racism in relation to Aboriginals, is in my view, an unambiguously healthy development. I’d like to know whether you think the increased concern about the rights of the first Australians that commenced in the 1960s has been good or bad.

Trade union rights and interests

The O’Shea industrial battle in 1969, which I describe above, ushered in a period of strong assertion of trade union rights, a rise in real wages for trade unionists, and a growth of trade union membership, all of which were only reversed with the adoption of the Hawke Governmen't Prices and Incomes Accord in 1982, which precipitated a reversal of all those trends. Personally, I regard the upsurge of trade unionism between 1969 and 1982 as a very good thing. I’d be interested in your views on that question.

Racism, immigration and multiculturalism

In the 1960s we collectively helped lay the basis for the overthrow of the White Australia Policy, which was completed in the 1970s. The group of courageous intellectuals, the Immigration Reform Group, initiated this agitation, and it was taken up throughout the labour movement.

ACTU and Labor Party conferences carried resolutions removing the White Australia Policy from ACTU policy and the ALP platform, and the basis was laid for the subsequent abolition of White Australia by the Whitlam Government.

Sensibly, the subsequent Liberal Government of Malcolm Fraser continued and even widened the demolition of the White Australia policy, much to the chagrin of anti-immigration conservatives like Katharine Betts. The whole period since then has been one in which sources of migration have constantly broadened.

We now have infinitely greater cultural and ethnic diversity than ever before in Australia. For the first time ever, non-Anglo Australians are a comfortable majority of the population. Paradoxically, during this whole period of extraordinary ethnic and cultural change, the amount of overt racism in Australia has declined dramatically, compared, say, with the 1950s, in which we both grew up.

Personally I am an advocate of high immigration, without any discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, and I am a vociferous supporter of multiculturalism. In the last few years I’ve written a fair bit on these topics, for my forthcoming book.

I note in one of your Quadrant essays a rather curious discussion of multiculturalism. You attack multiculturalism in the United States on the grounds that it is divisive of the American culture, and you make some mealy mouthed distinction between America and Australia, saying, in a rather condescending way, that all multiculturalism means in Australia is a wider variety of ethnic food, and that therefore it is not the same as the very bad multiculturalism in the USA.

You can’t be unaware of the widespread attack on multiculturalism in Australia by your Australian neo-conservative allies, particular other writers in Quadrant. I feel that if you make throwaway remarks about multiculturalism, you have an intellectual obligation to address the question in more detail in relation to Australia, and I’d be very interested in a much broader elaboration of your views, so that we can have a serious debate on these matters.

Multiculturalism and migration are areas of major current discussion amongst public intellectuals. Clearly, once again, Ms Himelfarb et al in the USA are opposed to multiculturalism, opposed to immigration from non-European sources, and would like to have the power to insist that all migrants assimilate into the prevailing Anglo cultural hegemony there. I’d be interested in your balance sheet on those matters as applied both to the USA and Australia.

German Australians

These questions may have a certain personal resonance for you, as someone who commenced his intellectual activity in the sphere of Australian history. From your name, it’s clear that somewhere relatively recently in your ancestry is a significant German cultural heritage.

In my researches into ethnic and cultural Australian history, I have been sharply confronted by the circumstances surrounding 19th century German mass migration to Australia, and the awful suppression of German Australian culture that took place during the orgy of mad British Australia chauvinism characteristic of the First World War.

I recently read Gerhardt Fischer’s important book Enemy Aliens, which describes in considerable detail the brutal way in which the German Australian multiculture, which had been the second major multiculture after the Irish Catholics, was violently uprooted by the "British" Australia racism directed at Australian’s German migrants, their children and grandchildren, between 1914 and 1919. Until I read Fischer, I must admit that I had forgotten how brutal these events actually were.

All the German towns in South Australia and Queensland were renamed, many Lutheran Churches were closed, and 6000 Germans and southern Slavs, many of them Australian citizens, who had been interned for a number of years in Australia’s first concentration camp, at Holsworthy near Liverpool, were ruthlessly deported from Australia in 1919. The German language, which had previously been spoken by many thousands in the areas of German mass migration in South Australia and Queensland, was suppressed.

The German component, at 4 per cent, in the Australian ethnic mix is still the largest non-British component after the Irish, but most of those in Australia with a German ethnic heritage, like yourself, no longer have much knowledge of their cultural background because of its ruthless suppression during the First World War. Someone named Windschuttle ought to be pretty sensitive in relation to the question of multiculturalism, as, also, for that matter, should someone called Himelfarb.

Asian migration

Another aspect of the immigration and multiculturalism debate that possibly has some significance for you is Asian migration. I regard the recent explosion of Asian migration to Australia as a very healthy thing because, in practice, it internationalises Australia in the best possible way, not the worst way represented by the dominance of multinational corporations over our lives.

Without knowing too much about the details, I’d be extremely surprised if a large number of the students in your very successful educational institution, Macleay College, were not fairly recent Asian arrivals to Australia. I would have thought that a kind of basic human solidarity with a significant number of those out of whom one makes one’s living, should lead you to a liberal and civilised attitude supportive of increased Asian migration.

As you will have noticed, quite a few neo-conservatives here and in the United States are belligerently opposed to any increase in Asian migration, and many of them are opposed to any Asian migration at all. I would hope that you disagree with them on these matters.

I would be very interested to hear an exposition of your views, because, as I’ve said, in the course of your day-to-day educational activity, I imagine you have quite a deal of experience in dealing with Asian people who have come to Australia for educational purposes.

Populist journalistic neo-conservatives, migration and multiculturalism. Paddy McGuiness and Quadrant take a major lurch further to the right

You can hardly have avoided noticing the constant theme that has emerged from the stable of populist right-wing journalists, Paddy McGuiness, Paul Sheehan, Michael Duffy and Piers Ackerman. They have made an enormous hullabaloo highlighting the antagonism to non-British migration and multiculturalism that is one aspect of the Pauline Hanson populist outbreak.

They have a sophisticated mantra best expressed by McGuiness and Duffy, who say the anger of rural people about migration and multiculturalism has to be listened to, and taken notice of, but that the same people should not listen to backward "Luddites" who oppose the effects of economic rationalism on the lives of Australians who live outside the major cities.

Duffy was particularly succinct in this vein in The Telegraph recently. On the left-hand side of the page he had one column supporting the statement of a member of one "elite" -- the Parliamentary political "elite" -- Ross Cameron, the Liberal member for Parramatta, that rural people should move to the city if they couldn’t get jobs, or they didn’t like life in the bush under economic rationalism.

Duffy’s column said that the rural people who were outraged by this just had to understand the "facts of modern capitalist economic life". In his right-hand column on the same page, he had another piece explicitly denouncing four judges as members of a terrible "elite" because they had had the temerity to write a very effective letter condemning the racist mandatory sentencing laws that bear down so vindictively on Aboriginal youth. Duffy really works hard to earn his money churning out right-wing journalistic populism of the most inflammatory sort.

The whole neo-conservative populist journalistic pack tend to angle their demagoguery in the same way. They hope to capture the justified anger of economically deprived and disenfranchised people and direct it against migration and multiculturalism, rather than against the brutal economic effects of the capitalist system, which they proclaim are inevitable economic necessities.

Personally, my whole political instinct is the opposite of theirs. I make common cause with the angry rural masses against economic rationalism, but I argue that migrants and multiculturalism aren’t the enemies of poorer Australians, and that the anger of the oppressed is better directed against the ruling class and the capitalist system itself.

Quadrant tests the water on anti-immigration and opposition to multiculturalism

A small-l liberal-conservative approach by Robert Manne on many matters, such as migration, multiculturalism and Aboriginal affairs, was obviously involved, among other issues, in his enforced removal from editorship of Quadrant and his replacement by McGuiness.

Many Australian conservatives who have been associated with Quadrant over many years, and who helped finance it, share Manne’s views on the above questions. These more liberal conservatives, who have a kind of equity in the future of Quadrant, may well be getting pretty toey about the way Quadrant is evolving under McGuiness’s quirky editorship.

The new editor is making all sorts of overtures towards strange elements out there on the right, for instance, towards the Mormon Church, which now has some influence in the right-wing liberal faction in the NSW Liberal Party. He has also published a lengthy and learned article by a right-wing astrologer. Maybe Paddy is consulting his own horoscope about what to publish next!

McGuiness also recently published a rather curious article by Paul Monk attacking Robert Conquest, and Conquest’s high figures of the number of people murdered by Stalin, in the usual "revisionist" style of J. Arch Getty, Stephen Wheatcroft and Shiela Fitzpatrick. Why McGuiness would regard as worth publishing, this revisionism in relation to the facts of Soviet history is a bit difficult to comprehend, and it produced a completely justified and devastating response from Conquest, published in the March issue.

Alongside this extreme journalistic experimentalism has gone a certain contraction in the range of conservative views published. Even under McGuiness’s editorship there are still, from time to time, articles in Quadrant that I find useful and informative, like Alan Barcan’s article on history and history teaching. Nevertheless, most material in Quadrant these days is, in my view, useful only by way of negative example.

I’m not necessarily the most unbiased critic of Quadrant, being a confirmed and long-standing opponent of its general outlook, but nevertheless I have been a careful reader of the magazine since issue one, 45 years ago, and my pronounced impression is that under McGuiness’s editorship it has become narrower, more declamatory, and rather dull and boring, which must be a bit worrying for its more far-sighted conservative supporters. They may well be beginning to wonder whether it was such a good idea ousting Robert Manne.

Richard Krygier, the old Quadrant, migration and multiculturalism

The old Quadrant was a vehemently right-wing, anti-communist political and cultural review. The founder of Quadrant, Richard Krygier, was a Jewish social democrat, a survivor of both the Holocaust and Stalinism in Eastern Europe and Poland, where he was born. While his Quadrant was a pro-American, Cold War magazine, it was also strongly supportive of migration and not at all worried by diversity of cultures in Australia.

It was opposed to anti-Semitism and racial discrimination. While some of Quadrant’s significant contributors, Hal Colebatch and the late Frank Knopfelmacher, opposed multiculturalism, they were in a minority, and the pioneer academic Catholic multiculturalist, the Polish Australian, Jerzy Zubricki, was more typical of the Quadrant view on migration and multiculturalism.

The civilised right, if they might be called that, of which Krygier and Zubricki were fairly representative figures, had a certain European culture, and steered strongly away from excesses of racist right-wing populism.

The attitude of the magazine over many years, towards immigration and cultural diversity, was clearly the result of a kind of equilibrium between right-wing Jewish European social democratic intellectuals like Krygier and right-wing Catholics like Bob Santamaria and James Macaulay who, in those days, were also pretty careful and discriminating in matters of race, culture and migration, and who tended to support the liberalisation of sources for migrants, and who certainly supported the liquidation of the White Australia Policy when it took place in the 1970s.

I have quite a sharp personal memory of Richard Krygier and the old Quadrant. Sometime in 1962, about the time of the second, deeper exposure of the crimes of Stalin by Khrushchev at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, I heard from somewhere that Krygier and Quadrant had many spare copies of Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech exposing Stalin.

I knocked on the Quadrant door, which was in a rather unrenovated old C-grade office building in the central business district. Krygier cautiously answered the door and let me in. He extracted from me the information that I wanted these pamphlets as part of my Trotskyist agitation among rank and file members of the Communist Party, and with a twinkle in his eye, he gave me 30 or 40 free copies of the New Leader version of the Secret Speech, out of about half a dozen big cartons in the corner of the room.

I was a bumptious young man in those days, and we then had a rather spirited and stormy argument about the Russian Revolution, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and the right-wing line of Quadrant and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Krygier impressed me as an intelligent and cautious man, and he was really very kind to me, considering how youthfully aggressive I was. I went back two or three times to get more stocks of the Secret Speech, which I dished out in all directions, and we had further heated but interesting arguments, in which neither won the other over, as you might expect.

He became quite generous with the books in his office and, as I remember it, he lent me copies of quite important texts of the 20th century, Whittaker Chambers Witness for one, and two very importan