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Deconstructing the 1960s and 1970s
An open letter to Keith and Liz Windschuttle
By Bob Gould
(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.
Class analysis of past literature is often useful despite the
fact that the postmodernists have devalued it a bit by their dopey
proposition that all narratives are equal, and some other absurdities.
(George Paloczi-Horvath, a leftist exile from Hungary in Britain during
the Second World War, went back to Hungary quite soon after he wrote
this article, and was arrested in the Stalinist frame-up trials in the
1950s (as a "British spy"). He spent a number of years in Hungary’s
Gulag. He survived and finally got back to England, where he wrote a
very moving and informative memoir of his experiences under Stalinism,
which he called In Darkest Hungary.)
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 defect of the Windschuttle, Kramer approach to Steinbeck’s Grapes
of Wrath
is obvious. If Steinbeck’s view of depression America was such a
distortion, why did the novel and the movie made out of it become as
broadly popular as they did, immediately on their release? After all,
the American public that soaked them up on such an enormous scale, had
lived through the events in the previous few years, and presumably knew
the facts.
No literary or film critic at that time even attempted this
Shindo kind of deconstruction, (although some conservative critics
didn’t like the book) because it was quite obvious that both the film
and the book were sensitive artistic reconstructions of the broad
social reality of 1930s America as it affected migratory farm workers,
and many other people. The detail of which Okies (which was, after all,
a generic colloquial term for all California-bound migrants from the
Midwest) came from where, was irrelevant and wasn’t even noticed by the
initially American audience for The Grapes of Wrath.
The reason for this enormous popular success was the way that it
captured, in an idiomatic way, a significant part of the experience of
depression-time America. Its later success in other countries, like
Australia, was a further expression of the effective way that it
captured the popular experience of the depression, even striking a
chord outside the USA.
A pseudo-scholarly attempt to rewrite the impact of the book and
the film as a Stalinist conspiracy, partly because the Okies portrayed
in the book don’t correspond to the alleged sociological average that
is now so painstakingly "reconstructed" by Shindo, is quite bizarre.
This Kramer-Shindo-Windschuttle construction misunderstands the
function of literature, the medium of film, and the development of the
modern novel. It is mainly persuasive to those with a totally morbid
neo-conservative view of past intellectual developments in Western
civilisation, many of whom date the beginning of the "decline of
Western culture" at about the beginnings of the Enlightenment.
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.)
Keith is clearly not unaware (how could he be) of the protracted
hell through which the House Unamerican Activities Committee put film
makers, novelists and playwrights in the early 1950s. The HUAC and
McCarthy did not make any subtle distinction between Stalinists and
anti-Stalinists. They treated all examples of radical thought in
movies, books and plays, as subversive, and attempted to make all their
victims recant and to name names if they were to continue to make a
living in American cultural life.
This indiscriminate attack on all critical social thought was
central to the McCarthy hearings and the HUAC. I recommend to Keith
that he watch again the film records of the McCarthy hearings, which
are available on video. He might also reread the useful book about
McCarthyism by the veteran anti-Stalinist David Caute, The Great
Fear (Simon and Schuster, 1978).
The broad-brush attack on all radical sentiments in books,
movies and plays, and even in music, which McCarthy threw in, and
Shindo and Windschuttle throw in now, was central to the McCarthy
project. The McCarthy Committee made exactly the same "amalgam" that
Shindo and Windschuttle do now, enforcing a rubric that all who
expressed radical sentiments were necessarily Stalinists.
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.
It took a whole generation for American culture to recover from
the devastating effects of this McCarthy witch-hunt, to which the
pursuit and investigation of the radical content in the works of these
artists was absolutely central. As a matter of fact, the recovery of
American culture from the McCarthy blight only seriously commenced in
the middle 1960s, the period to which modern neo-conservatives now
object even more than they do to the 1930s.
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.
This is a point of view not at all popular with the masses in rural
Australia. It may go down well in the Financial Review
but the population of rural Australia is in wholesale and dramatic
revolt against economic rationalism of this sort. Along comes Childe
Harold Windschuttle with his deconstruction of Steinbeck to explicitly
warn against such rural revolts or the Reds might get you! It is
difficult to caricature this article of Keith’s in the Financial
Review, its right-wing political intent is so extravagant and
clear.
In passing, how does Keith make the leap from one of his other
theses, that few Okies moved to California in the 1930s anyway, to the
proposition that in the 1950s and the 1960s the Okies in California
were supporting Reagan. What sociological research is there to indicate
that such Okies as might have been in California supported Reagan.
Kramer-Windschuttle-Shindo sociology is a hell of a moveable feast.
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 angry comment on the California unions' tactics, suggests
strongly that Keith may be pretty much opposed to the successful
implementation of international trade union bans against Patricks
during the waterfront dispute.
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.
Since the great retreat of trade unionism produced by the Accord
in 1982, Australian unions have been increasingly on the defensive. The
last few years have been marked by dramatic and critical defensive
trade union struggles. Some of them have been against closures of
factories and against cuts to employment, and for proper redundancy pay
and other entitlements for workers from factories that have closed.
Others have been defensive struggles for the very right to have trade
unions bargain in defence of their members' wages and conditions.
Several waves of changes to the industrial relations system have thrown
into question this very basic workers right to collective bargaining,
with unions representing them as their bargaining agent.
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.
The most moving feature of this struggle was the very large
popular support from people from other unions or no union at all,
including middle-class and professional people, who rallied to the
wharfies' pickets in every port. The hostile story about the
agricultural workers union in California, and the tabloid way Keith
presents this story in the Financial Review, a significant
employers’ house organ, suggests that he is now rather down on unions.
One can reasonably assume from this context that Keith Windschuttle was
not one of the middle-class professionals on the wharfies' picket
lines.
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.
The stand that people who can influence public opinion, like the
occasional journalist Keith Windschuttle, takes on these important
trade union struggles, some of which are life-and-death struggles for
the unions concerned, is very visceral for me. Even very moderate
people in the labour movement and even most of the ALP right-wing,
usually rally to the trade union side in major industrial disputes.
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.
Swinging over to the employers’ side on basic trade union issues
is something else again. It is a very much worse thing to take the side
of the capitalist class in basic industrial conflicts, and in
opposition to the revolt of the rural population against economic
rationalism. The sad picture of our old associate, Keith Windschuttle,
in an apparent new role, as a neo-conservative opponent of trade
unionism and rural revolt, is for me a rather bitter commentary on the
times we live in.
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 Hilton Krame-Windschuttle-Shindo conspiracy theory of
Western intellectual development is an ahistorical travesty of serious
cultural and political criticism. They should reread Edmund Wilson’s To
the Finland Station and refresh their memories about the
development of Marxism as an ideology.
Marxism, as elaborated by Marx and Engels from the 1840s on, was
an intellectual product of the whole history of the modern
Enlightenment, as they well know. It was developed by Marx and Engels
in the fiery maelstrom of early modern capitalism. The idea of the
class struggle as the motor force in social development was elaborated
by these two great pioneering social scientists on the basis of their
very thorough investigations of the social forces at work in early
modern Europe.
These theories incorporated their anger as civilized human
beings at the awful human cost of the development of capitalism, which
led them to the entirely moral decision to throw in their lot with the
newly emerging decisive class among the excluded and oppressed, the
modern proletariat.
The reason for Marxism’s rapid spread both among the proletariat
of advanced capitalist countries (and later, underdeveloped countries)
and among the intelligentsia, was partly because of its obvious
accuracy as a description of the development of modern capitalism.
Objectively viewed, the rapid spread of Marxism as the major ideology
of an emerging labour movement in many countries, was no conspiracy at
all. It flowed from the utility of this ideology to an emerging working
class thrown into the sharpest conflict with its oppressors, by the
brutal and exploitative character of the emerging global capitalist
system.
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.
The literature of the determined socialist opposition to high
Stalinism, from that period on, is of considerable enduring interest.
Trotsky wrote The Revolution Betrayed, Jan Valtin wrote a
memoir, Out of the Night, Koestler produced Darkness at Noon,
etc. The considerable literature exposing Stalinism had an important
impact in the 1930s, although it tended to be overshadowed at that time
by the greater volume and popularity of wish-fulfilment Stalinist
propaganda about the wonders of the Soviet Union.
This cultural atmosphere was reinforced by the seemingly
favourable contrast between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, which
was relentlessly proclaimed by Stalin’s propaganda machine, even at the
same time as Stalin was surreptitiously conducting his negotiations
with the Nazis that culminated in the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression
pact. (As Stalinism began to disintegrate later, the anti-Stalinist
literature of the 1930s found an enormous audience amongst
disillusioned Stalinists.)
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.
Eventually Stalinist "Marxism" disintegrated because of its
opposition to the interests of the working class, its own internal
contradictions, and the revolt against it of the masses in
Stalinist-ruled countries. The revival of Marxism in the 1960s
developed in the context of this increasing decline and ultimate
collapse of Stalinist "Marxism" and it is a gratuitous, ahistorical and
artificial construction to view the 1960s Marxist revival as some kind
of re-emergence of an already largely discredited Stalinism.
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.
The brothers who taught us at school were quite sophisticated
men, politically speaking. They were strongly anti-Communist. They
warned us sternly against "Professor John (Anderson), Karl Marx and
Lillian Roxon", as Chris Ringstad’s very funny Sydney University revue
song of 1954 captured so effectively, and Ron Blair’s beautiful and
moving one-actor monologue play, The Christian Brother
immortalised.
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".
Even their very determined attempts to innoculate us against the
Communist virus that was raging out there in the world, included a
certain amount of grudging acknowledgement, and even some respect for
the dedication and commitment of their Marxist opponents.
When I left St Patricks, Strathfield, in the 1950s, and more so
with people who left Catholic schools in the 1960s, we were members of
a previously oppressed social layer, the Irish Catholics. We were then
vigorously pushing our way up in the world, helped by the considerable
educational shove that the Brothers and Nuns had very effectively given
us. A significant minority of us were also in just the right frame of
mind to take Marxism seriously, partly because of the useful beginnings
of an education in social and political matters that we got from the
brothers and the nuns.
They cannot be blamed for the fact that some of us became
Marxists (we did that ourselves). The brothers educated and trained us
very effectively to survive and prosper in the harsh capitalist world,
but they also, at the same time, inculcated in us a certain scepticism
about the morality of the capitalist system, which had a bit to do with
the receptivity of some of us towards Marxist ideas later in our lives.
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 brothers and nuns did do an excellent job of making us aware
of the crimes of British imperialism, and also of the legitimacy,
reasonableness and even nobility of campaigning for the interests of
the less privileged in society, (as long as we pursued such activities
in the spirit of the Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum, rather
than the spirit of Lenin or Marx).
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.
These objective factors finally radicalised a large part of the
population. The fact that a broadly Marxist ideological atmosphere
developed was the product of this interaction of the objective
circumstances of the 1960s, and the very resilient ideas of Marxism in
the new conditions created by the vicious imperialist intervention in
Vietnam. A rapidly growing consciousness and understanding of the role
of American imperialism throughout the world, expressed at its highest
point in the Vietnam War, became absolutely central in the
radicalisation of the generation of the 1960s. In that context, David
Horowitz’s magisterial text, From Yalta to Vietnam, played an
absolutely unique intellectual role. However much Horowitz may regret
it now, that book brought it all together for our generation. The
radicalisation of the 1960s was no conspiracy.
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.
Hemingway’s novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls and the film
made out of it, with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, were thoroughly
Stalinist in content and tone. But we were also the generation who were
educated on Arthur Koestler’s classic novel of the Moscow Trials, Darkness
at Noon, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm, 1984 and Homage
to Catalonia.
We were the generation among whom literary, cultural and
political modernism came to its real peak. We were not particularly
naive. We knew quite a lot about Stalinism, and most of us were not
attracted by it. In my own case, I was repelled by Stalinism, as
expressed in the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, after a very
brief flirtation with it.
We drew our view of the Spanish Civil War much more from Homage to
Catalonia, which exposed the crimes of Stalinism in Spain, than we
did from For Whom the Bell Tolls.
(This was particularly true of those of us who went through Catholic
education, in which Koestler and Orwell were pretty obligatory, along
with the novels of prestigious Catholic converts like Graham Greene and
Evelyn Waugh.
Unless my memory is completely haywire, my recollection is that
rather more people who hadn’t gone to Catholic schools were among the
minority who became infatuated with Stalinism in the 1960s, not having
had such an intense exposure to Koestler and Orwell.)
One of the seminal texts of the 1960s, that also played an
enormous role in radicalising us, was Noam Chomsky’s first major
political book, American Power and the New Mandarins. This book
had immense influence in those days. The major essay in the book was a
lengthy piece about the naive and treacherous role of many liberal
intellectuals during the Spanish Civil War, when they acted as
atrocious apologists for Stalinism in its butchery of the Anarchists
and the POUM in Spain, in the interests of Stalin’s foreign policy.
The title of this essay was Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship
and Chomsky used this case study of liberal intellectuals and Spain to
highlight the treacherous role of many American liberal intellectuals
in apologising for US intervention in Vietnam. It is impossible to
reasonably stigmatise Chomsky’s book and its impact on us as part of
some Stalinist intellectual revival.
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 major factor in Greece, Spain, Portugal and many Latin
American countries was the struggle against, and then the overthrow of,
the right-wing military dictatorships in those countries. (These
dictatorships were doggedly propped up by US imperialism. In those days
the American ruling class were very selective in their use of rhetoric
about "human rights" of the sort that they wave around now.)
In most underdeveloped countries, the catalyst for the
radicalisation was the still continuing struggle for each country’s
national independence and development against all the imperialisms. In
most countries, there were significant Stalinist elements present in
the radicalisation, expressed particularly in an infatuation with
Maoism and China, but these strands were only some among others, and
were in fact dwarfed in most countries by a great many other currents
of radical change.
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 |