My post on Keith Windschuttle’s statements defending the White Australia policy drew an interesting response. No-one, as far I can see, was prepared to defend Windschuttle outright, but there was a sudden and startling outbreak of caution. Maybe Windschuttle had been misquoted. Maybe the interview gave a misleading picture of his book and we should all wait to read it. Maybe the term “White Australia policy” was never used officially. Maybe the dictation test was administered so as to admit educated Indians. Maybe my links were inaccurate.
All of this is very uncharacteristic of the blogosphere. The nature of blogging lends itself to summary judgements based on limited evidence, not waiting for years until all the evidence is in. You read the papers, make a judgement and (at least among the better class of bloggers) if you turn out to be wrong, you admit it with good grace. Why has the response in this case been so different ?
I think it’s because of the R-word racism. There is only one real instance of political correctness in Australia today and that is that you are never, ever allowed to call anyone a racist. It’s OK to say that Adolf Hitler was a racist, and that apartheid was racist, but the idea that any actual Australian could be a racist is utterly taboo. Even I can’t resist the Zeitgeist on this one. In my post, I called Windschuttle “a consistent apologist for racism, happy to use racist arguments in support of his cause”.
It’s obvious why this taboo has emerged. Racism is an evil, bloodstained ideology and no one wants to admit association with it. Hence, almost no-one is silly enough to come out with a clear-cut statement like “white people are inherently superior to black people, and should be able to use them as they see fit”.
In this respect, racism is very similar to Communism. But while few people were willing to endorse Soviet Communism openly, particularly after the purges and the exposures of Kruschchev’s secret speech, there were plenty who were always willing to make excuses for the communists along the lines of “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” and so on. With his characteristic turn of phrase, Lenin called people of this type “fellow travellers” to their faces and “useful idiots” behind their backs.
Since his (still unexplained) swing from far left to far right about a decade ago, Windschuttle has consistently sought to excuse racist actions by whites (or, more precisely, British whites) by the usual range of strategies including denial of the facts, quibbling about irrelevant details, denunciation of witnesses and attacks on the victims as subhumans responsible for their own demise[1]. But, in politically correct Australia, that’s not enough reason to call him a racist. So, I’ll just call him a fellow-traveller.
fn1. There’s an obvious model for this kind of thing in the recent historical literature, but I’ll leave the identification as an exercise for readers.
In case people have forgotten Windschuttle’s track record on matters of this kind let’s look at a couple of examples of blatant inconsistency, invariably operating to put whites who might be accused of racism in a good light, and blacks in a bad one. In his book on Tasmania, Windschuttle denies that Aborigines resisting white occupation could be viewed as displaying humanity or compassion on the basis of claims (for which he had almost zero evidence) that they had no words for these concepts. On the other hand, in claiming that the Aborigines were responsible for their own extinction, he accuses them of prostituting their women, a concept that is meaningless in a society without money or formal concepts of trade (leaving aside the well-documented and widespread incidence of rape).
In the interview promoting his new book on White Australia, Windschuttle supports the view, often stated by apologists for the policy, that it was the product of economic incentives. By contrast, in this New Criterion piece on the history of the British Empire, Windschuttle defends the view that the British abolition of slavery was due to moral revulsion rather than economic motives. In other words, when the British (taken here to include white Australians) do the right thing, this is evidence of the moral superiority of British/Christian civilisation. When they do the wrong thing, it’s a “rational and, in a number of ways, progressive, product” of economic circumstances.
If you want to confirm all this, I have a long essay here or you can search the site for chapter and verse.
John Quiggin 
And what a wordy journey it is!
Those who rely too heavily on dictionary definitions are doomed. Words are alive, and often connote far more than they are defined to mean. That’s why we have so many different words, to eek out each connotation, and to differentiate. Calling military service slavery (unless done in a metaphorical tone) just gets people thinking you’re odd. It’s like vegetarians saying “meat is murder.” May wake people up, but turns them off just as fast.
Vernon Imrich
It is interesting to consider the extent to which racism underlies and may to some extent support nationalism. I am an unashamed nationalist (of a sort of Wilsonian type), but would quibble over definitions with anyone who called me racist. Yet it seems that racism in some form tends to reveal itself when national existance is (or is thought to be) threatened. Witness Nazi Germany, post-Franco-Prussian-War France (antisemitism), Dutch South Africa, wartime UK (“the only good German is a dead one”) and Australia (anti-Asianism?). Perhaps someone more familiar with the origins of national feeling and the emergence of nation-states would like to comment.
It is also interesting to remember that there are primatologists and anthropologists who would gladly see chimpanzees, Neanderthals and even Homo Erectus enrolled as in some sense “human”. I have never felt attracted to such views; such an enlargement of the category “human” would render it meaningless, and possibly be insulting to chimpanzees and Neanderthals. But it reveals something about our sensitivity towards acknowledging differences. We seem to be unable to handle the idea that people (including races or even extinct species) are different from each other without at the same time running a kind of competition about which is “better”. Maybe the real problem is with our understanding of what “better” means?
I think it is pretty obvious that a country that supported a White Australia was dominated by racist institutions and the individuals that led those institutions. Certainly deciding which Aboriginal child would be kidnapped by the government (state and federal) based on skin colour is racist.
It is also tyrannical government. Racism and despotism in the same 70 years. Huzzah for Australian government. Australia’s black armband history has been supplied by the government. The “culture wars” are a farce.
If Windschuttle is unfairly making anglos look good, and aboriginals look bad, then he is just doing the opposite of 90% of journalists who are at the other extreme. They are just as bad as he is.
Remember one prominent female historian who, when exposed fraudulently giving statistics of how many aboriginals had been killed by anglos, defended herself with this line:
“Historians make things up all the time”.
“As soon as I call someone a racist, everyone hates me,” cries hard done by professorial economist raking in $150,000 per annum. You’re a bloody professional victim, mate. And it’s a bit unseemly on your wages. Here’s a word we CAN use. It’s the P word: Prat.
Arguing that calling people racist is “utterly taboo” in Australia today is utterly crap. You’re a disgrace to academia and intellectual commentary.
IRA – if you don’t have anything constructive to say – why bother?
I think that one of the reasons that the word “racist” is avoided when describing Windschuttle’s work is that it is too easy a label to apply. It’s too straightforward for a journo or other commentator to simply dismiss the man as a racist, and doing so would realistically not serve to progress the debate any further.
The best way to approach the kind of fascist revisionism that he has produced recently is through refutation of the claims and evidence that he puts forward.
I remember reading somewhere else that multiculturalism had begun to make the classical definition of a nation-state somewhat harder to pin down. It used to be that ‘nations’ were collections of cultures sometimes more easily defined by race and language. It also used to be quite conventional to protect these ‘nations’ by restrictive or nonexistent immigration policies. Were these policies racist? If so, in the absence of a true multicultural society, were these policies defensible? When did multiculturalism as we define it today first come into vogue? Was Australia a multicultural society in the 1950s? Is it permissible, even today, to attempt to preserve cultural aspects (such as race or language) through restrictive immigration practices?
I’m not an academic and I wasn’t alive in the age of the ‘White Australia policy’, but if someone was prepared to re-examine these issues, I’m not sure I could label the process racist. (For info, I say that as someone perfectly comfortable with present multicultural policies and immigration practices).
Jphn is right about the reluctance to accept people using the “racist” epithet. But is there a good reason for that reluctance? Isn’t it all too often an easy way to dismiss someone’s opinions as valueless, without actually engaging with what they say?
JQ, I look forward to more substantive rebuttals of Windschuttle (not necessarily from you) after his book is released on Monday. Until then, I at least am willing to withhold judgement.
Reading your other thread John, I suppose you could construe parts of my previous post as a partial defence of the ‘White Australia policy’. I guess I keep thinking of the analogy of Iceland, particularly in the 1940s or 50s (less enlightened times). Would the Icelanders be justified in restricting or excluding immigration on the basis of trying to preserve their unique language, way of life and maybe even race? Is Australia’s situation during the White Australia policy analogous? If so, should we feel guilty about it? If the answer is yes (which may be Windschuttle’s argument – I don’t know, and neither do you apparently), is that argument inherently racist? Not sure myself, but undoubtedly others know for me.
My take is Windscuttle is really having a go at the holier than thou attitude of multiculturalists who would brand culturalists as racists. Certainly Australians have been culturalist in their past and the WAP was founded in protecting this culture. eg in worker’s unions wanting to protect their lifestyle from ‘scabs’, a policy which was rooted early on in antipathy to the influx of Chinese workers in the goldfields and hung over with post-war ‘wog’ immigration. Ipso facto all unionists are racists and pro immigrationist bosses are all nice luvvy multiculturalists like Prof Q. Welcome to sunny Qld Kanakas and ignore those racist unionists or perhaps the NT aboriginal elder who, when a boat-load of refugees pulled up on his patch, told them they couldn’t stay because they didn’t have a permit. Was this elder a culturalist or a racist, by using current immigration policy in this way?
My own view is that ordinary Australians are culturalist, rather than overtly racist. Indeed they may espouse openly racist derogatory remarks at a macro cultural level but this hardly ever carries across to true racism at a micro one on one level. It is why they can support broad immigration measures to decide who comes here and yet be accommodating toward the individuals who have slipped through the net and into their local communities. All KW may really be saying, is the debate should be about the degree of practical emphasis on culturalist vs multiculturalist ideology, as racist may have outlived its usefulness as a derogatory term for both sides. Perhaps like all discriminating groups, unionists, sexists, racists, leftists, islamists, elitists, etc the good Prof Q may simply be a bit fearful of the stranger moving in on his erstwhile, comfortable patch.
You omitted “rightist” from your list of discriminatory groups. Any particular reason?
Wrong again, JQ.
In case you haven’t realised it yet, you yourself were being uncharacteristically bigoted on this subject. Now, when dealing with prejudiced people, you cannot deploy the full range of reasoned factual arguments. You have to work away at what little is left open to work on, as any direct application of “brute reason” will be rejected out of hand as “ah – another racist aplogist to be ignored” (you almost telegraphed that).
So you – or in this case we – have to approach the topic indirectly, much the way Harriet Beecher Stowe esplained the wrongs of slavery to a slaveowner not in the larger terms which he was accustomed to tuning out but in terms of what would happen to his slaves once he, the beneficent paternalist massa, was gone. Maybe some damned yankee would neglect them!
But I see you are still interpreting objections in terms od some pattern of how people get at the world, not in terms of any pattern of error of your own. You have a long way to go yet.
Here is an extract from what Wikipedia has to say about the origins of the White Australia Policy
” The main rationale of the policy was to keep Australia racially pure. “I am prepared to do all that is necessary to ensure that Australia shall be free for all time from the contamination and the degrading influence of inferior races.” (Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 12th Sept 1901 p.4845) The trade unions and their political party, the Labor Party, was the driving force for White Australia. Chris Watson, the leader of the Labour Party stated that “The objection I have to the mixing of these coloured people with the white people of Australia – although I admit it is to a large extent tinged with considerations of an industrial nature – lies…in the possibility and probability of racial contamination.” It was widely believed that racial purity was essential for social and political stability. “The unity of Australia is nothing, if that does not imply a united race. A united race not only means that its members can intermix, intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies one inspired by the same ideas…” (Alfred Deakin, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 12 September 1901, p.4807) ”
And from the same article, this is what our first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton had to say:
“The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.”
Source for the above quotes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy
Barton, Deakin, Watson: these weren’t fringe characters. They were all Prime Ministers at or shortly after Federation. Our national leaders, the architects of the WAP, didn’t mince their words. They spoke of the need to avoid racial “contamination” and “degradation” which would result from mixing the races.
So tell us again, Mr Windschuttle, how the WAP was not based on notions on racial superiority.
Wrong again, JQ.
In case you haven’t realised it yet, you yourself were being uncharacteristically bigoted on this subject. Now, when dealing with prejudiced people, you cannot deploy the full range of reasoned factual arguments. You have to work away at what little is left open to work on, as any direct application of “brute reason” will be rejected out of hand as “ah – another racist apologist to be ignored” (you almost telegraphed that).
So you – or in this case we – have to approach the topic indirectly, much the way Harriet Beecher Stowe esplained the wrongs of slavery to a slaveowner not in the larger terms which he was accustomed to tuning out but in terms of what would happen to his slaves once he, the beneficent paternalist massa, was gone. Maybe some damned yankee would neglect them!
But I see you are still interpreting objections in terms of some pattern of how people get at the world, not in terms of any pattern of error of your own. You have a long way to go yet.
Oh, and I take the cries of racist suffering as so much bleeding heart over-statement if taken as a full description. Even Sharpeville pales into insignificance compared with what the blacks did to the whites in the Congo about the same time (did I mention that our family had to be rescued by Belgian paras after a three day siege with the white community in a block of flats in Luluabourg?). And the extreme of institutional racism that is continuing at the moment is in Zanzibar, against the Arabs and even more against the Parsees, at the hands of the blacks. It’s perfectly understandable, but two wrongs don’t make a right, and there’s no occasion to turn “racism” into an anti-white tool.
Indeed, the concept of racism is unhelpful to the extent it draws attention to process at the expense of actual human harm. For instance, the other day some rednecks beat up some burglars in Queensland and that is being made out to be racism because of the coincidence that both blacks and whites were involved. Yes, racism prior to that no doubt no doubt created the situation, but the beating wasn’t racist – the culprits would have done the same to anybody. Which should not be taken by members of the race industry as meaning that it didn’t matter – it was still wrong.
Now if you want someone willing to give an apologia from the things done in past times, try this – but don’t use your own prejudices as an excuse not to assess either this or my previous Windschuttle remarks on their merits.
Both “separate but equal” and apartheid do represent noble ideals, though quite possibly put forward by cynical realists as a stalking horse. Who could possibly object to that sort of splendid isolationism, allowing each to disregard the lifestyles of the other yet not suffer thereby? Only, it was never practical policy, at least for implementing those ideals, and many realised it even at the time. But you can’t blame people being fooled for being racists, only for being fools. And the ideal is still nobler than multiculturalism, which cannot ever be worth pursuing in itself. It is at best good policy with a poor propaganda gloss, and at worst it doesn’t even deliver a quiet life.
But my willingness to live and let live isn’t practical, even though that is just precisely what apartheid set out to achieve. Apartheid was like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. Unfortunately the remedy consists in putting something at least as predatory and even more sneaky in charge – and that alternative was clear to the want-of-better supporters of apartheid in the ’60s, and while it does not justify them, it explains them as pursuers of the lesser evil – which they genuinely were.
Now, consider this dilemma: if I had not spoken out, you, JQ, would have supposed that nobody was willing to take a stand for truth, that the other side had no part in truth. Yet, now I have, have you adjusted your view of anything I say so that forever and forever you will not take anything I say on board – the very problem with enmity to truth that I and many others hold against the whole PC movement?
If the latter, only your readers can determine, and then only for so long as you do not mark these sorts of things as “uncivilised” and worthy of censoring. But I object to people who seek to cause harm as evil, and to mindless things and processes that lead to it as bad, whether I work within the PC framework or not. I even have no problem with using the word “nigger” within an argument for deeper purposes, any more than leading lights of the ’60s objected to nude scenes that served dramatic purposes.
Here I stand, I can do no other (which, I know, was subtly mocked in Peter Lorre’s closing speech as the child molester in the film “M” – which highlights our very human problem in matters of conscience).
This is a very disturbing topic that may herald most unfortunate developments in public discourse and perhaps public policy.
Racism is so multi-faceted it is worth identifying its varieties and deciding which of those varieties is germane to a discussion of polemicists like KW or polemicists who pose as historians.
some categories:
1. visceral racists who find it difficult to acknowledge the humanity of members of certain groups (there is no evidence that KW belongs to this category)
2. Scientific racists who construct rationales for unequal treatment of certain races. This attitude to race informed the Australian constitution and the Immigration Act of 1901. (KW declares that this attitude to race was justified at the time, given the world-view of dominant groups in Australian and international society.) There is nothing particularly objectionable about this statement in itself. But my objection to KW on this subject is that, given his subject is the rise and fall of official racism in Australia, it is incumbent on him to declare if and when such a policy ceased to be understandable and justifiable in his judgement. It is possible to accuse KW of counterproductive coat-trailing on this subject. As a public intellectual it is incumbent on him to make his position clear on this issue.
3. Apologists of the racism of historical actors. This is what KW is most famous for. His history of the Tasmanian Aborigines is driven by two major projects:
a. exculpation of European settlers by a critical and often tendentious assessment of the evidence of genocide. KW scored a few hits on his shoddy historian opponents, but he suffered more hits due to his disingenuousness in distinguishing and disallowing evidence. People of good will are capable of assessing the worthlessness of KW’s research methods.
b. redefinition of racism. KW’s declarations about the innate inferiority of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, both physical and moral, are designed by KW to serve as an omnibus exculpation of racist actions of Europeans in Tasmania. According to this view it was impossible for Europeans to be condemned as racist because Tasmanian Aborigines did not merit treatment reserved for human beings. This is an appalling view which releases the hobgoblins of racism into Australian political and social discourse.
This latter project makes KW’s quoted statements on official racism under the Australian Constitution particularly worrying and worthy of debate and condemnation. It should be clear that KW’s representation of Tasmanian Aborigines is very much in the mainstream of the same scientific racism that informed racist elements of the Australian Constitution.
The disturbing thing about this is that KW’s comments about the racism of the Founding Fathers can now be seen to have a personal significance for KW. No longer is KW defending understandable but perhaps regrettable ideas of a pack of dead blokes with beards. Rather KW is defending his own view of the world. This is a world where it is desirable and perhaps necessary to disqualify the right of certain groups from the privilege of membership of common humanity.
And if it is OK to do this for peoples in the past, then maybe it is OK to apply the same principles to treatment of our contemporaries. (Might KW be thinking about Aborigines and Arabs?)
I think that Jack Strocchi at December 5, 2004 04:54 PM beat you to it.
That may make Windschuttle a “fellow traveller” with racists, or vice-versa.
I am not that interested in Windschuttles history and certainly oppose the reintroduction of WAP and the Aborginal caste status. What does annoy me is the hijacking of historical debates for contemporary political purposes. (I concede that conservatives do this, but I feel that progressives have been the worse offenders. Having been educated at Uni Melb in the eighties I am entitled to have some slack cut for me on this score.)
This must be one of the silliest things that Pr Q has ever said. What planet is he living on?
Does Pr Q remember the moral panic that progressive elites whipped up about racism when the Country Party made a re-appearance under the guise of Ms Hanson? I know it was way back in the late nineties, still it should not be lost in the mists of time, I think.
Does he remember the infamous outbreak of Howard-hatred that spread like wildfire amongst the progressive cultural elites after the 2001 election, which was fuelled by cries of racism against persons who supported a strict border protection and a lawful settlement program?
(The non-racist supporters of Howard can now feel morally vindicated in that many of the Tampans have been lawfully resettled in AUS without public outcry. This proves that respect for civic law, rather than an urge to wage race war, was the majority factor in this issue.)
In fact, one of the first things done in any AUS political debate about “our role in the world” is to pre-emptively take the high moral ground by calling ones adversary a racist. A check of google brings up 391,000 hits for “Australia + racist”.
This attitude has always puzzled me, perhaps because I have been painfully aware of the wisdom of John 8:7. Having grown up with people from all walks of life one gets used to applying a rhetorical discount to the occasional bit of sledging.
Dr Knopfelmacher always used to say that racism is the last taboo subject, replacing sex. He meant rational analysis of race, not the use of “racism” as a swear word, which still has a pandemic potential in polite circles.
He also used to say that moral rhetoric was the last legitimate form of inter-personal aggression. Maybe thats why people get so touchy when the R-word is used.
It is hard to take all this hoo-ha about racism and apostatsy too seriously. It is important to take a stand against actual and existing racists but, pace General von Moltke, one is tempted to ask: if there is a race war on then “Where are the (neo-nazi) prisoners? Where are their field guns?”.
To a post-baby boomer it looks more like the replay of a schoolyard fight that started in the fifties, continued on through uni and is now being revived in graduate school, replete with name-calling, foot-stamping and face-pulling.
I think its time to treat the Culture Wars as a kind of kabuki play that can be analyed by Weberian clinical sociology. The term “racist”, like the older but cognate term “fascist”, has now almost exhausted its cognitive value as a rallying cry against injustice.
It is now a political football used by progressive elites as a dominance marker to take the prestige moral ground in a social status struggle with lower-status elites. By the same token, the lower-status elites are trying to bolster their political position by taking the popular moral ground by siding with the masses and their folk histories.
On this reading, the progressive Cultral Elites are the New Establishment. Windschuttles apostasy is just a counter-revolutionary pose with him, as usual, on the militant side of the barricades.
This is all quite amusing to watch but those not invested in the debates of the seventies are entitled to be underwhelmed. Mr Howard has leap frogged ahead in this symbolic politic game. Those, like Pr Q I am sure, who are interested in practical results, rather than moral grandstanding, will welcome this development.
Hayek, in the Road to Serfdom, quotes Hume on the embarassing pedigree of ideas. The fact that “mulit-culti” boilerplate is still used with a straight face by progressives is a source of never ending amazement to me. Does the anti-Windschuttle side recall that the first modern political party to use the term
“multiculturalism” in political discourse was Konrad Heinlein’s “Sudetendeutsche Partei”?
Just to rub it in a bit further: In the midst of all the (quite appropriate and welcome) celebration of Eureka Stockade Day has any one of the multitudes of progressive caught up in the nostalgia paused to consider that the subsequent Eurekans were out and out racists as well as ecological despoilers?
Should we now tear down all the Southern-Crossed-spangled banners? On Pr Q’s ideologic it would be hard to object to this form of politico-moral puritanism.
I suggest that political morality is relative to time and place. What exactly are we trying to prove when we say that Foundation Australians were vicious or virtuous? The founders of this country were neither angels nor devils. They were just poor forked creatures who had a go and wanted a fair go for their own kind.
History is a two-edged sword and those who wish to wield it for political purposes may find themselves run through by their own weapon.
On a point of information, wasn’t that Haenlein, not Heinlein, in the Sudetenland? I believe the similarity caused some awkwardness for Robert A. Heinlein, the SF author to be, as he was trying to get into politics in California at around the same time.
Another question for JQ: where were you when various people were making apparently racist remarks recently in the debate about Condi Rice’s suitability to be US Secretary of State?
Has anyone noticed the way the picture of Windschuttle in the SMH makes him look just like Penfold from Danger Mouse?
Congratulations Alex! I was waiting for that. We need a new version of Godwin’s law to cover the ‘If you didn’t say P about Q, you can’t say X about Y” positions like this.
“Unless JQ denounces *categorically* some alleged remarks by unnamed people pertaining to an irrelevant event in another country (if necessary travelling back in time to do so), he is banned from writing about an actual issue in this country”. I like it.
As a matter of interest, where were you when that happened Alex? Is it a thing like the moon landing or the Kennedy assassination where you always remember what you were doing?
Hey, don’t overstate my case! I didn’t say that not commenting on the Condi Rice case automatically disqualifies JQ from having a go at Windschuttle. However, it is worth asking the question, because it may be that JQ is more interested in having a go at Windschuttle than at Condi Rice’s tormentors because on other issues he disagrees with W, whereas he disagrees with Rice (and therefore is less concerned about criticism of her, even if apparently racist).
Alex, I hadn’t heard anything about attacks on Condi Rice but a Google search suggests that you are referring to a Wisconsin radio host (who has since apologised). For the record, I deplore his remarks.
With this preliminary issue out of the way, I look forward to your condemnation of Windschuttle.
JQ, see my earlier post on this thread (4.20 pm) and my comments on the other thread re conflating of various issues.
For the record, I am a racist. Lots of my best friends are white. In fact, now I think on it, they all are. Oh, except one – but she’s really the wife’s friend. I believe racism is a natural human attribute. Any decent psycho-evolutionist will tell you as much. So much for the science.
It’s the politics that’s interesting. For the record, I am not a racist. For mine, those who profess to be above unimportant squabbles like racism – Strocchi – are as much the problem as those – Windschuttle – who seek to provide political justifications for the overt expression of our common and innate racist impulse.
Racism, in a confined space, is a problem just like aggression and which we must combat in order to achieve the good life on this here earth. There can be no shirking of the issue. Progressives understand this. Recalcitrants just muddy the water and need to be ignored – Strocchi – or howled down – Windschuttle.
Prof JQ is, as almost always, correct to call it out loud and early.
One of the Bahnisch boys is on the money too saying that Windschuutle is a media tart and calculates this an issue to attract column inches and notoriety. However there is a reason matches are put in the high cupboard and there is a reason why playing the fool on this issue is as bad as playing for real.
Oh, and apart from the Wisconsin radio host, there was also this
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1285752/posts
and this
http://up2date.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/19/16733/877
and this
http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/19/1100838226867.html
although Mr Carlton claims irony as his defence, apparently
Jack Strocchi,
“Racism” and “racist” are usually terms of abuse which, as you imply, close off debate. As I hope to persuade you, that’s the racists’ choice.
“Racism” and “racist” are also analytical categories that allow identification of a fairly broad but also finite set of social, political and cultural ideas.
As Winthrop Jordan has shown, racism was deeply ingrained into English culture by the beginnning of the seventeenth century. He demonstrates how racism was nurtured by a particular understanding of bibilical texts that were peculiar to the English speaking world. (This is not to imply that only English were racist, just that their racism took on a particular, historically determined shape.)
The most potent form of racism, and the one most influential in the development of Australian official racism that informed the Immigration Act of 1901, and the racism that KW refers to and perhaps flirts with, is neo-Darwinian “scientific racism”.
In discussing the rise, elaboration, adoption as public policy, systematisation, partial eclipse, and possible recent recrudescence of scientific racism in Australia one is compelled neither to don a black armband nor a white blindfold.
Racist ideas existed and still exist. Public figures adhered and still adhere to racist ideas: they are racists. This is a simple matter of analysis. Disagreements around the margins should not blind us to the existence of the core.
Racist ideas and policies range from genocidal to relatively gentle exclusionism. Very few racists call for the Final Solution. The Left is sometimes blind to these nuances.
A measure of the success of liberalism in our culture is the reluctance of racists to self-identify. “I’m not a racist but…” This is a relatively recent victory.
Liberals (small l) who have as a tenet of faith that all human beings share identical potential and deserve equal recognition of their human dignity feel it is a victory when racists are shame-faced about their obsessions.
If they want to be proud about them, however, then let them identify themselves and bring it on.
Katz is now officially my intellectual hero. (Sorry, Rob!) Which is by way of saying “wot Katz said” except in this case, that would have sounded presumptuous.
Great post John. At times like this … I miss the freedom of the ‘sphere.
Katz, you write ‘A measure of the success of liberalism in our culture is the reluctance of racists to self-identify. “I’m not a racist but…” This is a relatively recent victory.’
That is not a success of liberalism, unless by “liberalism” you mean a sort of newspeak opposite of the real thing. This very real victory is retrograde, consisting in the success of intimidation and suppression – not of any persuasion of people that they (we, in many cases, since in many cases I am one of these) are in the wrong.
I know damned well that the claque will go to work if I try to bring out those things that their tunnel vision lumps all together to be ignored, so by and large I go about things differently in my pursuit of and bringing out of such truth as I can find.
But “PC” is an enemy of this, so be damned to any categorisation which serves in the end not to highlight but to mark for suppression – which your formulation shows is a view you hold in practice, whether you know it or not.
Back in the 1960’s the historian C.D.Rowley drew a simple map to distinguish between what he called colonial and post-colonial Australia. Post-colonial Australia(the south east cities and the south west) was distinguished from the rest by racist views not being overtly expressed and by the absence of overt racist actions.
This distinction was still present in Australia in the 1980’s when I was working in Cetral Australia. I vividly remember in 1981, when a group of 11 Aborginal people were poisoned by a bottle of port that had been laced with strychnine in Alice Springs. The Coroner at the inquest made the observation that the wrong case before his court was receiving the publicity at the time. The wrong case was the death of Azaria Chamberlain and the Coroner was Dennis Porrit.
In 2000, in one of the books written about the experience of the rabbit proof fence story – the author relates how a bullet was fired into a camp by a passing ute of white fellas. It was a commonplace event that hardly bore remarking from the local indigenous population. ‘what can yu do?’
In 2003, the West Australian published a letter from a local complaining about the ‘Aborginality’ of a particular violent child sex offense. This was after the paper and the TV had made sure that the race of the offender was clear. Why did the publish the letter? and other’s like it at the time? They published a letter from me a week latr pointing out that his race was ‘australian’ and that he was probably at least part English as well as part Aboriginal. And that blaming a minority for a heinous crime is a way of avoiding recognizing our collective responsibility and was a path that had been used by Goebbels prior to Crystalnacht.
I remember my grandparents and other people of their generation talking about ‘boongs’ and ‘niggers’ and ‘wops’ without any sense of guilt or economic self-interest. It was smugness and arrogance and pride that was in their voices that struck me as a youngster.
To all those apologists for white australia and the racist attitudes of this country – you are forgetting your own personal as well as your country’s past. I’m 52 years old, I can still remember all these things, I was there. It is a precondition for facism, this wilful forgetting.
That is not a success of liberalism
Yes it IS a victory of liberalism. The notion that we are not governed by ‘natural laws’ or ‘facts’ or ‘truths’ like that of ethnicity or race is THE legacy of liberalism. If this infiltrates our daily abductions, that IS a huge victory.
(1) Saying that racism (etc.) is the “last taboo”, or even just a “taboo” label, is a bit strong – although it is deployed with a good deal of caution. I suspect this is because the ‘average’ person associates racism with a ‘deep-seated’ ATTITUDE or an EMOTION – viz. fear and/or hatred. So, calling Hanson in the 1990s a racist or Howard in the 1980s a racist was a risky move because the burden of proof, falling on the accusor, was quite large – it required a demonstration of a deep-seated psychological state, something that was not really evident in the public personas of either Hanson or Howard.
(2) I had the good fortune of reading through almost every word in the Commonwealth Hansard on the early 1900s debates about Australian immigration, and so can say that the majority of speakers on the matter saw non-Anglos as a threat first and formost to British culture. British culture was seen as superior to all others and that its purity, virtuousness, etc., would be corrupted by adding people of inferior cultural backgrounds. It was an easy rhetorical and conceptual slippery-slide from race to culture and back again: an inferior culture denoted an inferior race, and an inferior race was a threat to the purity of a superior culture (which was, of course, thereby associated with a superior race). In the heat of debate, even on one-hundred year old yellowing pages, the passion with which these beliefs were held burns brightly. On reading wave after wave of it, it is hard, nay impossible, to come to any conclusion other than the White Australia policy was borne out of a deep-seated fear of “the Inferior Other Races”.
(3) As to Windschuttle’s “(still unexplained) swing from far left to far right about a decade ago”, apparently he attempted something of an explanation in November 1999 in Quadrant. Here is Bob Gould’s mildly amusing take on the whole thing: http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Windschuttle.html The relevant part starts from the section entitled The Grapes of Wrath as a communist conspiracy.
John, you write: “Racism is an evil, bloodstained ideology and no one wants to admit association with it.”
So why do you maintain a link to Margo Kingston, who a few months ago claimed that “the fundamentalist Zionist lobby controls politics and the media in the US and Australia”? And what about this, from a guy many of your fellow leftists link to?
As you wrote a few days ago, “don’t whinge when you get lumped in with them.”
Jack, since we were both typing, simultaneously as far as I can tell, that Windschuttle is a fellow-traveller with racism, let’s agree to agree on this one.
The attempt to find racists I haven’t condemned is getting kind of desperate here. Alex digs up a rather lame piece of humour from Mike Carlton, and Tim Blair points to a (rather half-hearted) apology about a racist remark from someone who might have been linked by someone I linked.
Tim also rehashes his Margo Kingston obsession with some OTT remarks by Margo that might be construed as anti-Semitic code, but might equally well be a clumsy reference to Christian fundamentalists and Likud supporters.
Again for the record, I found the ‘jokes’ linked by Alex to be tasteless and crass, and I think Margo should take care to avoid this kind of phrasing in future. If Tim can point to clear-cut anti-Semitism on her part, I’ll delink her.
Given that Tim and Alex have set the bar so high, I’m waiting, still, to see their condemnation of Windscuttle.
Well in today’s Australian we finally have access to what Windshuttle himself says rather that “filtered spun and adulterated” versions. On the face of it, to me it doesn’t quite seem to be the vile diatribe that Q sketched out. Whether it is factually accurate is the question, which well have to wait for the sources to verify I’d say.
I think a bit of perspective is need in judgment of WAP. The turn of the century came at a time when the world had experienced its largest ever mass migrations – I think something like 10% of the world emigrated 1870-1910(Higgins).
In other words the size of immigrant flows were large enough to literally change the character of the receiving nation. So when people made the choice about how to restrict immigration, they were quite literally choosing the cultural their nation would take. And 1900-1910, virtually every emigrant nation of note imposed some sort of racial restriction- so Australia was hardly the exceptional character. And race restrictions are still imposed – what about the US visa lottery – for instance.
The whole claim that “White Australia was exceptionally racist” is a straw man erected by Windschuttle, to deny the obvious fact that White Australia was racist.
What’s really interesting here is the comparison with apartheid. Windschuttle and other defenders of White Australia want to maintain a sharp distinction between White Australia and apartheid. But (as he ought to remember) the people who were most prominent in comparing White Australia and apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s weren’t leftist academics, they were apologists for apartheid, from Verwoerd on down.
P.M. Lawrence:
“But “PC” is an enemy of this, so be damned to any categorisation which serves in the end not to highlight but to mark for suppression – which your formulation shows is a view you hold in practice, whether you know it or not.”
So I guess that, objectively, I’m a totalitarian. I confess this comes as something of a surprise to me. Oh well, so be it.
I bet all you non-PC closet xenophobes, monoculturalists, ethnocentrists, chiliasts and sundry teleologists out there in your survivalist bunkers now regret sticking your noses in the blogiverse because we objective totalitarians know your names and we know where you live.
Expect a midnight knock on the door and a one-way ticket to the John Stuart Mill Mung Bean Collective and Political Re-education Facility.
[For those who still need to be told, this is an attempt at irony.]
wbb at December 5, 2004 10:43 PM. stands astride the Olympian high moral ground, like the moral Colossus he is:
I dont think that racism is unimportant on the global scene. All indications are that the global political struggles are getting more ethnolgogical and theological, as the 19-20th Enlightenment ideologicial struggles peter out.
The genius of AUS’s post-Menzies liberal Vital Centrism is that it has successfully contained the problem of racism through the dialectic of Whitlamite progressive racial differentiation and Howardite conservative social integration. FWIW, I put myself as a conservative-liberal, rather than a progressive-liberal, end of the Vital Centrist spectrum. The owner of this site, and most commenters, seem to be on the progressive-liberal side of Vital Centrism.
Yes! Thats the modern progressive way to learn and progress. Censor dissent and ignore unpleasant truths. Not.
John Quiggin at December 6, 2004 05:05 AM
I wish I had thought of saying that first.
And race restrictions are still imposed what about the US visa lottery for instance
Giles, you’ve committed the cardinal sin of assuming a simple isomorphism between citizenship and ethnicity. Nation, state and (imagined) biology have never been neatly packaged together, as much as extreme nationalists would like to promote the contrary.
Katz: all human beings share identical potential
If this is what I’m required to believe to join the elite PC brigade… then I guess I’ll just skip the semantic tricks and sign up as a racist. I think the idea that all humans share identical potential is patently absurd. We are not clones. Perhaps this explains why the left has no time for individualism?
However, it is difficult to question anything the left says regarding race for fear of being branded evil and immoral. For a long time I was too scared to debate such issues. I believe that this response (fear) is exactly what the PC brigade wants… which is why they are so arrogantly dimissive of immoral idiots that dare question them.
And yet, strangely, it is often people on the left who support government policy explicitly based on race (affirmative action).
John Humphreys:
Potential DOES NOT EQUAL achievement.
I thought this distinction had been made clearly enough by 1776 when Thomas Jefferson penned the notion that the nascent United States was dedicated to the principle that all people were created equal — i.e., equally deserving of opportunities to develop their potential. Do we really need to reinevent that wheel?
There are arguments for removing the rights of individuals for a variety of reasons: crime, idiocy, insanity.
But to argue that there are classes of human beings who are inferior at their moment of conception and thereby merit discriminatory treatment is a most regrettable point of view and one that cannot be justified emperically.
Katz: all human beings share identical potential
Steven Pinker has just killed this simplist meme in The Blank Slate.
d:
Sigh.
A brief summary of Pinker’s thesis goes like this:
“Pinker attacks the notion that an infant’s mind is a blank slate, arguing instead that human beings have an inherited universal structure shaped by the demands made upon the species for survival, albeit with plenty of room for cultural and individual variation.”
To assert (note that I am not claiming that it can be proven empiricially) that human beings are born with equal potential IS NOT the same as saying they are born as a BLANK SLATE.
In fact, note the important word in the above gloss of Pinker’s thesis: UNIVERSAL. Pinker is saying that every human being has this potential, it is a confirmation (but not a proof) of the validity of liberal values.
Unless you’ve got something better, Game, Set and Match.
I can’t help but imagine a picture of Victorian feudal Lords, swilling their chardonary, squabbling over the true nature of their impoverished serfs.
I am genuinally curious to know who here has actually been a victim of racism, given that you all seem to have authority over it and know it so well. And that is not sarcasm. I would really like to have a better understanding of the positions of those who proffess to know the true nature of racism in this great country. Left and right alike – I don’t care for political philiosphies here. When you’re being searched by police in the street or receive road-rage racial epithets or get rolled for being the wrong colour, you don’t have time to check if your assailant read Chomsky or Windshuttle.
A good question, JC. I haven’t ever been a victim of racism. (My picture might provide some clues as to why this should be so.) But I certainly ran across plenty of it in my younger days, and have seen a revival (or rather a return to social acceptability) recently.
Here FTR are my correct views on everything about racism.
There is passive racism and active racism. All members of the human species who dedicate disproportionate personal resources to blood relatives and their kind are passive racists. All sub-special groups that dedicate political resources to subjugating or denigrating other sub-special groups are active racists.
By this metric, the AUS federal settlement was a weak form of active racism. We disposessed traditional land owners, colonised South Pacific islanders and chased out Chinese gold diggers. Windschuttle, by supporting WAP, is attempting to justify this and is therefore giving aid and comfort to active racism, at least at the historiographical level. I see no evidence that Windschuttle is giving intellectual support to active racism in the sphere of contemporary political activity.
Active racism has more or less disappeared from the AUS political spectrum since the ascension of Whitlam. But before we all start scrambling for the high moral ground and deafening each other with bawls of self-congratulation I would urge commenters to pause.
Pretty much every person I know, including Pr Q, is a passive racist because they care for their kids more than other kids. The very word “kind” betrays that children (kinder), our blood issue, are micro-racial units of propagation. The Nazis were an extreme version of biological communitarians and got alot of mileage out of the slogan: ‘kinder, kusche, kirsch’.
Familial groups are racist institutions since they are the building blocks of tribal, national and racial populations. A race is simply a scaled up family with a certain level of non-lethal consanguinal interbreeding. Plato knew this and preferred citizenship to kinship as the foundation of the state. So he advocated breaking up families to strenghthen the state.
Humans appear to have evolved the moral sentiment of reciprocal altruism (tit-for-tat kindness) which was advantageously selected as the biological affinities in shared genes aided propagation and prolongation of familiar sub-species. The challenge of civilised statehood is to substitute kinship for citizenship, based on sociological affinities of shared memes.
The multi-culti seperatists, who Windschuttle attacks, advocate kinship based political communities which is leads back to tribalism ie racism. They pose a much greater threat to a liberal civic culture than Windschuttle’s apostatic poses.
Already AUS’s hardcore multi-culturalists have been associated with covering up criminal-political drug trafficking rings(Grassby), our first jailed cabinet minister (Theophanous) and our first political assasination (Newman). Not to mention the internal corruption of our oldest political party (ALP ethnic lobby branch stacking & immigration rorts). One could go on with the various rorts and wanks associated with equity and diversity bureaucracies and over-lawyering, but it would be too tedious. Every one knows this anyway but prefers to not mention it to avoid the Tickner treatment.
Holland, which had gone done some serious multi-culti experimentation over the past generation, has proved Poppers theory that a liberal civitas cannot tolerate the intolerant. We have had a small taste of where this can go with recent disturbances by dis-integrating cults in Sydney’s South West.
Where’s the outrage? I await, with unbated breath, progressive-liberal repudiation of the reactionary, vicious and stupid multi-cultural seperatist philosophy.
Katz, you are nuts. Are you really suggesting that I was born with the potential to be another Beethoven or Einstein?