Andrew Bolt has a column (no link) in which he attacks a number of Marxist academics on the basis that they are morally responsible for all the crimes committed by Marxist regimes, regardless of their personal attitude to those regimes. Rather than explore the problems with this kind of cliam, I’ll point out that
* The Iraq war, launched on the basis of lies, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and left millions homeless
* Bolt eagerly supported the war and propagated the lies told to justify it
* Bolt derided and defamed those who correctly predicted its disastrous consequences
* Even when it was obvious that the death toll from the war was huge, and certain to grow further, Bolt continued to lie, and offered no apology to those he had defamed
* To this day, Bolt has continued to defend the war, and failed to acknowledge the falsehood of the claims he made in its support
Bolt is in exactly the same moral position as an unrepentant apologist for Stalinism or Maoism.
John Quiggin 
I refudiate the comparison of Bolt with Glenn Beck. Beck is a parodist who inhabits his role far more deeply than contemporaries like Stephen Colbert.
I’m not even joking. Beck’s true politics are likely disinterested or even left-leaning, but as an entertainer he knows his audience perfectly.
@Sancho
OK, and in that light how do you describe Bolt?
Iconoclast @#43 wrote:
Thank you.
Iconoclast continued:
Could you provide examples of the criminality of the Russian and Chinese Governments?
Were you aware that the Russian Government, including President Vladimir Putin, was democratically elected? Were you aware that Russia has a free press that is far more truthful than the war propagandists and corruption denialists in the Fairfax media, the ABC, the SBS, the Murdoch Press?
For some time now, it has been understood by people, who are put themselves to the trouble of discovering the truth, that if you want to know, let alone understand, what is going on in Venezuela, Syria, the Ukraine, Bahrain, etc., that you are wasting your time watching CBS, the BBC, etc. To find out what is happening there, go to sites such as “Russia Today” (rt.com) and the Iranian PressTV (presstv.ir) etc.
If you can find examples of dishonest reporting on any of those web-sites, please feel welcome to provide examples here or on my web-site.
Iconoclast wrote:
Can’t you see that it had not been for some “bad persons” “wielding weapons” Syria would have been leveled by the United States and its allies last year with a death toll approaching that suffered by Iraq and its people would now be living under Sharia law?
Megan
1. There are no good f@scists. Actual f@scists are extremely dangerous incipiently or actually murderous political criminals who aim through violence (actual or apprehended) to enforce rigid conformity to the bosses’ state.
2. Your use of the term describes reactionaries, ignorant dupes and spivs. Such folk are antithetical to progress, but the dupes may be acquitted of mens rea.
I hate it when the term conflates would be perpetrators of genocide or democide on behalf of boss class rule with folks merely pitching/fostering a reversion to a more unequal and disempowering set of social arrangements.
@malthusista
Oh come on, look at the Realpolitiks! Are you saying, Russian oppression doesn’t happen in Checnya? Chinese oppression doesn’t happen in Tibet? Russia is ruled by Chekists and oligarchs. China is ruled by one authoritarian party and its crony capitalists. And of course the US is run by the plutocrats, the military industrial complex and the secret services. The “democracies” of the US and Russia are false covers.
The interesting phenomenon is the degree of convergence (towards plutocratic dictatorship) displayed by all three superpowers as late stage capitalism goes global. This, with the manipulation of “truth”, shows that Orwell’s “1984” was the most prescient of dystopian novels. Three Regional Hegemons To Rule Them All.
Radical pacifism can work. It has been shown to work by Gandhi and others. It can also fail. Pacifists can die just like combatants. There are also situations where both resistance and compliance are futile. On the other hand, meeting violence with violence (on a mass scale) is guaranteed to escalate the situation and result in ever more deaths. It is arguable that the women, children and old men show the most wisdom, by fleeing. The young male hot-heads who remain to fight, what will they win in Syria? Nothing but ruins.
Pr Q @ #39 said:
Most prominent Right-liberals (Bolt, Blair, Ackerman, Windschuttle) are usually former Left-liberals who had a bad reaction after being exposed to near lethal doses of Left-liberal ideological radiation at university during the seventies, the high tide of “idiot Leftism”. Their Right-liberalism is a form of apostasy against former comrades a gauche.If you want an explanation of why any middle-aged man might espouse some breath-taking bit of reactionary ideology it is usually sufficient to say he attended an Australian eastern seaboard university sometime between 1975-90. Left-liberals were ascendant then (they are established now) and were happy to celebrate a collapse in standards, not just intellectually but also morally as they moved from barricades to common rooms. The Right-wing lurch had an objective aspect of course: trade unions did over-step the mark (the BLF was a criminal conspiracy), commies were a threat (SS 20’s were pointed at Europe) and crime was out of control (Underbelly is now a TV franchise). After 1990 there was no point of comparison, the End of History you might say. It was post-modern liberalism (whether discoursing on deconstruction or trading in derivatives) as far as the eye could see.I dont know if Windschuttle’s lurch to the Right was such a “good career move”. He is a historian by trade and the unfashionable positions he now espouses certainly cost him any hopes of a tenured position. However any former Left-wing journalist who wanted to settle old scores with former comrades was sure to get a good hearing, and a healthy pay-check, if he hung his shingle out of News Corp shop front.The central problem with Australian Right-wingers is they do not espouse an “organic” form of conservatism that has evolved as a dialectic between their own political education and the traditional culture of their own country. Their so-called “conservatism” is not conservative – it is liberalism with a corporate face, Nor is it home-grown, it is usually imported from foreign think-tanks. (Of course much the same can be said of Australian Left-wingers who take their ideological cues from LSE, Sorbonne and Berkeley.) To make matters infinitely worse, the tradition of modernist liberalism has over the past generation undergone a massive mutation into the fashion of post-modernist liberalism. So Right-wingers now espouse a form of liberalism that has lost most of its creative potential, its basically apologetics for legal eagle tax-shelters and pixel-shuffling financial innovators.In fact the Australian media-academia complex cannot boast one single conservative – not a one! Every single last one of them, to a man, strives to be a “with-it” liberal, either a Left-liberal (usually in academia) or a Right-liberal (usually in the media). So far as I can see the only prominent Australian who espouses a conservative view of things is Barrie Humphries, who is, not surprisingly, self-employed. Perhaps you could throw John Carroll and Bettina Arndt in there with him. There used to be the occasional home-grown conservative poet or philosopher (David Stove, Les Murray, Vincent Buckley) but they have long since been weeded out.It makes for a terribly boring public intellectual life since both Right- and Left-liberal elites tend to agree on most things, usually the very things that members of the general public may have serious reservations over. Also the decline of traditional conservatism tends to be associated with an increase in vulgarity, boorishness and ignorance as a badge of honour. Conservatives tend to be a little better educated in the finer things of life. After all, thats the whole point of conservatism, to conserve worthwhile traditions which, once upon a time, the Occident had more of than you could poke a stick at. Nowadays of course no body bothers trying to master a difficult art because its too much like hard work.
Robert Conquest First Law of Politics
Pr Q @ #39 said:
Most prominent Right-liberals (Bolt, Blair, Ackerman, Windschuttle) are usually former Left-liberals who had a bad reaction after being exposed to near lethal doses of Left-liberal ideological radiation at university during the seventies, the high tide of “idiot Leftism”. Their Right-liberalism is a form of apostasy against former comrades a gauche.
If you want an explanation of why any middle-aged man might espouse some breath-taking bit of reactionary ideology it is usually sufficient to say he attended an Australian eastern seaboard university sometime between 1975-90. Left-liberals were ascendant then (they are established now) and were happy to celebrate a collapse in standards, not just intellectually but also morally as they made the long march from barricades to common rooms. The Right-wing lurch had an objective aspect of course: trade unions did over-step the mark (the BLF was a criminal conspiracy), commies were a threat (SS 20’s were pointed at Europe) and crime was out of control (Underbelly is now a TV franchise).
After 1990 there was no point of comparison, the End of History you might say. It was post-modern liberalism (whether discoursing on deconstruction or trading in derivatives) as far as the eye could see.
I dont know if Windschuttle’s lurch to the Right was such a “good career move”. He is a historian by trade and the unfashionable positions he now espouses certainly cost him any hopes of a tenured position. However any former Left-wing journalist who wanted to settle old scores with former comrades was sure to get a good hearing, and a healthy pay-check, if he hung his shingle out of News Corp shop front.
The core problem with Australian Right-wingers is they do not espouse an “organic” form of conservatism that has evolved as a dialectic between their own political education and the traditional culture of their own country. Their so-called “conservatism” is not conservative – it is liberalism with a corporate face, Nor is it home-grown, it is usually imported from foreign think-tanks. (Of course much the same can be said of Australian Left-wingers who take their ideological cues from LSE, Sorbonne and Berkeley.) To make matters infinitely worse, the tradition of modernist liberalism has over the past generation undergone a massive mutation into the fashion of post-modernist liberalism. So Right-wingers now espouse a form of liberalism that has lost most of its creative potential, its basically apologetics for legal eagle tax-shelters and pixel-shuffling financial innovators.
In fact the Australian media-academia complex cannot boast one single conservative – not a one! Every single last one of them, to a man, strives to be a “with-it” liberal, either a Left-liberal (usually in academia) or a Right-liberal (usually in the media). So far as I can see the only prominent Australian who espouses a conservative view of things is Barrie Humphries, who is, not surprisingly, self-employed. There used to be the occasional home-grown conservative poet or philosopher (David Stove, Les Murray, Vincent Buckley) but they have long since been weeded out.
It makes for a terribly boring public intellectual life since both Right- and Left-liberal elites tend to agree on most things, usually the very things that members of the general public may have serious reservations over. Also the decline of traditional conservatism tends to be associated with an increase in vulgarity, boorishness and ignorance as a badge of honour. Conservatives tend to be a little better educated in the finer things of life. After all, thats the whole point of conservatism, to conserve worthwhile traditions which, once upon a time, the Occident had more of than you could poke a stick at. Nowadays of course no body bothers trying to master a difficult art because its too much like hard work.
Robert Conquest First Law of Politics
i saw keith windshuttle deliver an oration.
it was at the sydney university history common room, around the time the “the killing of history” was published, it was one of a series of evenings for post grads to hear about topics outside their fields of interest from people in the “real world”.
he began his talk by denouncing the sydney university history department as being in the thrall of post modernism, lacan & nietzsche and therefore incipient fascists. really. if you have read “the killing of history” you would know that it is one dogmatic step for him from nietzsche to hitler to stalin to crimes against humanity.
he seemed genuinely surprised that he was not received warmly, and, instead, was asked numerous hostile & critical questions from students & academics around the room.
i don’t think he was a good historian at all, that he didn’t apply for a tenured position was not due to a conspiracy against him, or an incompatibility with the then prevailing fashion for postmodernism, but simply because he was just smart enough to realise he’s an intellectual simpleton. -a.v.
@jack strocchi
I was at least entertained up until your claim that the BLF was a criminal conspiracy. Now, which BLF would that be: the NSW BL’s or the Victorian Branch under so called Maoists or some figment of your fermented memory?
Well said a.v.
alfred venison @ #8 said:
His surprise surprises me. When you make yourself a cat among pigeons you should expect to see feathers ruffled.
Windschuttle’s scholarly work, what ever one thinks of his politics, at least has the virtue of being readable and germane to the burning issues of the day. Plus he forced Reynolds to back down on the Aboriginal genocide claim which was a good job of work certainly worthy of a chair.
The same cannot be said for most of his professional peers at the UoS and elsewhere who are either still in the grip of post-modernist ideology or have relapsed into more or less mindless fact-grubbing on issues of limited interest. I never studied History at the UoS or even heard of a UoS historian, despite living and/or working next door to it for a decade. This page showing the current academic establishment of this department does not exactly leap with household names. Perhaps Windschuttle’s strictures hit too close to the bone for comfort?
Since the late sixties the University of Sydney has had what one might call a chequered past when it comes to employing intellectuals who deviate from the Left-wing party line. Both Dr Knopfelmacher and David Stove were hounded out of positions there on trumped up charges. Key departments (Philosophy and Economics) were riven by ideological splits. Without going into the merits of these disputes this strife-ridden record surely supports a claim for having an intellectually diverse faculty. But obviously this was a bridge too far for Australian historians.
Thus Windschuttle is more or less self-employed. A loss to himself obviously but also to his peers who could use a little bit of ginger in the otherwise tepid gruel they serve up to HECS-burdened students.
More generally this points to the problem of Australian public intellectual life: fashion-driven, cliquish and detached from every-day life. The very best Australian intellectuals (Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, Geoffrey Blainey, Robert Hughes, Clive James, Nick Cave) tend to be somewhat idiosyncratic one-man shows, usually set-up over-seas. Which means that high-profile institutional forums back home are often at the mercy of energetic charlatans with axes to grind, like Andrew Bolt. Or dreary bores with bulging Rolodexes, like Michelle Grattan.
The Australian public are dying for an intellectual adrenaline hit but they aint going to get it from Australian public intellectuals.
@Fran Barlow
Of course they aren’t good. Hence the expression ‘good’.
There are many definitions of fascism and I understand your point but I use the term deliberately and not lightly. I believe it – at least arguably – applies to our current situation.
And I believe it is extremely important to include the supporters, enablers, proponents and actual actors in the classification. Otherwise they are let off the hook of responsibility for what they are doing.
andrew bolt is the charles maurras of our time. -a.v.
Jack Strocchi – careful when you say “still” – i do know my history. when i was there, as undergrad, honours, post-grad & tutor, the postmodernists were a faction. from 1988 to 1996 i was taught by seven faculty – one of the sorbonne – who were left wing & decidedly pre-postmodernist, which reasons are why i sought them out. they were there when windshuttle gave his talk, side by side with the postmodernists, all gave him the hard time he deserved. in the period since they have each retired; none of them could ever be called “still” postmodernist & none of them “relapsed”. the postmodern transformation set in after.
windshuttle was never a peer.
i find him as a writer not readable, rather irritating because he is a poor historian, shallow, and transparently ideologically driven – he is an intellectual puff pastry – he is a manufactured celebrity.
there is a place for political economy.
” I never studied History at the UoS or even heard of a UoS historian, despite living and/or working next door to it for a decade ” – what in the world is that supposed to mean? -a.v.
@jack strocchi
Citing Windschuttle as an Australian expert on genocide is ceding far too much intellectual integrity and knowledge to him. Prof Colin Tatz, who is an expert on genocide, points out that there most certainly was an Aboriginal genocide, according to the only authoritative definition that we have of genocide, that of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.
See: http://www.kooriweb.org/gst/genocide/tatz.html
I know arguing from authority is regarded as bad form, but to argue the actual form in which genocide happened in Australia is beyond this forum. However, I’ll happily argue the point with you if we use Tatz’s arguments as a starting point.
a.v.:
” I never studied History at the UoS or even heard of a UoS historian, despite living and/or working next door to it for a decade ” – what in the world is that supposed to mean? -a.v.
I think it means that, like a Manichee, he has not studied history and therefore has not eaten of the stuff of evil and is therefore uncontaminated.
Is Bolt morally responsible for all the crimes committed by multinational mega companies , free market extremists ,and, the governments beholden to them?
It’s giving him the benefit of doubt ,and he never does that for others ,but I think its worth assuming his opinions are genuinely held ; ie; that he is not simply a liar . It may be possible for an intelligent person to be so consistently wrong by selecting evidence etc (as we all do ). Much decision making is not as rational as we would like to think. The worst I would say about him is that he may feel that the ends justifies the means -that would make him pretty much of a liar then. I dont think he deliberately sets out to cause misery ,I think he is probably guided by some idea of progress for human kind in the long run (like Hitler was). Just writing him off as a misguided idiot or self-conscious liar (tho he could be either) might be missing an opportunity to develop understanding of our human nature.
I think thats a pretty generous appraisal and Im conscious of the fact that he is not a generous chap himself, part of me just wants to slap him across the back of the head.
@Megan
Beck is sensational, not vicious. When he rails against the evils of the Left, it’s in the tone of a ringmaster describing the unspeakable abominations to be seen at the freak show, guaranteed to amaze and appall – when everyone knows he’s only got a three-legged dog and a woman with gout.
The entertainment is in the delivery; watching someone cleverly and grandly overstate the mundane in order to make it enticing. It pulls in the rubes, sure enough, but the real performance is for the audience that enjoys the showmanship for its own sake.
Andrew Bolt is altogether different. There is no layer of self-awareness, let alone self-mockery in what he produces. Bolt despises the Left and anyone who so much as questions Tory ideals, and would gladly destroy them if he could.
Beck, of course, would never harm the source of his livelihood, and it’s conspicuous that the greatest damage he’s done is to the public image of the American Right.
I note that ikonoclast’s latest post (@#5) addresses almost none of the content of my latest post (@#3)
Ikonoklast, if you would prefer that I continue in this discussion with you, you should address my arguments and supporting evidence. Why not start with what I wrote in #44 on page 1? Either show me why I am wrong or else acknowledge that what I have posted is correct.
Ikonoklast wrote:
You realise that the Boston marathon bombers were Chechen terrorists and that the FBI failed to act on warnings given to them by Russian intelligence that Chechen terrorists preparing to bomb the Boston Marathon? Anyway, feel most welcome to explain how you know that justice lies with the cause of such terrorists and not with the Russians and their regional allies in the Caucasus.
Ikonoklast wrote:
As I explained above President Vladimir Putin was democratically elected. He was elected with a far higher margin than war criminal Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush.
Ikonoklast wrote:
Presumably, you would also have objected to the violence with which the young Australian ‘hot-heads’ on the Kokoda Track and at Milne Bay met the violence of the Japanese invaders in 1942? If you took the time to look at the facts about Syria, you would know that Syrian soldiers are no less defending their country against invasion by a cruel and viscious enemy than were Australians in New Guinea in 1942.
Excuse moi mosieur venison, Windshuttle a “poor historian”, give me a break!
He crudely morphed historical debunking into a process of forensic proof-reading for ad hominem attacks. Windschuttle’s own writings is exemplar, as he himself has embarrassingly found out, how easy it is to make mistakes.
Relevant history is about a spectrum of evidence backed up with primary sources. Windschuttle never offered any substantive research to support his own allegations. But plenty of
Windschuttle, The Historian as Prophet and Redeemer, Quadrant, December 2002:9-10)
Windschuttle, The Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian History Part II: The Fabrication of the Aboriginal Death Toll, Quadrant 44, (2000):23
Anyone who is still adhering to Windschuttle’s marshmallow view of European settlement in Australia must have somehow missed the road train of evidence in primary sources.
During the 1880?s Queensland’s annexation of eastern New Guinea was nullified by the British Imperial Government, based on the colony’s treatment of the native population. In particular it was noticed, that when the Torres Straight Islands were annexed, the first act of the Queensland Government was to advertise the islands for sale at five shillings an acre, in total disregard that these were the homes and property of a sizable indigenous population. According to ‘The Times’ 15 May 1883
There is a paper trail that links Queensland first Governor R G W Herbert, as a (silent) partner, with that scoundrel Dalryple in ‘claiming’ the land that then became Valley of the Lagoons station in the upper Herbert, upon where a massacre was committed. Another paper trail shows Queensland commissioning a paramilitary force (Native Mounted Police) and armament of 1000 snider repeater rifles and 500 000 rounds of amunition.
Windschuttle is the Fools Gold of Australian history!
i do have a gripe with henry reynolds (and marilyn lake) for producing a scholarly history study -“drawing the global colour line” – without a bibliography. i don’t know if that was the authors or publisher that did that but a bibliography is bog standard scholarly apparatus. so wtf? do they expect the reader to piece together the texts and papers they relied on to make their case from their footnotes? no way – i don’t do their work for them – i was so annoyed i stopped reading and sent it back to the library, thanks for the loan. after the copious and well organised bibliographies in “beyond the frontier” &c this was a very great disappointment. -a.v.
@malthusista
When you make claims about how free the press is (or isn’t) or how democratic elections are (or aren’t) in this country or that, I assume you aren’t expecting that your word alone is sufficient reason for people to accept the truth of what you assert.
I know of a few sources that claim to assess different countries for things like democratic freedoms and freedom of the press, but I know those sources may be flawed and I’m not making any claims here on the basis of what they say.
What are the sources that you rely on as integritous and reliable bases for claims like the ones you’re making?
What is strocchi’s problem?
If academics claim “that women are ‘on the whole’ intellectually inferior to men,” then they may well be rebuffed within modern universities who need to protect society from rightwing ideological falsehoods.
Members of Science Faculties trying to teach students the theory of ‘philostogen’ would be equivalents, as would medical lecturers teaching blood-letting and miasma theory.
When they found themselves on the street, would they really expect sympathy for having been hounded out on trumped-up charges?
Would you not be hounded from the Moore Theological College if you wanted to teach the religious benefits and closeness to God of underage sex?
So would strocchi rise again in mock defence?
Indeed writers such as Robert Conquest and Alexander Solzhenitsyn produced carefully detailed accounts of the bizarre world of USSR, a world of denial that was out of touch with reality. And as JQ has noted, Bolt is equally as out of touch with reality as the USSR.
I’m somewhat surprised that we can have a Piles Of Skulls thread with predominantly Australian participants that hasn’t mentioned the Indonesian massacres of 1965-67, the Indonesian invasion and occupation of 1975-99, and the stances of prominent Australians regarding those events. As someone who was too young to even know about the 1965-67 massacres at the time, but who opposed the invasion and occupation of East Timor from day one until it ended, I consider myself to be much less morally compromised than a lot of people, including several successive Australian Prime Ministers who are (rightly) praised for their enlightened stances on many other issues.
yair, yair.
you are allowed to live before you die.
Bettina Arndt, who Jack Strocchi mentions, was a leftist, feminist, and working mother with an uninterrupted career path who, upon reaching her mid-40s, underwent the sort of mid-life ideological conversion that has since seen her exhorting women under 45 to “do as I say, not as I did”.
Further to JQ’s link at @39, the late Bob Gould was a Trotskyist, as was Hall Greenland in the 1960s and 1970s, and the fact that Keith Windschuttle was their close personal friend and close political associate at the time is rather suggestive about his own political convictions. I don’t know that there is any evidence that Windschuttle ever found anything to like about Maoism.
@Paul Norton
Well a Grantite anyway … 🙂
Your general reasoning is sound however. There’s no way Gould and Windschuttle would have got along if the latter had been a Maoist. Both of them were populists of the Labor stripe i.e workerists), and Windschuttle argued this position in a famous exchange with Alan Ashbolt around 1980. It was very tedious.
But nothing he wrote suggested a sympathy for Maoism or Stalinism more generally.
What century do these people live in to be running around arms flailing in the air ranting about Communism/Marxism/Socialism/Maoism/Stalinism/other-ism? Newsflash – everyone knows by now that autocratic regimes are generally nasty places in which to live. Smearing the modern left with wild-eyed harangues about Stalin makes as much sense as accusing conservatives of running gas chambers. Quit with the poop-flinging alarmism.
Who is this Bolt person? Sounds like a puppet for the elites.