Common
sense is the first casualty when
commentators go to war.
He always
attacks his opponents, not only with
all arms, but also with snorts and
objurgations - he is always filled
with moral indignation - he is
incapable of imagining honour in an
antagonist, and hence incapable of
honour himself. -H.L. Mencken
WHEN the Herald's literary editor,
Malcolm Knox, came back from
last week's Melbourne Writers Festival,
he said he was stunned by the event's
conformity,
its dominance by a self-reinforcing,
self-congratulating insular consensus
which allowed only token dissent.
I'll take his word for it,
especially as Knox is by no means
someone who could be tarred with the
epithet "conservative" and the
festival's keynote address was
delivered by Tariq Ali, one of
the great apologists for dictatorships,
another example of the peculiar moral
relativism of the progressive side of
politics. Tariq used his latest visit
to attend a reunion of fellow
Trotskyites who had been members of the
Fourth International.
The Melbourne Writers Festival also
provided the launch of the latest
example of a blood sport in Australian
intellectual life, reputational rape,
where a single adversary is hunted down
and encircled by a large number of
antagonists intent on destroying the
reputation of the object of their
contempt. There have been several such
attacks over the past year or so, one
involving more than a dozen journalists
against one woman whose career they
sought to end and another involving
about 30 journalists unjustly shredding
the reputation of one man.
Reputation rape serves the cultural
purpose of sending a blunt message to
the rest of us: this could happen to
you.
At
the launch of the latest pack attack in
Melbourne last week, the term
"Kulturkampf" was used to describe a
supposed "culture war" being waged by
John Howard (left) and
his Government. Until recently, I had
thought it was a debate, with the
democratic process determining the
outcome.
Apparently it's a war. Hence the
propensity, since the election of the
Howard Government in 1996, for the
self-styled progressive side of
politics to make comparisons between
democratic Australia and Nazi Germany,
to use terms such as "concentration
camps", to make the analogies to
Adolf Hitler and to appropriate
the "Holocaust" - a phenomenon in which
millions of people were exterminated in
a system of murder factories - as a
bludgeoning
term.
The rage is empty, particularly the
screaming about race. Since 1996,
spending on indigenous affairs has
increased by 30 per cent in real terms
as people of goodwill, and the federal
and state governments, grapple to find
the best policies to advance the lives
of Australia's indigenous people.
As for the
alleged demonisation of Muslims,
Australia under Howard is a place
where the number of Muslims living
in this country has surged by 50 per
cent, from 200,000 according to the
1996 census to an estimated 300,000
today. Not exactly shutting the
gates.
Such basic defining facts are
brushed aside in an era where the media
promote and protect commentators, not
in spite of their hysterics but because
of their hysterics.
I suppose this policy is vindicated
when the most successful non-fiction
book in Australia over the past year
was Michael Moore's Stupid
White Men, still on the Herald's
bestseller list after 47 weeks and
showing no signs of leaving, an
emphatic commercial vindication of
Moore's use of intellectual dishonesty,
vicious wit and white-hot
hyperbole.
AND now we have our own Robert
Manne going for a piece of
hyperbolic brinkmanship, albeit without
a shred of wit. He has been using the
tactic of personal abuse for so long
that two academic economists,
William Coleman and Alf
Hagger, were moved to write in
their book, Exasperating
Calculators, published in 2001:
"Instead of arguments, what
we receive in Manne is commentary on
politicians; commentary on
commentators ... accusations of
malignity; and name calling ...
Facts are there just to decorate;
judgements are to intimidate
('bizarre', 'breathtaking', 'mad',
'extraordinary'). And, as of most
rhetorical controversialising, the
whole point, and test of
achievement, is to execute some
verbal perdition of the object of
loathing. This is not 'debate'."
No, it's not debate. Last week,
Manne was back to his old habits. In
the wake of the significant impact of
Keith Windschuttle's book The
Fabrication of Aboriginal History,
Volume 1, Manne has rushed into print,
with 18 others, with a book whose
purpose is to dismember Windschuttle's
reputation.
Manne has been joined by another
veteran of such attacks, Henry
Reynolds, a ringleader in the
campaign to mortally wound the
credibility of historian Geoffrey
Blainey.
Reynolds, one of 11 writers who
launched the joint assault on Blainey
in Surrender Australia (1985),
has joined forces with Manne to attack
a man who has embarrassed him.
Not content with assembling odds of
19 against one, Manne uses, as a weapon
of first resort, the tactic of linking
his opponent with Holocaust denialism.
Having already previously likened
Windschuttle to David Irving, he
now compares his work with that of the
Helen Demidenko literary fraud
on the grounds that both writers are
selling counterfeit goods and
Windschuttle has produced a work "so
ignorant, so polemical, and so
pitiless".
Manne, of course, sees himself as
neither polemical nor pitiless towards
those who challenge the shaky
foundations on which he has staked his
reputation. He will do anything to win,
seemingly oblivious to the accumulating
dangers created by the recklessness of
his methods.
David
Irving
comments: I GET
rather tired of having to do
this, but here it is again: I
have never written a single
book or article about what the
Jews call "the" Holocaust, nor
made a single broadcast,
etc. That's it. Basta. Genug.
Finis. Period. But if you
repeat a Big Lie often enough,
people will believe it.
Goebbels has his students and
disciples everywhere,
apparently. |
The most odious contribution to this
reputational gang attack is the final
chapter of the book, written by a
junior academic doing the dirty job of
comparing Windschuttle with Irving, the
notorious Holocaust denier, along with
assorted other genocide deniers.This gormless tract, which demands
that Windschuttle explain himself
before this self-appointed court of
seething adversaries, contains this
unctuously delusional sentence: "It
will not to do to smear Windschuttle as
he has smeared historians with his
insinuations that they are cheats who
invent sources."
Oh no, we real scholars don't smear
people, we just cooly compare them with
Nazi sympathisers. And, for the record,
Windschuttle didn't insinuate, he
accused, he stipulated, and he
generated retractions and reappraisals
now reverberating through a scholarly
discipline where ideology has been
known to masquerade as
historiography.
Manne's basic posture in drawing
together these assailants is that he
cannot believe that "civilised opinion"
could give comfort to Windschuttle's
cause. I guess this makes me a
barbarian.