Memo to all RWDBs.
Please cease defending Drew Fraser’s right to free speech. It has come to the attention of RWDB central command that he is not in fact a neo-Nazi right winger silenced by baying hordes of PC obsessed lefty police. We are now in a position to reveal - that Fraser is a leftist!
Authorised: Keith Windschuttle.
Talking points:
* Fraser’s views are “uncannily similar” to Lefties of the 1880s.
* The Macquarie Law School is a nest of commie vipers:
Fraser’s academic career confirms his politics. He is a long-time member of the group of Marxists who, until they were isolated in the Department of Public Law, dominated Macquarie University’s law school with their “critical legal theory”.
* Fraser uses lefty code words like “stakeholder” in articles.
*
Fraser’s brand of racism should be recognised as one of the logical conclusions embedded within multiculturalism.
All RWDBs should immediately take the line that the Deakin University Vice-Chancellor is a brave woman standing up to cunning PC warriors by turning their evil vilification legislation legislation against them. And that McConvill character - as a Keating supporter, he’s clearly part of the vast left wing multiculturalist conspiracy who destroy our children’s fragile minds by turning even hitherto respectable Law students into Western civilisation hating traitors.
You should not under any circumstances refer to previous comments on blogs you may have made defending Fraser’s right to free speech when it was thought that he was a rightist.
We are now at war with Eurasia.
Issued by command of Blog Brother. Bulletin on the evils of Critical Legal Theory follows.
Mark
I haven’t read the piece in full but the conclusion isn’t as weird as it seems. Fraser is definitely in the CLS school and I’ve noted a lot of anti-globalist, anti-corporate rhetoric in his writing. He’s definitely not a typical chardonnay socialist but nor is he a right winger and he is extremely hostile to neo-liberalism in his writings. A bit like the Strasser brothers who were on the ‘left wing’ of the Nazi party before it was purged by Hitler.
I really don’t understand this whole denial of free speech thing. One journal says no thanks. No one has stopped him talking about this (except when he’s supposed to be teaching law, not spouting off his own views), no one stopped the Australian from publishing his crap, so how has his free speech been denied? Journals pick and choose what to publish everyday. Am I being denied free speech if a journal chooses not to publish what I have written? No. It just means that I either haven’t met the standards set, or it’s the wrong medium. So get over it.
I have no doubt that Fraser mixes his racial nationalism with socialism, Jason.
Fortunately I’ve got Fraser covered from both sides.
Those other threads were getting too long, anyway.
Jason,
Are you really saying that in order to be on the right, you have to be a (neo)-liberal? There goes Hitler…
There are two possibilities here: either being right or left is to be nearer to paradigms, or right and left are useless labels (or perhaps only useful if we constrain the range of positions to which we apply them). On either possibility, Windschuttle’s claim that Fraser is a lefty is laughable.
Is there another wing I can join? I’m bored with all this right-wing left-wing stuff and never knowing who belongs where…
I prefer the Buffalo Wing. It pleases my sense of whimsy to imagine buffalo flying gracefully over the great plains, hunted by Sioux in astral form.
Fyodor,
Who’s your dealer?
This come back to a topic earlier this week, regarding GWB being a lefty. You need to define your enemies as the opposite of how you define yourself, and so are forced to define them as lefties.
Who cares what Fraser’s views are about neo-liberalism?
He’s a racist nut job, and should be universally condemned as such.
“Are you really saying that in order to be on the right, you have to be a (neo)-liberal?”
In contemporary Australian political discourse, more or less. And I still think there is something profundly anti-liberal in those critiques of the rule of law like CLS as tools of oppression by some shadowy wlite which is quite compatible with varieties of fascism.
I’d disagree, Jason - there are tons of conservatives who aren’t neo-liberals - most of the National Party for a start, Catholic right wingers, etc etc.
Windschuttles article - somewhat unwittingly - actually confirms, rather than refutes, the points I have already been making. And just because Windschuttle says something is right, does not make it wrong.
I argued that the banning of Fraser was part of the New Right and New Left MO. Both the Economic Rationalists and Politically Correct appear to favour (for different reasons) privileged forms of speech. And disfavour free speech.
Windschuttle is making the obvious point about Fraser’s White Australian identity politics - that its collectivism and statism have a Leftish pedigree:
I have already made the a similar point in a gazillion different ways. Fraser is just practising a kind of (Christian/Caucasian) majority identity politics that mirrored the (non-Christian/non-Caucasian) minority identity politics practised by the New Left these past three decades.
So, once again, I can indulge in the guilty pleasure of saying: I told you so.
Personal Note: Would it be too much to ask LP to not refer to me as a “RWDB”? Else where, FWIW, I have stated my position in the ideological scheme of things, which is as a wishy-washy “Vital Centrist” (VC). At the moment this means being a conservative on cultural identity, a progressive on fiscal equity and a, somewhat reconstructed, realist on national security. If VC = RWDB then you can sue me.
I am not interested in marrying myself off to any particular abstract ideology, that kind of approach is categorically mistaken. I merely wish to promote a philosophy of truthfulness and niceness alround.
Nor am I interested in getting immersed in the grubby machinations of a political party. Although I confess to voting ALP at the last election.
I never thought I’d back anything coming from Windschuttle, but there was something uncannily Marxist about Fraser’s ‘analysis’, if you can call it that. I’ve read his article thorugh and dissected it, focusing on what he says about East Asians rather than Africans
http://bowlingforillidan.blogspot.com/2005/09/white-australia-redux.html
I guess Fraser’s proof that if you bend the left and right ends of the spectrum far enough, they eventuallly meet
Apologies, Jack, I withdraw the RWDB reference - you’ll note that the post was meant to be humorous/ironic though so don’t take it too much to heart.
As to collectivism and statism, they’re as much the heritage of conservatives and authoritarian nationalists as socialist lefties. There’s also a strong individualist and anti-statist tradition on the Left (shared with liberals - who historically were the first Left).
JS: I still think there is something profundly anti-liberal in those critiques of the rule of law like CLS as tools of oppression by some shadowy wlite which is quite compatible with varieties of fascism.
EP: Huh?
Am I alone in finding the current high-minded sounding defence of the banning of Fraser a little, shall we say, disingenuous? The claim is made that Fraser’s teaching and publishing are unacceptable because of the intellectual shoddiness and ideological offensiveness of his work. True enough.
But where were these self-same high-minded academic gatekeepers over the past two generations, when the academy was infested with communist revolutionaries and cultural liberationists corrupting youth with a potted mixture of marxism and cultural theory? Asleep on the job? Not a bit, they were cheering them on!
Now a somewhat cranky academic puts out a counter-blast from the Right and suddenly everyone develops “standards”. Give me a break.
Not sure what’s more amusing here.
“the White Australia Policy wasn’t all bad” Windschuttle having a go at “Anglos Rule OK!” Fraser or Jack Strocchi complaining about someone sticking a simplistic label on him.
EP: What’s this? I seem to be a leftie.
MB: Huh?
“But where were these self-same high-minded academic gatekeepers over the past two generations, when the academy was infested with communist revolutionaries and cultural liberationists corrupting youth with a potted mixture of marxism and cultural theory? Asleep on the job?”
Well, speaking for myself Jack, I was born in 1975 so I wasn’t exactly in a position to have a go at the left wing versions of Fraser when your generation was bringing down the academy, though I would have if I could.
I first went to Uni in 86. Most of the lecturers I had in history and government were conservatives.
EP: What’s this? I seem to be a leftie.
MB: Huh?
That’s exactly what I thought.
The explanation may lie in Gore Vidal’s remark that the US has one major party with two right wings, EP.
“Asleep on the job?”
Asleep after a big night out more like it. I can’t remember anything academic I was exposed to at uni, let alone whether it was left or right.
You’re a fine one to talk about parties, Mark. You just pooped the Strocchifest, Cap’n Purplepants.
Well, Jack has continued the theme on this thread, Fyodor.
It’s not the quite the same, is it? The discontinuity means I’d have to refer back to the other thread and the whole Strocchibaiting project loses its sleek, blogdynamicity, dunnit? Now I’ll have to wait a whole 2 or 3 nanoseconds before he says something stupid again. Curses.
Mark says: September 29th, 2005 at 2:40 pm
Where did they go wrong, I wonder?
Mark must have been fortunate to inhabit a universe parallel to the one that everyone else lived in during those times. When I first attended uni, in the early eighties, I was immediately bowled over by one of my teachers informing me that he was working on a project to “update Lenin’s critique of imperialism”. I just had time enough to pick myself up off the ground when I was bounced by another academic hell bent on fashioning a critique of “heteronormativity”. They were fairly representative.
Meanwhile Dr Knopfelmacher, a brilliant scholar and hardly an orthodox conservative, was forced to teach out of some broom closet.
Things have not changed all that much since the halcyon days of the New Left. Kevin Donnelly argues that the politics of the Australian Education Union, which cant be that far off their brother teachers in the academy, are a pretty flaming pink:
I would be interested to know how Mark interprets the notion of “conservative”: someone to the Right of Engels or Althusser, perhaps? My own notion of conservative would be in line with common usage: someone who regularly voted DLP, CP/NP or ON. It is unlikely that such folk would be thick on the ground in the humanities faculty of many Aus universities nowadays and certainly not then. (Any current data on the voting behaviour of Aus academics?)
I feel your pain, Fyodor.
There wree a few communist profs at Melbourne when I was there in the 70s and 80s. One of them, whose name I have conveniently forgotten, managed to write a whole book about the Soviet political system without mentioning the KGB even once. That’s like describing the Nazi system without referring to the SS.
Jack, I enrolled in Arts/Law at UQ in 86. A lot of the lecturers in both History and Government were Liberal party members - some were ALP supporters, but a minority. No one was a Marxist.
There was one lone ALP supporting Law lecturer. Total Tory fiefdom with a smattering of NCC types and a few League of Rights Lunar Right supporters.
The only Marxists who were at all discernible at UQ then were in the English and Economics departments.
As to current data, no I don’t think there’s any. But I’ve made this comment before - after 9 years’ working in a variety of universities in Social Science and Business Faculties, most academics I’ve spoken to are as disinterested in politics as most citizens. There are a reasonable number of people who are very interested - but I strongly doubt the breakdown in a partisan sense is too much different from any comparable group of professionals.
The few 70s Marxists who are still around are pretty grizzly, long in the tooth, and soon to be superannuated.
There is an enormous amount of straw hysteria about the politicisation of universities.
By the way, there’s an error in your quote - which doesn’t surprise me since the source is dear old Dr Donnelly - Bourdieu was not a Marxist.
Rob says: September 29th, 2005 at 3:42 pm
That was probably Lloyd Churchward. And he was one of the more decent scholarly ones. Apparently things were worse in the red-brick unis.
From the tone of comments on this thead it seems that the history of those years has been conveniently flushed down a memory hole.
And Jackerstrocchi is more hysterical than most. I can’t resist pasting in this quote:
Oh, the irony.
Here’s a question - if lots of scholars caught the Althusser bug in the 70s, who cares now? And why should we?
30 yrs after Whitlam and Co opened up the unis to anything that flies,(buffaloes?) we have now inherited a deep conservative left, the stragglers of which are hanging about LP, Surfdom and the like. HECS has presented their biggest numbers challenge recently and now VSU will inevitably hasten that decline. Hence the lament for the good ol’ days among the declining faithful. They also breed later, or not at all, which exacerbates their numbers problem.
Yes, I think that was him, Jack.
Pretty much no one but Strocchers. In the same way that Hendo is convinced that he was shoehorned out of the Age because he blamed Evatt for the DLP split and not Santamaria, Strocchi can’t seem to view the world beyond those red profs who were mean to him in the 70s. I can’t imagine what he’s like outside the blogworld.
‘Would you like some Canapes, Jack?’
‘By your offerings you shall know them indeed! While supposedly disdaining elitist haute-cuisine those paragons of revolutionary vanguardism, the Hoxha-ist Economics professors of the Sydney-Syndicalist Bloc were spied by myself, the Scarlet Strochernel snaffling fresh canapes served to them by petite arts undergrads at many a campus party. Why the abject hypocrisy of gulping down titbits while across the sea Pol Pot’s dire legions of totalitarian brutality were enslaving whole villages blahblahblha…”
Jack
from a quick perusal of the UQ Law faculty website I recognise 3 names there that are affiliated with or have written for the CIS, and I’m not even terribly familiar with UQ. The law of peer group dynamics suggests those 3 are not alone.
People have always railed at the Academy’s various idoicies du jour
(*Robert Plant voice* “Does anyone remember Laputa?”). It’s just Jack wasn’t reading the right blogs back in the eighties.
Anyway I submit that this thread cannot move on until he apologises for having ancestors from the country that invented fascism.
I’ve got a couple of academic qualifications - an Honours degree in History (and quite a bit of Politics) and a grad. dip. in Information Studies. One obtained in the mid nineties, the other last year.
I can’t recall being taught by anyone who declared themself a Marxist, although a couple may have embraced that term when they were younger. The academics I came across included anarchists (one Asian Studies lecturer and one Politics lecturer), classical liberals (eg. my Honours supervisor), social democrats, democratic socialists, a couple of Labourites and at least a couple of historians who most likely voted Liberal. In History, most teenagers or early twenties students would have struggled to tell someone’s exact political preferences unless you directly approached them about it. In postgrad seminars, academics were often too busy asking the same question no matter what the topic was. It struck me that most of them were quite conservative and quite removed from any political engagement.
In Information Studies, the most political things got was a caution against censorship and a commitment to trying to keep information as free as possible.
Quote “if you bend the left and right ends of the spectrum far enough, they eventuallly meet”
There’s not much difference between Germany in the 1930s and China now. Strong relationship between govt and business, preference for homogenuity, both killers. I guess the quote has got it right.
PS Does the live comment preview slow these pages down or has everyone got broadband ‘cept me?
“PS Does the live comment preview slow these pages down or has everyone got broadband ‘cept me?”
No. LP’s server is powered by a smacked out hamster in a rusty wheel. Everyone’s having problems with it. Hear that Mark and Robert? EVERYONE! SLOW! HAMSTER!
I was at UQ from the mid 90s till this year, however was in the physical sciences and engineering faculty. Some of the academics were with Labor some Liberal voters. For the most part I think the majority were swing voters. Though Howard taking away their job-security, while not upping their pay, might have pushed a few more to the left. Then again, it pushed just as many into the private sector management jobs as the only thing that was keeping them at the uni was job security.
Can’t really recall any Marxists. I think in my department about a third of the full-time staff was involved in the NTEU. Not exactly a hotbed of Marxist ideology.
“PS Does the live comment preview slow these pages down or has everyone got broadband ‘cept me?”
I’ve got broadband, and I find this site painfully slow. I blame the gravatars.
When I went to UQ in the early 60s I suspect the spread of political views was pretty much as in the community. I recall one German lecturer telling us that if you weren’t a socialist when you were 20 you had no heart and if you weren’t a conservative by the time you were 30 you had no head.
Someone fixed him by writing “Goethe is a fink” on the blackboard. It was only fun but it really upset him.
Doing education in the 70s and early 80s, yep, there were heaps of lefties. There was one definite Marxist - Red Ted D’Urso.
Heh: “I am not a Marxist” - Karl Marx (1870s, or thereabouts)
Do you have the reference, Chris? I was thinking the 1873 preface to Capital but I’ve just done a quick check and it seems not. It’s undoubtedly an authentic quote though.
No, I don’t have the reference, but it was in correspondence. Actually, I think he wrote it a couple of times. Going on memory, it was in arguing with French radicals, who were full of “revolutionary phrasemongering” and denying the value of reforms. Sound familiar? (But that’s rough - I’d like the exact references and full contexts too.)
At one stage, I’m also sure Darwin said he wasn’t a Darwinist.
I also have a vague recollection of Jesus saying he wasn’t a Christian (well, he wasn’t - he was a Jew, but I don’t mean that: this was in a context where it was sort of ‘well if they’re Christians or what not, than I’m not’). Perhaps some of the religious types about these parts might know better.
I’m collecting weasel words. My two favourites are inappropriate and racist.
I figured that you only have to look at the historical examples - such as “disbeliever” - and it would tell you an awful lot MORE about the people who used such terms than it did about the witches and heretics who had to wear it.
But what?
Define “weasel words”. The phrase is inappropriate in that it makes no apparent sense.
This is a reply to a post from way back in the last blog regarding why Africa is in such Dire Straits (because of arbitrarily drawn borders by European colonisers).
A quote from Leinad:
“Part of the reason why africa is such a mess is because borders between states were drawn by multiple colonial powers without regard to the tribal/ethnic/religious makeup of the resident population, essentially mashing togerther different groups with different languages and customs together and saying ‘hey you guys are a nation now‚Äô.”
Are you suggesting, Leinad, that the tribal/ethnic/religious makeup of a population is actually important to nation-building? That, the forcing together of different tribal/ethnic/religious groups is responsible, inter alia, for the current mess that many African states now endure? Can you draw any parallels between the African example and Western multiculturalism, which brings together people with far greater differences in tribal/ethnic/makeup than those that exist between neighbouring tribes in Africa?
If Australia’s immigration policy should essentially be blind to matters of race, culture, religion and custom then are we not “essentially mashing different groups with different languages and customs together and saying ‘hey you guys are a nation now‚Äô”? Although in the multicultural West, instead of starting with an ethnically heterogeneous population and forcing them under single government (ala Yugoslavia), we start with a relatively ethnically homogenous population and force new people of different languages, customs and races into the group and then say “hey you guys are a nation now”. Isn’t there something we can we learn from the experiences of other ethnically diverse countries?
Perhaps multiculturalism and mass immigration in Western societies is punishment for being collectively responsible for so many of these poorly and artificially constructed post-colonial/post-war nations at the hands of the British. The destruction of our own societies/ethno-nations seems fitting - Karma’s a bitch.