We are appalled that the former member of the ultra leftist troskyite ’spartacist party’ and now ultra right wing historical polemicist and revisionist Keith Windschuttle has been appointed to the ABC board for 5 years by the Howard government.

His writings on Aboriginal are particularly offensive particularly his ludicrous claims that only 120 aboriginal people were killed in conflict during colonial times in Australia.

He needs just to read the historical record of William Buckley – Victoria’s first long term European inhabitant. Buckley, an escaped convict who survived in the bush with the Watourang people in the Geelong region for 32 years before giving himself up in 1835.

Appointed by Batman and Faulkner’s in 1836 as a go between the settlers in Port Phillip and the local aboriginals he evidenced hundred of killings in that part of Australia alone in the decade after settlement by what were mainly ticket of leave ex convicts from Launceston and other parts of Tasmania many of whom had taken part in the so called Black wars in Tasmania which destroyed almost the entire Tasmanian aboriginal population.

A man or woman who denied the holocaust would never be allowed on the ABC board. How come a man who denies the scope of the conflict within frontier Australian society in the early years after settlement and beyond is allowed to be put on such an important cultural icon as the ABC?

Michelle Grattan says his “appointment is beyond controversial. It is highly provocative, suggesting that those in the Government determined to strike a decisive blow at the ABC’s culture have won out.”

We believe that the Howard Government agenda in appointing the likes of Windschuttle, the right-wing news limited columnist Janet Albrechtsen, arch conservative anthropologist Ron Brunton and Peter Hurley the national senior vice-president of the Australian Hotels Association is to debase and politically control the ABC.

As one of the most important institutions in Australia its independence is vital for the health and maintenance of democracy in this country!

By making these appointments John Howard has shown himself to be a totalitarian at heart:

His governments anti democratic bent can also be clearly seen in its Big F Federalist agenda its radical reduction of the powers of the Senate and in its attempt to stiffle free trade unions with its new repressive IR regulations and by its legislative agenda which has severely restricted the freedom of expression and right of dissent in Australia since coming to office in 1996.

Finally we ask if Howard wants to greatly diminish the role of ABC (by appointing these political hacks), why does he not have the courage to say he is doing so openly?

Is it because so many liberal voters value the independence of the ABC (as do most other Australians) and enjoy its services so much!

Go sic ‘em, Keith!

I think I’ll pick on single Mums. Or maybe the disabled. Yes, there’s been far too much PC mollycoddling of those two-wheeled whingers. And why are the homeless so malodorous? My tax dollars are being sprinkled all over public parklands by night, and they’re just TOO LAZY to go stand under one.

But no – its has to be Tasmanians. Those ponces Windy and McGuiness always baulk at this one. but not me. WHo gave them self-government when they clearly weren’t ready? Bloody UN-inspired anti-colonial notions blinding us to the fact that their culture is primitive, their institutions immature, their leaders corrupt tribal demogogues with no respect for individual freedom. Yes, ‘free Tasmania’, the left cried sure, and I was among them – all fine till we found they had no viable industry, and the Oz taxpayer was footing the bill while they sat around in Hobart bagging us for our trouble. I say we intervene, and insist on adequate governance and accountability before they get another mainland red cent etc etc

the fluxes

Out of context, sounds suspiciously Deleuzian? Wasn’t Deleuze some sort of Marxist and poststructuralist?

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jan99/said.htm

And especially this:

The proposition that produces this contradiction is the claim that every culture needs to be defined by an Other. This is not an historical statement at all, but an epistemological assumption derived from structuralist theory. It is now such a standard refrain within cultural studies that it usually goes unquestioned. There is, however, very little to recommend it. Although they have long distinguished themselves from the barbarians of the world, Europeans do not primarily draw their identity from comparisons with other cultures. Instead, identity comes from their own heritage. Europeans identify themselves as joint heirs of classical Greece and Christianity, each tempered by the fluxes of medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modernism. In other words, Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by historical references to its earlier selves, rather than by geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past one thousand years.

He simply doesn’t understand it.

The last quote is from the neo-con’s leading light Irving Kristol.

The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will — perhaps slowly but nonetheless inexorably — twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.

How true – just look at the way the Federal Parliament is doing business these days.

Otherwise, nice little spoof of The Turner Diaries, Ag.

What it means is this: that you are to take over every institution, whatever it may be, and empty out everything which distinguishes it from other institutions, and turn it into yet another loudspeaker for repeating “the general line”. Destroy the specific institutional fabric of — a university, a trade union, a sporting body, a church — and give them all the same institutional content, viz. a political one. Contrapositively, the essence of resistance to this process by liberal-democrats must consist in trying to maintain the specific institutional integrity of different institutions.

All that talk about “liberation” twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting, all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists.

For two centuries, the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas — until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society — the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions — are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will — perhaps slowly but nonetheless inexorably — twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.

ASIO of course could have been paranoid fools who wouldn’t know a communist if they fell over one.

For the record, I was never a member of the Communist Party or of any of the factions—Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist, Maoist or whatever—that emerged from the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Indeed, in my student days I was attracted to the 1960s American New Left precisely because it seemed a form of radicalism uncompromised by the old, discredited pro-Bolshevik factions.

But as the 1970s unfolded, the New Left, too, reverted to type. When it descended into a morass of violence—with the Black Panthers, Weathermen, Baader-Meinhoff gang, Red Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army practising armed robbery, kidnapping and murder—it ended any romanticism I had about the Left.

The biggest issue among student radicals at the time was the Vietnam War and the biggest mistake we made, though few will admit it even today, was to believe the war was a genuinely nationalist movement to liberate the Vietnamese people from French and American imperialism, rather than what it actually was, a war of communist expansion throughout South-East Asia. The other big issue was the campaign against apartheid in South Africa, a cause I still think was right.

The Marxist theory to which I subscribed in the 1960s and 1970s was far more about history than politics, and came straight from Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, a beguiling book that seduced many of my generation (as well as suggesting a title for Attwood’s own much later work The Making of the Aborigines). Thompson launched social history, or history from below, and defended English empiricism, both of which I supported enthusiastically.

When Louis Althusser’s ultra-theoretical, Stalinist version of French Marxism subsequently became the vogue in left-wing academic circles in the mid-1970s, I was a vocal and argumentative critic. As my 1984 book The Media testifies, I also rejected the other fashionable academic Marxisms of the time, that of the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies.

I joined the Australian Labor Party in 1969 and remained a member until 1991. No one who knew me during that time would have called me a communist. Although I had Trotskyist friends, none of them would have called me a Trotskyist either. Hall Greenland once called me a civilised Whitlamite, a reproach for being Left but not Left enough.

Myself, I like documents and evidence. But I’m not afraid to say that history is writing, it needs a story and it needs a narrative.

And Naomi, there’s no difference there from conservative English historians who praise “narrative history”. Well there is, but you know what I’m getting at.

Windschuttle was never a “rabid Communist.�

ASIO thought so at the time! Ian Syson posted some pdfs of Windschuttle and McGuiness’ files on his blog a while back. I didn’t think Windy denied or tried to minimise his Marxist past. In fact it’s part and parcel of his rhetorical strategy.

Not true. Check out Greg Lehman’s essay in Whitewash.

Alzo, grit your teeth and read this.

I think it might be more of a play with the Saussurian notion of language comprising a system of arbitrary signs where there is no neccessary relationship (such as that of onomatopaea) between signifier and signified. Which would make it something like a pre-post-structuralist exercise in deploying arbitrary signs for poetic effects such as gradiloquence and euphony without having to worry about outdated notions, such as Frege’s idea of “reference”.