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71 responses to “McCarthyist or silly little man?”

  1. grace pettigrew

    What we do know is that Gerard Henderson keeps very large dirt files on everbody he hates, hoping to be Australia’s J Edgar Hoover, Commissar for Domestic Terrorism in the next Howard Government. Dream on, Gerard.

  2. gandhi

    Well, I would be extremely interested in hearing more about this, but since Crikey blocks access to non-subscribers, it’s not much of a story for anyone on the outer.

    All I know is that Manne wrote yesterday: “There are lies, damn lies, and Gerard Henderson. He is in a category of his own…”

    And Henderson wrote today: “According to Robert Manne in yesterday’s Crikey, I am a liar in a category of my own. This is a serious, professionally damaging allegation – but Professor Manne has not supported it with any evidence…”

    I understand Crikey’s business model, but if Stephen Maybe is serious about challenging Costello, maybe NOW would be a good time to drop the firewall for a few weeks????

    In the meantime, has anyone got a link to the background on this?

  3. Sam Clifford

    Gandhi, Mayne turning off the firewall during the campaign would get him a whole new level of readership of which some would, I’m sure, subscribe once the firewall goes back up after the election.

  4. joe2

    Presumably, Crikey pays Gerard Henderson. If you were to subscribe, wouldn’t you putting money in the neo- McCarthyist pocket?

  5. Kim

    Gandhi, all you know is probably all you need to know. It’s a boring stupid and self-indulgent discussion between two cold war-horses about whether Manne was actually on the right or a secret undercover leftie as Henderson alleges. Or something. Personal culture wars about student politics decades ago. Why does Hendo get space to carry on with this trash is the more relevant question.

  6. Mark

    I’m sure Gerard does it for the glory.

    Stephen has nothing to do with the management or editorial decision making of Crikey – he sold his interest in it, and just writes for Crikey the same as the rest of us. Nor does Crikey have anything to do with his campaign.

  7. Mark

    However, since we’re allowed to reproduce Crikey stuff with attribution, here’s Manne yesterday:

    There are lies, damn lies, and Gerard Henderson. He is in a category of his own.

    Here is the latest instance. Yesterday I published a letter in The Australian, in response to an editorial that suggested, at least by implication, that I still believed in the truth of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and had mistaken Kevin Rudd for Che Guevara. This is the kind of loopy claim characteristic of The Australian under the editorship of Chris Mitchell.

    I replied by pointing out that, unlike the recent converts like Imre Saluszinsky, I was an anticommunist when, among the intelligentsia, there was a social cost to pay.

    Enter Gerard Henderson. Henderson claims he met me in the mid-1960s. In 1965 I was studying for my matriculation at Camberwell High School. I don’t recall meeting Henderson until about 1968, when one of the academics who influenced me at that time, Frank Knopfelmacher, told me Henderson was close to the NCC, “Bob” Santamaria’s organisation. We had a distant relationship.

    In his letter Henderson claimed I joined the left-wing Labor Club. This is true. What he doesn’t point out is that I left the Club after a few weeks. The reason was that I came to see that it was pro-communist and even had an ambivalent relationship to Joseph Stalin, someone who by now (I was a second year undergraduate) I had come to think of as one of the most evil political figures of the twentieth century.

    Henderson implies that I was a member of the Labor Club at the time it supported sending aid to the National Liberation Front. This is also completely untrue. The issue only arose after I had quit the Club. In fact I was opposed to sending aid to the NLF which I regarded as an offshoot of the North Vietnamese Communist Party. In a debate at Melbourne University on this question I supported the position of the anticommunist journalist, Peter Samuel. We became friends as a result.

    It is true that I opposed the Vietnam War, as I still do. Nothing of value was achieved. Perhaps three million Vietnamese died. The indifference of people like Henderson and Greg Sheridan to the futility of the suffering inflicted by the side they supported is morally shocking and connected to the support they later gave to the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq.

    Although I opposed the US war in Vietnam, I never supported the communist side. In 1970 I marched in the anti-Vietnam Moratorium under the banner “Neither Washington nor Hanoi”. Because I was opposed to the war but was also an anticommunist, after 1975 I worked inside an organisation I formed in Melbourne, the Indo-China Refugee Association, to help bring South Vietnamese fleeing communist rule to Australia.

    In his letter to The Australian, Henderson concedes that I did become an anticommunist in 1968. I was by now a third year undergraduate, although Henderson falsely implies I was already an academic. He claims, however, that this “was hardly an unfashionable stance to take since European communism was effectively discredited following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.” The idea that being an anticommunist was not unfashionable in intellectual circles after 1968, and that it was consistent with having good relations with the Left, is almost breathtakingly dishonest. Even by Henderson’s standards it is extraordinary.

    Let me give two examples. In 1977 I attended a very large conference on human rights in Asia held in Hobart. I was the only person at the conference who spoke about the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. After I had debated Ben Kiernan on the question of the crimes of Pol Pot, I was treated as a pariah. The session ended when the audience applauded a young Cambodian woman who said I would not be welcome in People’s Kampuchea.

    At this time I began to write regularly for Quadrant, which was, at that time, no more popular on the Left than it is now. Most academics treated me with considerable suspicion. In 1985, Richard Krygier, the publisher of Quadrant, asked me to write a piece on Wilfred Burchett. I researched the article for several months concentrating on Burchett’s role in the defence of the postwar Stalinist regimes and support for the communist side in the Korean War.

    I wrote about Burchett’s visits to the POW camps, where Australians were held, which he had described as Swiss holiday camps. I also wrote about Burchett’s involvement in the interrogation of US pilots and the extraction of false confessions to germ warfare. In this article, as a result of his Korean war activities, I described Burchett as a traitor to his country. On the Left, at this time, as Henderson knows, I was thoroughly detested. In some circles, despite everything that has happened since, I have still not been forgiven.

    There are many intellectuals, like Imre Saluszinsky, who only became anticommunists after the Berlin Wall collapsed. They paid no social cost. There were others, like Henderson and myself, who became anticommunists as young people, although often for different reasons. Especially in the universities, to be an anticommunist during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980, involved a social cost. Henderson knows all this.

    Why will he not tell the truth?

  8. Mark

    And here’s Hendo today:

    According to Robert Manne in yesterday’s Crikey, I am a liar in a category of my own. This is a serious, professionally damaging allegation – but Professor Manne has not supported it with any evidence.

    In my letter in The Australian on 30 October, I queried Manne’s claim that he “was an anti-communist at a time when, among the intelligentsia, there was a social cost to pay”. I made three claims.

    First, that Manne joined with the fashionable left in marching in the May 1970 Vietnam Moratorium. He does not dispute this claim – indeed he has written about this previously.

    Second, that around 1968 Manne became convinced about the evils of communist totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe. He does not dispute this – indeed he has written about this previously.

    Third, that I first met Manne at Melbourne University in the mid 1960s and that he joined the far-left Labor Club. Manne’s response was to claim that we did not meet in 1965 (which I had never claimed). He acknowledged that he did join the Labor Club but maintained that he “left the Club after a few weeks” (but provided no evidence in support).

    I understand that Manne commenced at Melbourne University in 1966 (sounds like the mid 1960s to me) and completed his BA(Hons) course in 1969. I remember meeting Manne in the mid 1960s; he remembers meeting me in “about 1968″. This is pretty thin ground on which to call someone a liar.

    I also wrote that in 1967 the Labor Club attempted to send aid to the communist National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. This is also true. Here the recollections of one-time Labor Club member Henry Rosenbloom are helpful. Writing in The Age on 12 September 1994, Mr Rosenbloom made the following comment:

    “Manne is biting about Frank Hardy’s passing infatuation with Stalin. As it happens, Hardy later recanted this position with care and thoughtfulness. Lots of people have at some time said silly things and adopted positions they would rather forget. What if Robert Manne himself, as an undergraduate, once supported sending aid to the NLF? Would we be right to remind him of this in public every time he referred to Vietnam?”

    Good question. Robert Manne can resolve the matter by producing evidence as to when he joined the Labor Club and when he resigned from the Labor Club.

    I have always acknowledged Robert Manne’s important research on the Petrov Affair and Wilfred Burchett along with his valuable support for Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees. But all this occurred after 1974 when Manne obtained a tenured academic position.

  9. anthony

    a secret undercover leftie as Henderson alleges.

    Secret Agent Manne
    Secret Agent Manne

  10. gandhi

    Thanks, Mark – I just finished setting up a new trial subscription under a new email address, but you save me the bother of publishing this extremist nonsense!

    The bigger issue is how the media (including Crikey, since they are foolishly following the business model) dictates election coverage. To that end, the latest Family First fiasco is potentially educational. $weety just happened to be in Far North QLD when the FF candidate demanded to know if his Liberal opponent was gay (hint: her name is Charlie). Headlines guaranteed, but where does this nonsense take us…?

  11. Mark

    Sorry, Gandhi, $weetie’s Liberal opponent? Don’t you mean the Libs’ candidate for Leichardt?

  12. Mark
  13. joe2

    Thanks Mark.

  14. gandhi

    Sorry Mark, the word “his”was not a reference to $weetie’s Liberal opponent (as if!) but to the FF candidate’s Liberal opponent!

    As long as we are bashing Henderson, however, I offer the following quote:

    Australia – where the threat of terrorism is a (taxpayer-subsidised) joke.

    Yes, he really said that. Who says he is incapable of speaking the truth, eh?

    Then there was an interesting case of plagiarism that went un-noticed…

  15. Juz

    Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

    I mean seriously, if Hendo has nothing better to do than demand Manne produce 40-year old receipts or something (how would you produce evidence of leaving the Labor Club, exactly?), he needs even more therapy than I thought.

  16. gandhi

    The question is why Fairfax in particular keep publishing Henderson’s blatant rightwing nonsense. He has no public mandate for such a vocal media platform.

  17. Mark

    Exactly.

    And I’m afraid I don’t have “evidence” about what clubs I was in at Uni (shock! horror! one was the UQ ALP Club). The demand is nonsensical.

  18. Leinad

    I think the real question here is when exactly did Gerard Henderson jump the shark and start mistaking the rest of us for people who give a shit about who was in what Sekrit commie student club in 390 BC?

  19. GregM

    My thoughts exactly, Leinad.

  20. Mark

    It really does show how out of touch and irrelevant the culture wars commentariat are – on both sides, I’d argue. Why should anyone particularly care about what Manne’s politics were in the 60s? His writing and ideas now can be judged independently of them. All this refighting ancient battles stuff is pure elitist self-indulgence.

  21. tigtog

    Count me as another with no evidence of the uni clubs to which I belonged. There were a number of clubs whose meetings I attended as long as I found them interesting, and stopped attending them if I found them boring.

    As far as I remember not one of them required the filling in of a membership form, and when the club president etc were chosen it was all just a show of hands from whoever was at the meeting. Possibly some clubs were more organised, but I don’t know which ones. Does Robert Manne have any evidence that the Labor Club at UQ at that time even kept membership records?

  22. tigtog

    Sorry, that should be the Labor club at MU, obv.

  23. Darlene

    The Labor Club? Christ almighty.

    Those clubs hardly kept records to last for all time. Indeed, they probably only kept the members names for the year they were on the club executive and then tossed them. Indeed, they probably also didn’t keep the names of members who were in other factions. Perhaps the Chocolate Society were more thorough with these things. At any rate, it’s a load of old codswallop.

    “All this refighting ancient battles stuff is pure elitist self-indulgence.”

    Absolutely, most people have to move on (indeed it’s healthy to do so). Silly old buggers.

  24. Darlene

    At any rate, what if Robbo just joined the Labor Club to meet chicks.

  25. FDB

    At any rate, what if Robbo just joined the Labor Club to meet chicks.

    Then from my experience, he could have done better.

  26. John Ryan

    Why does Henderson look like he has a bad case of piles when sitting and being interviewed,I have seen him on Insiders and Lateline,he look so uncomfortable or just plain shifty, and we get his column in the Worst on Wed,mind you the Worst lifts a lot of its international and Eastern States from the Herald.
    Why this man gets as much space as he has beats me,he should just fade away and retire to where ever nitpickers retire,maybe he could join Annie(on Blogocracy)in Kiama.

  27. Down and Out of Sài Gòn

    Especially in the universities, to be an anticommunist during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980, involved a social cost.

    What’s this “social cost” that Rob is on about? It is like being sent to a re-education camp (as happened to my Vietnamese teacher’s dad in 1975)? Or is it just not getting laid on a Saturday night?

  28. Andyc

    I’m sorry. It’s been a hard day, and I’m feeling obtuse. But just what exactly is the difference between “McCarthyist” and “Silly Little Man”?

  29. Andrew E

    McCarthyist or silly little man?

    I’m with Andyc: both.

    The question is why Fairfax in particular keep publishing Henderson’s blatant rightwing nonsense. He has no public mandate for such a vocal media platform.

    Here’s how this scam works:

    1. Allege that a media outlet is hopelessly biased, for years and years.

    2. Refract your allegations widely, questions in parliament, etc.

    3. Tell the editor straight-faced that the only way to avoid accusations is to have you on board, and pay you.

    Worked like an absolute beauty in the US. All MSM outlets have their token rightwinger, who will then 4. Demand equal time, which blurs the debate (and remember, all that is necessary to stop progress is that the debate be blurred).

  30. Meself

    From my hazy recollection of political clubs at Melb Uni in the ’60s, one joined them to pull the birds. We were all ornithological twitchers.

    Again from my lazy hazy summer salad days and winters of discontent, I remember lefty birds were somewhat more accommodating, and one didn’t have to be a fully paid up member of the Melbourne Club or the MCG to get yer left leg over.

    Maybe our Gerry mightn’t have been a Manne for all seasons and didn’t have much luck with manoeuvring his right leg …and to this day still bears (and bares) choleric scars.

    (Bottom line – along the birds we pursued back then – no one gives a toss!)

    Gerry stop faffing about and resume your rightful role in an Evelyn Waugh novel.

  31. Enemy Combatant

    Fascinating to get some drum on the longstanding animosity between the working class boy made good (you can hear it occasionally when he gets exicited and drops the odd “g”) and the aristocratic professor.

    Darlene, I like the fit; Gerry and Jedgar.
    Both diminutive in stature, and both pruriently obsessed with files beyond their power to coerce or help fortify their respective power bases although I’ve no information on whether Gerry likes to play dressings up after star chamber meetings.

    But one thing “Hangdog” Hendo is not, and that’s stupid. That’s why he looks so sorrowful. He’s knows his power bolt is well and truly shot. Master is going down here, and if Jeffersonian Democracy prevails Stateside, the Neocons for whom he shills so fiercely will soon be irrelevant.

  32. Sir Henry

    Henderson is stunningly, boorishly, one-track mindedly, rote-learned formula stupid, Enemy Combatant. This shows up in his writing. The evidence and the research he cites is nearly always shonky and politicised. He models himself on Father Pat Ryan the Catholic scholastic philosopher but when there is an audit of intellectual life of the late 20th and early 21st century, Hendo’s name will not be there, whereas Robert Manne’s will be.

    Henderson provides a service as a propagandist to the Liberal Party. His intellectual input into the world of ideas is but a commercial transaction. In my opinion he’s not worth the money. His claim to being an independent observer is as risible as calling the Sydney Institute an “independent” think tank. it is quite the opposite: a dependent organisation, depending on funds from the Liberal Party and its mates. And if Henderson thinks we punters buy that, he is not very smart.

    Henderson loves to dredge up stuff from people’s past in order to slag them. Well, listen to this. A Sydney anarchist-libertarian and professional punter by the name of Darcy Waters lived an independent life, unconcerned by notions of career. He was a wharfie most of his life but in his later years became severely crippled as a result of an operation on a broken leg gone horribly wrong. Added to that he suffered from severe heart disease and later emphysema.

    He had nowehere to live and he had not amassed a nest egg. At 60 he was broke and homeless. He existed on sickness benefits and on his friends’ goodwill.

    His mates eventually organised a Housing Commission unit for him in Leichhardt so he could die in reasonably comfortable surroundings.

    After Darcy passed away, there was a big wake for him at the Harold Park Hotel. Because of Darcy’s fame as a Sydney character, the event attracted a large crowd of not just friends and acquaintances but also fame hyenas and camp followers, as well as a media presence. And guess who should turn up? Gerry. He ate and he drank to repletion and put himself about as one of the mob saying good bye to a Sydney original.

    A few days later Hendo published an incredibly, embarrassingly vicious diatribe about Darcy in the Herald, in which he took it upon himself to point out in the most simple-minded and false syllogistic that here was a man who opposed the notion of authority and the state but in the end put his hand out to suck off the public purse. What a hypocrite! Hendo cried.

    I rest my case.

  33. ansteybranchopolous

    GH is such a tosser – the greatest sadness is he thinks what he writes is important.

  34. CK

    Henderson provides a service as a propagandist to the Liberal Party. His intellectual input into the world of ideas is but a commercial transaction. In my opinion he’s not worth the money. His claim to being an independent observer is as risible as calling the Sydney Institute an “independentâ€? think tank.

    Oh come on SH, what utter guff.

    It’s a tank. It thinks. And it’s independent.

    In short? A bit like a cross between RoboCop and a backyard corrugated-iron water repository.

    What more do you need? You sound like a dangerous idealogue.

  35. Nana Levu

    The Labor Party Club it was called. I too was a member in 1966. I was at the Melbourne University Law Scool. A Commonwealth scholarship student from an Irish Catholic family of cow cockies in Gippsland. The first of my extended family to get to Uni. I remember Gareth Evans was SRC President. I remember a grand Labor Party Club dinner in a stuffy Union hall with Gough Whitlam. I cannot remember either Robert Manne or Gerard Henderson. But then they were just fellow students. There were much more momentous changes taking place and more dynamic personalities around.

    What does it matter now the revolution and revisionism of the cold war? The personal is political. Late 60s early 70s. The second wave of Feminism upon us. Adding knotches to the bedposts in the wake of Germaine Greer. La Mamma. Graeme Blundell. Drinking with Noni Hazelhurst at her father’s Carlton pub. Learning the morality of the group house: “You don’t sleep with the one you live with; you don’t live with the one you sleep with”. Lygon Street before it moved up market. Bob Dylan, bongs and coloured condoms filled with coloured water suspended from the door bell. Wilhelm Right’s ‘Function of the Orgone’. Rationalist Society meetings on Tuesday nights at the back of a Lygon Street wine bar; a Catholic girl learning to question the existence of God.

    Discovering the embyonic multiculturalism among the international Columbo Plan students and the beginning of a future non-white Australia. Discovering Africa and adding a bit of colour to Australia. Suckling your baby in the corner of Jimmy Watson’s wine bar with Helen Garner suckling hers.

    The Zionist propagandists pushing their copies of Leon Uris’s Exodus. The Metalworkers Union and the New Guinea Association with a dream of independence and a map of New Guinea with the bird’s head still attached to the tail; rather than the later half-brained verion of Papua and New Guinea with West Papua missing.

    Then to move on. Papua New Guinea during the years straddling independence. Africa, Fiji, Eurpoe ….

    And now to hear those two great intellectuals, Manne and Henderson, still ensconced in the stuffy halls, still debating left and right and what they were doing in the 1960s in Melbourne University as if it matters in the wider scheme of things. Maybe those two missed the most important revolutions happening under their noses.

  36. Mark

    the aristocratic professor.

    How so, EC? I think Manne’s parents were post WW2 Jewish refugees.

  37. mick

    Bloody hell. Just so Henderson can keep his leftie lists in order, here is a list of the following uni-ish organisations that I don’t have evidence of leaving (so by default I’m still a member):

    1. Beer Appreciation Society (to meet girls and drink beer)
    2. SECS (to meet girls and drink beer)
    3. UQLS (to meet girls and drink beer)
    4. Choc-soc.
    5. Goodies appreciation society.
    6. PAIN (Physics appreciaction society)
    7. Amnesty International.
    8. Labor club (maybe, honestly I don’t remember if I ever forked over my $2 on O-day. I probably did, there may have been free beer involved.)
    9. Free education alliance or something like that anyway.
    10. UQ frisbee club.
    11. UQ engineering society.

  38. Enemy Combatant

    “A few days later Hendo published an incredibly, embarrassingly vicious diatribe about Darcy in the Herald, in which he took it upon himself to point out in the most simple-minded and false syllogistic that here was a man who opposed the notion of authority and the state but in the end put his hand out to suck off the public purse. What a hypocrite! Hendo cried.

    I rest my case.”

    Sir Henry, I put it to you that Gerard Henderson, in the words of the great Albert Basil” The Deek” Deakin, is a sink.

    Yes, Mark, but Robert exudes a class that Gerry can only dream about. It’s the style of his prose and the poise of his live delivery; an aristocracy of mind rather than antecedents, I suppose.

    And pardon me, grace pettigrew, my previous comments re Jerry/Jedgar were intended to be addressed to you, rather than Darlene.

  39. Mark

    Gotcha, EC.

  40. grace pettigrew

    No worries, enemy combatant, and I enjoyed your uptake:

    “…although I’ve no information on whether Gerry likes to play dressings up after star chamber meetings.”

  41. Shaun

    I gotta say I’m with AndyC and Andrew E. Kim was trying to set everyone up via a trick question!

  42. Enemy Combatant

    Touche, Mark.

  43. Herindoors

    ‘Henderson is stunningly, boorishly, one-track mindedly, rote-learned formula stupid, Enemy Combatant. This shows up in his writing. The evidence and the research he cites is nearly always shonky and politicised. He models himself on Father Pat Ryan the Catholic scholastic philosopher but when there is an audit of intellectual life of the late 20th and early 21st century, Hendo’s name will not be there, whereas Robert Manne’s will be’.

    My thoughts entirely Sir Henry, wordsmithed perfectly.

    Hendo really came within my ken when he appeared on the same stage as Hanan Ashrawi, Beatrix Cambell and Arief Budiman, in order to discuss Dr. Ashrawi’s keynote address, ‘Democracy, Survival and Co-operation’ on the opening night of the 2003 Adelaide Festival of Ideas. They were all sitting in generous, high backed arm chairs, in a semi circle on the stage of the Festival Theatre, and Henderson’s feet – at the time he was a rather portly little chap (lately he appears to have lost a good deal of weight)- seemed unable to reach the floor, and thus he had to forceably propel himself forward out of the confines of the chair each time he wanted to contribute to the discussion. Sadly, his contribution was nowhere near the intellectual and utterly engrossing standard of the other three.

    Indeed, his utterances were often so naf and ill-informed that the audience became noticeably discomforted each time he would launch his plump little torso forward in order to have a word. Not that he appeared to have any idea that he was totally outclassed, what with that strange psuedo profundo speechifying that I have since become so used to. That he is treated as such a cipher here in Australia leaves me utterly mystified. But then again, you can fool some of the people all of the time…. Perhaps owning the moniker of Executive Director of the Sydney Institute is the key.

    BTW, it is hardly surprising that he was to later write a rather spiteful piece in the SMH (28th Oct, 2003), decrying the awarding of the Sydney Peace Prize to Dr. Ashrawi, entitled ‘Junk the Prize and Keep the Peace’.

    Now, Professor Robert Manne truly has an intellect, and an utterly engrossing way of expressing it.

  44. Sir Henry

    Junk the Prize and Keep the Peace is too good a headline to concede to Gerry Henderson. It would have been written by a sub-editor.

  45. The Enforcer

    What are you hassling McCarthy about Kim? He was the good guy. The marxists were the bad guys.

  46. wilful

    Hendo claimed to have been victimised when The Age stopped publishing him, but the reason he was dropped was clear – he’s boring as batshit. I really don’t know why he gets a platform.

  47. GregM

    Hendo claimed to have been victimised when The Age stopped publishing him, but the reason he was dropped was clear – he’s boring as batshit. I really don’t know why he gets a platform.

    They publish Catherine Deveny so that can’t be the reason they dropped him.

  48. grace pettigrew

    Sir Henry, I have cut out your post and fixed it into my “Gerard Henderson” file and returned it to my compactus of files on vicious lame-brained right-wing culture warriors who are going to get it in the neck come the revolution.

    Good story, I think I might have been there, but can’t remember.

  49. Sir Henry

    I apologise at the start for going on about this. But I went to the newspaper index available to me and pulled out Gerry’s minor Opus on Darcy Waters. It takes the cake for pointless and bitter pique, cruel venom, sullen, chip-on-the-shoulder sullenness and virulent jealousy. I also should declare that I wrote the Herald obituary that Gerry refers to, and that I was one of Darcy’s friends. This opinion piece below upset me more than most. Here it is back to haunt Gerry. (This post is for you, Darcy, my mate):

    WHILE on the subject of consistency, consider the case of Darcy “Horse” Waters (1928-97) – the late and much lamented leader of the Sydney Push. In the sense that the anarchist/libertarian-inclined Push actually had a “leader” or “leaders”.
    It’s just a month since Waters passed away to that great racing track (with free beer on tap) in the sky. But his departure, after a long illness, was certainly noticed.
    There were substantial obituaries in The Australian (by Wendy Bacon), Daily Telegraph (Anne Coombs) and Herald (anonymous). Push graduate P. P. McGuinness wrote a column which started with a discussion of where Horse’s ashes should be scattered. Not surprisingly, P. P. nominated Randwick racecourse as a suitable destination. It was not clear what odds were on offer.
    How strange that one who renounced the formal trappings of life should be honoured in death by all the leading newspapers in Sydney. And how odd that one who denounced work and profession alike, and who stressed the need for independence, should wind up dependent on friends and taxpayers alike.
    In her book, Sex and Anarchy (Viking, 1996), Anne Coombs described the charming and intelligent young Darcy as “a sort of Don Quixote without the chivalry”. According to Wendy Bacon, Waters enjoyed the support (financial and otherwise) of a network of close friends “even when his celebrated charm was fading”.
    But it was not as simple, or as libertine, as that. The Horse spent his final years in a Department of Housing flat. To qualify for such assistance, he must have been in receipt of a welfare benefit.
    Darcy Waters may have lived the life of the look-mate-no- dependence anarchist. But, in the end, he too was on the taxpayer-subsidised teat. Not much consistency there.

  50. Katz

    It really does show how out of touch and irrelevant the culture wars commentariat are – on both sides, I’d argue. Why should anyone particularly care about what Manne’s politics were in the 60s? His writing and ideas now can be judged independently of them. All this refighting ancient battles stuff is pure elitist self-indulgence.

    Why shouldn’t both sides of the culture wars attampt to mine the rich lode of ore which is the 1960s for constructing their contending visions of the future?

    After all, the 1960s was the decade in which evolved so many of the battle lines and social and cultural schisms that continue to inform our public life and private morals.

    The battle for control of the story of the 1960s therefore makes up a significant part of the battle for the control of our present stories.

    Hendo’s efforts in this struggle for the control of this story are filthy, snide, underhand and trivial, just like many people have said. But that doesn’t mean that this battle has to bear Hendo’s ugly hallmarks. There is important business about the 1960s that has yet to be completed.

    Hendo and his ilk must be confronted. To declare what he says to be irrelevant is disturbingly close to conceding his damaging claims. The New Left came into existence during the 1960s. If Hendo succeeds in convincing his readers that the wellsprings of the New Left were poisoned, then he has won an important battle for the Cultural Right.

    I’d like to draw a parallel with the Aboriginal story of post settlement Australia. It took a century and a half for Aborigines to begin to reclaim their story from the condescension of colonialist falsifiers. In that time much damage was done to Aboriginal sensibilities. And I suppose it could have been argued that Aborigines had better things to do than to attempt to reconstruct their own historical stories. Were the people who eventually did it “self-indulgent elitists”? I doubt it.

    When fighting the History Wars the New Left owes it to themselves to avoid the fate of Aborigines.

  51. Fanny Robin

    My sentiments exactly, Katz. Strange that history, for some, is so lightly dismissed as irrelevant when it obviously isn’t.

    Good on Robert Manne for responding to Henderson’s attack. It’s all interesting, all important, very necessary, as you explain so well.

  52. pablo

    If I recall correctly this is the second time Robert Manne has called Gerard a liar. They crossed swords on some issue a couple of months ago on Lateline with the ‘l’ word resulting. You begin to wonder if a file is building and a sharply worded writ is about to descend.
    Maybe Gerard should follow his own advice from the Crikey piece.
    ‘Lots of people said silly things and adopted silly positions in the past…
    If this contretemps is one example then spare a thought for Robert Manne’s mention of Ben Kiernan. He paid for it dearly with his life in the holocaust of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. He’d probably nod in agreement of Gerard on that score.

  53. GregM

    If this contretemps is one example then spare a thought for Robert Manne’s mention of Ben Kiernan. He paid for it dearly with his life in the holocaust of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. He’d probably nod in agreement of Gerard on that score.

    Ben Kiernan did not pay with his life in the holocaust of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. He is still alive and writing about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Kiernan

    He recanted his earlier views which were sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge when he became aware of the scale of the horror the Khmers Rouges were perpetrating on the Khmer people. He is one of the finest researchers and writers on the topic.

  54. grace pettigrew

    Well said, Katz

  55. pablo

    Greg M. Thanks for the correction Greg. I think I must have extrapolated from a particularly vicious attack that I recall he suffered. A relief to know otherwise.

  56. wilful

    GregM, while you might disagree with Catherine Deveney, you can’t claim she’s boringly banging on about crap that happened 40 years ago and is of no relevance now. She always gets a huge response in The Age blogs and letters pages. A sure sign of relevance.

  57. Mark

    Katz, there’s a bit of a difference between re-interpreting the 60s and silly squabbling over personalities.

  58. Katz

    I note that you way that there’s “a bit of a difference” between re-interpreting the 60s and silly squabbling over personalities. I agree.

    I note you don’t say that these two activities are mutually exclusive. And I’d agree with that as well.

    And I’d add that neither Hendo nor Manne is merely “squabbling over personalities”. Henderson is coming close to accusing Manne of sedition. And Manne is attempting to clear himself of the charge.

    Many people in the 1960s did break the law and commit seditious acts in the name of a greater good.

    At the root of this rather unedifying fracas between two greying men in late middle-age is the question of whether commiting acts of sedition can ever be seen as serving a greater good. For most of Australian history that question was nothing more than a hypothetical. In the 1960s it became concrete, urgent and real.

    Some American conservatives insist that the history of dissent in the 1960s should not be taught. It is interesting that there are two contradictory positions on this question. The first is that it is trivial. The second is that is too dangerous.

    This question of civil disobedience is just one of many issues that ceased for a time in the 1960s and early 1970s to be hypothetical. Hendo wants to foreclose the debate by declaring Manne and everyone else who espoused civil dispobedience to be traitors.

    Yes, that’s deeply personal. But it’s also deeply political.

  59. Mark

    Well, it’s Hendo’s obsession to play all this in terms of “who believed what when”, Katz, that I think both trivialises the issues and renders what he writes pretty uninteresting and largely irrelevant.

  60. Ambigulous

    GregM

    Ben Kiernan’s then wife, a Cambodian, paid a high price for the butchery that was Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. In the dedication of one of their books about the Pol Pot era, is a list of some Cambodians who were killed. I don’t read Khmer, but by the look of those names I guessed that she lost many close relatives.

    I believe Professor Kiernan now holds a chair in the US. He had the grace to admit he had been disastrously wrong about the Khmer Rouge government. Unlike Noam Chomsky, who kept quibbling for years, about the unreliability of the testimony of refugees from Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
    And some folk still hold Professor Chomsky (theoretical linguistics) as an expert on US foreign policy, the Indochina wars, mass media, Islamism, etc. etc.!! IMHO he scarecely qualifies as “an intellectual”, so rough and careless is he with evidence.

  61. MRD

    The ever so humble Gerard always,it seems to me,to have a bitterness and a barely restrained anger lurking just below the surface. There is something of Uriah Heep about this guy,not the band,need I add.

  62. Ambigulous

    GregM
    were you thinking of that UK political academic, strong supporter of far left Asian communist parties, who went on a fact-finding tour in Kampuchea, met Pol Pot for discussions, and was shot dead in Phnomh Penh?

  63. silkworm

    Some American conservatives insist that the history of dissent in the 1960s should not be taught. It is interesting that there are two contradictory positions on this question. The first is that it is trivial. The second is that is too dangerous.

    Just like Uncle Joe’s position on the unions. They are both irrelevant and dangerous.

  64. Katz

    Yes, Hendo is a bore, a bully and a moral coward.

    Does that mean that Manne should simply ignore him when Hendo accuses him of seditious acts?

    And if not, what is the best non-boring, non-self-indulgent response?

  65. Mark

    Go meta! Just stick one line in there denying Hendo’s claims then analyse what he’s up to with his McCarthyism and why it sucks. By responding defensively and in detail he gets drawn in to playing on the wicket where Hendo is bowling.

  66. FDB

    I agree Mark – to me Manne’s piece sounded whiny; to a right winger it could well have sounded protesteth-too-muchy. Either way, for all his sharpness of intellect he could learn a thing or two about pithiness.

  67. Klaus K

    The apparent instability of irrelevance/danger is all about the way in which stereotype operates. Constructing an effective stereotyped account of 60s radicalism means lumping together a bundle of contradictory judgements on the period. It’s an anxious and unstable project which is well served by the ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ personal artifact collecting that Henderson is so adept at.

    Manne is playing along, to an extent, by keeping to the proposed terrain of personal history. He should have gone straight to the question of sedition, which Katz correctly identifies as the underlying issue here, and tackled it head on. It may be too much to expect, but an interpretive leap like that could turn an exchange like this into a genuine debate, or force the Hendersons of the world to retreat into explicit judgement instead of sowing these stereotypes.

  68. GregM

    GregM
    were you thinking of that UK political academic, strong supporter of far left Asian communist parties, who went on a fact-finding tour in Kampuchea, met Pol Pot for discussions, and was shot dead in Phnomh Penh?

    No, I was thinking of Ben Kiernan who now holds a professorship at Yale.

    Pablo may have confused him with the Pol Pot apologist Malcolm Caldwell, who was murdered in Phnom Penh on the eve of the Vietnamese invasion. I must say that having read that foul creature’s writings, especially his simpering pandering to the Khmer Rouge, when I read an account of his death at their hands I thought to myself that among the million or more murders they perpetrated this was one that no decent person should be concerned about in the slightest. At least he got off more lightly than those condemned to Toul Sleng. More’s the pity.

    Since this is a thread about matters of ancient history and history wars here is an article by Robert Manne on Caldwell’s death and, incidentally Keith Windshuttle’s Pol Potist sympathies- with a Windshuttle rebuttal.

    http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:QvXUzqqxoJQJ:www.sydneyline.com/Manne%2520Windschuttle%2520Quadrant%25206%252006.pdf+khmer+rouge+murder+british+academic&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=au

    Manne gives him a thorough booting. Enjoy.
    Mann

  69. nasking

    Well, once again i’m seeing one of the Howeirdians taking us down the Fox News road.

    This is something you would expect from an O’Reilly or a Hannitty…bide my words people, Sky News will transform soon into something similar…or there will be an offshoot. I’m positive the dual citizen Mr. Murdoch & his Enablers have plans for this Country, we’re partially the way there.

    A badly divided, angry, argumentaive, hyped, fearful Nation makes for great Corporate TV…heaps of profits for moguls & advertisers, a boon for lawyers…& ruination of personal lives & reputations to capture LIVE…& if they pull this sh*t off, they’ll throw any kind of social & community harmony & future political co-operation out the backdoor.

    The wonder years…sigh.

  70. Andyc

    nasking “the dual citizen Mr. Murdoch”

    Didn’t he become a yank at a time when they insisted on abjuration of previous allegiances, and we insisted on people giving away their Ozziness if they acquired anything else?

    Hence, Rupert “$20 a barrel” Murdoch is actually 100% foreign now.

  71. Kim

    Just noting that I’ve deleted a stack of comments from this thread and no further comments imputing motives or beliefs to other commenters will be tolerated.