What with the pond being on the road and out of the intertubes and lizard Oz loop, this placeholder comes from several days ago, and who knows what might have happened in the interim.
It's more by way of interesting documentation than commentary, and it concerns Harvard, and King Donald's attempt to enforce conformity and subservience, something straight out of Adolf's playbook ...
This was the opening thrust, all five pages of it ...
Astonishing really, but good to have the names of the flunkies, minions and servile sycophants on record, especially as severe financial consequences were attached to the sundry threats and grievances.
In response this came from Harvard, a lot shorter, just two pages ...
Okay, okay, it's only Harvard, a heavily endowed institution and real estate venture with access to the markets, and there are many more who have missed out bigly as the current administration goes full fascist. Try the chance of going to an El Salvador gulag without benefit of court date for starters.
But all the same, this struggle will take on a fascinating fight to the death quality, a bit like a mongoose battling a cobra, though rating Harvard as a mongoose does the mongoose a disservice, just as labelling King Donald a cobra defames snakes ...
Will Harvard eventually lose its ticker? Will other craven universities fall, like a few have already done and like so many craven law firms have already done?
If so, it will be a hard fall, because they've drawn a line in the sand with this letter to the community/diaspora/alumni, and any backing down by either side will mean much loss of face...
That's how it goes these days in the "land of the free", aka the land of the National Socialists ...
Meanwhile, our Henry, on this Holeyest of days, seems to be joining the move to beatification of the Windschuttle. (I tried to get My Source to precis what the Henry has written for this day, but she gave me terse comments about how I waste my time, in return)
ReplyDeleteThe prods to beatification are quite common in the Quad Rants - Ms Weisser even putting up notice of Windie's funeral arrangements for those with even more time to waste.
In some ways we innocent bystanders might hope this could proceed, setting someone on a path to sainthood specifically for what he did not do - which is to produce the often-promised Volume 2 of ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History’, which was going to reveal - well, everything on Aboriginal (sic) history.
As one who is similarly unlikely to produce several, definitive, volumes on Australian history and character, I wonder if I might qualify for similar mawkish comments in the Rant, and Speccie and other journals of tiny circulation, when I shuffle off this mortal.
I certainly hope that Henry’s piece was chock-full of comparisons between Windshuttle and various great thinkers of both the Classical Age and the Enlightenment - the more ludicrous the better.
DeleteWhat fun ! Now if only it can be arranged for Harvard and Trumpkind to achieve mutual total self-destruction.
ReplyDeleteIm not sure if this is a public service or a public nuisance, but here’s Our Henry’s eulogy for Saint Keith the Martyr. Pretty much what you’d expect.
ReplyDelete>> Keith Windschuttle and the continuing battle for history
The Great Australian Silence of the 1960s, which glossed over the realities of the settler-Indigenous encounter, has given way to a new Great Australian Silence which, for fear of offending progressive sensitivities, refuses to address that encounter in a frank and balanced way.
HENRY ERGAS
With the death last week of Keith Windschuttle Australia lost a scholar driven by the duty Leopold von Ranke famously defined as the historian’s highest calling: to write about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” – “as it had really been”.
To achieve that task, Ranke observed, three qualities were indispensable – common sense, courage and honesty: the first, to grasp things at all; the second, to not become frightened at what one sees; the third, to avoid the temptations of self-deception.
Most of all, however, the historian needed to recognise that “Every epoch is equally close to God”, equally infused by grandeur and equally scarred by tragedy. It is not “the office of judging the past, or of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages” that has been assigned to historians; it is that of carefully reconstructing, rationally analysing and dispassionately presenting the past in all of its remoteness and complexity.
Never was that task harder than in this country’s “history wars”. Triggered, in the self-congratulatory words of the ANU’s Tom Griffiths, by a “concerted scholarly quest to dismantle the Great Australian Silence” – a silence that had “hardened into denialism … denial of bloody warfare on Australian soil” – the revisionist historians’ portrayal of Australia’s history as a never-ending tale of murderous dispossession, cultural decimation and environmental destruction inevitably took its toll on accuracy and objectivity.
There was, in the revisionists’ onslaught, little room for the Rankean virtues, first and foremost that of meticulous attention to the documentary records. It was therefore unsurprising that The Fabrication of Aboriginal History’s relentless focus on those records thrust Windschuttle into the firing line.
Nor was it surprising that he paid a high price for his audacity. As Tim Rowse, one of Australia’s most distinguished scholars of Aboriginal history, noted, “at least one speaker” at a 2001 National Museum of Australia conference on Windschuttle’s work “was patronising towards Windschuttle to a degree that exceeded anything I’ve experienced in academic life”; instead of addressing his arguments, the focus was on comparing Windschuttle to David Irving, thereby placing him “outside the conversations of humanists”.
Yet it would be wrong to suggest Windschuttle’s colossal efforts were ignored. As Rowse, who could hardly be accused of being a reactionary, admitted, Windschuttle’s review of the NSW archival evidence on the Stolen Generations was “compelling”, raising real questions about an episode that has become emblematic of “the heavy-handed and insensitive management of Indigenous Australians”.
Moreover, even the attempts to debunk the Fabrication’s contentions yielded tangible benefits. Windschuttle’s Quadrant articles were “widely derided as politically mischievous”, writes Mark Finnane, a legal historian whose work on the interactions between Indigenous Australians and the law has reshaped the field; but their longer-term impact “has been to accelerate research in local and regional studies”, providing a sounder factual base for broader analyses.
At least partly as a result, there are some outstanding works, including by historians broadly on the left, that are far removed both from the revisionists’ overwhelming Manicheanism and from the flights of fancy of the post-modernists Windschuttle had so effectively denounced in The Killing of History (1994).
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START PART 2
ReplyDeleteFor example, Rowse’s White Flour, White Power (1998) – with its conclusion that “‘assimilation’ was in some respects a constructive policy era, not only a destructive onslaught on Indigenous ways of life” – remains an exceptionally fine book, and several of his more recent essays, such as the one on the “protection” policy’s role in reversing the decline in the Indigenous population, directly challenge the revisionists’ core assumptions.
Equally, Finnane’s Indigenous Crime and Settler Law (2012), co-authored with Heather Douglas, provides a balanced account of the repeated efforts the colonial authorities made – albeit with only mixed success – to deal sensitively and humanely with the gap between tribal custom and English law.
places to constant warring, seeking advantage of alliances with settlers to advance or protect their own interests”.
And Andrew Fitzmaurice’s Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000 (2014) is a deeply researched corrective to simple-minded claims (including, unfortunately, by the High Court) about the relevance of “terra nullius” to Britain’s assertion of sovereignty.
But despite those efforts, the sloppiness continues, as even a cursory glance at the ever-expanding literature on the Native Mounted Police shows.
For example, the military historian Peter Stanley – who has been influential in the Australian War Memorial’s portrayal of the “frontier wars” – has recently claimed that “the Native Police were Australia’s own Einsatzgruppen”, the Nazi murderers who machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of Jews that they had herded on to the edge of pits, stripped naked and beaten to within an inch of their lives. That Stanley’s claim is abhorrent for minimising the horrors of the Holocaust should not need to be said; that it is grotesque for its obvious historical inaccuracy ought to be apparent to even the least informed reader.
Striking too are the contentions of Queensland historian Raymond Evans. The mounted police, Evans claimed in 2010, were responsible for 24,000 deaths. But since then, Evans, in work with Robert Orsted-Jensen, has nearly doubled that estimate to 41,040, allegedly on the basis of a methodology that is “conservative” and “cautious”.
In an attempt to justify relying on highly selective samples and superficial extrapolations, Orsted-Jensen has claimed that there was a “a very systematic, deliberate and comprehensive destruction of virtually all sensitive flies stored in Queensland’s Police Department” – an accusation that has become one of the revisionist historians most widely repeated tropes.
However, a devastating review of Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s work by Finnane and Jonathan Richards not only points to the wealth of documentary material on which Evans and Orsted-Jensen could have drawn; it also concludes that any gaps in the records are more likely “an accumulated outcome of administrative culling, bureaucratic indifference, and misadventure” than of systematic destruction.
In fact, “rather than a history of cover-up, the entire administration of the Native Police from as early as 1861 on illustrates the concern of governing elites with the risk of unwarranted killing”.
As for Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s estimates of casualties, Finnane and Richards show that they are “highly subjective … and correspondingly unreliable”, while “the picture (Evans and Orsted-Jensen) paint of massive governmental indifference to or complicity in the deaths of tens of thousands of Aboriginal deaths does not stand up to scrutiny”.
But if questionable assertions remain common in the professional literature, they absolutely pervade the public commentary. Predictably, the ABC publicised Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s estimates; no less predictably, it has done nothing to correct the record. And if the academic historians are willing to rebut inaccuracies in scholarly publications, they are far more reluctant to do so when that involves intervening in the public debate..>>
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START PART 3
ReplyDeleteThat was apparent in the wake of Keryn Walshe and Peter Sutton’s Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? (2021), which vividly exposed the flaws of fact and analysis in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. The reviews in scholarly journals, such as that by Peter Veth in Australian Archaeology (2021), did not mince their words about Pascoe’s egregious errors; but more often than not, the media commentary by academic historians was cautiously circumspect.
There were, for sure, attacks on Walshe and Sutton that merely reproduced the left’s deeply engrained orthodoxy. To take but one example, Heidi Norman from UTS accused Walshe and Sutton of “wanting to strip the debate of contemporary meaning” by deploying a neo-colonial framework in which “Western definitions and labels are supreme”.
However, the academics’ dominant tone was mealy-mouthed, conceding that Pascoe had made mistakes but arguing that those mistakes counted less than Dark Emu’s merits in advancing reconciliation.
Thus, reviewing Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? in The Guardian, Sydney University’s Mark McKenna carefully put the word ‘fact’ in scare quotes, as if there was some doubt as to its meaning; while “at face value, this is a dispute about ‘facts’”, he wrote, the dry-as-dust issues of evidence and verisimilitude are far less important than “Pascoe’s ability to capture and move audiences desperate to hear his stories of Aboriginal ‘achievement’”.
In exactly the same way, the Tasmanian historian James Boyce recognised shortcomings in Pascoe’s work but nonetheless hailed it as a “significant cultural achievement”, whose “lifegiving” story “speaks to people for whom Aboriginal Australia remains a foreign country but want this to change”.
And Henry Reynolds, writing in Meanjin, essentially pooh-poohed the criticisms, arguing that Pascoe’s faux pas was primarily one of terminology: had Pascoe “declared that the First Nations peoples were not ‘just’ hunters and gatherers but graziers rather than farmers”, the problems with his account would have been largely overcome.
The undertone, in those comments, was clear: that it would be unfair to disabuse Pascoe’s adoring white fans, whose intentions were as pure as their thoughts were confused. Keeping faith with those intentions might involve distorting the truth; but the lie, like those Plato advocates in The Republic, would be a noble one, which ruling elites tell “in order to benefit the polis” by convincing citizens that “it is not pious to quarrel”.
Ironically, in their effort not to discomfort the masses, the revisionists had enveloped themselves in a Great Australian Silence of their own.
Yet the harm those deliberate distortions of the historical record cause is not just to truthfulness; it is to our ability to live with the past, rather than to live in the past. For so long as we cannot accurately and dispassionately view this country’s history, we will lack the foundations needed to better shape its future.
And it is not much comfort to know that when intellectual constructs stray too far from careful readings of the world, as they so tragically have in everything to do with Indigenous history and policy, reality has a nasty habit of biting back.
In the end, Nietzsche was right: the basic question societies, no less than individuals, must face, is “How much truth can we endure? Error is not blindness; it is cowardice.” Exposing cowardice takes courage. Now, with Keith Windschuttle gone, that duty must fall to others.>>
END
I found it interesting that rather than saying much about Windshuttle as historian - and pretty much nothing at all about him as a person - Henry uses the bulk of his article to simply battle the History Wars all over I suppose something like the human touch was beyond him.again.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that's because Holely Henry has little grasp of the principles of history and very little grasp of humanity and especially his own lack of it.
DeleteAnonymous (of the 3 parts) - thank you for putting up that text. Even though it probably justifies the comments from My Source, it was a service to the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteOh I dunno, Chad; how many more times do we need to be shown just how the likes of Holely Henry has no grasp whatsoever of "common sense, courage and honesty"?
DeleteIncidentally, just for one more time, did anybody mention Budj Bim ?
ReplyDelete"The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape is located in the traditional Country of the Gunditjmara Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia. The three serial components of the property contain one of the world’s most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems."
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1577
This may trip at the '2 day hurdle', but -
ReplyDeleteThis might see y’r ev’r h’mble correspondent cast into Polonius’ pit of ‘the sneering left’, but looking across the electronic flutterings from the Flagship for this weekend, left him confused (but still h’mble, always h’mble!)
He saw the Angelic one, drawing on no doubt extensive, and comprehensive, opinion polling, to characterise ‘many’ of our fellow citizens, who might remain unconvinced about the specific matter of the resurrection, but are ‘happy’ to follow wildest conspiracy theories on social media - which conspiracies somehow direct their thinking entirely to food.
Against that, the Bromancer - no, not his putting in the frighteners on the Russians - tells us that the concept of hell is ‘essential to the elevated Christian vision of human dignity’. Well, this observer sees much of the Bro’s writing as being about putting the frighteners on us - to guide us in the right way to live - it is a wonder that he does not so direct the lesser Leak in theme and style (style?) of his cartoons.
Aside - with several reptiles trying to whip up some election discussion out of Russian ‘diplomacy’ with Indonesia, I recall the character who used to fill in moments in ‘The Goon Show’, by saying (as I recall) ‘Ver Russians done it, Mate’. Neddy would ask ‘Why do you say that’, and the character would respond ‘ I don’t have a reason Mate, I just sez it!’.
I am still happy to follow wildest routines from ‘The Goon Show’.
A further exchange with My Source on the Bro’s focus on the significance of Hell. MS reminded me of lines in ‘Paradise Lost’ -
ReplyDeleteHere we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
- and wondered if the Bro, ever obscure, had been reflecting on how the Trump has taken to reigning. Or are we crediting the Bro with more intellectual range than he has justified, so far?
At the very least it would be intellectual bravery for the Bro to allude to works that were on his church's Index from time of publication to just a little before he was brought into this world.