1 week Ago By Mervyn Bendle
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]K[/fusion_dropcap]eith Windschuttle was a titanic figure in the middle of the most important intellectual battle of our times. Whether it’s called the Culture Wars or the History Wars, the battle for the past is the front line field of combat in the war for the future of Western Civilization, and Keith was right there for decades, marshalling the troops in his role as editor of Quadrant, and inspiring others through his courageous scholarship, both as an historian, with The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Vols. 1&3, 2004&9), and as a critic capable of engaging, in The Killing of History (1994), with the often excruciating intellectual and ideological posturing of the postmodern theoreticians who were butchering the discipline of history.
He was also a staunch ally when things got ugly in the snake pit of Australian academic life, as he demonstrated in the support he provided for me in the years after the 9/11 and Bali terrorist attacks. At that time, I published a series of articles in Quadrant and elsewhere exposing the secret Saudi funding of influential Australian university centres and departments and the role played by academics in key positions as ‘fellow travelers’ of al Qaeda, ISIS, and other Islamist terrorist organizations.Keith’s advice and support was invaluable when both Quadrant and I were subsequently threatened with defamation action, and (in my case) physical violence and a concerted campaign to have me sacked from my university position .
Then, after I was forced into early retirement, Keith encouraged me to continue to contribute articles to Quadrant and to write Anzac & its Enemies (order your copy here) for the centenary of the Gallipoli landings in 2015. Throughout this grueling period he was unwavering in his support, for which I will be forever grateful.Keith was a key member of what might now be called the Liberal-Conservative Resistance to the Cultural Marxist takeover of the history profession that began during the 1960s.
That was a time of fierce intellectual ferment at the height of the Cold War, when there was an especial interest in developing the theoretical and methodological basis of historical scholarship. This initiative was pursued from across the political spectrum and varied greatly in approach, accessibility, and ultimate intellectual value, but it was a useful attempt to expand the capabilities of the history profession.But then, cutting across this fertile period of intellectual inquiry, there was a massive ideological onslaught from the far left, which Keith subsequently found himself intellectually well equipped to combat.
This onslaught involved the promotion of Cultural Marxism throughout the Humanities and Social Sciences, the results of which are now all too tragically obvious. It was guided by the concept of ‘hegemony’ developed by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, and by the strategy of cultural subversion well-described as the left’s ‘long march through the institutions’.Accompanying this was an extreme theoreticism exemplified, e.
g., by Louis Althusser’s Reading Capital (1970); Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969); and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which became the foundation text of postcolonial studies, especially with its master concept of ‘the Other’. Such works promoted a complex new vocabulary that aspiring historians were expected, to master; and this was the case irrespective of whether they actually produced useful historical works.
Indeed, it was upon such ‘mastery’ - rather than upon any actually useful historical research - that many subsequent academic careers were built. Again, Keith’s book blew the whistle on what was really just an academic scam.As Keith pointed out, the full-scale colonization of historical studies by this leftist theoreticism encouraged a collapse into unthinking subjectivism and relativism, exemplified by the claim that history is simply just another form of narrative, indistinguishable from fiction, that only exists to promote political causes.
Activists purporting to be historians now felt comfortable denying that scholarly objectivity is even possible, and that its pursuit constitutes an evasion of the responsibility of historians to commit all their efforts to promoting progressivist political causes. Consequently, instead of the profession being expanded by the application of new methods and concepts, history was exploited to provide a veneer for new and explicitly political new pseudo-academic fields of ideological posturing, including cultural studies, feminism, postcolonialism, queer theory, critical race theory, critical legal theory, etc., all supported by an esoteric vocabulary cobbled together from the various theorists that Keith so comprehensively exposed in The Killing of History.
That the task of the Australian historian is political posturizing and moralizing has been made clear by the dominant figures in academic Australian history, indeed an entire book has been published exalting this moralizing role: The Historian’s Conscience (ed. Stuart Macintyre, 2004) There we are told that “compassion is ..
.good history’s main motive”, and that history is “a moral discipline that enlarges our understanding of humanity and extends our human sympathy”. This is simplistic and absurd, as any number of ‘disciplines’ can serve that function, from literature to psychological counselling.
However, as Keith insisted, it falls to history alone to ascertain the facts of what actually happened in the past so that any sympathy that arises can be appropriately and accurately directed towards the truly deserving parties.Absurdly, this obvious point attracted outrage and promoted an organized and concerted attack on Keith, the focus of which was his account of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Although Windschuttle’s exhaustive and objective account debunked stories of large-scale massacres and atrocities committed by white settlers against Aboriginals, this was not considered appropriate and he was condemned for being ‘pitiless’, not being sensitive to ‘feelings’, and for ‘lacking sympathy and ‘compassion’.
In other words, the primary concern of these ‘morally superior’ academic historians was not that Keith’s exhaustive research had removed the basis for widespread and profound – but misplaced - contemporary guilt over frontier tragedies; rather, he was condemned for not displaying pity and sympathy – but exactly to whom this should be directed, his critics have never identified. There were conferences and books attacking Keith’s commitment to objectivity and sound historical scholarship, but it was all bluster.This theoreticism quickly became an intellectual straitjacket that led to a reduction ad absurdum, as E.
P. Thompson observed in his devastating critique, The Poverty of Theory (1978), with neo-Marxist historians declaring that “history is condemned by the nature of its object to empiricism”, which has been revealed to be a mystifying manifestation of bourgeois ideology because “the real object of history is inaccessible to knowledge”, and therefore “the study of history is not only scientifically but also politically valueless”. The study of history in Australia has never completely escaped from this methodological nihilism, and it was this historiographic cul-de-sac that Keith attacked so brilliantly in The Killing of History.
And this was an absolutely vital task because, almost overnight, this ideological tsunami transformed the prevailing situation of comparative tolerance within the history profession into an endless series of ideological confrontations that were played out as zero-sum games in what is now called ‘cancel culture’.This quickly became a rout, with victory going to post-structuralism (i.e.
, degenerate structuralism) and postmodernism, which converged around a group of fashionable Parisian theorists, to whom was assimilated Edward Said and Orientalism (1978), which promoted additional master concepts like ‘the Other’ and ‘the Subaltern’.[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]ragically for Australia and despite the immense amount of work undertaken by Keith and by others he inspired, the study, writing, and teaching of history in our country has been debauched to an incredible degree, especially in Australia, where our national history has been portrayed by academics and their fellow-travelers as a racist, sexist, blood-soaked litany of horror, punctuated by moments of futility epitomized by the Anzacs. Gallant attempts have been made to contest this portrayal but the weight of the academic consensus, and the left’s control of the media, have made it very difficult to break through and give voice to opposing viewpoints.
An odious stigma and professional marginalization are the price that must be paid by anyone prepared to contest the Black Armband view.Sadly, there is a tragic dimension to this development. No nation can sustain a positive national identity without a strong sense of its own history and the part it played in the history of the world.
Until the 1960s there were a number of commendable histories of Australia that fulfilled this vital function. However, for half a century since then, mainstream Australian historians have worked relentlessly to tear down and destroy those positive narratives.Academic historians on the left are very aware of this situation.
As Mark McKenna makes clear in ‘The History Anxiety’, his contribution to The Cambridge History of Australia (2013, pp.561ff.):Every nation is brought into being through the writing of history”.
Citing various other leftist historians he observes how “nation-building is inherently and self-consciously historical”; that ‘settler societies’ like Australia “are marked by a particular self-consciousness concerning the past”; that they “are marked by a craving for continuity and a deep past” that connects them, e.g., to their British heritage; and that they pursue “a proper history of which people could be proud.
Such historians believe also that it is their mission to snatch away any such pride and to deny and destroy such nation-building aspirations. Moreover, they are happy that they have largely achieved their mission: “The connection between national identity and the writing of history ..
. would remain strong in Australia until the late 20th Century”, after which the Black Armband view overwhelmed the earlier narratives and largely left them in ashes.Much of McKenna’s chapter is a tendentious and sarcastic account of the earlier efforts to construct a viable national narrative, lampooning the pioneers of Australian history.
One particular target is the historical societies that sprang up after Federation and attempted to give shape to a new national pride, collecting and compiling the documentary evidence that would later provide the basis of subsequent historical inquiry. These are dismissed as “middle-class, non-professional ‘educationalists’ of distinctly antiquarian bent [who] busied themselves advancing heroic stories of discovery, exploration and pioneering, and cultivating benign, self-congratulatory genealogies”.[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]N[/fusion_dropcap]evertheless, these folk provided much of the raw material that made possible the work of the first generation of Australian historians: George Arnold Wood, George Henderson, and Ernest Scott.
These adhered to the “Rankean adherence to the scrupulous examination of primary sources and objective truth”, and under their influence “factual accuracy was prized, [and] professional history would increasingly be defined by a detached, rigorous examination of documentary evidence”. Such principles made possible the authoritative and reliable historical accounts of Australia’s past that formed the basis of history education.It is a mark of the willful decadence of the contemporary historical profession in Australia that this Rankean tradition has been replaced by the belief that the history is moralizing, mythology, and fiction, and that history teaching is primarily a process of propaganda and indoctrination into politically correct and extremely negative and dispiriting ideas about our nation’s past.
That the historian’s task should be myth-making has been made clear by the incredible reception enjoyed by Dark Emu, a sort of creative non-fiction book by Bruce Pascoe that purports to offer an historical account of pre-colonial agriculture, engineering and building construction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Despite its divergence from virtually all conventional accounts of the Aboriginals as resourceful hunter-gatherers it has been accepted as historically accurate and has received numerous prestigious awards. A second edition, published under the title Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture was published in mid-2018, and a version of the book for younger readers, entitled Young Dark Emu: A Truer History, was published in 2019.
Both the first and the children's editions were shortlisted for major awards, and the former won two awards in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.Clearly, Keith left us while there was yet more work to do. His memory is best honoured not only by the words of his admirers in Quadrant and elsewhere, but in continuing the fight for truth that became his life's work.
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