The Howard offensive: launches more vitriol at the left

by Elliot K – Perth Indymedia	2006-10-04 1:01 AM +0800
October 04, 2006: Prime Minister John Howard has fired a tirade attack on Australia’s lefties, questioning their loyalty to the nation. Howard named Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II as the “three towering figures” of the late 20th century.He said their moral clarity “punctured the nonsense” of left-wing apologists. Howard attacked Australia’s “intelligensia”, which he says has a past of denigrating the nation and the West and is now doing the same with the war in Iraq. Mr Howard gave a foaming speech last night in praise of the 50th anniversary of ultra-conservative right-wing magazine – Quadrant of which writer Paddy McGuinness is the editor. Quadrant was set up with funding from the CIA…
Mr Howard blamed the left for “the incomprehensible sludge” in school curriculums and “the black armband view of Australian history” – his offensive term for those who pushed for white Australia to apologise to Aborigines over past wrongs. He said the left had a history of denigrating the nation and was now doing the same with the war in Iraq. He said Australian universities were still breeding leftists and described pro-communists of decades past as “opposed to Australia and its interests”. Mr Howard praised Quadrant – a journal “dedicated to opposing political correctness”, for countering “stultifying orthodoxies and dangerous utopias that have, at times, gripped the Western intelligentsia”. He linked the great historical battle of ideas between communism and capitalist democracies to the modern-day struggle with Islamist terrorism, arguing that both clashes demanded “clear and unambiguous statements of belief and purpose”. Seeing a sinister threat in the left activism of the 1950s in Australia, Mr Howard said it was anything but an innocent ideological gambol. He said publications such as Quadrant, which was set up with funding from the CIA, countered such views in “a noble and moral cause”. By contrast, Ronald Reagan branded the Soviet Union “the evil empire”, the sort of talk “that sends diplomats the world over into panicked meltdown”. Margaret Thatcher “as well as anyone grasped and articulated the essential connection of personal, political and economic freedom”. And the late pope “inspired millions” behind the Iron Curtain to dream. Rejecting charges that the West was anti-Muslim, he said it was not the Arab League that went to war in the 1990s on behalf of Muslim minorities in the Balkans, and the person who probably killed more Muslims in history was Saddam Hussein. An unapologetic and defiant Mr Howard praised his Government’s successes over the “posses of the politically correct”. Quadrant, a magazine of small circulation and a conservative ranter rag, had been “Australia’s home to all that is worth preserving in the Western cultural tradition”, said the PM. “Of the causes that Quadrant has taken up that are close to my heart, none is more important to me than the role it has played as counterforce to the black armband view of Australian history,” Mr Howard said. About 230 conservative intellectuals, judges, politicians, businessmen, churchmen and commentators arrived to pay homage at Sydney’s Four Seasons hotel in The Rocks. He sat at a power table that included his wife Janette, Catholic Archbishop George Pell, NSW Chief Justice Jim Spiegelman, revisionist historian and ABC board member Keith Windschuttle and former Liberal MP and Quadrant’s longest-serving editor Peter Coleman. Health Minister Tony Abbott was an enthusiastic wellwisher. Mr Howard’s chief speech writer, John Kunkel. So did senior staffer Brian Loughnane. Former head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority and arch-monarchist David Flint soaked up the atmosphere along with fellow traveller Kerry Jones. So did High Court judge Ian Callinan, former Howard minister Jim Carlton, former Treasury chief and Nationals MP John Stone, academic John Paul and former ABC board member Maurice Newman. Think-tank chief John Roskam, who heads the Institute of Public Affairs, was in good spirits, as was Greg Lindsay, executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies. Attendees from the Labor camp included former NSW Supreme Court judge Jeff Shaw, former NSW Labor Council secretary Michael Easson and former Keating minister Gary Johns. There was an impressive line-up of media commentators, including Piers Akerman, Christopher Pearson, Frank Devine, Miranda Devine and Sam Lipski. — [Quadrant Magazine was the brainchild of Richard Krygier, the founding secretary of the Australian branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom which was established by the CIA in 1950 as a key element in their strategy to combat Soviet propaganda. In its first year the CIA outlay on the Congress for Cultural Freedom was $200,000.]
John Howard: Standard bearer in liberal culture Howard names his three towering heroes – The Age Howard attacks left intelligentsia – News Ltd Howard rallies Right in culture war assault – The Australian PM puts boot into left as soft on tyranny CIA as Culture Vultures – Jacket Black Armband History – ANTaR

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