[Marxism] Humphrey McQueen reviews "The White Australia Policy"

["Clinton Fernandes" <cfer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.alphalink.com.au/~loge27/aus_hist/aus_hist_windshuttle.htm

Before presenting the review Keith Windshuttle's latest book that I broadcast 
on the ABC's Book Talk on 29th January 2005, I should declare a personal 
interest. It seems that it is all my fault. My 1970 book, A New Britannia, 
established the "Paradigm of the Sixties Generation". Outside the four pages 
where Windshuttle attributes so baleful my influence, I have to say that I come 
off fairly lightly. None of my subsequent writings has been touched.

However, Windshuttle alleges that I, along with his bete noir Henry Reynolds, 
pushed the racist line to advance my career. This method, he explains, is how 
the young get on. One's own memory of motivation is the most fallible of guides 
after 35 years, so I shall say nothing in my own defence. However, the 
accusation of careerism has alerted me another possibility. Was my offence that 
I got in first, occupying the place that Windshuttle had his own eye on at the 
time? Alternatively, was he a slow developer who, in defiance of the wisdom of 
that true conservative, Sam Johnson, as laid down at the start of Rasselas, 
expects "that age will perform the promises of youth"? I can no more believe 
that Windshuttle has devoted his declining years to the refutation of 
conventional wisdom for reasons of vanity than I want to believe that my 
motives had been similarly base.

On that score, Windshuttle goes some way to putting my mind at rest. Alongside 
the careerism, he accuses me of sundry political offences, summed up as Maoism. 
Warming to his charge sheet, he declares that "They" did this dreadful thing 
and that "they" believed that terrible idea. My memory is that Windshuttle's 
"they" should be "we", for Keith was once a jolly comrade. And here it is not 
just my self-serving memory. From June 1970 to March 1971, Sydney students 
produced a newspaper called "Old Mole". This title was taken from a remark by 
Karl Marx: "We recognise our old friend, our old mole, who knows so well how to 
work underground, suddenly to appear: the Revolution". First among equals on 
Old Mole's editorial Soviet was someone calling himself Keith Windshuttle who 
attacked the Beatles's latest release, Let It Be, as "Nowhere Men", winding up 
his review through an attack on Revolution with its dismissal of "carrying 
pictures of Chairman Mao, You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow". 
Windshuttle doubted that the Beatles could "resolve the question of what to 
think about Chairman Mao".

Revolution, in fact, was counter-revolutionary, and Nina Simone has done the 
left a service in rewriting it. "Yes, I'm talking about destruction/ Of all the 
evil in the world", she sings.

In view of recent events, it is no longer possible to believe that it is enough 
just to imitate the buoyant optimism of the Beatles or to live as they do. It 
is no longer a matter of music but rather one of betrayal. They come off with a 
whining affirmation of their own values - all you need is love or Mother Mary 
or Instant Karma - while the kids build barricades in the streets." (Old Mole, 
??? 1970, p. 10)

Everyone is entitled to switch sides. But it is a bit rich to accuse other 
people of hypocrisy while you are erasing your own engagement in the crimes and 
follies that you are now denouncing.

While on the subject of student activism, it is worth pointing to an element in 
the demise of White Australia which Windshuttle ignores. The public face of the 
campaign began during the 1961Federal elections when a group of students at the 
University of Melbourne formed "Student Action" with the aim of ending the 
racially biased immigration programme. Although the leaders believed in that 
cause, they had another aim - namely, the removal of the hard Left Victorian 
Central Executive of the ALP. As their leader, Bill Thomas, explained the plan 
to me in Brisbane in January 1962, they had picked on White Australia as a way 
of driving a wedge between Jim Cairns and Arthur Calwell, which would split the 
Left-wing State Executive, provoking Federal intervention. Thomas claimed to 
have to backing of several University of Melbourne academics, notably Frank 
Knoffelmacher, Donald Horne at the Bulletin, and the U.S. Embassy, presumably 
through its Labor Attaché.

The review proper:
"Australia is not, and never has been, the racist country its academic 
historians have condemned". That line is on the back cover of The White 
Australia Policy, and goes to the heart of Keith Windshuttle's case. Across 
eleven chapters he surveys intellectual, economic and political aspects of our 
responses to the Chinese, Pacific Islanders and the Japanese. Aborigines do 
come into his account but aren't the focus of this latest effort at revisionism.

Let's be clear about what Windshuttle is proposing. He's not claiming that 
Australia has been free of racism. Whenever he identifies its presence, he 
condemns it as forcefully as would any of his target academic historians. 
Nothing in this volume should be used to convict its author of racism. There 
are places where he might be accused of insensitivity but those spots, I 
suspect, are failures of the intellect more than of ethics.

Some of what Windshuttle writes is already conventional wisdom among academic 
historians. Other points about our past that he wishes to inscribe into the lay 
understanding deserve inclusion. Similarly, a clutch of the academics whom he 
traduces do merit the strictures that he inflicts on their ignorance or 
silliness.

My disappointment arises because Windshuttle's presentation is likely to stymie 
the required rethinking. He's made such a guy of himself that his antagonists 
will be able to divert attention from matters of concern such as the 
restoration of class analysis alongside gender and ethnicity.

This review can't cover all the fields that Windshuttle harrows. Instead, I'll 
take three instances to illustrate how his treatment becomes self-defeating.

The first will be his claim that to discriminate against only the Chinese can 
not be racist.

The second illustrates how he slips from a sound criticism into daffiness.

The third case examines his mishandling of the economic motivations behind 
White Australia.

So we begin with the discriminations practiced by Colonial institutions against 
the Chinese. Windshuttle asserts that they cannot be called racist because 
those prohibitions were aimed only at the Chinese. Instead, their enforcers 
were guilty of Sinophobia. To be racist, he reasons, the regulations would have 
to have been against all Asians.

Windshuttle's definition of what constitutes "racism" follows from his view of 
what people in the nineteenth century considered to be a race. Here, he relies 
on Johann Blumenbach, who, in 1795, divided humankind into three races: the 
Mongolian, the Caucasian and the Ethiopian. Hence, the Chinese were a sub-set 
of the Mongolian race. According to Windshuttle, racism required its upholder 
not to discriminate between the peoples lumped together in this 1795 
classification. He has redefined racism as detesting all Mongolians equally.

The novelty of this position doesn't add to its appeal. Indeed, it set me 
wondering whether he would apply his definition of "racism" to the German Jews 
under Hitler? If so, the Nazi race laws were not racist because they targeted 
only Jews, and not all Semites.

Among other objections to this thimble-and-pea trick is the fact that 
Blumenbach's tri-partite division was not the only one abroad by the last 
quarter of the nineteenth-century. Linguists had proposed a version that put 
the dark skinned Indians and the blond Nordics together as Aryans. From a 
different direction, as Windshuttle reports 250 pages later, Meiji ideologues 
were maintaining the uniqueness of the Japanese race as the children of the Sun 
Goddess. They did not see themselves as Mongolians. European ethnographers were 
busy carving homo sapiens into five, six and eventually, seventy races. For a 
time, the Australian Aborigine was a race apart, and the Tasmanians yet another.

Windshuttle's account of race is more often inadequate than plain wrong. On the 
key question, he is politically correct, that is to say, scientifically 
accurate. There are no such divisions in nature as races. Or more precisely, 
differences in appearance are so slim in terms of genetic makeup as not to 
constitute meaningful categories. This much Windshuttle acknowledges as one 
more plank of his own anti-racism. Having recognised the non-existence of race, 
he accepts that racism is nonetheless possible. Beyond that truth we are all on 
much shakier ground. As we have seen, Windshuttle's solution is to grasp after 
the crudest formulae. For him, racism has to be an objection based on 
biological characteristics.

Given this definition, it's no surprise that he nowhere discusses the 
Australian experience of Anti-Semitism. Had he attempted to do so, he would 
have been up against prejudices that still weave together religion, ethnicity, 
physiognomy and economic behaviour. That is all too demanding as an 
intellectual enterprise for someone of Windshuttle's cast of mind. He finds 
more congenial tasks for his intellect in tormenting "academic historians"

His first target is a Queensland Professor, Ray Evans, whom he properly accuses 
of outrageous hyperbole by connecting the Nazi Kristallnacht of 1938 with an 
anti-Chinese riot in Brisbane fifty years earlier. Put simply, no Chinese was 
killed whereas 91 Jews were murdered. Even to mention Kristallnacht in regard 
to the earlier affray is offensive to the dead Jews and a violation of 
scholarly decorum.

Having scored a bulls-eye with his practice round, Windshuttle proceeds to 
wound himself in the footnote by accusing Evans of "exaggerating" when he wrote 
that two white women were "violently assaulted". Windshuttle himself admits 
that they had been "roughly handled". It'll take a finer stylist than he to 
convince a jury that "roughly handled" is substantially different from 
"violently assaulted". He goes on to quote a local newspaper that the women 
were "pushed and even struck all along the block". Since when did being 
"pushed" and "struck" repeatedly not constitute a violent assault?

Economic motivation 
The thrust of Windshuttle's book is to restore attention to economic 
competition as the motivation behind White Australia. To the extent that this 
aspect has been played down in recent decades, his objective deserves support. 
What is not needed is his either/or approach.

Ill at ease with multi-factorial explanations, Windshuttle heads a sub-section: 
"Economic Motives versus Racial prejudice". In place of interaction, he revives 
a vulgar economic determinism, asking "Did racism cause economic competition or 
was it the reverse?" That is a crude, not to say odd, formulation of a 
complicated situation.

Since economic competition was important, it is appropriate to ask who 
benefited. The answer includes the Free Traders whom Windshuttle praises for 
their non-racist advocacy of the free movement of cheap Asian labour. The 
historians' task is to incorporate the conflict between races into class 
conflicts among Europeans. That path is closed to Windshuttle because it would 
lead him back into the company of not just academic historians, but the Marxist 
kind whom he now affects to despise most.

One of the academics whom he alleges has failed in his duty as a professional 
is the Monash historian Andrew Markus. Marcus's offence is to have published an 
article on the Chinese cabinet-makers who. in 1893, formed a trade union in 
Melbourne, and sought affiliation with the Trades Hall Council. Their activism 
is most inconvenient for the Inquisitor-General. First, it runs against his 
view that the Chinese were culturally unable to participate in "civic 
patriotism". Secondly, their trade union offered the European workers a chance 
to demonstrate that their Sinophobia was economically driven, not racist. Those 
white workers scabbed on Windshuttle by rejecting the Chinese unionists out of 
hand.

Despite having outlined the efforts by the Chinese to join their European 
fellow cabinet-makers, Windshuttle proceeds to tell us that it was "natural" 
for the latter to refuse the hand of comradeship because "the Chinese isolated 
themselves in a separate economic sector". He mocks Marcus for finding it 
"easy' to say - eighty years later - that the white unionists should have 
accepted the offer of solidarity from the Chinese. That option was not open - 
Windshuttle goes on - because of the Orientals were willing "to accept low pay 
and work long hours". What has happened to their trade union and their 
application to join the Trades Hall Council?

Windshuttle persists with his amnesia about those facts by arguing that the 
Chinese had "no sympathy or even understanding of union ideals". Yet the 
approach from the Chinese cabinet makers had made united action a "real option" 
for the European furniture union. The Chinese were no longer willing to be 
oppressed in the old way. In the course of two pages, Windshuttle has managed 
to forget that his dispute with Marcus arose only because the Chinese had 
organised themselves into a trade union.

How does Windshuttle keep getting himself into such messes? Part of the answer 
is that rancour and petulance are more prevalent throughout this volume than is 
subtlety r nuance. By indulging himself, Windshuttle has spoilt what in more 
objective hands could have been a welcome corrective to a drift of learned 
opinion away from economic analysis. 

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