"The Situation We Face Today"

At the risk of treating anecdote as a signifier of a social trend, there appears to be a slow but determined proliferation of small-yet-growing civic associations across Australia’s eastern seaboard which explicitly identify as operating outside the ‘mainstream.’ A void is clearly being filled by people who have lost patience with contemporary elites, cultural and political, and particularly on the conservative side of the divide. 

   Some of these groups have been promoted in the pages of this journal. All of them are characterised by an appeal to tradition, truth and authority conceived in a pre-postmodern understanding. Some are focused on education; others concern them-selves with advocacy. All of them share an interest in maintaining a collective memory which has been intentionally bleached from established institutions of cultural trans-mission. These groups are organised on the principle of resistance to the hegemonic encroachment on the private and intellec-tual life by the bureaucratic state and the caustic influence of its animating ideologies. They may be disparate and local, focused on specific if not narrow objectives and motivated by unrelated causes, however net-works are forming among those who under-stand that each will one day be a component of a greater organic whole. 

   This development constitutes a new ‘cold war’, but one that is contested within the national boundaries of the states who supposedly won the previous contest in the late twentieth century. It is not a struggle between two military industrial complexes and two global hegemons; rather, it is a contest of two worldviews, both of which have been cross-pollinated by the ideologies of both prior combatants, the supposedly victorious and the allegedly defeated.

   We once confronted the ‘state capitalist’ regimes of the communist East; now we live in a ‘free market’ in which we are told we will ‘own nothing and be happy’. Those of us who look back with nostalgia are verbally branded, gagged and censored as the revisionists or dissidents of the old ‘people’s democracies.’ Indeed, on those rare occasions when our voices are heard at the ballot box, we are assaulted with lamen-tations that ‘democracy must be saved’ from inconvenient democratic outcomes. Some of those who arrived here from the East before the fall of ‘The Wall’ have begun to see increasing similarities with what they sought to escape: small but gradual changes for the worse papered over with appeals to official régime slogans, and cheap, base entertainment. 

   The situation we face today is one in which the establishment no longer serves the fundamental interests of the people who have inherited it; it has betrayed its architects’ designs. It is no surprise therefore that many have begun the slow process of reconstruction, on our own terms, from the bottom-up. Where it is lacking, leadership must be assumed by committed men of good faith. This will be a generational project for which it is an honour to participate.

Prof. Keith Windschuttle, Australian histo-rian, journalist, author and editor, who dedicated the latter half of his life to challenging the mendacity of the liberal academy and progressive commentariat, passed away on 8 April this year. He was active right to his last days, working on the second volume of his trilogy The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (volumes one and three having already been published via Macleay Press). It is hoped that this final work will one day soon find an editor and press for publication. His passing came as a shock, and saddened us deeply. 

   Prof. Windschuttle was a friend to the intellectually curious, those who refused to genuflect before the idols of a politicised academe, and who questioned the fashionable orthodoxies of the day. He was one of the very few Australian public intellectuals who represented a genuine oppositional force to entrenched leftist narratives in the press and publishing industries. He would never be forgiven for his free thinking by the ageing and self-proclaimed ‘free thinkers’ of the soixante-huitard generation – a generation of radicals he knew well, having himself sat among their ranks as a young student at Sydney University.

   He had integrity enough to see through the falsehood of ideology and gradually moved right in his pursuit of truth in historiography. Often a lone voice in many a ‘culture war’ debate from the 90s and onward, he would be routinely targeted by the establishment’s public firing squads. Seen by many as a ‘controversialist’ (unfairly so, since his motivation was not to seek controversy, but to discover the truth behind fashionable historical claims), these early attempts to cancel him from polite society only appeared to reinvigorate his efforts. 

   Prof. Windschuttle understood the need to mentor young writers and thinkers who would form the new counter-culture in a hyper-liberal world. I recall the first time I met him at a function organised by a now defunct milieu of right-wing campus activists in the then Young Liberal Movement, when he presented a paper to the short-lived “Conservative Speaker Series”. He spoke about the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan and what this meant for Australian political culture. Having in mind the near complete dominance of Cultural Marxism in the post-Cold War West, I asked, perhaps a little too flippantly, who actually won that conflict. While his answer broadly recapitulated the thesis in John O’Sullivan’s The Pope The President and the Prime Minister, he later approach me saying that he did, on reflection, understand what I was driving at. I will not forget what he added: Your generation faces a unique set of circumstances that only you understand and will be equipped to deal with.

   I remember these words because I was struck by his sense of humility, and the fact that he acknowledged the generational divide without condescension or sarcasm. This is rarely encountered from old Cold War Warriors and other senior members of  our ‘movement’. I remained in infrequent correspondence and telephone contact with Prof. Windschuttle for years afterwards, and I was always grateful for his counsel and generous advice. He would accept my work for publication in Quadrant even if it did not necessarily agree with his own conclusions. His critics could learn a great deal about genuine open-mindedness from this man of integrity.

   Prof. Windschuttle’s funeral service was conducted at the All Souls Chapel, Rockwood cemetery, Sydney, on 24 April. He will be missed. Requiescat in pace.