In his Latest Readings he has another look at John Howard & his writing.
The ALP regarded him as the devil. So did almost the whole of the Australian intelligentsia, who have been handing down their elementary anti-American, anticapitalist, and indeed anti-Australian views from one generation to the next for many years now. There is a vestigial blue-collar left to which I myself still belong, but the much more vocal white-collar left has always been united in hating Howard, despite, or perhaps because of, his popularity with the electorate. The Labor Party spent a doomed decade looking for a leader who would be so different from Howard that the electorate would change its allegiance. Then Kevin Rudd realized that the only way to win against Howard was to promise to do all the same things Howard did, but do them younger. (p144)
In the chapter on Australian poet Stephen Edgar –
But now the Australian poets don’t have to waste their time thinking on nationalist lines at all, because the world is their oyster. I never expected this to happen in my time. It should be no surprise, however: along with the freedom to prosper, the freedom to create is one of the first freedoms a democracy offers. And even the Americans now know roughly where Australia is. All over the world, any underprivileged or oppressed group of people would like to get into Australia. Though many are invited in – for its intake of immigrants, Australia rates high as a host nation – they can’t all come: a fact which gives the Australian pseudo-left intellectuals, always looking for a new grievance, a chance to call their own country an offense to mankind. Meanwhile the first container ship full of Australian Aboriginals has yet to arrive in the Persian Gulf. As I reflect on these things, I resolve to take down from the shelf, this very night, Stephen Edgar’s nearest thing to a definitive selection – published in the United States, it is called The Red Sea – and further soothe my aching brain. Along with my heart, my brain is practically the last part of me that works, but the news from the Middle East is enough to further scarify the mental lesions one already has. A new group of extremist killers has shown up who regard Al-Qaeda as being too soft on the infidel. A storm is blowing out of Paradise.
Back in ‘Angles on Hitler’ he dips his lid to Ron Rosenbaum (& others). Rosenbaum wrote the superb Intro to the 2011 edition of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, lauded in ‘American Power’ (p77) as one of the journalists “who wrote the formal history that counted.”
… as a history of its subject it was never been equaled, nor is it likely to be.
[something escaped the proof reader there]
In ‘Extra Shelves’ –
I sold off my complete set of Martin Gilbert’s biography of Churchill, but all of Gilbert’s books about World War II and the Holocaust are there. My rationale for this particular cull was that I would be unlikely to find time to read the Churchill biography again, even though one of its volumes, Finest Hour, is among the great books about Britain’s salvation from barbarism. On the other hand, all six volumes of Churchill’s own history of World War II are still there, as if I will have time to pay them another visit. But I probably won’t, so their presence is really talismanic.
NYT notes the passing of Shobha Nehru, Gilbert’s “Auntie Fori“.
In his Intro to Shirer, Rosenbaum –
It becomes clear all too late, Shirer shows us, that the diplomats and statesmen of the day were not aware that they were dealing with a different kind of animal for whom the lie was a chief weapon of war, and mass murder was “realism.”
Of course Shirer’s “capture” didn’t succeed in undoing what Hitler and Eichmann and the Reich had done, but it did its part to ensure that what had been done – the full depths of horror – would never be lost in oblivion. And, in a way, the values Shirer displayed – of thoughtfulness, coherence, rationality, discernment, and empathy for the suffering of the victims – were a vindication of the values the Allies fought for.
Those values would be fine for an Australian set, perhaps extending the last of them to pursuit of Justice, maybe a value that would be agreed by Gilbert.
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