Extraotrdinary. David Smith, sole defender of truth, does it again.
Smith, apart from being a former flunky to the GG, has also become a contributor of note to Quadrant. In that role he has played a bit of a role in defending the idea that there is one correct history. Quadrant of course, and its current editor, Keith Windshuttle, have been fond of regarding any written record as superior to any oral record.
But in refuting Malcolm Fraser's claim Smith goes one further than those who are criticised by his Quadrant fellow travellers.
The argument goes that, because John Kerr did not tell him that the conversation with Fraser included the two disputed points, they cannot have occurred. So we are asked to believe that the absence of heresay evidence is more significant than the evidence of a person who was present and who has a note that purports to be contemporaneous with the conversation.
That Kerr and Fraser may have denied it in the immediately following period, and that Kerr may have left it out of his briefing to Smith, are merely consistent with their concern that the conversation was improper. Would this be the first time people had lied to hide a misdeed?
PS Meanwhile Fraser's co-author Margaret Simons and Gerard Henderson have been having a separate stoush that has been reported in both Crikey and Media Watch Dog. Henderson has asked the pefectly reasonable question of why the time and date on the note is in a different pen than the rest. The supposed answer is that Fraser dated it later that day, but is now relying on a thirty year old memory to make that claim.
It is however interesting to note that Smith claims the extra two conditions were not discussed later at Government House, which means they either were discussed on the phone call or that this note was merely Fraser's idea of what he planned to offer but was never asked to.
At the moment I'm favouring the version in the Fraser book. Ether way, the evidence remains that Kerr handled the situation abomoinably. He should never have ambushed Whitlam. No "advice" from Whitlam as PM was ever enough to stop the GG withdrawing his Commission, and it is entirely unlikly that a "race to the palace" would have seen the Queen remove Kerr' commission.
PPS Perhaps Richard Nixon had the right idea and all conversation in the head of state's offices should be recorded.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Monday, March 15, 2010
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Individuals, Society and History
Gerard Henderson provides another lead.
In today's SMH Gerard Henderson relays a Lateline inteview between Tony Jones and Robert Fisk. I haven't seen the interview, and am relying only on Henderson's report.
In the article it is claimed that Fisk's essential thesis is that the individuals at the head of the various terrorist organisations are now irrelevant. What is important is recognising that these movements are the creation of "the West". In counter, Henderson uses the line that;
One of the lessons of history is that revolutionaries should be taken seriously, since they usually do, or attempt to do, what they say they intend to do. This is true of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and more besides.
This is one of the delightful, but largely irrelevant, battles being debated in the studying both contemporary and past societies.
There are a number of social network mapping tools that can be used to determine the importance of an individual to a "society", including one called NetMap that was developed in Australia. These tools are applied by organised crime investigators to deterine how significant each individual is to the survival of the organisation. That is, the question of whether the individual is important or not is an empirical question, not an a priori one.
Similarly, as a counterpoint to Henderson, can he imagine a world order in which any or all attributes of "the West" were varied in such a way as the terrorist organisations would not have arisen. I can think of at least one, it goes something like this - the Archduke didn't get shot so the escalating armaments didn't trigger World War I, so there was no treaty of Versailles, there was therefore no World War II and thus no holocaust, and so the West wasn't wearing collective guilt over the treatment of the Jews. Or, in more recent times, the West did not practise a policy of "appeasement" of oil rich states and the propping up of various regimes merely to secure oil resources, but had instead pursued human values before economic values.
In each of these cases terrorism as we know it is far less likely to exist. That doesn't mean, however, that there is something that the West can now simply magically change and terrorism would simply cease to exist. It's one of those unfortunate features of causation, that once the cause has triggered the effect removing the cause doesn't remove the effect. Once the match has lit the fire, extinguishing the match does not extinguish the fire.
History is made up of individuals working within a social construct, each is created by the other. Historical explanation requires the interpretation of both, though it is far easier to relay as a narrative of the lives of influentialmen and women.
In today's SMH Gerard Henderson relays a Lateline inteview between Tony Jones and Robert Fisk. I haven't seen the interview, and am relying only on Henderson's report.
In the article it is claimed that Fisk's essential thesis is that the individuals at the head of the various terrorist organisations are now irrelevant. What is important is recognising that these movements are the creation of "the West". In counter, Henderson uses the line that;
One of the lessons of history is that revolutionaries should be taken seriously, since they usually do, or attempt to do, what they say they intend to do. This is true of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and more besides.
This is one of the delightful, but largely irrelevant, battles being debated in the studying both contemporary and past societies.
There are a number of social network mapping tools that can be used to determine the importance of an individual to a "society", including one called NetMap that was developed in Australia. These tools are applied by organised crime investigators to deterine how significant each individual is to the survival of the organisation. That is, the question of whether the individual is important or not is an empirical question, not an a priori one.
Similarly, as a counterpoint to Henderson, can he imagine a world order in which any or all attributes of "the West" were varied in such a way as the terrorist organisations would not have arisen. I can think of at least one, it goes something like this - the Archduke didn't get shot so the escalating armaments didn't trigger World War I, so there was no treaty of Versailles, there was therefore no World War II and thus no holocaust, and so the West wasn't wearing collective guilt over the treatment of the Jews. Or, in more recent times, the West did not practise a policy of "appeasement" of oil rich states and the propping up of various regimes merely to secure oil resources, but had instead pursued human values before economic values.
In each of these cases terrorism as we know it is far less likely to exist. That doesn't mean, however, that there is something that the West can now simply magically change and terrorism would simply cease to exist. It's one of those unfortunate features of causation, that once the cause has triggered the effect removing the cause doesn't remove the effect. Once the match has lit the fire, extinguishing the match does not extinguish the fire.
History is made up of individuals working within a social construct, each is created by the other. Historical explanation requires the interpretation of both, though it is far easier to relay as a narrative of the lives of influentialmen and women.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Anzac Day and the "culture wars"
If only it was that easy to win a war!
Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald on Anzac Day claimed a victory of sorts in what he calls the "culture wars". He based this on the interest expressed by young Australians in the "facts" of World War I, and argues this means they reject the view that those who died did so in vain fighting someone else's war.
This is simply wrong on so many levels it is not funny. At the most basic, the interest in the young in memory and war graves is about understanding the agony. The baby boomers among us can tell you a different story - we grew up with a generation of parents who took the process of remembering war seriously, but never talked about it. It was really quite hard to associate oneself with these very internal and unstated memories.
This feature that returned servicemen didn't share their stories is something people are only beginning to realise - I think everyone thought it was only their father, or their grandfather, who didn't talk about the war.
It has taken having a half a century between the last war that had mass involvement and today for that sense of wonderment to return.
But the interest in the experience cannot be used to conclude anything about the interpretation that should be placed on the involvement. As I'm fond of doing myself, people arguing against something create for themselves a "strawman" argument to critique. The strawman that Henderson attacks is this;
From the 1950s to the 1980s, the public commemoration of Australia's involvement in World War I was usually associated with the theme that those who had fallen at the Dardanelles or on the Western Front had died in vain fighting other people's wars. This was the predominant view in history texts (Bill Gammage's The Broken Years), plays (Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year) and films (Peter Weir's Gallipoli) as well as in much journalism.
But let's break this down into its component bits. Firstly, did the Australian (and New Zealand) volunteers understand what they were volunteering for? Certainly not, the view being universally that this would be a short lark - after all war like this had never been seen before (except in New Zealand, strangely, where trench warfare was invented).
Secondly, was there a great purpose to the war? Almost certainly not. There was no great crash of idealogies involved - heck the protagonists were cousins. There had been in defence of empires an escalating arms race that ultimately spilt into war.
Thirdly, was it important to Australia that Britain won? This is probably a most useful debating point. Yes, Germany had ambitions on parts of the British empire. Yes it could have been possible that Australia would have become part of a German Empire. But what would have been different? It was a protestant, capitalist state with developing democratic institutions and effective rule of law. It was economically more advanced than Britain, with Germany joining the US in leading in fields like electrical goods and chemicals - the so called second Industrial Revolution.
Did the young men suffer, bleed and die? Yes. Did they think it was for a good cause? Yes.
The real tragedy of WWI, however, was not that war itself. It was that the settlement of that war led to the preconditions for the war that had to be fought, and had to be won. The war that was against an ideology first and foremost, but also a maniac.
In his suggestion that the values of the diggers are admired Henderson briefly includes a discussion on the story of Simpson and his donkey. He notes the criticisms that have been made, that Simpson was really English who had jumped ship in Australia, that he was a left-winger and refused to fire a shot. But says Henderson;
The fact is that, whatever his background and whatever his views, the values which Simpson demonstrated at Gallipoli are much admired - from the bottom up.
He might be interested to hear a story I've been told. At a dinner at the War Memorial in Canberra to mark the 75th anniversary of Gallipoli one of the diggers was asked what he thought of Simpson. "We shot him" was the brief reply. His version of the story was that Simpson wandering around kept identifying Australian troop positions to the Turks, and since he wouldn't stop they shot him. According to my source at the dinner War Memorial staff said they had researched this and there is evidence that Simpson was shot by Australian troops, but who wants to destroy a hero?
The real message is that history is different to an interest in facts. And as for this being a "culture war" - it seems to me that everyone else gets it that culture, like language, evolves, and hence there never has been, nor can be, a single "unifying" culture.
By the way - my grandfather Henry Leopold Spratt (who added the Havyatt when he migrated to Australia in 1928) fought at Gallipoli and was part of the New Zealand force that took Chunuk Bair.
Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald on Anzac Day claimed a victory of sorts in what he calls the "culture wars". He based this on the interest expressed by young Australians in the "facts" of World War I, and argues this means they reject the view that those who died did so in vain fighting someone else's war.
This is simply wrong on so many levels it is not funny. At the most basic, the interest in the young in memory and war graves is about understanding the agony. The baby boomers among us can tell you a different story - we grew up with a generation of parents who took the process of remembering war seriously, but never talked about it. It was really quite hard to associate oneself with these very internal and unstated memories.
This feature that returned servicemen didn't share their stories is something people are only beginning to realise - I think everyone thought it was only their father, or their grandfather, who didn't talk about the war.
It has taken having a half a century between the last war that had mass involvement and today for that sense of wonderment to return.
But the interest in the experience cannot be used to conclude anything about the interpretation that should be placed on the involvement. As I'm fond of doing myself, people arguing against something create for themselves a "strawman" argument to critique. The strawman that Henderson attacks is this;
From the 1950s to the 1980s, the public commemoration of Australia's involvement in World War I was usually associated with the theme that those who had fallen at the Dardanelles or on the Western Front had died in vain fighting other people's wars. This was the predominant view in history texts (Bill Gammage's The Broken Years), plays (Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year) and films (Peter Weir's Gallipoli) as well as in much journalism.
But let's break this down into its component bits. Firstly, did the Australian (and New Zealand) volunteers understand what they were volunteering for? Certainly not, the view being universally that this would be a short lark - after all war like this had never been seen before (except in New Zealand, strangely, where trench warfare was invented).
Secondly, was there a great purpose to the war? Almost certainly not. There was no great crash of idealogies involved - heck the protagonists were cousins. There had been in defence of empires an escalating arms race that ultimately spilt into war.
Thirdly, was it important to Australia that Britain won? This is probably a most useful debating point. Yes, Germany had ambitions on parts of the British empire. Yes it could have been possible that Australia would have become part of a German Empire. But what would have been different? It was a protestant, capitalist state with developing democratic institutions and effective rule of law. It was economically more advanced than Britain, with Germany joining the US in leading in fields like electrical goods and chemicals - the so called second Industrial Revolution.
Did the young men suffer, bleed and die? Yes. Did they think it was for a good cause? Yes.
The real tragedy of WWI, however, was not that war itself. It was that the settlement of that war led to the preconditions for the war that had to be fought, and had to be won. The war that was against an ideology first and foremost, but also a maniac.
In his suggestion that the values of the diggers are admired Henderson briefly includes a discussion on the story of Simpson and his donkey. He notes the criticisms that have been made, that Simpson was really English who had jumped ship in Australia, that he was a left-winger and refused to fire a shot. But says Henderson;
The fact is that, whatever his background and whatever his views, the values which Simpson demonstrated at Gallipoli are much admired - from the bottom up.
He might be interested to hear a story I've been told. At a dinner at the War Memorial in Canberra to mark the 75th anniversary of Gallipoli one of the diggers was asked what he thought of Simpson. "We shot him" was the brief reply. His version of the story was that Simpson wandering around kept identifying Australian troop positions to the Turks, and since he wouldn't stop they shot him. According to my source at the dinner War Memorial staff said they had researched this and there is evidence that Simpson was shot by Australian troops, but who wants to destroy a hero?
The real message is that history is different to an interest in facts. And as for this being a "culture war" - it seems to me that everyone else gets it that culture, like language, evolves, and hence there never has been, nor can be, a single "unifying" culture.
By the way - my grandfather Henry Leopold Spratt (who added the Havyatt when he migrated to Australia in 1928) fought at Gallipoli and was part of the New Zealand force that took Chunuk Bair.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
The Work Plan
When I renamed my blog "Anything Goes" before my sudden abandonment of it I wrote a short piece explaining why I chose the title. I did it because too many people in discussion argue from a position of the correctness of their own theoretical position, which is OK so long as both parties adopt the same theory. But increasingly in the area of public discourse this isn't so. There are different theories and they are often "incommensurable" - the same word does not have the same meaning in different theories.
So the adoption of the "Anything Goes" title was meant to mean that there would be blogs about theories rather than just the application of theories. I'm also concious of the fact that "Anything Goes" was the title of a book by the late David Stove that was attacking the "irrationalist" approach to science. I've had the book for a while but have only nibbled at it. I have decided it needs a far more robust response - but not today.
One of the things Stove does in that book is construct his own "strawman" of the general thesis being propounded by his rivals - and this strawman he then attacks. This is a technique that really is the only way of engaging in discussion about theories, but it is not always valid. For example, Stove starts by criticising the irrationalists because they. he claims. do not accept that there is a growth of knowledge, and he attempts to suggest this must be absurd because anyone looking at the last 400 years of science would see more knowledge now than before. I think perhaps Stove has missed a major point here that the "irrationalists" do not dispute this point but do say that the curve of Amount of Knowledge as a function of time is not monotonically increasing everywhere and there are times where it can go down.
But enough of that for now. The purpose of this post is to say I have three projects that I wish to explore here over coming weeks. The first is an assault on what I call "economic libertarianism" - a thesis that the collective action of self-interest cannot be improved upon. The second is a short contribution to what has become known as the History Wars - in which I will try to discuss "What is History" and in the process will rely heavily on a book by that name by E.H.Carr. And finally I wish to launch an assault on what I will call the Quadrant Realist Tradition - a troika of belifs that embraces realism, a correspondence theory of truth and a designation theory of meaning; this belief set is the core of a set of derisory criticisms of a notional left consisting of postmodernists who are painted as describing truth as relative and operating through a collective of manipulative "elites".
So hold on for the ride.
So the adoption of the "Anything Goes" title was meant to mean that there would be blogs about theories rather than just the application of theories. I'm also concious of the fact that "Anything Goes" was the title of a book by the late David Stove that was attacking the "irrationalist" approach to science. I've had the book for a while but have only nibbled at it. I have decided it needs a far more robust response - but not today.
One of the things Stove does in that book is construct his own "strawman" of the general thesis being propounded by his rivals - and this strawman he then attacks. This is a technique that really is the only way of engaging in discussion about theories, but it is not always valid. For example, Stove starts by criticising the irrationalists because they. he claims. do not accept that there is a growth of knowledge, and he attempts to suggest this must be absurd because anyone looking at the last 400 years of science would see more knowledge now than before. I think perhaps Stove has missed a major point here that the "irrationalists" do not dispute this point but do say that the curve of Amount of Knowledge as a function of time is not monotonically increasing everywhere and there are times where it can go down.
But enough of that for now. The purpose of this post is to say I have three projects that I wish to explore here over coming weeks. The first is an assault on what I call "economic libertarianism" - a thesis that the collective action of self-interest cannot be improved upon. The second is a short contribution to what has become known as the History Wars - in which I will try to discuss "What is History" and in the process will rely heavily on a book by that name by E.H.Carr. And finally I wish to launch an assault on what I will call the Quadrant Realist Tradition - a troika of belifs that embraces realism, a correspondence theory of truth and a designation theory of meaning; this belief set is the core of a set of derisory criticisms of a notional left consisting of postmodernists who are painted as describing truth as relative and operating through a collective of manipulative "elites".
So hold on for the ride.
Wednesday, January 08, 2003
Is it just me or has anyone else noted how the escalating hysteria about (a) the "black armband theory of history" and (b) "border protection" just continues to highlight the inconsistency between the two positions. And it is a particularly fun debate because you get to put it in the context of that most favoured of economic concepts - property rights. How come if it is so important that "we chose who should come here" should we assume previous generations' decision to invade was okay?
And does the absence of a concept of individual property in that early period justify the position? Not really, because the justification of the current position is about communal property - the overall thing called Australia (including those islands currently proscribed by regulation). So previous inhabitants had just as much right to chose who should come.
Perhaps it just reveals the simple corollary of the institutional underpinning of capitalist economies, that posession is nine-tenths of the law. But more importantly it reveals the uselessness of trying to decide these questions on the basis of absolutes. These are both relative questions and need to be discussed within a context. And as that context changes - either with time or frame of reference - the conclusions may be different. How firmly I should believe in my conclusions can be tested by some simple "sensitivity" analysis - how much do my conclusions vary if I change the context.
Our internal debate about our relationship with indigenes and our debate about people whose home lands are such that they will risk much to seek to relocate both draw us to current questions of economic development. And to discuss that we go to the really big questions of defining progress. That's for another conversation - but I'll declare my bias - I'm happy that I and my children live in 2003 and would prefer to live in this year now than in any preceeding year. And I think that the institutional (and associated cultural) developments that have accompanied this have been generally good. So these changes are clearly worth imposing on others - it is the altruistic thing to do - far more than "preserving cultures".
But just as the development of capitalism varied depending on the fine detail of the fuedalism it replaced in different parts of Europe, there is no one "model" of liberal democracy. And certainly the success of developing liberal democracies will need to be sensitive to the initial conditions experienced.
But equally our own institutions must essentially be continually questioned. Constitutional debate in general is therefore of far greater significance than usually recognised. And it is not merely about republics versus monarchies, or federalism versus centralism. It includes the relationships between the much vaunted three wings of government. It includes the way the citizens select their representatives and their relationships with them. "Judicial activism" is of itself not wrong - without judicial activism in eras past there would be no contract law.
This is so self-evident (to me at least) I wonder why more of the national discourse is not engaged in these debates I suspect it is because of the false distinction between the absolutists and the relativists - and one camp is so certain in truth that it must at all times defend what we have, and the other so entranced by a misunderstood extrapolation of "anything goes" that debate is not properly joined. The right is conservative not by dint of reason, but as justification, the left dispersed, disorganised and confused or - at its worst - merely oppositional, defining itself merely as what it is not rather than what it is.
And does the absence of a concept of individual property in that early period justify the position? Not really, because the justification of the current position is about communal property - the overall thing called Australia (including those islands currently proscribed by regulation). So previous inhabitants had just as much right to chose who should come.
Perhaps it just reveals the simple corollary of the institutional underpinning of capitalist economies, that posession is nine-tenths of the law. But more importantly it reveals the uselessness of trying to decide these questions on the basis of absolutes. These are both relative questions and need to be discussed within a context. And as that context changes - either with time or frame of reference - the conclusions may be different. How firmly I should believe in my conclusions can be tested by some simple "sensitivity" analysis - how much do my conclusions vary if I change the context.
Our internal debate about our relationship with indigenes and our debate about people whose home lands are such that they will risk much to seek to relocate both draw us to current questions of economic development. And to discuss that we go to the really big questions of defining progress. That's for another conversation - but I'll declare my bias - I'm happy that I and my children live in 2003 and would prefer to live in this year now than in any preceeding year. And I think that the institutional (and associated cultural) developments that have accompanied this have been generally good. So these changes are clearly worth imposing on others - it is the altruistic thing to do - far more than "preserving cultures".
But just as the development of capitalism varied depending on the fine detail of the fuedalism it replaced in different parts of Europe, there is no one "model" of liberal democracy. And certainly the success of developing liberal democracies will need to be sensitive to the initial conditions experienced.
But equally our own institutions must essentially be continually questioned. Constitutional debate in general is therefore of far greater significance than usually recognised. And it is not merely about republics versus monarchies, or federalism versus centralism. It includes the relationships between the much vaunted three wings of government. It includes the way the citizens select their representatives and their relationships with them. "Judicial activism" is of itself not wrong - without judicial activism in eras past there would be no contract law.
This is so self-evident (to me at least) I wonder why more of the national discourse is not engaged in these debates I suspect it is because of the false distinction between the absolutists and the relativists - and one camp is so certain in truth that it must at all times defend what we have, and the other so entranced by a misunderstood extrapolation of "anything goes" that debate is not properly joined. The right is conservative not by dint of reason, but as justification, the left dispersed, disorganised and confused or - at its worst - merely oppositional, defining itself merely as what it is not rather than what it is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)