Beyond the limits: Australian anti‑communism and the unforgiving 1950s (original) (raw)

Australian Cold Warrior: The Anti-Communism of W. C. Wentworth

This thesis is a case study of the Australian anti Communist W. C. Wentworth. His wide range of associations and interests makes Wentworth an ideal subject. It will examine his anti-Communism and the various ways it manifested itself in his thoughts, policies and actions over his long political career. This study of Wentworth also sheds light on the broader spectrum of anti-Communist politics in the Cold War period in Australia. Introduction – W. C Wentworth: Australian Anti-Communist Chapter I – Defence, Survival and the Arsenals of the Free World Chapter II – Nuclear Nation: Atomic power and weapons in Australian defence Chapter III – Evatt, Émigrés and External Enemies: Wentworth and Foreign Affairs Chapter IV – Ensuring Loyalty and Security: McCarthyism, Legislation and ASIO Chapter V – Reds Amongst Blacks: Wentworth and Aboriginal Affairs Conclusion – Australian Cold Warrior

An Accidental Biographer? On Encountering, Yet Again, the Ideas and Actions of J.W. Burton

Telling Pacific Lives: Prisms of Process, 2008

I have never set out to write a biography. I'm not sure that I know how to. But early in work on my thesis-on race, work and Christian humanitarianism in the southwest Pacific-I encountered the writing and activism of John Wear Burton (1875-1971), Methodist missionary to the Indians in Fiji, 1902-1911, and mission administrator in Sydney from the 1920s to the 1940s. My first encounter was with the Burton written about by other Pacific historians such as Ken Gillion, Brij Lal, Andrew Thornley and John Garrett: Burton the social campaigner, the whistleblower on Indian indenture in Fiji. 1 The story is well known. In 1901, the Australian Methodists upgraded their mission to the Indians, originally conducted by two lay people, John Williams and Hannah Dudley, by sending ordained European missionaries: Cyril Bavin to Lautoka and John Burton to Nausori. Initially they did not concern themselves with the indenture system; Bavin never did. Burton was rather more interested, but in 1903/4, with as yet limited experience of the conditions of indenture, he was moderately approving of the system, following the usual official and mission line:

How to Remake the World: The Radical Life of Francis Jennings

Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate

This article places the historian Francis Jennings’ life in political history. Before becoming a professional historian, Jennings was a high school history teacher and a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. The connective tissue that bound Jennings’ high school teaching career to his career as a professional historian was not the history, but the politics. This article argues that Jennings’ experiences with Communism and anti-Communism profoundly shaped the way he understood the relationship between politics and history. Jennings the historian believed in a sharp division between academic history and political action. This perspective was a consequence of his repudiation of something that Communism and Truman-era anti-Communism had in common: the insistence by authorities—governmental and revolutionary—that politics could not be meaningfully separated from any other facet of life. Jennings’ willingness to toe the Party line and his subsequent HUAC testimony led him to see po...

The EMBERS of REVISIONISM (essays in full)

The EMBERS of REVISIONISM, 2017

The EMBERS of REVISIONISM Essays critiquing creationist Irish history and Roy Foster on Ken Loachʼs The WIND that SHAKES the BARLEY Niall Meehan & Brian P Murphy Contents THE EMBERS OF REVISIONISM Critiquing Creationist Irish History - Dr. Niall Meehan Introduction – enter Conor Cruise O’Brien PART I MAKING SPACE FOR REVISIONISM PART II THE SOUTH 2.1 ‘Catholic Bourgeoisie’ 2.2 Southern Economy 2.3 ‘Wonderful Catholics’, ‘Good Little Protestants’ PART III REVISIONISM AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 3.1 Deceived Schoolboys 3.2 Journalists and History 3.3 Left, Right 3.4 Reporting History 3.5 Tales of the RIC 3.6 Academic Tales 3.7 Protestant Views 3.8 Adulterers and Homosexuals 3.9 Kilmichael Interviews 3.10 April Killings 3.11 Ethnic Cleansing Retreat PART IV CONCLUSION The WIND that SHAKES the BARLEY Historical reflections on Roy Foster’s criticism of Ken Loach’s 2006 film Dr. Brian P. Murphy osb INTRODUCTION HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE FILM THE CROWN FORCES DEMOCRATIC MANDATE AND REFERENCE TO IRAQ SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ISSUES SECTARIANISM SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE WRITING OF IRISH HISTORY Southern Star letters on the West Cork History Festival Niall Meehan essay begins: Introduction – enter Conor Cruise O'Brien Historians who search for enhanced knowledge of past events never do so in a vacuum. Inevitably, societal pressures infiltrate the historian’s thought processes. When the subject matter of history comes closer to the present, politics intervenes. This is especially so in Ireland where the past is never past, but instead is considered the political present in retrospect. Attempts to control the presentation of Irish history redoubled after 1970. This was due to official apprehension that nationalists and republicans in revolt against sectarian rule in Northern Ireland might influence southern popular consciousness. The consequent attempt to revise and to reverse a nationalist version of Irish history, so as to alienate southerners from northerners, was actively pursued by Conor Cruise O’Brien. He operated prominently in four areas of Irish life: government, politics, academic history and journalism. Their interaction was central to the relative success within academia of the revisionist project. In revising Irish history O’Brien revised also his 1960s self. Before tacking to the right during the 1970s, he contributed three important articles to London’s New Left Review (NLR). They contained observations and sentiments he would later either ignore or disavow. The first in 1965 challenged Cold War neo-colonialism, a subject of which O’Brien had direct personal experience. In 1961 he was forced out of his UN role in the province of Katanga in the newly independent, former Belgian, Congo. He had opposed the violent attempts of Western interests and white-ruled Rhodesia to partition off and turn Katanga into a client state. O’Brien wrote in the Observer on 10 December that year, ‘My resignation from the United Nations and from the Irish Foreign Service is a result of British Government policy’. In exile from Ireland from 1962-68, O’Brien was associated with the ‘new left’. He opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War, racism plus police violence in the US and Apartheid in South Africa. A 1967 NLR essay explained O’Brien’s role in exposing how the CIA funded and manipulated Encounter magazine (through the Congress of Cultural Freedom). O’Brien recounted also Encounter’s failed attempt to silence him. Another 1967 essay warned that ‘counter revolutionary subordination’ of intellectuals by the state in western society was a threat to ‘scholarly integrity’. O’Brien was a committed supporter of resistance to US forces in Vietnam. Some years earlier he had supported the Algerian fight for independence from France. At a 1967 symposium on the Vietnam War O’Brien clashed with Hannah Arendt, who had remarked, ‘As to the Viet Cong terror, we cannot possibly agree with it’. O’Brien responded, 'I think there is a distinction between the use of terror by oppressed peoples against the oppressors and their servants, in comparison with the use of terror by their oppressors in the interests of further oppression. I think there is a qualitative distinction there which we have the right to make.' In December 1967 O’Brien was front-page news in the Irish Times, that reported his arrest while demonstrating against the war, and being kicked by a policeman. In May 1968 O’Brien condemned police attacks on, and harassment of, the militant, armed, Black Panther Party. O’Brien linked his Irish and international perspect-ives in his second NLR contribution, ‘The Embers of Easter’, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising against British rule. It was a robust anti-imperialist inter-pretation of Irish history. O’Brien had a connection there too. His uncle, the pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington, was executed during the Rising on the orders of a later found ‘guilty but insane’ Cork-born, Anglo-Irish British officer, Captain J.C. Bowen-Colthurst. To great fanfare, in December 1968 O’Brien joined the small but then vibrantly and newly left-wing Irish Labour Party. Under a soon to be abandoned slogan, ‘The 70s will be socialist’, he was easily elected to the Dáil (Irish Parliament) at the June 1969 general election. O’Brien’s triumphant return to Ireland coincided with the emergence of civil rights demands that became a civil rights revolt in Northern Ireland. He was quickly in the thick of opposition to the North’s ‘Orange state’ .... 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