Andrew Bolt: Leftist revolution gobbles up its Dark Emu deserters

Left-wing anthropologist Peter Sutton’s shock at being guillotined by his former ABC comrades for being on my side of the Bruce Pascoe fraud is laughable.

A man who cannot tell the truth even about his ancestry, cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the country’s past, either. Picture: Andy Rogers

Every revolution eats its own, and now the ABC has gobbled up Left-wing anthropologist Peter Sutton, right down to his sandals.

Ho, ho. No tears from me for Sutton, who on Tuesday wailed to The Australian about how the ABC and filmmaker Blackfella Films done him wrong.

Oh, he’s right, of course. Sutton was indeed crucified in The Dark Emu Story, a “documentary” on fake Aborigine Bruce Pascoe which the ABC commissioned and screened two weeks ago.

As Sutton says, he was “dudded” and “set up” after agreeing to be interviewed in the film.

He was “viciously” misrepresented and “abused”, smeared as a “racist” and accused of “ooga-booga anthropology”.

It was a ritual ABC slaughtering of a Leftist for defying the Left’s groupthink. See, Sutton had – gasp! – co-authored a book, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, which further exposed Pascoe, hero of the Left, as Australia’s greatest literary fraud.

Peter Sutton has now been ritually punished in The Dark Emu Story, which he correctly describes as ‘propaganda’ and a ‘puff piece for Pascoe’. Picture: Andy Rogers

His book is chock-full of examples of Pascoe writing a fake Aboriginal history in Dark Emu, falsely claiming Aborigines were traditionally farmers, not hunter-gatherers.

And Sutton has now been ritually punished in The Dark Emu Story, which he correctly describes as “propaganda” and a “puff piece for Pascoe”.

I should have more sympathy. I actually admire Sutton’s work as an anthropologist, and have often quoted his great essay, The Politics of Suffering.

But I must say, after reading his complaint in The Australian, that Peter Sutton is a hypocrite. He’s the biter bitten.

You can sense his horror at suddenly being treated as an outcast of the Left. But I’m one of you, he shrieks. I even worked with Marcia Langton, architect of the Voice.

But I have no tears for Sutton because of two paragraphs in his piece.

Here’s one: “In a low insult, the film links Walshe (co-author of his Pascoe book) and myself to Right-wing shock jocks and racists.”

Gosh, which “Right-wing shock jock” could he mean? The Dark Emu Story makes that clear by showing one of my bylined articles on Pascoe while the vitriolic Langton is filmed denouncing the “huddles of proto-fascists” who criticised Pascoe.

You can sense Peter Sutton’s horror at suddenly being treated as an outcast of the Left.

And here’s the other paragraph that lost Sutton my pity: “One of the many film moments shot – but not included in the end result – was my firm disassociation from Andrew Bolt. I am against his personal attacks, including those on Pascoe.”

I’m not like that shock-jock racist Bolt, says the man horrified he’s unfairly branded a shock-jock racist, too.

A question for Sutton: What are these terrible “personal attacks”? What have I said about Pascoe that you haven’t now said yourself?

Yes, I’ve called Pascoe a fake Aborigine, because it’s relevant. A man who cannot tell the truth even about his ancestry, cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the country’s past, either.

What’s more, becoming “Aboriginal” turns Pascoe into an oracle, a prophet, a critic-proof moral hero from Mallacoota.

Sutton himself said the same on The Dark Emu Story, even if he didn’t directly accuse Pascoe of fraud: “If he had been a white farmer in Mallacoota, they would have just said ‘how does he know?’

“That there are people who believe that knowledge comes with your blood and from birth, that’s obviously bullshit. So, the claim of Aboriginality is a big deal, and that is why it is humming at the moment ...

“You can get ahead in academia and the arts, the public service if you’ve got an Aboriginal identity.”

Just as I’ve said for years, to explain the preposterous number of whites now claiming to be black instead.

And, yes, I did also point out years before Sutton’s book that Pascoe made up or misrepresented the evidence of early explorers to claim they’d described Aborigines farming and living in big “towns” of “1000 people”.

Again, Sutton now also accuses Pascoe of “misuse and doctoring of quotations” – not that the ABC’s “documentary” let him say that on air.

True, it does show Sutton confronting Pascoe at Sydney’s Mitchell library (to pretend it’s even-handed) but, as Sutton confirms, most points he made against Pascoe were edited out.

But I laugh at Sutton’s naivety – his shock at now being guillotined by his former comrades for being on my side of the Pascoe fraud.

I laugh even harder to hear him protest that it’s unfair to smear him, while he smears me for exactly the same crimes against the Left. Like, you know, telling the truth.

Wake up, Peter. Fight for a principle and not a side.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Leftist revolution gobbles up its Dark Emu deserters