Low distinction for revisionism

Murdoch University history lecturer Dean Aszkielowicz is not the first academic to ‘demonstrate contempt for our national heritage’.

With Anzac Day near, self-loathing academics are back. Anything that undermines our national pride, besmirches our military achievements and questions our values will be prosecuted.

Rewriting Australia’s proud military record is important to revisionists. They want us to see brave, selfless service as being nothing more than the projection of white supremacy.

Murdoch University history lecturer Dean Aszkielowicz is the latest to demonstrate contempt for our national heritage. He mocks a section of the Australian War Memorial website that states “Australians continue­ to invoke the Anzac spirit, including the concept of egalitarianism, a sardonic sense of humour and a contempt for danger, in times of hardship”. Aszkielowicz tells his students that “very few things the Aust­ralian War Memorial claims on its website about Anzac Day are true”.

How is it that only 74 years after the end of World War II, a young academic, filled with resentment and lack of appreciation for the world he has inherited, could be so ignorant of its values and have such disdain for the bravery of those who saved this country from tyranny?

Yet he and many of his academic cohort share this obsession to rewrite history and deny the real­ity that distant wars fought to preserve freedom also helped shape our national identity.

Murdoch University defends Aszkielowicz, saying “students are encouraged to draw on arguments and views from across the political and ­ academic spectrum”. “In the context of these lectures­, our academics provided ­informed but challenging comment respectfully — this is academic freedom in action,” it says.

Academic freedom? At so many universities these words have assumed Orwellian qualities. Today, freedom in the classroom and on the campus means conformity and alignment with the approved dogma. Refusal to toe the line can mean exclusion, expulsion and failure for students.

Take Bjorn Lomborg’s attempts to establish the Australian Consensus Centre, along with a $4 million endowment, at the University of Western Australia. He was rejected because, as UWA student guild president Lizzy O’Shea observed: “Many believe his (Dr Lomborg’s) ‘research’ downplays the effects of climate change and calls for inaction.” At least three other universities agreed and also turned him down.

Heretical teaching clearly has its limits. Those limits terminated the careers of Peter Ridd and Bob Carter, each having served for 30 years at James Cook University. Both differed with their colleagues over climate change, with Ridd criticising his colleagues’ “deficient” and “misleading” environmental research. He also called into question claims the Great Barrier Reef was being wrecked by global warming.

This was heresy on a grand scale and, rather than investigate his claims, the university simply fired him. It seems at JCU some academics have more freedom than others.

This politicisation of our universities also can be seen in the number of rejections experienced by the Ramsay Centre, which is seeking to establish liberal arts courses leading to a Western civilisation degree.

The centre offers a handsome endowment and numerous scholarships, but University of Queensland antagonists reflect the general academic view the courses are “trying to undermine critical analyses of ‘the West’ in favour of an anti-intellectual celebration of Western civilisation, something which is impossible to defend in a modern university”. In other words, we won’t have the virtues of Western civilisation taught at our “modern” universities.

This is now a pattern. Students at the University of NSW are told James Cook was an invader rather than a discoverer.

The rewritten history of governor Arthur Phillip portrays him as genocidal, notwithstanding his demands Aborigines be well treated. He abolished slavery 20 years before Britain. Yet better to depict him as a white supremacist than someone doing his best with what he had.

Likewise, governor Lachlan Macquarie must be remembered for his tit-for-tat violence towards Aborigines than his role in the social, economic and architectural development of the colony.

There is a growing movement to have the statues of all three removed and their names erased from public places.

Winston Churchill understood “a nation that forgets its past has no future”. French histor­ian Ernest Renan said “forgetting … is a crucial factor in the creation of the nation”.

Louisa Lim, author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, writes: “National amnesia has become what Chinese writer Yan Lianke calls a ‘state-sponsored sport’. And as Beijing’s global influence rises, its controlling instincts — to tame, corral, shape, prune, expurgate history and historical memory — are increasingly exported. At home, Beijing’s tightening grip on history deigns not only what can be remembered but also the manner in which it can be marked.”

China’s latest official version of history has the force of law. It venerates Chinese patriotism and military sacrifices. As well as uniting the country behind common beliefs, Beijing will conveniently use this history to press territorial claims over the entire South China Sea.

In Australia, we have yet to hear the vision splendid our universities and academics, such as Aszkielowicz, envisage will arise from the ashes of our best-forgotten past. Perhaps, like the Chinese, it is a socialist utopia where censorship, not academic freedom, is clinically enforced and where complying academics can win an exalted place in history.