Thank you for posting the transcript. What refreshing and inspiring prose!
Hooray Quadrant and Prime Minister John Howard!
But it really is an enormous pleasure for Janette and me to celebrate this great event of a great literary journal which has fought the good fight in the best sense of that expression over half a century because it is true that over the last 50 years Quadrant has upheld, often as a lonely counterpoint to stultifying orthodoxies and dangerous utopia’s, the best of the Western cultural tradition.It has helped many of us to navigate the battle of ideas, while staying true to its calling as an outlet for essays and poetry of the highest quality. Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that Quadrant has been Australia’s home to all that is worth preserving in that Western cultural tradition.
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As has already been remarked by both Paddy and Peter, Quadrant has always attracted a very diverse group of people to its circle. People of different backgrounds, different faiths as well as those of no faith, people with different party political sympathies, but all united by a commitment to intellectual freedom and liberal democracy.
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It’s worth recalling just a few of the philo-communism that was once quite common in Australia in the 1950’s and 60’s. For example, Manning Clark’s book Meeting Soviet Man where he likened the ideals of Vladimir Lenin to those of Jesus Christ. John Burton, the former head of the External Affairs Department, arguing that Mao’s China provided a model for the ‘transformation’ of Australia. All those who did not simply oppose Australia’s commitment in Vietnam, but who actively supported the other side and fed the delusion that Ho Chi Minh was some sort of Jeffersonian Democrat intent on spreading liberty in Asia.
To quote George Orwell: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool’. There is a view that the pro-communist left in Australia in decades past was no more than a bunch of naïve idealists, rather than what they were – ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression opposed to Australia and its interests....
thread cites full article...