Phillip Adams and the
moral bankruptcy
of the left
Gerard Jackson
Phillip Adams pathological attacks on Prime Minister Howard, particularly over the toppling of Saddam, serve to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy and utter hypocrisy of the left.
Of course, there is nothing new in Adams' recent verbal assaults against Howard. His hatred of Howard is that deep and unreasoning that he has even accused him of being a "traitor" (The Australian 4/7/98). An accusation that he intended to be taken seriously.
To justify his vicious claim that John Howard betrayed Australia Adams was forced to defend genuine treason. According to this left-wing moralist — now that is an oxymoron — real traitors like Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean and Kim Philby provided "aid and succour to communism because that ism, warts and all, seemed vastly preferable to the other isms on offer: Nazism and Fascism . . . Ditto for the physicist who gave the Russians some of the secrets of the Manhattan Project.... Yet the term treason was used against the likes of Klaus Fuchs as if they were on par with Lord Haw-Haw."
What this odious double-talk amounts to is that those diplomatic officers and physicists who betrayed the Western democracies to the murderous Joe Stalin were not traitors at all but agents of "the forces of history." This is Adams at his sanctimonious worst.
MacLean, Burgess, Philby. Blunt, Fuchs did not betray Britain because of Hitler. This is just another left-wing lie to justify their treachery. These British traitors became dedicated Marxist-Leninists while at Cambridge University. Their commitment to Stalinism was such they would have betrayed their country no matter what. Let us not forget, however much Adams would like us to, that these traitors worked to turn Britain into an extension of Stalin's Gulag.
If they were driven by a fear of Hitler, why did they support the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact? Why did they betray their country to Stalin while he was sending war material to Germany to be used against Britain? Why did they continue to spy for this mass murderer even after Nazi Germany had been crushed? Well, Adams, why did they? If Philby was driven by his hatred of Nazism, as Adams claims, why did he betray Volkov to the NKGB, who then tortured him to death, several months after the war ended?
These men were guilty of the most appalling treason. They betrayed their country to a regime that without mercy and with premeditated ferocity put to death millions upon millions of its own citizens. It killed with starvation, the rope, the firing squad, mass torture and by working millions of them to death in the freezing wastelands of the Gulag, the Kolyma arctic death camps being the most notorious in the Gulag. This is the regime to which these traitors betrayed Britain.
This is the regime to which these traitors dedicated themselves to handing over the British people. And this is the treason that Adams defends. These are indisputable facts that Adams completely ignores
Adams appalling assertion that Lord Haw-Haw's treason was greater than Fuchs' demonstrates his contempt for the truth. Fuchs' family were known, because of their politics, as the Red Fuchs (Red Foxes) of Kiel. Fuchs got his politics from his family and not any hatred of Hitler. Fuchs, like many others, abused his position of trust to betray the democracies to Stalin. That he continued to do this until 1949 destroys Adams' flimsy defence that he was motivated by anti-Nazism.
In 1950 he was arrested in Britain for espionage and sentenced to 14 years. He secured an early release and then went to work for the totalitarian East German regime. Why does Adams still defend the actions of these left-wing traitors? Perhaps it is because he has always had a soft spot for totalitarian left-wing regimes, including Mao's Tse Tung's which killed about 50 million Chinese.
Having tried to whitewash genuine treason he then equated corporate tax avoidance (a perfectly legal action) with treason; he accuses "screen-jockeys" of committing treason when they profit "from routing a currency", as if these people can actually determine currency values. (Oddly enough, he neglected to mention the wharfies treason on behalf of the Soviets.) This ideological bile finally caused him to direct his pent-up hatred at Howard, a hatred he seems unable to control.
According to Adams, Howard is a traitor because he did not crush Hanson. Not only that, Adams would have us believe that Hanson was promoted by the Liberals, ignoring the fact that the Liberal Party expelled her. However, more considered opinion, and certainly more intelligent, is shifted much of the blame for Hanson's rise to where it really belongs and that is with the Labor Party and the likes of Adams.
The Labor Party ruthlessly played the race card; the Labor Party funded and exploited ethnic divisions and politics; the same party callously pursued interest-group politics without any regard for the national interest. All of this while sanctimonious Labor supporters like Adams, scorned. libelled, ridiculed, slandered, intimidated and threatened those who dared criticise these destructive tactics.
This man who directs his self-hatred onto Howard chose to ignore the Labor Party's own despicable racist history. When in 1938 John McEwen, Minister for the Interior, announced that infirm and old Jews were to be denied refugee status on account of their uselessness, Labor's John Curtin immediately gave this despicable policy his full support, leaving Nazis thugs to smugly consider this as an endorsement of their anti-Semitic policies. No wonder they could crow: "See, nobody wants Jews!"
When the Japanese advance trapped thousands of Eurasians in Singapore the Curtin government denied them refugee status, despite the protestations of Sir Charles Shenton. Even those who actively helped allied forces were left to the mercy of Japanese troops. (100 were allowed in as a token gesture.) But this kind of behaviour was on par for the Labor Party.
In 1949 Arthur Calwell, Federal Labor Minister for Immigration, opposed Asian immigration because "a mongrel Australia is impossible." It was Gough Whitlam, the Labor Party's living shrine and self-proclaimed legend, who, as Prime Minister, called the Indo-Chinese people fleeing communism "f...ing Catholic Balts." And it was the likes of Adams who enthusiastically supported those murderous communist regimes that created this Asian Diaspora. Something he has never been man enough to apologise for.
It was the Labor Party and its media mates that played midwife to Hanson and gave birth to One Nation. Yet Adams the cowardly hypocrite, the master of the oily sentence, the weasel phrase and the self-congratulatory smirk, the man who still defends Stalin's agents has the gall to accuse others of treason.
What kind of man would call corporate tax avoidance treason while praising men who worked to send millions of their fellow citizens to their deaths. I for one believe such a man to be without honour, principle or integrity. Such a man is no friend of liberty and never will be.
My opinion of Adams was later confirmed by another of his left-wing diatribes (The Australian, 25/9/99) in which he once again expressed his view that resistance to communist aggression, even in the form of the Western alliance, had been wrong. To Adams' left-wing mindset such resistance was immoral. No wonder he opposed the destruction of Saddam's sadistic regime.
Gerard Jackson is also Brookes' Economics Editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 4 August 2003