Professor John Quiggin slimes Windschuttle
Gerard Jackson
Joe Cambria, who occasionally writes for Brookes, sent us the following e-mail for publication. Ordinarily this kind of thing would not be worthy of comment. However, Professor Quiggin is one of Australia's prominent leftists with considerable access to the Australian Financial Review. The comments that follow the e-mail will cast more illumination on Quiggin's approach to these who challenge his lefty outlook.
"I thought you may be interested to know that since yesterday I have had a raging fight with John Quiggin. Quiggin had the audacity to call Windschuttle a racist because of a book he is about to publish (or has published) on the White Australia policy. Quiggin hasn't read the book but is prepared to malign Windschuttle as a racist. I find this horrid. Although I haven't read Windschuttle's works I have noticed that leftoids accuse him of horrible things but I have not read anything anywhere directly refuting his work on Tasmanian aboriginals. In other words leftoids call him names etc. and think that is enough rather than attacking his work in a scholarly way.
"I took to Quiggin repeatedly, asking him how he could attack Windschuttle without reading his book. He then accused me of being a racist as well. I let him have it. I called him a Nazi and a second rate mind. He has now threatened me with legal action. I have never feared a thug like Quiggin so I encouraged him to go right ahead as I would be happy to see him in court. The man throws names and accusations around like they were balls. Honestly, I don't understand how someone like that could teach kids. This is a serious accusation to make against someone. I dare Quiggin to sue me and let the courts see how many people this animal has maligned in the past. I know of three already".
Now Quiggin accused Windschuttle of being "…a consistent apologist for racism, [and one who is] happy to use racist arguments in support of his cause." This statement is about as defamatory and as vindictive as one can get. (Incidentally, Windschuttle does not belong to any political organizations or groups).
But this tactic of smearing the man rather than debating him is par for course for Quiggin. Not only is Windschuttle a racist, for example, but Mark Steyn the columnist is a "calculating liar" and Steve Milloy, a biostatistician, is "slime". It gets worse: the renowned
Daniel Pipes is accused of being sympathetic to terrorists as well as trying to "suppress free speech on campus".
(The hypocritical Quiggin took umbrage because Pipes and campuswatch had the audacity to expose leftwing thuggery in US colleges and universities. Now he has the nerve to threaten litigation against a critic in an effort to shut him up. Shame on you, Professor Quiggin).
Quiggin's political hatred runs so deep that he also made the bizarre claim that Christian fundamentalists were just as dangerous as those Islamo-Nazis who are responsible for the 9/11 atrocity. His proof? "Fundamentalist Christian militias" were basically responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing. This is one hell of a whopper, even for someone as politically bigoted as Quiggin.
And this insufferably conceited ideological windbag has the gall to present himself as an unprejudiced scholar whose only interest is the truth.
Needless to say, yours truly has also felt the wrath of Professor Quiggin's profound political insights and stinging wit. He used his site to accuse me of defending Stalinist tactics (sic) to justify Letelier's murder because Letelier was a KGB agent. This is another of his lies. (See An academic's libels and Letelier's treason). Quiggin also accused me of belonging to the "Stalin school of falsification".
To be fair, our establishment rightwing can also be pretty mean-spirited. For example, Nahan, director of the Melbourne-based IPA, falsely accused me in writing of suffering from "delusions". Self-professed free-market conservative Tim Blair behaved just as badly when stated that I "deserve to be blacklisted".
I'm not suggesting that our right is as bad as Quiggin whose specialty appears to be moral posturing, character assassination and personal abuse: These are the typical tools of an academic lefty coward. My point is that the right is far from being pure, despite its pretensions to the country. And this brings me back to Quiggin.
When it came to dealing with his vilification of Windschuttle it was Joe Cambria, an outsider, who had the guts to take him by the horns on the matter and expose him as a lying political bigot. Our establishment right, as usual, was no where to be found.
On a final not: Although Quiggin is a professor of economics he appears to have missed the fact that union support for the White Australia Policy was probably motivated by a dim understanding that a rapidly increasing labour supply from Asia would drive down wage rates. This, professor, is called supply and demand analysis.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 13 December 2004