SELECTIVE COLD WAR MEMORIES Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor The Australian 14 September 2012

MILAN Kundera, the great Czech novelist, once remarked that the battle against totalitarianism is the battle of remembering against forgetting. David Marr's sloppy, frequently inaccurate and almost absurdly unfair little pamphlet on Tony Abbott, Political Animal, involves not only sloppy mistakes and ludicrous allegations. Much more than that, it involves a great act of historical forgetting, a kind of willed historical ignorance. That forgetting involves the nature of the Cold War and how the politics of that era played out in Australia, and specifically on Australian campuses in the 1970s. The Cold War was the dominant global dynamic in the second half of the 20th century. Propagandists like Marr, and a significant section of the ABC, are peddling an entirely false version of the Cold War, so false it often ends up reversing reality. At the geo-strategic level, the Cold War was the struggle for global influence between the democratic US and its allies, as opposed to the communist Soviet Union and its fellow travellers.

The contest was less important in democratic countries like Australia than the battle of ideas between traditional democratic life and the whole amalgam of Marxist, communist and other extremist and frequently violent anti-democratic ideologies. Communism has been so discredited that it is difficult to remember the vast global attraction it held, not least for very active and dedicated minorities in societies such as Australia. Marr makes a series of judgments about campus politics that have no relationship to the facts and represent either historical amnesia or historical distortion. He states, for example, that those whom he describes as Democratic Labor Party activists were as extreme as the communist and Trotskyist groups they opposed. He also told ABC's Lateline, which afforded him the usual worshipful and uncontested interview, that the 70s was a wild time in student politics and the wildest participants were the DLP students. He makes these historical judgments as incidental to his inaccurate characterisation of Abbott in that period. The obsessive and bizarre focus on Abbott's politics as a 19-year-old seems to stem in part from Marr's aggressive hostility to Catholicism. This seems to be the case in parts of the ABC, too. So let me try to provide some context to campus life in the 70s. The DLP had no presence on campuses in the 70s. The party had emerged out of the great Labor split over anti-communism in the 50s.

It never espoused extremist policies. The DLP leaders left the ALP because they felt Labor was not effectively opposing communist control of The DLP, which for many years had a slew of senators, involved dozens of former Labor politicians and state premiers who were no more extremists than any other mainstream political party. What has this to do with campus life in the 70s? Abbott and I were both members of the Sydney University Democratic Club, which was affiliated with BA Santamaria's National Civic Council. The NCC and the DLP were related because Santamaria was influential in both. But they were separate organisations with different internal dynamics and cultures. Marr's inaccuracies in basic matters of which organisation was which mirror his larger distortions. For example, he is wrong in saying Democratic Club membership was "tightly controlled". Such phrases are meant to convey a sense of the sinister. Club membership was limited only by Australian students' sturdy indifference to most politics. In any event, Marr wildly overestimates Santamaria's influence over Abbott. Abbott advocated voluntary student unionism and convinced Sydney University students to disaffiliate from the Australian Union of Students. Both these positions were opposed by Santamaria's NCC and Democratic Clubs on other campuses.

The moral equivalence Marr posits between mainstream, democratic political activists and far-left extremists is dishonest and against the facts. On many issues in campus life there was a de facto alliance between all the mainstream groups - Labor, Liberal, NCC, Australian Democrats and politically active fragments of evangelical and Jewish student movements - against the violence and extremism of the far Left. Often, the greatest hostility from the far Left was directed not at conservative students like Abbott but at moderate Labor figures. As always, the communists hated the social democrats more than they hated anyone else, although they had a special hostility for Abbott because he had a disconcerting habit of winning. Some time ago I was interviewed for 90-odd minutes by ABC's Four Corners about this period and Abbott's role. The show used about 30 seconds of what I said. Almost all questions seemed designed to get me to say that Abbott had a problem with women. Like Marr, Four Corners was not interested in finding facts and seeing what patterns might emerge; it was interested only in factoids that could be used to support existing prejudices. I knew as I spoke that certain sentences could never be be broadcast on Four Corners given its ideological commitments and hostility to Abbott's Catholicism. At one point I said: "Tony Abbott and I had some concerns for the human rights of Vietnamese after they fell under communism, unlike

the Left, who couldn't care less about them once the Americans were defeated." But the 70s were the height of the Cold War and foreign policy was important. Abbott and I and many others, including many in the ALP, opposed the Soviet Union and were concerned for the human rights of people who lived under communism. In the view of Marr and some at the ABC, this apparently makes you an oddball and a wild extremist. Whereas if you supported Pol Pot and approved of political violence, you were an idealist and your heroism against the vile forces of conformity is to be forever celebrated. The far Left was powerful on campuses in the 70s and it was violent and intolerant. It was divided into countless groupings but united by its hatred of everyone else. There was the main Communist Party, which defined itself by a notional independence from the Soviet Union. There was the Socialist Party, which took money from Moscow. There was the Maoist-line Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), which ran a bewildering array of student front groups. And then there were the energetic Trotskyist sects, often among the most violent subculture of the far Left, plus lots of nonaligned Leftists. Many of these people subsequently grew up and had productive careers once the extremism of that time was broken by democratic students who took away their institutional power. But Marxism and Marxists of different stripes had big institutional bases within the university hierarchy.

The economics department was split into a Marxist-influenced political economy department and the mainstream department. As the latter specialised in mathematical approaches, - econometrics - I took courses in political economy. It was necessary to mouth a farleft critique of capitalism if you wanted to do well. Similarly, I took a course in human geography. I remember our lecturer explaining the concept of praxis. With all the detachment of a priest instructing a first communion class, he told us it was the organic unity of analysis and practice. This had been brought to a historical peak in the person of Mao Zedong. Even as a callow undergraduate I knew that Chairman Mao had been responsible for the death through state policy of tens of millions of innocent Chinese. If that was praxis, I thought, praxis was probably a good thing to avoid. There was a similar takeover of part of the philosophy department, which split into two. The respectable half was called traditional and modern philosophy. The Marxoids were found in the general philosophy department. The far-lef students and academics were extremely intolerant. They didn't believe in "bourgeois liberal democracy" and held to bizarre theories such as that Western democracy was really a system of "repressive tolerance". On foreign policy, they almost always supported the interests of the Soviet Union and sided with Third World extremists.

I cannot remember the number of times I heard people say of Pol Pot's radical policies in Cambodia that "in order to make an omelette you have to break some eggs". The full dimensions of his genocide were not known by 1977, but a lot was known. Student money was sent overseas to support terrorist groups. Bizarre social policies were embraced in the interests of breaking down the patriarchy, which allegedly was at the root of all Australian power structures, especially the traditional family. It was a turbulent time on campus. There were front lawn meetings where conservatives were often prevented from speaking. There were poorly supported student strikes in which lecturers refused to teach the majority of students who turned up to class. So here, it seems, is how the political lexicon of the 70s works for Marr and many in the ABC. If you thought communism was a bit crook, you were obviously a reactionary fanatic. If you thought the Soviet Union abused and threatened human rights, you were obviously a wild reactionary. If you happened to be a Catholic worse, a Catholic who played football - you were the most dangerous conspirator in the pack. But if you supported Soviet foreign policy, supported Pol Pot, believed in violence, dedicated yourself to destroying the traditional family and promoted illegal drug use, you were a progressive intellectual whose heroism deserved the nation's thanks.

The problem with that lexicon is that it bears not the slightest resemblance to historical reality or mainstream life. The Cold War is so comprehensively forgotten because the communists were so comprehensively defeated, internationally and within Australia. That, by the way, is a good thing