By Peter Boyle
Resistance's successful anti-racist campaigning among secondary students has been furiously attacked by several conservative newspaper columnists and by the editor of Sydney's Daily Telegraph, Piers Akerman, for "manipulating" and "brainwashing" school children.
But the more they have ranted and raved, the more these conservative "commentators" have exposed themselves as the real manipulators. They get paid huge salaries to manipulate public opinion, day in and day out.
Distortion of the facts, exploitation of common prejudices, tendentious arguments, pretensions to respectability and unfair insinuation are their professional tools.
The talkback radio "shock-jocks" have extra weapons: they can cut off their "interviewees" or callers at will; they abuse, belittle and intimidate callers; they have the power to select which callers they allow on air. They get huge salaries for their manipulation. For example, according to Nikki Barrowclough in the June 6 Good Weekend magazine, John Laws was paid $11 million in 1997.
In trying to brand Resistance as sinister communist manipulators, the conservative commentators had to resort to a whole array of dirty tricks.
Piers Akerman compared Resistance to the 1930s Hitler Youth in the July 9 Daily Telegraph: "His black-shirted [actually Hitler had the "brownshirts" and Mussolini had the "blackshirts"] thugs enlisted hundreds of thousands of young Germans to march in support of his policies for nearly 20 years, and it was definitely politically correct to participate. It is no more paternalistic to claim that the young Germans were manipulated than it is to note the same sort of manipulation at play in the phony demonstration last week."
In the same column he also accused "radical teachers" of manipulation: "Schoolteachers have notoriously misinformed young people about numerous issues, the environment, ecology and nuclear energy in particular. It is in the nature of schoolteachers to style themselves as radicals and encourage hero worship from their immature charges who revel in the notion of challenging authority, parental, governmental and moral."
Akerman repeated and expanded his lurid comparisons in his July 28 Daily Telegraph column, entitled "Mirror of history's hatred": "China had its Red Guards, Russia the Young Pioneers, Hitler his Jugend and Australia has Resistance. They all look the same and sound the same. Young people being exploited by others for their own purposes."
One Nation's Queensland leader, Bill Feldman, repeated this garbled slander in his inaugural speech to parliament, where he called for the student campaign to be "stamped out" lest young people's minds be "twisted and warped".
"It's our equivalent of the sloganising of the fascist blackshirts of the socialist Mussolini who busted up the meetings of their political opponents. It's the equivalent of the sloganising of the brownshirts of the Nazis ... who busted up the meetings of their opponents. It is the equivalent of the sloganising of the redshirts ... who smashed the meetings of their opponents in every country."
This is a diversion from the more accurate comparison there is to be made between the political rhetoric of One Nation's leaders and the fascists of Hitler and Mussolini. The scapegoating of Aborigines and Asians today has a chilling similarity to the fascists' scapegoating of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.
Other conservative commentators, like News Limited's Michael Duffy (whose columns are featured in Sydney's Daily Telegraph, Brisbane's Courier-Mail and other rags in the Murdoch stable), have been more open in attacking other anti-racists, including Sydney's deputy mayor, Henry Tsang, and author Thomas Keneally.
"It's time for Hanson's enemies to stop hiding behind the word 'racist', which is being used so often to describe One Nation, and come out into the open and justify their absurd hatred of Pauline Hanson", Duffy blustered.
Sanitising One Nation and its far-right backers and organisers, Duffy added: "In Europe, the headquarters of right-wing political parties are staffed by young skinheads with criminal records. In Australia at One Nation offices and meetings, you meet ordinary-looking Australians, pretty typical of all of us except they're a bit older and more Anglo-Celtic. Just what do the critics fear from such people?", he asked with contrived innocence.
This deserves to be known as "the Duffy Rule of Political Correctness": you can't be a racist if you look Anglo-Celtic.
Only the most intellectually bankrupt or the dishonest can keep up with this pretence that One Nation is not racist or that its rhetoric about "equal rights" does not amount to a demand that the real and gross inequality suffered by Aborigines be perpetuated. Nor can they seriously deny that One Nation does not continually promote the racist scapegoating of Asians.
Because One Nation's apologists cannot win this argument rationally, they have turned to red-baiting.
While Duffy clumsily tried to taint Resistance with the crimes of Stalin, the Sydney Morning Herald's regular columnist P.P. McGuinness (also now editor of the right-wing journal Quadrant) employed a more sneaky approach in his July 9 attack on Resistance.
"As one who spent a fair amount of time in my younger days organising and taking part in demonstrations, long before it became fashionable, and got arrested on several occasions and in several countries, I am hardly in a position to criticise young people who do the same these days. Nor would I want to", McGuinness began.
This is just a slimy way of saying these students don't know what they are protesting about, they are just following fashion (funny, I thought the media wisdom was that protesting had become unfashionable!) and that McGuinness knows all about protesting.
"They are perfectly right to detest racism, whether directed against Aborigines or immigrants and to express their detestation of it", he continues. "But demonstrators, particularly the idealistic young, are often enough the dupes of far more sophisticated and less idealistic people whose motives are not as straightforward. There used to be a standard joke about the old Communist Party organisers of 'spontaneous' demonstrations; and of course, they pioneered the front organisations which enable a tiny minority to manipulate much larger numbers of people."
If anti-racists was stupid enough to follow McGuinness' advice, they would keep their protests private and individual. Perhaps one could write letters to newspapers or to the prime minister, but on no account participate in a demonstration unless you are old and cynical (or you were McGuinness and living in the '60s).
Without any facts to prove manipulation, McGuinness opts for asserting guilt by associating the Resistance-called anti-racist action with unspecified but allegedly manipulated demonstrations organised by the Stalinist Communist Party of Australia.
McGuiness' convoluted argument succeeded in confusing at least one right-winger, who wrote into the SMH after the July 24 national secondary school walkout, openly called by Resistance, to point out how sinister it was that "spontaneous" walkouts took place all around the country.
McGuinness might have confused some of his feverish fans, but he admitted that Resistance had widely acknowledged organising the demonstrations. In case anyone thought that wasn't sinister or manipulative enough, he went on to concede that he knew that Resistance did not arise out of the Stalinist parties, indeed its origin was from the anti-Stalinist left.
But facts are not allowed to get in the way of slander. Resistance, wrote McGuinness, is "one of the many tiny sectarian Left groups left over from Trotskyism. Such groups (or, as the French call them, groupuscules, to emphasise their minuscule membership) are not always committed to democratic principles or methods, nor are they always peaceful in their intent. It is always in their interest to provoke the police to violence — and the police are often crude and naive enough to allow themselves to be provoked. If they maintain discipline, it used to be common for middle-class girls to make sexual comments or even spit in their faces in order to make the younger police lose control."
Resistance, McGuinness insinuates is undemocratic, provokes violent clashes with the police, uses young middle-class girls for sexual provocation and in any case is so small that it's irrelevant. There's nothing like a string of unsubstantiated insinuations, spiced with a sex angle, to keep readers' interest, if not their critical attention.
In fact, Resistance is many times more democratic than the Liberal, National, Labor and One Nation parties, and bears no comparison to the totally undemocratic media empire McGuinness works for.
Resistance is a vocal opponent of both the dumb confrontationist tactics advocated by some ultra-left sects and the "ignore her and she'll go away" approach advocated by the Labor Party and those it influences within the anti-racist movement. If Resistance is so inconsequential, why does McGuiness waste a column attacking the organisation, urging ASIO to "keep close tabs" on it?
Akerman, McGuinness, Duffy and the One Nation MPs who parrot their line have not cited a single instance of either Resistance or radical teachers coaching or manipulating protesting students.
Indeed, the totally independent anti-racist views of the students shone through in interview after interview with local and international media at the July 24 national walkout. The truth is that the Resistance-initiated actions set in train a powerful new movement of young people, acting as the political conscience of the people of Australia.
As they marched along the streets, there were applause, smiles and tears of pride from large numbers of people regardless of their backgrounds, myself included.
What worries the conservative commentators is that this anti-racist youth movement could seriously undermine the systematic manipulation that they are paid huge sums to carry out. That's what has driven Akerman, McGuiness and their ilk into such a frenzy.