RUTHFULLY YOURS

The attack on free speech is one of the most disturbing manifestations of the “woke mind virus” which has captured ruling elites in the West. Donald Trump’s re-election is its most encouraging rebuttal. The historic size of Trump’s victory is evidence that we have, at last, passed “peak woke”. The lamentations and gnashing of teeth of America’s left liberals is, one hopes, its wake.At the top of the president-elect’s to-do list he says is ending the “censorship cartel … that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called ‘mis-’ and ‘dis-information’” driven by a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media … conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people” by suppressing “vital information on everything from elections to public health”.

The good news is that Trump’s proposed legislation to protect free speech in America will hamper Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s attempts to censor social media in Australia.It follows a pushback on the Starmer Labour government’s attack on freedom of speech in the UK. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s attempt to quietly throttle the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has been condemned by more than 600 academics, writers, and public intellectuals including Stephen Fry, Ian McEwan, historian Tom Holland, Lady Antonia Fraser, and former Poet Laureate Sir ­Andrew Motion. While they might have their political differences, they were united in condemning the government for not protecting ­“humane and liberal values” or opposing “cancel culture” in British universities.

With all this as a backdrop, the visit to Australia in October of Nigel Biggar, best-selling author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning and Chairman of the Board of the Free Speech Union of the United Kingdom, couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment.

Bringing anyone to Australia who has been cancelled is fraught with the fear that the visa may be delayed so long that it is not possible to hold the events. It happened to Donald Trump Junior, Nigel Farage, and even Graham Linehan, creator of popular British sitcoms like Father Ted and Black Books, who fell into the “black books” of Australian immigration officials for daring to refer to men who identify as women as “men in dresses”.

Could it happen to Biggar, emeritus regius professor of moral theology at Oxford University and an ordained Anglican minister? This was, after all, the man who dared to say to the iconoclasts that Rhodes’s statue must not fall and was cancelled by his closest colleagues for organising a project to undertake a moral reckoning of the British Empire. It seemed unlikely, but it was nevertheless a relief when his visa was granted without a hiccup.

Jordan Peterson, Canadian psychologist, best-selling author and star turn at the Australian meeting of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which coincided with Biggar’s visit, wasn’t so lucky. Peterson did lodge his application only days before he was due to depart for Sydney, but one suspects that a visa would have been more likely to materialise for a hero of the Left than for a man who refused to follow Canadian law on gender pronouns and was forced last year by the College of Psychologists of Ontario to undergo “re-education” or lose his licence for expressing politically incorrect views on social media. O tempora! O mores! 

In his seminal essay written in 1950 on “The Cultural Cringe”, A.A. Phillips wrote that “the Australian cultural cringer is like an incompetent schoolboy in an examination room, with an uneasy, defensive feeling that the examiner has a higher cultural position and greater cultural prestige than he himself possesses. He is an Australian with an Englishman looking over his shoulder.” Almost three quarters of a century later there seemed to be nothing left of the cringe with regard to history. As Biggar acknowledged, he is a Johnny-come-lately to the history wars, only becoming directly aware of the political agenda warping the history of the British Empire during the referendum on Scottish independence. The narrative being promoted was simply that the British Empire was evil and the only way Scotland could cleanse itself was through secession.

Australians, as Biggar observed, have been fighting the history wars for decades. At lunch of the two historians, Geoffrey Blainey mildly recounted how he was “cancelled” at Melbourne University in the 1980s, long before the phrase was coined. The demonisation of Quadrant editor and historian Keith Windschuttle started more than twenty years ago when he exposed the extent to which left-wing historians had fabricated Aboriginal history.

The highlight of the visit for Quadrant was dinners in Sydney and Melbourne which, like The Three Tenors concerts, brought together The Three Historians—Biggar and Windschuttle with Blainey in Melbourne and Margaret Cameron-Ash in Sydney.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Peter Robinson, host of the Uncommon Knowledge podcast at the US Hoover Institution, paid Quadrant the honour of convening a “Three Historians” podcast in November with Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, and Andrew Roberts to discuss the 1619 Project, Winston Churchill’s role in the Second World War, and the Cold War.

To a man with Biggar’s passion for visiting military sites, perhaps the only area in which Australia is deficient is the absence of battlefields in a continent that has only been scarred by skirmishes. His visit coincided with the first to Australia of King Charles and Queen Camilla giving Senator Lidia Thorpe the opportunity to perform an authentic “Unwelcome to Country”. She also gave new meaning to the phrase “splitting hairs” when she explained that to render null and void her oath of allegiance to the Crown, she swore it to the Queen and her “hairs”.

Thanks to the generous support of our donors, Biggar was able to attend not just Quadrant dinners in Sydney and Melbourne, but to speak at the Christopher Dawson Centre in Hobart, a Conversazione at the Melbourne Club organised by the eternally youthful Professor Claudio Veliz, at the Australian Club in Sydney, at the Centre for Independent Studies’ Consilium on the Gold Coast, to the Cook Society in Melbourne, the Australian Institute for Progress in Brisbane, and at events organised by the Australian and New Zealand chapters of the Free Speech Union. 

Quadrant has excellent literary, music, online and deputy editors but when it comes to the exasperating minutiae of event management, transport logistics, media and public relations, there’s only the editor. Criss-crossing the east coast, it brought to mind W.S. Gilbert’s “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell”: “Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold, And the mate of the Nancy brig, And a bo’sun tight, and a midshipmite, And the crew of the captain’s gig”. In the ballad, the elderly naval man assumes all these roles after the Nancy Bell is wrecked and its survivors eat one another until only the protagonist is left. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote in a similar vein of “Little Billee” who almost suffered the same fate after going to sea with “gorging Jack and guzzling Jimmy”, who ate their way through the provisions and then decided that, as they had nothing left, “Us must eat we”. Billee was only saved by reciting his catechism up to “the twelfth commandment” and the timely appearance of a British naval vessel captained by an admiral who hanged fat Jack, flogged Jimmy, and promoted little Bill to “Captain of a Seventy-three”.

Gilbert’s ballad was rejected by the editor of Punch as “too cannibalistic for his readers’ tastes”, a taboo that continues to this day. Readers of Quadrant know that we are one of the few publications that doesn’t shy away from the subject of cannibalism in Aboriginal society or the obvious benefit brought by British and Australian settlers stamping out the practice. You would never guess this was the case from the saccharine bromides offered up numerous times every day, not least by airlines who repeatedly acknowledged, during my travels with Biggar, “the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work, live and fly” and to whose “Elders past, present and emerging … we pay respect”. The romanticising of primitive life is the flip side of demonising the British Empire. As Michael Crichton observed:

The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true … The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself.

The taboo against telling the truth is what protects the woke establishment. Trump has been derided as everything from a boor and a buffoon to a fascist. Yet it was he, not his preening critics, who observed, “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominos one by one.” Amen to that. And merry Christmas, happy Hanukah, and happy holidays to all.