St Laurie Aarons: Beneath this sod lies another
Phillip Adams's (or as Geraldine Doogue would say, Phillip Adam's) program, Late Night Live, is, as far as I know, the best thing on Australian radio, but Tuesday's obit on dead Communist Party leader Laurie Aarons was sort of puke-making.
Picture a man whose main achievement was to head the one mob of Australians whose raison d'etre for decades was to do everything possible to support Adolf Hitler, and to attack, vilify and hinder every compassionate and honest soul in the world who stood for freedom versus Nazism and struggled to oppose the Nazi horrors.
OK, it wasn't Hitler and Nazism, it was Stalin (and Khrushchev, etc) and Marxism-Leninism, but the point is the same, except that during Aarons's (sorry, Geraldine: "Aaron's") heyday the Communists murderered and tortured many, many times more people than Hitler dreamed of, the Holocaust notwithstanding. Aarons kept up his dangerous, vile mission for many years after the anti-Communists that he and his cronies vilified were able to provide incontrovertible evidence that his utopias were enslaved nations. Phillip Adams and his guests did allow that Commissar Aarons "made a few mistakes" in all those years.
Mr Adams often speaks of his own membership of the Party in his youth, but never quite with beating of breast and rending of clothes one might expect. His distaste for the word 'sorry' is Howardian in magnitude. I suppose an apology to thousands of millions of people is a bit of an ask, but he and others in a similar situation could start with the Australian anti-Communists whose lives were made hell by the Aaronses, Frank Hardys and many others in the intellectual elites whose McCarthy-style influence from circa 1950 to 1990 excluded from the main Australian discourse, those who were so humanely right when they themselves were so dangerously wrong.
Bye-bye Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong and the rest, and may the name of Laurie Aarons become as risible and yet feared to posterity as the Oswald Mosleys, Unity Mitfords and Joe McCarthys of the world.
Picture a man whose main achievement was to head the one mob of Australians whose raison d'etre for decades was to do everything possible to support Adolf Hitler, and to attack, vilify and hinder every compassionate and honest soul in the world who stood for freedom versus Nazism and struggled to oppose the Nazi horrors.
OK, it wasn't Hitler and Nazism, it was Stalin (and Khrushchev, etc) and Marxism-Leninism, but the point is the same, except that during Aarons's (sorry, Geraldine: "Aaron's") heyday the Communists murderered and tortured many, many times more people than Hitler dreamed of, the Holocaust notwithstanding. Aarons kept up his dangerous, vile mission for many years after the anti-Communists that he and his cronies vilified were able to provide incontrovertible evidence that his utopias were enslaved nations. Phillip Adams and his guests did allow that Commissar Aarons "made a few mistakes" in all those years.
Mr Adams often speaks of his own membership of the Party in his youth, but never quite with beating of breast and rending of clothes one might expect. His distaste for the word 'sorry' is Howardian in magnitude. I suppose an apology to thousands of millions of people is a bit of an ask, but he and others in a similar situation could start with the Australian anti-Communists whose lives were made hell by the Aaronses, Frank Hardys and many others in the intellectual elites whose McCarthy-style influence from circa 1950 to 1990 excluded from the main Australian discourse, those who were so humanely right when they themselves were so dangerously wrong.
Bye-bye Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong and the rest, and may the name of Laurie Aarons become as risible and yet feared to posterity as the Oswald Mosleys, Unity Mitfords and Joe McCarthys of the world.
Pip Wilson posted item above at 8:52 AM | Permalink
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