Keith Windschuttle

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Keith Windschuttle (* 1942 in Sydney ) is an Australian writer , historian and member of the board of directors of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation . He has been editor of the Quadrant and publisher of Macleay Press since 2007 .

His books have been written since the 1970s. His most significant and also most controversial work, which opened another chapter of the History Wars , The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 (2002), which accuses a number of Australian historians of the historical facts regarding the violence falsify between white settlers and aborigines . In The White Australia Policy (2004), he argues that academic historians would exaggerate the extent of racism in Australian history.

biography

Keith Windschuttle attended Campsie Public School, Erskineville Opportunity Class, and Canterbury Boys' High School in Sydney. After high school, Windschuttle worked as a journalist for various newspapers and the like. a. also at the Daily Telegraph Sydney and magazines. He graduated from the University of Sydney with a BA (first class honors in history) in 1969 and an MA (honors in politics) from Macquarie University in 1978 . He did not finish a doctorate he had started . In 1973 he became a tutor in Australian history at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). In 1980 he wrote the documentary series Work that Was für das Fernsehen, broadcast on ABC Television . Between 1977 and 1981 Windschuttle was a lecturer in Australian history at the New South Wales Institute of Technology, now called the University of Technology, Sydney , before returning to UNSW in 1983 as a lecturer. He left UNSW in 1993 and has since been the publisher of Macleay Press, owner of Macleay College and a regular visiting professor at American universities.

Political development

In the 1960s and 1970s, Windshuttle was affiliated with the New Left , but later moved to the right. This change was first visible in his book The Media from 1984, which dealt very critically with the Marxist theories Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall . The first edition of this book, however, still advocated government regulation and damned private companies and free markets . In the third edition of the book, however, he took other positions:

“Overall, the major economic reforms of the last five years, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the imposition of wage restraint through the social contract of The Accord, have worked to expand employment and internationalize the Australian economy in more positive ways than I. thought possible at the time. "

"Overall, the economic reforms of the last 5 years, the deregulation of the financial sector and the wage restraint imposed by the social contract The Accord have expanded employment and influenced the internationalization of the Australian economy more positively than I would have thought at the time."

- Keith Windschuttle: : The Media . 3rd edition, 1988.

This political evolution continued through the early 1990s. In The Killing of History , Windschuttle defends the methods of empirical history against postmodernism and praises historians like Henry Reynolds . In the meantime, he believes that although he valued these historians at the time, he later discovered, while examining their primary sources, that they were often not based on empirical methods. Instead, historians from both the left and the right spectrum twisted and falsified history in order to strengthen their respective political goals and ideological positions.

Windschuttle presented a paper at a conference of conservative historians in 2000, in which he questioned the number of 20,000 Aboriginal people killed in massacres . He presented his evidence on four massacres and stated that the official figures did not match the results of his investigations. Due to the great public response, he wanted to write a multi-volume work. A single volume appeared in 2002 on the massacres in Tasmania , The Fabrication of Aboriginal History , which aroused fierce opposition among historians, as Windschuttle contradicted the current state of research with daring speculations. This was followed by an anthology by historians in which Windschuttle's statements were critically questioned and refuted. Windschuttle's theses led to the debate that has been going on in Australia for almost 20 years, known as the History Wars. In the Australian public, however, there was already a mood in 2000 that was seeking reconciliation and this became manifest on Sorry Day 2000, when over 250,000 people took to the streets in Sydney . Kleist evaluates this in such a way that Windschuttle reversed the desired conservative revision of history with his theses.

In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History and other recent writings on Aboriginal history , Windschuttle criticized leftist historians in particular who, in his opinion, have fabricated historical evidence. He claims that Aboriginal rights, including land rights and demands for compensation for past suffering, have become a concern of the political left , and evidence has been tampered with in support of Aboriginal goals.

Windschuttle argues that it is the task of historians to provide empirical history close to objective truth. The political effects of objective, empirical research are not the responsibility of historians. A historian can have his own political opinion, but this should never lead to falsifying historical evidence. Critics like the authors of Whitewash say that Windschuttle does not follow its own criteria and that its results always reflect its political views.

A frequent author of the conservative magazine The New Criterion and the self-edited Quadrant , Windschuttle denies that white settlers in Australia committed an Aboriginal genocide and denies the existence of a guerrilla war against British colonization. He denies that there were similarities between the Australian attitude to races with South Africa during apartheid or in Germany during the Nazi era , as he believes to see them in the portrayal of left historians.

Publications

  • Unemployment: a Social and Political Analysis of the Economic Crisis in Australia . Penguin, 1979.
  • Fixing the news . Cassell, 1981.
  • The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia . 3rd ed., Penguin, 1984, 1988.
  • Working in the Arts . University of Queensland Press, 1986.
  • Local Employment Initiatives: Integrating Social Labor Market and Economic Objectives for Innovative Job Creation . Australian Government Publishing Service, 1987.
  • Writing, Researching Communicating . McGraw-Hill, 1988, 3rd ed. 1999.
  • The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists . Macleay Press, Sydney 1994; Macleay Press, Michigan 1996; Free Press, New York 1997; Encounter Books, San Francisco 2000 online edition
  • The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847 . Macleay Press, 2002.
  • The White Australia Policy . Macleay Press, 2004.

items

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Keith Windschuttler on sydneyline.com ( Memento of the original from February 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 23, 2010. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sydneyline.com
  2. ↑ Windshuttle to edit quadrant . Sydney Morning Herald, October 24, 2007; Retrieved January 23, 2010
  3. ^ The battle is not to be left behind . theage.com.au; Retrieved January 23, 2010.
  4. ^ A b Robert Manne (Ed.): Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Black Inc., 2003
  5. ↑ J. Olaf Kleist: The Australian History Wars and what belongs to it: Limits of historical recognition and reconciliation . Retrieved January 23, 2010.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Windshuttle, Keith
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian writer and historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Sydney