POLITICAL BIAS IN THE ARTS AND LITERATURE.

PROBABLY NO JOURNAL more than Quadrant understands the double standards which operate in cultural, artistic and intellectual funding in this country. From the very beginning the charge that Quadrant had, knowingly or unknowingly (as far as its editors were concerned), received funds from the CIA has been used against the magazine, as if no other journal which mixed political and intellectual analysis with literary and artistic material had ever been in receipt of tainted funds. Not that there was any particular taint in CIA funds, despite that organisation's antics in other matters, at a time when many supposedly independent journals were receiving funding directly or indirectly from the KGB.

The Communist Party of Australia always received subsidies from its Soviet masters, and various Left cultural figures benefited from the ever-popular junketing around the then communist countries. It is a strange distinction which makes the receipt of funds during the Cold War from sources which were, whatever their faults, opposed to totalitarianism somehow especially to be condemned while the receipt of funds directly or indirectly from sources which were committed to totalitarianism, mass murder and the suppression of dissent is somehow to be treated as praiseworthy and to be excused by subsequent reluctant concessions that communism was repugnant, though partially redeemed by its underlying idealism.

The children and grandchildren of Stalinists in Australia nowadays like to represent their forebears as the true idealists and motivators of social change and reform in Australia, deserving of praise from those who were less obsessive and subservient to the Soviet influence. Equally, the descendants of the "useful fools" and other recipients of grants, awards, decorations, travel invitations and so on from the various organs of Soviet propaganda are supposed to be somehow more principled than those who received any kind of similar rewards from the United States, a country which with all its egregious faults has remained a democracy. The absurdity of smearing the memory of James McAuley because he was both a religious Catholic convert and a firm opponent of communism, and therefore somehow was working against or distracting attention from the social ills and evils which existed (and still exist) in Australia is easily demonstrated.

Indeed, the true offenders were those who seized upon such evils for political purposes while neglecting to mention or admit their existence in much worse form in the countries from which they drew their political inspiration. By insisting on intermixing good causes with their own repellent ideological and political commitments they did the former, and the victims of social disadvantage, discrimination and neglect, immense harm. Far more poor people were damaged by anti-capitalism, whether communist or fascist, than by capitalism in the twentieth century. For example, on the Korean peninsula, a flawed form of cartelised capitalism in the South has nevertheless produced a society in which there is far less poverty and starvation, and a greater degree of equality of wealth and income, than in the communist North.

The mindset induced by this double standard lingers in the cultural orthodoxies still. That is, there are certain political positions and social beliefs which are so obviously true and virtuous that support for them is not considered to represent political bias. This mindset is firmly established at the Australia Council, for example, from which indeed Quadrant receives some funding for which we are grateful, despite the widely held antagonism to us from many of the Council employees. However Quadrant is categorised, there is no doubt that it is no more political, and it is certainly more open intellectually, than magazines like Meanjin, Overland, Eureka Street, as well as virtually all the little literary journals which are university based and funded.

In fact, Quadrant is the only truly independent small magazine in that it has no institutional base, no large donors (organisational, corporate or individual), and no legacies of past support. It enjoys a certain amount of support from advertisers, but depends mainly on subscription and over-the-counter sales. Some of the labour is voluntary, and some paid (though not very handsomely); the payments we are able to make to contributors are derisorily low. Nevertheless we maintain a standard which is higher than most Australian newspaper, as well as small magazine, literary-intellectual publishers. The ownership of Quadrant is vested in a non-profit limited company, which appoints (and can dismiss) editors. In the past it was published by the Association for Cultural Freedom; that has long since been wound up.

Where Quadrant is unique is in its dissent from the fashions and the "progressive" consensus of the so-called liberal intelligentsia of modern Australia. This has led to a campaign of defamation and malicious lies directed against it. As in the debate concerning Aboriginal history and policy. We have been misrepresented and maligned as somehow "anti-Aborigine". This is a pure absurdity, as any fair reading of the pages we have devoted to such matters can demonstrate. Where we have disagreed from the consensus is in arguing that the current suite of policies, the consensus of the last generation, regarding Aborigines has clearly not been working to their benefit. It is hardly anti-Aborigine to argue for policies which will improve the welfare of that people when so many current policies are clearly not doing so. Instead of a rational response we have been met by malicious slander, an hysterical and irrational clamour which is almost obscene in its nature--even to the extent of the claim that we are tantamount to "Holocaust deniers" in the David Irving mode because we argue that the history of Australia is not comparable to that of Nazi Germany.