Santamaria: The Politics of Fear.(Review)

Santamaria: The Politics of Fear, edited by Paul Ormonde; Spectrum Publications, 2000, $24.95.

I STRONGLY CRITICISED some of B.A. Santamaria's ideas and actions in the last part of his life and told him so when he was alive. I am not a Catholic or a member of the National Civic Council.

Still, one need not be his unquestioning acolyte to find this gang-attack on his memory by a group of politically-correct writers associated with the defunct magazine Catholic Worker less than impressive. It appears in general obsessed, spiteful, petty and often factually wrong. But perhaps vast acuity is hardly to be expected from a publication which in the year 2000 still wallows in adolescent leftism.

There seems in any event to be something intrinsically unpleasant about collections of work by various authors setting out to denigrate an individual, particularly a deceased member of their own religious faith. The mind boggles at what might move Manning Clark to decent behaviour but even he commented that the previous gang-attack on Geoffrey Blainey reminded him of the situation in the Soviet Union where some writer was suddenly identified as a hyena and roundly condemned--and Blainey was at least alive and able to reply.

The very cover has something childishly and even sectarianly unpleasant about it: a drawing of Santamaria with unctuous expression, washing his hands in greasy Latin style under a Roman clerical hat--a garment which as far as I know never adorned him.

The polemic technique is frequently childish: hyperbolic statements Santamaria made as a student or young graduate in political debates before the Second World War are gleefully dragged forth as if discrediting everything he did and said later in a career of about sixty years. (What student has not said silly things?--and in this case some of them were not all that silly.)

His youthful verbal support for Franco in the 1930s is dwelt upon in a book some of whose contributors as mature adults supported Ho Chi Minh, architect of a far more totalitarian, murderous and apparently more permanent dictatorship.