Anticommunism and Vietnam. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Since I am mentioned in two letters in the July-August Quadrant--from Stuart Macintyre and Paul Ormonde--I trust I may reply.

Dealing with Mr Macintyre in the context of Manning Clark, I do not suggest criticism of the dead is wrong as a general principle: it depends on the context, though it is sometimes seemly to leaven it with politeness and dignity. Abuse and defamation of the dead was one of Clark's own specialities. A feature of Clark's writing was readiness to attack only the dead or people not remotely capable of hitting back. Compare his unctuous praise of Robert Menzies' allegedly "tragic grandeur", when Menzies was alive and influential, with his categorisation of him as some kind of quisling and damned soul when he was dead. Given his proclivities in this direction Clark's acolytes can hardly object to his own scholarship, ethics and personality being posthumously criticised.

Turning to Mr Ormonde's letter, I am simply unable to argue with his apparent overarching proposition that to fight communism was a bad thing, for much the same reason that I would find it difficult to argue with someone who believes Hitler was right. I believe Santamaria was wrong on some important issues. But in organising to fight communism he was as indefeasibly right as Claus yon Stauffenberg and the German anti-Nazi bomb-plotters.

I also find it difficult to argue with someone who apparently sees no moral difference between the methods of communism--state-sponsored terror and military aggression and a theory and praxis which denies the existence of objective good and evil except in the service of revolution, with a total of about 100 million dead to its credit--and the methods of argument and persuasion that were employed by Santamaria and which were hardly if at all different from those of ordinary party politics in democracies. Pace the implications of Mr Ormonde, or the claim that Santamaria rigged meetings like Moscow trials, it is not qualitatively comparable to having opponents shot or sent to gulags or re-education camps. Supporters of North Vietnamese communism seem to me to have little moral right to criticise Santamaria's youthful verbal support of Franco.

Contrary to Mr Ormonde's claim, I did not say News Weekly had never discussed Centesimus Annus, which endorses free markets. I said I did not recall seeing it discussed and said this as an adverse criticism of News Weekly. If AD2000 did discuss Centesimus Annus, that is a point in its, and Mr Santamaria's, favour. Mr Ormonde's invocation of Quadragesimo Anno shows such polemical ineptitude that, if he can still find such a facility, he might consider checking himself in for urgent ideological repairs. Quadragesimo Anno described socialism as "far worse" than the evil it sought to remedy, and pointed out that Pope Leo XIII had in Rerum Novarum strongly defended the right of property against the tenets of socialism "by showing that the abolition of private property would result not to the advantage of the working class but to their extreme harm".

The Council for the National Interest is not "seemingly moribund" but publishes a quarterly journal, National Observer (formerly Australia and World Affairs).

I turn to Mr Val Noone and Retrieval, the magazine which memorably printed and apparently endorsed Chomsky's claim that: "The widely-reported photos of Khmer Rouge atrocities are fakes." If, as Mr Ormonde says, Mr Noone was not a mere contributor to Retrieval but founding editor, this increases Mr Noone's responsibility for its contents. I would have thought a better polemic tactic for Mr Ormonde to adopt here would have been silence. However, if he wants the record of that journal dragged into the light of day I will hold my nose and point out that in the issue of October-November 1977, it claimed protests about ...