John Howard Lashes Left

From the Sydney Morning Herald

Hat Tip Andrei, Sir Humphries

The Prime Minister, John Howard, has revived the culture war with a strong attack on Australia's left-wing intelligentsia...

In a speech last night for the 50th anniversary of the conservative magazine Quadrant, Mr Howard hailed its record of countering "stultifying orthodoxies and dangerous utopias that have, at times, gripped the Western intelligentsia".

Warning that Australian universities were still breeding leftists, he described the left as having "fangs" and questioned its nationalist loyalty over the past decades. He said pro-communists of decades past were not naive idealists but "ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression".

"It became the height of intellectual sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less oppressed than people under the yoke of communist dictatorship," he said.

"(But) we should not underestimate the degree to which the soft left still holds sway, especially in Australia's universities, by virtue of its long march through the institutions."

Mr Howard blamed the left for "the incomprehensible sludge" in school curriculums and "the black armband view of Australian history", his term for those who pushed for white Australia to apologise to Aborigines over past wrongs.

New Zeal What a winner!