Reassessing the Iron Curtain

 

Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 totally undercuts the revisionist notion that the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe was a response to American belligerency. Roosevelt and then Truman, according Applebaum, were essentially bystanders during the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe. Iron Curtain convincingly demonstrates that Soviet-style communism, operating in the vacuum created by the collapse of the Nazi Empire, obeyed a totalitarian logic all of its own.

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http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2013/10/reassessing-the-iron-curtain-1

Aussie Green Bikers - Salisbury Review, Autumn 2013

British-born journalist Nick Cater emigrated to Australia in 1989 and his career never looked back. For nine years now he has been a senior editor at Murdoch’s flagship newspaper The Australian. Cater’s The Lucky Culture: And the Rise of an Australian Ruling Class (2013) argues that the good old days of Australian egalitarianism are now under threat from “a knowledge-owning nobility”. Cater asserts that where a spirit of fraternity and mateship once held sway in our young nation, and with it a sense of fairness and non-doctrinaire tolerance, now divisiveness rules. “Classless Australia” might be becoming a thing of the past.

Delusional to the end, Labor stays the course

      

Emotions, to paraphrase Clive James, are a tricky thing. In the midst of defeat a sense of hopelessness can often prevail, when hope is the quality required in such a situation. Conversely, during times of triumph it is humility, or at least clear-headedness, that serves us better than haughtiness. This particular reflection, admittedly, occurred to me as television pundits began calling the September 7, 2013, election for Abbott – and I sipped a celebratory glass of a 1996 Barossa shiraz.

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http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2013/09/a-party-resolutely-steeped-in-delusion

The Determination of Margaret Thatcher

In 1960, the political philosopher F.A. Hayek wrote an essay entitled “Why I Am Not a Conservative”. Any conservative who expresses admiration for Hayek can expect to be challenged at some point for the alleged paradox of their position. Margaret Thatcher, a self-declared devotee of Hayek’s work and Leader of the British Conservative Party (1975-90), was once questioned in a BBC interview about the incongruity of her stance. The Iron Lady waved aside the objection. According to Charles Moore’s authorised biography, Not for Turning (2013), she was right to assert a connection between Hayek and the Conservative Party – her rendering, at least, of the British Conservative Party.

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http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2013/9/the-determination-of-margaret-thatcher

Kevin Rudd [Mark 1]

Shortly after the ALP’s resounding victory in the 2007 federal election, psychologist-activist Steve Biddulph wrote a triumphalist missive for the Sydney Morning Herald assuring us that “Rudd and Gillard are not in power for power’s sake” and that together they would make Australia “a better place for the people in it”. Moreover, the irresistible charm of “Kevin and Julia, as Australia already calls them”, might actually “herald the end of the Liberal Party itself”. According to Biddulph’s scenario, by 2013 federal politics would be a battle between Labor and the Greens, conservative politics having “withered away". Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy is Lindsay Tanner’s take on why the fairytale went wrong.

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http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/7-8/the-labor-sideshow

Love in the Age of Choleric

Throughout the 2007 federal election campaign Senator Penny Wong declared herself to be in total agreement with the ALP’s anti-same-sex marriage policy. She argued – rather persuasively – that that “there was a cultural, religious and historical view of marriage between a man and a woman.” This past week Tony Abbott said the very same thing. While acknowledging that for many people, including his sister Christine, gay marriage represented “an important issue”, he believed in “evolutionary change” and did not want to be stampeded into a “radical change based on the fashion of the moment”. Senator Wong, who turned pro-gay marriage after the 2007 election, gave him a serve: “Note to Mr Abbott: Equality is not a fashion item.”

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http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2013/08/love-in-the-age-of-choleric

Roger Sandall, More Right Than Ever

 

Sunday, August 11, the day of the Rudd-Abbott debate, marks the first anniversary of the passing of one of Australia’s greatest thinkers, Roger Sandall (1933-2012). Sandall’s The Culture Cult (2001) is a relatively slim tome and yet it provides the sharpest of insights into an ideology that has, over the past half century, hijacked the Left in Australia and throughout the entire Western world. Marx is dead – long live anti-bourgeois bohemianism!

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http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2013/08/roger-sandall-more-right-than-ever