„Keith Windschuttle“ – Versionsunterschied

Keith Windschuttle (born 1942) is an Australian historian and journalist who is the author of several books, including Unemployment (1979) which criticises media treatments of unemployment and advocates a socialist response, The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, a critical analysis of the media from a largely Marxist perspective, The Killing of History (1994), which is a critique of postmodernism in history, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002) which accuses a number of Australian historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence in the past, and The White Australia Policy (2004), which argues that left-wing academic historians have exaggerated the degree of racism in Australian history.

After education at Canterbury Boys High School, Windschuttle was a journalist on newspapers and magazines in Sydney. He completed a BA (first class honours in history) at the University of Sydney in 1969, and an MA (honours in politics) at Macquarie University in 1978. In 1973, he became tutor in Australian history at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Between 1977 and 1981, Windschuttle was lecturer in Australian history and in journalism at the New South Wales Institute of Technology, now University of Technology, Sydney before returning to UNSW in 1983 as lecturer/senior lecturer in social policy. He resigned from UNSW in 1993. Since then he has been publisher of Macleay Press and a regular visiting and guest lecturer on history and historiography at American universities.

A Marxist until the 1980s, Windschuttle has moved sharply to the right. His personal website [1] carries advertisements only for his more recent, right-wing books. However, he does not appear to have repudiated his earlier work in general, or to have indicated which parts, if any, he stands by.

This political evolution has continued since the early 1990s. In The Killing of History, Windschuttle defended the of practices and methods of traditional empirical history against postmodernism, and praised left-wing historians such as Henry Reynolds who relied on traditional empirically-oriented approaches. Subsequently, he has adopted an overtly polemical position, attacking Reynolds and others and freely mixing political and empirical arguments.

A frequent contributor to socio-political magazines Quadrant and The New Criterion, Windschuttle's recent research disputes whether the colonial settlers of Australia committed widespread genocide against the Indigenous Australians and denies the claims by some left-wing historians that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Extensive debate on his claims has come to be called the History Wars. He rebuts assertions, which he imputes to the current generation of academic historians, that there was any resemblance between racial attitudes in Australia and those of South Africa under apartheid and Germany under the Nazis.

Major publications

• Unemployment: a Social and Political Analysis of the Economic Crisis in Australia, Penguin, (1979)
• Fixing the News, Cassell, (1981)
• The Media: a New Analysis of the Press, Television, Radio and Advertising in Australia, Penguin, (1984, 3rd edn. 1988)
• Working in the Arts, University of Queensland Press, (1986)
• Local Employment Initiatives: Integrating Social Labour Market and Economic Objectives for Innovative Job Creation, Australian Government Publishing Service, (1987)
• Writing, Researching Communicating, McGraw-Hill, (1988, 3rd edn. 1999)
• The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, Macleay Press, Sydney (1994); Macleay Press, Michigan (1996); Free Press, New York (1997); Encounter Books, San Francisco (2000)
• The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, Macleay Press, (2002)
• The White Australia Policy, Macleay Press, (2004)

See Also

For comparison, see also Christopher Hitchens, also a former left-wing intellectual who has become an equally committed right-winger.

External link

• The Real Stuff of History

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