This week, Labor MP Tim Watts upheld his party’s 30-year revulsion for a tertiary education that is free. In a tweet aimed not just at Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit but the approach that institution takes to the study of international relations, Watts told everyone that they should just feel ashamed. Watts, a chap who has argued both poorly and at length for our nation’s very urgent need for respectful debate, appears to want those who engage in it respectfully condemned within universities.
Look. Here’s the piece that rankled Watts. You probably won’t like the state-sponsored travelogue, and I didn’t much, either. A tankie defence of North Korea is not my jam and I do not agree with Jay Tharappel that the fight against imperialism demands the subjugation of those who contest it. I ardently agree with almost no one, however, that it is the ideal work of universities to contest all pre-existing knowledge.
Surely, the liberal and imperial ideals Watts cherishes are strong enough to withstand the research of Dr Tim Anderson — I’d guess, the true target of Watts’ attack. Surely, it’s OK if one or two or three people manage to exist in the departments of our nation’s international relations departments while not arguing the Washington liberal consensus.
That a doctoral view like Tharappel’s can actually be formed within the academic context is an effing miracle. Again, I’d prefer that North Korea was not upheld as a meaningful, viable or scientifically socialist threat to US imperialism. Personally, I’d like it better if the guy had chosen Venezuela instead. I’d like it most of all if Watts, whose own views on international trade, labour and conflict can be easily sampled in all their inchoate ruin, would quit damning what remains of actually respectful debate in universities.
[Author of controversial pro-North Korea piece has firebrand activist history]
I’d also like it if Tim Watts would write for Honi Soit about his own state-sponsored trip to Israel. Then, we could all (respectfully) compare it to Tharappel’s North Korea trip so we might all come to (respectful) conclusions about that political bias, both conscious and nonconscious, that appears in every travelogue.
Which reminds me: seven years ago, local journalist Carolyn Webb wrote a travelogue. Seven years ago, local journalism wrote a prelude to its end. In a print media manoeuvre that has since become familiar, Fairfax sacrificed another soldier to win its weekly war on clicks. Webb was not a travel writer, but the company — one that had done away with more than 80 of its subeditors six months prior to the article’s arrival — commissioned and published her callow review anyhow.
Fairfax did not apologise to the many readers who found Webb’s take on a Balinese town distasteful. Instead, they published distaste for Webb, whose misdeed had been to report her irritation at all the poor people she found on a holiday in the Global South. Before you could say White Man’s Burden, a number of writers content to romanticise poverty outside the West were published.
Tim Elliot wrote a piece, now archived, urging Webb to get her head out of her G20 fundament. Which might have been a reasonable request if made by a company that did not otherwise and overwhelmingly write holiday reviews of “developing” nations as though they were trying to piss off the ghost of Edward Said. Janet DeNeefe, expat founder of a Balinese literary event, elected to dress “like a tourist” to prove that Webb had been wrong about the charms of impoverished Ubud workers. A local bloke called Nyoman appeased the Western need to read about the wisdom of the destitute. “I don’t have anything,” the worker told DeNeefe. “I just have a heart.”
It was a response by Richard Woolveridge that really got post-colonial condescension down. No, unlike Webb, he was not offended by the desperation of Balinese hospitality workers. Au contraire. He was charmed by his “animated” Balinese guide who “just smiled every time I glanced around”. Woolveridge doesn’t mind that he is subject to the “smooth” deceptions of the Balinese. After all, it’s lovely to be “taken for a ride” by simple folk. He concluded his heart-felt infantilisation of the Orient by warning others never to give money to foreign children.
I have done time as a travel writer, and even as an editor of travel writing for a terrible in-flight magazine. I can tell you, just as the Webb affair does, that political bias is almost always on painful display. You want to read a chipper holiday piece that wilfully ignores the worst crimes of a punitive nation-state? Buy the weekend papers or pick up some brochures at a US travel fair.
Crikey has learned that Jay Tharappel funded his own travel to North Korea, not a”junket” as the text originally said.
Hey Raz, how about an expose on those bloody boats traveling down the Rhine…filled to the gunnels with rich MILFS and their new 20 year older husbands.
Do we need to pretend every bit of propaganda is “debate” that is so precious that merely condemning it must be condemned? Whether that propaganda is coming from North Korean sympathisers or from News Corp and their far-right brigade, propaganda is propaganda. Pretending we have to engage respectfully with propagandists is why News Corp rules the Australian media now.
The guy is a scholar. He has formed a view. Just as every international relations student does.
It’s just that most of them tend to write theses in support of continued US trade and military dominance.
In an academic context, both of these approaches are academic choices. Not propaganda.
PS I don’t really think this respectful debate stuff is much chop, either. But, the critic of the Honi Soit writer does.
Academics are as capable of propaganda as anyone else.
It’s one thing to be anti-US (my own experience is that that is very common among history and politics academics), and quite another to be an admirer of every tinpot dictator from Assad to the Kims, and to endorse authoritarianism as a necessary antidote to the United States and claim the negatives printed about the North Korean regime are bullshit put around by US corporate shills.
As Charlie Lewis put it here in Crikey, tongue firmly in cheek, “US corporate shills like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are always banging on about the torture, repression and starvation imposed on the people of North Korea”.
I think to write this up as a scholar who has formed a considered view is being a bit naive. This is a work of propaganda trying to talk up a dictatorial regime. The fact that it’s against US military and trade hegemony as well doesn’t make it laudable.
I read often in local IR and I would say that the consensus view remains the consensus view. It’s a myth that dependency theory is taught at universities. Most often, it is not.
So one guy writing a thesis has an extreme take (which I am clear that I find reprehensible) on the need for authoritarian regimes? And publishes it in a student paper?
Does this merit public critique by an MP? Especially one apparently committed to reasonable language? Is it right for Watts to chide universities, already under siege? My view is that his is an act of hypocrisy.
“(my own experience is that that is very common among history and politics academics)”
What, like, people who have spent a lifetime studying it?
It’s true that expanded education tends to lead one to at least a slightly left of centre position, mainly because history has shown that’s the one that works best. Social justice studies will lead you inevitably to be a raving Marxist. That’s where education leads you.
It should be noted that HRW shouldn’t be regarded an unimpeachable source having been founded explicitly to propagandise against the USSR as Helsinki Watch and only later exspanding it’s scope when it became clear that it would make their anti communist work more credible.
Likewise Amnesties reports seem to be only given any press when the line up with the interests of Imperialism, Their early (and often corrected or retracted) reports about abuses by a target regime are shouted to the roof tops while later reports about the forces that deposed the regime are often ignored, see Libya for an example.
“I’d also like it if Tim Watts would write for Honi Soit about his own state-sponsored trip to Israel.”
The Israeli junket thing was a revelation, Helen? The hypocrisy of complaining about one despotic travelogue whilst being a freeloading guest of another is risible.
I have learned that the journey to N Korea was not funded, and will correct the article.
And, no. This isn’t a case of false equivalence, really. I am pointing out that stories from abroad are overwhelmingly delivered with ideology. Hence, the detour into the most overt form of travel writing.
Fair enough and noted, thanks.
I still think that there is a big does of hypocrisy in the wrap up, but your correcting the record lessens the bruise slightly.
I don’t really want to see Watts write a piece on his trip to Israel, incidentally. But, then again, there is no need. The major Australian political parties make their views on Israel widely known.
Not sure if the reference to Venezuela is meant to be in support of that country’s current kleptocratic regime or if it’s meant to be ironic, or if you’re just happy to ‘wilfully ignore the worst crimes of a punitive nation-state’.
In the last 20 years Venezuela has earned about one trillion USD through its oil exports – but has any of this wealth been used for the good of the citizens of Venezuela? A German banker is currently sitting in US prison, arrested for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars. The colleague who turned witness secretly taped him saying that he had 600 million parked with the Gazprom Bank which he needed to launder and another 200 million waiting to be ‘washed’. There is a direct connection between this money and the stepsons of the current president of Venezuela. Of course the country is a victim of US sanctions, but it’s also a victim of the kleptocrats who have been in power for 20 years. I’m not using this as an example to disparage socialism, but more to point out the fate of the people of Venezuela. More than 1.5 million people have fled the country in the last three years alone. HIV infections and deaths through AIDS have increased sharply (more than 5000 deaths last year) as well as under-age pregnancies – just to name some of the problems. I don’t think they would agree with you that their country can be ‘upheld as a meaningful, viable or scientifically socialist threat to US imperialism.’ – if that is what you meant to imply in that paragraph.
Source: various articles at https://www.sueddeutsche.de/
I source my information about Venezuela, a nation bullied into economic and political submission by the world’s fine liberal institutions for daring to have a slightly leftist leader (note: not a socialist country) more broadly.
“Surely, it’s OK if one or two or three people manage to exist in the departments of our nation’s international relations departments while not arguing the Washington liberal consensus.”
You’d think!
On the other hand that might lead to plurality of thought, and god forbid, doubt, shades of grey and even nuanced thinking.
If Chavura can write his Newcorp sponsored dross over at Mac Uni and poison the minds of the yoof, then bring on the apologists for the hermit kingdom.