Keith WindschuttleRecensioni

Gosh. Golly gee whiz. Hot diggity dog. Bowl me over with a feather. And other such phrases.

Windschuttle is a famous (notorious?) revisionist historian in Australia well known for his biases, but I opened this book with the genuine desire to know more about this issue. I came away bleary-eyed, bewildered, and chortling like a Catholic schoolboy at a PG-rated film.

There are only two arguments in this book, and they’re both fantastic. I use that word in its literal sense.

The first argument is from the “scientists have made up climate change for nebulous and still-unrevealed reasons!” school of thought. Apparently, countless Australian historians and archaeologists have just invented much of the history of colonial Australia. Did you know that my Anglo ancestors didn’t actually have racist views? They threw pancake parties for Aboriginals and bought them all ponies! They were so kind.

Healthy scepticism is useful, and revisiting sources from scratch rather than relying on received wisdom is grand. Here, however, KW takes his scepticism way waaaay past the healthy yardline. Ironically, for someone who accuses almost all of his colleagues of acting with obvious bias and deceptive intent, he refuses to acknowledge that he might be less than impartial. Is Windschuttle German for “confirmation bias”, by any chance?

And why, you may ask, are historians on this crusade? Well, friend, that’s the second argument of the book! You see, the plan from Australian aboriginals is to secretly take over the country. Even better, they’re using us – that is, non-aboriginal Australians – to do it! That’s right! All of this messy reconciliation business is just a ploy to get an aboriginal state taking up 60% of the continent. Next up: all of it. ALL OF IT.
This is elaborate, B grade movie, “George W Bush flew the planes into the towers” bullshit. It’s right up there with the gays are planning to Pied Piper all of our children and the Jews are tracking my grandma’s bank account.

This book will no doubt find its audience, and bring comfort to Australia’s most nervous patriots. At the same time, please don’t tell my indigenous friends about it because they will be upset that they weren’t invited to be part of the conspiracy. Unfair, Secret Leaders of the Aboriginal Junta! My friends are cool! Let them play with you!

Hmm. I seem to have wandered off the point. Which is, at least, one thing I can’t accuse Mr Windschuttle of doing. His performance is a consistent thing of absurdist beauty, even if one rather suspects the performer isn’t in on the joke.
All this for only $44.95 plus postage? What a steal.

Post-Modernism is once again the culprit in the destruction of standards as they apply to the study and writing of history. Highly critical of the whole enterprise of literary theory and how its incoherence has caused irreparable damage to western culture.

Gives a very clear explanation of all the post-modern theories of culture and history, and explains why their influence on historians has effectively destroyed objective historical research and writing.
Although written 20 years ago, the text is not dated; if anything, it is even more applicable.
Describes semiotics, structuralism, ethnohistory, poststructuralism, anti-humanism, post-history, postmodernism, relativism, hermeneutics, induction.
For those not inclined to wade through the weeds, chapter 7 is the most important.
Note to self: page 144 relates to a post on Neoneocon. com of 2017-11-06.½

There are many excesses and absurdities in postmodern theory, as there are in any other academic movement or endeavor. However, Windshuttle in this book merely shows himself either disingenuous or incapable of reading. If you were to follow his prescriptions to their logical extent, no historian's work would ever be acceptable.

Keith Windschuttle takes a number of modern fads in history, most descended from literary theory, and attempts to show how incoherent and damaging they are to the discipline of history. Windschuttle takes on semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, relativism, and so on. He does this primarily by attacking the faulty research of these practitioners, their illogical conclusions, then he tries to trounce their philosophical underpinnings.

All in all, he does a fine job, though the relativists and postmodernists he attacks will state that the "logic" he uses is provincial and Western, thus, not to be trusted. I have to deal with such ideas all the time in pursuing my Ph.D. in history. People like Foucault and Said are worshiped mainly because they attack the establishment, which means anything Western, Christian, conservative, or capitalist (four things which define me). Windschuttle makes many arguments against these people, which I will not go into here.

To allay fears that this is not, as many on Amazon claim, just a "right-wing" screed or hit piece, he attacks one of the beloved figures in "right-wing" historiography: Fukuyama. Why? Fukuyama used Marx's beloved Hegel to attack Marx, but Windschuttle hates any grand over-arching theory, Hegel included, even when supportive of the West.

A problem, though, Windschuttle does not acknowledge that these theorists, however odious, do bring something to the table. Postmodernists and structuralists do make the valid point that everybody, no matter how hard they try, is biased. It is only when they use this point to attack everything that they hate that it becomes silly. It is when they attack the historical heroes of the past, say Washington, turning him from a demi-god to nothing but pure evil. It is when they, as an example J. B. Harley, "cartographic postmodernist," goes about highlighting the motes in other eyes and ignoring the beams in his own. (Ah, how oppressive and culturally biased of me, so typically Western, to allude to the Gospels!) But Windschuttle too does not offer any philosophy in exchange for the ones he attacks, and seems to intimate that an objective, factual history is possible. While I think, in some ways, it can be possible, he offers no philosophical reasoning behind it.

Thus, four stars. Still, I believe that this is an important book, and should be assigned in historical methods courses alongside books by the like of Keith Jenkins, and others.

A critique of social and historical theory written from the right.