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FAKE BUT TRUE
Historian Manning Clark’s claim:
I happened to arrive at the railway station at Bonn am Rhein on the morning of Kristallnacht. That was the morning after the storm-troopers had destroyed Jewish shops, Jewish businesses and the synagogues.
Biographer Mark McKenna’s discovery:
It was Dymphna Lodewyckx,[Clark’s future wife] not Manning Clark, who witnessed the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht ... I am convinced that Clark chose deliberately to place himself on the streets of Bonn, knowing full well that he was not there.”
McKenna’s bizarre excuse for the late commie:
McKenna didn’t doubt for a moment that what Clark learnt of the pogrom and what he saw of its aftermath a few weeks later had the profound impact he always claimed. McKenna writes: “In this sense, there is no fabrication.”
(Via Paul Wright)
I’ve been concerned about justice for Native Americans ever since I witnessed the the massacre at Wounded Knee.
No, Wait! What I mean is, I once has a layover in Omaha.Posted by bugscuffle on 2007 03 05 at 07:26 AM • permalink“My really profound memories of Kristallnot”
Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2007 03 05 at 08:00 AM • permalinkIs that the same as Algores Incontinent Truss?
Posted by surfmaster on 2007 03 05 at 08:16 AM • permalinkWell, it had the air of truthiness about it and that’s all that really matters isn’t it?
Posted by joe bagadonuts on 2007 03 05 at 09:02 AM • permalinkHmmmm.
In a like sense I was there when Adam and Eve did the “beast with two backs”.
Not that I *was* there in a physical sense but that I was there in a metaphysical sense ... which seems to cover any and all eventualities.
I’m thinking of writing a book on it. Perhaps I’ll title it “What I saw if I had actually been there.”
Posted by memomachine on 2007 03 05 at 09:28 AM • permalinkever eager to defend leftards, ABCs AM began a report on this with the words ’ an accusation that would have led to a law suit if the subject were still alive’
Posted by eeniemeenie on 2007 03 05 at 10:09 AM • permalinkI think I’m going to take up relativism, uh, relatively speaking of course.
Posted by Old Tanker on 2007 03 05 at 10:11 AM • permalinkWhat, a communist has been caught lying?!!?!?!? Who woulda thunk it?
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 03 05 at 10:30 AM • permalinkI was there when USA Hockey beat the Russians. That is, I was in the USA. And I believe in miracles.
Posted by Some0Seppo on 2007 03 05 at 10:41 AM • permalinkKristall clear memories, eh? Call Fitzgerald!
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 03 05 at 11:32 AM • permalinkI’ve been everywhere, man. I’ve been everywhere.
BTW: Where were you the first time somebody asked you where you were when Kennedy was assassinated?
Posted by Jack from Montreal on 2007 03 05 at 11:47 AM • permalink#38 I was in a Dallas police interrogation room.
Well, in spirit anyway, but I can feel Lee’s pain
Posted by Jack from Montreal on 2007 03 05 at 12:23 PM • permalinkWhen I was at the Little Big Horn, I could feel the unrest of the souls lost there, so, in that sense, it’s no fabrication to claim that I was there with Custer. (I really did experience a profound sensorial awareness of the history of that battlefield. My husband did as well. Ditto for Manassas.)
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2007 03 05 at 04:00 PM • permalinkcan’t top any of these. Will only note that the documentary maker who recently profiled Norma Khouri, who fabricated an entire memoir around the issue of honour killings, said exactly the same thing. Because Khouri was ‘doing good’, her lies don’t matter.
what is truth anyway? It’s only a white male construct, so who cares?
For our non-Oz readers, Clark is a huge culture hero to the Left in Australia, because he wrote a massive multi-volume history of Australia from the ‘correct’ point of view, i.e., that Australia is basically a failed country because it has never thrown off its imperial/colonial heritage and become a socialist republic. Over the years, the work has been demonstrated to be so riddled with factual errors as to be effectively worthless. Whenever this is pointed out, his defenders just shrug: ‘So what? The important thing is he felt the right way.’
“Because Khouri was ‘doing good’, her lies don’t matter.”
Manning Clark visited the USSR in the late 50s and wrote a panegyric The Making of New Soviet Man or some similar title.Imagine the lies he got away with in that servile and career-busting book -except it wasn’t career-busting.
For those who don’t know, he soon became the Left’s Greatest Australian Historian.I might add that merely ten years later, many acaden=mics were trumpeting the ‘success’ of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the MSM, in exactly the way Clark did, and getting tenure as the teachers of our growing university population.
I recall their ecstatic accounts of Life Under Mao.
Wonder where New Chinese Man is today, if he’s not long dead?Along these lines, I strongly recommend the movie The Barbarian Invasions by Denys Arcand, which was recently screened on SBS here in Oz. How that movie ever got made in Canada, I’ll never know. It’s a withering, scathing portrayal of a mediocre soixant-huitard moonbat academic who’s on his deathbed and realizes all his ideological posturing has been a lie and a complete waste of time. He recalls trying to get some Chinese girl into the sack by praising the Cultural Revolution, only to realize that she’s just come out of 10 years in a re-education camp.
For those not from Oz, Manning Clark was very famous in Australia from the early 70s until his death 20 years later. As a self-styled and self-promoting ‘left wing intellectual’ with interests in the classics etc, he was an academic equivalent of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (1972-75) with whom Manning C shared several good but many bad attributes. That the persona ‘Manning Clark’ became so famous for such a long time I think reflected a desire for there to be such a character - in a sense ‘Manning Clark’ arose as a result of market forces. Does anyone read his History volumes now?
Of course, Manning’s written legacy is a great steaming pile of crap, but I think no historian before or since has quite been able to look off into the distance with quite the same air of tragic majesty.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 03 05 at 07:38 PM • permalinkFor our non-Oz readers, Clark is a huge culture hero to the Left in Australia, because he wrote a massive multi-volume history of Australia from the ‘correct’ point of view, i.e., that Australia is basically a failed country because it has never thrown off its imperial/colonial heritage and become a socialist republic.
He sounds very much like our Howard Zinn. Zinn’s biggest selling book, A People’s History of the United States , “depicts the struggles of Native Americans against European and U.S. conquest and expansion, slaves against slavery, unionists and other workers against capitalists, women against patriarchy, and African-Americans for civil rights.”
From an interview available online:
RB: You no doubt have heard Michael Moore’s characterization of the Bush-Gore election as one of “The Evil of Two Lessers”...
HZ: [Laughs] Leave it to Michael Moore. I love the last line in his last movie, “One evil empire down, one to go.” To me this means…let me put it this way, I think there is a very large number of people in this country — this even borne out by public opinion polls which over the last ten or fifteen years have shown that on issues — the public is ahead of both major parties. That the public has been consistently willing to take more money out of the military budget and spend it for education and housing and human needs. I believe there are huge numbers of people in this country who would be willing to have radical changes in our economic and social system in order to make it a more egalitarian society and do away with homelessness and hunger and clean up the environment. But these people have no voice. They have no way of expressing themselves. Elections give them no way of expressing themselves. I go around the country and I speak and not to audiences of radicals.
RB: Given your busy schedule, one can assume that your audience is much larger than the core progressive community…there aren’t that many radicals.
HZ: [laughs] No, there aren’t. I go to speak to California Polytechnic Institute in San Luis Obispo. How many radicals can there be there? How many liberals can there be there? [actually Cal Poly is a very liberal campus—how odd of Zinn not to have noticed] Fifteen hundred students show up. And they listen to me and I’m talking about the economic system and the profit system as being wrong and inhuman and I talk about the necessity to abolish war as a means of solving problems and to not have any more military interventions and to seriously cut down the military budget. I talk about these things and they…agree. I found this, I talk to audiences in Oklahoma and Texas and here and there and mostly to audiences of people who don’t really know my work. I certainly don’t expect them to be sympathetic to my ideas. When I express my ideas — and they are radical ideas — except that I don’t start off by saying, “I’m now going to tell you radical ideas.” Or, “I’m now going to expound ideas of socialism or attack capitalism.” Or, “This is going to be a hate imperialism talk.” None of that. People respond to commonsense ideas about foreign policy and domestic policy. It encourages me about the potential in this country, despite who is running it.
It’s interesting, and comforting somehow, that Anglosphere leftists are just so many interchangeable parts.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2007 03 05 at 07:44 PM • permalink#41
When I was at the Little Big Horn, I could feel the unrest of the souls lost there, so, in that sense, it’s no fabrication to claim that I was there with Custer. (I really did experience a profound sensorial awareness of the history of that battlefield. My husband did as well. Ditto for Manassas.)
Kyda S., believe it or not, I can kind of understand this. Back in the 70s when Mr. H was stationed in Munich, and we toured Dachau (I would say it was the country club of concentration camps if that were not such a travesty), I was overwhelmed with the sense of identification with its victims. You can’t go in a place like that and not be.
Since then, I’ve never been able to find any common ground with people who use hyperbole to describe US policy on… well, pretty much anything. Leftists are especially prone to this, which is why I virtually spit on them at every opportunity (something they mindlessly provide almost daily). If I couldn’t laugh about it, I would cry. Thank God for the VRWC.
By November 1938 Hitler and Stalin were preparing to jump into bed together,their union was consumated in August 1939 with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Agression Pact.To clear the way for that alliance,in May 1939 Stalin sacked Maxim Litinov,his Commissioner for Foreign Affairs.Litinov was a Jew.Stalin and Hitler had more in common than just their totalitarian politics.As a consequence of that Pact Australian Lefties immediately set about sabotaging Australia’s war effort resulting in the Army having to load ships carrying supplies to Australian troops in the Middle East because members of Left controlled Unions refused to support Australians who were fighting against allies of the Russians.I wonder just what Manning Clark was really doing in Germany at that time.Of course with the benefit of hindsight he eventually decided he was there to “witness” and deplore the treatment of the Jews on Kristallnacht and subsequently,but any dedicated Soviet supporter at that time was busy cheering on their Nazi allies and I suspect that he was part of that cheer squad.
I’ll say this in favour of McKenna: although it’s buried in great steaming mounds of truthiness and excuse, the facts are there.
Far too many on the left don’t just excrete truthiness, they omit the inconvenient facts.
McKenna is one of the very few of his ilk who, once coming across a little problem like this, a flaw in the Manning Clark shibboleth, actually had the guts to expose it. I don’t think he’ll go far in his career, underneath the fashionable academic veneer is a small kernel of honesty. That’s fatal.
Manning Clark certainly never had that problem.
Heres an example of his “objective history” writing.
“The whole performance,” wrote the historian Manning Clark, “stank in the nostrils. Australians had once again grovelled before the English. There were Fatman politicians who hungered for a foreign title just as their wives hungered after a smile of recognition from the Governor-General’s wife, who was said to be a most accomplished snubber.”
But John Pillger quotes him so it must be true.Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2007 03 05 at 11:32 PM • permalink#45 last year a BBC journalist -(hmm, or was it a Guardian writer? No matter, she was English - probably, and that’s all that counts)
- was criticised for getting some facts wrong about something-or-other.
Can’t recall quite who, but either she or her editor hastily claimed her piece was an “impressionistic sketch” so her getting things wrong was not important!!The fact that she was there as a reporter not an artist did not seem to worry anyone.
Posted by carpefraise on 2007 03 06 at 06:01 AM • permalink
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In this sense, plastic wood is no fabrication: it is made from oil, which is made from, among other things, decomposed wood trunks from millions of years ago. Plastic wood is in this sense real wood.