Friday, June 16, 2006

World: Windschuttle: it's like having a holocaust denier oversee the BBC

Startling news that the Howard government has appointed Keith Windschuttle, radical rightwing history revisionist, to the board of the ABC, Australia's public broadcaster.

This is really shocking. A lurch to the extreme for Australian cultural life. Windschuttle is the equivalent of a holocaust denier, pretending that wholesale slaughter of aboriginals by early Australian settlers didn't happen. Surprising that the Wikipedia article on him doesn't do justice to the heinous ideas that he perpetrates. Well, here's a critique of his fabrication of history in a mainstream paper; just to be fair, here too is a critique from the right: Gerald Henderson, arch conservative, has a go at him.

The worst of all is that, even if his views have marginal effect on the ABC, this appointment helps legitimise his nonsense. Do you think even Howard intended to go that far?

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