Kischmania!

If Kisch’s talents as a propagandist are the source of his appeal to those who are currently celebrating his work, it is strange that they soft-pedal his commitment to Stalinism. The ABC’s program makers are satisfied to define Kisch in their program blurbs as a “gutsy, anti-fascist fighter”, “a theoretician of classical journalism”, “the original foreign correspondent” and “inspiration to journalists and writers alike”, leaving his Communism to be dealt with lightly in the fine print.

His current admirers portray his Communism as not determinative in his writing, to put it mildly. But Kisch’s party membership survived Stalin’s famines, the purges of party members, including Germans, in the 1930s, the show trials, the gulag, the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 and the diverse Comintern bastardries during the Spanish civil war (where Kisch was employed behind the lines).

The lie promoted by the Communist-led left that Kisch was an independent voice was accepted, from lack of public evidence to the contrary, by histories of the period.

Professor Ernest Scott (died 1939) in his A short history of Australia described him as “a Czech writer”. As late as 1956 Professor Geoffrey Sawer in Australian federal politics and law thought Kisch a “Czech left-wing writer” while calling Kisch’s fellow “anti-fascist” speaker Gerald Griffin “a New Zealand Communist”.

Most recent authors reveal the fact of Kisch’s Communism, but not all. Brian Murphy, in his 1993 book The other Australia, experiences of migration, prefers the suggestive “Czechoslovakian journalist and political activist”.

For those who like their Stalinism in the old style, without nuance, the Cambridge guide to women’s writing in English offers this gem: “This Czech journalist, who opposed the Nazi regime which Australia then supported …”. Kisch’s Australian sponsors of the 1930s could not have put it better. For those who prefer their misrepresentation up-to-date, The Age gives us Kisch “The first boatperson”.

In hindsight, Egon Kisch was no more than a minor cheer-leader of the totalitarian left. What his embalmed celebrity does reveal is that the relationship between myth and history is two-way. Selective recall of events is needed to maintain the force of the myth. Once established in the demi-monde of media archives and academic papers, the myth of the heroic “anti-fascist fighter” is available to be resurrected, re-used to defy the historical record, and thereby re-charged for long-term storage.

Just this one small myth can endorse so many contentious assertions about our past simply by endorsing a man who asserted or implied them. Among them, I deduce, we may find these: the pre-war Stalinists were uniquely pure in their opposition to fascism and trust-worthy partners, indeed leaders, for democratic socialists and liberals, despite their plans to destroy them. Communist opposition to the re-armament of the democratic states, and the fact of the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, may reasonably be played down.

The Australian conservatives (in this case, the Lyons Government and its young Attorney-General Robert Menzies) were intolerant and crypto-fascist. The ALP Scullin Government (1929-31) was gutless and subservient during the Depression (Jack Lang’s story is more refractory, despite his vehement anti-Communism). Australian intelligence agencies were stupid, ill-informed and repressive. Australian society was insular, ignorant of important trends overseas and intolerant.

How many of these contentious historical themes you buy into when you swallow the myth of Kisch the “gutsy, anti-fascist fighter” may be determined by your prior acquaintance with them, but at the least the myth prepares you to believe them on the next occasion they are presented to you. As a package, the historical interpretations supported by the Kisch myth repeat the extreme left’s denigration of Australian democracy in the turbulent 1930s.

I hope that we have to wait many years to hear the broadcast celebrating retrospectively the historic role of John Pilger, gutsy anti-imperialist warrior. I suspect, however, that the script has already been written by his partisans.