Manne of influence: Wilfred Burchett and Australia's Long Cold War

This raises a serious point about Manne’s mode of argument. In 1985 he debased discussion on Burchett by resorting to character assassination (accusing Gavan McCormack of teaching his students “a neo-Stalinist version of post-war Asian history” and of “doctoring history”). In 2008, Manne diagnoses those who do not follow his own convoluted argument as “pro-Burchett” leftists, sunk in “parochialism” and “post-Cold War intellectual inertia”, who suffer from “vanity or pride”, and “rancour”. His dropping the offensive charge of Stalinism is welcome, but Manne’s new language is no more enlightening.

Declaring Burchett somewhat ambiguously “the most controversial and influential communist in Australian history”, Manne still insists on two points: first, that he was a secret member of the Communist Party of Australia; and second, that he was guilty of treason.

In the first case, whatever the truth, most people have long regarded Burchett as a communist. Throughout the Cold War he was frequently introduced in the Western media as “the Australian communist journalist Wilfred Burchett”. We have no knowledge of evidence proving beyond doubt whether he did or did not belong to any communist party and are open to the possibility that he may have lied by denying such membership. We hope, however, that witch-hunting McCarthyist values now hold little sway outside Quadrant magazine, a journal considered “too right wing” even by its CIA sponsors (Ben Kiernan, “Australia, East Timor and the Aborigines,” Overland, No. 167, 2002, p. 28).

At any rate Manne contradicts himself, saying (in a characteristically tortuous phrase) that Burchett was a “self-directed but financially dependent agent of influence”. To grant that he was “self-directed” is to concede that Burchett was his own master and not a servant of any party. That he also happened to be poor is well known. The term “agent of influence” is in any case a spurious cold war construction used by Western security organisations including ASIO to brand prominent people whose associations they disliked but about whom they had no evidence of wrongdoing. In that way, Manne’s revival of the term to describe Burchett maintains the long discredited ASIO narrative on him.

Manne maintains his core charge that Burchett was a “traitor”. Yet this most serious of allegations he cannot state without equivocation. In print he adopts the formula that Burchett “did not betray his country in Korea because he was a bad person but because he thought he was supporting a higher cause”, and on radio, only when pressed to say whether he still considered Burchett a traitor did Manne reply, “Well, I think he was, to be honest”.

One seeks in vain a clear and consistent definition of this capital crime and any recognition of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. At work here is Manne’s distortion of legal terms to suit his argument. As he knows, the Australian government devoted considerable effort to put together a case to try Burchett as a traitor. It failed, and abandoned the case (Tom Heenan, From Traveller to Traitor: The Life of Wilfred Burchett, Melbourne University Press, 2006).

The United States government too, stated that it had “no independent evidence” for any charges. Henry Kissinger invited Burchett to Washington as a breakfast guest, and in 1977 the United States government granted Burchett a visa to conduct a lecture tour of the United States.

What matters, we have always insisted, was what Burchett wrote, where he got it right and wrong, and how his country treated its leading public dissenter.

He was badly wrong on some things, notably Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Among others, Kelvin Rowley pointed out in his 1986 essay, which Manne’s article ignores, that Burchett's “uncritical reportage” on Stalinism was “terribly mistaken” and “profoundly misleading”. Rowley wrote that “Burchett had witnessed the consolidation of Stalinist control over Eastern Europe. And he didn't even notice it.” (Kiernan, Burchett, pp. 49-54.)

Greg Lockhart has observed the black-white dichotomy of “good socialists and bad Americans” in Burchett’s Cold War writings (“Red Dog? A loaded question,” The Australian Literary Review, March 5, 2008). Burchett may well have been wrong on germ warfare in Korea also (see McCormack, Target North Korea, 2004). Possibly so too were others, like the great Cambridge historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham, who maintained a similar view till his death. Burchett’s sensitivity to what he saw as signs of bacteriological warfare is scarcely surprising in one who had been the first to report to the world the horror of nuclear war.

On the question of what Burchett did or did not do in Korea, Manne has yet to respond to the detailed evidence and analysis published 20 years ago, especially that concerning the Korean POWs. Among many POWs and other conflicting sources, Manne still chooses to rely heavily on the evidence of one US airman, Paul Kniss, and still ignores the various different and contradictory versions of Kniss’ uncorroborated story (McCormack’s chapter in the Kiernan volume, pp. 188-90, and Meanjin, 3/1986).

Acknowledging that Wilfred Burchett “backed the right horse” in the Vietnam War (about which he wrote nine books), Manne makes his stand that Burchett was a “traitor” primarily on the Korean War, of whose justice he still seems in no doubt. However, in past decades the historiography of the Korean War has changed in fundamental ways.