Culture catcher: 9

Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954 – 1965 (Cambridge, 2006):

The orthodox-revisionist split has yet to become a full-fledged debate, because many orthodox historians have insisted that the fundamental issues of the Vietnam War are not open to debate.

Some prominent orthodox scholars have gone so far as to claim that revisionists are not historians at all but mere ideologues, a claim that is indicative of a larger, very harmful trend at American [Ed: ditto Australian] universities whereby haughty derision and ostracism are used against those whose work calls into question the reigning ideological orthodoxy, stifling debate and leading to defects and gaps in scholarship of the sort found in the historical literature of the Vietnam War [Ed: ditto Australian history].

 

“History Under Siege”, ABC Radio National: 20 April 2008:

Academic Rob Pascoe:

And what we find extraordinary, reading through the main New Right publication which is the journal Quadrant, is in fact how thin on the ground the New Right history is.

Actually New Right history is history that’s spoken not by the intellectuals and the writers and the professionals and the academics, rather it’s written by the journalists, the media commentators, the people who work in think-tanks and the politicians.

They’re the people who try to set the New Right agenda and try to drum up a different version of our past, and it’s because they don’t have a history training of the sort that we would see as normal and legitimate, then their history is very, very shallow indeed.