Bigger than Barry Spurr
It’s rare for the left to receive gifts from the establishment. Yet the leak of Professor Barry Spurr’s private email conversations is a gift if ever there was one. And we can happily predict that this gift will keep on giving.
Barry has been suspended. And better still, the emails reveal a long list of recipients: friends and colleagues who presumably share his bigoted views. I imagine a lot of frantic inbox clearing took place in the days after the scandal broke.
The hostile reaction to Barry Spurr’s bigotry has been heartening. Students have protested, and all his allies in politics and the academy have been conspicuously silent, or have distanced themselves from him.
However, this scandal speaks of more than just one (or a handful) of bigoted cranks. It illustrates a couple of important realities about academia and politics.
While it sounds hackneyed to say it, Barry Spurr is a bona-fide example of the fascist outlook. Fascism is in many ways a different and more dangerous beast to simple run-of-the-mill conservatism.
For one, he despises the mainstream right and thinks it too soft. Much of his bile is reserved for Abbott, who he castigates for “loving” Aboriginal Australians. He hates those who he perceives as the undeserving rich, new-money and toffs who are presumably less cultured and deserving than himself. He loathes the hypocrisy of the middle class left and multiculturalism. He openly pines for a return to the golden age of athletic übermenschen and demure, frocked women.
Most of your bog-standard racists at least genuflect to multicultural tolerance. Even while consciously fostering hostility towards Muslims, Abbott feels the need to include platitudes about respect for their religion.
Not Barry. His worldview is so thoroughly racialised that he predicts a day when “…The western world will wake up, when the Mussies and the chinky-poos have taken over.” This paranoid delusion about non-white races taking over and the accompanying dream of a return to a golden age of white, patriarchal, Western supremacy is straight out of the imagination of classical fascism.
Given that out-and-out fascist parties are still part of the political scene in Europe, Barry Spurr is a timely reminder that the educated classes are no strangers to that movement. The majority of the German academy and judiciary, including philosopher Martin Heidegger and jurist Carl Schmitt, supported Nazism. In Australia, the fascist New Guard of the 1930s enjoyed wide support amongst the middle classes, including intellectuals.
This is only a surprise if one accepts the widespread myth that fascism is a product of popular or working class movements. As Tim Mason and other historians of the Third Reich have noted, the working class accounted for a small percentage of Nazi Party membership. In contrast, the educated middle classes were over-represented. As Dostoyevsky wrote, “Have you not noticed that the most refined shedders of blood have been almost always the most highly civilised gentlemen, to whom all the various Atillas and Stenka Razins could not have held a candle?”
More specifically, this scandal is a by-product of the conservative evolution of academia over the past few decades. This is about more than just one crank.
New Matilda has made a similar observation. Noting that Barry Spurr’s recommendations for the national curriculum are in substance identical to his racist email exchange, they editorialised that:
‘It reveals just how little you have to lie to make your racism publicly acceptable, and to write it in to a major government review. Choose your words carefully, hold back ever so slightly, and you’ll get away with it. Take out your overtly racist language; draft your racist recommendations and implement your racist ideology with subtlety.’
It shouldn’t have taken the exposure of his more blunt and crude personal conversation to have Barry Spurr outed. It has been obvious for a long time that right-wing warriors are being systematically promoted and given space in academia. And it’s clear that this is the ideological flank of a government that knowingly tortures and kills refugees and presides over the genocide of Aboriginal people.
The rise of this hard intellectual right has advanced alongside the neo-liberalisation of universities. The predominant ideological flavour in Australian universities is still moderate liberalism. Yet this polite academic liberalism, which will spare no breath in condemning Barry Spurr, has something to answer for in allowing this situation to arise. Academic liberalism has for decades been too preoccupied with discourse analysis, identity politics and symbolic, cultural or legal forms of redress for oppression.
By neglecting the real, structural origins of inequality, racism and oppression and by accepting the notion that polite, restrained academic discussion should include viewpoints like those espoused by Spurr, the academic left has conceded far too much ground.
Rather than debating them politely, or viewing them as aberrations, we need to view such intellectuals as the organic intellectuals of the Liberal party and the ruling class. We ought to be as merciless towards them and their ideas as the Liberals are to Aboriginal people, refugees and the poor.
