‘There is no crime which cannot be condoned when "our" side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified-still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function." George Orwell ‘Notes on Nationalism' (1945)

As those who follow ideological politics in Australia are aware, it is one of Gerard Henderson's many unpleasant habits to engage his enemies in legalistic email exchanges, usually based on a petty grievance about something they have said or written about him, and then, after their patience has been exhausted, to publish the exchanges without permission in his in-house magazine, the grandly titled Sydney Institute Quarterly. On August 22 I was informed by a friend that Henderson had published an email exchange between himself and me on the question of the anticommunist intelligentsia in Australia and the mass murder of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 communists or suspected communists in 1965-6. I soon discovered that this was indeed the case. The email exchange was published without my permission. But not only that. Prior to its publication the editor of The Monthly, Sally Warhaft, had asked for Henderson's permission to publish the full email exchange on The Monthly website. Henderson refused. At this time the edition of The Sydney Institute Quarterly which contained a version of the email exchange had already gone to print. Hypocrisy was the least of it, however. In what was published, Henderson, conveniently enough, left out the only email where I outlined my position in detail on the political and moral failure of the anticommunist camp, the camp to which both Henderson and I once belonged.

In what follows the unexpurgated email exchange is published without even the smallest alteration (including my late night misspellings of James McAuley's name). It is published not mainly as a comment on the ethical standards of the Director of the Sydney Institute, nor even as evidence of his legalistic pedantry, evasiveness, disingenuousness and intellectual shallowness. All this is too well known to require demonstration. It is published, rather, because, strangely enough, so far as I am aware, the issue I raised in passing in my original Monthly article on Wilfred Burchett-the willingness of the Australian anticommunist camp to support, in one way or another, one of the great political crimes of the twentieth century, the Indonesian mass murder of 1965-6, where approximately as many died as in the Armenian genocide of 1915 or in the Rwanda genocide of 1994-has never before been discussed by anyone associated with the anticommunist camp. As readers of this exchange will see, Australian anticommunists supported one of the great crimes of the twentieth century in a variety of ways-by turning a blind eye to the horror of what had occurred; by openly applauding the consequence of the crime; by failing to discuss the atrocity in an appropriate moral register; by supporting in words and deeds those who helped unleash the mass murder; by denying publicly that these people had been involved, and so on. They will also see that in the email that Henderson did not publish I asked him a simple and direct question. Did he regard these mass murders as a crime against humanity? Predictably enough, Henderson failed to reply.

To enable readers to understand this exchange the passage in dispute in my original article in The Monthly (June 2008) is reproduced here:

The recent rise in Burchett's reputation is not difficult to explain. Part of the reason lies in the determination of his son, George Burchett, who has been an intrepid defender of his father's literary legacy and political reputation. Part lies in the rise of anti-American sentiment among the Australian intelligentsia following the unlawful and catastrophic invasion of Iraq. Part lies in the parochialism of many members of the Australian Left, who seem to be more shocked by the injustice of the Menzies Government's denial of a passport to Burchett after his exploits during the Korean War than they are by Burchett's life-long apologetics on behalf of a string of murderous regimes.