I felt hard done by to be anonymously tagged a "student Leftist" for my "stridently pro-Burchett thesis" in Robert Manne's essay "Agent of Influence" (June). Manne once labelled a Burchett historian whose views he disagreed with a "neo-Stalinist"; "student Leftist" seems decidedly tame in comparison.  

It was not unexpected that Manne would employ throwaway epithets that fuse adherence to historical conclusions with subscription to ideological ones, thereby politicising and paralysing the history on Wilfred Burchett's life in the exact manner I had criticised in my thesis. After all, it is what Burchett represents ideologically - "the human catastrophe of communism" - rather than the historical facts, which has always concerned him.

Manne has written about Burchett on a number of occasions since his groundbreaking "The Fortunes of Wilfred Burchett: A New Assessment", published in Quadrant in 1985 (it is worth noting that the subtitle of the 2008 essay is "Reassessing Wilfred Burchett"). Back then, he constructed a robust case attacking Burchett's communist past and defending the Menzies government's denial to him of a passport. Readers learned of Burchett's "Don Juan sexual adventures" and that he had once worked as a used-car dealer. Such ad-hominem attacks were accompanied by equally dubious methodology. Manne relied heavily on an article by Denis Warner which Gavan McCormack had identified as containing falsified evidence. Manne even defended inconsistencies on the part of court witnesses on the grounds that they had deluded themselves because of their hostility towards Burchett, and continued to use them extensively as reliable historical sources. The essay as a whole conflated Burchett's communist sympathies and his alleged treasonous activity in Korea seamlessly. The preordained conclusion? That "Burchett was in the deepest sense of the word a traitor."

So much of the evidence supporting this allegation has since been discredited that in his 2008 article the treason charge is avoided entirely. It is not what Manne says, but what he omits, that is revealing. The testimony of the KGB defector Yuri Krotkov or of the POW Derek Kinne, indeed the entire 1974 defamation case won by the Democratic Labor Party Senator Jack Kane against Burchett, all pillars of his 1985 case, are mentioned in passing or not at all. Old evidence surreptitiously absents itself; new evidence takes its place; the argument is recast. But the conclusion - that Burchett shares moral responsibility for the actions of the communist governments he was associated with - remains the same.

As for the denial of Burchett's passport, in 1985 this lay at the crux of Manne's historical inquiry. He "simply [could] not understand" how people could dispute the appropriateness of the government's actions, given Burchett's past. Today, Manne decrees, the question simply "is not the issue central to the assessment of [Burchett's] life." When the evidence does not fit the conclusion, just move the goalposts.

According to Manne, the politicisation of the history on Burchett is due to three factors: "pride" in not wanting to recant one's prior beliefs; "rancour" in being loath to make concessions to old ideological foes; and "political friendships" - the desire not to betray one's former comrades. Plainly, being born in the year of Manne's Quadrant article, none of these could possibly apply to this "Leftist". But they apply all too accurately to Manne himself. Eric Hobsbawm once noted that historians "have a responsibility to historical facts in general, and for criticising the politico-ideological abuse of history in particular". Manne can rest assured that fastidious historians of all stripes will always hold him to account on both scores.