Manning Clark’s Anti-Semitism

That night tears came not only to my eyes when we stood and clapped and stamped and cheered Gough Whitlam … at long last we had a teacher who had a chance to lead us out of darkness into light, always provided that THEY did not pull him down, that THEY spared him a little before he went from hence and was seen no more.
—Manning Clark, The Years of Unleavened Bread

My belief is that our Leader, Adolf Hitler, was given by fate to the German Nation as our saviour bringing light into darkness.
—Nazi leader quoted in J.P. Stern, Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People

Recalling his waning days as editor of Quadrant in the March issue of the Monthly (which is itself probably a good indication of what he would have liked to make Quadrant into) Robert Manne mentions that: “Yet another of Les Murray’s recommendations argued, preposterously enough, that Manning Clark was an anti-Semite.”

As has been published in various places, including Peter Alexander’s biography Les Murray: A Life in Progress, I was the author of that article. If it was indeed the catalyst precipitating Mr Manne’s departure from Quadrant, I cannot count it, or myself, to have been wholly in vain. Since Mr Manne seems determined to continue picking over the matter, however, I am prepared to respond to what is, after all, something of a reflection on me or my writing.

Mr Manne’s version of events is barely accurate in its implications. Briefly, the article in question was not a serious or detailed examination of Clark’s anti-Semitism, but (I hope) a humorous examination of some of the more egregious of his historical howlers and gross professional incompetence in a number of areas, such as apparently attributing to the Harry Flashman of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, written by Thomas Hughes and published in 1857, a scene from George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, published in 1969.

I cannot recall everything I wrote in a minor, would-be humorous, piece more than ten years ago, but I think there was also mention of Clark’s memorably crazy claim that the hardy seamen of South Asian seas before 1770 did not dare approach the vicinity of Australia for dread of a speaking fruit, which allegedly said “Wak-wak!” (possibly Clark’s interest in a speaking fruit was inspired by fellow-feeling), and his claim that a certain British nobleman was fond of Australian brothels, which if true would have been generous-minded of him since he never in fact visited Australia.

Others before me had remarked on Clark’s weird erotic ideas, such as the statement that men could be sexually aroused by listening to a bassoon and big bass drum, that country women lost their looks unless they had sexual intercourse with Aborigines—which was, apparently, known as “the sin of the bush”—or the very special sort of pleasure which he seemed to derive from recounting the humiliation or embarrassment of gently-bred women. As I recall, these matters also did not wholly escape my comment. Clark’s anti-Semitism was referred to in my article, but was not its main point.

However, I may now say that I believe that the evidence for Clark’s anti-Semitism is obvious and overwhelming, and it is a sorry reflection on the history industry in Australia that it has in effect been taboo to mention this fact. It is usually a matter of code-words and what has been called recently a “dog-whistle effect”. I note that Mr Manne was thanked for his help with a 2007 paper on “Dog-whistle politics in Australia”, so I cannot believe that he is unfamiliar with the term. Indeed, ploughing through one of Mr Manne’s generally tedious and interminable columns, one comes across a perfect definition of Manning Clark’s dog-whistle modus operandi in this case: “dog-whistle politics is a strategy for awakening popular fears for political advantage in such a way that the intention remains plausibly deniable”. Mr Manne continues by alleging that certain comments from a Liberal minister “excited a deep layer of racial phobia, as he must have known they would. Howard instantly claimed that it was utterly ‘contemptible’ to describe his minister’s comments as politically motivated or racially based. This is the way the dog-whistle works.” (It is perhaps ironic in this particular context that Manne’s bête noire, John Howard, to whom he is so ready to ascribe racist dog-whistle politics, has received the highest awards from the US Jewish community for his support of Israel.)

Particularly in the last two volumes of A History of Australia Clark constantly refers to the hate-figures of “Mr Money-Bags”, “The money-changers” and “Mr Fatman”—code-words for Jews. Beyond this minimal coding, there are repeated references to exploiting finance conspirators, money-changers and bankers as “Shylocks”.

On page 254 of Volume VI we read: “Political independence had no value when Australia was to be throttled financially and economically by the Shylocks of Great Britain.” It is part of Clark’s polemical technique that it is often impossible to tell whether he is allegedly paraphrasing others or stating his own opinion, but here he leaves no doubt that he wants this to be taken as the authentic voice of progress and enlightenment.

On page 268 we read: “The Shylocks of London would throttle the liberties of the Australian people.” On page 399, on the dismissal of Lang and the economic recommendations of Sir Otto Niemeyer we read: “The Conservatives were using the Shylocks of England to defeat a people’s hero.” Sir Otto Niemeyer was not in fact Jewish, but because of his suspiciously cosmopolitan-sounding name he was widely supposed to be. I think most people would have taken it that Niemeyer was a Jewish name. Hermann Goering said early in the Second World War (a little rashly as it turned out) that if a British bomber ever reached Berlin he would re-name himself Hermann Meyer.

The History is filled with references to dark international finance conspiracies by the Shylocks and “People in black”. One page 354 of Volume VI Clark quotes with obvious approval the Labor Daily of August 23, 1930, claiming that Niemeyer’s economic proposals would “hand over our present and our future into the clutches of the foreign Jews”. On page 407 there is another reference to “the money-changers, the bond-holders, the Otto Niemeyers”. In Melbourne, according to Clark, poor tradesmen were exploited by “self-made Jewish money-lenders”, another instance where he evidently forgets the minimal code-words.

One source of this stereotyping of “Shylocks” appears to be Labor politician Frank Anstey’s pamphlet The Kingdom of Shylock, published in 1915 and probably the crudest and most vicious anti-Semitic tract ever produced in Australia. As well as I can trace the matter, this was suppressed by government action in 1917, but was released again later that year, probably in modified form. I have seen the 1917 version and it could be straight from the pages of Der Sturmer.

Among its claims were that the Great War was due to the financial manipulations of the Rothschilds who, as Jews allegedly had always done, were worming their way into British society and corrupting it, rather as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “fand man, wie de Made im faulenden Leibe, oft ganz gelendet von plotzlichen Lichte, ein Judlein” (“one found, like the maggot in the foul corpse, often quite dazzled by the sudden light, a Jewboy”).

The pamphlet is in general an attack on international Jewish money-power, allegedly responsible for wars through the ages. Cartoons in it feature skeletons, cannon, bereaved widows, piles of skulls and slaughter and ruin in general for the benefit of the Shylocks: “Dead men of the battle-fields, profits for the cormorants”, as the chapter “The Clutching Hand” puts it. Other chapter headings include: “Lords of Lootery”, “The Mighty Swindle”, “The Dawning Slavery” and “Gorging the Vultures”, along with passages like: “This war … fills the treasure of Shylock to overflowing … every year Shylock is to draw hundreds of millions more in interest from his investment in wasted lives and bloody slaughter … brave men go eastward [from England] to the slaughter, and the Jews are making much money.” It was potentially deadly stuff to blame Jews for the war when tens of thousands of families were bereaved by war-losses, a fact not lost on the Nazis a little later.

Now Clark in various, albeit indirect, ways actually endorsed this vile pamphlet. He refers to it favourably and suggests that the reason it was suppressed was that it told the truth. On page 414 of Volume VI of the History Clark said: “A section of the working class smelt a rat … In The Kingdom of Shylock … Frank Anstey argued that the war was … filling the treasury of Shylock to overflowing. The book was suppressed, strengthening the suspicion that the Labor leaders were the secret agents of the bourgeoisie.” On page 419, Clark stated: “Fourteen days after the two archbishops claimed divine approval for the war-aims of the British Empire, Frank Anstey reminded readers of The Labour Call that Money Power was doing nicely out of the war.” On page 349 there is a reference to: “Frank Anstey, who believed the people were held back by the forces of prejudice [!] and timidity”. On page 423: “Frank Anstey, the man with the picturesque appearance and the voice which could arouse thousands to passionate loathing of Money Power, collected facts and figures with which to embarrass Fisher during discussions and party meetings.” The plain thrust of all this is that Anstey was a courageous spokesman for truth.

Clark, perhaps unusually among Australian historians, appears to have hated soldiers and physically brave men (such as, for example, the explorer John Forrest). In General Sir John Monash, he was confronted with the figure of someone who was both a distinguished soldier and a Jew, indeed possibly almost the first Jew to have commanded a major army since Roman times. The conventional view of Monash is that he was a brave, patriotic and admirable man, and a fine commander of outstanding ability who served Australia magnificently. Clark’s view of him is as a snivelling, odious “Court Jew” seeking, in allegedly immemorial Hebrew fashion, to ingratiate himself into sources of power. We are told that “Monash was purring” at being socially accepted, and, in the same context Clark quotes a line of T.S. Eliot’s poetry: “The rats are underneath the piles.” The next line, for which Eliot has been widely criticised, is: “The Jew is underneath the lot.” There is also a derogatory reference to Monash and “synagogues”.

Henry Lawson, praised by Clark in the most extravagant terms as virtually a manifestation of all that was progressive and agreeable to him in Australia, was, incidentally, also a virulent anti-Semite, penning lines like: “The dirty Jewish talons reached from palaces and slums” and hailing: “The fleets that shall guard our seaboard when the East is backed by the Jews”. There is no disapproval of this in Clark’s biography of Lawson.

Given all this, is my charge that Clark was anti-Semitic, albeit in a snide, cowardly, dog-whistle way, actually “preposterous”—that is, to be ruled out of court without debate or examination? I venture to say not.

Then there is the charming anecdote by the Marxist journalist Humphrey McQueen, one of Clark’s greatest admirers, published in the Australian Book Review of November 1996, stating that Clark “wanted to dine at Government House in 1977 to see whether his sometime student Zelman Cowen would, even as representative of the Queen, still feel compelled to talk all the time for fear that if anyone else were to speak they might call him ‘Jewboy’.” One can perhaps imagine the manner in which Clark conveyed this ambition to his acolyte. McQueen’s work is something I would normally have no interest in. This, however, is important evidence because it is what is technically known as an admission against interest.

All this, I suggest, was bad enough. But there was an even darker and dirtier part of Clark’s mentality. There were many people such as T.S. Eliot who before the rise of Nazism and the Second World War indulged in a sort of snobbery-driven anti-Semitism but who dropped this when they saw what it led to, and who, when the war came, left no doubt that they sided against Hitler and Nazism.

However, it is impossible to read the second volume of Clark’s autobiography, The Quest for Grace, and other of his writings, and not conclude that his hatred of Britain (possibly because it had failed to sufficiently appreciate his cricketing prowess), and of the so-called “Austro-Brits” symbolised by Sir Robert Menzies, was so obsessive that he inclined in some way to side with the Nazis, or at least to see them as fellow-enemies of Britain, the Glavni Vrag. Nor was this simply the folly of a young man excited in the 1930s by the glamour and promises of Nazism. It was written long after the war.

His adulation of Lenin, whom he likened to Christ, calling the creator of the gulag “Christ-like, at least in his compassion”—he also likened the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to the advent of Christianity—and of Soviet communism in general, is now well known, and his speech in these terms when he received a Lenin Jubilee Medal at a secret ceremony in Moscow in 1970 has been on the public record since the opening of the Soviet archives.

However, in addition to this, the implicit pro-Nazism, or at least anti-anti-Nazism, scattered through his work is not hard to find. It appeared any totalitarian cause attracted him, provided only that it was vile enough. He spoke admiringly of both Robespierre and Saddam Hussein. Of course, Soviet communism was hardly philo-Semitic either. As Lewis S. Feuer has pointed out, any totalitarianism is potentially anti-Semitic because Jews, by tending to retain their own identity, intrinsically form an obstacle to social engineering. (Among much other literature on the subject see, for example, Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner, 1990.)

Clark recorded his disgust when travelling to England in the late 1930s over the fact that the British people on his ship spoke as if Britain owned Gibraltar (which it did, actually, and just as well, too!). He claimed that, by leading Australia when it joined in the Second World War against Hitler, Robert Menzies had “prostituted” himself to a “corrupt and doomed society”, and “may have tasted deep damnation”. He also claimed in his summing-up of Menzies’ life that he paid a “terrible price” in 1941 for his arrogance and false allegiance to the “old dead tree” of Britain.

Then there is his reaction to hearing of the news of the outbreak of war (this is where he confused the two Flashmans): “Chamberlain spoke like Dr Arnold at Rugby School: ‘You lied to me, Flashman. There can be no further place for you at Rugby School.’ Hitler was at least aware of the high solemnity of the moment …”

So Hitler’s unprovoked butchery of Poland was a matter of “high solemnity”! In fact Chamberlain’s speech is on record and its actual tone is nothing like this. (The same goes for the dignified and noble speech made at the time by King George VI.) The British, meanwhile, according to Clark, were “wallowing”, like pigs in filth, in false “moral superiority”. Winston Churchill was also less favourably described than the Fuhrer, being portrayed as more or less raving mad and “like a man possessed by a wild demon”.

Clark went on in a sort of anti-British frenzy:

“I knew the French either did not want to fight or could not. 1914–18 had cured them. I knew the French were determined never again to pull chestnuts out of the fire for the English, to manure the soil of the Patrie with the blood of French soldiers to save the skins of les Anglais …”

It is hard to comment on this passage, pushing as it does a line which would have gladdened the heart of Goebbels, when one is, hopefully, still labouring under the limitations of sanity. Is it actually necessary to point out that in both world wars Britain saved France at great cost to itself? And what of the taken-for-granted assumption that resisting Nazism was something one might be “cured” of, like a disease?

Clark claimed (he specialised in traducing Menzies, though only after Menzies was safely dead) in the Weekend Australian of September 3, 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war, that:

“Wars provide good examples of the vanity of human wishes. In September 1939 the Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Gordon Menzies, believed Australia was fighting for British influence and power in the world. He misread the signs of the times. The British were on the decline.”

It is hard to know how to respond to this bizarre and morally cretinous statement. The inference is that Britain, abetted by co-conspirator Menzies, was the aggressor in the Second World War, seeking “influence and power”. Is it really necessary to point out that Britain entered the war with the greatest reluctance, the government and Treasury fully expecting that the result would be ruin and bankruptcy even if it somehow won, and with its army still unprepared and far too small, but left with no choice because of Nazi aggression? Or that Menzies’ instant commitment of Australia to the fight against Nazism is a matter not of shame but of pride?

Then there is the question of Clark’s own behaviour in Britain during the war. Britain was desperately short of manpower. If Clark was unfit for the services he could, merely by sticking to his post as a schoolteacher, have freed a man or woman for the services or for war-work in a factory, farm or fire station. As an historian he was, at least, offered an opportunity to be present at one of the great decisive moments in history.

However, about the time the German army reached the English Channel, Clark returned to Australia. It is in some contrast to the elderly West Australian Agent-General whose term expired in 1939 and who asked to be allowed to stay on, not despite, but because of, the fact that he knew war was by then inevitable; or Clark’s fellow sensitive Australian university student Richard Hilary, also caught in Britain by the war who stayed on and became a distinguished British clubman (the Guinea-Pig Club, in his case); or to Robert Menzies, who journeyed there and stayed giving morale-boosting speeches and tours during weeks of heavy bombing. Yet there is nothing in The Quest for Grace about Britain and the Second World War except sneering and abuse.

Ideological treason as well as physical cowardice may have been a motive for Clark’s behaviour. It is, I submit, impossible to read The Quest for Grace without concluding that there is something abnormal about its mental atmosphere. This judgment is not a matter of subjective or sentimental Anglophilia: if values have any objective existence at all, Britain’s preparedness to accept total national destruction rather than parlay with Nazism was utterly heroic. Like the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae or Horatius at the bridge, it was an action which, it might be said, demands a certain response from a normal person. One detects this response in the writing and memories of people allegedly far less literate and articulate than a cultivated and educated professor, yet the most notable thing about the mental atmosphere of The Quest for Grace is the utter absence of that response.

Take Clark’s virtually pathological ingratitude when recalling an English couple who helped him and his wife in need:

“Fin. Crisp nobly helped us move our worldly goods to the house of the Chaplain of Balliol, the Reverend Malcolm Layng and his wife Mabel. The English liked being Samaritans to Colonials with overflowing hearts but empty pockets. It made them feel good, even eased their consciences about their own conspicuous consumption of wealth …”

That “conspicuous consumption of wealth” would take the form of years of bombing and a decade of rationing and other shortages.

The ship on which Clark travelled back to Australia was escorted and guarded by the British Navy, which he mocked and sneered at in terms that would have done credit to the Radio Berlin of the day. Writing decades after the war, he still managed to sound like Goebbels or Lord Haw-Haw: “Britannia still ruled the waves, so Britons never would be slaves, because the British fleet, like Christ, was unsinkable.” While this is not necessarily the lowest point in Clark’s renegade polemic (whatever he wrote, he was generally capable of producing something even fouler), it is still remarkably disgusting given that the men of the Royal Navy were to endure six years of frightful hardship and, in several tens of thousands of cases, death, to keep the likes of Clark alive. He spent the rest of the war as far from action as it was possible to get, much of it playing cricket with boys at Geelong Grammar School and sneering at the soldiers defending him, his country and civilisation as “These puffed-up, pigeon-chested men dressed in khaki”.