Hitler good, feminism bad / MI5 Nazi Sex Orgy… and er, Quadrant

From Hitler to Windschuttle in three easy steps…

o n e

Nazis assault feminist festival-goers
The Local
May 19, 2008

At least seven people attending a festival promoting feminism [Färnebo Feministfestival] were assaulted on Sunday evening by a group of neo-Nazis in a small Swedish village. One man was left needing hospital treatment after he was attacked with a metal pipe by an unidentified gang in Österfärnebo in east central Sweden. “The men drove around the area in a car, shouting ‘sieg heil’ and doing a Nazi salute,” police investigator Kalju Poltrago told newspaper Upsala Nya Tidning…

t w o

Speaking of poor/filthy rich old Nazis, Max Mosley — son of Oswald Mosley — was recently caught with his lederhosen down and having sex with five prostitutes. Now:

Max Mosley orgy revelation forces M15 agent to quit
Andrew Alderson and Sean Rayment
The Daily Telegraph
May 18, 2008

An MI5 agent has resigned after it emerged his prostitute wife engineered the tabloid sting that exposed Max Mosley, the head of motor racing, as having taken part in a sado-masochistic orgy. The disclosure is deeply embarrassing for Britain’s security service and has forced a review of vetting. The man was a surveillance operative with several years of service. His wife, 38, is believed to have approached the News of the World when she realised that Mr Mosley – a regular client – had booked five prostitutes for a sex session costing £2,500…

In my opinion, both Mosley and the MI5 agent’s wife have behaved very badly, and should be punished.

t h r e e

So should Keith Windschuttle:

Quadrant: It’s okay to be a Nazi if you’re pretty
Kath Wilson
Crikey
May 15, 2008

Quadrant, John HoWARd‘s favourite magazine, is now angling for younger readers. But with the appointment of Keith Windschuttle as editor, the arch-conservative, publicly-funded magazine’s stable of aging Cold Warriors remains, and this month’s issue still fights the good fight against decadence in modern theatre, Robert Manne’s footnotes and Manning Clarke’s supposed anti-Semitism.

The accusations against Clarke are particularly odd, given the characters Quadrant continues to publish. As Michael Danby told Parliament during the Howard era:

Quadrant magazine, edited by Mr McGuinness… ran an article by [Holocaust denier] Michael [de] Brander [‘Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the West’, March 2005], a former chairman of the neo-Nazi group National [Action] who has been convicted in an Australian court of assaulting a protester with a flagpole.

[Brander also addressed a post-graduate conference organised by the University of Sydney in July 2005; the assault took place at a public protest in Melbourne on March 18, 1995.]

Then Quadrant published Helen Demidenko/Darville/Dale, whose novel The Hand That Signed the Paper was described by Gerard Henderson as “a loathsome book… that would give comfort to anti-Semites.” Dale’s Quadrant memoir didn’t promote anti-Semitism so much as flog the magazine’s favourite whipping-boy, Robert Manne. But alongside yet another smear of Manne, this month’s issue features a bizarre memoir that trumps the spate of right-faction Liberal Party and Young Liberal anti-Jewish slurs.

‘Things Diana Mosley Told Me‘, by historian Philip Ayres, documents his correspondence with the late Lady Diana Mosley, the high-society Mitford sister typically described as “unrepentently Nazi”. Financier of the British Union of Fascists, editor of the far right The European, and a close friend of Hitler who reportedly “took her disgusting, unchanged views to her grave”, Mosley nonetheless fascinated Ayres during his scholarly endeavours. Why? Not simply for his historical research, but because, he explains in Quadrant, Mosley was pretty. “I was curious to know more about her because of her looks… She had been described as “the most beautiful woman in the world”…”

Having read Mosley’s account of her imprisonment after the war broke out, Ayres lamented:

“They stuck this beautiful woman in a rat-hole… After many months of mistreatment they let this gorgeous girl out… while I understood perfectly well why she was locked up, the conditions as she described them would make most men with balls feel like they wanted to rescue her, especially given her looks. Me anyway. I could dream about a woman like that.”

Evidently stuck in an era where gentlemen prefer gentiles and female beauty is a virtue overriding all sins, Ayres then wrote to the Nazi and Fascist-supporter in 1990. “This was a beautiful woman,” he again explains. Mosley wrote back, asking Ayres to read a book about her and write a review. He obliged, but “I wrote a review and sent it off to Quadrant, then being edited by Robert Manne, but for whatever reason, some perceived lack of didactic intent perhaps, whatever, he didn’t publish it.”

But Windschuttle has now published this version, and Ayres reveals: “Basically, I wanted to write to the woman in the photographs… What made the exercise an experience for me was not so much the information at the end of it … The interest for me was… the way I’d come across this beautiful lady, flipping through a book with its photographs of her when she was young.”

For John HoWARd’s favourite magazine, it’s okay to be a Nazi if you’re pretty. But in today’s Liberal Party realpolitik, perhaps Susan Chandler wasn’t pretty enough — or maybe, unlike Quadrant, modern conservatives understand that in the 21st Century — since the Age of Enlightenment, even — perceived feminine virtues don’t forgive abhorrent views.

I reckon Welf Herfurth (who is definitely not a neo-Nazi, whatever The Jew says) oughta try getting published in Quadrant.

Sirs,

From the same issue of Quadrant (May 2008, Volume LII Number 5), see also Michael Warby, Fascism and the Left.