Perikles;
you handle the truth carelessly:
Wilfred Burchett's political affiliations were no secret to Australian Security Intelligence and he did not slander or degrade his country.He was critical of the Liberal Government as a great number of his fellow countrymen were because of their failure then as they do now to develop an Australian Foreign Policy which is not determined in Washington.I too would like to see us modify our participation in ANZUS...New Zealand does not permit nuclear powered war ships in their ports and did not send troops to Iraq yet maintain an independent policy on some issues.The USA has assigned Australia's role in the pacific as their Deputy Sheriff a task our Government has botched because of it's latent Colonial attitudes.
There are many Australians who are more concerned about where our subservience to the USA is leading us and it's expansionism rather than the Soviet policy of maintaining influence over countries with which they shared borders.
Australian Communists were critical of the USSR's interference in the development of democracy in the bordering countries , particularly the ousting of the Dubchek Government of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact powers.
And don't kid yourself that our soldiers sent to fight in Vietnam were defending Australia. They were doing the same as our soldiers are doing now in Iraq...fighting an illegal war to support the empirical ambitions of expansionist USA.
Wilfred Burchett will always be a proud Australian Son despite the spin of the Rabid Right Wingers like yourself's attempts to rewrite history to suit your own philosophy.

the tone of the comments from the Right in this thread is fairly typical of the level of debate from critics of Burchett. thank you, Maracas, for a rational and sensible contribution, but to those of you who think a Wikipedia entry is a reliable source of information, here's just one of many corrections (those of us who are well informed have given up correcting the nonsense the rabid Right keep posting under the Burchett entry). Wilfred applauded the rise to power of Pol Pot, but immediately it became apparent what was happening in Cambodia he conducted a very public campaign denouncing the Khmer Rouge. this lost him many friends on the Left, and his support of Vietnam in its dispute with China over Cambodia also lost him many political associates in China. so, a simple propagandist? the Right always likes to believe these crass versions of history. for those who like to think a bit, I recommend the Memoirs. for the rest of you, including Mr O'Connor (who frankly should know better than to participate in the Murdoch press's lame campaign against Burchett, which has really just created much more interest in the man), back to Wikipedia-world. If Mr O'Connor is really "researching" with the benefit of a Fulbright, they should be revising their award procedure! Jung Chang's book as an authority on Mao? it's already been widely discredited. and the documents "opened up" by the Russians under Yeltsin are well known to be riddled with false and fabricated material. but of course it serves the purposes of the Right, so they'll just accept them unquestioningly - as another poster commented, why on earth would the Russians send such a message to the Chinese? ridiculous. Oh, and one more thing - despite endless hate-driven attempts by right-wing journalists over a period of some decades, they have all failed to come up with one credible piece of evidence that Wilfred was a member of the Communist Party.

Hi dioxin, maracas,

Looks like I may have been mistaken about Jon Halliday, my apologies. I see a lot of raging controversy on the Web about his biography of Mao, for example.

So, we need to regard very suspiciously Halliday's claims that the stories of the use of biological warfare by the US in Korea were fraudulent.

dioxin, thanks for letting me know about Burchett's public campaign denouncing the Khmer Rouge. I had recalled, years ago, that he spoke favorably of the Khmer Rouge. He had promised in "Grasshoppers and Elephants" to write similar accounts of the liberation of Laos and Cambodia, but, obviously he since learned the ghastly truth about the Khmer Rouge and was not afraid to let people know of that truth.

Ironically, it was the US, together with China, that prolonged the cancerous influence that the Khmer Rouge had over Cambodian society by hampering, with trade sanctions and international isolation, the efforts of the Vietnamese and the pro-Vietnamese Cambodian government to eradicate the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia.

well maracas

What a nice spray. For your information I am not a rabid right-winger - on the contrary I am social democrat/redistributionist and therefore, the class enemy of commie lovers who will never admit to the tyranny of Stalin and the butchery of his malignant regime. I approach history on the basis of evidence and docmentation as Dr O'Connor has done with Wilfred "bird's sh.t."

Communists who openly served the USSR are by any definition traitors. A casual read of some of the biographies of Australian Communist Party members will show that they had death-lists drawn up for the revolution. Too bad I suppose that generically speaking, the Soviets regarded such collaborators as "sh.t-eaters" - their term, not mine.

I makes me sick to the guts that I fought for the best part of my life to defend your right to write ill-informed rubbish on the one hand and keep the current government in power on the other. I notice that rather than address O'Connor's arguments, you have seen fit to attack me - fine - go choke on your own ignorance.

Well Perikles,I would hardly equate your philosophy with that of your namesake. I addressed my response to O'Connors article with a short treatise on Wilfred Burchett. I do not put much credence in O'Connors sources; In fact I think it was a Fulbright scholarship wasted. I would not consider you a social Democrat 'wasting your life keeping the present Government in power' In fact if that has been your goal in life I would agree, you have wasted your life in propping up an undemocratic Right wing regime so if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
You also display ignorance of Australian Communism and its various factional persuasions.

Dioxin “the tone of the comments from the Right in this thread is fairly typical of the level of debate from critics of Burchett.”

That’s the thing about democracies, there is a “right” and there is a “left”. There will always be comments from the centre as well as the “right” to criticize traitors who sold the democratic rights of their fellow Australians out for the easy life of a paid lackey of the KGB. As I said previously, politely put, one of the “Useful Idiots”, in his case a “Bought and Paid For Useful Idiot”.

Burchett was the paid recruit of the extreme left, who counted his “Judas coin” as ordinary people were shot or shipped into gulags for “re-education”.

The problem is, when you get rid of the “right” the “centre of balance” shifts and there is more “right” to be shot or shipped off to gulags. More coin for the traitor to collect on. More victims of Communist butchery and repression.

That’s the difference between us. My set of “right” values prefer to see you display your ignorance through freedom of speech.

Burchett’s and I assume those who would choose to defend him (Dioxin), advocate a recurrence of Stalinist purges for all who dared express a “counter-revolutionary” opinion (The problem is Stalin’s 50 million victims is 2 ½ times the population of Australia).

Therefore, I conclude, Burchett and his defenders, personify hypocrisy in its most malignant form.

The memory of Burchett will eventually be buried. Perhaps his surname could be used as some form of noun. Maybe “Burchett” could become the official Australian translation from the original Norwegian “Quisling”.

Either way, as is in keeping with your views, I see you have chosen a suitably toxic nom-de-plume (how unoriginal).

I heard the only realistic thing one could do with dioxin was to bury it in a deep pit, somewhere well away from any water courses. Burchett was a bought-and-paid-for communist “mole”, doubtless you kindred spirits might well meet up as he borrows between one and another of the lower circles of hell.