Apologies* for not responding here to Andrew Bolt thusfar. I’ve been busy in real life™, doing things of actual importance. However, now I return to my primary occupation, correcting people on the internet.

(xkcd. It’s been posted many times elsewhere, but it’s still as true as ever.)

David Farrar posted last week about his meeting with Andrew Bolt, brought to New Zealand at the behest of the NZBRT, to inform about what Kevin Rudd is really like. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I posted on Kiwiblog what I thought were his comments (from The Ostrayhun). He responded on his blog, and then I apologised for misattributing the comments, but not for calling him on anti-Aborigine denialism, and the fact that many of those comments were in fact similar to his own positions.

He now says that he finds most of those quotes disagreeable – but why, I do not know.

They are in many cases restatements of his own positions, in more violent lurid language. He says he is not racist, but the torrents he inspires certainly are. He denies the truth, despite overwhelming amounts of evidence, to support positions that are violently anti-Aborigine, and anti-Green. He is not above calling people he does not like Nazis (or fascists, or friends of fascists, or soft on fascists) – he does it with regularity.

Anyhow, the gory details can be found in the links above. I’ll quote from Robert Manne, who has been accused many times by this man.

One of the qualities of nationalist extremists is the anxious denial of their own group’s historic crimes. As soon as the cultural warriors of the right embraced Keith Windschuttle, perhaps for the first time in our history an authentic version of Australian denialism began to emerge.

One branch of this denialism concerns the question of what Australians have come to call the “stolen generations”, the policy and practice of removing mixed descent Aborigines from their mothers, families and cultures between 1900 and 1950 when the thinking was unambiguously racist, and between 1950 and 1970 when racist thinking and welfare considerations became intertwined.

The most extreme exponent of this branch of denialism is the Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt. Despite the fact that an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey reveals that between 1900 and 1970, 20,000 to 25,000 indigenous children were separated from their natural families; despite the fact that a mountain of documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony exists that reveal the cruelty and the racist motivations of the policy; despite the fact that even the Howard Government has funded a monument to the stolen generations – in column after column, Bolt has described the question of the stolen generations as a “preposterous and obscene” myth, a “pride murdering fantasy”, a “libel on our past”.

(article continues… – Robert Manne in The Age)

*You know my apologies come qualified, unless I love you. And I don’t love Andrew. This is the apology he deserves; “Andrew Bolt, please forgive us“.