The implosion of the Adelaide Writers’ Festival stands as a hard reminder of historical lessons ignored.
Initially, the board cancelled a scheduled Palestinian-Australian author. A mass exodus of left-wing authors followed, culminating in the resignation of festival director, Louise Adler, and the cancellation of the event.
The author’s cancellation also brought a wave of withdrawals from writers and others, protesting what they call censorship.
Reasons given for boycotting the event included not being ‘party to silencing writers’.
However, uninviting controversial writers from a publicly-funded event is a far cry from silencing writers in general. It is my view that if people want to write controversial stuff, then they can do so at their own expense.
Among those who withdrew from the publicly-funded event were ABC journalists, whose actions raise sharp questions about the dangers of blind idealism. Such misplaced idealism is not new.
Orwell and Hemingway went to Spain in the 30s, not just to watch but to join what they saw as a fight against fascism. The Spanish Civil War set Republican forces, backed by socialists, communists, and anarchists, against Franco’s Nationalists.
Hemingway, tough chronicler of men under fire, lived with the Loyalists and turned it into For Whom the Bell Tolls. Orwell, the honest idealist, fought with the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) militia on the Catalan front. Both started out sure of the cause, viewing socialism as a shield against tyranny and a road to real equality.
The war turned sour. They met the horseshoe effect, where communism and fascism curve around and meet in the same dark place, authoritarianism, and betrayal.
Orwell felt it deepest. In Homage to Catalonia he wrote of Stalinist communists, supposed allies, turning on other leftists, purging anarchists and POUM men in ways that echoed fascist cruelty. He saw executions, lies, and truth crushed. He learned socialism in its totalitarian form was no noble thing, just a cover for people hungry for power.
Hemingway took longer to break free from his early sympathies, but he faced the same grim truths. His romantic notions faded into the war’s moral mess, where anti-fascism broke down into factional killing and ideological rot. Both writers came out changed, their work marked forever by distrust of collectivist dreams that promised freedom and gave chains.
Australia will now face a difficult reality. In light of the Bondi massacre, there will be those who debate the ground between censorship and insensitivity.
The parallels bite. Those old writers rallied to a cause they thought pure, then found the rot inside. Today’s voices often start from real concern for rights, then find themselves alongside the injustice they wished to fight.
Other writers who withdraw in solidarity follow the same path. They are drawn to what they think is a noble struggle without facing its hard truths.
The many families devastated at Bondi in December on Australian soil represent a reality that few left-leaning writers and journalists appear able to accept.
Accountability matters here.
ABC staff are not free agents. Taxpayers should not pay for them to take this kind of stand, even in boycott. If ABC employees must act, let them do it on their own time and money.
Orwell and Hemingway never leaned on public funds. Orwell lived lean, scraping by on journalism and novels, his honesty forged in hardship. Hemingway made his way through sales and his own risks, no government grants needed.
The Spanish Earth shows how good intentions can turn bad.
Orwell and Hemingway experienced socialism’s ghosts first-hand. As seen in 1930s Spain, idealistic writers are often hijacked by the bend toward tyranny.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have watched this long, slow accident occurring before our very eyes. Ever-present in the activists’ tropes is socialism, that proven failure that requires individual blindness to support the collective stupor.
If now is not the time to stop making excuses for the events of October 7, 2023, at the Nova Festiva massacre, October 9, 2023, on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, and the Bondi massacre on December 14, 2025, then when is?
If true literary freedom is the desired outcome, then let it develop organically.
The Adelaide Festival writers haven’t done themselves any favours this week. But Adelaide is as good a place as any to exorcise the ghosts of socialists past.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.
