Robert Manne, A Political Memoir: Intellectual Combat in the Cold War and the Culture Wars, Latrobe University Press with Black Inc
In my youth I was puzzled why so many older people devoured biographies. Now I understand why they did so. Biographies, and particularly autobiographies, provide a mirror for how we responded to the same or similar events shaping our own lives. The lives of others encourage self-assessment. For that reason I found Robert Manne’s A Political Memoir fascinating as I noted how the development of his opinions at times matched and at times diverged from mine. More importantly, his book is bracing for the thoroughness of his research on the issues he takes up, for his honesty in admitting mistakes and reassessments, and for his courage in the face of sometimes mean and duplicitous dealing.
In A Political Memoir Manne traces his growth in political awareness and his contribution to public conversation. He stresses the importance of his upbringing in a non-religious Jewish family. His maternal and paternal grandparents died in the Holocaust. At Melbourne University he became intensely interested in politics, joining the Labour Club at a time of political ferment sharpened by the Vietnam War. He then moved from the political Left to the anti-communist Right. Influenced by the fiercely polemical Frank Knopfelmacher, most of whose family were killed by the Nazis — a heroic or hated figure for different groups of students — he came to see in communist totalitarianism a mirror of Nazi Germany. He won a scholarship for postgraduate studies in Oxford, taught for a year, and then returned to Australia and was appointed a lecturer in the stimulating Politics Department at Monash University. There he wrote scholarly articles and recognised the importance of public conversation in influencing society. He began to write on cultural and political issues in newspapers and in such magazines as Quadrant and, much later, The Monthly.
In his early forays he argued against the tide of what he calls anti-anticommunism: the reaction in political culture against the blanket criticism of Communism current after the Second World War. The virtues of Communists and revolutionary groups, and the duplicity and cruelty of the West and particularly of the United States, were highlighted in discussion of domestic politics and in international relations. Manne focuses particularly on the assessment of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, in which he combined his exposure of partisan and ungrounded