Peter Crawford’s
Literary Offences
Dear Sun editor:
I refer to Mr. Crawford’s recent article in the SUN
(“Australia Under Threat”, The SUN,
Dec 2015-Jan 2016).
I am unaware of what, if any, editorial policies govern the
inclusion of material for this publication. Policies may be predicated the
broadest definition of free speech Mr. Crawford both misquotes and mistakenly
attributes to Voltaire. If so, it may be a good idea to consider the difference
between liberty and license (that we are not free to deceive, or to yell
“Fire!” in a crowded theatre full of impressionable people, and rightly so). Yet
he is given license to do both these things in your pages. But more on that
later, as freedom of speech is one of the many red-herring arguments Mr.
Crawford scatter-shoots across the two-page spread the editor has allowed him.
Or perhaps, editorial policies are predicated upon a PR
model—material most likely to attract and resonate with like-minded people. If
so, I would be interested to learn the publication’s distribution numbers and
market area reach. As it happens, this issue reached my desk at the Adelaide
church, and I shared it with a few congregants who, like me, searched Mr.
Crawford’s article in vain for anything resembling content that might attract
and resonate with those likely to happen upon Unitarian publications. Still,
good to get all views in, I’m sure.
Whatever the editorial policies are, it is clear that
rhetorical standards higher than middle school are not among them. Indeed,
having taught undergraduate writing at universities for many years, I should
have been compelled to hand this back as a ‘fail’ if it had been submitted by any
of my students. The essay is replete with factual error or misdirection,
logical fallacy, and emotive dog-whistling, but is sadly free of much evidence,
balance, or knowledge of the broader context of his subject. The net effect is
of shrill, bilious, fear-mongering that leaves the reader suspecting that Mr.
Crawford merely needed to get something off his chest, and could perhaps benefit
from a few sessions of counselling. He is clearly frightened out of his wits,
but his two-page nervous breakdown will be edifying to precisely no-one else.
He begins defensively (never a good rhetorical move),
devoting the first two-and-a-half paragraphs to inveighing against political
correctness, insisting it muzzles the very freedom of speech he is exercising by
writing that it is doing so. Well, clearly not. Or perhaps he has simply been
frustrated by being unable to get his views aired on the outlets his freedom of
speech has been unconstricted by. The literary offenses in this article may
give an indication as to why the ABC has not knocked on his door for comment. How
is he or anyone expounding similar views ‘persecuted’? In any case, it would be
tedious to list the more widely-read ‘honest comment’, very like his own, that
does indeed get published. Andrew Bolt’s regular column is but one example,
and, one imagines, an inspiration for Mr. Crawford.
That circularity is not the end of Mr. Crawford’s
difficulties with logical argument. Straw men litter the essay. There exist,
apparently, immigration lobbies, sleep-walking politicians, unwitting refugee
advocates, European political elites, and a tyrannical UNHCR. None of these
shadowy cabals apparently have any redeeming points of view worth considering. False
choices abound: ‘if I don’t get to air these views, human rights agendas aren’t
meaningful.” “If you do not accept we are under threat of a terrorist attack,
you are delusional or in denial.” “Charity alone discharges our international
responsibilities.” “Refugees brought by smugglers are ‘impostors’.” We are in a
simplistic either-or land throughout the piece. But nuance is an enemy to
gaseous polemic.
Circularity and false choice are not the least of Mr. Crawford’s
offenses to logic. Far worse is the ‘slippery slope’ or ‘thin end of the wedge’ fallacy that he saves for
his emotional coup de grace: we will
be ‘targeted’ by ‘millions’ of ‘self-proclaimed’ refugees (as if there’s any
other kind until they are verified, but well…), creating a ‘huge’ culture that
will lead to ‘out of control’ changes leading to Islamist cultural domination.
What is clearly ‘out of control’ is Mr. Crawford himself. His
disdain for providing examples, data, or any clarifying, compelling evidence
for his strident, overblown claims. With a student essay with words count
limits, limitations of space normally allow some leeway here, but since giving
him space is clearly not The Sun’s
problem, this can hardly be an excuse. There are:
·
No examples of persecution of honest comment
·
No data on Iraq/Syrian intake to establish his
claim that it is increasing to ‘unabated’ levels
·
False claims that the Paris attacks were carried
out by refugees who gamed the system
·
No specifics on how far ‘downward’ we should
revise refugee intake.
·
Terrorists in Australia’s jails: how many?
Evidence that refugee intake is to blame?
Tellingly, the one piece of hard data is an opinion poll
from The Australian newspaper, which poll
suggests Mr. Crawford speaks for the (70%) majority opinion…of readers of The Australian,
he fails to add. It is hard to imagine that anyone with a grasp of the politics
of the contemporary media landscape could fail to recognise that our national
paper of record has consistently presented ‘honest comment’ that encourages
these very views, thus shaping the terms of the debate. It would be tiresome to point out that a popular opinion is not necessarily a correct or informed one.
Perhaps if Mr. Crawford turned his attention from The Australian to actual peer-reviewed academic
material on the topic, a more balanced treatment of the subject might appear in
your pages. Perhaps if he were a student of the history of Australia’s
complicity in creating a region so politically troubled, he might accept the
simple cause and effect that if you bomb people, they tend to run, that if you
topple their governments and exploit their resources and demonise them, they
get angry at you.
But somehow, I doubt it very much. This article is clearly
an emotional exercise in discharging Mr. Crawford’s anger and belligerence,
larded as it is with scare-words like: threat (in the title and many
repetitions), menace, folly, rife, wicked, impostors, unwitting, appeasement
(that’s for you WW2 fans), terror, lies, never-ending influx, and on and on ad nauseum. I can reduce the sub-textual
effect of his language to one word: “Boo!”
His solutions to his case for a local DefCon2 are to abnegate
our responsibility under international agreements Australia not only signed, but
co-authored. In effect, he encourages a national violation of law, or at least
a 180-degree about-turn. For the vaguely guilt-ridden, he proposes throwing some
money (no details on how much per person) at charities managing unmanageable
human flows. Because what’s at stake here is OUR comfort on the North Shore. Free
from fear of others, free from remorse of conscience. But it needs to be
pointed out that if fear made us safer, Mr. Crawford should at least feel
secure. But he clearly does NOT feel secure, and this unexamined assumption
absolutely undermines and makes ridiculous the trouble he has taken to try to baffle
and scare us with this article.
When I used to hand back such ‘fails’ to undergrads, the
most usual bleats were “I worked so HARD on it, how can this fail” and “You
just don’t agree with me, that’s why you failed me!”. Yeah, nah. I’m not
convinced, and that’s because you haven’t convinced me, and you started this by
picking the topic. To head off further embarrassments like this article, I might
suggest an editorial policy that maintains at least a 1st-year undergraduate standard
of competence in making a point with clear reasoning, evidence, and the
courtesy not to employ manipulative shock tactics. The ‘Australian civilization’
Mr. Crawford worries so much about, and has self-appointed as spokesman for, would be better served.
