The Murdoch journalist who whitewashed treason

Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 1 August 2005

The leftist media war against labour market reform is relentless, particularly in the scale of its dishonesty. Elisabeth Wynhausen, one of Murdoch’s lefty journos, launched a thoroughly ill-informed attack on free labour markets in The Australian (A slippery slope to inequality, 5 March 2005). It seems that this miserable economic illiterate is trying to make a name for herself as a defender of the oppressed masses.

She has even gone so far as to ape the Marxist-driven Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By) by producing her own little assault on the free market that she imaginatively called Dirt Cheap — Life at the wrong end of the job. This was done with the help of dear old Rupert her allowed nine months leave to indulge her hatred of capitalism.

However, this article is not about Wynhausen’s adventures among Australia’s downtrodden proletariat (I have dealt these anti-market arguments numerous times) but about her longing for the kind of socialist state that in the last century killed more than 100 million people.

Writing in The Weekend Australian Review (25 January 1997) dear, dear ol’ Lizzie did her best to present ex-members of the defunct Australian Communist Party as nothing more than dedicated idealists who were misunderstood and persecuted by conservative governments. What this freedom-loving excuse for a journalist omitted to point out is that the CPA (The Communist Party of Australia) was an instrument of the late Soviet Union.

It not only supported every sickening twist and murderous turn of Soviet foreign policy, including the mass murder of peasants, it took its orders directly from the Kremlin. The sole object of the Party’s existence was not merely to promote the interests of Soviet tyranny, even in its most malevolent form, but to destroy Australian democracy and impose a Soviet-style state — complete with Gulag, torture chambers, mass deportations, firing squads etc. — that would be utterly subservient to the Kremlin. In short, the CPA was guilty of high treason.

None of the above was even alluded to by the humanitarian Wynhausen, let alone mentioned. Instead we got self-serving ideological claptrap that absurdly claimed that the duly elected conservative governments of Robert Menzies were “repressive regimes” (sic) and how those who were declared as enemies by these same conservative governments were forced into a “Kafka-esque” existence.

This piece of obscene ideological garbage was followed by the vicious claim that the royal commission that followed the Petrov affair was a witch-hunt. (Petrov was the KGB Resident in Australia who defected in 1954). To support her libel she asserted that the commission failed to find any evidence of a spy ring. Ergo: the Soviets were not spying on Australia, communists were loyal to their country and Petrov was a liar. Well, we will soon see who the real liar is.

The release of the Venona papers by America’s National Security Agency made it absolutely clear that the Soviets had a very active spy ring operating in Australia. These papers confirmed the commission’s findings that a Soviet spy ring had been operating in the country up to 1949 under the NKGB (later known as the KGB) residency of Semyon Makyrov. Under Makyrov NKGB agents had quickly penetrated the Australian Ministry of External Affairs.

The reason why the Soviets ceased operations in 1949 is that Kim Philby had informed them that the ring’s activities were being monitored. He obtained this intelligence in his role as SIS liaison officer in Washington. Furthermore, two of Makyrov’s most important agents, James Hill, codenamed Tourist, and Ian Milner, codenamed Bur, defected to the East. (Perhaps the fellow-travelling little Miss Wynhausen will explain to The Australian’s readers how these facts escaped her eagle-like attention).

With the left-winger’s usual contempt for the truth she continued her whitewash by defending Rupert Lockwood, a Communist Party ‘journalist’, who had been accused of passing information on to a Soviet agent. However, her defence was of a peculiar kind. Rather than try and tell us why Lockwood was innocent of any wrongdoing she described, instead, the alleged suffering of his family, as if their embarrassment was proof of his innocence.

But even someone as insensitive to common decency as Wynhausen would have known that Lockwood was the author of the infamous Document ‘J’ that that he actually typed inside the Soviet embassy. The document was a profile of politicians, public servants and members of the press gallery. It was scathingly and accurately described by the commission as a “Farrago of fact, filth and fiction”. The real truth is that Lockwood was a dedicated Soviet agent of influence, a willing instrument of Soviet tyranny and treachery.

J. N Rawling, who joined the CPA in 1925 and left in disgust in 1939, wrote:

They [communist parties] are merely the instruments of the Russian Foreign Office and the Kremlin, ready to frame or change policies and manufacture ‘justification’ for them on receipt of cabled instructions from Moscow.