The recent disclosure that Sir Donald George Bradman warmly welcomed Labor’s defeat in the 1975 federal election must have come as a shock to anyone foolish enough to have presumed that this staunchly Protestant stockbroker, Freemason, monarchist, and Companion of the Order of Australia was something of a closet Communist.
But the publication of the Don’s effusive epistle, written upon the election of Malcolm Fraser, has at least had the salutary effect of exposing other ironies. Revolutions eat their own children – and revelations eat their own champions. It is a lesson that Phillip Adams is learning the hard way after wading into what he can only have assumed was a guaranteed win.
Adams erred, not in seizing upon the letter (in which Bradman acclaimed Fraser’s defeat of Gough Whitlam as a ‘marvellous victory’), nor even in tweeting that the Don was a right-wing nutjob (‘RWNJ’ in Adams’ textese). His mistake was that, after his initial tweet was challenged by Bradman’s friend and admirer Kamahl, Adams responded in a way that was condescending, insulting, and racially charged.
Phillip Adams tweeted:
Clearly, Kamahl, he made you an Honorary White. Whereas one of the most towering political figures of the 20th century was deemed unworthy of Bradman’s approval.
To which Kamahl replied:
Daring to suggest that Sir Donald Bradman invited me to his home in August 1988 as a ‘token white’ is disgusting at best. You may be White, but oh your Soul is Black! It’s ironic to note your vocabulary is Excellent. Why are people so unkind?
The possibility that Bradman might have held Kamahl in high regard was brushed aside by Adams, who instead opined that Bradman thought of the Kuala Lumpur-born crooner in terms favoured by the apparatchiks of apartheid: ‘Clearly, Kamahl, he made you an Honorary White.’
There is not the slightest skerrick of evidence that Bradman internalised South Africa’s system of racial categorisation in this way. Adams certainly hasn’t produced any. But, in aiming his assertion directly at Kamahl himself, Adams has succeeded in smearing two grandees in the same swipe. First, by suggesting that Bradman’s default position towards those of non-European extraction was characterised by racism, Adams besmirched Bradman. He then further insulted Kamahl. The slur could scarcely have been more unseemly had Adams used the term ‘Uncle Tom’.
Amid our prevailing cancel culture, and its enthusiasm for headhunting, botching the character assassination of a long-dead WASP might seem like a difficult enterprise. But Adams has succeeded where others have failed. Twitter trolls are now clambering up the walls of Fort Adams and clamouring for the man’s metaphoric erasure.
But the episode need not be unsalvageable. If Adams cares to heed it, there is a lesson for him. That lesson might also benefit others who are deluded enough to believe they can summon the progressive wolfpack at their will.
Adams’s leftism is of the fuddy-duddy variety – he is like the sort of former communist who still rejoices in the use of the term ‘comrade’, who speaks of Gorbachev as ‘Gorby’, and who recalls his adolescent dalliance with dialectical materialism as if it were a badge of honour. For years, he has persisted in referring to his little wireless program LNL by the annoying appellation ‘Lenin-L’ – a tribute to the man who, shortly after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, instructed troops to ‘absolutely hang, in full view of the people’, dozens of peasants in order to set ‘an example’.
Sensing an opportunity for moral grandstanding, Adams unwisely decided to play the role of left-wing maestro by attacking an establishment figure. In doing so, he utterly failed to recognise that the fellow travellers on whom he could once have relied to lap up his outpourings have largely been replaced by a different breed of leftist zealot. Old-fashioned socialists of the Adams variety are despised by Wokeists with the same intensity that Stalinists once reserved for disciples of Trotsky. In the world of Wokeism, Adams is reminiscent of old Bolshevik – a Bukharin or a Zinoviev – who hasn’t noticed that he is out of favour with his ‘comrades’. His reputation as a leftist stalwart counts for nothing to those who look at him and see not a kindred spirit but another curmudgeonly old white man, perhaps even another Bradman.
Bradman’s social views were conservative and typical of his time – a fact that was incontrovertible long before the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers decided to disingenuously construe a misplaced missive to a neophyte Prime Minister as newfound evidence of political depravity.
In his final Test innings, Bradman was famously dismissed for a duck, when he failed to pick the wrong’un. You don’t have to be an admirer of Adams to take the view that it would be unfitting for him to end his career on a similar note, forced out by a Prince Philip-esque indiscretion. At 83, Adams is unlikely to recant the convictions of a lifetime, but perhaps it is not too late even for him to recognise that an eagerness to virtue-signal can cloud one’s judgement. If your aim is to preach to the converted, it pays to ensure you haven’t misread your crowd.
