“I’ve never been a member of the Communist party."
This post is about prominent YES-Campaigner and architect of the Voice Co-design Report, Professor Marcia Langton AO FASSA FTSE.
We have just posted here information that our researchers have come across during their archival searches during the course of their normal work . We let our readers make of it what they will.
1- Fact-Checking a Claim of Marcia Langton
Is/was Marcia Langton a “Communist”?
Not according to her.
Figure 1 - Source The Guardian 4 Aug 2023
“They’ve [the so-called “nefarious Trump-like cult groups”] played the old-fashioned fear tactics but now they’ve got all the extra post-Trumpian tactics, the Steve Bannon tactics of swamping social media with bots and AI generated Facebook lies and lies on Twitter.”
Langton said: “I’ve never been a member of the Communist party. I did have a very cute Communist party member boyfriend once here in Sydney.
“If you only read the ‘no case’ bots about that evil Marcia Langton, you’d be horrified. You’d run out of the room.”
- The Guardian online 4 Aug 2023
Fact Check by NTLCGDU (our “Nefarious Trump-Like Cult Group Down Under”) finds that: Professor Langton Appears to be mistaken.
Professor Langton complains about, “some no vote supporters of spreading “garbage”, personally targeting Indigenous supporters of the voice and “swarming social media with bots and AI lies”. A particular false meme she claims is going around the internet is that she is, “a member of the Communist party.”
From what we can see this claimed “garbage’ arises from a 1976 letter, that has been floating around the internet for years, which clearly implies that she was a member of Australia’s “Communist League” when it merged with the “Socialist Workers Party” (Figure 2).
Figure 2A - Page#6, Source
Figure 2B - Page#7
Figure 2C - Page#8
This letter can be downloaded (see pages #6,#7 & #8) from marxist.org.
But is it true? Or is it a “plant” by one of the “nefarious Trump-like Cult groups” Professor Langton says is trolling her?
Our fact-checker located the original Direct Action newspapers referred to in the letter as a way of corroborating the letter’s details. The original copies of the 1976 edtion of Direct Action were located in the archives, of all places, The City of Sydney archives at the Town Hall.
Figure 3A - Direct Action Front-page 25 Nov 1976
Figure 3B - Direct Action Front-page 16 Dec 1976
The articles regarding Marcia Langton, who was “one of the best known activists in the black and anti-racist movements in Australia”, distinctly confirm that she wanted the, “development of a strong and united party of the Fourth International”, that is the Trotskyists.
Figure 4 - Direct Action 1976
Figure 5 - Direct Action 1976
Figure 6 - Direct Action 1976
Figure 7 - Source
Further Corroboration
“ASIO particularly wanted information on Marcia Langton, now a prominent academic but then a leading Trotskyist.”
- A LIFE IN MIRRORS - Jeff Sparrow and Rjurik Davidson meet Thomas Shepherd, a former ASIO informer, OVERLAND, ISSUE 196 SPRING 2009 here page 5
Fact Checking Conclusion: Unless Professor Langton is relying on semantics - that is, she admits to being a member of the “Communist League” and the “Socialist Workers Party”, but they are not specifically called the “Communist Party” - we conclude that she has indeed has been a member of a party that is/was communist. In particular, she was a member of the Socialist Workers Party (in existence 1974-1989) that professed to be Trotskyist.
Professor Langton, like one of her proteges Bruce Pascoe, seems to be ”just making stuff up” about her own history.
Figure 8 - Source: Marxist.org
2 - An Incident that Speaks to Honesty with Government
Figure 9 - Source: Australian - 20th February 2003
Figure 10 - Source: Kooriweb
3 - Professor Marcia Langton - Using Racism when Politically Expedient to her Cause?
Source: Meanjin December 1977
This provocative title, “Here Comes the Nigger”, was from a 1976 play in which Marcia Langton appeared.
Author and Historian Geoffrey Partington in The Incivility of Marcia Langton tells us how he cops the wrath of anti-racist [sic] Marcia Langton:
In January 1997, I was invited to take part in ABC Radio’s Peter Thompson’s Breakfast Program. One of the other three participants was Marcia Langton, then a professor in the University of the Northern Territory, a member of the National Aboriginal Council for Reconciliation, and a member of the Order of Australia. She became a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2001 and was awarded the inaugural Neville Bonner Award for Indigenous Teacher of the Year in 2002. She subsequently became Inaugural Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne and Chair of the Cape York Institute for Leadership and Policy. The Federal Minister for Education, Dr Brendan Nelson, appointed her as Chair of a new Higher Education Council.
I had recently had published a book entitled Hasluck versus Coombs: White Politics and Australia’s Aborigines.
Langton told listeners:
“Hitler had Goebbels, John Howard’s got Geoffrey Partington ... This is the most outrageous interpretation that I’ve heard in a long time. Geoffrey Partington’s book was so appalling and the footnotes were so shonky that serious people didn’t bother to review it ... it is entirely irresponsible, but, you know, I urge historians in the Academy to take this man’s work to task because it is entirely irresponsible. This is the treason of the clerks that Dr Coombs was talking about that we let people like this assume the mantle of historian when the unmitigated garbage that comes from his pen and his mouth …”
Hmmm…. Admittedly not one of the finer moments for so-called ‘anti-racist’ Professor Langton.
Commentator Andrew Bolt also writes of Professor Langton’s ‘race-baiting’ in the name of her professed so-called, anti-racist politics - here.
