A Pungent Rant of Dubious Moral Virtue, Presented Forthwith for the Indignant Delight of all Right-Minded Readers.

Germaine Greer is a stormchaser. She loves nothing better than sitting at the centre of a raging tornado. Indeed, she is drawn to it inexorably. I have heard people accuse her of being a publicity-seeker, but I think it’s closer to the truth that she is a controversy-seeker. She loves stirring the possum. This has made her invaluable to many discussions and debates, but unfortunately the most recent decade or so have not been kind to her.

From being a world-renowned feminist icon, she jumped on the extreme anti-colonialist bandwagon. Every time she steps foot in Australia — her native land, by the way — she insists on a ceremony in which Aboriginal elders grant her permission to enter the country. This is not a troublesome behaviour; it is even rather quaint and charming and in principle could stand as a role model for others to indulge in a little respect for Australian Aborigines. But the rationale behind her ceremony — choosing a small group of elders to “allow” her into the country — has little bearing on a pragmatic understanding of Australian history. Australia was not a single political entity before the British arrived. It was a collection of hundreds of individual tribal groups and dozens of different languages. If Greer was to land in Sydney, then the people she should be seeking out are the Eora elders. Sadly, the Eora are no more. This is a great tragedy, symbolic of the dissolution of Australian Aboriginal culture. But asking for non-Eora permission to land in Sydney is, well, pretty darn odd. It makes about as much sense as protesting the Spanish conquest of the New World by asking the Yanomami of Venezuela to approve your disembarking at the Mexico City airport. Polite but pointless.

And now, in the British controversy over the Brick Lane filming, Greer has supported the right of a small group of vocal Bangladeshi traditionalists to disrupt the filming of Monica Ali’s book. In other words, she is encouraging a handful of angry Bangladeshi patriarchs to shut down the filming of a book by a female writer who described the oppression of other young women of Sylheti ethnicity. Essentially, Greer’s unnuanced anti-colonialist leanings have butted heads with her feminism, and anti-colonialism won. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. It fits Greer’s recent pattern. For instance, Greer has given support to continuing the practice of clitoridectomy of young girls because of its long cultural tradition — taking her anti-colonial stance to a level that is utterly implacable to reasonable feminism, or indeed humanism.

Am I reading anti-colonialism into this? No. Greer has made it explicit herself. Her great objection to Brick Lane is, “The novel couldn’t go it alone, without exploiting Anglo-Saxon attitudes to a minority community…” The ethnicity of the author is of no account to Greer. The ethnicity and sex of the protagonist of Brick Lane is of no account to her. The possibility of raising awareness of the exploitation of some Bangladeshi brides is of no account. Greer is not interested in helping women like those described in Brick Lane; Greer is not interested in the right of a young Bangladeshi woman writer to have her book filmed; instead, Greer is most concerned about Anglo-Saxon attitudes. And the way to prevent negative Anglo-Saxon stereotyping is not education or debate, but to condemn filming anything that might paint non-Anglo communities in anything other than a glowing light.

I do not believe that regular readers need guess my position on these particular points, so I don’t intend to defend these arguments in this post. What I am more interested in showing is that Greer has become a sterling example of the anti-truth, anti-humanist stream of modern political discourse.

Greer has responded to criticism:

By now I have appeared as a character in at least seven books, of which I have read only one - my husband’s Let’s Hear It for the Long-legged Women, which gave such a bizarre account of our relationship that I nearly drove myself mad trying to reconcile it with what I remembered. When I recovered a modicum of self-belief, I decided that henceforth I would never read any account of myself whether flattering or otherwise, and no friends who used me as grist to their mill would remain friends.

In 1982 I shared a house in Oklahoma with the American novelist David Plante, quite unaware that he was writing a book about Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell - and me. When Difficult Women was all but finished, Plante finally confessed and begged me to read it, so that he could change anything I didn’t like. I refused point-blank. I despised him for being so ready to change his work, and also because - though he made a great parade of sensitivity - he had no idea how deeply I would resent being made to utter namby-pamby Plante-speak like a dummy on his knee.

It seems odd that Greer should make such a personal defence, but she had every reason to do so. It was Salman Rushdie who first got personal in his criticism of Greer’s arguments (and I hope he know regrets it), so it is natural that Greer should respond in kind. But what of the guts of her response? She is saying that her memory is different to others’ — which is hardly a revelation — but then makes the extraordinary statement that she despised David Plante for offering her an opportunity to correct his mistakes. (I find it hard to believe he offered to let her change anything she didn’t like. I can’t imagine that from any writer but an appointed biographer.) Heated argument means more to her than accuracy.

Greer has defended her position on the Brick Lane protests with this:

I don’t believe in censorship of any kind at any level…

Natasha Walter, writing on these pages, claims not to know what I could possibly mean by saying that the residents of Brick Lane have a “moral right” to refuse to cooperate with the people making the film of Monica Ali’s book. Perhaps Walter doesn’t understand how disturbing it is to have gobbets of your life sampled, digested and dished back up to you in unrecognisable form. You don’t have the moral right to stop the process, but you must have a moral right to refuse to cooperate in your own misrepresentation.

Which sounds very noble. But in fact, it’s not true. What got Greer in trouble was supporting the right to disrupt filming. This is what she said the first time…

The community has the moral right to keep the film-makers out but they cannot then complain if somewhere else is used and presented to the world as Brick Lane.

First she supported the right of “to keep film-makers out” and then dissembled for the purpose of demonising her critics. With her own life, she can fall back on the fallibility of memory and good luck to her. But here she is distorting the public record. Even in the exceedingly unlikely event that she can’t recall the gist of what she said to journalists a week or two earlier, she could try checking the facts.

Of course, that only works if you actually believe in the importance of facts, which is so, so,… so colonial, isn’t it?