AN EYE FOR ETERNITY: The Life of Manning Clark by MARK McKENNA

AN EYE FOR ETERNITY: The Life of Manning Clark

by MARK McKENNA
The Miegunyah Press, 2011, 793 pages, $54.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

In a Gallup Poll in 1988 on popular figures in Australia, Manning Clark, Australia’s first professor of Australian history, came in 21^st, pipping John Howard, Shadow Treasurer and future Prime Minister, by one spot.  This slight was to be avenged by Howard, as Mark McKenna’s biography of Clark shows, as part of the offensive against Clark by a hit-squad of right-thinking reactionaries.

Howard said he was 'nauseated' by Clark and the cultural left, eagerly joining in the condemnation of Clark, after his death in 1991, by conservatives for what historian Geoffrey Blainey in 1993 called Clark’s ‘black armband history’ which highlighted what Clark identified as the 'three great evils' of the coming of the British to Australia - violence against the original inhabitants, violence against the first European convict labour force and violence against the land itself.

Howard’s outburst followed a long history of Liberal parliamentarians taking a stick to Clark, beginning in 1947, alleging that Clark was a communist spy, a fiction which was picked up by the Brisbane Courier-Mail fifty years later whilst Les Murray, the poet and literary editor of the CIA-funded journal Quadrant, chimed in with a venomous smear against the 'traitor Clark who was a hero of left-leaning intellectuals’.  ASIO dutifully played along, considering Clark to be 'someone to be watched'.

The charge that Clark was Stalin’s spy proved to be the baseless figment of malicious gossip but the right were right to fear Clark, a progressive public intellectual who had begun life as the son of a clergyman in 1915.  Melbourne University in the thirties educated Clark on war and fascism and he took a real and risky anti-fascist stand when leaving a visit to Hitler’s Germany in 1938 “wearing a huge black velour sealskin coat stuffed with gold watches and other treasures given to him by the Jews he met in Bonn for safe transport to England”, an action quite at odds with Les Murray’s subsidiary slander that Clark was an anti-Semite.

Clark’s long dalliance with the left continued, incongruously, as a History teacher at Geelong Grammar, a “God and Empire” school for the rural bourgeoisie, where he regularly cycled twelve kilometres to buy his copy of the Communist Party of Australia’s Worker's Weekly.  At the same time, Clark was also flirting with Catholicism and whilst he believed in 1944 that 'socialism is the best organisation of society’, this ideological commitment was, adds McKenna, grounded “as much in Christian compassion for the poor as it was in political theory”.

As a professional historian, Clark turned his taste in history for “grand, romantic, epic, character-driven literary narratives" to what was to be his massive, six-volume A History of Australia.  History must tell a story and be alive to human emotion, Clark believed, but this approach had its critics who, with some justification, faulted Clark’s focus on individuals at the expense of political and economic, and social and cultural, forces.  Clark’s imaginative recreations proved popular, however, and readers forgave his often overblown prose and factual inaccuracies for the sake of a good, dramatic read. Clark “made the dead live”, says McKenna.

Clark’s popularity agitated his right wing critics.  His books sold like hotcakes, his 1963 Short History of Australia topping a quarter of a million, making it on to school reading lists and being serialised in tabloid magazines like Pix, “flanked by bikini-clad models and man-eating crocodiles”.   Clark’s abridged history also resonated with popular discontents, describing a fledging nation “left prey to the materialism and greed of the bourgeoisie”, and pulled no punches in its criticism of post-war anti-communists. 

The professional Red-haters cranked up a mud-slinging campaign, seeing in Clark’s three trips to the Soviet Union evidence of taking instruction in his secret career as a Red spy.  Whilst Clark’s romantic yearning for the utopian promise of the 1917 Russian Revolution could lead him to soft-pedal his comments on the Soviet Union, Clark was in fact revulsed by the Stalinist betrayal of the revolution, noting in his diary how Lenin’s vision had “rotted in the minds of his successor”. 

Not of any interest for the intellectual bruisers of the right were the less-than-Bolshevik inconveniences of Clark’s rejection of Marxist philosophies of history, his individualism which meant he would never align himself organisationally with the socialist movement, his claim to “stand above the fray of Left and Right” and thus antagonise both, his membership of the editorial board of Quadrant, his more-Pope-than-Marx religiosity, his view of the university New Left as 'hideous', and the limits of his leftism (an ALP supporter, in Whitlam he thought he had found his Messiah).

The right’s target, as ever, was not some fictitious espionage agent but Clark’s left-wing and progressive advocacy as a national celebrity whether during the Cold War (when anti-communist hysteria tarred all dissent with the communist brush) or in his later years of opposing the ‘intellectual torpor” of 23 years of conservative rule from 1949 to 1972 and his support of the anti-nuclear, anti-war, pro-environment and Aboriginal rights movements (Clark once disrupted a Ku Klux Klan meeting in North Carolina, abusing the hooded racists as 'strutting galahs').

Clark became “the central figure in the war over the nation's past” because history is also a battle over the nation’s present and future.  Through all the sometimes overwhelming minutiae about Clark’s colourful private life, McKenna’s biography rarely loses sight of how Clark’s practice of “engaged scholarship” was the outcome of his political view that those who have been on the losing end of history need not, and should not, always be so.

GUANTANAMO: My Journey by DAVID HICKS

GUANTANAMO: My Journey

by DAVID HICKS
William Hienemann, 2010, 456 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

"I was an Australian, the laws protecting prisoners would apply to me, so I would be all right.  My government would make sure of that".  So thought David Hicks when imprisoned by the US military in Guantanamo Bay in 2001 during the 'War on Terror'.  He couldn't have been more wrong, as he records in his book of his six years' imprisonment without trial, his "six years of hell".

A "troubled teen" from the Adelaide suburb of Salisbury, the travel bug got Hicks at the same time as he was fired into indignation by the ethnic cleansing by the Serbian military in Kosovo and by Indian army atrocities in Kashmir.  "Seeing fellow human beings suffer" in Kosovo and Kashmir "infuriated me and was the motivating factor to bear arms and risk my life to help them", writes Hicks, adding, however, that because he was politically untutored, "the way in which I chose to help others may not have been the wisest ... but my motivations were of a good nature". 

He supported the NATO-approved Kosovo Liberation Army (where, in a training camp, he posed for a lads' trophy photograph with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a photo which was later misused by the press to smear Hicks as a terrorist).  He also joined Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Pakistan which was defending Kashmiri civilians, and which was, at the time, not a listed terrorist organisation.

Hicks was sent by LeT for training in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in 2001, although the allegiance of both LeT and Hicks was not to the Taliban but to another threatened Muslim people.  Hicks was trapped in Afghanistan when the US-led invasion began and he was captured by the Western-supported Northern Alliance of warlords and sold for $5,000 to the US military.

Through all this, Hicks never fired a shot at anyone and all his training, as later verified by Government-commissioned experts from the Australian armed forces, was standard military training with no element of terrorist strategies.  Hicks can best be described as a military-minded adventure tourist with a social conscience, naive in some respects but no terrorist.  Neither did Hicks break any Australian, US or international laws, which is why he was never to be given a fair trial where his innocence would have been easily proven.

None of Hicks' actions warranted the subsequent abuses he was to be subjected to.  Directly experienced or witnessed by himself, Hicks fell into a brutal world of vicious beatings and kickings, hooding and shackling, threats and intimidation, sensory deprivation and forced medical experimentation, dog attacks and electrocution, stress positions and temperature extremes, mock executions and actual murder. His life became one of unrelenting fear, pain and hopelessness.

Hicks notes that the physical and psychological torture was not simply the result of low-ranking, sadistic soldiers getting their kicks but was systematic and ordered from above.  The strategy was to 'soften up' the detainees for interrogation to extract forced confessions - "There is nothing against you ... [but] you will not leave this place innocent", was how one US interrogator cynically explained it to one detainee. Australian Prime Minister Howard delivered the same message to Hicks' lawyer that 'under no circumstances would [Howard] let me return to Australia without my entering a guilty plea'.  Hicks' 'guilt' was concocted from false testimony extracted under torture from, and provided in exchange for privileges to, another detainee.

Legal rights were also denied Hicks and the other detainees.  The Bush administration proposed trial by legally-flawed Military Commissions from which even some prosecutors quit, saying the system was rigged to secure convictions.  The craven support of the Howard government for the Military Commissions, and Howard's obstinate indifference to Hicks' complaints of mistreatment, finally convinced Hicks that "my government did know what was really going on; they just went along with Bush's policies" for political reasons, leaving Hicks to rot in cruel and inhumane conditions.

Abandoned by the Australian Government, "the thought of remaining in the military's hands for years to come, in this place, scared the hell out of me", writes Hicks, who duly made the requisite false confession to 'material support for terrorism' which al last got him out of Guantanamo to serve out a prison term in Adelaide's Yatala jail.

His persecutors had not quite finished with Hicks, however, with outrageous conditions in his plea bargain including a one-year gag order to keep Hicks silent before the 2007 federal election, whilst any proceeds related to his story were to be assigned to the Australian Government even if Hicks were to receive compensation for torture, mistreatment and illegal imprisonment.

All but the torturer, the gaoler, the lazy journalist and the war-whooping politician will be made angry at the physical and human rights abuses documented by Hicks in his compelling book.  Hicks' prison-memoir, a harrowing record of one unlucky man's callous sacrifice to 'anti-terrorist' war hysteria, is a gritty and stark challenge to the whole, sordid 'War on Terror' which destroys human rights even as it claims to defend them.

HIROSHIMA NAGASAKI by PAUL HAM

HIROSHIMA NAGASAKI

By PAUL HAM
HarperCollins, 2011, 629 pages, $55 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The very first victims of the atomic bomb dropped by the US Air Force on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 were all the patients, doctors and nurses of the hospital above which the bomb directly exploded, instantly killing the first of the 78,000 that were to die on that day.  In Paul Ham’s book on the atomic strikes on Hiroshima, and on Nagasaki three days later (35,000 dead in an instant), he argues that, just as these innocent civilians died, so too has the truth died about the real reasons for the nuclear bombing.

Successive US governments have claimed that the atomic annihilation of the two Japanese cities ended the war in the Pacific and saved up to a million US casualties that would otherwise have been suffered in a meat-grinding land invasion of Japan.  Through the (strictly private) words of the US political and military elite at the time, Ham shows that the nuclear strikes were militarily unnecessary.

By early 1945, US air superiority and its naval blockade had so strangled Japan’s economy and war machine that the White House and the Pentagon had ruled out a land invasion as, in just months, an economically stricken Tokyo would have been forced to surrender.  What made the US embrace the atom bomb was entirely political - Stalin’s Russia, until then the key asset in Europe against Nazi Germany, was now unwelcome to the allies after Hitler’s defeat and had to be kept out of Japan at all costs.

Washington wanted a post-war Asia-Pacific solely under American influence.  General Groves, who headed the $24 billion Manhattan Project which built the atomic bombs, saw that ‘Russia was our enemy and the [Manhattan] Project was conducted on that basis’.  His political masters agreed and to maximise the political payload of the atomic bomb many thousands of Japanese civilians had to die.

Spared the relentless fire-bombing of Japan were a handful of major cities reserved as potential nuclear targets, which, said Groves, should be ‘mostly intact, to demonstrate the awesome destructive powers of an atomic bomb’.  It would not do, decreed the Target Committee, if their civilians were given prior warning or if a demonstration blast were held in an uninhabited area.

Whilst Washington proceeded with its mushroom cloud message to Moscow, Japan’s warlords  merely shrugged as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were added to the 66 cities already destroyed through incendiaries.  What forced Tokyo to finally surrender to the US, says Ham, was its fear of the Red Army (then massing in Manchuria for an attack on Japan) plus Tokyo’s fear of a communist Japan.  Totalitarian Japan, like its ‘democratic’ capitalist peers, made no distinction between Stalin’s geo-political expansion and their own country’s domestic socialist forces.  Tokyo feared the Red Menace more than the atomic bomb.

A casing of lies has ever since surrounded the American nuclear weapons.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not, as was claimed, military targets and their bombing did not ‘shorten the agony of war’ for the US military (economic factors, not foot soldiers, would have proved decisive, in a matter of months).

The agony was, however, shifted to Japanese civilians, aided by a moral sleight-of-hand - ‘we have used [the atomic bomb] against those who have attacked us’, said President Truman, as if it was Japanese civilians who had bombed Pearl Harbour or committed the Japanese military’s ghastly war crimes in Asia.  “In a total racial war”, says Ham, allied governments and press fanned a view of all Japanese as sub-human vermin to be exterminated by indiscriminate terror from the air.

A censorship regime “every bit as rigorous as totalitarian Japan’s”, says Ham, was used to suppress reports of subsequent deaths and gross disfigurements from radiation poisoning.  When the facts of nuclear warfare became known, however, and US public support for the atomic bombing collapsed, Washington resorted to the lie that the decision to bomb had been ‘regrettable’ and a ‘painful last resort’.  Ham’s rigorous documentation of what went on behind closed doors shows, however, that the nuclear bombing was a “desirable outcome”, a “diabolically zealous enterprise”.

It is disappointing, then, that Ham fudges his conclusion.  His book is not about “finding villains”, he declares, but rather exploring “complexity”, the muddle of “thoughts, feelings, relationships that drive human history”.  Thus are the nuclear criminals in Washington offered refuge in Ham’s variant of the theory of history as chaos.

Although Ham deplores nuclear weapons, he argues that they were inevitable during the Cold War and are necessary now because we live in a dangerous world of rogue states and terrorists.  Such futile hand-wringing, and his non-committal stance in what he terms the “stifling debate” between the revisionists (the atomic bombs were a warning to Russia) and the orthodox (they avoided a million-casualty land invasion) sits lamely with the campaigning that still needs to be done to rid the world of these hideous weapons and their raw material - uranium.

FLY AND BE DAMNED: What Now for Aviation and Climate Change? by PETER McMANNERS

FLY AND BE DAMNED: What Now for Aviation and Climate Change?

By PETER McMANNERS

Zed Books, 2012, 182 pages, $26.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

In a future green world, will there be a place for aviation?  In Fly and be Damned,  Peter McManners thinks there will be but that air transport will look quite different.  Today, although total CO₂ emissions from aviation are only 3% of total global CO₂ emissions, annual passenger and freight travel by air is growing at twice that rate and will quickly become unsustainable.  McManners argues for curbing air travel consumption and for developing green air vehicles.

The biggest obstacle to both is the global 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation which ensures that aviation fuel for refuelling on international flights in hosting countries is tax free.  Cheap fuel was intended to boost aviation growth but it also acts as a disincentive to invest in alternatives to fossil fuel. 

Taxing aviation fuel is the essential first step, McManners argues, noting the absurdity that it costs three times as much to refuel a car in London than to refuel a plane at Heathrow.  Making flying more expensive will see less flying, especially in the low cost airline market which has spiked total passenger boardings to seven million a day.  The unnecessary ability to air-freight fresh fruit, vegetables and flowers from poor to rich countries will no longer exist (a £1 million annual import trade in the UK, for example), and rightly so.

A changed tax model will, says McManners, lead to a “surge of innovation” from the “green business community”.  Current improvements in aircraft efficiency (through aerodynamics, aircraft weight and fuel-efficient engines), better air traffic control (to reduce landing delays) and development of bio-fuels (which, however, take forests and agricultural land out of use and whose energy inputs outweigh energy output savings) are “too little, too late”.  Continued aviation growth will boost aggregate CO₂ emissions despite such efficiency improvements.

McManners’ radically redesigned green air fleet will see conventional fuels for the power needed for take-off and headwinds but there will be solar cells and hydrogen for cruising fuel, use of above-cloud thermals, and hybrid aircraft/airships with lighter-than-air buoyancy from an inert gas like helium (unlike the German passenger airship, the Hindenburg, which caught fire from its highly flammable hydrogen in 1937 in New York).  Such flying will be slower and restricted to daylight hours.

Domestic short-haul flights will be replaced by fast rail (using renewable electricity or hybrid locomotives) whilst, for long-haul travel, modern ships powered by sail and renewable energy would be able to compete on price.

McManners’ green flying vision is intriguing although it is based on both an optimistic techno-fix to the problems of climate change and a significant residual role for fossil fuels.  His ‘enlightened’ business entrepreneurs also face an uphill battle against the vested interests of the aviation and fossil fuel industries whilst his forum for instituting a tax on aviation fuel (the G20) is congenitally futile as that body, consisting of governments (including Australia’s), is beholden to capitalist profit and growth.  The future of flying, in a green world, remains up in the air.