Sunday 24 August 2014

AN OFFICER AND A SPY Robert Harris

AN OFFICER AND A SPY
ROBERT HARRIS
Hutchinson, 2013, 483 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

What do you do when you are a national security official with access to secret intelligence and find that the shonky information and tenuous evidence in it has been corruptly used to convict an innocent man of treason?  Join in the suppression of the case?  Or expose the injustice?  Major Georges Picquart, commander of France’s secret police in 1895, faced exactly this dilemma in the Dreyfus Affair and, at great risk of his own victimisation, chose to expose the frame-up of the French Army Captain, Alfred Dreyfus.  Robert Harris’ historical novel dramatically reconstructs the transformation of Picquart from loyal military officer to crusading whistle-blower. 

After France’s colossal defeat by Germany in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, a scapegoat-hungry French military and political elite found, amongst France’s vilified ‘Jews and Traitors’, a convenient fall-guy in Dreyfus, a military officer and a Jew with German cultural roots in the German-occupied French territories of Alsace-Lorraine.

Picquart had many misgivings about Dreyfus’ conviction for espionage which resulted in his exile to France’s isolated Devil’s Island hell-hole.  Dreyfus, thought Picquart, had no apparent motive.  The prosecution illegally (via Picquart) provided to the court-martial judges a secret file which “wouldn’t withstand ten minutes’ cross examination by a halfway decent attorney”, says a repentant Picquart once he sights the material in his newly-promoted capacity as secret police chief.  The spy was identified solely by the letter ‘D’ (for ‘Dreyfus’, that’ll do, thought his framers) on the one incriminating sheet of paper allegedly in Dreyfus’ handwriting.

With resourcefulness, guile and irresistible obsession, Picquart dug into the case and discovered that the real agent was a French Army Major, Esterhazy, selling military secrets to pay off his gambling and mistress debts.  Making his superiors aware of the true situation, Picquart is ordered off his personal investigation to prevent the certain embarrassment and career ruin of Dreyfus’ judicial, military and political persecutors, including five of France’s most senior Army Generals.

When Picquart defies his bosses, a ‘desperate and vindictive army’ attempts to silence him.  He is spied on, interrogated, arrested, held in indefinite detention without trial, transferred to effective exile in France’s African colonies, then dismissed from the Army.  But Picquart is never put on trial.  The ‘founder of the school of Dreyfus studies: its leading scholar’ who knows ‘every letter and telegram, every personality, every forgery, every lie’ of the Dreyfus Affair would be too dangerous to its perpetrators and apologists if given a platform in court.

The limelight-shunning Picquart eventually finds his ‘solitary burden of secrecy’ lifted when he connects with the broad and vigorous mobilisation of social forces (led by intellectuals, left-wing politicians and socialists) that was the essential crux on which turned the eventual victory of the ‘Dreyfusards’ against France’s establishment conspirators, perjurers, forgers and anti-Semites.  Picquart and Dreyfus were both exonerated in 1906, after a decade of seemingly hopeless struggle. 

The relevance of this historic triumph, well-narrated by an industrious Harris despite some sluggish passages of weighty detail, has not dimmed – of never giving up the slog of campaigning against heavy institutional odds, and of the value of the system’s insiders who, with moral courage, forensic diligence and the dogged pursuit of getting the truth out, blow the whistle on the abuse of official power and secrecy.

Monday 18 August 2014

CORAL BATTLEGROUND Judith Wright

THE CORAL BATTLEGROUND
JUDITH WRIGHT
Spinifex, 2014, 203 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

From the days when Captain Cook’s Endeavour tangled with the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, humans had learnt to fear the Reef with its “treacherous waters and weather” but  now the Reef “should fear us more”, writes Judith Wright in The Coral Battleground, a reprint of her 1977 account of the campaign to save the largest and most spectacular marine coral ecosystem in the world from oil drilling.  “We were opposing wealthy interests, entrenched government policies, and political forces that seemed immovable”, she writes, yet the environmentalists won.

One of Australia’s pre-eminent poets, Wright (who passed away in 2000) was a founder of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (WPSQ) in 1962 and became its influential public voice.  ‘Progress’ and ‘development’ – “we learned”, she writes, “to dislike the sound of those two words” which came freely from the mouths of  the Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and the rest of his Cabinet, most of whom held substantial shares in oil and mining companies.

With 80% of the Reef leased by the government for oil and mineral exploration, the WPSQ, buoyed by their recent win to halt limestone mining in the Reef, erected the barricades against the offshore oil industry’s environmental threat (oil-well blow-outs, tanker accidents and ‘normal’ operational spills, detergent treatments and mud discharge).

The government rang familiar alarms about how saving coral polyps would spook a ‘flight of capital from the state’, threaten investment, jobs and government revenue, and drive up the price of petrol.  They appointed a dodgy expert (a geologist with no biological qualifications) who would give the required verdict in favour of ‘controlled exploitation’.  The state conservatives’ federal government colleagues called a Royal Commission with terms of reference loaded towards where and how the Reef could be drilled and not whether it should be drilled.   

This delaying and defusing tactic, however, also allowed time for the election of a federal Labor Government, which responding to the popular environmental momentum and sniffing the “political capital’ to be made from banning oil-drilling, declared the Reef in 1975 a Marine National Park off-limits to oil-drilling.

Before this legislative end-game, however, came the crucial turning point in 1968 when Queensland’s’ trade unions placed a black-ban on oil-drilling in the Reef.  The conservationists had won the scientific argument, the aesthetic argument and the popular argument but now they had the winning muscle – the ‘Green Ban’ “held the key to stopping drilling”, says an elated Wright.

A “small, voluntary, spare-time organisation” had turned popular feeling into a stunning victory against economic and political forces, casting off the weighty anchor of the moderate environmentalists in the Australian Conservation Foundation whose silence and foot-dragging had been bought by government subsidy and corporate membership fees.

As the book’s new publishers note, however, whilst oil drilling has been banned, the threat from the use of the fossil fuel, and its climate change cousin, coal, continues - coral reef ecosystems can not survive higher water temperatures and sea levels, increased extreme weather variability and ocean acidification.  Government inaction and apathy also waves through other mining dangers (nitrogen-laden waste-water from Clive Palmer’s nickel mine, and the recently-approved dumping of three million cubic metres of seabed sludge from expanded shipping terminals as part of Australia’s new, and largest, coal port at Gladstone).  Pesticide and fertiliser pollution from banana and sugarcane farming, and coastal industry, urbanisation and tourism, round out a dire threat assessment which has the United Nations pondering declaring the World Heritage Area to be in danger.

The historic triumph over oil drilling, however, shows how to win against corporate and political environmental vandalism.  Wright’s re-issued book, a self-confessed “unadorned, bare chronological account”, whose prose is often more plodding than poetic, is perfectly timed.

Friday 1 August 2014

Command & Control, A Short History of Nuclear Folly, Atomic Comics

COMMAND AND CONTROL
ERIC SCHLOSSER
Allen Lane, 2013, 632 pages

A SHORT HISTORY OF NUCLEAR FOLLY
RUDOLPH HERZOG
Melville House, 2014, 252 pages


ATOMIC COMICS: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear Age
FERENC SZASZ
University of Nevada Press, 2013, 179 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Atomic bombs have only ever been used twice but they have nearly been detonated, through accident or mistake, many more times, writes Eric Schlosser in his book on nuclear weapons mishaps.  With one modern thermo-nuclear bomb packing three times the force of all the bombs used in World war 11, an unintended catastrophic detonation or scattering of deadly plutonium has been too close, too often, for any complacency.

Nuclear bombs have been accidently launched from planes, have been crushed or burned during plane crashes, or have been damaged during storing and loading.  Dropped tools have punched holes in fuel tanks engulfing nuclear weapons in fire, or have been left in missiles during construction causing electrical short-circuits.  Lightning and improperly installed battery chargers have set them on fire.  Electro-magnetic radiation has interfered with missile controls.  Bomb detonators have been set off during routine tests of electrical systems. 

The American nuclear missile command and control centre has mistakenly identified the moon, forest fires and volcanoes as Soviet nuclear missiles heading for the US.  A defective 46-cent computer chip once indicated that 2,200 Russian missiles were on their way.  In 2003, half the US Air Force units responsible for nuclear weapons failed their safety inspections.  In 2007, six thermo-nuclear bombs went missing.

Safety precautions against misadventure have been sacrificed because they would require super-thick casing and padding, making the nuclear bomb four times heavier and thus reducing the number that could be carried by plane or submarine.  Psychiatric disorders, and drug and alcohol abuse afflict alarming numbers of armed forces nuclear weapons personnel. 

Schlosser admits to a profound ignorance of nuclear weapons and the history of nuclear war strategy and unfortunately feels compelled to include all his newly discovered knowledge in his book which trades off analytical depth for lengthy dramatic re-creations.  Nevertheless, he is persuasive that we continue to live on borrowed time regarding “the most dangerous technology ever invented”.

Rudolph Herzog agrees that dozens of accidents in which nuclear bombs were damaged, lost or accidently launched have played Russian roulette with atomic catastrophe but he expands his indictment to include the very real history of other nuclear disasters.

An atmospheric bomb test in Nevada in the 1950s sent a radioactive dust-cloud to neighbouring Utah where the two hundred cast and crew, and five thousand Native American extras, of a John Wayne film breathed in the nuclear carcinogens resulting in cancer rates six times higher than normal.

Pacific islands have been made uninhabitable from US and French nuclear testing.  A decade of British nuclear tests in Australia in the 1950s reduced by twenty years the life expectancy of the twenty thousand British and Australian military personnel involved whilst further cruelling the lives of remote Indigenous inhabitants.

Nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered submarines rust at the bottom of the seas, dozens of nuclear-fuelled military satellites orbit the planet, occasionally returning uncontrollably with their uranium payload, and massive amounts of military atomic waste was covertly dumped at sea by the old Soviet military.

Civilian nuclear power has rolled out its own catalogue of folly, from chart-topping nuclear reactor accidents to its lesser-known hits.  A plutonium-fuelled Russian space-probe bound for Mars burned up over the Pacific in 2006.  A plutonium-powered battery was taken up the Himalayas, near the source of the river Ganges, to power a US weather station and was lost in an avalanche.  Humans have been subjected to involuntary radiation experiments whilst atomic pacemakers irradiate from places unknown following the death of the user.

‘Missing’ weapons-grade uranium and plutonium forms part of the trade portfolio of the Italian, and post-Soviet Russian, mafias.  Uranium mining has contaminated the environment and workers’ bodies.  Nuclear waste waits unavailingly for a solution. We have fortunately been spared the implementation, but not the conception, of proposals for nuclear-powered cars and for giant mining and earthmoving construction projects.  What new chapters of “atomic idiocy” await writing, asks Herzog.

Herzog and Schlosser make no claim to be comprehensive or scholastic, and their politics are routine boilerplate, but, together, their books are, through the power of cumulative example of nuclear lunacy, unnerving.

Altogether more comforting has been the US comics industry.  Ferenc Szasz’s history of atomic-themed comics begins with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon in the 1930s where the assumed technological wonders of peaceful nuclear energy outweighed any anxiety over atomic war.  Dagwood Bumstead, Mandrake the Magician, Popeye and atomic-enhanced cartoon animals, including Donald Duck, have lent an ‘educational’ hand to the task of reassuring readers that any dangers of nuclear fission were manageable.

A flock of caped heroes (Captain Marvel, Captain America, Superman and Wonder Woman) ensured that atomic bombs would not fall into the wrong hands (terrorists, evil scientists, unreconstructed Nazis, foreign powers, Reds).  It was assumed that the American hands which held The Bomb were the right hands and that nuclear warfare against the Soviet Union could be both limited and winnable.

An “atomic banality”, says Szasz, now reigns in the comics and animation world in which “cynicism, resignation and bland acceptance” of nuclear fission, and the light satire of The Simpsons, coats over the continuing nuclear problems.

The corporate fingerprint is evident in all this cartoon contentedness.  Although Szasz’s book should have developed this crucial issue more, the business giants of the comics industry, Marvel and DC Comics, which control three-quarters of the $700 million a year US comics market, share the supreme value of money-making with those who profit from nuclear energy and weapons.  Capitalism and the nuclear age are no laughing matter.