ANZAC: The Unauthorised Biography CARLYN HOLBROOK

ANZAC: The Unauthorised Biography
CAROLYN HOLBROOK
NewSouth, 2014, 266 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

The “bungled invasion of an isolated Turkish peninsula” one hundred years ago, writes Melbourne University’s Dr. Carolyn Holbrook in Anzac, looks set to super-heat the “commemorative frenzy” of Anzac Day when what is needed is a cooler examination of the historical fate of (white) Australia’s first serious taste of modern warfare.

The Boer War a few years earlier had been too insufficiently crimson to provide the requisite sacrificial genesis for Australian nationhood, but the sixty thousand dead Anzac soldiers from the ‘Great War’ was a better fit for Australia’s ‘baptism of fire’, centering on the Allied landing at Gallipoli (eight thousand Australians killed) on 25 April, 1915, as part of an ill-fated plan to take Turkey out of the war.

Thus did Anzac Day begin its career as a sacred day for khaki patriotism but it has not gone unchallenged.  Dissent from the approved Anzac values of nationalism and militarism began from the time of the war itself.  Whilst the official war chronicler, Charles Bean, dutifully penned the narrative of the Australian people coming together in search for national identity through war, Holbrook writes that, “lost in the clamour of Anzac idolatry”, is the fact that, helped by two defeated national referenda on conscription, six out of ten eligible Australian men failed to follow the blood and nation script by not enlisting for the war.

Post-war, many veterans themselves preferred to forget rather than remember, let alone celebrate, the whole ghastly experience, whilst internationalist, socialist and anti-war movements kept the Anzac fever dampened during the inter-war years and almost drove it to extinction during the 1960s and 1970s.

In response, Anzac’s more sophisticated guardians have rehabilitated its history, acknowledging the misery and hardship of war but redeeming it through an ennobling mateship.  The poignancy of the personal tragedy has replaced the geo-political causes of war as the Anzacs are movingly portrayed as victims but without any perpetrators.  This is a far cry from, for example, Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front whose “profound subversiveness” was to see the real enemy, on both sides, as “a political system that led millions to awful, senseless deaths”, writes Holbrook.

Holbrook’s critique of the Anzac religion is, however, compromised by subscribing to Anzac’s subtly refurbished conservative politics.  She is loathe to be numbered amongst the card-carrying “Vietnam generation of baby boomer historians” who see Anzac Day as glorifying and justifying war.  She is warmly sympathetic to those Anzac family descendants whose state-supported personal histories try to separate the war from the men who fought it but this approach risks tripping up on the old patriotic banana skin of  ‘support our troops’ which amounts in practice to acquiescing in whatever war they are engaged in, no matter how illegitimate or ugly.

Holbrook claims that “it is difficult to be offended about the benign form of the contemporary Anzac legend” yet this surrender to the ideological modernisation of Anzac leaves unchallenged the omnipresent cultural symbols and rituals of Anzac Day remembrance with their reverberations with all things military.

Anzac is too valuable a conservative political franchise to be allowed to lapse by its custodians - the military, the corporations, the Prime Ministers and the establishment media who took us to Gallipoli a century ago, who keep taking us to other exotic butchering fields and who are so keen to partner with “Australia’s most powerful brand” today.

Holbrook is no crass militarist or Anzac cult member but she does keep her dissenting noise down to a reverential whisper and her book will not alarm Anzac nurturers such as Kim ‘Bomber’ Beazley, Labor’s former Defence minister, who wrote the book’s foreword.  Anzac Day has never been an anti-war day.  Those who wish to see a world free of sordid resource wars should not be marching in its ranks.

THE RISE AND FALL OF GUNNS Quentin Beresford

THE RISE AND FALL OF GUNNS LTD
QUENTIN BERESFORD
NewSouth, 2015, 442 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

It was a sweet day when the placards – No Pulp Mill! – won an epic seven year battle against elite corporate and political power in Tasmania after Gunns Ltd., the largest timber corporation in Australia, went bust in 2013 with debts of $3 billion.  Public outrage over its proposed woodchip pulp mill had sunk the state’s largest, and most powerful, corporation.

Quentin Beresford, politics professor at Edith Cowan University, situates Gunns’ spectacular implosion in ‘crony capitalism’ – the close and profoundly undemocratic bond between business and state - that had ruled Tasmania’s economy and politics for decades and had arrogantly ignored or bullied its people.

Hydro-industrialisation had led the way with cheap hydro-electricity for industry, the tab picked up by the taxpayer for the government’s loan financing debt.  The logging industry next joined the corporate profit party with “eye-glazing” government subsidies, bargain-basement government royalty revenue and environmental regulation exemptions.  The trading of financial favours worked both ways with forestry industry political donations to Liberal and Labor parties returning the state’s economic favours.

Gunns not unreasonably thought that its ideologically-compliant and donation-tamed ministers would surely see to it that nothing would get in the way of government approval for Gunns’ next big project, a proposed pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, near Launceston.

Not the toxic pollution from the dioxin-contaminated effluent, not the rotten-egg gases and other air pollutants, not the mill’s enormous thirst for water, not the massive clear-felling of old-growth native forests to supply the woodchips for the mill, not, for good measure, the quantum leap in greenhouse gas emissions.

Every single politician of note, Labor or Liberal, state or federal, got on board the Gunns-forestry-pulp mill bus.  They may have been part of the minority (less than a third) of Tasmanians supporting the mill but the politicians had all the power.  Their armoury against the popular will included personal aggression when under public challenge, a lack of tolerance for dissenting views, quarantining government policy and deal-making from public scrutiny, fast-tracking parliamentary approval, criminalising protest and dogmatically refusing to consider an economically diversified and cleaner future as an alternative to capital-intensive, low-employment, anti-environment ‘development’ projects.

Gunns, for its part, tried to sue its critics into silence whilst mobilising its timber workers, made susceptible to corporate propaganda over their jobs, as shock troops against mill opponents in an “organised campaign of intimidation”.

There emerged, however, a counter-power.  A “multi-dimensional strategy” incorporating local community opposition, mass public rallies and ‘corporate activism’ targeting Gunns’ business customers and investors sustained a campaign that was remarkable for its size, breadth, intensity and longevity.

Beresford devotes much favourable attention to ‘corporate activism’.  Certainly, its successes were real.  The ANZ (Gunns’ principal lender) withdrew its backing for the pulp mill after tens of thousands of the bank’s customers threatened to close their accounts.  Other large financial investors ran off, fearing similar “reputational risk”.  Japanese buyers of Gunns’ woodchips (Gunns’ most profitable market) dumped Gunns’ native forest woodchips in favour of the surviving market of sustainably sourced woodchips during the global financial crisis.

These were all hard-headed commercial decisions based on Gunns’ soaring investment risk, rising debt, falling profits and tumbling share price.  All these failing financial indicators, however, had been fatally aggravated by a vibrant and determined popular campaign against the pulp mill.  ‘Corporate activism’ is dependent for its effectiveness on the old-fashioned protest stuff, and even has the potential for being counter-productive, as demonstrated by The Wilderness Society, a multi-million dollar organisation reorienting from protest to boardroom business deals, which offered its green imprimatur to a pulp mill in return for Gunns sparing more native forests.

In the end, Gunns’ refusal to move with the greening times burst its government-backed financial bubble as “their plans unravelled in the face of people power”.  The fatal mistake of Gunns and its hired governments was to underestimate the power of the placard.

IN THE COMPANY OF COWARDS, Michael Mori

IN THE COMPANY OF COWARDS: Bush, Howard and Injustice at Guantánamo
MICHAEL MORI
Viking, 2014, 292 pages, $29.99 (pb)

MURDER AT CAMP DELTA: A Staff Sergeant’s Pursuit of the Truth about Guantánamo Bay

JOSEPH HICKMAN
Simon & Schuster, 2015, 245 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Major Michael Mori was a Republican-leaning, US military lawyer who “embraced the values I had been taught in scouts, sports, high school, college, law school and the Marines”, above all the ideal of fair play.  In 2003, Mori was assigned as defense counsel for David Hicks, an Australian citizen captured by Afghan warlords during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan following the Al Qaeda terrorist attack in New York in 2001, and then detained in the US Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Mori, however, was confused about what, if any, crimes Hicks was alleged to have committed.  So, too, were the prosecutors as Hicks’ imprisonment without charge, but with severe abuse, dragged on for year after year as he faced certain future conviction by a rigged Military Commission judicial process which junked all the basic rules of evidence.  Mori saw his priority as getting a suicidal Hicks out of Guantanamo.

Faced with the dead-end of the kangaroo court, Mori had to take Hicks’ legal and human rights to the court of public opinion, “the only arena that mattered to politicians”, especially to Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, in an election year (2007).  Howard had done nothing for Hicks for six years when it was in his political interest to promote war and terror neurosis but with the electoral calculus changed to parliamentary survival, Howard, in a “belated political move to defuse the Hicks issue”, instigated a plea bargain with Washington which at last got Hicks returned to Australia with a residual prison term.

The price Hicks was to pay for an end to his existence of fear, pain and despair, however, was the tag of ‘convicted terrorist’ despite Hicks’ guilty plea being coerced under extreme duress and, in 2015, ruled void in the US courts.

Mori, who retired from the military in 2012 and joined the social justice section of an Australian law firm, played a vital role in justice for Hicks but he reminds the readers of his valuable book that “it was they, the Australian public, who got David Hicks out.  I hope that the people of Australia never forget that”.

Like Mori, Sergeant Joe Hickman was “a patriotic American” and he was proud to finally get to “meet the enemy” as a guard in Guantanamo in 2006.  “Keeping terrorists locked up was an important job”, Hickman writes, but, like Mori, he also had standards, namely a belief in “basic American principles of decency”, even towards those he had been told were “evil men bent on destroying our country”.

Decency, however, was decidedly lacking in the “excessively punishing” detention conditions, cultural insults and “Rodney King-style beatings” of cuffed and shackled detainees.  The “mass violation of regulations” was disturbing to Hickman, a former civilian prison officer, more so because the abuse by the guards was condoned or orchestrated by senior officers.  A culture of lies and cover-up made Hickman “feel shame, both in myself and in my military”.

What tipped him over the moral edge, however, was the murder of three detainees.  Ludicrously portrayed as a triple suicide designed to damage the reputation of the US in an act of ‘asymmetrical warfare’, the deaths were, to Hickman, who was a witness, probably the result of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (torture, in any decent person’s language) that “went too far”.

A US Navy investigation tried to bury the affair in a “dry, heavily redacted, deliberately garbled” report, so Hickman felt compelled to take his story public.  With initial caution (Hickman was a “lifelong conservative”), he approached the Seton Hall University Law School whose professor (a “left-leaning wingnut from the 1960s”, feared Hickman) and his students had earlier found that 92% of the almost 800 Guantanamo detainees (including David Hicks) were not Al Qaeda terrorists at all. 

Through forensic document analysis, the official Navy report was shown to be a complete whitewash and Hickman went from wanting to punch the lights out of “typical liberal college kids” to bonding with the “bright, young legal researchers”.

Everybody else, sadly but predictably, failed Hickman in his search for the truth about the deaths in custody.  The US military command failed him.  The Justice Department and FBI, under new (Obama) management, failed him.  The mainstream media failed him.  The cost to Hickman was his career, retirement benefits and lifetime medical coverage as a veteran but he refused to place a price on integrity.

As a Bertholt Brecht poem put it, the military man is very powerful because,

“He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think”.

Major Mori and Sergeant Hickman thought deeply about the wrongdoing they saw in the ‘War on Terror’.  They courageously acted for truth, justice and an ‘American Way’ other than the one of lies, torture and killing.

TRIUMPH: Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics by JEREMY SCHAAP

TRIUMPH: Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics

JEREMY SCHAAP
Head of Zeus, 2014, 272 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

He may have been the world’s greatest athlete at the time, writes Jeremy Schaap in Triumph, but Jesse Owens was also a black American, and Owens, the winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was refused a room at hotel after hotel on his arrival back in New York until one finally agreed on condition that he use the service entrance.

To the grandson of slaves, born into rural poverty in Alabama, racism was part of the deal, not only down south but also in the industrial Midwest where, picked up by Ohio State University as a track star, Owens could not live on their whites-only campus, was refused service in restaurants and coped with the other daily offerings of prejudice only through his outstanding ability to run and jump.

It is little surprise, then, that Owens did not support the movement to boycott the Nazi Olympics on the justifiable grounds that it was hypocritical for the US to oppose discrimination against Jews in Germany whilst blacks at home had to cop it.

It is true, however, that sporting and financial self-interest also played a role in the decision of Owens (who faced a future as a petrol-station attendant) and the other black members of the US Olympic team to welcome a trip to Berlin.  Black Americans generally, however, were split on a boycott and many legitimately argued that attending what Hitler planned as a spectacular pageant of Nazi grandeur and power would legitimise the concept of a ‘master race’ that not only persecuted Jews but blacks and other ‘non-Aryans’.

Some black Americans ceded this pro-boycott principle but argued that ‘Black Gold’ (which was almost certain with Owens) would tellingly refute Nazi, and American, claims of white superiority.  Hitler was duly embarrassed by the gold medals won by Owens and by other black Americans, pointedly leaving his box before the medal presentations and refusing to press black flesh in private receptions.  The Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, was also made angrily uncomfortable by the documentary of Leni Riefenstahl (Hitler’s favourite cinematographer) having a black American, a member of an ‘inferior’ race, as its star performer.

Also irked was the President of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, the reactionary millionaire member of a whites-only club in Chicago, a “crypto-fascist” and future International Olympic Committee head.  Team USA wasn’t winning gold, Team Black was, and Brundage vindictively suspended a financially-strapped and physically tired Owens from any future athletics competitions, amateur or professional, ostensibly for refusing one of many unpaid exhibition meets in Europe at the end of the Olympics (earning himself the new name of ‘Slavery Brundage’ for his treatment of his black chattels).

Owens’ gold medals, therefore, could not be monetised and he struggled financially, sometimes selling himself to race against horses.  In the depths of the Cold War, however, Owens “found he was useful – to industry and government” as a symbol of the democratic opportunities that Washington liked to boast of when it compared itself to the Soviet Union.  The State Department sent an amenable, Republican, anti-Soviet Owens on ‘goodwill’ (propaganda) tours of Asia to promote his example of a poor outsider who made good in America rather than making communist revolution in the poor world.

Unfortunately, Schaap’s writing, unlike Owens’ athleticism, doesn’t take flight.  It is mired in sports journalism cliché and his treatment of Owens’ politics is cursory.  Owens did not see his Berlin exploits in a political light and he was rejected for his stance that politics and sport don’t mix, and for his role as counter-revolutionary US cultural ambassador, by militant black American athletes at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, although he appeared to reconsider his views in his autobiography before his death in 1980.  Despite Owens’ lack of political sophistication, however, his symbolic days in Berlin remain as a dramatic rebuttal of the divisive claims of people’s inferiority because of the pigment of their skin.

RED APPLE: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York PHILLIP DEERY

RED APPLE: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York
PHILLIP DEERY
Fordham University Press, 2014, 252 pages, $41.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The mouth-foaming Wisconsin Senator, Joseph McCarthy, who chaired the House Committee on Un-America Activities in the 1950s, added extreme vigour to the perpetual war by the American state against dissent, says Professor Phillip Deery of Melbourne’s Victoria University in Red Apple.

Deery explores this particularly “virulent strain of persecution of leftists” through vivid case studies of selected New York radicals who were active in the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC) which assisted some of the half million refugees from Franco’s Spain after the fascist defeat of the left-wing Republican government in the late 1930s.

All the JAFRC activists had refused to hand over the organisation’s financial records which identified tens of thousands of aid donors and recipients who would have potentially been exposed to persecution by the FBI and by Franco.  All the activists paid a ruinous price for their non-cooperation through jail, career loss and financial adversity, including a hospital surgeon, two professors, a writer (Howard Fast, author of Spartacus) and others of eminent professional standing.

Some of the JAFRC activists were members of the Communist Party of the USA, most were not.  All were motivated by wanting to see a fairer, kinder, cleaner world.  Not that any of that mattered a jot to the Red-hunters because any Communist association enabled a political body to be deemed a ‘communist front’ and declared a ‘subversive organisation’.  As Deery points out, however, the concept of a ‘front’ is “problematic not axiomatic” because there were widely different degrees of communist influence on broad-based progressive movements.  There was “not a whiff” of communist frontism about JAFRC.  Such subtleties, however, were entirely lost amidst the “rudeness, intimidation and sheer bullying” of the hearings held by McCarthy and other Washington demagogues.

The JAFRC activists fought back but the dice were loaded with the weight of a vast bureaucratic network of government inquisitorial committees, Congress (which voted overwhelmingly to cite non-cooperators for contempt of Congress), the Justice Department (which prosecuted the defiant ones for their contempt), the FBI which dug up (or made up) red dirt on their targets, and university administrations (which feared that not sacking their ‘commie’ staff would affect their corporate and government funding).

Deery shows a microscopic but grimly illuminating slice of the immense human, and political, cost of “one of the most savage assaults on civil liberties in American history”, one that destroyed hundreds of progressive organisations and devastated many thousands of lives.  But the “corrosiveness of Cold War anti-communism” is to be truly measured, he says, by the unquantifiable toll from propagating fear and stifling dissent - “reforms that were never implemented, unions that were never organised, movements that never started, books that were never published, films that were never produced”. 

McCarthyism is not, concludes Deery, just a historical matter for scholarly dissertations.  It remains relevant in showing the fragility of democratic rights and the vulnerability of free speech when the capitalist state, in the service of private power and wealth, comes spruiking the latest lines in political panic and alarm.