MADLANDS: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Sceptic by ANNA ROSE

MADLANDS: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Sceptic
ANNA ROSE
Melbourne University Press, 2012, 357 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Anna Rose, a climate change youth activist and leader, was warned by her many colleagues in the environment movement of the risks of agreeing to do a television documentary, screened earlier this year by the ABC,  pitting her against the former Liberal Party senator, science minister and climate change denialist, Nick Minchin.

The “whole show will play into the denialists’ strategy of framing the science as disputed when it actually isn’t”, she was told, and it would serve merely to give the infinitesimally tiny bunch of cranks and denialists prime time exposure to market their shonky product, ‘doubt’.

Rose had heard that the respected scientist, Tim Flannery, and the ABC’s science journalist, Robyn Williams, had declined to ‘balance’ the scales on an issue for which the time for weighing up the science is long past.  Nevertheless, the documentary was going ahead, so Rose decided it may as well be her and pinned her hopes on exposing the weaknesses of the denialists’ case to sway the undecided viewer.  Madlands is her account of the experience.

Her first meeting, with Minchin’s hand-picked right wing libertarian bloggers, “a mum and dad team from Perth” who “had discovered that thousands of climate scientists and all the world’s main scientific academies were wrong”, set the tone for incredulity which was not dispelled by subsequent denialists.

Meanwhile, a stubborn Minchin proved impervious to the patient persuasion of Rose’s chosen climate scientists.  Pillow-punching frustration at Minchin’s smug (‘I remain to be convinced’) irresponsibility is punctuated by Rose’s dawning realisation that his intransigent denialism is not really about the science at all but the implications of the science for the future of, and for the massive profits from, a fossil-fuel-based economy.

Minchin’s claim to be an ‘open-minded sceptic’ is hollow, says Rose, showing how Minchin relentlessly denies scientific fact because of his core conservative political and economic values, especially his opposition to environmentalism as ‘the new religion’ of the ‘extreme left’ and his dread of government interference and regulation of the free market - except, of course, for favoured causes such as government subsidies ($9 billion annually in Australia) that make fossil fuels so much cheaper in relation to assistance-starved renewable energy.

By book’s end, Rose, having despaired of changing Minchin’s politically-shuttered mind but determined to find “common ground” with denialists, joins hands with Minchin in celebrating “competitive economic advantage” through energy efficiency, a solitary policy plank which sidesteps the central issue of replacing carbon-dirty energy with clean renewables.

This not only concedes scientific ground to ratbag denialists but Rose’s concluding plea that the climate change movement needs “people who understand markets”, like Minchin and other free market ideologues (“harmonising the market with the environment” is “what this whole project has been about”, she concludes), is a crippling political concession given  the carbon tax and emissions trading scheme failures of the capitalist market to solve a world-threatening crisis of its own making.

PROJECT REPUBLIC: Plans and Arguments for a New Australia by JONES & McKENNA

PROJECT REPUBLIC: Plans and Arguments for a New Australia
BENJAMIN T. JONES and MARK MCKENNA (eds)
Black Inc., 2013, 251 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

If the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) represents those who wish to make Australia a republic yet the ARM sends congratulations to the Queen in 2012 on her sixtieth year of rule from London, what hope is there for Australia becoming a royal-free zone?  Not much, must be the conclusion, after reading the ARM’s call-to-republican-arms book, Project Republic.

Republicanism has majority public support (48% versus 39% at last count in 2012) despite the defeat of the 1999 referendum when a monarchist Prime Minister and conservative republicans, including the ARM, opted for the referendum question on a republic to decide on the highly unpopular model of parliamentary appointment of a President as Australian head of state rather than direct election by all voters.

When republican ‘direct electionists’ made the politically short-sighted error of advocating a No vote to a republic in the mistaken assumption that a direct-election model would be put at an imminent second referendum, the majority republican sentiment (75% at the time) was split, the referendum lost (45% voting Yes), ushering in a long and continuing period of “indifference and silence on the republic”.

To re-ignite republican fervour, Professor Mark McKenna and comedian Julian Morrow, in their contributions, adopt anti-monarchical irreverence although this is frowned upon by the National Director of the ARM who frames republicanism as being all about patriotism and not criticising the Queen or the rest of the royal bludgers.

Obsequiousness towards the monarchy peppers the book, including the opening salvos by erstwhile political opponents, the Liberal’s Malcolm Turnbull (admiring the Queen for a ‘lifetime of service’) and Labor’s Wayne Swan (loving the Queen for her ‘unfailing record of public duty’).  Both also chummily agree that another word for republicanism is patriotism (Turnbull – a republican is “simply, purely, patriotic”; Swan - an Australian republic will be better positioned to “take advantage” of the region during the ‘Asian Century’).

Quite how this lame royalty-reverence and limp nationalism will help the republican movement to “find a new language that will connect with the electorate” and fire the republican imagination is not immediately apparent.  McKenna notes that today’s republicans have shed their historical image as “radical, atheist, anti-British left-wingers hell-bent on revolution” but, in thus “normalising the republican case”, they have “sanitised the argument to the point of blandness” and narrowed the vision to ‘minimalist’ constitutional change (replacing the Queen with an Australian head of state).

The reaction of many people to this minimalism, says Larissa Behrendt (Indigenous Law professor), is “a collective yawn”.  The republic must be about more than token symbolism, and any constitutional revamp must embody values of democracy, multiculturalism, fairness and equality.

Decorative symbolism is only important for the substance it adorns, agrees Henry Reynolds who grasps the political nettle - monarchy “cements in place at the apex of the political system the principles of hereditary power and privilege which … are profoundly undemocratic”.  Biology should not decide who sits at the top of the power heap.  The res publica (‘people’s space’) should.

Even at the level of limited democratic reform, republicans need to be bolder and to consider issues of popular, democratic power instead of contenting themselves, as nearly all contributors do, with waffly sentiment about an Australian head of state instilling some variant of nationalism (‘national identity’, ‘national dignity’, ‘national pride’, etc.) to the office.

Whether a hereditary, foreign royal or an elected Australian citizen occupies the post, the occupant should not have the present, coyly termed, ‘reserve powers’, most notoriously the ability to sack an elected government (as happened in 1975).  As head of state, a republican President would still be the head of a state (police, courts, bureaucracy, army, etc.) that serves the Australian capitalist class and will dismiss  a government they fear, rightly or wrongly, will harm those class privileges.

Abolishing the British monarch as Australian head of state, nevertheless, remains an essential, immediate-term, democratic reform.  Wiping out one undemocratic bastion of privilege should, however, be just the overture to tackling other fortresses of class wealth and power in Australia.  The politically tepid Australian Republican Movement, and its book (which often gets lost in arcane constitutional ponderings), can help with the former but not, one despairs, with very much, if any, of the latter.

EARTHMASTERS: Playing God With The Climate by CLIVE HAMILTON

EARTHMASTERS: Playing God With The Climate
CLIVE HAMILTON
Allen&Unwin, 2013, 247 pages, $24.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’ seems to be the philosophy, says Clive Hamilton in Earthmasters, of the fossil fuel companies, the World Bank and the billionaire ‘techno-entrepreneurs’ like Bill Gates and Richard Branson who are funding research into geo-engineering schemes for “large-scale intervention in the climate system designed to counter global warming”.

Geo-engineering advocates are coming in from the ‘mad scientist’ fringe to plug “the yawning gap between the urgent response scientists say is needed and the timid measures governments are willing to take”, says Hamilton, including Australia where coal exports over the next decade will be eleven times greater in CO₂ emissions than any reduction due to the carbon tax.

“If Plan A (persuading the world to cut emissions) is failing, shouldn’t we have a Plan B?”, plead the Earth engineers fondling their blueprints to manipulate cloud cover, change the ocean’s chemical composition, install a solar shield of sunlight-reflecting sulphate particles, sequestering carbon in the soil, and other even more exotic proposals.

Hamilton makes short work of such ideas, diagnosing their many technical defects, unintended consequences and the expensive and vast industrial infrastructure required to implement them.  Pursuing these “highly speculative technologies fraught with political and scientific uncertainties and risks” when “we could just stop burning fossil fuels” is a particularly fraught version of environmental roulette based on unjustified technological hubris. 

There is, says Hamilton, something “increasingly desperate about placing more faith in technological supremacy when it is the unrelenting desire to command and control the natural world that has brought us to this point”.  This faith is particularly marked amongst the leading geo-engineering advocates whose “common institutional and ideological origins” in Cold War nuclear weapons programs has primed them for further big technological schemes to defend free market capitalism.

Conservative politics explains the apparent paradox of fossil-fuel-friendly climate change deniers supporting a solution (geo-engineering) to a problem (anthropogenic global warming) they say does not exist.  For if the science of climate change were to win out against their best efforts at delay and denial, any policy response must involve no “infringement of economic freedom, or require social change  which challenges the structure of economic and political power” of the market economy.  Those who made the climate change mess are to remain in charge to profit from the (illusory) geo-engineering clean-up.

Hamilton cites Naomi Klein’s observation that climate change deniers ‘understand much better than liberals the political implications of accepting the science’, namely the revolutionary changes which would be required to ‘the underlying logic of our economic system’ which is based on continued material growth and consumerism.

Although such radical social transformation is routinely dismissed as utopian, Hamilton notes that it has been part of the “daily discourse of western society from the French Revolution to the 1980s when the neoliberal revolution brought about the ‘end of history’” and that today’s political quietude represents a pause in revolutionary history rather than a finale, a temporary stasis that climate change has the potential to dramatically upset.

In the end, Hamilton doesn’t take the plunge into anything as specific as a socialist solution to human and environmental crisis (he is more comfortable, and highly proficient at, philosophising) but his book sets up a useful platform for others to take the leap into changing the world.

DRONE WARFARE: Killing By Remote Control by MEDEA BENJAMIN

DRONE WARFARE: Killing By Remote Control
MEDEA BENJAMIN
Verso, 2013, 246 pages, $24.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

‘Never before in the history of warfare’, boasted the Wall Street Journal, ‘have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones’.  The Obama administration has helped in this claim, writes Medea Benjamin in her book on the ‘unmanned aerial vehicle’, by conveniently defining every military-age male in the strike zone as a combatant.

The 60% domestic support which drones enjoy in the US rests largely on the reputation of the drone as “the cost-free magic wand that can eliminate terror”.  ‘Don’t you want the bad guys to die?’ is the argument used to silence doubters as drone killings of Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and north Africa comes with the bonus of zero American military casualties.

As Benjamin shows, however, the ‘good weapon’ status of the drone is undeserved.  From eight thousand miles away in Nevada, a drone ‘pilot’ “can watch an Afghan as he lights up a cigarette … or goes to the bathroom” but the problem is that a “a tall, bearded man in a robe” who may be a terrorist “can look just like another tall bearded man in a robe” who isn’t.

The innocent, as wrongly identified targets, are not only thus killed accidentally but also incidentally as ‘collateral damage’, as bystanders caught in the blast radius of a drone missile as it strikes a suspected terrorist.  Others to pay with their lives are those with a ‘pattern of life’ of a militant, an ill-defined category which accounts for most drone strikes.  So, of the estimated 3,400 people killed by CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, most have been either innocent civilians or those whose assumed terrorist sympathies were untested by the right to trial.

The US drone network powers on regardless, turbo-charged by Washington’s global ‘war on terror’ which has boosted the Pentagon’s drone fleet from fifty (primarily for battlefield surveillance) a decade ago to 7,500 including 800 of the larger, weaponised drones up to the size of commercial jet planes.  Drone stocks are added to by the CIA (which operates the most drones), the Department of Homeland Security and the mercenary forces of Blackwater (now known as Academi).

These agencies pump bucket-loads of recession-proof money into the veins of corporate America for   the drone hardware, the surveillance software and the missiles.  General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon all line up for a share of the Pentagon’s annual $5 billion procurement program and the CIA’s unknown amount from its ultra-secretive ‘black budget’.

Cheaper only in comparison to nine-figure fighter jet price tags, drones are still mighty expensive (the most popular model, the Predator, rings up $5 million per drone, the Reaper $28 million) whilst the Hellfire missile rakes in a tidy $68,000 a pop.

The drone has not completely solved the ethical problem of human agency, however.  Drones have been explicitly designed to exploit “youth gaming culture”, the drones’ teenage ‘pilots’ trained to adopt a “PlayStation mentality” to real killing.  The in-house US military slang for drone deaths is ‘bugsplat’.

Real-time video-feed, however, allows the ‘pilots’ to witness the results of their murders up close which can be distressing (“It’s hard to go home to one’s own family after wiping out someone else’s”, comments Benjamin) so the ‘pilots’ are taught to compartmentalise their lives between work and home, and to rationalise their actions as doing a bit of evil in order to do good, whilst research into enhanced robotisation with pre-programmed, computer-automated drones seeks to eliminate the “troublesome emotions and consciences” of even the ‘cubicle warriors’.

Keen to keep the reality of drone warfare from public consciousness, the White House has recently (after Benjamin’s book went to press) been forced to cede more transparency and tighter restrictions on drone use to better manage their image.

This is in response not only to campaigns by anti-war and anti-drone activists (such as Benjamin, herself) but also because of Washington’s growing realisation of the harm that drones are doing – not to the civilians killed by them or who live in constant fear from their ominous hovering and buzzing but the harm being done to US geo-political interests from nominal allies such as Pakistan where three quarters of the population now consider the US an enemy.  Obama’s summary execution of suspected terrorists, rather than Bush’s inhumane detention and torture, has not solved the US administration’s problems of international embarrassment and regional hostility.

There are peaceful purposes for non-weaponised surveillance drones, says Medea.  They were used by governments to check radiation levels at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan and to monitor wildlife after floods in Australia, whilst the anti-whaling Sea Shepherd uses them to detect illegal whaling in the Pacific Ocean.  This, however, is a far cry from, and a fiscally wasteful gulf between, the state-sponsored assassinations, semi-covert wars and militarised thinking of the US government.

RYSZARD KAPUSINSKI: A Life by ARTUR DOMOSLAWSKI

RYSZARD KAPUSINSKI: A Life
By ARTUR DOMOSLAWSKI
Verso, 2012, 456 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When the Solidarity protest movement kicked off in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk in 1979 against the neo-Stalinist Polish government, Ryszard Kapusinski faced a difficult choice – would the “world’s most famous Polish reporter”, writes Artur Domoslawski, “side with the mutinous people or his pals on the Central Committee”.

Kapusinski, the Polish United Workers’ Party member of thirty years, tried his decades-old balancing act between writing about genuine revolutions outside Poland and his loyalty to a domestic party claiming but dishonouring revolution.  General Jaruzelski eventually decided the issue – when he declared martial law, Kapusinksi resigned from his ‘communist’ party.

Born in 1932 in provincial Poland, where the fury of war and the grind of poverty dominated the landscape, the young and zealous idealist set out to ‘build socialism’ through the Moscow-supported post-war government.  With the 1956 exposure of Stalin’s crimes, however, and the repression of local dissidents by Moscow’s surrogate party in Poland, Kapusinski supported the de-Stalinisation movement to ‘mend socialism’.

This reforming movement, however, was too cautious and controlled to satisfy Kapusinski’s revolutionary leanings which eventually found their outlet as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency (PAP).  ‘The revolution at home was over, and he went in pursuit of it elsewhere’, said a PAP colleague.  Kapusinski was fortunate that, for their “own economic and geo-strategic” reasons during the Cold War, the European neo-Stalinist states generally supported the anti-colonial movements of Africa and Latin America thus enabling Kapusinski to safely celebrate revolution at a distance.

He was politically agile enough, however, to offer, through his reportage, a “universal allegory of the mechanisms of power and revolution” which applied just as much to Poland as to countries in revolutionary ferment overseas.  Whether in a half-starved, colonial hell-hole, or in a “well-fed and well-entertained” country like Poland, Kapusinski diagnosed how and when an oppressed people stops being afraid of the regime’s gendarmes, ceases to obey and challenges for power.

His writing style also had wide appeal.  Its sensual tone and poetic rhythm gave the lived experience of the people at the bottom of the power structure a literary force.  Kapusinski lived their life, was “bitten by the same insects, fell ill with the same diseases, ate the same food” and saw their struggle and political radicalisation through their eyes.

A side-effect of this emotional identification, however, was a tendency for Kapusinski to romanticise the new wave of Third World revolutions and to be somewhat uncritical of certain revolutionary tactics and heroes, although he was perceptive about the potential for post-independence degeneration which derived too often from the anti-colonial slogan being ‘liberty not equality’.

Kapusinski could also invent and embellish to create an image of himself as a “fearless war reporter” who narrowly escaped death by firing squad and who personally knew socialist icons like Che Guevara and Salvador Allende.  These experiences may have been inventions but the global and class inequalities, and the power structures which kept them in place, were no invention by Kapusinski.

What threatened to more seriously damage Kapusinski’s credibility were the allegations by Poland’s rightwing anti-communists who suggested his success had been owed to his friends in high party places and his cooperation with the regime’s intelligence services.  Could this devalue Kapusinski’s entire work?

No, replies Domoslawski.  Kapusinski did not spy on Poland’s domestic opposition and Polish journalists’ intelligence reporting from Third World countries “did not usually have great significance, nor was great weight attached to it”.  Kapusinski regarded his overseas political assessments, including reports on CIA operations, as “a morally good deed” – a case not without merit, given where the CIA has stood on global human rights and democracy.

Kapusinski’s last decades before his death in 2007 were marked by his rejection of a neo-liberal market “shock therapy” future for the former neo-Stalinist states and an expanded capitalist world of mindless consumption and entertainment which masked poverty, hunger and imperialist war.

Domoslawski’s biography is discursive and exploratory, honest and questioning.  It’s greatest merit is as an appetiser to the journalism of Kapusinski which, despite its occasional political and ethical glitches, stands head and shoulders above that of capitalism’s contemporary reporters.  Their sins of propaganda and style, though masked by ‘impartiality’ and being ‘realistic’, accept, and reinforce, the narrow boundaries of what is possible under capitalism, something that Kapusinski, as a committed socialist, had always challenged.

MOSCOW 1937, STALIN'S GENERAL, AGENT DIMITRI

MOSCOW 1937
KARL SCHLOGEL
Polity, 2012, 652 pages, $39.95 (hb)

STALIN’S GENERAL: The Life of Georgy Zhukov

GEOFFREY ROBERTS
Icon Books, 2012, 375 pages, $24.99 (pb)

AGENT DIMITRI: The Secret History of Russia’s Most Daring Spy

EMIL DRAITSER
Duckworth, 2012, 420 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Stalin’s Great Terror spared no sphere, writes Karl Schlogel in Moscow 1937.  In the usually sedate world of architecture, for example, one leading Soviet architect rounded on what he detected as ‘enemies of the people, diversionists, wreckers, agents of fascism, spies, murderers and blood-sucking gangs of Trotskyist and Bukharinist degenerates and traitors who are stretching out their filthy paws into architectural planning work’.

Many Russian architects duly faced arrest, labour camp or execution as part of the two million people killed during the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938.  Most perished without the fanfare which accompanied the mood-setting show trials of the Bolshevik Party’s ‘old guard’, the comrades of Lenin and Trotsky, an entire generation of socialist revolutionaries liquidated by Stalin because they posed a real or latent challenge to his dictatorial power.

Barely two decades after its victory, the Bolshevik Revolution was utterly reshaped by Stalin’s “hurricane of violence”.  As Schlogel notes, most of the party members in the late 1930s were newcomers, an elite benefiting from the purge of the Soviet administration which opened up an “astoundingly rapid career progression” with its access to material privilege that “consolidated their loyalty to the leader”.

Schlogel’s book is a catalogue of vignettes of the political fear, grim living conditions and cultural aridity of life under Stalinism but, whilst strong on exposition, Professor Schlogel’s book is less forthcoming on explanation.  For Schlogel, the Great Terror exists in an historical vacuum and Stalin’s rise to power is untheorised.  Schlogel decrees the time of Marxism as an analytical tool as “long since past” and the result, despite the human trauma of the Great Terror, is an insipid political drama uninformed by the intense struggle for the soul of socialism that pitted Stalin’s conservatism, opportunism, nationalism and mechanical thinking against the Bolsheviks’ best Marxists.

One survivor of the Great Terror, who yo-yoed in and out of favour with Stalin, was Georgy Zhukov who was, writes Geoffrey Roberts, the “main architect” of the Red Army’s victory against Hitler.  Under General Zhukov’s direction, Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad were saved, and Nazi Berlin taken, yet, just three months later, Zhukov was sacked by Stalin.

Zhukov’s life prospects (peasant poverty, small business trading or conscript war casualty) had been dramatically transformed by the 1917 revolution through a military career in the Red Army.  A Bolshevik long before a party card became prudent for job security, Zhukov repressed his doubts about Stalin, even as the Great Terror reached the Red Army High Command and liquidated 20,000 officers.  Zhukov came under suspicion through victim association but he survived and, indeed, prospered, as the purges fast-tracked promotion.

Zhukov’s qualities as military commander won the favour of Stalin who valued Zhukov’s harsh discipline and his profligate-with-lives military philosophy of no surrender and no retreat.  Patriotism also bound the General and his political master, the casualty being socialist values which were in short supply (beyond the required lip service) in, for example, the capture of Berlin , where looting, rape and other retaliatory atrocities against German civilians soured the liberation.

With the war won, Stalin clamped down on even the slightest possibility of military autonomy, banishing the sometimes independent Zhukov to Odessa and airbrushing him out of the history of the war.  Zhukov feared much worse (‘I had a bag ready with my underwear in it’, wrote Zhukov in his memoirs) and, like many of Stalin’s other elite victims, whose loyalty to Stalin was beyond question, his capricious fate sent a message to all Russians - if the most famous and closest to Stalin could suffer, so could any of them.

Zhukov was rehabilitated by Khrushchev where, as Minister of Defence, he undid some of the Stalinist past (exonerating the military victims of Stalin’s purge) whilst maintaining a neo-Stalinist present (advocating hard-line suppression of the popular and reform-Communist uprising in Hungary in 1956, and overseeing the Soviet Union’s nuclear bomb program including tests on Russian soldiers).

Stalin’s successors, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, loyal Stalinists both, remained wary of Zhukov (who knew where the political bodies were buried and the role that his new bosses had played in putting them there) and bounced Zhukov up and down the bureaucratic ladder until his death in 1974.

Zhukov’s biographer, an orthodox Western war historian, respects Zhukov “because he never lost a battle” and his book is skewed towards a military, rather than political, analysis.  Zhukov got a necessary and ugly job done against the Nazis but the book does not contextualise him as part of Stalin’s bureaucratic party-state social base which found democratic socialism a threat to its power and privilege.

The Soviet spy, Dimitri Bystrolyotov, was another, as Emil Draitser writes in Agent Dimitri, who fell foul of Stalin.  ‘Do you want to write your testimony in ink or in your own blood?’, Bystrolyotov was asked by his interrogator when arrested in 1938 as part of a massive purge of Stalin’s security organisation aimed at “eliminating the old guard of spies devoted to the ideas of world revolution”.  Gruesomely tortured, Bystrolyotov served sixteen years in the prison camps of Siberia, his death in 1975 hastened by his broken health and his shattered socialist spirit.

A declassed aristocrat, Bystrolyotov had fled war-torn Russia in 1919 and wandered as a poor labourer through Europe before pitching up at the Soviet Trade Mission in Czechoslovakia.  Having embraced communist ideas out of ‘a great anger’ at economic inequality, Bystrolyotov was recruited by the Soviet spy-front where his aristocratic looks and twenty languages were prized as spying assets.

A ‘sexpionage’ expert, Bystrolyotov “put his male charms to use” to trade love for technological secrets from white-collar, female factory employees and for diplomatic secrets from foreign embassy women.  “Pillow talk” with an SS officer guarding files on Nazi Germany’s secret and illegal rearmament revealed evidence of Hitler’s invasion plans, whilst the Soviet Union’s other enemies (White Russian refugees, Western intelligence officers, Mussolini) were spied on and disrupted.

The fruits of this intelligence, it could be said, though Bystrolyotov’s biographer does not, are justifiable even if the means in a pre-Wikileaks world (seduction, bribery, blackmail) are unsavoury.  Despite the isolation and scarcity distorting the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet Russia’s military and economic survival was essential to the defeat of both fascism and capitalism’s vendetta against the Russian socialist experiment.

Growing tired from the risk of exposure, the constant pretence and disguises, and the often-sordid ethics of his job, Bystrolyotov returned to Moscow in 1937 to his grim fate as a prisoner.  Rehabilitation during Khrushchev’s post-Stalin ‘Thaw’ was followed by will-sapping battles with the KGB bureaucracy for recompense and welfare, censorship of his Gulag memoirs under Brezhnev, and posthumous admittance in 2001 to the KGB ‘Hall of Fame’, with its sanitised history of the KGB and its successor under Putin, a one-time KGB officer.

Draitser, a former Soviet journalist, has laboured to produce a book in which the factual detail is minute but the political analysis is sweeping generalisation, unreflectively concurring with Bystrolyotov’s ultimate disillusion with the entire idea of socialism, which was nothing but a ‘beautiful illusion’, as he put it, ‘dragged through the mud’ on the night of his arrest.

This, then, is Stalin’s political legacy – the conservatising, anti-socialist lesson refracted through the experience of those who, like the  authoritarian Zhukov or the embittered Bystrolyotov, know only of Stalin’s deviant version of ‘communism’.  Collectively, these books are politically gloomy, unrelieved by the alternative of a socialism which is both revolutionary and democratic, an alternative kept well-hidden by most books on Stalin pumped out by the capitalist printing presses.

SEVEN DEADLY SINS: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong, by DAVID WALSH

SEVEN DEADLY SINS: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong
DAVID WALSH
Simon & Schuster, 2012, 426 pages, $27 (pb)
 
Review by Phil Shannon

After four shots at the Tour de France and placing no higher than 36^th, and after life-threatening testicular cancer, Lance Armstrong returned to the world’s most prestigious and richest bike race in 1999 and won for each of the next seven years.  Magically, he was a changed man, writes David Walsh in Seven Deadly Sins – changed, as we now know, because he was “chemically enhanced”.

Walsh, a British sports journalist and one of the few to query the heroic, back-from-the-brink Lance myth, notes how, after being repeatedly beaten by doped-up European teams, Armstrong decided to join the drugs arms race by taking the performance-enhancing drug, EPO with spectacular results.

His moving, success-against-the-odds, cancer-survival back-story wooed adoring journalists but Walsh smelled a rat.  After French police and customs busted most of the 1998 Tour’s leading contenders for filling their tanks with EPO, Armstrong left his death-bed to spearhead the 1999 Tour as the clean-skin poster boy.

Armstrong’s performance, recording the fastest Tour time in history and effortlessly outpacing the EPO generation, was, however, suspect to Walsh who got on the case, interviewing cyclists, doctors, masseuses, trainers, coaches and other Armstrong intimates, unearthing a lengthy history of doping by Armstrong and its cover-up by team officials.

This history included backdated medical prescriptions, visits and million dollar payments to the “world’s dirtiest doctor” in Italy about to go on trial for doping professional riders, the use of makeup concealer to hide needle marks, brown paper bags full of EPO, syringes emptied of EPO.

What was keeping Armstrong’s secret under wraps, however, were his formidable intimidatory weapons.  Personal bullying of clean, and drugged but conscience-stricken, riders enforced the code of silence on drug-taking in cycling whilst a former team doctor interviewed by Walsh received a call from Armstrong saying ‘I have lots of money, good lawyers, and, if you continue to talk, I’ll destroy you’.

Armstrong’s pockets were indeed deep, with multi-million annual income from prize money, merchandise, corporate sponsorship and product endorsements.  This funded many legal stoushes, ending in settlements in Armstrong’s favour always stopping short, however, of proceeding to court where perjury almost certainly would await an under-oath Armstrong.

Strategic donations also bought complicity in the cover-up.  Six-figure donations to world cycling’s governing body took care of any positive drug tests which had slipped through the net.  An affidavit from Indiana University Hospital testifying that Armstrong was drug-free was secured, courtesy of a $1.5 million endowment for a chair in oncology at the hospital where Armstrong, under treatment for cancer, had confessed, for clinically necessary reasons, to a history of ‘EPO, testosterone, growth hormone, cortisone and steroid’ use.

Restrictive British libel laws also proved friendly to Armstrong in keeping critical English language books and articles out of circulation though these were few enough as most journalists were readily co-opted to the Armstrong cult by the threat of being denied media access to the super-hero’s magic circle.  Any doubters could be further held at bay by the cynically exploited shield of Armstrong’s support for cancer charities.

These elaborate defences, however, crumbled when two of Armstrong’s highest profile, former teammates, Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis (the first, post-Lance Tour winner in 1996), put on record their own drug use which also implicated Armstrong in damning detail.  Their evidence against Armstrong “served as the thread that, once pulled, unravelled the myth much like a two-dollar sweater”.

Armstrong chose not to contest the resulting lifetime ban and retrospective disqualification of all his results following publication of the 2012 report of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) which confirmed what the USADA head called the ‘greatest heist sport has ever seen’.

Armstrong, who richly profited as a cheat and a liar, deserves opprobrium but so does the capitalist culture that sport operates in with the systemic values that entice individual moral transgression, values involving unhealthy competition for a success measured by obscene wealth and defined by the glorification of the elite individual by a passive, spectating many.

Walsh, a self-described media “revolutionary”, only skirts around this analytical framework, however, in a somewhat self-indulgent book (as much about the journalist as his quarry) but one which adds journalistic colour to the destruction of ‘LanceWorld’, a grubby fantasy which should have been buried long ago were it not for the drug-soaked corruption of sport by money.