JOSEPH ANTON: A Memoir by SALMAN RUSHDIE

JOSEPH ANTON: A Memoir
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Random House, 2012, 636 pages, $35 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

There was much that was hard to take for the author of The Satanic Verses – not being able to pick up his own mail, not being able to go for a walk without armed police taking an hour to set it up for him, being robbed of the deep concentration necessary for creative writing.  That, and the constant threat of violent assassination.

Salman Rushdie’s memoir of his decade dodging death vividly shows how he (as Joseph Anton, his security alias named after two of his favourite authors – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov) coped with his loss of liberty and the death threat (fatwa) issued against him in 1989 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini by, in the end, taking his fight for free speech to his would-be silencers.

The London-based writer from a free-thinking Indian Muslim family artfully combined left wing politics with the personal in his novels.  In 1981 came the Booker-winning Midnight’s Children, about India’s independence, then Shame, about Pakistan’s military governments, followed by The Satanic Verses, his “origin story of Islam” which scrutinised Muhammad’s ‘divinely revealed’ text, the Qur’an, like any other book, as a human product of history, sociology, psychology and politics.

In Iran, Khomeini headed up a “mullocracy” which had usurped the 1979 revolution - the Ayatollah, says Rushdie, had “murdered those who brought him to head of the revolution” and dispatched others he disliked – “unionists, feminists, socialists, Communists, homosexuals”.  The Satanic Verses had a portrait of an Imam like Khomeini, “eating his own revolution”.  Unpopular because of a disastrous war with Iraq, the ruling clerical caste needed to regain political momentum and found its rallying point in Rushdie and his ‘offensive’ novel.

Iranian government hit squads and a million dollar, quasi-governmental bounty, and British Islamic extremists, meant the death threat “was not merely theoretical”.  Books were burnt, bookstores and libraries fire-bombed, mass ‘KILL THE DOG’ Muslim rallies held in Hyde Park, threatening letters sent written in blood, translators and publishers stabbed, shot and killed.

Rushdie was protected by Special Branch police - their “ordinary human kindness … toward a fellow human being in ‘one hell of a jam’ … never ceased to move him”.  He was less enamoured of their ‘higher-ups’ in Scotland Yard who poorly disguised their distaste for him because he was a Labour man in a Tory administration who, unlike the politicians under their guard, ‘had not performed a service to the nation’.

There were others hostile to Rushdie.  Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, would not meet him because this would ‘send the wrong message’ to Iran (it certainly sent the wrong message on free speech).  A meeting with her successor, John Major, was scuttled by a Tory backbench which “by a curious coincidence” allowed a proposed British trade delegation to Iran to proceed.  The historian and Tory peer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, mused on how British Muslims should ‘waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve his manners’.

Labour politicians equivocated, worried about the Muslim vote.  A British Muslim community leader who declared  that ‘death is, perhaps, a bit too easy’ for Rushdie was knighted on the recommendation of Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Prince Charles called Rushdie a bad writer who cost the government too much to protect (the irony detector of this expensive, taxpayer-supported social parasite who has never written anything of interest must have been on the fritz when he said this).  Pop singer and Muslim convert, Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) kept bubbling up in the media “like a fart in a bathtub”, joining the chorus demanding a grovelling apology from Rushdie for causing religious ‘offense’. 

The tabloid media banged on about the ungrateful reprobate who ‘hated Britain’, with the Daily Insult maintaining a steady character assassination (he was ‘bad-mannered, sullen, graceless, silly, curmudgeonly, unattractive, small-minded, arrogant and egocentric’).  The ‘liberal’ media found the usual two sides to it all, “shifting the blame from the men of violence to the target of their attack” because Rushdie had ‘brought it on himself’.

Many more, however, sprang to Rushdie’s defense.  With moral support, solidarity declarations and safe houses, writers rallied to his side universally (apart from John le Carré, nursing a grudge about a negative book review Rushdie had once written of a le Carré novel, saying that Rushdie had been ‘impertinent to great religions’ and was engaging in ‘cultural intolerance masquerading as free speech’).

Many people bought Rushdie’s book as an act of solidarity, and wore ‘I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE’ badges.  Building workers guessed why bullet-proof glass was required in the ground-floor windows in a house they were renovating for Mr Anton but staid mum because they “understood that this was an important secret to keep; and so, quite simply, they kept it”.

Warmly-received, surprise appearances at literary events were life-giving whilst, on airlines which allowed the terrorist target to board, he found spontaneous “friendship, solidarity and sympathy” from the passengers.  Eighty thousand U2 fans cheered him on stage at Wembley Stadium.  When nervous bookchains in North America withdrew the book from sale, their staff unions protested and volunteered to stand next to plate-glass windows with the book display.

On a world book tour, an Algerian restaurateur named Rouchdy (pronounced Rushdie) was proud of the high-risk name-association - ‘I was always getting mistaken for you!  I say, no, no, I am much better looking!’.  In Australia, an ambulance officer who attended a near-fatal crash between Rushdie and a semi-trailer on the Princes Highway was delighted to ask for his autograph.

This  determination of his supporters “not to allow the darkness to prevail” strengthened Rushdie’s “battle against hopelessness”, making him straighten his shoulders and campaign against the fatwa.  Staying low, and trying to love and be loved by his enemy, had proved futile.  “Enough of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt”, he resolved – “there was more dignity in being a combatant than a victim”.

 

Pugnacious ripostes to all his detractors were delivered with elegant scorn and Rushdie also took up his case directly with world leaders, slowly making the tide turn.  Rushdie suspected that he was “being used by the West as a pawn in a larger game” of geo-political power plays in Iran and the Middle East but he quite justifiably used this to grab his life back.

In 1998, Iran formally ended the fatwa, a victory won by “ordinary people”, says Rushdie, for the principle of free speech.  All those who vacillated, who demanded apology and compromise, who dragged the red herrings of taxpayer cost and Rushdie’s personality across the free speech trail, who muddied the waters in the name of opposing ‘Islamophobia’, were objectively on the side of the book-burners and assassins.  Rushdie is wholly persuasive about this.

What he is less than convincing on is that “Islam itself”, and not just the radical fringes of its one billion followers, is fatally corrupted by religious intolerance.  Some of Rushdie’s toughest defenders were Muslims, who were assaulted or killed by their fanatical brethren for their pains.  Rushdie’s attempt to taint all Muslims with the “bloody theocracies” of dictatorial Islamic states, as with his glib parallel of equating Marxism with repressive Stalinist states, is not compelling.

Part of a critique of “religious unreason” is how power inequalities between the West and the Muslim world are refracted through religion, not caused by it.  A radical anti-Islam stand can lead to uncritical support for the hypocritical donning of the mantle of ‘freedom’ by Western powers in their political crusades against Muslim countries, and, sure enough, Rushdie fell into trap of supporting the US-led war against Afghanistan on anti-terrorism grounds. 

As Rushdie would no doubt accept, however, the “ability to quarrel”, over his politics as with religion or anything else, is fundamental to a free society.  His own determination to fight violent censorship, and his brilliantly-written memoir, have strengthened the right to free speech.

GREENWASH: Big Brands and Carbon Scams by GUY PEARSE

GREENWASH: Big Brands and Carbon Scams
GUY PEARSE
Black Inc., 2012, 264 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The response of big business to global warming, their propaganda would have us believe, is to ride to the rescue by reducing their carbon emissions.  As Guy Pearse shows in Greenwash, however, this is just a marketing ploy to attract the dollars of the environmentally-concerned customer.

Techniques for slapping on the green veneer include the cost-free chart-toppers of green rhetoric, slogans, logos and name changes  – the oil company, BP, for example, becomes Beyond Petroleum although fossil fuels deliver 98% of its revenue.

Also popular are the setting of vague and distant ‘carbon-neutral’ targets or timelines, if any.  Where carbon-reduction is quantified and documented in glossy sustainability reports, mathematical sleight-of-hand and fancy linguistic footwork obscure the bigger picture of rising emissions.  Excluding overseas operations or the manufacturing outsourced to carbon-intensive factories of developing countries helps to cook the carbon books, as does ignoring the 90% or more of a big corporate’s total carbon footprint which is to be found in supply chain carbon emissions (raw materials, packaging, transport, etc.).

Green tokenism is a favourite in the greenwasher’s palette.  A few green products, made in miniscule numbers, are heavily promoted to lend “green kudos” to their major line of carbon-heavy business - car-makers plug their hybrid and electric vehicles, coal-fired electricity producers tout their tiny involvement in renewable energy, and builders such as Australia’s Grocon showcase on-site renewable energy buildings but their core business remains, respectively, petrol-guzzling cars, fossil fuel power and huge concrete-and-steel high rises.

Hyped-up examples of renewable energy use (solar panels at head office, for example) also act as tokenistic diversions.  McDonald’s turns the organic waste from its restaurants in Switzerland into bio-gas for its trucks but the rest of their 33,500 restaurants serve 64 million cheeseburgers a day, each with a serving of the three kilograms of CO₂ used to make it.

Richard Branson finds that bio-fuels make great window-dressing for Virgin’s aeroplanes but he doesn’t mention how such ‘green’ jet fuels rely on the destruction of forest carbon-sinks, nor does he publicise the force-feeding of CO₂ from coal-fired power stations to turbo-charge algae growth.  Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic sets itself quietly for a six-fold increase in CO₂ per space passenger.  

Banks promote the earth-friendly way they shuffle money around in their greened offices but they are mute over the fossil fuel projects the money finances (the ANZ bank is the largest financer of new coal projects in Australia, for example).  Greened-up accounting, legal and consultancy firms also “play a crucial role in floating, financing and defending” the world’s biggest carbon polluters amongst their fossil fuel clients.

Green minimalism plunges to its depths with ‘Earth Hour’ – killing their office lights for one hour on one Saturday night a year is the cheap entry price to this green charade for Earth Hour’s 20,000 business sponsors including such heavy carbon polluters as mining companies, coal-fired power-generators, car-makers and steel-makers.  And the result for the atmosphere?  The equivalent of pausing global coal use for two minutes.

Of course, it never hurts one’s green image to collaborate with green academia (Panasonic funded the establishment of a Chair in Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University in Sydney) or certain environmental groups (the World Wildlife Fund accepts $70 million a year from corporations who prize the green business value of the WWF’s panda logo).

‘Green’ power companies make valuable greenwash partners, too.  The Australian Football League went carbon-neutral in 2006 with Origin Energy, the largest green energy retailer in Australia which nevertheless produces half its electricity from coal or gas-fired sources and whose one-third share in the coal seam gas from the massive Australia Pacific Liquefied Natural Gas export project will erase all the emissions saved by Origin’s green power sales since 1999, ten times over.

“In the end”, concludes Pearse, greenwashing is simply about “looking green to increase profits”.  Don’t just take his word for it.  The casino giant, Caesars Entertainment, explicitly says a green image makeover is good for business profits - ‘climate change presents the company with an opportunity to strengthen its reputation and brand … we anticipate that over time this will lead to increased market share and revenues’. 

Despite Pearse’s capitalist sympathies (he doesn’t want to “demonise big business or overlook the positive steps that many companies are making” in the challenge to be green “while remaining profitable and competitive”), as he deftly peels away the green façade from many of world’s biggest capitalists, it becomes apparent that the environmental challenge is beyond them, beyond the profit-driven market economy.  To be truly green, we need to be Red, too.

THE HOCKEY STICK AND THE CLIMATE WARS: Dispatches from the Front Line by MICHAEL E. MANN and THE INQUISITION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE by JAMES LAWRENCE POWELL

THE HOCKEY STICK AND THE CLIMATE WARS: Dispatches from the Front Line
MICHAEL E. MANN
Columbia University Press, 2012, 395 pages, $42.95 (hb)

THE INQUISITION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE

JAMES LAWRENCE POWELL
Columbia University Press, 2012, 232 pages, $32.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The “six stages of denial” for the climate change non-believer, says Professor Michael Mann in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, are (1) climate change isn’t happening, (2) even if it is, it isn’t caused by humans, (3) even if humans are involved, their impact is minor, (4) even if it is major, the results will be good, making crops grow, (5) even if the results are bad, humanity can adapt or rig up a technical fix, and (6) besides, it’s too late to do anything about it, even if it is happening, which happily brings the climate change denier back to (1).

No amount of scientific evidence or logic can breach the fortress of denialism, as Mann has personally found out.  For over two decades, he and his “hockey stick” graph of historical temperatures have been under siege from the “denialist machine”.

First developed in the late 1990s, the hockey stick (by now a hockey team, with Mann’s graph confirmed by a dozen independent studies) shows that, for two millennia, there has never been a global temperature spike anywhere near that which has occurred since coal, oil and gas powered the Industrial Revolution, resulting in the dramatic and historically anomalous upwards curve of the hockey stick end of the temperature graph).

The hockey stick sent to the knacker’s yard the denialists’ sacred cow of an earlier warming (the Mediaeval Warm Period [MWP], 950-1250 AD) which they had used to argue that if warming from natural factors (volcanic activity, solar output, etc.) happened before, it could happen again, thus absolving fossil fuels from any blame.  The MWP, however, was a molehill compared to the current temperature mountain which can not be explained by natural factors alone and which, indeed, should have, on their own, resulted in a cooling.  Only human factors, specifically fossil fuel burning, can explain the abrupt current warming.

The hockey stick thus became for the deniers a powerful icon that needed to be attacked as part of “the best funded, most carefully orchestrated assault on science the world has known” by those, says Mann, who were “profiting handily from civilisation’s addiction to fossil fuels”.  James Powell, a geology professor, in The Inquisition of Climate Science, agrees that the deniers’ campaign  is “the most vicious … attack on science in history”.

The “contrarian barrage” that has ensued has had much success.  As Powell notes, whilst the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming has risen, public acceptance has fallen.  In 2009, two thirds of Americans believed scientists still disagreed about global warming, thanks to the “willing accomplices” of the media which cloaks its denialism behind the spurious notion of ‘journalistic balance’.  Between 1980 and 2002, for example, the four major US newspapers gave all, equal or some positive attention to the deniers in 94% of their global warming coverage, with only 6% of coverage reflecting the scientific consensus.

Global warming deniers are given a free media ride, say Mann and Powell, because Big Oil and Big Auto have a lot at stake and Big Media protects its own.  If the deniers’ case “has misinformed or confused” people, adds Mann, “it has served its purpose in manufacturing doubt and confusion”, with the goal of thwarting government efforts to regulate carbon emissions.  Meanwhile, “carbon dioxide concentrations and temperatures rise and precious time is lost”.

Who are the deniers, so trumpeted by the shouting hacks of the establishment media?  A handful have scientific credentials (and conservative politics), masquerading their denialism as healthy scientific scepticism and are tamely in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry.

Their non-scientist sidekicks provide the light humour.  The deceased science fiction writer, Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park), was motivated by animosity to environmentalism which he scorned as ‘the religion of choice for urban atheists’.  Legions of credentialed climate scientists were apparently trumped by Bjorn Lomborg (author of the error-riddled The Skeptical Environmentalist) a young unknown who disproved global warming after just a year or two of reading, whilst the loopy Viscount Monckton of Benchley, a Cambridge classics graduate, dispenses denialist lies (from doodled calculations on the back of an envelope) in between dispensing a farrago of dishonest self-promotion.

The deniers all portray themselves as latter-day Galileos repressed by the scientific establishment in a giant conspiracy in which data is fabricated or hidden to keep research dollars flowing and advance the “liberal political agenda of the United Nations”.

This would have to be, as Powell patiently dissects it, the mother of all conspiracies, involving all 2,500 scientists on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all the world’s governments who appoint the bureaucrats to oversee the scientists’ work, and all the 70 international science organisations and the peak national science academies in dozens of countries which have formally accepted the reality of anthropogenic global warming, not to mention the 97-98% of the world’s most active climate researchers whose publication and citation data showed, in a 2010 analysis, support for the tenets of human-caused global warming.

Or, perhaps, it is the most feeble conspiracy ever.  The so-called ‘Climategate’ affair of 2009 (when a thousand private emails between Mann and his colleagues in the Climatic Research Unit at the UK’s East Anglia university were criminally hacked) was, says Powell summarising the six enquiries by distinguished panels which cleared all accused scientists of any impropriety, “much ado about nothing”. The investigations found possibly half a dozen incautious words amongst the million in the emails but found, says Powell of the allegations of conspiracy, not “a single faked data point, not a single deleted email, not a single [denialist] article prevented from publication”.

All climate change deniers operate outside the normal, robust scientific process, with peer-review of research by anonymous scientific experts at its core, which involves good faith and respectful challenges and responses between colleagues with the aim of better scientific understanding.

Bereft of real science, the deniers resort to their weapon of choice, says Mann – personal attacks on individual scientists.  This has included vexatious demands under Freedom of Information for decades of research materials and computer codes, vitriolic cyber-bullying (including placing climate scientists’ photographs on neo-Nazi websites), campaigns against their government funding and academic tenure, plus stalking, death threats, abusive phone calls and shock jocks calling for their capital punishment, flogging and suicide.

Conservative politicians have rushed to join in.  The Bush administration attempted to purge Mann’s hockey stick from a 2003 government report (replacing it with a study financed by the American Petroleum Institute), forced Mann to front hostile Senate and House committees, denounced him on the floor of the US Senate, and named him as one of 17 scientists who should be investigated for criminal prosecution.  The overtones of an ugly past (‘are you now or have you ever been a climate scientist?’) were not lost on other climate scientists, as intended.

Mann and other climate scientists have, however, fought back (see their denialist-busting website Realclimate.org).  Mann says that whilst he can “live with the attacks of the corporate-funded denial machine”, he can no longer stand by whilst their lies endanger the world.  As with the scientific apologists for Big Tobacco, who condemned millions to death through their lies about smoking and cancer, Mann asks “will we hold those who have funded or otherwise participated in the fraudulent denial of climate change accountable?”.

As long as Big Capitalism rules the roost, there will be no such accounting.  That will take a world where science, morality and planetary survival count for more than the corporate dollar.  These two marvellous books by Mann and Powell will help to get us there.

AND SO IT GOES: Kurt Vonnegut - A Life by CHARLES J. SHIELDS & UNSTUCK IN TIME: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels by GREGORY D. SUMNER

AND SO IT GOES: Kurt Vonnegut - A Life
CHARLES J. SHIELDS
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012, 515 pages, $39.95 (pb)

UNSTUCK IN TIME: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels

GREGORY D. SUMNER
Seven Stories Press, 2012, 355 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Not everyone was impressed by Kurt Vonnegut.  His local paper objected to his famous 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five - ‘his style is not conventional, his approach is not delicate, his themes are not conservative’ – whilst in North Dakota in 1973 the school board of the town of Radke ordered three dozen copies of the book to be shovelled into the school furnace.

Vonnegut’s admirers, however, more than made up for his detractors, as two new biographies by Charles Shields and Gregory Sumner attest.

Born in Indianapolis in 1922 of German-American ancestry, journalism sidetracked Vonnegut from completing higher education but taught the future novelist the virtues of clarity and economy in writing.  He also discovered that, to write well, he needed ‘an axe to grind’.  His coming-of-age years provided him with two whetstones – the Great Depression, which turned him against capitalism’s inequities, and World War 2, which made him a pacifist.

Mobilised to Europe after the D-Day landings, Private Vonnegut stumbled headfirst into Hitler’s last gamble (the Battle of the Bulge) and he became a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany where he was forced to dig the graves of watching American POWs who had been condemned to be shot.  It was, however, the mass murder of the horrific Allied firestorm bombing of Dresden in February, 1945, which scarred Vonnegut.

He survived by sheltering in the storage room of a slaughterhouse, two levels below ground, but the ‘tableaux of horrors’ above the abattoir, and his later reflection that the carnage was for no strategic advantage (‘it didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defence or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp’), turned him against all wars, advocating especially, writes Sumner, for the “future bombing victims” of all America’s subsequent wars.

Along with war, other traditional and newly-hyped ideas and institutions (‘progress’, materialism, nationalism, the moon landing, nuclear power, the ‘conquest of nature’) were debunked by Vonnegut the social critic, radical raconteur and protest rally speaker.  Vonnegut, a once-aspirant labour movement organiser, also flailed at the ‘savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate American class system’, praising trade unions as ‘admirable instruments for extorting something like economic justice from employers’.

It would be a mistake, however, as both authors agree, to see Vonnegut as a revolutionary.  Sympathetic to socialism, Vonnegut described himself, however, as a ‘lifelong Northern Democrat in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt tradition, a friend of the working stiffs’ whose political philosophy was ‘unsystematic’ and strategically vague.  He wanted not to overthrow capitalism as to somehow make it fairer, more humane and less destructive.

A child of the family-wealth-sapping Depression, Vonnegut “admired entrepreneurship and could be a shrewd businessman”, writes Sumner, whether that involved Saab dealerships or writing for the mass magazine and pulp fiction market which he did early on when his novels had been distributed “along with westerns and teenage romances to drug stores and bus stations”.  Vonnegut sought the security of wealth, even if this meant investing in big property developers, IBM, anti-union mining companies and Dow Chemical (the maker of napalm during the Vietnam War).

Vonnegut’s novels, however, rose above his political contradictions.  Despite the chaotic absurdity of a world ruled by predatory capitalism and mechanised death, Vonnegut found an inherent dignity, humour and kindness in its victims.  Starved and beaten by sadistic guards as a POW, for example, Vonnegut was also fed by sympathetic local German women at much risk to themselves.

His faith in the counterweight of ‘community’ was resilient, especially amongst the young, those irrepressible questioners of the social order, who (when they looked up from their digital distractions - the typewriter-using Vonnegut had many reservations about the cyber-revolution) strove for meaning and purpose in a better world.

Vonnegut has been dismissed by some in the literary establishment as a cult, sci-fi author.  They dislike his genre-straddling, narrative-subverting, expressionistic style (staccato sentences, short chapters, use of graphics and white space) – the very qualities which make his novels something like poetry.

This is sometimes literary cover for a deeper scorn for Vonnegut’s social and political values.  Alas, this includes one of his biographers, Shields, who disapproves of Vonnegut reminding Americans that Al Qaeda does not have the monopoly on terror because it was the US that was the only nation ever to pulverise civilians with atomic weapons.  Shields also denigrates Vonnegut’s opposition to the US war in Afghanistan as the confused thinking of an 83 year old and a failure to recognise that world freedom and US capitalism are indivisible.  Sumner, fortunately, avoids the political pitfalls of American patriotism, although his close textual analysis of Vonnegut’s fourteen novels requires, to be most useful, familiarity with all of them.

Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007 from brain injury after tripping over the leash of his much loved pet dog.  After surviving both the Nazis and the Allies during terrible war, the superb ironist might have noted of his own demise, using his famous catchphrase, ‘and so it goes’.

WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University by RICHARD HIL

WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University
RICHARD HIL
NewSouth Publishing, 2012, 239 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Universities were better in the olden days, says Dr. Richard Hil in Whackademia.  As an Essex University student in the 1970s, Hil joined the Socialist Workers Party (which expanded his political horizons) and the Campaign for Real Ale (which expanded his waistline) whilst his lecturers stimulated his intellectual growth.  With 25 years behind him as an academic in Australian universities, however, he has seen the excitement of higher education stifled by corporatisation and its business model which treats education as a commodity to be sold, a degree as a “passport to a business career”.

The market assault on higher education in Australia was begun by the federal Labor government in the 1980s under the guise of ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ and as an attack on ‘elitism’ and a sheltered workshop of pampered scholars who were not paying their way in Australia’s capitalist economy.

Under Labor’s ‘reformers’, the university workplace was redefined by the values of “economic rationalism, commercialisation, managerialism, corporate governance and other outgrowths of neo-liberalism”, says Hil.  Bureaucracy and corporate jargon dominate - all the crud of Key Performance Indicators, performance reviews, ‘quality assurance’, marketing and promotions, and micro-management of academics presided over by all-powerful corporate managers.

In a context of declining government funding, universities search for revenue streams, the most lucrative being full-fee-paying overseas students, whilst entry requirements for domestic students are eased and ‘soft-marking’ and ‘soft assessment’, especially for the semi-literate, compromise quality in the quest to reduce drop-out rates and keep the university’s market share of students, and their dollars, up.

The transformation of universities from places of intellectual passion into dull commercial enterprises designed to serve industry has seen the economic imperatives of the capitalist economy determine which courses survive.  As universities become managed by the corporation for the corporation, the curriculum increasingly suits vocational, market-oriented ends.

As the Business Council of Australia higher education spokesperson and accountant at one of Australia’s largest accountancy firms, demanding a lock-step customer-supplier business ethos, succinctly put it, “I am your major customer – I take 750 of your product each year”.  The liberal arts, especially, are on the endangered list unless they can be tethered to the ‘creative industries’ of visual design, media, publishing and advertising.

For Australia’s 120,000 academics, they have become cogs in a grinding knowledge machine.  Research has become a distant dream as class sizes expand, bureaucratic monitoring and reporting dogs every day and an administrative burden flourishes.  Academics are “overworked, burnt out, not coping, running out of energy, stressed out, not sleeping, and plain knackered”.  The 67,000 casual teachers have the bonus of poor job security.  Meanwhile, like other corporate CEOs, Vice-Chancellors prosper, soaring into the million dollar salary atmosphere.

Hil argues for a return to a university of community, collegiality, fun, soul, interest and delight.  To a republic of ideas and debate where critical thinking and clear communication matter most.  To education for active citizenship in a vibrant democracy.  To a campus that is “critic and conscience” of capitalist society’s unjust status quo.

Academics, like cats, are difficult to herd but, starved of sustenance by government budgets, sedated by forms and tranquilised by bureaucracy, there has been regrettable success in disciplining them.  As Hil’s entertaining book shows, however, there is a way out beyond just complaint – activism, small and large, for education as intellectual discovery, for education for social change.

EUREKA: The Unfinished Revolution by PETER FITZSIMONS; and EUREKA STOCKADE: A Ferocious and Bloody Battle by GREGORY BLAKE

EUREKA: The Unfinished Revolution
PETER FITZSIMONS
William Heinemann, 2012, 696 pages, $49.95 (hb)

EUREKA STOCKADE: A Ferocious and Bloody Battle

GREGORY BLAKE
Big Sky Publishing, 2012, 249 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Labor’s Foreign Minister and history buff, Bob Carr, has dismissed it as a ‘local tax revolt’ and the Liberal Party has stoutly ignored it but the political importance of the gold miners’ Eureka Stockade in 1854, the closest thing Australia has had to an armed insurrection, deserves more than the short shrift it gets from Australia’s politicians who are the beneficiaries of the democratic reforms won through armed struggle by working people, as two new books on Eureka by Gregory Blake and Peter Fitzsimons show.

The discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851 sucked half the male population of the British colony away from their city and farm jobs and, facing massive wage rises for those left, the squattocracy (the rural ruling class) and the urban capitalists got their colonial government to impose a tax, through a license fee, on the miners to, as Fitzsimons notes, force the diggers back to work for their proper masters.  The tax also pumped a handy £50,000 per month into the government itself, prompting one journalist to note that ‘the Government is the greatest Gold Digger after all’.

Exploited by a tax (paid in advance, gold or no gold), oppressed by police (“uniformed thugs with guns”, says Fitzsimons), chained like beasts to trees and logs if caught without a licence during digger-hunts, denied justice in corrupt courts, their grievances not listened to by government, the tinder was set.  The spark was the connivance of a bent coroner and magistrate in absolving a pub owner and mate from the murder of a miner, and the prosecution of three miners for arson when the pub was torched by angry miners.

When a 12,000-strong miners’ meeting protested by burning their licenses, government officials ordered a license-hunt by mounted police, this time with drawn swords, who arrested seven miners, and by newly-arrived British soldiers with fixed bayonets who fired on the miners.  Incandescent with fury that the government had abandoned all restraint, most miners switched from faith in deferential petitions and ‘moral persuasion’, taking to ‘physical force’ and erecting a defensive stockade on a small hillock called Eureka.

Politicised through English Chartists (working class political radicals), the armed miners united around a manifesto of demands for democratic reforms to Victoria’s parliament of the rich which was elected by just 4,000 propertied men of a total population of a quarter of a million.

Governors La Trobe and Hotham, writes Blake, feared this “conspiratorial democratic political agenda”.  The authoritarian Ballarat Goldfields Commissioner saw demands for the abolition of the license fee as ‘a mere cloak to cover a democratic revolution’, writing of the need to teach a ‘fearful lesson’ about the price of rebellion to any other Victorian democrats.  Hotham had been overheard, as he departed England, to say ‘a little blood-letting would not do the unruly gold-miners any harm’.

When least expecting it (naively thinking the authorities would respect the Sabbath), and consequently with only 120 miners in the stockade, the attack came on Sunday, 3 October, overwhelming the stockade in just twenty minutes.  Around 60 miners were killed, most, notes a rightly indignant Fitzgerald, after resistance had ceased - “the worst of the murderers, for that is what they have become, are the police”.

To justify what Fitzsimons calls its “killing frenzy”, the government tried 13 prisoners for High Treason but could not find a jury of common men willing to convict any of them, so strong was popular sympathy for the miners.  With Governor Hotham’s moral authority listing badly in a sea of popular outrage, Hotham was forced to give the miners reform rather than face revolution, conceding all their demands (abolition of the license fee, granting the miners’ a vote and wider male suffrage not long after).  To ease Hotham’s pain, his own Commission of Inquiry into Eureka also noted that the economic returns from increasingly difficult mining were less than the usual wages the miners could earn and that this would drive them back to their old jobs better than armed troopers.

Democracy, on bourgeois terms, also turned out to be not so bad as feared.  Peter Lalor, leader of the rebels, was elected (minus one arm lost in the battle) to parliament in 1856 where he spent three conservative decades as a Minister of the Crown and strike-breaking mine-owner opposing further democratisation.

Blake, alas, makes little of the politics of Eureka.  His turgid history dismisses the historical relevance and class conflict interpretation of Eureka as driven by the “rigid political ideology” of Marxism but lead-footed doctrine better describes Blake’s own history of Eureka.  It is a myth, Blake says, that poorly armed, “innocent gold miners” were confronted by a “tyrannical government” which “brutally slaughtered” them in a “fearsome massacre” and his aim is to redeem the government, police and soldiers in an “affirmation of Australian nationhood” through Eureka.

Ultimate government responsibility for crushing the revolt was, pleads Blake, a “necessity” when faced with insurrection.  Government officials were poor, helpless cogs in a war dynamic when faced with a political challenge to their rightful authority, whilst the police have been victims of unwarranted “prejudice and vilification”.  The blood-lust behaviour of the soldiers (such as repeated use of the bayonet on the wounded) was “perfectly consistent” with what an army has to do against an “insurgency”.  Blake’s swooning over gun calibres and associated militaria betrays his intention of normalising Australia’s war brutalities.

As for the miners, says Blake, they have been romanticised as underdog heroes.  They brought on their  own heads the state’s military response by aggressively arming for war with guns aplenty and a sturdy fortress.  Fitzsimons shows, however, that the stockade was “a long way from impregnable” and that the rebels’ guns, pikes and theatrical sword props faced a “devastating” firepower disadvantage from the  276 well-armed attackers, including cavalry, with 200 in reserve and 850 more, plus artillery, on the way.

Fitzsimons is not ideologically hamstrung by Blake’s revisionist militarist nationalism although he does share the limitations of the nationalist analytical framework, promoting Eureka, along with the Anzacs at Gallipoli, as part of the ‘birth of a nation’ through bloodletting.

Eureka, in Fitzsimons’ telling, is much more than Blake’s narrow “history of a battle” – it is the history of class struggle.  The conservative columnist, Gerard Henderson, as noted by Fitzsimons, has lauded Eureka as a rising by small businessmen ‘against iniquitous taxes and over-regulation that was stifling their creation of wealth’ but this, whilst technically correct (the miners were independent, petit-bourgeois producers in economic competition with their claim-jumping rivals), misses the point.  The miners united, by manifesto and arms, for economic justice and democratic political rights, as have slave, peasant, national liberation and proletarian rebels, a political process of universal relevance to all oppressed and exploited classes, not just Henderson’s self-employed, small-time capitalists.

Fitzsimons wants his book to be “read like a novel” and this is how it is best read – for the artistic flavour of the drama of a stirring political rebellion by flawed but passionate common people against the power of the privileged.  As Mark Twain put it, Eureka is the ‘finest thing in Australasian history.  It was a revolution … a strike for liberty … a stand against injustice and oppression ... a victory won by a lost battle’.

THE PRICE OF VALOUR: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Gallipoli Hero, Hugo Throssell, VC by JOHN HAMILTON

THE PRICE OF VALOUR: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Gallipoli Hero, Hugo Throssell, VC
JOHN HAMILTON
Pan Macmillan, 2012, 393 pages , $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Stunning his home-town audience of patriotic Australians in 1919 with his statement that ‘the war has made me a Socialist’, Captain Hugo Throssell, one of nine Australian soldiers to win a Victoria Cross for supreme bravery at Gallipoli in 1915, made headlines, and enemies, on the anniversary of the signing of the Allies’ World War 1 peace treaty with Germany, says John Hamilton in his biography of Throssell.

The civic authorities of the town of Northam in Western Australia listened with increasing disbelief as Northam’s own war hero went on to denounce war for enriching armaments makers, war profiteers and rival national capitalist classes in their competition for territory, markets, resources and profits.

Throssell, the privileged son of a conservative State Premier,  had married Katherine Susannah Prichard, the journalist and feminist who went on to fame as a novelist and founder of the Communist Party of Australia.

Throssell, the dashing cavalry officer, who, in the first flush of battle, wrote how it was ‘most glorious’ to see a bayonet charge and what a ‘wonderful thing’ it was to see men running through an artillery bombardment, had become war-weary and disillusioned after seeing his mates killed and after suffering severe mental injury himself.

With what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, Throssell’s days were filled with nervousness and headaches (he had taken a head wound) and his nights were tortured into sleeplessness by what he had seen at Gallipoli and by the death of his brother who had signed up with Hugo in the belief that war was a thrilling adventure.

Prichard’s communism, and her profound love for a handsome, vital, selfless man, helped Throssell make sense of his ghastly war experiences.  Reading Engels may not have been easy – ‘Hell, girl, what the blazes does this mean?’, he would holler – but ‘usually our political discussions ended in love-making’, wrote Prichard.  Throssell, without becoming a party member, accepted Prichard’s political views as his own.

Australia’s political police put Throssell’s radicalisation down to ‘his wife’s influence’, or ‘his mind perhaps having been affected’ by the cerebro-spinal meningitis he contracted during the war.  Throssell’s biographer hedges his bets, saying it is possible that the brain injury Throssell received from a botched, war-time sinus operation made him “more vulnerable and easily influenced”.   Socialism, apparently, can only be understood as a psychological disorder, the product of a weakened mind.

Throssell, however, knew his own mind – on the back of his will he wrote ‘I have never recovered from my 1914-18 experiences’, shortly before committing suicide by his army pistol in 1933.  He also added an appeal that ‘my wife and child get the usual war pension’.  Owing £10,000 with just £10 in the bank, Throssell’s financial disasters during the economic Depression had been exacerbated, writes Hamilton, by his “enemies at work within the government” who helped ensure his economic projects were costly failures, and by conservatives in the Northam Returned Soldiers and Sailors League who got the government to remove Throssell from his job as soldiers’ representative on the government’s Discharged Soldiers’ Settlement Board.

The Repatriation Department added insult to tragedy by disputing the Coroner’s finding that Throssell’s war wounds were the cause of his suicide.  Prichard angrily defended her husband who ‘believed he would be ensuring a pension to me and my son by his last act.  I consider that his “grateful country” made it impossible for my husband to live.  He thought he had to die to provide for his wife and child’.

It was not until 1999 that a “modest memorial the size of a backyard barbecue” was erected to Throssell in Northam by his ‘grateful country’ whilst during the Depression, Throssell had been forced to try to pawn his Victoria Cross but was offered only 10 shillings for it – the ‘price of valour’ for a war hero who had, as his son, Ric, said later when donating Throssell’s medal to People for Nuclear Disarmament, ‘declared his commitment to peace’.

Throssell has not been well served by official history, nor by his biographer, Hamilton, whose conventional war narrative focuses on Throssell the warrior not the socialist and which includes a disapproval of Throssell’s decision to choose a patriotic occasion of military celebration to denounce war – “not the time nor place”, says Hamilton – but what better time or place could there be.  It took political courage and Throssell had just as much of that as he had bravery on the battlefield.