THE STATUE OF LIBERTY: A Transatlantic Story by EDWARD BERENSON

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY: A Transatlantic Story

By EDWARD BERENSON
Yale University Press, 2012, 229 pages , $35.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

‘We are the keepers of the flame of liberty’, said President Reagan, opening the centennial celebration in 1986 of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, claiming the statue to be an American beacon of freedom to the world.  As Edward Berenson shows, however, the statue’s political virtue had been compromised long before Reagan’s neo-conservative hypocrisy.

The French creators who gifted the statue to America in 1886 - Edouard Laboulaye (legal scholar), Frederic Bartholdi (architect) and Gustave Eiffel (engineer) - were “centrist liberals” who, although civil libertarians and anti-slavery abolitionists, opposed the progressive republicans, democrats and socialists on their left.

The statue they built in Paris and shipped to New York was intended as a reminder of the financial and military debt that the American revolutionary War of Independence owed to the French revolution, with an expected return of US trade and diplomatic favours to France as quid pro quo.  In both American and French anti-monarchical revolutions, however, the spoils had gone to the respective republican bourgeoisies.  The statue’s French creators were class allies of this wealthy elite, very much committed to the liberty, and power, of this elite.

They reassured their American counterparts, who were expected to raise the funds for the statue’s pedestal, that the statue represented a liberty of free enterprise, ‘not that Liberty who, wearing a red bonnet and carrying a pike, marches over a field of dead bodies’.  Not for the statue’s respectable republicans in France the radical democracy of the lower orders in the 1871 Paris Commune which had so inspired Karl Marx and terrified the French, and American, bourgeoisie.

Nor was the statue to reflect artistic allusions to the revolutionary Goddesses of Liberty which flourished during the French revolutions of 1792, 1830 and 1848.  The Statue would be demure, of placid expression, fully clothed and smashing no chains.

Many Americans saw through the statue’s public veneer of liberty and emancipation.  Suffragists disrupted the opening ceremony from a chartered boat denouncing the hypocrisy of ‘erecting a Statue of Liberty embodied as a woman in a land where no woman has political liberty’.  African-Americans were cool – the statue would not end their discrimination and segregation, nor the lynching epidemic during the 1890s when 1,200 were murdered in acts of vigilante justice.

Workers could expect no liberation from unemployment (16%) and poverty (40%) from a copper-clad monument.  Aspirant migrants, screened out from the ‘land of the free’ if they hailed from southern and eastern Europe (‘diseased’, ‘troublemakers’, refusing to ‘assimilate’, ‘taking the jobs of Americans’) confronted the cold stare of xenophobia not the warm welcome to ‘your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to be free’.  Liberty in capitalist America meant freedom for the rich , not the poor.

Just as the writer, Mark Twain, found nothing to celebrate a hundred years ago – he wanted a statue ‘old, bent, clothed in rags, downcast, shame-faced’ so it could represent the ‘insults and humiliation the principles of liberty have faced over the past six thousand years’ – the statue has been a protest site for many who deplore the failure of the US to live up to its proclaimed liberal ideals whilst mouthing a hypocritical rhetoric of freedom.

This official oratory now includes the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of American ‘freedom and anti-terrorism’, a development which testifies to the “power of liberty as a universal ideal”, says a smitten Berenson whose admirable academic objectivity sadly, but not surprisingly (Berenson is a political liberal), deserts him the closer history comes to today and when liberty needs much more than a corporate-sponsored sculpture of elite class origins.

LETHALITY IN COMBAT: A Study of the True Nature of Battle by TOM LEWIS

LETHALITY IN COMBAT: A Study of the True Nature of Battle

By TOM LEWIS
Big Sky Publishing, 2012, 359 pages, $34.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The truth of war, says Dr. Tom Lewis in Lethality in Combat, is that it is violent and lethal.  Well, no surprises there but coming from a former Navy officer within the institutional and ideological framework of the Australian military, it is a deviation of sorts from official military history which is most comfortable with the ‘honour and glory’ take on war rather than the killing and bloodshed bit.

Unlike those who are repulsed by war’s human carnage, however, Lewis thinks we should be realists and celebrate the lethal reality of war in order to train for a military better at it.  Lewis’ book is a long polemic against the “fashionable arguments” of anti-militarist critics, who, he agrees, correctly “put killing back into military history” but who, falsely he laments, deplore the military’s “celebration of violence”.

Anti-militarism is so much moral squeamishness and humanitarian foolishness, argues Lewis, which would only assist in “the soldiers of your country’s enemies marching through your capital city in triumph”.  Killing, brutality, viciousness are, on the contrary, to be “applauded” if “we” want to win.  If so, one’s hands would be clapped out at the sheer extent of the ugly business end of combat documented by Lewis.

Killing rather than taking prisoners, Lewis shows, rightly “happens frequently” and the killing of the wounded is also “excusable”.  Others who no longer pose a threat are also for killing (fighter pilots cutting in half by propeller bailed out parachutists, or strafing of sailors in lifeboats).  Mutilation and other mistreatment of dead enemy’s bodies is valuable because it “dehumanises the enemy and makes them psychologically easier to kill”.  So, too, do derogatory nicknames (‘raghead’, ‘gook’, ‘Kraut’). 

Revenge killings are “probably unlawful” but need “understanding”.  Shooting your own kind (for cowardice, desertion, mutiny, for attempting surrender) is top discipline, essential for making soldiers obey orders and stay in the killing game.

Killing civilians may be ”unfortunate but inevitable”, Lewis concedes, but it is certainly not the military’s fault.  There was hardly a civilian death in Vietnam, he argues, that was not warranted – all 12 year old Vietnam girls were potential ‘terrorists’ whilst his silence on the record tonnage of American bombs dropped on Vietnam, with their notorious inability to distinguish enemy from civilian, glosses over the rather clear guilt of the US military.

Lewis has a convenient excuse for all this combat lethality – “military necessity”.  Aggression, blood lust, avoidance of remorse are essential to winning, and military training must inculcate these values to “overcome the aversion to killing”.  “It is unfair”, Lewis says, “to judge [our warriors] by standards set by others who do not understand the true nature of combat”.  ‘So toughen up’ is Lewis’ message to the bureaucrats with their pettifogging ‘rules of engagement’ and Geneva Convention codes and to anti-war critics who base their horror of war on such irrelevant standards as moral right and wrong and international class solidarity against the planners of wars for resources, profits and geo-political power.

Because “warfare is part of the human condition”, Lewis pessimistically concludes, we must learn to embrace the smell of blood and cordite in the morning if we want to stop the Hun/Vietcong/Argies from waltzing into our shopping malls.  Whilst Lewis departs from the reverential worship of the myths of war’s ‘nobility’ and ‘sacrifice’, his catalogue of combat lethality serves the same flag-waving, imperialist purpose of militarist history – his realist military history would have us building a more effective and ethically-immune military machine promising bigger and better war crimes, atrocities and brutalities.

A DIFFICULT WOMAN: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman by ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS

A DIFFICULT WOMAN: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman

By ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS
Bloomsbury Press, 2012, 439 pages, $39.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The writer, and one-time Trotskyist, Mary McCarthy, said in a 1979 television interview that the celebrated playwright and one-time Communist, Lillian Hellman, was not only over-rated but that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including and and the’.  Hellman spent the last five years of her life suing McCarthy for libel.

As Kessler-Harris says in her biography of Hellman, this famous literary feud was the culmination of a lifetime of attempts to discredit Hellman by ranting conservatives and ‘respectable’ liberals whose illiberal support for, or inaction in the face of, government attacks on freedom of speech in 1950s America Hellman had held up to public reproach.  The very name, ‘Lillian Hellman’, continues to act as Pavlovian stimulus to a seething right-wing response of charges of left-wing hypocrisy and totalitarian evil.  Hellman does not deserve this.

Hellman, galvanised by the Spanish Civil War, adopted left-wing politics in the thirties, was a union organiser for the Screen Writers’ Guild, was briefly a member of the US Communist Party (1939-41), opposed the anti-communist government witch-hunts in the 1950s, was blacklisted by Hollywood producers from the movie industry, bounced back to theatre and movie success in the 1960s, was a strong but not uncritical supporter of the New Left, Black rights and women’s liberation, before character assassination brought her to a messy, litigious end.

The lies told about Hellman dwarf her own.  A rigid Stalinist would not have, unlike Hellman, condemned Soviet repression of writers, or opposed the party line during the Nazi-Soviet pact by writing an overtly anti-fascist play (Watch on the Rhine).  Although Hellman was late to see through some Stalinist crimes, she did admit she had been wrong about Stalin, an awakening delayed by her overriding concern about the march of fascism which saw her adopt a stance of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.

Like many other thirties’ communists, Hellman’s acceptance of the Soviet Union as a model for a socialist society was motivated by her commitment to a world free from the class, economic and racial injustice caused by the power of money.  When Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was persecuting leftists, Hellman refused to turn on her party comrades, whose intentions had been good, by courageously refusing to name names at her HUAC hearing in 1952.

Soviet and domestic communism was no threat to the US, said Hellman, but McCarthyist attacks on freedom of thought and speech were.  This stance infuriated the ‘cowardly liberals’ who had junked their fine words on liberty for fear of being tarred with the communist brush.  Hellman’s 1976 memoir, Scoundrel Time,  which revisited the political and personal failure of America’s liberal intellectuals under McCarthyism reignited a storm of anger from those she accused of moral failure who were now Cold War political conformists bravely fighting repression in Russia, safely distant from the struggle against political surveillance and the silencing of dissent in their own backyard.

In smearing Hellman as a liar, her critics were aided by one episode from Hellman’s memoirs.  Her 1973 story, Julia, was an account of Hellman’s purported effort to smuggle, in Berlin in 1939, a fur hat containing $50,000 to a friend, Julia, who was active in the Austrian resistance.  A 1977 film  (starring Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia) widely publicised this daring act of anti-fascist heroics but it is “most likely”, says Kessler-Harris, that Hellman had based her story on what she had heard from a common friend about a Muriel Gardiner, a US psychiatrist, appropriating this woman’s life for Hellman’s own ends.

In this, Hellman “overstepped the bounds of memoir”, letting her life as a dramatist take over.  This was Hellman’s one ‘big lie’ which has been used ever since to opportunistically tarnish Hellman’s lifelong moral and political integrity.  Many of Hellman’s friends and admirers retreated in the face of the onslaught and Hellman’s lawsuit against Mary McCarthy in response was far from her finest hour.

The liberals who folded before HUAC could now absolve their far greater sins before this one, far less significant, fictional fantasy by Hellman.   They had a field day but Hellman loved a stoush and used her quick wit and biting sense of humour to continue to show up the false friends of freedom who abandon history’s victims as soon as the going gets personal.