THE POLITICAL BUBBLE: Why Australians Don't Trust Poilitics, MARK LATHAM

THE POLITICAL BUBBLE: Why Australians Don’t Trust Politics
MARK LATHAM
Macmillan, 2014, 291 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The only thing surprising about the 4% of Australians in 2013 who ‘almost always’ trusted the federal government is that the figure is that high, considering the many failures of Australian politics enumerated in The Political Bubble by an angry Mark Latham, the former national leader of the Australian Labor Party.

Now considered as standard political operating behaviour are broken election promises and post-election linguistic spin, politics packaged as a sub-genre of the entertainment industry and the triviality of personality politics, vitriolic abuse and three-word slogans, pilfering of the public purse and the feathering of politicians’ remuneration nests, and corruption and policy-for-sale through political donations.

The only thing that keeps the system going, says Latham, is compulsory preferential voting which forces everyone, including the don’t knows and don’t cares, to eventually select, however reluctantly, one of two shop-worn (Labor/Liberal) brands.  The result is the “hollowing out of democratic engagement” as an apathetic public turns off politics, whilst party membership becomes “smaller, older, less representative” with a “shrinking gene pool of dedicated apparatchiks” who eye off a comfortable parliamentary tenure and the lifestyle of the top 3% of income earners which goes with it.

Politicians are thus cocooned in their own little bubble of privilege and self-importance, with career benefits also for those orbiting the bubble, including political staffers, journalists and, it could be added, increasingly-long-ago ex-politicians (Mark Latham Literary Enterprises is going strong - Political Bubble is book number nine, and counting).

Latham is not the first to observe that life inside the bubble is a world apart from the real life concerns of the public but where Latham goes off the well-evidenced rails is his argument that the grounds for divorce between the people and their representatives is less about political betrayal of popular trust than irrelevance.

Apparently, there has been a “self-reliance revolution” out in “middle-class suburbia”, in which depoliticised individuals have become bootstrap-lifting agents of their own self-improvement and prosperity, making for a society that is “affluent and satisfied”.  “Contrary to Marxist theories of the radical left” (and oblivious to the voluminous research of non-Marxist economists like Thomas Picketty), “capitalism is becoming more equal, not less”.  In this glorious, petit-bourgeois utopia of self-sufficiency, there is much less for government to do.

In Latham’s shill for this vast, “sensible middle”, he rejects not only the “feral right” of Liberal politicians, Murdoch’s News Corp and the “hate-fests” of right-wing radio  talkback (low-hanging fruit for even a tepid social-democrat) but he also flails against the green-left “fanatical fringe”, punching out not only the most radical mainstream party (the Greens) but every street campaign and protest movement.

The substantive centrepiece of Latham’s alternative, “minimalist” politics is government by experts.  Expert bodies would take charge of fiscal policy (government expenditure and revenue), climate change policy and other areas of government dereliction.  Such old-hat technocratic solutions, however, would only further blow out what Latham justly deplores as Australia’s “democratic deficit”.  Experts are not ideology-free and they would be government-appointed, not elected or subject to democratic accountability.  The experts themselves would be elite members of the Bubble. 

Latham is right to say that Australian democracy is broken but it is bourgeois democracy (economic rule by the rich, political rule by their class buddies) that doesn’t work for society.  We only have nominal control over our law-making political representatives, and we have zero control over law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, public service chiefs and big media, the banks, miners and other powerful corporations.  Political, economic and social decisions that affect everyone should be made by everyone, not just the Bubble People.  What is needed is socialist democracy.  On this, Latham has nothing to say.

UNLIKELY HEROES: The Extraordinary Story of the Britons Who Fought for Spain by RICHARD BAXELL

UNLIKELY HEROES: The Extraordinary Story of the Britons Who Fought for Spain
RICHARD BAXELL
Aurum Press, 2014,  531 pages, $24.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The defiant red and black flags, the proud trade union banners, the clenched fists, the full-throated slogans (No Pasaran! No Pasaran!), the spine-quivering singing of The Internationale – these drove the waves of emotion in Spain amongst the 2,500 British volunteers who came to the military defence of the Spanish Republic against General Franco’s fascists in the late 1930s, writes the London School of Economics’ Richard Baxell in Unlikely Warriors.  The Britons, although they and democratic Spain were to lose the Spanish Civil War, would never lose the memory of this electrifying solidarity.

The English-speaking volunteers from Britain, Ireland and Commonwealth countries (including over fifty from Australia) comprised the 15^th International Brigade from amongst the 35,000 overseas volunteers from 53 countries.

Most of the Britons were anti-fascists who had waged a “muscular response” to Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in England.  They would now do, in Spain, what their anti-communist governments, adopting the policy that the Spanish Republic was ‘better dead than red’, would not.

Unlike the early wave of literary intellectuals and other “radical romantics and middle class Marxists” in spontaneously-formed militias, the Brigaders were organised by the Communist International (the Moscow-led global network of national communist parties), around three-quarters being members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.  Most were working class men (and the occasional woman – the first British volunteer to be killed in battle was the sculptor, Felicia Browne).

The communist foundation of the International Brigades has allowed Cold War polemicists to argue that the Brigades were simply a political instrument for Stalin to pursue a satellite Spanish dictatorship behind an anti-fascist façade.

Whilst the Brigades’ political leadership certainly kept a watch on dissidents and rival leftist forces, the British Brigaders did not share in the responsibility for the Stalinist bastardry, so brutally illustrated in the suppression of the anarchists and the radical Partido de Unificacion Marxista (POUM) in the 1936 Catalan uprising.  There were no executions of Britons for political disobedience, a leniency extended to deserters whose harshest punishment was being sentenced to digging trenches or latrines, the comparatively mild disciplinary reactions of a “desperate army in a bitter struggle for its very survival”.  If the war was lost through military indiscipline, concludes Baxell,  then no revolution could be won.

The Stalinist “civil war within the Civil War” was tragically unhelpful at best, although Baxell notes that the Spanish Republic was to be defeated, not by Stalin’s terror, but by the “utterly farcical”  non-intervention agreement signed by 28 countries, including fascist Italy and Nazi Germany which blatantly supplied weapons and soldiers to their Francoist ally.  This one-sided pact left the Spanish Republic out-numbered, out-gunned and out-financed, doomed in the face of the ferociously effective, elite military forces of Franco’s Army of Africa from France’s Moroccan colony. 

Nevertheless, the political fervour and suicidal bravery of the Brigaders served to delay the end until they were withdrawn in 1938 by a besieged Spanish government in a vain attempt to mediate a peace with Franco through obtaining international assistance by expelling the illegal overseas fighters.  The International Brigades not only made a difference, they were different in that, as a British ambulance driver put it, ‘it was their war, they were fighting for their interests, unlike soldiers in large imperialist wars’.

As a work of academic scholarship, Unlikely Warriors is more than sound, and more than ethically decent in its not-uncritical empathy with the sometimes-shades-of-Stalinist-grey cause and personnel of thirties’ anti-fascism.

Baxell does not gloss over brute military reality (the wretchedness of life as a soldier) and he acknowledges that all was not battlefield heroism (incompetence and individual weakness fray the edges of the anti-fascist epic) or working class harmony (the Irish decamped en bloc from their ‘British’ comrades to the American battalion).  Baxell also examines the grudgingly-tolerated affront to the volunteers’ egalitarian political idealism offered by a traditional, non-democratic army (the Brigades were part of the Spanish Republican Army). 

Unlikely Warriors is, however, primarily a work of oral history, and in this it excels by giving vivid, moving and honest voice to those who upended, and too often ended, their own lives in their attempt to save millions of others’ from fascism.

KLAUS FUCHS (Mike Rossiter) and KIM PHILBY (Ben Macintyre)

THE SPY WHO CHANGED THE WORLD: Klaus Fuchs and the Secrets of the Nuclear Bomb
MIKE ROSSITER
Headline, 2014, 344 pages, $xx.yy (pb)

A SPY AMONG FRIENDS: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

BEN MACINTYRE
Bloomsbury, 2014, 352 pages, $xx.yy (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Klaus Fuchs has had a very bad press because the refugee German physicist who was at the heart of the war-time British and American nuclear bomb projects also passed on all their secrets to Stalin’s Soviet Union.  There is, however, more to Fuchs than his depiction by conservative Cold Warriors as a reprehensible traitor, as can be gleaned from Mike Rossiter’s biography.

Fuchs came of political age during the rise of Nazism when he joined the German Communist Party (KPD) as the only effective resistance force to Hitler.  A fearless activist, Fuchs was once attacked by Hitler’s street thugs outside Keil University and thrown in a river, losing some teeth during the assault.

After Hitler’s power-grab, the KPD leadership sent their highly valuable young scientist to safety in Britain with a dual career as nuclear scientist and Soviet spy.  MI5, Britain’s domestic secret police, was unaware of Fuchs’ covert role and waved aside what they assessed as Fuchs’ ‘slight security risk’ for the sake of Britain’s greater nuclear good.   

A decrypted Soviet spy message, however, trained their gaze on Fuchs in 1949.  The evidence was scanty, vague and circumstantial, and, as MI5 would not want to reveal in court that it had cracked the Soviet’s secret espionage code, Fuchs would almost certainly have escaped prosecution.

Under gentlemanly interrogation by MI5, however, Fuchs volunteered a confession.  He may have developed doubts about the Soviet Union, and he was concerned about his colleagues, friends and family getting dangerously caught up in his MI5 investigation, but the inducement of immunity from prosecution, which was beyond MI5’s powers, in return for a confession was crucial.

Fuchs’ illegally obtained confession should have been ruled inadmissible as evidence in court but with Lord Chief Justice Goddard hearing the case, there was no way this rank conservative would obey legal niceties.  Nor was Goddard moved by the fact that Fuchs also effectively spied for Britain, his phenomenal memory transporting highly classified American nuclear weapons know-how, jealously-guarded from even US allies, back to Britain.

Washington, says Rossiter, knew that its nuclear weapons dominance “gave a significant advantage to the country that possessed it” in terms of geo-political power and it was not just the Soviet Union but also Britain which believed, as Labour’s Foreign Secretary put it, that ‘we could not afford to acquiesce in an American monopoly’ of the atomic bomb.

Tricked into a confession, Fuchs got fourteen years and served nine for good behaviour before returning to East Germany, becoming that neo-Stalinist state’s most senior nuclear physicist where he died in 1988, the year that also saw the death, in Moscow, of Kim Philby, another Soviet spy and as reflexively vilified, including by his latest biographer, Ben Macintyre. 

Like Fuchs, Philby moved from moderate laborist politics to communism in the 1930s after witnessing the brutality of fascism in Berlin.  An underground communist activist in quasi-fascist Austria, Philby returned to London and Cambridge University where his impeccable upper-crust family credentials made him a perfect choice for Soviet intelligence which was scouting for well-connected students at elite universities with good career prospects who could blend invisibly into the British establishment.

Reinvented under the guise of a keen young fascist and anti-communist, a role Philby found ‘deeply repulsive’ but compensated for by the romantic thrill of espionage, he joined MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, eventually rising to head up MI6’s anti-Soviet intelligence operations.

From this position, all activities of MI6, and of the CIA courtesy of “long boozy lunches” with the CIA head in Washington, found their way to the Soviet Union which Philby never wavered from seeing as the embodiment of his left-wing political values, despite Stalin’s Show Trials and deadly purges, including the liquidation of Philby’s early, cultured and still idealistic Soviet ‘handlers’.

For Philby, his spying meant helping to foil the West’s Cold War ‘roll-back’ strategy which centred on MI6 and CIA operations to destabilise the strong national communist movements in France, Italy and Greece, to repress anti-imperialist liberation struggles in Latin and Central America, South America and Asia, and to foment insurrection behind the Iron Curtain.

When exposure loomed for Philby, he, too, like Fuchs, was offered immunity from prosecution in return for a confession but, unlike in Fuchs’ case, leading MI6 officers wanted to avoid what would have been a massive, and career-ruining, spy scandal and they did nothing to prevent his midnight flit to Moscow in 1963.

Philby’s services to Soviet intelligence had meant the deaths of those he fingered – the armed anti-communist insurgents in Georgia, Armenia, the Ukraine and other Soviet satellites; a would-be Soviet defector bearing the names of those spying for the Soviet Union in the West; and anti-Nazi but right-wing, anti-communist Catholic resistance activists in Hitler’s Germany.

Whilst Macintyre vents unalloyed disgust at Philby’s regret-free “killing for the communist cause”, he fails to summon such moral outrage for Britain’s war-time execution of Nazi spies (also a result of Philby’s ‘legitimate’ spy job), nor for the Western spy agencies’ vastly more numerous Cold War toll of peasants, workers, Catholic nuns and others in the developing world.  For Macintyre, some causes (such as “combating the communist menace”) apparently justify guilt-exempt, spy-induced murder.

Top-heavy on the what and how of spying (codewords, clandestine rendezvous, etc.) both books are underweight on the why (motives and principles) of Fuchs and Philby whose guilt is posed only at the level of breaching official secrets and treason laws.  True political guilt, however belongs to Stalin who was guilty of misleading the likes of Fuchs and Philby into a blind belief that Russia under the counter-revolutionary tyrant was socialist and therefore worth spying for.

In the spy’s micro-universe, Fuchs and Philby were isolated from public engagement as socialist activists working for a democratic, egalitarian and war-free world.  These were the revolutionary ideals that Fuchs and Philby started out with and for which, despite their misguided strategy, they remain guilty – and proudly so.

NO PLACE TO HIDE: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State
GLENN GREENWALD
Hamish Hamilton, 2014, 259 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Glenn Greenwald’s No Place To Hide is not just a thrilling account of the journalist’s “cloak-and-dagger” encounter with National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, but a clinical and impassioned analysis of the danger posed by America’s vast surveillance state.

Greenwald, no tech-head, nearly blew his opportunity for the dramatic scoop because of his dilatoriness in installing a computer encryption program for communication with Snowden until guided mouse-click by mouse-click by the latter.  Only then, in 2013, was the six-decade history of near-invisibility of the NSA, the world’s largest intelligence agency, ready to be definitively breached.

A high-school dropout (intellectually unchallenged by the curriculum) and a US Army discard (ethically challenged by the invasion of Iraq), Snowden’s native computer intelligence saw him swiftly advance from CIA security guard to information technology specialist and then to high-level cyber-spy pulling in $200,000 a year in the NSA.

The faith of this spy-with-a-conscience that President Obama would honour his pledge to reform national security abuses and lead ‘the most transparent administration in history’ was extinguished, however, when Snowden found that the NSA’s powers were being expanded, its mission upgraded, as he told Greenwald, to build ‘a system whose goal was the elimination of all privacy, globally’.  If the President wouldn’t act, then, Snowden concluded, he himself would have to.

The thousands of NSA documents Snowden leaked to Greenwald exposed lie after official lie.  NSA officials had repeatedly said they would not spy on innocent citizens but, with mathematical exactitude down to the last electronic tap of Internet servers, communications satellites, underwater fibre-optic cables, telephone systems and personal computers, the documents showed the NSA eavesdropping on billions of communications by millions of US and global citizens (97 billion emails and 124 billion phone calls globally in just the one month of May in 2013, for example).

This massive data trawl was enabled by the NSA’s corporate ‘partners’ (Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Gmail, Hotmail, Skype, YouTube), as the “richest and most powerful telecommunications providers in the country knowingly committed tens of millions of felonies” in providing the NSA with access to their users’ private data.  Those other theoretical devotees of individual freedom and liberty, the ‘democracies’ of America’s lapdog allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), were also eager collaborators with the NSA.

More hypocrisies were revealed by the leaked documents.  Washington, which had been furiously denouncing China for its penetration of the US telecommunications market with hardware allegedly implanted with surveillance devices, was itself using the NSA to intercept American Internet hardware being exported from the US and physically installing spyware – one NSA document crowed that this ‘signals intelligence tradecraft ... is very hands-on (literally!)’.

The documents also punctured the flimsy cover for the NSA’s mass surveillance – the “threat of terrorism”.  The most productive spying was actually global economic and diplomatic espionage on behalf of NSA ‘customers’ such as the US trade, agriculture, treasury, commerce and state departments.  Thwarting terror “is clearly a pretext”, says Greenwald, especially when official reviews have shown that conventional, and more democratically answerable, policing is much better at preventing terrorist incidents than the NSA which is yet to trouble the ‘War on Terror’ scorekeeper.

Even if the NSA were effective at its stated, anti-terrorist, job, there is less chance, notes Greenwald, of being killed in a terrorist attack than being struck by lightning, which makes the mass population surveillance and huge expense (domestic homeland security spending has increased by US$1 trillion since 9/11) a grossly irrational response to a terrorist possibility that has been exaggerated for interests that are political (watching dissidents, winding back civil liberties, diversion from domestic political unpopularity) and vested (commercial surveillance industries).

Essential to keeping the ‘national security’ panic inflated is the establishment media, says Greenwald, an unsparing critic of such media’s “excessive closeness to government, reverence for the institutions of the national security state, and routine exclusion of dissenting voices”.  Briefly dazzled by the glittering new story revealed by the NSA leaks, many journalists turned a long-forgotten sceptical eye on the NSA but quickly reminded themselves of where their political values and corporate paychecks lay and reverted to form as “loyal servants to the government” whilst predictably rounding on the whistle-blower and his conduit.

The tame media downplayed the substantive issues of NSA spying in favour of personalising the story and psychologising political dissent.  Snowden was portrayed as a strange coot, Greenwald discredited as an obsessive with a damning past including the heinous crime of having a dog over the weight limit allowed in his condominium apartment.  Media stars joined right-wing politicians in calling for the criminal indictment of both men as traitors. 

Greenwald’s journalist credentials were denied, his media peers labelling him a mere blogger, a reprehensible ‘activist’.  The inflammatory stoking of terrorist dread, and the concomitant cheerleading for a strong government not too prissy about democratic niceties, by the tabloid ink-slingers is, in their universe, not activism of course whilst the national security reporting of the more ‘professional’, ‘objective’ reporters, the “the opinion-less, colour-less, soul-less” journalists as Greenwald calls them, neuters the impact of critical stories with a ‘balance’ that treats the official government voice with uncritical deference.  Both species of journalist are “a threat to nobody powerful” which ensures their access to, and membership of, the political elite.

By depicting Snowden and Greenwald as weird deviants, the establishment media reinforce the message that “obedience to authority is implicitly deemed the natural state” whilst those who radically, and actively, depart from the political norm are unnatural.  Remain boring and you will be safe, runs the political sedative - only bad people with something to hide should fear NSA surveillance.  Limitless spying, however, is certain to be abused, says Greenwald, with the historical surveillance record crammed with targets overwhelmingly drawn from left and progressive dissidents, and from whatever marginalised population subgroup is ripe for vilification.

With an unaccountable NSA, Washington set up a “one-way mirror” in which “the US government sees what everyone else in the world does … while no one sees its own actions”.  It takes the life-altering courage of rebels like Snowden, and committed journalists like Greenwald, to shatter this mirror - ‘I have’, said Snowden, ‘been to the darkest corners of government and what they fear is light’.

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE COLD WAR, DADDY? Curthoys & Damousi

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE COLD WAR, DADDY? Personal Stories From a Troubled Time
ANN CURTHOYS & JOY DAMOUSI (eds)
NewSouth, 2014, 297 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The Cold War (1946 - 1991) affected everything, so how did the conflict between the capitalist West and the Soviet East play out at the personal level, ask Ann Curthoys and Joy Damousi (History professors at Sydney and Melbourne universities) in What Did You Do In The Cold War, Daddy?  The book’s contributors try to recreate how their families experienced the Cold War in Australia.

Patrick Stalin Brislan (fortunately, this classical musician’s middle initial now stands for Sean) was the wartime son of a father who was, not surprisingly, a Communist Party of Australia (CPA) organiser, and he recalls the trouble his middle name threatened on top of the “personal physical violence” he already received from his school peers.

George Zangalis, of Greek anti-fascist familial origins, found support as a migrant worker in the CPA  as he encountered double Cold War jeopardy, being told by a police officer when arrested as a CPA election candidate in Victoria in 1973 that ‘What’s worse than a commo bastard is a dago commo bastard’.

John Docker (culture academic) remembers the struggle between doctrinal purity and friendship as political rifts split the Old Left, including his own arguments over the New Left with his father, Ted, a founding member of the CPA.

Children of both the expelled and the expellers sense an emotionally fraught atmosphere in a party which was often enough the author of its own misfortunes because of its slavish adherence to a Moscow-imposed party line.

The temperature was cooler over at the Australian Labor Party (ALP).  Rodney Cavalier (party ‘machine operative’) was the son of an ‘unthinking Liberal’ and was unmoved by the sixties in university until, in 1968, he joined the ALP, not the  students who were ripping up Parisian cobblestones and capitalist verities.  ‘Never attracted to Marxism’, he found the serenity of often inquorate but career-smoothing ALP branch meetings more comforting.

For the ALP more broadly, the Cold War meant the wary and stumbling choreography between its Right and ‘Left’ factions, and the CPA, for union influence in the face of ‘The Movement’, B. A. Santamaria’s visceral anti-communist, anti-Labor, Catholic organisation.  The political manifestation of ‘The Movement’ was the Democratic Labor Party which housed Peter Manning (ABC and commercial journalist), from a conservative Catholic family, during his time at Sydney University, and it took many years for him to see that, at least on the Vietnam War, it might be better to be red than dead.

With Professor Martin Krygier, the historically sloppy and politically lazy equating of the left (all shades) with Stalinist authoritarianism is on display as he inherited the stale anti-communist formula which justified the switch of his father, Richard, from Polish socialist to leading Australian anti-communist and founder of the CIA-funded magazine, Quadrant.

For conservatives like the Krygiers, the Cold War was always about the class war, no matter how they dressed it up as a fight between tyranny and ‘liberal democracy’.   Stalin’s gulags and ‘the God that failed’ were only ever excuses for the reactionary social policies, intellectual conformity and ‘free enterprise’ economy that were their true religion.

Few contributors, alas, meet the, admittedly difficult, brief of the book’s editors.  As young children, informed political awareness of the Cold War was not possible so their contributions rarely bring off a successful merger of history with memoir, anecdote with analysis.

Nevertheless, their chapters can be productively compared to show that, for all its self-inflicted faults, the historical communist left in Australia, and not the Cold War Right, were on the truly right side, the side of the exploited and oppressed many, not the powerful and wealthy few.  The Cold War may be over but the class war goes on.

SERVING THE REICH: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler by PHILIP BALL

SERVING THE REICH: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler
PHILIP BALL
Vintage, 2014, 320 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Nuclear physicists in Nazi Germany did not build an atomic bomb but, as the science writer, Philip Ball, shows in Serving the Reich, this was more by good fortune than by clever (mis)management by the likes of one of the regime’s favourite scientists, Werner Heisenberg, whose reputation-salvaging claim to have deliberately ‘falsified the mathematics’ to sabotage Hitler’s nuclear war option has been roundly discredited.

Such self-exoneration, says Ball, was common to almost an entire cohort of non-Jewish German physicists who, although rarely Nazi sympathisers or anti-Semites, colluded with the Nazi regime’s military ambitions and racial ‘cleansing’ policies.

The physicists either carried out the required dismissals of their Jewish colleagues, did not resign their academic posts or emigrate in protest, or self-interestedly welcomed the career advancement opportunities suddenly opened up by the purge of Jewish physicists.  Expressions of dismay were voiced privately not publicly whilst disapproval of Nazism was at best symbolic – Professor Max von Laue, Einstein’s friend, never went outdoors without a parcel under each arm to avoid having to give the obligatory, raised-arm ‘Heil Hitler’ salute.

The over-riding motive for the physicists’ “lethal indifference” was to maintain the intellectual status of German science and the best way to do this, they reasoned, was by protecting themselves from the Gestapo’s gaze.  Their social position and consciousness, however, also predisposed them to collaboration, however reluctant.  Intensely patriotic, they were privileged members of a conservative intellectual elite that was often “favourably disposed towards some elements of a totalitarian state”.  They believed that their first duty was obedience to the German state, including a genocidal, warring Nazi one.  The law was the law, reasoned the physicists’’ intellectual and institutional leader, Max Planck, and if respectful petitioning through official channels proved inadequate then there was nothing to be done.

The physicists were, writes Ball, “more tragic than despicable” in seriously misapprehending, or selectively denying, the true nature of Nazism but some were also compromised by mixed attitudes to fascism, like Heisenberg who believed that, over time, ‘the splendid things will separate from the hateful’.

Whilst it is understandable that fear of reprisal made a heads-down silence attractive, what is ultimately damning about the physicists’ behaviour was their “almost universal inability … to acknowledge, or even recognise, their failures in retrospect” when the concentration camp no longer threatened.

As electronic bugging of their conversations, when prisoners in England after the war, revealed, there was an almost total lack of remorse or moral self-examination.  Some even took the perverse moral high ground by arguing that the ‘democratic’ Allies actually built and used a nuclear bomb but totalitarian Germany did not.  This ignores the main reasons for the Nazis’ nuclear tardiness – the purge of Jewish physics talent (one quarter of the profession) which seriously depleted the relevant skills base, and the Nazi rulers opting for their V1 and V2 rocket program as more technically feasible than atomic bombs in a fast-narrowing timeframe.

Nazi Germany, says Ball, exposed the ‘apolitical’ stance of the German physicists as a delusion.  It prevented them from criticising their governmental paymasters and turned their retreat to ‘pure’ science into de facto professional support for the regime’s political program.  Their failure to see that science can not be “morally neutral” resulted in their political failure to resist Nazism.

The social and political implications of scientific research are inescapable, says Ball, not just in the specialist field of nuclear physics, with its still deadly applications of nuclear energy and weapons, but equally as much, concludes Ball, in contemporary, and potentially calamitous, technologies such as genetically modified crops, nano-technology, fossil fuels and all things military.  Contemporary scientists supporting such research may care to reflect on the damage done to society by Hitler’s physicists who tried, and failed, to remain ‘above’ politics.

HELL-BENT: Australia’s Leap into the Great War by DOUGLAS NEWTON

HELL-BENT: Australia’s Leap into the Great War
DOUGLAS NEWTON
Scribe, 2014, 344 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Behind all the froth, then and now, about the noble cause of the first world war (defence of freedom by Britain and its allies against German aggression) lay a far less exalted reality, writes Douglas Newton, retired University of Western Sydney historian.   The war’s “grand plan” for Britain, called, candidly enough, ‘The Spoils’, by the British Colonial Secretary, was to divvy the world up amongst the victors.

Territorial claims by Britain and its allies (France, Italy and Tsarist Russia) were pegged out in the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific, with the British Dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa) instructed to begin the conquest of the German colonies in these regions as, in the words of a secret British cable, an ‘Imperial service’ on behalf of London.  Australia was given carriage of New Guinea, the Marshall Islands and Nauru in what Newton aptly calls a “war of brigandage”. 

Australia’s war role was tied to London’s war aims through the bonds of Empire loyalty.  So devoted was the Australian Government, in fact, that its commitment of its entire Navy and some 20,000 expeditionary troops was made forty hours ahead of the British Cabinet decision to declare war on Germany.  Australia’s generous, early gift strengthened the hand of the warmongers in the British Liberal government which was sharply split between ‘Liberal Imperialists’ and neutralists.

Newton documents the eagerness with which Australian politicians made a “rapid and reckless leap, without any conditions or limits” into the looming conflagration that was to claim 18 million lives.  Although Australia’s decision was made by just four Cabinet members of Joseph Cook’s federal Liberal government, the entire Australian political establishment was war-minded.

The British Governor-General to Australia happily noted that both the Cook Liberals and Andrew Fisher’s Labor Opposition were ‘full of zeal’ for war.  Engaged in a national election campaign at the time, they competed in what Newton calls a “love-of-empire” auction.  Labor boasted its support for conscription and its defence spending when in government from 1910-13, with Fisher now pledging to help and defend Britain “to our last man and our last shilling”.  ‘In times of emergency’, he declared, the Labor Opposition would ‘stand behind the government in all measures ... to assist the Mother Country’.

Labor’s unity pledge on war was partly driven by a concern for “political safety” in response to the Liberals’ electoral opportunism, summed up by a Liberal Senate candidate who noted that ‘the European situation affords Liberals in Australia excellent material for a good war-cry during the current campaign’ allowing them, writes Newton, to attack Labor in a “khaki election” as “traitorous, a friend of Germany and a nest of Irishmen disloyal to Empire”, no matter how fanciful this description was.   As symbolised by Labor’s most hawkish figurehead, Billy Hughes, the party’s fundamental political values were in alignment with the needs of the “rich men, corporate lawyers, mining tycoons, bankers and reactionary publicists” who, says Newton, formed Hughes’ ultra-patriotic Australian National Defence League.

Labor’s decision to back the war dealt the official ALP Opposition, and its affiliated trade unions, out of influence at a time when there was “no sign that Australians were being eaten up with anxiety that they might miss the war”.  The real opposition, says Newton, was left to the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, socialists, and anti-militarist radicals, feminists and Christians.  An internationalist, working class, anti-war party would have responded differently to the war but the Australian Labor Party politicians were no Bolsheviks.

Neither is Newton, who argues that the Great War was not escapable for Australia, “nor should Australia have stood aside from it”.  This may be true but only for a country under capitalist management accepting its role as a regional branch obedient to the Head Office of the imperialist British Empire brand.

Nevertheless, Newton’s book, despite adding copiously to the already-mountainous documentary heights of high diplomatic manoeuvring, has useful context.  Sounding almost like Lenin explaining the old axiom that war is politics by other means, Newton notes that the Australian military “fought for the empire, and all it stood for – class distinction, reservoirs of cheap labour … captured markets and resources …”.

Newton also, thankfully, plays truant from that school of Australian war history which glories in the current celebratory clamour of the centenary of the ‘Great War’ whilst, most valuably, arguing that we should “think critically about the nation’s descent into war – in the past, in the present, and in the future”.  Such radical reflection, it is abundantly clear, will come, not from the descendants of the political, military and media elites which took us to calamity in 1914, but from the heirs of the war’s dissenters.

AN OFFICER AND A SPY Robert Harris

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

Review by Phil Shannon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CORAL BATTLEGROUND Judith Wright

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

Review by Phil Shannon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A SHORT HISTORY OF NUCLEAR FOLLY

RUDOLPH HERZOG
Melville House, 2014, 252 pages

ATOMIC COMICS: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear Age

FERENC SZASZ
University of Nevada Press, 2013, 179 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVING WITH A WILD GOD: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth About Everything BARBARA EHRENREICH

LIVING WITH A WILD GOD: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth About Everything
BARBARA EHRENREICH
Granta, 2014, 237 pages, $xx.yy (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

What are we to make of the latest book by Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer of wit, clarity and insight, proud to count herself a socialist, feminist, atheist and scientist, who concludes that her teenage ‘mystical’ experiences with some sort of ‘living Presence’, ‘higher Consciousness’ or ‘mysterious Other’ were real encounters with another dimension, beyond the scope of rational analysis?  Not that much, alas.

Ehrenreich is no “New Age fluffhead” - spirituality is “a crime against reason” especially to one “born to atheism” by parents “who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms” - but her ‘transcendent’ adventures in the 1950s have prompted a late-life rethink of her intellectual roots.

She dismisses the explanatory materialist candidates for her “aberrant mental phenomena” - sleep deprivation, hypoglycaemia, faulty perceptual processing of sensory data, optical illusion, dissociative disorders, impaired  neuronal wiring.

She rejects the hypothesis that the “fabric of space-time was doing just fine” and the problem might be with her internal psychology.  As a good scientist, she does not write off anomalous data like her too-strange-to-be-forgotten experiences, but she opts for the scientifically incredible (mysticism) over the scientifically simple (neuroscience) with her operating assumption that there is something out there,  an animistic force emanating from “conscious beings that normally elude our senses”, a power which is, moreover, “seeking us out”.

This stance has only come about in the last decade, after Ehrenreich’s long immersion in sixties-inspired politicisation and scholarly investigation when she saw her “perceptual wanderings” as a petit-bourgeois “distraction from political activism”.  Now, with the decline of the left  into long, navel-gazing meetings “in windowless conference rooms”, she has re-embraced her illicit ‘mystical’ past.

Ehrenreich has declared that she will never write her life story.  This is a great pity because her current memoir would then have been a more digestible, condensed chapter on, say, ‘Neuroscience and the Teenage Mystic’ whilst the tantalising glimpses of the rest of her wonderful life would elaborate on how her political radicalisation tore apart the “façade of everyday normality” to reveal, not some metaphysical power, but the very real, “ongoing, inexcusable cruelty” of the powerful in human society.

POWER FAILURE: The Inside Story of Climate Politics Under Rudd and Gillard PHILIP CHUBB

POWER FAILURE: The Inside Story of Climate Politics Under Rudd and Gillard
PHILIP CHUBB
Black Inc., 2014, 302 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

 

In 2007 in Australia, “climate policy was a reform full of promise and excitement”, writes Monash University journalism academic, Philip Chubb, in Power Failure.  Six years later, however, an “exhausted and confused” electorate had installed a climate-change-denying government that was dismantling the previous Labor government’s few fossil fuel carbon emission reduction programs.  Chubb dissects, with much sorrow, the climate change “policy fiasco” of Labor that led to this outcome.

Labor’s climate change policy in government was to establish a market mechanism to price carbon within an emissions trading scheme to theoretically provide a cost disincentive to the use of fossil fuels.  The schemes of both Labor Prime Ministers, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, seriously misfired, however.

Rudd’s proposed scheme (the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – CPRS) suffered from delay, conceptual complexity, dense technical detail, poor communication, a back-office technocrat (Penny Wong) as climate change minister, the sidelining of the Greens, an autocratic but erratic Prime Minister who refused to call a double dissolution election on the issue when popular support was still significant, and an intensifying political and corporate opposition from aggressive climate change deniers and electricity generators threatening power cuts and job losses.

People “did not know what the government was doing on climate change or believed it was doing nothing”, says Chubb.  They queried Rudd’s commitment and questioned how important the whole issue of climate change could really be given such chameleonic leadership, especially when Rudd suddenly abandoned the CPRS, and, with it, any governmental lead on what he had called ‘the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time’.

Gillard was more inclusive on policy process than Rudd, was a more focused communicator and a better manager of the Greens (buying their support with concessions, albeit important, such as a $10 billion green investment bank) but an antagonistic Murdoch media had so soured the fixed-price carbon tax entrée to her floating price emissions trading reduction scheme that her package died along with the Labor government in the disastrous 2013 election.

For all the apparent differences between Rudd and Gillard, and their respective carbon reduction schemes, however, both were offering essentially the same product – market-based emissions trading in carbon pollution.  What finally sunk both schemes was not, as Chubb proposes, the different flaws in the leaders’ psychology or presentation skills but the common elements of both schemes, namely weak targets and a gushing money tap of compensation for industry.

The pathologically shy target (5% less carbon by 2020) did not match what the science said it should be whilst the free carbon pollution permits and cash compensation for industry was logically contradictory because “the government was trying to force companies to change their behaviour, but then paying them so they did not have to change”.  As could have been predicted, and as subsequent research on the carbon tax (in Victoria) found, says Chubb, coal-fired electricity companies simply passed on the cost of their carbon emissions to consumers through higher prices whilst reaping windfall profits from their taxpayer-funded compensation.

The problem, largely ignored by Chubb, was not the messenger (Rudd versus Gillard) but the message (emissions-trading markets).  Nor was the problem what Chubb terms an “excess of purity” from those environmentalists who were opposed to Labor’s inadequate policies.  Voters were simply underwhelmed by what was on offer.

Chubb does note, without, however, expanding on it, the strong popular support for renewable energy which continues to exist, across class and political divides, including government investment in renewables and the Renewable Energy Target (a Rudd legacy which mandates that electricity generators source a percentage - currently a modest 20% - of electricity from renewables).  There, with state intervention in the market and not in political genuflection to it, lies the future, for a political party willing and capable of grasping it.

THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book by FINN and COUVEE

THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book
PETER FINN and PETRA COUVÉE
Harvill Secker, 2014, 352 pages, $35 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Both the KGB and the CIA thought they had the measure of Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel, Doctor Zhivago.  As Finn and Couvée recount, the Kremlin feared it (as an attack on their rule) and the White House celebrated it (as a condemnation of all things socialist).  Both were right.

A Russian poet who was sympathetic to the Bolshevik revolution, Pasternak became disillusioned with Soviet Russia after the show trials of Old Bolsheviks and the mass repression of the late 1930s.  His short-lived attempt to ‘think the thoughts of the era, and to live in tune with it’, including his poetry lauding Stalin, was abandoned.

At age 65, Pasternak’s passive opposition went public with his first novel, Doctor Zhivago, about the doctor-poet, Yuri Zhivago (Pasternak’s alter ego), and his love affair with the nurse, Lara Antipova, during the 1917 revolution and subsequent civil war. 

Doctor Zhivago first saw the light of day, in 1957, thanks to a wealthy and dissident member, and financier, of the Italian Communist Party, who arranged for Pasternak’s manuscript to be smuggled out of Russia.

Courtesy of British spies, the CIA gained access to the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago, which, particularly after Pasternak’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, became a star exhibit in the Agency’s clandestine publishing arm.  This million dollar operation (including the CIA’s own printing press which produced ‘black’ editions) subsidised, translated and disseminated anti-communist books to the Soviet bloc (touring Moscow Philharmonic members, for example, hid pages of Doctor Zhivago in their sheet music).

The CIA recognised the propaganda potential of Doctor Zhivago for its ‘intrinsic message’ (‘a cry for the freedom and dignity of the individual’ or, as an anti-communist placard in the US put it, ‘Troubled by communism? Then consult Dr. Zhivago’) as well as for the ‘circumstances of its publication’ – the censorship and vociferous harassment of a writer forced to decline the Nobel Prize.  The 1965 Hollywood film starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie added cinematic melodrama and malign Marxist murderers of the Tsar’s family to the West’s cultural offensive.

Although Pasternak was unhappy with being turned into Cold War fodder in the West, he had left himself open to such treatment.  Doctor Zhivago transfers Pasternak’s disgust with Stalinism to a distaste for the early revolutionary period, implying that Stalinist tyranny was the direct outcome of Bolshevik-led socialist revolution even though the monolithic and repressive nature of the regime did not take shape until a decade after the revolution.

This familiar political revisionism marrs the political integrity of Pasternak, and, not that you know it from the authors’ failure to analyse Doctor Zhivago as a political and literary work, it also infects the artistic virtues of the novel.  The fate of all the novel’s characters is one of misery, despair and death at the hands of the Bolsheviks.  Love and humanity is defeated in a historically and psychologically simplistic battle between the sensitive and the evil, the individual and the collective.

The CIA got the novel right  but it was the crushing of the socialist revolution by Stalin which enabled Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to be turned into the cultural servant of capitalism.

STEPHEN WARD WAS INNOCENT, OK by GEOFFREY ROBERTSON

STEPHEN WARD WAS INNOCENT, OK: The Case for Overturning His Conviction
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON
Biteback Publishing, 2013, 194 pages, $24.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

‘Get Ward’, was the order to the heads of Britain’s criminal and political police in 1963 by the Home Secretary.  Dr. Stephen Ward, society osteopath and portrait artist, would thus become, says human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, the scapegoat for a disgraced Tory government out to save its own neck in the sensationalist ‘Profumo affair’.

John Profumo, Minister for War, had had a brief sexual liaison with the promiscuous ‘society girl’, Christine Keeler,  whose brief fling with a Russian embassy defence attaché had implicated their mutual introducer, Ward, in a political panic that loose pillow-talk could threaten ‘national security’.  It helped, by adding some moral alarm to the mix, that Ward was promiscuous, an atheist and “vaguely left-wing”, and thus ripe pickings for a Tory government desperate to silence him, by judicial means, and keep a scandal-plagued government in office.

Grasping at the charge of Ward ‘living off immoral earnings’ from Keeler and the showgirl, Mandy Rice-Davies, who both shared Ward’s flat, police hounded potential witnesses, pressured dozens of genuine prostitutes to give false evidence, persuaded Rice-Davies to change her mind about cooperating courtesy of a spell in Holloway prison on a driver’s licence misdemeanour, and scared off Ward’s patients.

The police ruination of his medical practice prompted Ward to publicly expose the Tory moralist, Profumo, who had sworn in parliament that he had never had sex with Keeler, as a hypocrite and liar.  Thus did the Tories seek vengeance against Ward by making him the fall-guy.

The aggressive police investigation was conducted against a booming extra-judicial prosecution.  With politicians chiming in on Ward’s moral depravities, the press, both tabloid and ‘quality’, slandered Ward, the media honey-pot attracting prostitutes with preposterous stories for sale, whilst both Keeler (the star witness, and confessed perjurer) and Rice-Davies sold theirs for very large sums, with Keeler’s ghost-written ‘exclusive’ for The News of the World massively prejudicing the popular climate against Ward.

Ward’s fate was sealed by a crooked trial judge with well-known views on the sinfulness of prostitution and promiscuity.  He had already pre-judged Ward as guilty of pimping and conveyed this to the jury which convicted Ward even though Keeler and Rice-Davies were not prostitutes (they did not seek payment for the sex they had with the partners they were highly selective about) and even though it was they who lived on Ward’s considerable professional earnings, not the other way round.  The judge’s highly biased summing up was the final indignity that spurred Ward to commit suicide just before the verdict.  An “appalling misuse of state power” had finally silenced Ward.

A host of errors of law, logged with technical precision by Robertson, make a strong legal case for overturning Ward’s verdict.  The artistic case is being made by Andrew Lloyd Webber whose upcoming musical, Stephen Ward, relies on Robertson’s input.  Together, they may just help to deliver historical justice to Ward, and prevent future frame-ups of other “innocent victim[s] of public prejudice and politically expedient prosecution”.

THE GREAT PROSTATE HOAX: How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster
RICHARD ABLIN
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 262 pages, $42.50 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When Richard Ablin, then a young immunologist and now a University of Arizona pathology professor, discovered, in 1970, an enzyme specific to the prostate gland (prostate-specific antigen or PSA) whose elevated levels in blood indicate an abnormality in the gland, he had no idea how a simple blood test would go on to become the foundation of a “profit-driven public health disaster” through prostate cancer screening.

Elevated PSA levels can be caused by prostate cancer but also by infections, aspirin, riding a bicycle, ejaculation and normal, age-related prostate enlargement.  The PSA test is organ-specific not cancer-specific yet it has become ubiquitous as a diagnostic cancer-detection tool leading to many unnecessary and dangerous treatments.

Most prostate cancers are slow-growing and can be safely left alone because prostate cancer is an older man’s disease and nearly all men will die with it but few of it, succumbing instead to other diseases of ageing (80% of men in their seventies will have prostate cancer but only 3% will die because of it).  Nearly all prostate cancers will do absolutely no harm unlike, however, the screening and treatment for them.

Because of the PSA blood test’s worse-than-chance inaccuracy (15% of its negative results are wrong, 60-80% of its positive results are wrong), the test requires a follow-up biopsy of prostate tissue.  The biopsy causes bleeding and pain and, with the biopsy needle passing through the bowel, carries a risk of potentially fatal infections of genito-urinary organs and of the blood.

The treatments that follow biopsy have their own suite of adverse effects.  Surgical removal of the prostate gland (prostatectomy) carries a high risk of urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction, radiation therapy causes inflammation of the bowel, and chemotherapy is not renowned for its pleasures.

The associated waste of health resources and men’s well-being is staggering.  There are an annual 30 million PSA tests (at $80 a pop) in the US, a million biopsies (at $2,000 each) and 100,00 prostatectomies (each fetching $30,000) for a total cost of US$28 billion, coming from the pocket of patient or taxpayer.  All of this expense is for little clinical benefit – one thousand men have to be PSA-tested to successfully prevent just one prostate cancer-related death.

Yet, the PSA test has become embedded in routine men’s health checks – all because of money, says Ablin.  Entrepreneurial medical scientists and the biotechnology industry saw the potential of mass screening to turn the PSA test, and its more expensive successor blood tests and cancers treatments, into a cash-cow, to be milked by pathology, urology, radiotherapy and oncology practices, medical device companies and ancillary medical businesses (erectile restoration, incontinence pads).

From blood test to diaper, “the prostate cancer business is a self-perpetuating industry that creates a need for its services and products”.  The only difference any of this over-servicing makes is to the corporate medical bottom line, not to prostate cancer mortality.

Corporate influence over government health watchdogs also creates a regulatory culture “that looks the other way” over dodgy data and clinical risk, whilst medical industries finance most clinical trials and dollar-dazzled doctors-for-hire have a financial interest in plugging the PSA test.  The corporate dollar also feeds patient advocacy groups whilst marketing triumphs over evidence as charismatic survivor testimonials and sports celebrity endorsers manipulate millions of men, playing on the fear of cancer, onto the prostate cancer conveyor belt with its unnecessary, costly and dangerous, but above all, lucrative, testing and treatments.

“Powerful interests knowingly misused the PSA test to generate huge profits”, concludes Ablin.  Be informed, is his warning to men when their GP talks prostate.  Ablin’s story of “greed and damaged men and government failure” is a good place to start.