CARDINAL: The Rise and Fall of George Pell LOUISE MILLIGAN

CARDINAL: The Rise and Fall of George Pell

LOUISE MILLIGAN

Melbourne University Press, 2017, 384 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

The Vatican Treasurer, George Pell, could well turn out to be the Lance Armstrong of the Australian Catholic Church.  Like the world’s former top cyclist, who furiously denied being a drug cheat until he was eventually rumbled by dogged investigative journalists, Pell, Australia’s top Catholic, has maintained his complete innocence in the face of credible and mounting allegations that he not only covered up an epidemic of clerical sexual abuse of children by Australian Catholic priests but was himself a paedophile abuser.  The ABC’s Louise Milligan has been on Pell’s case for a while now and Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell zeroes in on the fire causing all the smoke which surrounds Pell.

 

Pell, born in Ballarat in 1941, rose through Catholic seminaries and presbyteries which were hotspots for turning out paedophile priests.  He became Archbishop of Melbourne and then, in 2014, the Vatican’s No. 2 in Rome but Pell left a ruinous path of personal destruction (depression, substance abuse, suicide) in his holy wake.  If only, whilst at priest school, Pell had taken up the contract offered by Richmond Football Club to play as a ruckman for the Tigers, then a lot of people might have been spared a lot of grief (other than opposition footy players who would have discovered just how bruising the intimidating Catholic conservative hard-liner could be).

 

Whilst insisting he never had any idea what was going on under his leadership, Pell had stopped priests from speaking out about their peer’s sexual crimes and he was actively involved in moving offenders on to new parishes to re-offend all over again.

 

As public allegations of clerical abuse continued to grow, however, the Church turned to Pell, highly regarded by church leaders as an able administrator, to save the Church in Victoria from reputational and financial damage.  Pell instituted an in-house scheme which, in return for the victims’ legally-enforceable silence, paid them a paltry average of $32,000 in compensation as hush money.  This saved the Church not only too great an outlay on Pell’s $20,000-a-day defence silks, but many hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from civil suits in civilian courts.

 

Despite Pell’s labours, however, the scale of the abuse eventually came to light through a Royal Commission which had been prompted by police whistleblowers.  The Commission’s statistics were shocking - between 1950 and 2010, there were 4,444 incidents of child sexual abuse made against 1,880 priests (7% of Australian Catholic priests).  Pell’s diocese of Melbourne topped the national body count.

 

Subsequent to these revelations, Pell himself came under suspicion of being an abuser.  Milligan was central to documenting some of the alleged cases concerning Pell from his time as trainee priest to becoming Archbishop.  These included the genital groping of an altar boy at a Church camp on Phillip Island; the groping of Catholic primary school boys in Ballarat’s Eureka Pool and full-frontal exposure in the showers afterwards; indecent exposure to young surf lifesavers in the change rooms at Torquay surf club; and oral sex with choirboys in St. Patrick’s Church.

 

Pell, tipped off about a police investigation into these allegations, decided that the Vatican, which has no extradition agreement with Australia, was a safer place to be.  Further preventing Pell from flying back to Australia is a sudden-onset heart condition - medically certified by the Vatican house physician whose bag of scientific tricks includes the authentication of miracles by aspirant saints.

 

Pell is now 76 – “how long before he reaches ‘I don’t recall’ territory”, says an unimpressed Milligan.  In February 2017, a Greens motion calling on Pell to voluntarily return and assist the police investigation was passed by the federal Senate.  Pell scorned it as a ‘political stunt’.

 

The post-Pell Catholic hierarchy in Australia is now saying all the right things and displaying all the right emotions on the Church’s child abuse but, unless there is a full accounting of its past, all the way up to the former Archbishop himself, including bringing him back from his Vatican bolt-hole, then it could all just be an image management exercise.  To the victims, the refurbished rhetoric may be “as hollow as all the holy lectures they received as children, all the while that they were being raped in presbyteries, touched up in confessionals” - or flashed at, groped by and giving fellatio to Pell.

 

This hypocrisy is of a piece with what the Catholic Church (and other institutional religions) share with their capitalist (and other class society) hosts - immense power, vast wealth and a boundless waste dump stuffed full with the human wreckage inflicted by an unaccountable elite.

OCTOBER: The Story of the Russian Revolution CHINA MIEVILLE

OCTOBER: The Story of the Russian Revolution
CHINA MIÉVILLE
Verso, 2017, 369 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

1917 offered an extraordinary course in political literacy for the people of Russia.  In the February anti-Tsarist revolution, which “dispensed breakneck with a half millennium of autocratic rule”, and then in the October socialist revolution, eager workers and peasants stumbled over and then mastered a new way to speak of economic and political democracy, writes China Miéville in his narrative of the Russian Revolution.

Miéville is an English left-wing political activist and award-winning writer of fantasy fiction and magical realism, which he self-describes as ‘weird’ fiction.  The only thing ‘weird’ about 1917, however, at least by todays’ establishment political orthodoxy, is the notion that ordinary people can utterly recast their society and bring about momentous change.  They can confront the apparently immovable object of capitalist solidity – and win!  As Miéville says, the world’s first socialist revolution matters, and deserves celebration, because “things changed once, and they might do so again”.

Miéville has a novelist’s eye for a great story, and his breathless, journalistic narrative befits the dizzying pace and political drama of revolutionary upheaval, combining an impressionistic flurry of events with sparkling political tension.  Miniature character portraits humanise the legendary cast.  Lenin is a “plain not sparkling wordsmith” but his relentless political focus is “mesmerising” to friend and foe alike.  Trotsky is “hard to love but impossible not to admire … charismatic and abrasive, brilliant and persuasive, and divisive and difficult”.  The early Stalin is “a capable, if never scintillating, organiser.  At best an adequate intellectual, at worst an embarrassing one … The impression he left was one of not leaving much of an impression”, other than of something ‘troubling’ in his character.

The sweep of Miéville’s story takes in not just high politics but its grass-roots ferment, where “every queue was a political forum”, where waitresses refused to accept tips as demeaning, and where Tsarist statues were keenly pulled down, “some having been erected for the sole purpose of pulling down”.  There was a glorious profusion of hyphenated political life-forms (Anarchist-Communists, Socialist-Revolutionary-Maximalists, etc.) on the left, outshining the main political species to their bourgeois and landowning right, the Constitutional Democrats, whose name was as drab as their political vision.
Miéville explores all sorts of by-ways, including religion, that were lapped by the waves of socialist radicalism.  Muslim women, for example, found their voice – an All-Russian Muslim Women’s Congress hosted 59 delegates (including socialist and feminist Muslims) who adopted ten principles on Muslim women’s rights, including equality of the sexes, the non-compulsory nature of the hijab, and opposition to plural marriage (polygyny) without consent.
Lenin looms ever larger as the pace of events picks up, deservedly so because political leadership mattered immensely.  Miéville notes that Lenin is “easily mythologised, idolised or demonised” either as a “mass murdering monster” or a “godlike genius”.  Miéville’s Lenin, by contrast, is credible.  He was a selfless idealist but with all-too-human flaws (he was a fierce, sometimes insensitive, polemicist with his erstwhile comrades).  An intellectual who didn’t just think about but lived for the hurly burly of revolution, Lenin was utterly determined (what his detractors misrepresent as fanatical) yet tactically flexible and strategically subtle, astutely judging when “the political moment” called for “patiently explaining” or for bold action, and when to toss overboard long-held Marxist verities (such as no socialism until consolidation of capitalist industrial development) – when, in short, to be, as he put it, ‘as radical as reality’.
What also emerges strikingly from Miéville’s account is the indispensability of democracy to Lenin’s politics, to the rest of the pre-Stalin Bolsheviks and to the revolution.  From farm to factory, from soviet to party leadership, debate was boisterous, intense, heated at times, but always meaningful and prized.  Lenin, the supposed proto-Stalinist tyrant,  copped as good as he gave when it came to verbal jousts with his comrades, and more than a few times found himself in a minority in the party, and sometimes a minority of one on the Bolshevik Central Committee.
Miéville’s book is an amalgam of the journalistic, historical and biographical accounts of the revolution by Leon Trotsky, Victor Serge, John Reed and Isaac Deutscher but Miéville loses little in artistic comparison, and cedes nothing in revolutionary tone, to these writers who are clearly his strong political and stylistic influences.
Miéville’s aim in the book was always storytelling first, however, and, more than do his literary mentors, he foregrounds the theatre of revolt over the theory of revolution.  In his Epilogue, however, he offers updated reflections on how “October is still ground zero for arguments about fundamental, radical social change”.  All that the Right has to offer on this is some repeat-loop version of the malignity of socialism and its inevitable authoritarian slide into Red Terror because Marx begat Lenin begat Stalin, etc.
Miéville is much more honest and nuanced about how the post-revolution “moral and political rot” set in.  The basic cause, he says, was the devastating loss of material and human resources from imperialist war, imperialist invasion, imperialist economic blockade, imperialist-backed civil war, and, above all else, socialist Russia’s isolation arising from the post-war failure of revolution (viciously suppressed in Germany) in capitalist Europe.  These conditions fertilised the soil for what were, in the beleaguered times, unavoidable but meant-to-be-temporary retreats from a socialist democracy and economy.  The emergency reversals in policy gradually hardened into virtues under Stalin, who groomed a new generation of politically undeveloped party members into a privileged bureaucratic stratum.  A political diet as rich as it was in democracy and ideals and hope in 1917 could never sustain a healthy socialist development which lacked basic material nutrients.
What the anti-socialist warriors, then and now, can never concede is that Lenin’s Bolsheviks won the battle of ideas in 1917, in Pravda editorial, conference resolution, street pamphlet and stump speech.  The revolution was not a contest of military force and political coup played out over the people’s heads but a successful fight to win over people through debate.
The haters of socialist revolution may still be partying over the death of a socialism which they declare was manifested in the nauseous fever of Stalin and the long coma under his neo-Stalinist successors, but their celebrations are always at risk of being cut short.  The socialist idea is too resilient and that is why the Russian Revolution matters, Melville concludes, because “what’s at stake isn’t the interpretation just of history but of the present”, as he has noted elsewhere about the “extraordinary political upsets” and near misses, for better or worse (BREXIT, Corbyn, Sanders, Trump), in 2016 when “the questioning of received opinions” erupted.  1917 may have been “ultimately tragic” but it remains “ultimately inspiring” for those who want such revolts to break in the better direction.

THE CASE AGAINST FRAGRANCE Kate Grenville

THE CASE AGAINST FRAGRANCE

KATE GRENVILLE

Text Publishing, 2017, 198 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

The fragrance industry really gets up Kate Grenville’s nose.  The Australian novelist has gradually worked out that artificially-scented consumer products, from high-end perfume to toilet cleaner, were the cause of her debilitating headaches and wooziness.  In The Case Against Fragrance, Grenville discovers that synthetic scent molecules literally get up the nose and attach themselves to nerve receptors causing all manner of medical mayhem in the brain and nervous system.

Scented products such as cosmetics, shampoo, soap, after-shave, moisturiser, laundry detergents, cleaning products and air fresheners have been scientifically implicated in a vast suite of health problems including migraines (around half of sufferers have them triggered by fragrance), sore eyes, breathing difficulties, asthma, skin rashes, fatigue and, with high enough fragrance doses over time, some cancers.  Over a third of all people report having some sort of health problem from fragrance.  The problems are most acute, and potentially fatal, in the growing population of clinically-diagnosed chemical sensitivity sufferers like Grenville.

Avoidance of fragrance is virtually  impossible - fragrances used by other people or in air-conditioned buildings permeate the public air space, including public transport, offices, concert venues, restaurants and shopping centres. 

None of this worries the fragrance industry, however.  Artificial scents are cheap to synthesise and have a large manufacturers’ market.  They are not subject to profit-thinning regulation - time-consuming and expensive safety testing of the chemical ingredients of fragrances is avoided when the only safety watchdog is the industry itself which magically transmutes conflict of interest between sales and safety to a rewarding confluence of interest.

Grenville devotes much of her book to unsnarling the technical tangle of polysyllabic alpha-numeric molecular chemical compounds and their heath effects, and advocates a policy of using ‘fragrance-free’ products, but only occasionally touches on broader corporate and political issues.

Nevertheless, her disgust with the industry is evident.  However nice the product smells, the fragrance industry is malodorous.  It produces an entirely unnecessary product, wastes the valuable skills of many scientists and condemns huge numbers of consumers to ill-health in known and as-yet-unknown ways, all in the pursuit of money-making.  What really stinks, however, is the capitalist economic and political system which allows it to happen.