OIL AND HONEY by BILL McKIBBEN

OIL AND HONEY: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
BILL McKIBBEN
Black Inc., 2013, 255 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When the American environmental writer, Bill McKibben, became a climate change activist, he discovered the delights of Internet abuse (‘Asshole!  Shitstain!  Harvard Grad! … Harvard Nazi scumbag moron climatebecile!’ was one of the more baroque emails) and the public meeting crazies including followers of Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a “marginal and bizarre but tenacious political cult”, as he entertainingly describes in Oil and Honey.

When his quarter-century deployment of scientific facts with literary flair proved inadequate against these foes, and the more deadly fossil-fuel-funded, climate-change-denying Republicans and the cowardly Democrats “afraid of Big Oil”, McKibben, in 2009, set up 350.org, “the first big green movement for the Internet age”, named after the atmospheric CO₂ level above which climate change starts to get really serious.

350.org revolutionised organising on global warming, including the following virtual-human protest extravaganzas.  An international Twitter campaign to end fossil fuel subsidies (whose hashtag “drew more tweets on any one day, falling just short of birthday greetings to Justin Beiber”, he wryly notes).  An Internet-based global day of action spreading to 181 countries.  A human siege and encirclement of the White House.  The “biggest climate rally [50,000] in US history”.

1,253 arrested at the White House in 2011 in a civil disobedience protest against President Obama’s hankering to approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s dirty-oil-rich tar sands to Texas refineries, a “fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent”. A bus tour across America which seeded divestment campaigns by students at 252 campuses for university trustee boards to withdraw from their fossil fuel investments.

A vibrant ‘Do The Math’ campaign theatrically elucidating, with McKibben’s typical explanatory clarity, three crucial numbers: 2,795 gigatons of CO₂  in the coal, oil and gas reserves of the fossil fuel companies and petro-state countries which are planned to be burned for profit, a catastrophic five times higher than the 565 gigaton ‘carbon budget’ that can be burned if we are to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees since the Industrial Revolution when coal and oil companies developed carbonated capitalism.

Campaigning in desperate times calls for leadership and McKibben, who gently mocks himself as an “accidental activist, making it up as I went along and kind of sorry to be having to bother anyone”, stepped up.  He has survived the tiredness, the endless emails, conference calls and travel, the ten speaking invitations a day, the challenge of saying afresh the same thing for the hundredth time, the ever-present question of ‘what next’ after the post-protest exhilaration.

McKibben’s book is not all about carbon, however.  There is honey, too, as he takes respite from the personal strain of activism through his love of beekeeping.  The global and the local are his twin focuses for societal change and, although he doesn’t always achieve a seamless integration of the two political philosophies, nor manage to quite gel the two strands of the book, McKibben succinctly notes how the climate-change-induced wild weather of 2012 wrecked the world’s honey crop - “no flowers, no nectar”, “too much oil, too little honey”.

ECO-BUSINESS: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability by PETER DAUNERGNE & JANE LISTER

ECO-BUSINESS: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability
PETER DAUVERGNE and JANE LISTER
MIT Press, 2013, 194 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Every big retail brand name you can think of – McDonalds and Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Nestlé, Nike and Adidas, Disney and Google – are leading an apparent corporate charge towards ecological sustainability, or so they would have us believe, say Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister in Eco-Business.

There is some substance to this business movement, they conscientiously note, because it is more than just ‘greenwashing’, that public relations sprucing up of a company’s environmental image to attract more consumers.  On offer with the ‘eco-business’ model is not just competitive branding advantage but lower input costs and thus increased corporate growth, sales and profits.

Most of the big brands’ business costs, and their environmental damage, is to be found in their supply chains (up-stream production, packaging, shipping and distribution) and if a big brand can avoid reputational damage, falling share prices and profit slumps (from toxic toys, rainforest timber, ‘blood minerals’, etc.), and if cost savings through energy, water and other efficiencies can be made, then the big brands will become apostles for sustainability.  Where there is money to be made from going green, they will go green.

If it boosts their bottom line, they will even sup with the devil.  Partnerships between big corporates and environmental organisations are now far from rare, with companies purchasing the rights to display green logos in return for green cred.  The World Wildlife Fund, for example, partners with Coca-Cola, the WWF logo worth billions in increased sales to Coke and $20 million from Coke to the world’s largest environmental NGO.

Whilst mainstream green groups describe their corporate involvement as getting out of ‘the green ghetto’, Dauvergne and Lister show that the green heavyweights are complicit in the corporate takeover of sustainability.  The growing corporatism of the global environmental movement, through its own organisational model and its co-option by corporate polluters, has moderated its earlier focus on “radical transformation – such as reducing consumption, slowing resource use and limiting economic growth – and opted to pursue incremental market-driven advances instead”.

The fatal ecological flaw of eco-business, argue the authors, is that sustainability is not possible within a world economy that relies on a perpetually growing consumerism based on rapid obsolescence and ever more turnover of retail goods.  Environmental efficiencies, which decrease per unit resource use, can never keep pace with total growth in consumption through selling more TVs, T-shirts and other stuff to more people, especially in the expanding consumer markets of emerging economies such as India, China and Brazil.

The authors make the best case they can for eco-business (their book sandwiches copious lists of eco-business ventures between clunky layers of business jargon) but in the end they conclude that eco-business is all about “sustaining business, not ecosystems”.  This valuable message remains relevant for a green movement wanting to remain untamed by the lure of the corporate dollar.

SILENCES AND SECRETS: The Weintraubs Syncopaters by KAY DREYFUS

SILENCES AND SECRETS: The Weintraubs Syncopaters
Kay Dreyfus
Monash University Press, 2013, $34.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Stefan Weintraub and Horst Graff, German-Jewish jazz musicians, were alarmed when, having fled persecution in Nazi Germany, they were then interned in Australia in 1940 in a prison camp in Victoria which was under the de facto management of its German-Australian Nazi detainees, who were menacingly effective at ‘maintaining order’ in the grateful eyes of the Australian military.  This “cruel irony” is one of many noted by Monash University’s Kay Dreyfus in Silences and Secrets, her study of the German jazz band, the Weintraubs Syncopaters.

Exiled from Germany under Hitler in 1933 because they were, mostly, Jews, who played ‘Negro’ music, and who featured in Marlene Dietrich’s The Blue Angel (much to the annoyance of Goebbels who described the film as ‘offal’), the seven-piece band finished a world tour in Sydney in 1937 where their first obstacle was a hostile Musicians Union of Australia with its fiercely protectionist policy on jobs for Australian musicians.

Mass unemployment amongst Australia’s working musicians (estimated at 80% by the union) as a result of the 1930s Depression and the new sound movies, had accelerated the union’s predisposition towards an anti-immigrant jobs policy.  Governmental ‘White Australia’ policies under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 gave the union a receptive lobbying ear in parliament and conferred practical influence through legislated industrial awards and the arbitration system.

It took patriotic war fever, however, to cause the demise of the band.  A lone, fanciful denunciation about  espionage by the band for the German government whilst on tour in Russia was made in 1939 to Sydney police by a businessman whose Britishness (Australia was ‘Britain beyond the seas’, editorialised the Melbourne Argus in 1940) and war veteran status outweighed, to Australian security agencies, his dubious credibility (he was to be arrested after the war for theft and black-marketeering of Red Cross packages intended for prisoners of war).  As a result, three of the four German nationals (all Jews) in the Weintraubs Syncopaters were interned as ‘enemy aliens’.

With hindsight, “it seems absurd that the Weintraubs Syncopaters, as Jews and refugees by circumstance, should have been suspected of spying for the German Government” but, on the lookout for potential ‘fifth columnists’, the guardians of ‘national security’ regarded all Germans as disloyal and therefore dangerous by definition.

Dreyfus avoids the tempting but facile equation of Nazi anti-Semitic persecution with the war-time treatment of Jewish refugees in Australia.  The Nazi state’s “ultimately murderous program of cultural purging” was not the same as the parallel civil rights abuses in Australia despite the similarity of “state-sponsored racist ideologies”.  She recognises the “legitimate military and national security concerns” that shaped Australia’s war-time internment policy, though its intelligence officers proved vulnerable to spy hysteria, less than capable of nuanced understanding of exotic political lives, and often blind to the personal motives behind some private denunciations to authorities such as the accusations against band members, the brothers Cyril and Ernest Schulvater, by, respectively, a vengeful jilted fiancée and a landlady who objected to noisy violin-playing.

Australia was a “reluctant refuge”, where there was no threat of Jewish extermination but where individuals were treated unfairly, though this, too, could be partially addressed through legal remedy.  Similarly, Dreyfus acknowledges, with much sympathy, the legitimacy of the Musician Union’s “desire to protect jobs and working conditions of its [Australian] members”, though she laments that it took until 1960 for the union to realise it was better to organise with refugee and migrant musicians rather than against them.

Dreyfus’ book, betraying its origins as a doctoral thesis, doesn’t always avoid the nose-bleeding academic heights of conceptual abstraction, nor the sluggish narrative meter of bureaucratic and legalistic detail, but the human story is engrossing, and, as briefly alluded to by Dreyfus, its contemporary relevance for refugee policy is clear.

THE GREATEST TRAITOR: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake by ROGER HERMISTON

THE GREATEST TRAITOR: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake
ROGER HERMISTON
Aurum, 2013, 362 pages, $39.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

George Blake was smart, resourceful and committed.  A teenage courier with the Dutch anti-Nazi Resistance during the war and a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6) spy after it, Blake then picked, says Roger Hermiston in The Greatest Traitor, the wrong cause, converting to Marxism and becoming a Soviet mole in the SIS.

The British Establishment’s vengeance would be severe - a 42 year prison term - only for the ever-ingenious Blake to escape over the walls of Wormwood Scrubs via a rope-ladder made from knitting needles, finding refuge in Moscow where, on an intelligence service pension, he still resides, unrepentant.

Blake first turned leftwards when he headed the SIS station in post-war South Korea, mingling with distasteful Korean businessmen lining their pockets from US aid whilst the rest of the population festered in poverty, ruled over by a corrupt regime which was to survive thanks only to brutal US military tactics in the Korean War.

Communism, Blake decided, compared more than favourably with the capitalist class system, despite his three-year privations as a prisoner of North Korean and Chinese troops during the peninsular war.  In 1951, the ideologically-converted Blake began passing on copies of secret SIS documents to the KGB.

After nine years of dead-letter drops and clandestine meetings with his KGB ‘handlers’, Blake fell under suspicion but he only confessed after being goaded by his SIS interrogators’ suggestion that he had spied for financial gain or under duress of torture in North Korea.  On the contrary, an indignant Blake maintained, he had acted from political conviction.

Conviction was not lacking, however, by the British political and judicial Establishment which sought to make an example of Blake with an unprecedented sentence.  Blake’s response was to become an escapee, in 1966, aided by willing helpers, including two peace campaigners who had done time with Blake for non-violent civil disobedience and who assisted Blake from humanitarian affront at his virtual life term rather than from any sympathies for Stalinist dictatorships.

Like most who took up spying for Moscow, Blake did so from high-minded socialist idealism, equating this with protecting the Soviet Union from Western imperialism, a not unworthy aim given that imperialist threats against the Stalinist state were the Cold War ideological and military umbrella sheltering, under the guise of ‘fighting Communism’, the real Western agenda to seize eastern European and post-colonial societies for Western capital.

Alas, Hermiston has a different take on Blake, to whom the words ‘traitor’ and ‘treachery’ are freely applied at all opportunities.  Hermiston can not conceive of anyone who believes they ‘have no country’, as both Blake and Marx averred, and who act out of internationalism, however much hindsight may now show this to have been distorted by Stalinist travesties of socialism for some members of a past generation of Marxists.  In Blake versus capitalist Establishment, the red mole still comes out on top.

PETE SEEGER, 1919-2014

PETE SEEGER, 1919-2014

By Phil Shannon

Pete Seeger, who passed away in January this year, discovered both socialism and banjo in the 1930s.  The result, for folk music and politics, was highly beneficial.  Not everyone welcomed the development, however.  Harvard’s most famous dropout would become the most-picketed, blacklisted music entertainer in American history as Seeger united in virulent enmity the militarists, anti-communists, racists and union-busters of the American right.

War veterans, the Ku Klux Klan, local police, amateur Red-hunters and the professional anti-communists of Hoover’s FBI and Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee variously rained stones at Seeger’s head, cancelled his bookings and kept him off TV and radio.  Denigrated as “Moscow’s trained canary”, Seeger fell back on grass-roots touring, singing at small venues where a beleagered American left nurtured renewal during the Cold War.

Always distrustful of commercial success, however, Seeger revelled in this environment as a performer with an extraordinary ability, through simple tunes, clear diction and magical banjo, to work a crowd through song, laughter and feeling.  He served lovely appetisers through traditional folk songs (Froggie Went a Courtin’), invigorated labour ballads and ditties (Which Side Are You On; Little Boxes), recast the Civil War Union song (Redwing) into a feminist class war union song (Union Maid), made the exotic African freedom song (Wimoweh) into a domestic standard, and took black spirituals like We Shall Overcome to goosebump-worthy heights at mass singings. 

Seeger’s original compositions also found a subversive measure of popular success.  Where Have All The Flowers Gone was inspired by a novel by Soviet author, Mikhail Sholokov.  If I Had A Hammer, which now serves as an all-purpose song for freedom and justice, was first written for eleven US Communist Party leaders facing jail under anti-communist legislation.  Waist Deep In The Big Muddy undermined the Vietnam War consensus by a man who found it impossible to hate (except in extremis, for which the war certainly qualified, doubly so because of Seeger’s Asian-American family).

Seeger’s life on the left also had its own internal challenges.  Rapid repertoire obsolescence afflicted Private Seeger’s first group (the Almanacs, with Woody Guthrie) as they juggled anti-war with anti-Nazi feelings and traded Talkin’ Union for wartime class unity).  Seeger’s sense of humour, and artistic independence, also kept at bay the cultural correct-liners in the US Communist Party who wanted to tamper with Seeger’s lyrics (Seeger was an arms-length member from 1941 to 1950), whilst Seeger also had to fend off some doctrinaire Marxist criticism of the emergent environmental movement.

Seeger’s major musical crisis (his distress at his protégé, Bob Dylan, going electric with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival) also resolved itself courtesy of Seeger’s 1980s tours with Arlo Guthrie’s amplified band.

It took arthritis, not rightwing reactionaries, to still Seeger’s banjo towards the end but whilst the left may have lost its share of political battles, it has wound up with the best songs because, as was inscribed on Pete Seeger’s banjo, ‘This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender’.

UNDESIRABLE: Captain Zuzenko and the Workers of Australia and the World by KEVIN WINDLE

UNDESIRABLE: Captain Zuzenko and the Workers of Australia and the World
KEVIN WINDLE
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013, 274 pages, $39.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

On the 7^th of November, 1917, when the Winter Palace was stormed in Petrograd, sealing the victory of the Russian revolution, Alexander Mikhailovich Zuzenko, one of the revolution’s most loyal servants, faced a local court in Ingham in northern Queensland, where he worked on the canefields, and was fined 10 shillings for losing his ‘aliens registration certificate’.  Zuzenko was tragically to pay a much heavier price two decades later under Stalin, writes Australian National University academic, Kevin Windle, in Undesirable.

The young Latvian revolutionary had hurled himself into Russia’s abortive 1905 revolution, dodging the post-uprising repression by escaping to Australia where thousands of other Russian exiles and job-seekers were concentrated in the labour-hungry workplaces of Queensland.  Zuzenko was one of their leaders, in the militant and anti-war Union of Russian Workers and the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Attacked by violent patriots in Brisbane and arrested for carrying a banned red flag, Zuzenko was deported to Russia in 1920, where the former anarchist joined the Bolsheviks, now seeing anarchism as pretty much the same thing as Bolshevism, not least in the proclamation that the ‘complete abolition of the state’ was the end aim of the Moscow-based Third, or Communist, International, the organising body for world socialist revolution.

Zuzenko’s Australian experience impressed Lenin and he was assigned to establish an Australian communist party which he successfully forged from the rival claimants before being arrested and again deported in 1922.  In Russia, Zuzenko found an exhausted socialist state where idealism was in reluctant retreat against the chaos and dislocation from civil war, invasion, blockade, political isolation and economic backwardness.

Undaunted, Zuzenko became captain of the Smolny in the Soviet merchant fleet on the Leningrad-Hamburg-London route.  Zuzenko relished his role as unofficial envoy of Soviet Russia, once teaching an on-board English jazz band the tune of the Marxist anthem, the Internationale, much to the delight of the dockside German audience other than the fuming Nazi brownshirts.

Zuzenko wasn’t to have known it at the time, however, but his travel to capitalist countries provided some of the hostages to fortune in the murderously paranoid new Stalinist reality, along with his anarchist past, his ship’s costly accidents and long lay-ups for repairs (when the labels of economic ‘saboteur’ and ‘wrecker’ carried great jeopardy) and his prominence as an ‘Old Bolshevik’, the politically heroic and visionary socialist generation targeted for liquidation by Stalin at the head of the rising new class of privileged party-state bureaucrats.

It did Zuzenko no good to denounce, at a crew meeting in 1937, the ‘vile Trotskyites and Rightist renegades’ who were framed at Stalin’s ‘Show Trials’ in Moscow.  Peril awaited even those most admiring of Stalin.  Awareness of the bankruptcy of the Stalinist regime came too late to Zuzenko who, shortly after complaining in private of the ‘fascism’ sweeping Soviet Russia, was shot during the purges of 1938 as a ‘British spy’.

Windle regards Zuzenko’s tragic end as the shameful murder of “a brave and lifelong revolutionary”.  Windle shows a Zuzenko who, as a journalist, may have been woodenly didactic but who made up for his lack of literary flair with the energy and drive of a tireless organiser and the commitment and sincerity of a motivational leader.  As even his Australian secret-police taggers conceded, Zuzenko’s ‘fluency and forcefulness as a speaker’ rightly scored him high on political effectiveness.

Zuzenko’s political competencies, however, came at the cost of a sometimes divisive bluntness when berating local communists for ideological deviation, organisational incompetence and lack of revolutionary ardour.  Zuzenko, a veteran of high political and industrial drama in revolutionary Russia, also tactlessly vented his frustration with the ‘apathy and inactivity’, and xenophobia, of the Anglo-Saxon proletariat.

In the end, however, what betrayed Zuzenko’s socialist hopes were not these hurdles but Stalin’s counter-revolution.  Windle, despite his warm regard for Zuzenko, is dismissive of his socialism – an ideology, says Windle, which may once have had some potency but which “now belongs firmly in the past”, a “misguided conviction” of purely historical interest.  To so blithely dismiss what inspired Zuzenko, with no consideration of the new language, forms and political fronts of a still-evolving socialist politics, is to betray Zuzenko and the other Bolshevik pioneers of socialism a second time.

THE PRINCE: Faith, Abuse and George Pell by DAVID MARR

THE PRINCE: Faith, Abuse and George Pell
DAVID MARR
Quarterly Essay, Issue 51, 2013
Black Inc., $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The police had, writes David Marr in his Quarterly Essay on paedophile priests in the Catholic Church in Australia, “vigorously, for a very long time, protected the church”, leaving the clergy’s sex crimes to be looked after in-house.  This entirely suited the clerical child abusers until the international tide of Catholic sexual abuse revelations engulfed Australian shores and sparked police of conscience into action.

In 2012, police whistleblowers in Victoria and New South Wales linked dozens of adult suicides to clerical child sexual abuse and accused the church of protecting paedophile priests, hindering investigations, destroying evidence, silencing and discrediting victims, and moving guilty priests to fresh pastures and fresh crimes.

Community outrage prompted the then Federal Labor government to call a Royal Commission into institutional sexual abuse, a judicial inquiry of which even Tony Abbott, the then Liberal Opposition leader and Catholic hard-liner, approved, noting a poll showing 95% popular support for a full-throttled inquiry.

For Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s No. 1 Catholic, deserted by his political and police allies, the challenge was immense.  His failure to rise to it is no surprise, says Marr, of the young Ballarat Catholic who fell under the 1950s spell of B. A. Santamaria, the anti-communist, anti-Labor, anti-union, Catholic extremist.  Pell’s subsequent seminary training established his reputation for rigid orthodoxy, unquestioning obedience to Rome, and ideological and physical bullying.

Pell’s loyalty and conservatism impressed the Pope, who promoted Pell up the clerical career ladder.  Priests raping trusting and defenceless altar boys did not disturb the Catholic moralist’s gaze which remained fixed on the Vatican-ordained sex crimes that really mattered - homosexuality (‘a much greater health hazard than smoking’), masturbation, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, abortion, contraception, ‘mail-order divorce’.

Where sexual abuse by priests could not be ignored, it could be ‘treated’ by prayer, or, in a display of Christian virtue, forgiven.  Offending clergy, wrapped in the protective mystique and aura of the priesthood, were deemed scared persons, Christs on earth, and not, therefore, subject to secular law or police handcuffs.

Secular justice was not the only temporal trouble that Pell, the Vatican’s man in Australia, had to repel.  Second only to the threat of communism was ‘secular liberalism’.  In Australia, and from his powerful Vatican posts, Pell opposed a charter of human rights, heroin injecting-rooms, ‘the climate change bandwagon’, the Greens, gay adoption and other ‘progressivist’ transgressions.

One merit of the earthly world, however, was its public treasury coffers from which Pell, heading the Catholic education business, demonstrated a remarkable talent for extracting money, winning federal funding for sectarian higher education institutions.

The High Court of Australia, too, gave its lay blessing to the Church, deeming the Church’s property trusts, where it had parked its immense, tax-free wealth and assets, as unable to be held responsible for the sexual conduct of Catholic priests.  Australia thus remains “the only country in the common-law world where the Catholic Church cannot be sued” because it is “just an association of believers with no corporate entity, rather like a mothers’ club or a bridge circle”, its legally-quarantined riches off-limits to potential litigants.

Pell’s non-spiritual concern for Church finances had earlier been on miserly display, whilst archbishop of Melbourne, with the so-called ‘Melbourne Response’, a private church tribunal with all the trappings but none of the power or independence of a royal commissioner.  This process catalogued 304 proven complaints against sixty priests in Melbourne but not a single case was referred to police.

The victims, in return for secrecy, received payouts averaging a mere $32,500, the only compensation alternative being a long and financially exhausting battle through the real courts.  Compared to an average Catholic child sexual abuse settlement of $1 million in the US, Pell saved his church in Australia hundreds of millions of dollars.

If the sex crimes, their cover-up and bargain basement hush-money had not trashed the Catholic brand by now, Pell’s stumbling attempt to deflect blame in response to the announcement of a Royal Commission would.  Pell’s contempt for the media and its ‘disproportionate and repetitious’ reporting of the sex crimes of the clergy surfaced in spades with Pell portraying his Church as the victim of journalists.

Marr’s case against Pell is convincingly, and elegantly, made – he communicates ideas and anecdotes clearly and concisely, with his moral tone set to coolly incandescent.  Marr, however, could have been more analytical.  His focus on Pell, and on enforced priest celibacy, as the root of Church paedophilia, tends to  subordinate a broader and more theoretical examination of the role of Catholic Church material interests, authoritarianism, democratic unaccountability and theology in the criminal behaviour of the powerful men of religion.

Marr is right, however, to warn of the danger posed by the current conjunction of the two most powerful and reactionary Catholics in Australia, both ‘Movement’ men from the Santamaria tradition – the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and his spiritual adviser and close friend, Cardinal George Pell.  What further Catholic abuses and scandals lie in wait?