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.