IN THE COMPANY OF COWARDS, Michael Mori

IN THE COMPANY OF COWARDS: Bush, Howard and Injustice at Guantánamo
MICHAEL MORI
Viking, 2014, 292 pages, $29.99 (pb)

MURDER AT CAMP DELTA: A Staff Sergeant’s Pursuit of the Truth about Guantánamo Bay

JOSEPH HICKMAN
Simon & Schuster, 2015, 245 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Major Michael Mori was a Republican-leaning, US military lawyer who “embraced the values I had been taught in scouts, sports, high school, college, law school and the Marines”, above all the ideal of fair play.  In 2003, Mori was assigned as defense counsel for David Hicks, an Australian citizen captured by Afghan warlords during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan following the Al Qaeda terrorist attack in New York in 2001, and then detained in the US Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Mori, however, was confused about what, if any, crimes Hicks was alleged to have committed.  So, too, were the prosecutors as Hicks’ imprisonment without charge, but with severe abuse, dragged on for year after year as he faced certain future conviction by a rigged Military Commission judicial process which junked all the basic rules of evidence.  Mori saw his priority as getting a suicidal Hicks out of Guantanamo.

Faced with the dead-end of the kangaroo court, Mori had to take Hicks’ legal and human rights to the court of public opinion, “the only arena that mattered to politicians”, especially to Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, in an election year (2007).  Howard had done nothing for Hicks for six years when it was in his political interest to promote war and terror neurosis but with the electoral calculus changed to parliamentary survival, Howard, in a “belated political move to defuse the Hicks issue”, instigated a plea bargain with Washington which at last got Hicks returned to Australia with a residual prison term.

The price Hicks was to pay for an end to his existence of fear, pain and despair, however, was the tag of ‘convicted terrorist’ despite Hicks’ guilty plea being coerced under extreme duress and, in 2015, ruled void in the US courts.

Mori, who retired from the military in 2012 and joined the social justice section of an Australian law firm, played a vital role in justice for Hicks but he reminds the readers of his valuable book that “it was they, the Australian public, who got David Hicks out.  I hope that the people of Australia never forget that”.

Like Mori, Sergeant Joe Hickman was “a patriotic American” and he was proud to finally get to “meet the enemy” as a guard in Guantanamo in 2006.  “Keeping terrorists locked up was an important job”, Hickman writes, but, like Mori, he also had standards, namely a belief in “basic American principles of decency”, even towards those he had been told were “evil men bent on destroying our country”.

Decency, however, was decidedly lacking in the “excessively punishing” detention conditions, cultural insults and “Rodney King-style beatings” of cuffed and shackled detainees.  The “mass violation of regulations” was disturbing to Hickman, a former civilian prison officer, more so because the abuse by the guards was condoned or orchestrated by senior officers.  A culture of lies and cover-up made Hickman “feel shame, both in myself and in my military”.

What tipped him over the moral edge, however, was the murder of three detainees.  Ludicrously portrayed as a triple suicide designed to damage the reputation of the US in an act of ‘asymmetrical warfare’, the deaths were, to Hickman, who was a witness, probably the result of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (torture, in any decent person’s language) that “went too far”.

A US Navy investigation tried to bury the affair in a “dry, heavily redacted, deliberately garbled” report, so Hickman felt compelled to take his story public.  With initial caution (Hickman was a “lifelong conservative”), he approached the Seton Hall University Law School whose professor (a “left-leaning wingnut from the 1960s”, feared Hickman) and his students had earlier found that 92% of the almost 800 Guantanamo detainees (including David Hicks) were not Al Qaeda terrorists at all. 

Through forensic document analysis, the official Navy report was shown to be a complete whitewash and Hickman went from wanting to punch the lights out of “typical liberal college kids” to bonding with the “bright, young legal researchers”.

Everybody else, sadly but predictably, failed Hickman in his search for the truth about the deaths in custody.  The US military command failed him.  The Justice Department and FBI, under new (Obama) management, failed him.  The mainstream media failed him.  The cost to Hickman was his career, retirement benefits and lifetime medical coverage as a veteran but he refused to place a price on integrity.

As a Bertholt Brecht poem put it, the military man is very powerful because,

“He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think”.

Major Mori and Sergeant Hickman thought deeply about the wrongdoing they saw in the ‘War on Terror’.  They courageously acted for truth, justice and an ‘American Way’ other than the one of lies, torture and killing.

TRIUMPH: Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics by JEREMY SCHAAP

TRIUMPH: Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics

JEREMY SCHAAP
Head of Zeus, 2014, 272 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

He may have been the world’s greatest athlete at the time, writes Jeremy Schaap in Triumph, but Jesse Owens was also a black American, and Owens, the winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was refused a room at hotel after hotel on his arrival back in New York until one finally agreed on condition that he use the service entrance.

To the grandson of slaves, born into rural poverty in Alabama, racism was part of the deal, not only down south but also in the industrial Midwest where, picked up by Ohio State University as a track star, Owens could not live on their whites-only campus, was refused service in restaurants and coped with the other daily offerings of prejudice only through his outstanding ability to run and jump.

It is little surprise, then, that Owens did not support the movement to boycott the Nazi Olympics on the justifiable grounds that it was hypocritical for the US to oppose discrimination against Jews in Germany whilst blacks at home had to cop it.

It is true, however, that sporting and financial self-interest also played a role in the decision of Owens (who faced a future as a petrol-station attendant) and the other black members of the US Olympic team to welcome a trip to Berlin.  Black Americans generally, however, were split on a boycott and many legitimately argued that attending what Hitler planned as a spectacular pageant of Nazi grandeur and power would legitimise the concept of a ‘master race’ that not only persecuted Jews but blacks and other ‘non-Aryans’.

Some black Americans ceded this pro-boycott principle but argued that ‘Black Gold’ (which was almost certain with Owens) would tellingly refute Nazi, and American, claims of white superiority.  Hitler was duly embarrassed by the gold medals won by Owens and by other black Americans, pointedly leaving his box before the medal presentations and refusing to press black flesh in private receptions.  The Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, was also made angrily uncomfortable by the documentary of Leni Riefenstahl (Hitler’s favourite cinematographer) having a black American, a member of an ‘inferior’ race, as its star performer.

Also irked was the President of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, the reactionary millionaire member of a whites-only club in Chicago, a “crypto-fascist” and future International Olympic Committee head.  Team USA wasn’t winning gold, Team Black was, and Brundage vindictively suspended a financially-strapped and physically tired Owens from any future athletics competitions, amateur or professional, ostensibly for refusing one of many unpaid exhibition meets in Europe at the end of the Olympics (earning himself the new name of ‘Slavery Brundage’ for his treatment of his black chattels).

Owens’ gold medals, therefore, could not be monetised and he struggled financially, sometimes selling himself to race against horses.  In the depths of the Cold War, however, Owens “found he was useful – to industry and government” as a symbol of the democratic opportunities that Washington liked to boast of when it compared itself to the Soviet Union.  The State Department sent an amenable, Republican, anti-Soviet Owens on ‘goodwill’ (propaganda) tours of Asia to promote his example of a poor outsider who made good in America rather than making communist revolution in the poor world.

Unfortunately, Schaap’s writing, unlike Owens’ athleticism, doesn’t take flight.  It is mired in sports journalism cliché and his treatment of Owens’ politics is cursory.  Owens did not see his Berlin exploits in a political light and he was rejected for his stance that politics and sport don’t mix, and for his role as counter-revolutionary US cultural ambassador, by militant black American athletes at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, although he appeared to reconsider his views in his autobiography before his death in 1980.  Despite Owens’ lack of political sophistication, however, his symbolic days in Berlin remain as a dramatic rebuttal of the divisive claims of people’s inferiority because of the pigment of their skin.

RED APPLE: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York PHILLIP DEERY

RED APPLE: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York
PHILLIP DEERY
Fordham University Press, 2014, 252 pages, $41.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The mouth-foaming Wisconsin Senator, Joseph McCarthy, who chaired the House Committee on Un-America Activities in the 1950s, added extreme vigour to the perpetual war by the American state against dissent, says Professor Phillip Deery of Melbourne’s Victoria University in Red Apple.

Deery explores this particularly “virulent strain of persecution of leftists” through vivid case studies of selected New York radicals who were active in the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC) which assisted some of the half million refugees from Franco’s Spain after the fascist defeat of the left-wing Republican government in the late 1930s.

All the JAFRC activists had refused to hand over the organisation’s financial records which identified tens of thousands of aid donors and recipients who would have potentially been exposed to persecution by the FBI and by Franco.  All the activists paid a ruinous price for their non-cooperation through jail, career loss and financial adversity, including a hospital surgeon, two professors, a writer (Howard Fast, author of Spartacus) and others of eminent professional standing.

Some of the JAFRC activists were members of the Communist Party of the USA, most were not.  All were motivated by wanting to see a fairer, kinder, cleaner world.  Not that any of that mattered a jot to the Red-hunters because any Communist association enabled a political body to be deemed a ‘communist front’ and declared a ‘subversive organisation’.  As Deery points out, however, the concept of a ‘front’ is “problematic not axiomatic” because there were widely different degrees of communist influence on broad-based progressive movements.  There was “not a whiff” of communist frontism about JAFRC.  Such subtleties, however, were entirely lost amidst the “rudeness, intimidation and sheer bullying” of the hearings held by McCarthy and other Washington demagogues.

The JAFRC activists fought back but the dice were loaded with the weight of a vast bureaucratic network of government inquisitorial committees, Congress (which voted overwhelmingly to cite non-cooperators for contempt of Congress), the Justice Department (which prosecuted the defiant ones for their contempt), the FBI which dug up (or made up) red dirt on their targets, and university administrations (which feared that not sacking their ‘commie’ staff would affect their corporate and government funding).

Deery shows a microscopic but grimly illuminating slice of the immense human, and political, cost of “one of the most savage assaults on civil liberties in American history”, one that destroyed hundreds of progressive organisations and devastated many thousands of lives.  But the “corrosiveness of Cold War anti-communism” is to be truly measured, he says, by the unquantifiable toll from propagating fear and stifling dissent - “reforms that were never implemented, unions that were never organised, movements that never started, books that were never published, films that were never produced”. 

McCarthyism is not, concludes Deery, just a historical matter for scholarly dissertations.  It remains relevant in showing the fragility of democratic rights and the vulnerability of free speech when the capitalist state, in the service of private power and wealth, comes spruiking the latest lines in political panic and alarm.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN Jill Lepore

THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN
JILL LEPORE
Knopf, 2014, 410 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Wonder Woman can’t marry, according to Amazon law, but she doesn’t want to, either, especially if it would mean that she, the comic book superhero, disguised as a secretary, would be stuck in the kitchen cooking dinner for her would-be domesticator, Captain Steve Trevor, the US pilot she fell in love with after rescuing him from his plane crash on her woman-only, feminist island utopia.

As the Harvard history professor, Jill Lepore, writes, Wonder Woman, who became the most popular superhero in the 1940s after only Superman and Batman, had her origins in the struggle for women’s equality.

William Marston, a psychology professor, created Wonder Woman to, as he said, ‘combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement’ in fields ‘monopolised by men’.  First stirred by the women’s suffrage movement, Marston, better known for inventing the lie detector test, created a strong, politically-charged, feminist superhero for DC Comics.

Wherever women were given a raw deal by men, Wonder Woman would be there to right the injustice.  She led women’s rallies and boycotts against milk-pricing rackets and intervened with her magic lasso in a strike by female department store clerks, doubling their wages.  Despite her non-violent principles, Wonder Woman physically taught husbands who maltreated their wives a lesson by socking them on the jaw. 

Marston was also influenced by the free love philosophy of the feminists who all lived together with him under the one roof - his wife (Elizabeth Holloway), his younger mistress (Olive Byrne) and sometimes a third lover (Marjorie Huntley).  Holloway rejected domesticity to work as a book editor and Byrne, a child psychologist, raised all the household’s children.  For half of humanity, combining employment and motherhood was a two-woman job.

Unlike the mythical Amazon society of Ancient Greece which was the backstory to Wonder Woman, however, the Marston household was no matriarchy (his women brought in the real money, did the childcare and typed his books) and there were other contradictions in Marston’s feminist comic-book creation.

The long-legged, slender, pin-up-girl-quality Wonder Woman (and the former Miss America beauty pageant winner who starred in the 1960s TV series) reinforced the stereotype that, to achieve recognition or success, women had to conform to conventional male criteria of female beauty.  When Wonder Woman was used by Gloria Steinem to launch the corporate-funded, feminist magazine, Ms., in 1972, radical feminists derided the exercise for its failure to break from the importance placed on women’s physical appearance and for its middle class individualism in which only the few, well-resourced super-women can succeed.

Women as sexual objects also coloured the Wonder Woman comics.  In every episode, Wonder Woman is either “chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered or manacled” and, whilst it is true that this borrowed from earlier suffragist and Abolitionist iconography which featured chains as an allegorical representation of voteless women and slaves’ lack of liberty, there is, says Lepore, more to it than that – it is “feminism as fetish”.  Marston excused it as ‘harmless erotic fantasy’ but bondage fetishists got another message about dominance and women.

Wonder Woman was also kitted out, in what little clothing she wore, in patriotic red, white and blue because Marston saw America as the home of freedom and democracy and not just because there was a war on against fascism at the time.  There was little American freedom for Wonder Woman, however, when the White House pressured the comics industry into self-censorship in the 1950s.

Their moral code now outlawed anything under-dressed, ‘deviant’ (Wonder Woman’s latent lesbianism) or unconventional (any ‘love interest shall emphasise the value of the home and sanctity of marriage’, it declared).  The supplement on biographies of famous women which had been part of Wonder Woman’s early comic book days under Marston was now replaced by a series on weddings.  Wonder Woman continued on after Marston’s death in 1947 but she was no longer recognisable as a feminist fighter.

Although Lepore claims that Wonder Woman is the missing link between the ‘first wave’ feminism of the early suffrage campaigns  and the ‘second wave’ feminism of 1960s women’s liberation, Wonder Woman was a phenomenon and not a movement, and too ideologically conflicted, to bear such an historical crux.  Wonder Woman’s shortage of feminist clarity and political substance may explain why Lepore overpopulates her narrative history with auxiliary figures and events but her book remains a valuable addition to feminist scholarship.

THE MAN WHO LOVED DOGS, Leonardo Padura

THE MAN WHO LOVED DOGS
LEONARDO PADURA
Bitter Lemon Press, 2014, 576 pages, $27.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Leon Trotsky refused to let paranoia about his all-but-inevitable assassination cramp his political life in his Mexican refuge, even receiving Jacques Mornard, the suspicious Belgian businessman and partner of a trusted New York Trotskyist bearing his poorly-written political article in one hand and a mountaineer’s ice-pick concealed beneath his coat in the other.

In The Man Who Loved Dogs, the Cuban novelist, Leonardo Padura, artistically reconstructs Trotsky’s assassination by the Spanish Communist, Ramón Mercader, who infiltrated Trotsky’s compound in that disguise and committed the murder on one terrible August day in 1940.

Mercader, a heroic communist fighting Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War, had been tapped for darker deeds against the non-Communist left by the Stalin’s secret police.  Stalin, the ‘gravedigger of the revolution’ as Trotsky called him, feared his sole remaining Old Bolshevik rival who was the Marxist symbol of opposition to the “bureaucratic minority protecting its material interests” in Soviet Russia through brutal purges, farcical show trials and other “horrifying crimes against humanity, dignity and intelligence”.

After killing Trotsky, Mercader served twenty years in jail before returning to Moscow to a mixed reception as a Hero of the Soviet Union but also “one of the more annoying proofs of Stalinism” for a neo-Stalinist regime modernising its tools of repression.  A terminally-ill Mercader spent his last years in Cuba.

In Padura’s novel, Mercader, now remorsefully realising that he was the “puppet of a dark and miserable plan” based on cynical lies told by Stalin about Trotsky, feels compelled to tell his story which he does to Iván Cárdenas, a once-promising but now disgraced Cuban writer.  Cárdenas sits on the sensational story fearing “complications of all kinds” from writing about contraband history - in Cuba, there was “programmed ignorance” about Trotsky because of Cuba’s economic dependence on the Soviet Union.

With the downfall of Mercader’s Soviet world, however, Cárdenas picks up his pen again only to discover, against all his instincts, some compassion for Mercader as a victim of Stalin, summonsing Trotsky as witness to “the degree of perversion that Stalin’s influence had injected into the souls of men”, including once-idealistic communists who instead entered history as reviled murderers.

Mercader, however, may be just a grotesque extreme of an inevitable corruption of the socialist utopia, suggests Padura.  He has Trotsky, the iconic anti-Stalinist revolutionary, ruminate guiltily on how much responsibility he shares for Stalinist despotism, for the “excesses he himself had committed in order to defend the revolution” when, under desperate duress, Trotsky (and Lenin) forcefully ate away at democracy in the working class and the Bolshevik Party.

Are all great utopian dreams condemned to failure, ponders Cárdenas, with the authentic biographical ring of Padura himself.  Padura’s fictional alter-ego had, in his youth, cut sugarcane with “militant enthusiasm and invincible faith” in the Cuban revolution but after living through years of “sexual, religious, ideological and cultural intransigence”, and the material poverty of the post-Soviet, pre-Venezuelan 1990s, has now drifted into “skepticism and sadness”.

“My capacity to believe had been ruined forever”, laments Cárdenas, reflecting on “the great disenchantment” of failed communist dreams in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and elsewhere, all doomed by Stalin’s toxic legacy. 

Despite his loss of faith, however, Padura has not left Cuba where official cultural caution (The Man Who Loved Dogs was initially given only a limited distribution) is buffeted by the winds of political change.  Padura has recently won a national literary prize even as his detective novels, on which his international fame is based, continue to tackle government corruption and social inequality.

In his finely-wrought, if overly-long, novel, Padura’s political pessimism vies with his admiration for Trotsky, imperfect and capable of error but whose revolutionary spirit survived the assassin’s ice-pick and continues to challenge the jaded cynicism of the corrupted and disillusioned.

SOPHIA: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, ANITA ANAND

SOPHIA: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary
ANITA ANAND
Bloomsbury, 2015, 416 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

Sophia Singh boycotted the 1911 Census in Britain, writing on her form, in protest at the denial of the vote for women, that ‘as women do not count, they refuse to be counted’.  She also risked fines and imprisonment through refusal to pay taxes to a government she had no voice in.  This was no way for an Indian Princess in Britain to behave, swapping her VIP seats in the spectators’ gallery in the House of Lords for anti-government street protest with militant suffragettes.

As Anita Anand writes in her biography of Singh, the Indian Royal was, however, prepared to shock.  Singh was the daughter of the last Maharaja of the Punjab, who had been deposed and exiled to Britain and bought off with a large allowance to dissuade him from returning to India to stoke insurrection against British colonial rule.  Made god-daughter of Queen Victoria, Singh, too, received a generous political pension (£600 a year) and a luxurious palace with all the trappings (cooks, servants, prize-winning Pomeranians and thoroughbred horses).

Her politically docile upbringing was, however, shaken by trips to India where her hectic social round of grand balls and dog shows in Britain lost their gloss when compared to the poverty and deprivation which resulted from India being drained economically dry of its natural and human resources by India’s British rulers.  The British aristocracy’s refusal to allow Singh’s proposed mixed–race marriage also soured her attitude to Britain.

After adopting the cause of Indian self-determination, Singh’s radicalisation really flared from the fiery campaign for the vote for women in Britain.  An exotic, celebrity member of the Women’s Society for Social and Political Union (WSPU), Singh gave money, sold the WSPU’s paper outside her palace and put her body on the line in the violent street battles between suffragettes and the police whose state-sanctioned ferocity shocked even the police’s political boss (Winston Churchill).  Often arrested, Singh was never sent to prison because of the embarrassment this would cause to the government from jailing  a favoured royal ward.

Singh was a WSPU loyalist, becoming a nurse and fund-raiser for the British empire’s Indian troops as she followed the WSPU’s descent into shabby patriotic compromise when it did a deal with the government to cease all protest and to support Britain’s war effort during World War 1 in return for government reconsideration of the women’s franchise after the war.  The vote was granted in 1918 but only to middle class women.

There is much biographical material here for a politically vibrant history of colonialism and feminism but Anand, a BBC journalist with a touch of princess worship about her, squanders it.  Anand clogs up with numbing literary detail the emptiness of the privileged life of the vacuous social parasite whilst Singh’s radical transition is told with draining slowness.

Although the political narrative picks up with Singh’s WSPU activism, Anand, with bland BBC reserve, shirks analytical reflection on the class brakes applied by a socially elitist, middle class WSPU leadership to the feminist struggle for the vote.  Singh shared this shortcoming – her instincts for the working class ran to philanthropy, the preserve of the wealthy, whilst, totally mystified by public transport, she attended suffragette rallies in liveried horse and carriage, wearing expensive furs.  Singh was a socialite feminist, not a socialist feminist.

Both the tactical desperation of the WSPU’s campaign of property damage (which Singh supported) and its ultimate class allegiance to  the men who ran Britain’s war for empire trumped the mobilisation of working class women for the vote and for broader political, social and economic justice for women.  A biographer less regally awestruck and more politically enquiring could have made more of Singh’s class-conflicted contribution to full women’s voting rights in Britain (won in 1928) and Indian independence (1947), a contribution that deserves to be both properly critiqued and honoured.

BLOOD & GUTS by SAM VINCENT

BLOOD & GUTS: Dispatches from the Whale Wars
SAM VINCENT
Black Inc., 2014, 274 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Industrial-scale whaling, writes Sam Vincent in Blood & Guts, had picked clean the world’s oceans until only the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary remained, protected by the icy remoteness of Antarctica and a worldwide ban on commercial whaling.  A convenient loophole allowing lethal whaling for ‘scientific research’, however, was exploited by Japan, resulting in many thousands of gory whale deaths – until the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society began physically disrupting, on the high seas, Japan’s annual hunt.

The “bad-ass do-gooders” of Sea Shepherd come with the blessings of the nine out of ten Australians (including former Greens leader, Bob Brown) who support the organisation’s direct action campaign.  Vincent, a journalist for the Australian establishment media, has, however, some disillusioning news for what he derisively calls the “whale-huggers”.

During his time with Sea Shepherd in 2013, Vincent uncovers, behind the donor-friendly, charismatic image of the Sea Shepherd leader, Paul Watson, a domineering, “megalomaniacal misanthrope” who harbours, amongst his whale-loving crew, like-minded “human-haters” who care more about whales than the plight of refugees in Australia or homosexuals in Africa.

Racism, too, Vincent discovers, is an “integral part of Australia’s whale advocacy”.  Norway and Iceland kill more whales than Japan but it is only the latter that draws condemnation because, he says, it is easier to demonise Orientals as barbaric, especially Australia’s old war-time enemy.

Vincent also disparages Sea Shepherd as an example of cost-free environmental activism, its feel-good whale-saving theatrics allowing us to ignore the greater threats to whales from pollution, overfishing and climate change with their attendant demand for changes in personal consumption behaviour.

Vincent’s killer blow against Sea Shepherd is to blame it for the continuation of Japanese whaling.  If only the anti-whaling zealots in Sea Shepherd (and Canberra) would back off, he says, then Tokyo would have no pretext to play the nationalist card in defence of a bogus ‘tradition’ against ‘Western cultural imperialism’, leaving market forces to bury an antiquated industry kept alive only by a  large government subsidy.

Vincent’s lack of awareness that irrational and uneconomic government policies can well continue because of their domestic political benefits is on a par with the rest of his obsessive fault-finding crusade against Sea Shepherd.

Yes, Watson is personally and ideologically fallible but he is extremely good at what he does – disrupting the whale-hunt to financially cripple a terrible industry.  Yes, a proportion of Sea Shepherd’s popularity does come from anti-Japanese racial prejudice but this layer of support is an aberration.

And, yes, whilst there are other issues deserving attention, the whale slaughter, which, for Australians, takes place in Australia’s own backyard/ocean, raises a philosophically profound environmental issue ripe for political generalisation - is Nature simply a resource to be ruinously exploited or are we hominids part of a mutually inter-dependent biosphere, a part, moreover, with a unique responsibility to mind our technologically oversized ecological footprint.

Vincent, however, is exercised by a different question.  Because whaling is “so miniscule in every respect – whales killed, money made, cultural importance”, Sea Shepherd’s fixation on it must be about something other than whales, he reasons, nominating Watson’s “Gaddafi-size ego” and vegan fanatics using whale conservation to aggressively promote their extremist (to the “no moral qualms” carnivore Vincent) creed of animal rights.

This is too cynical, by half.  Saving whales can serve as a symbolic entrée to the necessary revolution in thinking from anthropocentrism to biocentrism.  Life on planet Earth is not all about us, especially not the profit-crazed elite who literally make a killing out of exploiting the natural world which is our one and only home.