NAZI DREAMTIME: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler’s Germany by DAVID S. BIRD

NAZI DREAMTIME: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler’s Germany
By DAVID S. BIRD
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012, 448 pages, $44 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

‘This modern abandonment by the Germans of individual liberty ... has something rather magnificent about it’, said an impressed federal Attorney-General, Robert Menzies, after his three visits to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.  Hitler, Menzies added, was ‘a man of ideas, many of them good ones’.  The future Liberal Prime Minister, writes David Bird in Nazi Dreamtime, “saw much that he liked” in the fascist state whose Fuhrer, enthused Menzies, ‘produces a spiritual exaltation that one cannot but admire and some small portion of which would do no harm among our somewhat irresponsible populations’.

Menzies, so often treated with reverential but undeserved awe, was not alone amongst conservative Australian politicians who licked their lips at the overseas models of right wing extremism.  Italian fascism had earlier beguiled the Premiers of Victoria and NSW, and the Depression Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, who said that Mussolini had done ‘immense good’.  Hitler’s brand of fascism continued the spell on the Premiers of South Australia, Tasmania and NSW (the latter receiving a Hitler Medal during the 1936 Berlin Olympics).  The federal Trade Minister said in parliament (as late as 1939) that Hitler had a ‘shining record of service to his people’.

All these worthies were to be amongst the many “minute-to-midnight” conversions to anti-fascism just ahead of the outbreak of war in 1939 when fascist Germany and Italy transformed from shiny exemplar to darkly threatening imperialist rival.  Many of these politicians, and other prominent Australians, writes Bird, went on to “adjust their memory” of their early pro-fascist acclamations.

Few had been genuinely “rampant Nazis”, says Bird, but all were “fellow-travellers” of an extremist radical right, sharing some or all of the fascist ideology of ‘Aryan’ racial superiority, rejection of “Western liberalism, humanitarianism and democracy”, and antagonism to trade unions, socialism and Jews.

Around these hard-core Nazi “politicals” there circulated a group of patriotic “poeticals” - “literary nationalists” who kept bad company with those who supported their literary endeavours.  Bird is largely forgiving of the “poeticals” but he also extends a less warranted pardon to the mainstream politicians who flirted with fascism.

Whilst these politicians made no public suggestions that fascism was needed in Australia, and whilst they found some fascist methods distasteful, their benign or positive endorsement of the overseas fascist “experiment” showed a wilful turning of blind eyes to the reality of fascism.  It also spoke to a discomforting proximity between right wing ‘bourgeois-democratic’ capitalist politicians and their fascist cousins.  Both waged war on behalf of the wealthy classes against the working class - Communists, after all, were Hitler’s first victims, as they were the desired targets of Menzies who, as post-war Prime Minister, tried to intern them and ban their party.

This class politics at the heart of fascism is also missing from Bird’s documentation of the occupations of Australia’s fascists which included solicitors, undertakers, farmers, chemists, doctors, dentists, finance executives, advertising agents, salespersons and real estate agents.  This was the shock-jock-listening, taxi-driver class of the time, and, as in Europe, it was this petit-bourgeoisie, the middle class, that formed the mass base of fascism.

Hitler’s fascist ideology demagoguedly appealed to the self-employed, small capitalist’s economic fear and hatred of both the working class (and their unions) and big capital.  As in Europe, too, however, Australia’s big capitalists were not fooled by the ‘anti-capital’, ‘socialist’ rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘national socialism’.  They backed Hitler to the hilt whilst, in Australia, the business travellers to Nazi Germany, including a CSR sugar magnate, a large flour-miller and big miners, liked the business prosperity they saw flowing from a subdued labour force.

Few and ill-organised Australia’s “Nazi dreamers” may have been but they were far from the eccentric, harmless, if noisy, “lone wolves” they often come across as in Bird’s history.  They were the carriers of a lethal political virus which, although it did not take off in Australia needs but the right mix in its capitalist host of economic austerity, right wing extremism, racial scapegoating and imperialist dynamic to make totalitarianism an option.  For the labouring classes, complacency over the potential ruthlessness of the capitalist ruling class should never be an option.

RUPERT MURDOCH: An Investigation of Political Power by DAVID McKIGHT

RUPERT MURDOCH: An Investigation of Political Power

By DAVID McKNIGHT
Allen&Unwin, 2012, 285 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

An adviser to the former New Labour government of Tony Blair in the UK called the right-wing media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, the ‘24^th member of cabinet’, adding that no big decision inside No. 10 was ever made without ‘taking into account the likely reaction’ of Murdoch.

David McKnight reveals the extent of Murdoch’s influence on governments in the UK, US and Australia.  A senior member of Cameron’s Tory government met a Murdoch executive once every three days, whilst the editor of Murdoch’s scandal-plagued News Of The World, Rebekah Brooks, visited New Labour Prime Ministers, Blair and Brown, six times a year.  Thatcher, Reagan, Rudd, Gillard – every Prime Minister and President has dined with and wooed the powerful media proprietor.

Murdoch’s influence is also exercised as part of the background political culture with his media empire pumping out reactionary propaganda to promote a set of right-wing political values - ‘public bad, private good’ plus loathing of socialists, trade unions, greens, feminists, anti-racists and gays.  Murdoch is a right-wing populist, claiming to represent ‘ordinary men and women’ against a ‘liberal elite’ who have ‘captured government, the mass media, science and the universities’ where their ‘left-wing bias’ dominates via the coercive orthodoxy of ‘political correctness’.  This fantastic claim is immune to the hypocrisy of Murdoch’s own membership of a genuine elite, a billionaire whose self-interested political correctness prescribes low-taxing and non-interfering governments, privatisation and the primacy of the market in all things.

It is not news that Murdoch is right-wing.  Born into an establishment newspaper family, educated at Australia’s most elite private school (Geelong Grammar) and Oxford University, Murdoch is a tireless leader of the hard right.

What is new in McKnight’s book, is the scope of Murdoch’s political ambit.  Murdoch promotes the Tea Party in the US (the most reactionary wing of the Republicans), he has funded right-wing political causes (including secret financing of ultra-Thatcherite activists and US neo-conservatives) and he runs loss-making conservative magazines and newspapers aimed at shifting the White House and the Republican Party even further to the right.

Murdoch’s more overt media assault is noisily dominant.  His US cable news channel, Fox News, is populism on steroids, fronted by angry, bullying “shouting heads” who spruik fear (of terrorists, liberals, gays, etc.).  Although preaching to just three million viewers, its political virus spreads far wider, as it does in Australia where Murdoch’s reactionary ranting, aided by his 70% control of Australia’s newspaper market, “sets the agenda” and the political tone for other media (radio, television, on-line news and the “Twitterati”).

One of the biggest consequences of Murdoch’s rise as a newspaper and television mogul, says McKnight, is not so much the “tabloidisation” or “dumbing down” of the industry (through his metastasizing formula of “sleaze, scandal and crime stories”) but his political influence, especially cementing Australia and the UK into a military alliance with the US.  Murdoch helped to make the case for invading Iraq in 2003 by “mobilising his editors, commentators and journalists” with direct edicts on how to report the war, and by presenting non-existent ‘evidence’ of Iraq’s armoury and terrorist links as fact.

This is markedly different to Murdoch’s treatment of the overwhelming factual consensus on the science of human-induced climate change which is routinely scorned by the Murdoch stable of climate change deniers (such as the sneering and abusive Andrew Bolt in Australia and Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson in the UK).  Murdoch’s ‘conversion’ in 2007 to the science of global warming, however, surprised a few when he announced to his employees that ‘climate change poses clear catastrophic threats’ and that the debate needs to shift from whether it is happening to how to solve it.

Like the populist he is, Murdoch may have been worried about being left behind by a popular swelling of concern about climate change, but, argues McKnight, it seems to have had more to do with placating his son and heir-apparent, James Murdoch, who believes the science.  Rupert Murdoch’s subsequent announcement in 2011 that News Corporation was carbon neutral, however, was a “hollow gesture” given his failure to enforce his views on his mouth-foaming, attack-dog climate change denialist commentariat.

In return for ideological services rendered, Murdoch receives handsome favours from politicians.  He plays favourites with those most eager to cultivate Murdoch’s approval.  Murdoch, for example, dumped the UK Tories for New Labour at the 1997 UK elections because Labour posed less of a threat on media regulation restricting cross-ownership of large newspapers and terrestrial TV.  All those meetings with politicians are for some purpose, after all, and not just a convening of a mutual appreciation society.

Most Murdoch observers are mesmerised by Murdoch’s highly successful business dealings (his personal wealth is $6 billion, News Corporation is a $30 billion juggernaut) but, adds McKnight, they tend to underestimate Murdoch’s political and ideological crusading.  McKnight’s book usefully readjusts the focus but, like many who decry the odious influence of Murdoch, the effect of being too Rupert-conscious, without a contextual analysis of the broader capitalist media, is to make the non-Murdoch media look good by comparison.

McKnight argues, for example, that non-Murdoch journalists, editors and media owners are part of the “democratic process” by “revealing facts that the authorities would like to keep quiet” but the media of the Packers, Fairfaxes and Conrad Blacks have shown as much parade-ground discipline as Murdoch in toeing many government lines (especially on wars) or have restricted debate to narrow limits (especially on climate change).  It is also the case that, as McKnight himself notes in passing, that the granting of electoral favours bestowed by the Murdoch media are engaged in by “nearly all newspapers” and that all powerful media owners have ‘reasonably good access’ to politicians.

The state media, too, are often no better than Murdoch and his private peers, especially on climate change – the Australian Broadcasting Commission, for example, mimics the self-proclaimed ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News by using the ruse of ‘balance’ to pair up denialists and climate scientists in debate, creating the perception of a legitimate controversy over global warming where no such scientific dispute exists.

Focusing on the differences (and they are differences of degree not substance) between Murdoch and his media stablemates underplays their similarities.  A capitalist media diversity, which dilutes the influence of Murdoch, is a very limited diversity.  In the end, McKnight ponders whether the slightly less awful Murdoch progeny (Lachlan, James, Elisabeth) will moderate the old man’s ideological fervour when he moves on, and return the Murdoch media to some sort of integrity, concluding that the family heirs face the “old, old choice between money and principles”.

McKnight sounds sceptical about which way they will jump, and whether the Murdoch-enthralled politicians, once the temporary unpleasantness of phone hacking and police bribery scandals blows over, will show any more courage in standing up to the Murdoch media empire.  Don’t hold your breath waiting, for as long as the Murdoch media, like its corporate cousins, remain capitalist concerns, the defence of their profits and the ideological defence of capitalism will come first and truth-telling a distant last.

OFFICIAL AND CONFIDENTIAL: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by ANTHONY SUMMERS

OFFICIAL AND CONFIDENTIAL: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover

By ANTHONY SUMMERS
Ebury Press, 2011, 602 pages, $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for half a century, tends to be best (almost fondly) known for his cross-dressing homosexuality but, as Anthony Summers shows in his biography of Hoover, the world’s most famous police official should be better known for his real crime – political policing.

Hoover, with his abnormally early passion for data gathering, well understood that information is power and as a right wing Republican law graduate working in the Department of Justice, he was the mastermind behind the ‘Red raids’ of 1919, his massive card index of left-wing radicals guiding the violent police arrests, imprisonment and deportations.

Promoted to FBI Director as his reward, Hoover rose to prominence in the 1930s on the back of a crime wave panic, milking the battles against the likes of Bonnie and Clyde in a display of a career-long aptitude – self-promotion through taking all the credit without any of the risk.  Hoover managed to be absent when the gangsters’ bullets were flying, just as the patriotic school cadet contrived to miss World War 1.

Charged with spying on American Nazis during the war, Hoover was less than eager (this was a man who, on his holidays at Miami Beach, chose hotels which carried the sign NO JEWS, NO DOGS, and who regarded women, blacks and Mexicans as little better).  His “enemies of choice” were always the Communists, those who were ‘hoodwinked and duped into joining hands with the Communists’ and anyone who might pose a threat to Hoover.  Striking unionists, civil libertarians, Black activists, liberal Supreme Court judges, police officials who fell out with him - all were caught in the Hoover net.

Hoover, says Summers, bore “primary responsibility for the anti-communist hysteria from which American society has never fully recovered”.  He leaked file information on actors, writers, artists, journalists, scientists and public servants to his ideological soul mate, Senator Joseph McCarthy, making the Senator’s witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee so effective in smearing and neutralising critics of the government.  The FBI ‘information’ was, as official investigations revealed after his death, a “mishmash of unchecked tittle-tattle”, writes Summers, equal parts rumour, gossip, conjecture and hearsay, two or three times removed.  

The FBI hunted ‘subversives’ on the flimsiest of grounds leaving real crime relatively untouched.  In New York in 1959, for example, 400 FBI agents were working on Communism and just four on organised crime.  Sometimes the crooks simply bribed the sheriff but it was blackmail over Hoover’s homosexuality that gave mobsters their hold on him - Mafia boss, Meyer Lansky, boasted in private that Hoover had been ‘fixed’.

Exposure of his sexuality was Hoover’s biggest fear because it could spell the end for a public official, so Hoover publicly disassociated himself from homosexuality by turning on other gays.  He loudly proclaimed his hunt for ‘sex deviates’ in government service whilst the FBI infiltrated gay rights groups.  This infiltration was part of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s secret, dirty-tricks operation to divide, disrupt and discredit the anti-Vietnam war, civil rights, women’s liberation and other progressive movements.  Social progress was delayed, jobs were lost and lives were lost in this attack on civil liberties.

None of the eight Presidents Hoover served, Republican or Democrat, tossed the corrupt, narcissistic, authoritarian, anti-democratic, megalomaniac out on his ear.  All politicians lived in fear of the files he held on them (for past misdemeanours including dodgy business deals, ballot-rigging, vote-buying and hypocritical sexual liaisons) and Hoover was never refused more funding or powers.

His nominal political bosses griped about Hoover in private (Lyndon Johnson summed up their cynical attitude by calling Hoover a ‘skunk’ but adding that ‘it’s better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in’) but all Presidents were also keen to use the FBI as their “private political police force” to dig up dirt on their political opponents.

Above all, the politicians protected Hoover because they were united in what the FBI called ‘The Cause’ – fighting ‘communism’, a highly elastic concept used as a cover to fight any challenge to the status quo of capitalist economic and political power.  Hoover’s job was the politicians’ job – policing dissent.

LOVE AND CAPITAL: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution by MARY GABRIEL

LOVE AND CAPITAL: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution

By MARY GABRIEL
Little, Brown and Company, 2012, 709 pages, $39.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

It was a ‘petty affair’, said Joseph Stalin, ordering it to be ‘buried deep in the archives’ lest Karl Marx’s fathering of an illegitimate child to his housemaid (with Friedrich Engels agreeing to keep it secret by assuming paternity) tarnish the image of the founder of modern socialism.  Mary Gabriel, in Love and Capital, describes how this greatest challenge to the “committed Communist couple”, Karl and Jenny Marx, was unable to wreck the Marx family which survived all manner of tests and whose members “sacrificed everything for an idea – socialist revolution”.

This latest Marx biography foregrounds Karl, Jenny and their three daughters for whom love, and Marx’s masterwork, Capital, reigned supreme despite the deaths of three children and four grandchildren, chronic poverty, angry creditors, irate landlords, spies and informers, ceaseless illnesses and dulling periods of political isolation.  It is the “story of a group of brilliant, combative, exasperating, funny, passionate and ultimately tragic figures caught up in the revolutions sweeping nineteenth century Europe”.

Jenny von Westphalen was a “Prussian baron’s daughter” of “rare beauty, vibrant wit and intelligence” who fell in love with Marx, the young, middle class, political rebel, renowned student debater and drinker, fiery journalist and all-round intellectual tempest.  Married in 1843, Marx took on their honeymoon forty five volumes of “Hegel, Rousseau, Machiavelli” and other philosophers, his “inquisitive mind” permanently in top gear.

With Marx almost perpetually “without work or income”, it was Jenny’s self-imposed task, and the socially-ordained role for women at the time, to “provide emotional and domestic support” to her husband.  Karl, unlike other patriarchs, however, regarded Jenny as “an intellectual equal”.  Their three surviving children (Jenny and Laura, and the youngest and more politically autonomous Eleanor) also willingly laboured in Karl’s shadow as secretaries, translators, researchers, intellectual sounding-boards, decipherers of Karl’s appalling handwriting and devoted daughters whose “courage, strength and brilliance” Gabriel rescues from the dark.

The Marx women (and Engels) were truly Marx’s saviours – emotionally and politically – during non-revolutionary times in exile in England when socialist retreat and factional squabbles, and the slow (sixteen years) work of writing Capital, weighed on Marx like a dead weight.  By contrast, at times of revolutionary ferment, Marx, energised by his eager family, was (like Gabriel’s book) at his best – his writing succinct, focused and eloquent, his intellectual and political leadership confident and decisive (which some mistook for arrogance).

Gabriel avoids the dual caricatures of Marx as “Communist saint or deluded sinner”, logging his flaws whilst concluding, like Jenny and their children, that a man could be great, flawed and still loved.  Gabriel’s non-Marxist pedigree gives force to her recognition of the historical stature of Marx who “did what he set out to do: he changed the world”, primarily through Capital.  Whilst “published to no acclaim” in 1867 (‘Capital will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it’, lamented Marx), it steadily built up into a “theoretical earthquake”, inspiring new generations of socialists to put Marxist ideas into spectacular practice.

Gabriel’s main interest, however, is less in political analysis than human narrative but what prevents what could have been a Marxist soapie (Days of Our Marxist Lives, perhaps) is the grand drama of a story based on real life actors whose family passion was matched only by the flame of their political desire – for a world free from exploitation and oppression.

ANZAC’S DIRTY DOZEN: 12 Myths of Australian Military History edited by CRAIG STOCKINGS

ANZAC’S DIRTY DOZEN: 12 Myths of Australian Military History

Edited by CRAIG STOCKINGS
Newsouth, 2012, 335 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Anzac’s Dirty Dozen takes issue with the emotive hype surrounding the “secular religion” of Anzac Day and the century of “commemoration, veneration and celebration” of Australian wars past, present and to come.  All contributors are academic military historians, most from the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, a conflict of intellectual interest which inevitably inhibits too much radicalism.

Craig Wilcox contests the myth that Australian military history began at Gallipoli in 1915 and shows that there was “mass engagement in citizen soldiering pre-dating this” but, rather than criticising this martial past (wars in Sudan and South Africa, and a death toll in colonial Aboriginal wars that is “not to be sneezed at”), the tone is one of honouring Australia’s pre-Gallipoli military heritage (though the race war was “not entirely virtuous”).

John Connor reveals that, contrary to Anzac legend, the Australian army was not the “only all-volunteer army in WW1”, that many volunteers had their enlistment decisions made for them by family, community and economic pressure, and that a volunteer is not necessarily a better soldier than a conscript – just being Australian is enough, apparently, to be honoured as a quality soldier.

Craig Stockings is irked by the notion that Australia fights ‘other people’s wars’, especially as advanced by John Pilger who argues that ‘we fight mostly against people with whom we have no quarrel and who offer us no threat of invasion’ to ‘appease a great protector’.  Stockings argues that all Australia’s wars are a result of “rational and calculating choice” and not blind loyalty to the UK or US.  Such wars are a “premium on a military insurance policy” in which (it is gambled) the British navy or American marines would come to Australia’s aid in a time of threat (from “communist expansion”, for example).  War decisions are the preserve of “Australian politicians and policy-makers”, he correctly notes, but Stockings identifies the interests of this elite with the interests of the Australian population, a mistake not made by Pilger who admits an international, anti-war, class solidarity that is alien to the khaki academic.

Michael McKinley mounts a robust, but rare for this book, critique of the politically privileged  Australia-US alliance which has often (for 40 of the last 66 years) taken an unwilling Australian population to the wars of our “bad alliance partner” – Washington is “war-prone” and its military record is one of battlefield disaster and criminal conduct.

Dale Blair questions the veneration of the ‘Aussie digger’ for a mythical “ethical exceptionalism” that portrays the Anzac soldier as always fighting fair.  Blair finds, to the contrary, a record littered with Australian war crimes and atrocities (originating from, or tacitly condoned by, senior command), for example killing prisoners and strafing survivors in lifeboats.  Blair, however, limits the unethical conduct to a minority, absolving the broader military which is praised for its ‘professionalism’.

Bob Hall and Andrew Ross examine a war of unfettered savagery (Vietnam) but find no bad behaviour.  Their myth-busting is confined to military tactics, showing that the small firefight, not the set-piece battle, was the norm for the Australian military.  They do show, however, that the largest landmark battle, the battle of Long Tan, is misrepresented as a heroic fight by outnumbered  Australian soldiers when, in fact, the Australians had massive artillery and air support.  Technological firepower won these military victories but the Vietnamese, they note, won the domestic and international political victories.  Even with this insight, however, the authors recycle another potent Vietnam War myth – that the “enemy insurgents” were separate from the people whom they ruled by force.

Peter Stanley usefully gets to grips with the myth of the centrality of war to Australian history, a fable which bestows a “positive view” on all Australia’s wars whilst extolling national pride.  This is the real aim of Anzac Day, he astutely argues, rather than the purported expression of any anti-war mourning, or regret.  Stanley is, however, in a minority of his peers who emphasise that they are not “undermining the foundations of Anzac just for the sake of appearing subversive”. 

The book also leaves a number of military myths unexplored such as that of the ‘professionalism’ of the modern Australian military.  This professionalism apparently does not include the routine physical and sexual bullying and humiliation of powerless victims, a core component of military training culture which inculcates the cruelty essential for preparing soldiers to be proficient at brutalising, dehumanising and eventually killing the ‘enemy’ in aggressive, imperialist wars, the purpose of having a military for capitalist societies.

The military historians are miffed that they are widely seen to “serve as high priests at the temple of Anzac”, so, to rectify this, they take Anzac down a peg or two in the interests of a (limited) historical accuracy.  By leaving the edifice of militarism modified but intact, however, they wind up serving as slightly disreputable, gin-drinking vicars (if not high priests) ably assisting the worship of armed force at the shrine of patriotism as much as the flag-waving cheerleaders of war in parliament and boardroom. Welcome to the world of the moderate militarist.

COLD LIGHT by FRANK MOORHOUSE

COLD LIGHT

By FRANK MOORHOUSE
Vintage Books, 2011, 719 pages, $32.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Edith Berry is about to face a challenge.  Married to a British diplomat and expecting something senior in the Canberra foreign affairs bureaucracy, her long lost brother, Frederick, turns up and announces that he is an organiser with the Communist Party of Australia seeking her help to oppose plans by the Menzies Liberal Government to ban the party and put Australia’s communists in internment camps.  Will Edith’s liberal belief in freedom of political expression, association and assembly, plus the “inescapable bond of birth” between brother and sister, see her stand for principle or cut her “danger brother” for the sake of her job?

Frank Moorhouse’s latest novel, Cold Light, tosses Edith about on the horns of her dilemma.  It would be unfair to give away the ending but Moorhouse’s interpretation of the interplay between different left-of-centre political worldviews (both Edith and Frederick share “idealistic aspirations for the betterment of the world”) is worth reviewing.

Edith’s cause has been internationalism, world peace and creating “plenty for the destitute of the world through nuclear power”, first as an advisor to Menzies and then as an “eminent person” appointed by Labor Prime Minister Whitlam (when asking Whitlam if his party still sees Australian uranium as “the Devil’s work”, Whitlam answers “yes, and being now a Government, the Devil’s work is now our work”).

Edith’s habitat is “multilateral diplomacy” via the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, her sustenance the “diplomatic passport, drivers, interpreters, bodyguards, consulate courtesies”.  Prodded by Frederick, and his partner-comrade(Janice), Edith puts a toe in the waters of political protest but thinks “capitalism could be changed from within”.  Frederick and Janice are, by contrast, anti-capitalist activists working to overthrow the international capitalist  order.

Edith’s quandary between challenging capitalist power and taming it via conference resolution remains unresolved.  She scans her life of “grand failures” (the League, the peaceful use of uranium, designing Canberra as an egalitarian community) and concludes that it is all too hard to “change human destiny for the better”.

Her new-found communist friends, on the other hand, get their come-uppance courtesy of Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech on the crimes of Stalin – Fred is politically destroyed and becomes a “hermit scholar”, Janice morphs into a hard-line Stalinist.  For Edith, Khrushchev’s revelations “showed what so many … had come to realise over the years – that the whole history of the Soviet Union had been a barbarous lie and a disaster”.  The “economic insights” of Marxism “might still stand but everything else”, she reflects, but the socialist politics and vision do not. 

Edith wallows in the “sad wisdom” that “improved versions of this world are imaginary”.  Politics (and relationships – Edith has “confused yearnings” for Janice, and her diplomat husband has a “fantasy identity as a woman”) is a life of “everlasting perplexity”.  All this irresolute political fence-sitting by Edith dilutes the dramatic tension of the novel.

Neither does the language of the characters assist.  Moorhouse’s communists speak in the clichéd jargon of the tedious ideologue (a technique which also equates the native Australian communist with the 1950s Russian Stalinist – two fundamentally different political species) whilst Edith’s middle class intellectuals routinely quote Byron, Shakespeare, H. G. Wells (and Lytton Strachey on Ottoline Morrell) at the drop of a not very convincing hat.

Cold Light is a novel which promises much but too often flounders in the sands of Edith’s (and Moorhouse’s) “traditional liberal values” – aware but pessimistic about capitalist power, sympathetic to the victims of that power but wary about change (especially socialist change) from below.  Good-hearted liberal elitism is not enough.

THE CONUNDRUM: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse by DAVID OWEN

THE CONUNDRUM: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse

By DAVID OWEN, Riverhead Books, 2011, 261 pages, $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

David Owen, writer for The New Yorker and international speaker on green issues, caused something of a stir when in Australia recently.  All so-called ‘sustainability’ solutions to the earth’s climate woes, he told ABC radio, are “irrelevant or make the problems worse”.  Owen expands on his green heresy in The Conundrum.

The green conundrums in his sights include the clearly fake green - natural gas is a toxic greenhouse doona, not a ‘bridge’ to a decarbonised future whilst bio-fuels such as corn-based ethanol exacerbate world hunger by colonising prime agricultural land.  The plausibly problematic are also teased out - recycling allows the conscience-free generation of more waste, he says, noting that the US “spends more on garbage bags than almost half the world’s countries spend on everything”, whilst ‘food miles’ (where food is grown) is less important environmentally than how it is grown and what was sprayed on it.

Energy efficiency  is a conundrum candidate, too, argues Owen, because increased efficiency leads to increased total energy consumption. Better energy efficiency for refrigeration, for example, encourages acquisition of the second fridge, the bar-fridge and the stand-alone freezer, thereby consuming more total energy to chill stuff and, whilst the five-star whitegood may use less electricity, the energy ‘embedded’ in the mining for, and manufacturing of, the greener machine is far greater than its ‘end-use’ energy saving.

Increased fuel efficiency for the car (“global environmental Enemy No. 1”) has the perverse effect of encouraging more driving by making it less expensive.  A ‘green’ car requires as much car infrastructure and car-based urban sprawl (both energy consumption multipliers) as a petrol-fuelled car.  More public transport simply clears congested roads for those who like to drive (“almost everyone with access to a car”).

More efficient high speed train travel also has a green downside, Owen argues, because the time-saving advantages of very fast trains boosts their patronage, thus wiping out the main environmental benefit of trains over airplanes namely that train travel is slower and therefore less people want to train it than plane it.  The environmental problem with all ‘green mobility’ (fuel efficiency, hybrids, fast trains, “jets that fly on vegetable oil”) is that it makes travel cheaper and more convenient and therefore encourages more of us to do more of it.

Paradox also bedevils “solar evangelists”, says Owen.  The diffuseness, and diurnal rising and setting, of the sun makes it hard to capture enough sunlight to meet base-load electricity requirements, whilst the construction of large-acreage solar-thermal energy plants, which concentrate and store solar energy, are stymied by environmental-aesthetic objections.

Owen may sound like a Green-baiting, climate change denialists’ dream, but he sincerely believes that “decreasing our consumption of fossil fuels is a pressing global need”.  We need, Owen says, to embrace the principle of less - “less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water, less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress”.  His solution is dramatic cuts in energy use because “energy consumption itself is the issue”, not better use of cleaner energy.

Such energy austerity, argues Owen, will need a “revolution in human behaviour” and this behavioural change will require more than just a supreme effort of will.  Less driving, for example, must involve government policies such as re-purposing existing car lanes for bike or bus travel, as well as higher petrol taxes, parking fees and other costs of driving.  Advocating energy efficiency and green technology may feel enlightened, he says, but it “involves no political risk” compared to stern energy-cutting measures which do call for sacrifice (energy taxes, pricing carbon, etc.).

In his quest to be contrarian at all costs, however, Owen strains logic and fact, counterposing two strategies which should be complementary – both decreases in some energy-wasteful consumption and increased use of green energy.  Some activities, such as flying and the private motor car, as Owen eloquently argues, would seem to have little future in an environmentally sustainable world but renewable energy surely substitutes for fossil fuel use without enhancing greater carbon-based energy use (renewables are feared by fossil fuel corporations for the very reason that free, clean inexhaustible sources of energy threaten the polluting business model of the coal and oil bosses).

Owen argues, correctly, that no single renewable energy source can get us to a de-carbonised future but no one (except climate change denialists) is saying that solar alone, or wind alone, or tidal/wave alone, or geo-thermal alone can do it all.  A suite of renewables is required, and Owen’s statement that no credible renewable energy blueprint exists is wrong (‘Beyond Zero Emissions’ in Australia has done the detailed scientific and technical work of just such a plan for Australia).

In backing the one-trick pony of energy consumption cuts, Owen also distracts from the political task required to get to a green future.  He dismisses as politically impractical such policies as mass public transport, a renewable energy ‘Manhattan project’, eliminating fossil fuel industry subsidies, etc. but identifying the obstacle to such policies is vital to overcoming what makes them seem ‘impractical’.  That capitalism blocks the way means that governments, which have the resources and powers to drive change through investment and strong regulation, need to be politically challenged rather than surrendered to. 

Whilst Owen is prepared to question basic capitalist economic faith (“economic growth, fuelled by energy consumption and natural resources, is not sustainable” and thus we “can’t grow our way out of energy, climate, resource, pollution, poverty and global equity problems”), his diagnosis that the problem lies with “over-consumption” and “acquisitive longing” for material goods misses the real problem – over-production by capitalists engaged in the cut-throat struggle to out-compete their rivals in the making and selling of ever more stuff to grow their capital and boost their short-term profit returns.

In the end, Owen, despite his best intentions, winds up in a tangled knot of his own green conundrums.  His negativism is such that when he claims that the carbon footprint of heavy investment in green technology to solve the world’s greenhouse ills would outweigh the existing carbon footprint of fossil fuels, it seems that he has disappeared up his own conundrum.