MERCHANTS OF DOUBT: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoking to Global Warming BY NAOMI ORESKES & ERIK M. CONWAY

MERCHANTS OF DOUBT: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoking to Global Warming

By NAOMI ORESKES & ERIK M. CONWAY
Bloomsbury, 2012, 355 pages, $37.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

‘Doubt is our product’, ran the infamous internal memo written by a US tobacco industry executive in 1969 about the industry’s campaign against the scientific consensus that smoking kills.  Another memo, from tobacco giant Philip Morris, later resolved to ‘maintain the controversy’ over passive smoking for which there was also scientific unanimity over the harm of sidestream smoke.

As the science historians, Professor Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, show in Merchants of Doubt, tobacco company memos conceded that the science of smoking and health was correct but the tobacco industry, whose “goal was to protect profits”, criminally proposed “multi-million dollar misinformation campaigns” to cast doubt on the science.

The tobacco industry recruited a tiny handful of prominent scientists to provide the ‘white lab coat’ credibility for their commercially-driven campaign.  This same, small coterie of scientists had its fingerprints over four decades of other industry campaigns attacking the science of acid rain, global warming, toxic pesticides and ozone layer holes to keep their business sponsors safe from victim litigation, state regulation and punitive taxes on their profitable but dangerous products.

The industry counter-offensives relied on highly distracting scientific red herrings, opportunistically misrepresenting inevitable scientific uncertainties on the margins to discredit the long-settled facts at the core.  Not everyone who smokes, for example, will get lung cancer therefore, claimed the industry scientists, the causal link between smoking and cancer is not established, ignoring the statistical probability that smoking will kill half its practitioners, a fact not open to reasonable doubt.

Acid rain, whose principal cause is the release of sulphur and nitrogen from the burning of fossil fuels, was explained away by corporate scientists as due, not to industrial pollution, but to natural variation or volcanoes, two factors which also served as diversions from industrial chlorofluorocarbons which caused the historically unprecedented depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer.

One lone entomologist has opened the portals of denialism to the four-decade-old consensus that the pesticide, DDT, is toxic to environment and people, whilst the sun, rather than fossil fuels, has featured prominently in global warming denialist ‘science’ by highly vocal but isolated contrarians whose views have failed the highly demanding standards of peer-review - “bad losers”, as Oreskes and Conway deservedly call them.  

The names of the same scientists crop up in all these industry campaigns, the most prominent being Frederick Seitz, S. Fred Singer, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow, physicists all, with no expertise as epidemiologists, ecologists, atmospheric scientists or climate modellers yet claiming the mantle of “all-purpose expert” – an oxymoron in the contemporary world of scientific specialisation and complexity.

All were centrally involved in the American nuclear weaponry and rocketry programs during the Cold War.  All were political conservatives, anti-socialist extremists who were also scornful of environmentalists whom they caricatured as either anti-technology Luddites or as political ‘watermelons’ – green on the outside, red on the inside.

All were free market ideologues who saw government regulation of capitalist industry as “the slippery slope to socialism, a form of creeping communism”.  Singer saw environmentalism as camouflage for an attack on ‘business, the free market and the capitalistic system’.  Their camp follower, Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park), aptly summed up their politics when he portrayed the science of global warming as a “liberal hoax meant to bring down Western capitalism”.  

Because peer-reviewed science had “revealed the hazards that capitalism brought in its wake”, it, like socialism and environmentalism, had to be attacked.  The scientific consensus on global warming, which strikes at the energy consumption heart of the global capitalist economic growth model, has provoked a ferocious denialism of the science of anthropogenic climate change, with the denialists falsely convincing 40% of Americans that most scientists are still arguing about the reality of global warming.

Swift to explain away the rest of the scientific world as self-interested scare-mongers out to obtain more money for their research, and as left-wing, ideologically-motivated subversives set on destroying capitalism, these industry mouthpieces are blind to their own, decidedly real, right wing  ideological motivations, and to the buckets of money the denialists have received from a large network of private corporations, right wing foundations and conservative think-tanks.

The Cold War denialists, who would have been the first to denounce the corruption of science under communism (which they simplistically equated with the anti-socialist, Stalinist regime of Russia) were guilty of the same sin of perverting science to conform to a political ideology (free market capitalism) but were doubly demeaned because they did so voluntarily rather than being coerced.

Their essential propaganda allies have been the mainstream media which, loving a conflict, pounced on the appearance of scientific division to present ‘both sides of the debate’.  This media ‘balance’ baloney has meant that one ‘side’ of a non-existent debate, an extreme minority representing “deliberate disinformation spread by well-organised and well-funded vested interests”, has received special treatment by the print and airwave echo-chambers for corporate interests.

Mainstream politicians, too, are willingly seduced by the denialists whose refrain that the science is uncertain, and the economic costs of corrective action too high, is used as justification for political inaction and delay.

Cold War and contemporary denialists are right on one thing, however.  In detecting a ‘Red Menace’ behind the ‘Green Threat’, they have fingered the political logic of environmentalism which is to constrain capitalism because of its reckless unconcern for the environment.  The industry scientists’ response of scientific doubt-mongering, however, serves only to defend profits.  Socialists, on the other hand, though Oreskes and Conway stop short of endorsing Marxism, have no trouble with doing what the science says must be done because people and planet matter more than profit.

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY: A Transatlantic Story by EDWARD BERENSON

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY: A Transatlantic Story

By EDWARD BERENSON
Yale University Press, 2012, 229 pages , $35.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

‘We are the keepers of the flame of liberty’, said President Reagan, opening the centennial celebration in 1986 of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, claiming the statue to be an American beacon of freedom to the world.  As Edward Berenson shows, however, the statue’s political virtue had been compromised long before Reagan’s neo-conservative hypocrisy.

The French creators who gifted the statue to America in 1886 - Edouard Laboulaye (legal scholar), Frederic Bartholdi (architect) and Gustave Eiffel (engineer) - were “centrist liberals” who, although civil libertarians and anti-slavery abolitionists, opposed the progressive republicans, democrats and socialists on their left.

The statue they built in Paris and shipped to New York was intended as a reminder of the financial and military debt that the American revolutionary War of Independence owed to the French revolution, with an expected return of US trade and diplomatic favours to France as quid pro quo.  In both American and French anti-monarchical revolutions, however, the spoils had gone to the respective republican bourgeoisies.  The statue’s French creators were class allies of this wealthy elite, very much committed to the liberty, and power, of this elite.

They reassured their American counterparts, who were expected to raise the funds for the statue’s pedestal, that the statue represented a liberty of free enterprise, ‘not that Liberty who, wearing a red bonnet and carrying a pike, marches over a field of dead bodies’.  Not for the statue’s respectable republicans in France the radical democracy of the lower orders in the 1871 Paris Commune which had so inspired Karl Marx and terrified the French, and American, bourgeoisie.

Nor was the statue to reflect artistic allusions to the revolutionary Goddesses of Liberty which flourished during the French revolutions of 1792, 1830 and 1848.  The Statue would be demure, of placid expression, fully clothed and smashing no chains.

Many Americans saw through the statue’s public veneer of liberty and emancipation.  Suffragists disrupted the opening ceremony from a chartered boat denouncing the hypocrisy of ‘erecting a Statue of Liberty embodied as a woman in a land where no woman has political liberty’.  African-Americans were cool – the statue would not end their discrimination and segregation, nor the lynching epidemic during the 1890s when 1,200 were murdered in acts of vigilante justice.

Workers could expect no liberation from unemployment (16%) and poverty (40%) from a copper-clad monument.  Aspirant migrants, screened out from the ‘land of the free’ if they hailed from southern and eastern Europe (‘diseased’, ‘troublemakers’, refusing to ‘assimilate’, ‘taking the jobs of Americans’) confronted the cold stare of xenophobia not the warm welcome to ‘your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to be free’.  Liberty in capitalist America meant freedom for the rich , not the poor.

Just as the writer, Mark Twain, found nothing to celebrate a hundred years ago – he wanted a statue ‘old, bent, clothed in rags, downcast, shame-faced’ so it could represent the ‘insults and humiliation the principles of liberty have faced over the past six thousand years’ – the statue has been a protest site for many who deplore the failure of the US to live up to its proclaimed liberal ideals whilst mouthing a hypocritical rhetoric of freedom.

This official oratory now includes the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of American ‘freedom and anti-terrorism’, a development which testifies to the “power of liberty as a universal ideal”, says a smitten Berenson whose admirable academic objectivity sadly, but not surprisingly (Berenson is a political liberal), deserts him the closer history comes to today and when liberty needs much more than a corporate-sponsored sculpture of elite class origins.

LETHALITY IN COMBAT: A Study of the True Nature of Battle by TOM LEWIS

LETHALITY IN COMBAT: A Study of the True Nature of Battle

By TOM LEWIS
Big Sky Publishing, 2012, 359 pages, $34.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The truth of war, says Dr. Tom Lewis in Lethality in Combat, is that it is violent and lethal.  Well, no surprises there but coming from a former Navy officer within the institutional and ideological framework of the Australian military, it is a deviation of sorts from official military history which is most comfortable with the ‘honour and glory’ take on war rather than the killing and bloodshed bit.

Unlike those who are repulsed by war’s human carnage, however, Lewis thinks we should be realists and celebrate the lethal reality of war in order to train for a military better at it.  Lewis’ book is a long polemic against the “fashionable arguments” of anti-militarist critics, who, he agrees, correctly “put killing back into military history” but who, falsely he laments, deplore the military’s “celebration of violence”.

Anti-militarism is so much moral squeamishness and humanitarian foolishness, argues Lewis, which would only assist in “the soldiers of your country’s enemies marching through your capital city in triumph”.  Killing, brutality, viciousness are, on the contrary, to be “applauded” if “we” want to win.  If so, one’s hands would be clapped out at the sheer extent of the ugly business end of combat documented by Lewis.

Killing rather than taking prisoners, Lewis shows, rightly “happens frequently” and the killing of the wounded is also “excusable”.  Others who no longer pose a threat are also for killing (fighter pilots cutting in half by propeller bailed out parachutists, or strafing of sailors in lifeboats).  Mutilation and other mistreatment of dead enemy’s bodies is valuable because it “dehumanises the enemy and makes them psychologically easier to kill”.  So, too, do derogatory nicknames (‘raghead’, ‘gook’, ‘Kraut’). 

Revenge killings are “probably unlawful” but need “understanding”.  Shooting your own kind (for cowardice, desertion, mutiny, for attempting surrender) is top discipline, essential for making soldiers obey orders and stay in the killing game.

Killing civilians may be ”unfortunate but inevitable”, Lewis concedes, but it is certainly not the military’s fault.  There was hardly a civilian death in Vietnam, he argues, that was not warranted – all 12 year old Vietnam girls were potential ‘terrorists’ whilst his silence on the record tonnage of American bombs dropped on Vietnam, with their notorious inability to distinguish enemy from civilian, glosses over the rather clear guilt of the US military.

Lewis has a convenient excuse for all this combat lethality – “military necessity”.  Aggression, blood lust, avoidance of remorse are essential to winning, and military training must inculcate these values to “overcome the aversion to killing”.  “It is unfair”, Lewis says, “to judge [our warriors] by standards set by others who do not understand the true nature of combat”.  ‘So toughen up’ is Lewis’ message to the bureaucrats with their pettifogging ‘rules of engagement’ and Geneva Convention codes and to anti-war critics who base their horror of war on such irrelevant standards as moral right and wrong and international class solidarity against the planners of wars for resources, profits and geo-political power.

Because “warfare is part of the human condition”, Lewis pessimistically concludes, we must learn to embrace the smell of blood and cordite in the morning if we want to stop the Hun/Vietcong/Argies from waltzing into our shopping malls.  Whilst Lewis departs from the reverential worship of the myths of war’s ‘nobility’ and ‘sacrifice’, his catalogue of combat lethality serves the same flag-waving, imperialist purpose of militarist history – his realist military history would have us building a more effective and ethically-immune military machine promising bigger and better war crimes, atrocities and brutalities.

A DIFFICULT WOMAN: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman by ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS

A DIFFICULT WOMAN: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman

By ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS
Bloomsbury Press, 2012, 439 pages, $39.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The writer, and one-time Trotskyist, Mary McCarthy, said in a 1979 television interview that the celebrated playwright and one-time Communist, Lillian Hellman, was not only over-rated but that ‘every word she writes is a lie, including and and the’.  Hellman spent the last five years of her life suing McCarthy for libel.

As Kessler-Harris says in her biography of Hellman, this famous literary feud was the culmination of a lifetime of attempts to discredit Hellman by ranting conservatives and ‘respectable’ liberals whose illiberal support for, or inaction in the face of, government attacks on freedom of speech in 1950s America Hellman had held up to public reproach.  The very name, ‘Lillian Hellman’, continues to act as Pavlovian stimulus to a seething right-wing response of charges of left-wing hypocrisy and totalitarian evil.  Hellman does not deserve this.

Hellman, galvanised by the Spanish Civil War, adopted left-wing politics in the thirties, was a union organiser for the Screen Writers’ Guild, was briefly a member of the US Communist Party (1939-41), opposed the anti-communist government witch-hunts in the 1950s, was blacklisted by Hollywood producers from the movie industry, bounced back to theatre and movie success in the 1960s, was a strong but not uncritical supporter of the New Left, Black rights and women’s liberation, before character assassination brought her to a messy, litigious end.

The lies told about Hellman dwarf her own.  A rigid Stalinist would not have, unlike Hellman, condemned Soviet repression of writers, or opposed the party line during the Nazi-Soviet pact by writing an overtly anti-fascist play (Watch on the Rhine).  Although Hellman was late to see through some Stalinist crimes, she did admit she had been wrong about Stalin, an awakening delayed by her overriding concern about the march of fascism which saw her adopt a stance of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.

Like many other thirties’ communists, Hellman’s acceptance of the Soviet Union as a model for a socialist society was motivated by her commitment to a world free from the class, economic and racial injustice caused by the power of money.  When Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was persecuting leftists, Hellman refused to turn on her party comrades, whose intentions had been good, by courageously refusing to name names at her HUAC hearing in 1952.

Soviet and domestic communism was no threat to the US, said Hellman, but McCarthyist attacks on freedom of thought and speech were.  This stance infuriated the ‘cowardly liberals’ who had junked their fine words on liberty for fear of being tarred with the communist brush.  Hellman’s 1976 memoir, Scoundrel Time,  which revisited the political and personal failure of America’s liberal intellectuals under McCarthyism reignited a storm of anger from those she accused of moral failure who were now Cold War political conformists bravely fighting repression in Russia, safely distant from the struggle against political surveillance and the silencing of dissent in their own backyard.

In smearing Hellman as a liar, her critics were aided by one episode from Hellman’s memoirs.  Her 1973 story, Julia, was an account of Hellman’s purported effort to smuggle, in Berlin in 1939, a fur hat containing $50,000 to a friend, Julia, who was active in the Austrian resistance.  A 1977 film  (starring Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia) widely publicised this daring act of anti-fascist heroics but it is “most likely”, says Kessler-Harris, that Hellman had based her story on what she had heard from a common friend about a Muriel Gardiner, a US psychiatrist, appropriating this woman’s life for Hellman’s own ends.

In this, Hellman “overstepped the bounds of memoir”, letting her life as a dramatist take over.  This was Hellman’s one ‘big lie’ which has been used ever since to opportunistically tarnish Hellman’s lifelong moral and political integrity.  Many of Hellman’s friends and admirers retreated in the face of the onslaught and Hellman’s lawsuit against Mary McCarthy in response was far from her finest hour.

The liberals who folded before HUAC could now absolve their far greater sins before this one, far less significant, fictional fantasy by Hellman.   They had a field day but Hellman loved a stoush and used her quick wit and biting sense of humour to continue to show up the false friends of freedom who abandon history’s victims as soon as the going gets personal.

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.