GRAPPLING WITH THE BOMB by NIC MACLELLAN

GRAPPLING WITH THE BOMB: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests

NIC MACLELLAN

Australian National University Press, 2017, 383 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Nobody better reflects the military and political elites’ cavalier attitude to nuclear weapons than the architect of Britain’s hydrogen bomb program, Sir William Penney, who, in meetings in 1961 between US Democrat President, John F. Kennedy, and UK Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, casually answered a question on how destructive the new weapons were by saying that ‘it would take twelve to destroy Australia, Britain five or six, say seven or eight, and I’ll have another gin and tonic, if you would be so kind’.

 

This casual indifference of Britain’s real-life Dr. Strangeloves to their grim new military power seeped out of the cosy gentlemen’s club they inhabited to inflict an all-too-real toll on the victims of ‘Operation Grapple’, the nine atmospheric H-bomb tests conducted in 1957 and 1958 in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (now part of the independent nation of Kiribati) in the Pacific Ocean, as Nic Maclellan documents in his diligently-detailed yet anecdote-enhanced history, published on the 60^th anniversary of the tests.

 

In the vast seas, safely far from London, any human inventory were considered unworthy of more than cursory consideration, particularly the thousands of indigenous Gilbertese islanders, ‘primitive peoples’ (in the language of British authorities) for whom radioactive fallout protection levels were set at more lax standards than for the ‘civilised’ military and civilian personnel who staffed the test sites.

 

Britain (and France and the US) did not need to seek, barter or bribe permission to irradiate their out-of-sight/out-of-mind backyard, says Maclellan, a veteran activist for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific, “only because they were colonial powers in the region” and could do as they liked with their colonial possessions - “in the 1950s, there were no independent and sovereign island nations in the South Pacific”.  None.

 

Panicked by a mooted UN ban on atmospheric H-bomb tests (a temporary moratorium was decreed in 1958 and made permanent in 1963), Whitehall raced to join the US, Soviet and French H-bomb powers, throwing time, caution and safety to the strontium-laden wind.  One aspect of the British tests, however, remained indispensable – keeping it from the public.

 

A “culture of secrecy” pervaded the program, from Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s decision in 1954 to go thermo-nuclear to the ensuing decades of soothing, official reassurances that the testing posed ‘negligible’ health hazards.  Just to be sure, however, that such claims would not be exposed through challenges in a court of law, the UK temporarily withdrew from the UN’s International Court of Justice jurisdiction over nuclear weapons tests in 1955 (a tactic London reprised in 2017 over the pace and scale of implementing UN resolutions on general nuclear disarmament).

 

The involvement of Britain’s regional Commonwealth allies in its H-bomb testing program was also designed to avoid alarming the public.  Australia had been ruled out as a possible H-bomb test site because of “the Australian Government’s need to mollify public opinion over radioactive fallout” which had been animated by Australia’s hosting of Britain’s earlier tests of its (much less powerful but still filthily potent) A-bombs but the ever-loyal, Cold War Menzies Liberal government provided the uranium.

 

Reflecting troubling public concern, the equally loyal New Zealand Nationals government posed the usually unspoken question between political friends by writing to London that ‘why, if there is no danger from these tests, do the British and Americans not hold them near to home?’, regrettably demurring about proposals to use New Zealand’s islands for the tests (which would be a ‘political H-Bomb’) but provided extensive but less visible logistical support, on the quiet, for the testing program.

 

Whilst the British authorities celebrated the H-bombs’ new megaton yields, the human casualties had less reason to smile.  Military personnel and civilians copped the radioactive fallout, some, in what a confidential Army memo admitted, as deliberate human guinea pigs with the aim of discovering the effect of the explosions on ‘equipment, stores and men, with and without various types of protection’.  To add chemical insult to radioactive injury, Fijian troops had their fly-ridden, military camps doused with regular doses of the toxic insecticide, DDT.

 

The health legacy from the nuclear tests endures through radiation-damaged genes passing on diseases and birth defects to the children and grandchildren of the Commonwealth military veterans and the islanders.  Yet, the British government continues to deny adequate financial compensation to the victims by stubbornly contesting the health effects of radiation.

 

Denied, too, is the “moral culpability of the state” for the damage it inflicted.  A 2004 class action by 1,011 UK, NZ and Fijian veterans ground to an exhausted halt in a decade-long tangle of technical and legal mud, sparing Britain’s Ministry of Defence any payouts.  As a sop in 2015, the Tory government included the British nuclear veterans in a £25 million government charity fund but this covers all UK military veterans, not just the A and H-bomb veterans (with diddley-squat for the indigenous Kiribati citizens).  The fund is also constructed in a way that absolves the government from any future legal liability for compensation.  There has been no admission of guilt.

 

The nuclear establishment at its dangerous and devious worst is well displayed through Britain’s H-bomb tests, where the initial crime is followed by bureaucratic chloroforming of public enquiry, a defensive war of legalistic attrition and the political distortion of independent medical findings.  First comes the damage, then the denial.  The power, and the danger, of the atom is easily matched by the power, and danger, of its political masters.

PLOTS AGAINST HITLER by DANNY ORBACH

THE PLOTS AGAINST HITLER

DANNY ORBACH

Head of Zeus, 2017, 406 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Nazi Germany is a test case in historical counterfactuals.  If the assassination-plotters and coup-conspirators in the German military had succeeded in their many attempts from 1938 to 1944 to remove Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime, then entirely different options to years of mass military deaths, civilian slaughter and horrendous concentration camps would have come into play.

 

The German military Resistance almost pulled it off but were dogged by continual bad luck, including faulty bomb technology, last-minute changes to Hitler’s schedule, and a mounting frustration which frayed the discipline necessary to the resistance network’s clandestinity.  Nevertheless, they came agonisingly close to saving the lives of millions.

 

Yet, as Danny Orbach (University of Jerusalem historian) discusses in The Plots Against Hitler, the military resisters’ entitlement to moral approbation has been challenged by revisionist historians.  These critics rightly point out that the German military rebels were, with few exceptions, conservative authoritarians.  Some had cooperated for many years with the Nazi regime.  Some had been mass murderers and war criminals responsible for directing the slaughter of Russians, Poles and Jews.  Some were anti-Semites who supported ‘legal and non-violent’ discrimination against Jews in Germany or their expulsion to a Jewish ‘homeland’.

 

It is a lengthy charge sheet, from which the critics conclude that, had the military Resistance toppled Hitler, although Europe may have been spared the vicious worst of Nazism, little would have fundamentally changed in fascist vision and practice in Europe.

 

Orbach is dissatisfied with both the romanticisation of the military Resistance as moral heroes of the anti-Nazi struggle and with the heated indictment against them as insufficiently anti-Nazi.

 

One of the loyalties of the German military officer caste was to their political leaders.  This included the Nazi regime but, for some officers, these early bonds began to weaken because of their professional disagreements with Hitler’s security bodies (the SS and the Gestapo), personal grievances and career marginalisation, or strategic policy differences over the scope and timing, but not the aims, of a war drive for territorial expansion which they supported in principle.

 

There was usually a major trigger which turned growing dissent into a dramatic break with the regime.  This could be one violent Nazi outrage too many such as anti-Jewish pogroms or the persecution of non-conformist clergy (all the conspirators held deeply religious beliefs) in Germany, or SS atrocities against Jews, civilians and Russian POWs on the eastern front (which the resisters-in-waiting saw as bringing dishonour on the Wehrmacht).

 

For example, the best known of the military rebels, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic officer and Nazi loyalist who organised Operation Valkyrie, the resisters’ final, and fateful, assassination and coup attempt, had his Damascene anti-Nazi conversion in response to the SS mobile death squads (Einsatzgruppen) which slaughtered eastern front civilian Jews wholesale.

 

The resisters might have at one stage agreed with many Nazi principles but their opposition to their violent implementation eventually revealed the inseparability of the conception and execution of Nazi philosophy, and a network of military dissidents cohered around their opposition to Hitler’s war crimes and military follies. 

 

The resisters came from the top levels of the army (including Generals), military intelligence, even the Gestapo itself.  These closet anti-Nazis led a nerve-wracking double life inside Hitler’s war machine, plotting to arrest or kill Hitler and his top political lieutenants.  Some were able to save prominent individual Jews from the Holocaust.

 

Their civilian wing came from the domestic civil service bureaucracy and the foreign ministry, whilst they also reached out to a broader popular support base for post-coup legitimacy.  They planned a Nazi-free Germany in concert with the centre-left politicians and trade union leaders of the SDP, who they slated for top posts in a post-coup government installed by the military.  Despite the resisters, in nearly all cases, being strongly anti-communist, they even made overtures to the political and paramilitary underground of what was left of the German Communist Party.

 

The failure of Stauffenberg’s Operation Valkyrie resulted in the crushing of the military resistance.   Almost every member was arrested, tortured and executed (unless they beat the Gestapo to it through suicide).  The most prominent leaders were hanged with piano wire from meat-hooks to maximise their humiliation and degradation.

 

The resisters paid with their lives in an attempt to save millions of others.  This, says Orbach, qualifies them as heroes.  Their anti-Nazi moral integrity, however, is heavy with enough caveats to not rule out that, had they succeeded, they may have had recidivist relapses into quasi-authoritarian rule-by-elites with overtones of a Nazism they had been supportive of in their early careers.   Their self-sacrificing, and profoundly tragic, fate, however, indicates that an anti-Nazi moral redemption is at least as likely a legacy for those German military rebels who took up arms against Hitler.

THE BILLIONAIRES’ CLUB: The Unstoppable Rise of Football’s Super-Rich Owners, JAMES MONTAGUE

THE BILLIONAIRES’ CLUB: The Unstoppable Rise of Football’s Super-Rich Owners

JAMES MONTAGUE

Bloomsbury, 2017, 330 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

At this stage of the 2017 English Premier League (EPL) season, it looks like either of the two Manchester teams to win the championship - and with barely a Mancunian between them.  Both Man United and Man City have overseas owners, overseas managers and overseas-dominated player lists.  The same foreign flavour emanates from most of the clubs in the elite competition – whilst only thirteen imports in the whole of the competition took to the field on day one of the season just 25 years ago, now 67% of players (and 69% of managers) are from overseas.

What the EPL clubs also share, not coincidentally, is wealth, loads of it – billionaires own the clubs, millionaires coach them and highly-paid players pull on the jersey.  What, asks the British journalist, James Montague, in The Billionaires’ Club: The Unstoppable Rise of Football’s Super-Rich Owners, has happened to this quintessentially English working class game of yore?

Big Global Money, that’s what.  Rampant capitalist globalisation has opened up an international footballing meat market, turning the people’s game into a plaything of international profiteers.

The pivotal year was 2003, when Chelsea, whose EPL existence was threatened by a large debt burden, was purchased by the Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich.  This shady businessman had graduated from minor ventures like rubber duck salesman (under Soviet President Gorbachev’s free market reforms) to staggering wealth from the liquidation sale of state assets at massively discounted prices to the most corrupt, greedy and politically-connected new money kings of post-Soviet Russia.  Abramovich had scored a spectacular goal in picking up one of Russia’s largest oil companies for just 2% of its true, three billion dollar, value and he used this windfall to finance his Chelsea vanity project.

Abramovich has since splurged north of £2 billion on top quality international players, and the silverware has duly followed.  Other EPL clubs have had to join the new financial arms race or die i.e. face relegation and the loss of their coveted slice of the EPL’s billion-pound broadcasting deals.

No longer can talented local lads take to a pitch which is now reserved for players with wage packets of up to £200,000 a game in a ridiculously overpriced global player transfer market.  No longer can ownership rest with the “local businessman made good” (Man U was once owned by a local butcher) or even with millionaires; only the super-rich can now cut it – billionaires have bought outright, or own controlling shares in, fifteen of the twenty EPL teams.

The ethical price ticket of this money invasion is steep.  Abramovich, for example, is from a long line of Kremlin-favoured business cronies with financially hazy pasts.  Other fiscal felons from the global kleptocracy have embraced the world’s most popular sport for the sparkling distraction it provides from the financial and humanitarian crimes of the game’s new owners.

The former Thai Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, for example, bought a majority stake, illegally using state funds, in Man City in 2007 to perfume his shonky human rights and corruption record.  When a military coup ousted him from office and froze his liquid assets the following year, Shinawatra was forced to sell his footballing holdings but the ethical fog did not lift, however, as Man City’s new buyer was Sheik Mansour al Nahyan of the autocratic monarchy which rules Abu Dhabi, the biggest emirate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (which also owns Melbourne City in Australia’s A-League).

The UAE’s grotesque wealth rests on massive oil deposits, a brutal state security apparatus, the outlawing of strikes and severe exploitation of the Asian migrant workers who build the leisured elite’s air-conditioned skyscrapers, malls and airports in 50 degree heat.  In 2004 alone, the embassies of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh sent 880 of their construction worker citizens back home in body bags.  The price of a prestige English football club is a small overhead willingly incurred by the UAE business-royals to help cover up their failings in labour relations and democracy.

Qatar’s Middle East despots, too, are anti-democrats and migrant-abusers who know the image-cleansing and profit-protecting value of sport, including their (corrupt) purchase of the 2022 World Cup hosting rights, their sponsorship of some of the biggest clubs and competitions in Europe, the naming rights of Arsenal’s new stadium, and the acquisition of French power club, Paris-St Germain, an “asset just like any other” on the state-run Qatari Investment Authority’s books (alongside Sainsbury’s, Harrods, Barclays Bank, Volkswagen, Porsche and Miramax).  Qatar Airways, the state airline which bans unions and sacks women cabin crew on pregnancy, is prominent in the fiefdom’s football outreach.

In the US, of course, the profit motive (well-honed in their domestic basketball, gridiron and baseball competitions) is central - the American owner of Man United (the property magnate, Malcolm Glazer) sees football as a pure “entertainment product” for commercial exploitation through advertising, television broadcast subscriptions, ticket prices and merchandising.

The fabulously wealthy elite of China, on the other hand, has to mix profit with politics (party approval at home and ‘soft power’ abroad) through its football investments.  A Chinese lighting manufacturer (which also owns the Newcastle Jets in Australia), for example, signed a sponsorship deal with Portugal’s’ second division which required the top ten clubs to include at least one Chinese player.  Meanwhile, to the background of the English and Chinese political leaders’ mutual celebration of Sino-Anglo trade and investment ties, a Chinese media mogul’s wise acquisition of a stake in Man City and a seat on its board paid promotional political dividends in China by procuring one of the rare slots (there are only 36 of them) in the English Football Association’s Hall of Fame for Man City’s Sun Jihai, a name not quite on par with fellow famers like George Best, Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton.

It is not just the foreign rich who have compromised ethics.  The British billionaire owner of Newcastle United, for example, is a sportswear retailer whose mega-wealth rests partly on a workforce exploited through zero-hours labour contracts and sub-minimum wages.  A British steel mogul is an industrial-scale tax evader whose state-supplemented player shopping spree included the goal-scoring metronome, Alan Shearer, to take the unlikely Blackburn Rovers to league championship glory in 1995.

The money culture of football matters in many detrimental ways.  Apart from the moral stain of an ownership wealth tainted by thievery and exploitation, the hegemony of money corrupts fairness through the ‘financial doping’ of teams to win titles and it concentrates success amongst the few, predictable, glamour teams.

Serious lucre also tampers with cherished football traditions, whether that be though altering traditional strips, colours and logos, or covert plans for a breakaway European-wide competition restricted to a qualification-exempt and relegation-proof elite of ‘legacy’ clubs, a mooted competition that avoids the risks to their rich owner’s investments from missing out on the existing pan-European competition.

Although Montague doesn’t address the deeper issue with the capitalist commodification of football - players as production inputs, the sport a media product, all run for profit – most detrimental is the disenfranchisement of local players and fans from a community connection.  Cheering on the heft of the owner’s wallet and celebrating the international managers’ and players’ monetary valuations is hollow compared to barracking for a team that has an authentic grass-roots identity.

Montague takes some heart from supporter ownership of football clubs (AFC Wimbledon, Exeter City, Portsmouth) but this model is feasible only in the lower, cheaper Divisions, and even these people power football roots are fragile – Pompey’s rank-and-file (2,500 supporters with £1,000 shares each) yielded to the temptation for higher league honours and sold to a former Disney CEO.

In 21st century capitalism, football always seems to be an away game played on Big Money’s home turf.  Still, there’s always next week, or next season, and upsets against the odds do happen, not just in the weekend kickaround but in the war between the classes as well.  It’s all to play for.

THE LAST OF THE TSARS Robert Service

THE LAST OF THE TSARS: Nicholas 11 and the Russian Revolution

ROBERT SERVICE

Macmillan, 2017, 382 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

At Tsarskoe Selo, the Romanov monarchy’s palatial rural retreat where the former ‘Tsar of all Russia’, Nicholas 11, was detained after being forced to abdicate by the February 1917 revolution, the once all-powerful autocrat found much to get annoyed about.  In particular, Nicholas disliked the military bands which serenaded him with rousing renditions of the anthem of liberation, The Marseillaise, and, with black humour, Chopin’s Funeral March. 

In The Last of the Tsars, Oxford University history professor, Robert Service, recounts how the Tsar’s guards had lost all deference towards their former ruler, refusing to shake hands with someone who, during his reign, had refused to take theirs when they had beseeched the ‘Little Father’ for help when respectfully protesting their democratic and economic impoverishment only to find the reform-shy Nicholas ordering his troops to open fire on them.  Poor Nicholas, always hopelessly out of touch with the lives and the hopes of his subjects, found their handshake rebuff “bewildering and painful”. 

As the anti-Tsarist February revolution gave way to the socialist October revolution, Nicholas became increasingly aggrieved as the relative luxury and indulgence during his detention relocations to Siberia and finally to Ekaterinburg (the capital of the Urals region) was replaced by more austerity, including the removal of pudding from his three-course evening meal (at a time when the lack of sugar was the least of his fellow citizens’ material hardships). 

Citizen Romanov was also to be held accountable for his criminal past.  The Bolshevik-dominated Council of People’s Commissars (equivalent to our parliamentary Cabinet) resolved to bring Nicholas to trial in Moscow when the crises afflicting revolutionary Russia (blockade, invasion, civil war, famine) allowed.  Service, an inveterate anti-Bolshevik,  instinctively calls the proposed trial a “show trial”, conveniently reading back into the pre-Stalin era the judicial terror of late-1930s Stalinism. 

The trial option receded, however, as monarchist rescue plots were hatched in conjunction with counter-revolutionary ‘White’ armies which made sweeping territorial gains.  It was the swift advance of the ‘Czechoslovak Legion of ex-POWs’ into the Urals which sealed the Romanovs’ fate.  Unable to evacuate their prisoners from Ekaterinburg, the Urals Bolshevik leadership resolved to execute the Romanovs.  They sought Moscow’s sanction before carrying out the decision but it never came as time ran out.

This is where Service gets to his main, and usual, business – conducting his own show trial of socialist revolution and the Bolsheviks in general and Lenin in particular.  Despite his laborious investigations, however, Service finds no gun still smoking in Lenin’s hand.  Forced to concede that “no unequivocal sanction” to proceed with the execution was given by Lenin, that there is “still no verification” and that “documentation is slender about Lenin’s culpability”, Service is forced to resort to the generalisation of the “bloodthirsty tirades” of Lenin “creating and endorsing an environment of violence”, a “climate of opinion” which made murder a Bolshevik political principle as they delivered “catastrophe” and mass terror to Russia.  

Service allows no mitigating circumstances in his prosecution of the Bolsheviks.  He does not admit any military exigencies which confronted revolutionary Russia with the threat of violent extinction and forced extreme and peremptory measures in response.  Any context that might explain Lenin’s advocacy for harsh treatment of the revolution’s key enemies is disallowed, such as the Bolsheviks’ extraordinary early generosity to the counter-revolutionary Tsarist Generals which was ruthlessly returned with artillery, bullet, pogrom and mass executions. 

Another historical sleight-of-hand by Service is his focus on the Tsar’s captivity.  More as an ironic chuckle about the jailer becoming the jailed, Service briefly acknowledges (it gets one sentence in a 400-page book) that popular hostility to Nicholas existed because he had “despatched thousands of political prisoners” to forced labour, imprisonment, exile or execution. 

There is, however, no detail given to explain the Tsar’s nicknames of ‘Nicholas the Bloody’ or ‘Hangman Nicholas’, no political indictment of the rabid anti-Semite, anti-democrat and reactionary nationalist who had spilled the blood of millions of Russians in disastrous wars and who ran a police state relying on repression and censorship to keep order. 

There is no recognition by Service that, for the year and a half of the Tsar’s detention, all that stood between the deposed tyrant and a vengeful people was the top leadership of the ‘murderous’ Bolshevik Party.  Instead, the end-game takes centre stage starring an almost innocuous Nicholas as victim and the Bolsheviks as the perps. 

Nevertheless, Service still convicts Lenin, not Nicholas, of political immorality.  Although Service can’t quite pin the Tsar’s execution on the revolution’s top dog, it seems that anti-socialist fervour, including amongst establishment Oxford dons, will suffice to trump scholarly history.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF FIFA David Conn

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF FIFA
DAVID CONN
Yellow Jersey Press, 2017, 328 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

In no breast did the prodigious financial corruption of world football’s administrative elite beat more vigorously than that of Chuck Blazer, the head of football in the north and central American and Caribbean regional body.  Chuck was not called ‘American soccer’s “Mr. Big”’ for nothing – his bottomless appetite for high-calorie nosh gave him a gargantuan girth, which was financially matched in size by his tax-sheltered bank accounts which bulged with millions of dollars received through fraud, embezzlement, bribes, perks, gifts and inducements, so much so that not only could he afford to rent an entire floor of luxury apartments in the prestigious Trump Tower in Manhattan but to preserve one of them solely for the use of his cats.

The cat angle is just one of the juicy tidbits from The Fall of the House of FIFA by Guardian sports journalist (and Manchester City fan), David Conn, to add to what is by now a widely-known story of how global football’s governing body, Fifa, has personally enriched its leading lights through bribes and material inducements to vote for Fifa’s top office-holders and World Cup venues, and kickbacks to award broadcast and sponsorship rights.
Fifa’s off-field corruption scandals have now been exposed to such an extent that criminal indictments, arrests or investigations have grown to take in 27 of Fifa’s most senior global administrators, whilst six other Fifa officials (including the Fifa boss of four decades, Sepp Blatter) have been sacked for ethics violations.
The FBI has declared Fifa to be a RICO, a ‘racketeering-influenced criminal organisation’, and, like another notorious RICO, the Mafia, the Fifa rot started at the top.  Blatter had, like a true Godfather, kept a ‘clean-hands’ image, turning a blind eye to the graft of his lieutenants in order to guarantee, at election time, his own prestigious position (he craved the title of ‘Mr. President’) through keeping the Fifa financial gravy train well-fuelled for its executive passengers.  Blatter was also able to eschew personal crude corruption, such as cash bribes in brown envelopes, because of the dizzying scale of the Fifa President’s multi-million dollar annual salary and bonuses, and four-yearly World Cup ‘performance pay’ reward.
The final act of Fifa’s unravelling was prompted by the credulity-stretching decision in 2010 to award the 2022 World Cup to the tiny desert state of Qatar to be held in the sweltering summer.  Russia, which won the 2018 World Cup hosting rights at the same time, thoughtfully decided to destroy all computers and other documentary traces that might contain evidence of massive corruption concerning their bid, too.
The ’reform’ broom of the new Fifa President, Gianni Infantino, looks to have many gaps, however.  He enjoys the perks of the job and its reduced but still generous remuneration, whilst he has compromised the independence of Fifa’s refurbished oversight committees.  When Infantino came under early suspicion for ethical misbehaviour as President, Fifa’s new ethics body cleared him, rather unsurprisingly for a committee whose members can be sacked by the very people they are investigating.
Unfortunately, Conn spends most of his book navigating the intricate maze of FIFA corruption, too rarely lifting his eyes to take in the bigger picture – how capitalist globalisation has infected the world game by monetising sport, making profit its main guiding principle and rewarding an unaccountable stratum of top administrators (and grossly overpaid elite players and coaches) whilst starving football’s mass grass roots.  The problem with Fifa, like that of capitalism, is the familiar one of too much money and not enough democracy.

CARDINAL: The Rise and Fall of George Pell LOUISE MILLIGAN

CARDINAL: The Rise and Fall of George Pell

LOUISE MILLIGAN

Melbourne University Press, 2017, 384 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

The Vatican Treasurer, George Pell, could well turn out to be the Lance Armstrong of the Australian Catholic Church.  Like the world’s former top cyclist, who furiously denied being a drug cheat until he was eventually rumbled by dogged investigative journalists, Pell, Australia’s top Catholic, has maintained his complete innocence in the face of credible and mounting allegations that he not only covered up an epidemic of clerical sexual abuse of children by Australian Catholic priests but was himself a paedophile abuser.  The ABC’s Louise Milligan has been on Pell’s case for a while now and Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell zeroes in on the fire causing all the smoke which surrounds Pell.

 

Pell, born in Ballarat in 1941, rose through Catholic seminaries and presbyteries which were hotspots for turning out paedophile priests.  He became Archbishop of Melbourne and then, in 2014, the Vatican’s No. 2 in Rome but Pell left a ruinous path of personal destruction (depression, substance abuse, suicide) in his holy wake.  If only, whilst at priest school, Pell had taken up the contract offered by Richmond Football Club to play as a ruckman for the Tigers, then a lot of people might have been spared a lot of grief (other than opposition footy players who would have discovered just how bruising the intimidating Catholic conservative hard-liner could be).

 

Whilst insisting he never had any idea what was going on under his leadership, Pell had stopped priests from speaking out about their peer’s sexual crimes and he was actively involved in moving offenders on to new parishes to re-offend all over again.

 

As public allegations of clerical abuse continued to grow, however, the Church turned to Pell, highly regarded by church leaders as an able administrator, to save the Church in Victoria from reputational and financial damage.  Pell instituted an in-house scheme which, in return for the victims’ legally-enforceable silence, paid them a paltry average of $32,000 in compensation as hush money.  This saved the Church not only too great an outlay on Pell’s $20,000-a-day defence silks, but many hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from civil suits in civilian courts.

 

Despite Pell’s labours, however, the scale of the abuse eventually came to light through a Royal Commission which had been prompted by police whistleblowers.  The Commission’s statistics were shocking - between 1950 and 2010, there were 4,444 incidents of child sexual abuse made against 1,880 priests (7% of Australian Catholic priests).  Pell’s diocese of Melbourne topped the national body count.

 

Subsequent to these revelations, Pell himself came under suspicion of being an abuser.  Milligan was central to documenting some of the alleged cases concerning Pell from his time as trainee priest to becoming Archbishop.  These included the genital groping of an altar boy at a Church camp on Phillip Island; the groping of Catholic primary school boys in Ballarat’s Eureka Pool and full-frontal exposure in the showers afterwards; indecent exposure to young surf lifesavers in the change rooms at Torquay surf club; and oral sex with choirboys in St. Patrick’s Church.

 

Pell, tipped off about a police investigation into these allegations, decided that the Vatican, which has no extradition agreement with Australia, was a safer place to be.  Further preventing Pell from flying back to Australia is a sudden-onset heart condition - medically certified by the Vatican house physician whose bag of scientific tricks includes the authentication of miracles by aspirant saints.

 

Pell is now 76 – “how long before he reaches ‘I don’t recall’ territory”, says an unimpressed Milligan.  In February 2017, a Greens motion calling on Pell to voluntarily return and assist the police investigation was passed by the federal Senate.  Pell scorned it as a ‘political stunt’.

 

The post-Pell Catholic hierarchy in Australia is now saying all the right things and displaying all the right emotions on the Church’s child abuse but, unless there is a full accounting of its past, all the way up to the former Archbishop himself, including bringing him back from his Vatican bolt-hole, then it could all just be an image management exercise.  To the victims, the refurbished rhetoric may be “as hollow as all the holy lectures they received as children, all the while that they were being raped in presbyteries, touched up in confessionals” - or flashed at, groped by and giving fellatio to Pell.

 

This hypocrisy is of a piece with what the Catholic Church (and other institutional religions) share with their capitalist (and other class society) hosts - immense power, vast wealth and a boundless waste dump stuffed full with the human wreckage inflicted by an unaccountable elite.

OCTOBER: The Story of the Russian Revolution CHINA MIEVILLE

OCTOBER: The Story of the Russian Revolution
CHINA MIÉVILLE
Verso, 2017, 369 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

1917 offered an extraordinary course in political literacy for the people of Russia.  In the February anti-Tsarist revolution, which “dispensed breakneck with a half millennium of autocratic rule”, and then in the October socialist revolution, eager workers and peasants stumbled over and then mastered a new way to speak of economic and political democracy, writes China Miéville in his narrative of the Russian Revolution.

Miéville is an English left-wing political activist and award-winning writer of fantasy fiction and magical realism, which he self-describes as ‘weird’ fiction.  The only thing ‘weird’ about 1917, however, at least by todays’ establishment political orthodoxy, is the notion that ordinary people can utterly recast their society and bring about momentous change.  They can confront the apparently immovable object of capitalist solidity – and win!  As Miéville says, the world’s first socialist revolution matters, and deserves celebration, because “things changed once, and they might do so again”.

Miéville has a novelist’s eye for a great story, and his breathless, journalistic narrative befits the dizzying pace and political drama of revolutionary upheaval, combining an impressionistic flurry of events with sparkling political tension.  Miniature character portraits humanise the legendary cast.  Lenin is a “plain not sparkling wordsmith” but his relentless political focus is “mesmerising” to friend and foe alike.  Trotsky is “hard to love but impossible not to admire … charismatic and abrasive, brilliant and persuasive, and divisive and difficult”.  The early Stalin is “a capable, if never scintillating, organiser.  At best an adequate intellectual, at worst an embarrassing one … The impression he left was one of not leaving much of an impression”, other than of something ‘troubling’ in his character.

The sweep of Miéville’s story takes in not just high politics but its grass-roots ferment, where “every queue was a political forum”, where waitresses refused to accept tips as demeaning, and where Tsarist statues were keenly pulled down, “some having been erected for the sole purpose of pulling down”.  There was a glorious profusion of hyphenated political life-forms (Anarchist-Communists, Socialist-Revolutionary-Maximalists, etc.) on the left, outshining the main political species to their bourgeois and landowning right, the Constitutional Democrats, whose name was as drab as their political vision.
Miéville explores all sorts of by-ways, including religion, that were lapped by the waves of socialist radicalism.  Muslim women, for example, found their voice – an All-Russian Muslim Women’s Congress hosted 59 delegates (including socialist and feminist Muslims) who adopted ten principles on Muslim women’s rights, including equality of the sexes, the non-compulsory nature of the hijab, and opposition to plural marriage (polygyny) without consent.
Lenin looms ever larger as the pace of events picks up, deservedly so because political leadership mattered immensely.  Miéville notes that Lenin is “easily mythologised, idolised or demonised” either as a “mass murdering monster” or a “godlike genius”.  Miéville’s Lenin, by contrast, is credible.  He was a selfless idealist but with all-too-human flaws (he was a fierce, sometimes insensitive, polemicist with his erstwhile comrades).  An intellectual who didn’t just think about but lived for the hurly burly of revolution, Lenin was utterly determined (what his detractors misrepresent as fanatical) yet tactically flexible and strategically subtle, astutely judging when “the political moment” called for “patiently explaining” or for bold action, and when to toss overboard long-held Marxist verities (such as no socialism until consolidation of capitalist industrial development) – when, in short, to be, as he put it, ‘as radical as reality’.
What also emerges strikingly from Miéville’s account is the indispensability of democracy to Lenin’s politics, to the rest of the pre-Stalin Bolsheviks and to the revolution.  From farm to factory, from soviet to party leadership, debate was boisterous, intense, heated at times, but always meaningful and prized.  Lenin, the supposed proto-Stalinist tyrant,  copped as good as he gave when it came to verbal jousts with his comrades, and more than a few times found himself in a minority in the party, and sometimes a minority of one on the Bolshevik Central Committee.
Miéville’s book is an amalgam of the journalistic, historical and biographical accounts of the revolution by Leon Trotsky, Victor Serge, John Reed and Isaac Deutscher but Miéville loses little in artistic comparison, and cedes nothing in revolutionary tone, to these writers who are clearly his strong political and stylistic influences.
Miéville’s aim in the book was always storytelling first, however, and, more than do his literary mentors, he foregrounds the theatre of revolt over the theory of revolution.  In his Epilogue, however, he offers updated reflections on how “October is still ground zero for arguments about fundamental, radical social change”.  All that the Right has to offer on this is some repeat-loop version of the malignity of socialism and its inevitable authoritarian slide into Red Terror because Marx begat Lenin begat Stalin, etc.
Miéville is much more honest and nuanced about how the post-revolution “moral and political rot” set in.  The basic cause, he says, was the devastating loss of material and human resources from imperialist war, imperialist invasion, imperialist economic blockade, imperialist-backed civil war, and, above all else, socialist Russia’s isolation arising from the post-war failure of revolution (viciously suppressed in Germany) in capitalist Europe.  These conditions fertilised the soil for what were, in the beleaguered times, unavoidable but meant-to-be-temporary retreats from a socialist democracy and economy.  The emergency reversals in policy gradually hardened into virtues under Stalin, who groomed a new generation of politically undeveloped party members into a privileged bureaucratic stratum.  A political diet as rich as it was in democracy and ideals and hope in 1917 could never sustain a healthy socialist development which lacked basic material nutrients.
What the anti-socialist warriors, then and now, can never concede is that Lenin’s Bolsheviks won the battle of ideas in 1917, in Pravda editorial, conference resolution, street pamphlet and stump speech.  The revolution was not a contest of military force and political coup played out over the people’s heads but a successful fight to win over people through debate.
The haters of socialist revolution may still be partying over the death of a socialism which they declare was manifested in the nauseous fever of Stalin and the long coma under his neo-Stalinist successors, but their celebrations are always at risk of being cut short.  The socialist idea is too resilient and that is why the Russian Revolution matters, Melville concludes, because “what’s at stake isn’t the interpretation just of history but of the present”, as he has noted elsewhere about the “extraordinary political upsets” and near misses, for better or worse (BREXIT, Corbyn, Sanders, Trump), in 2016 when “the questioning of received opinions” erupted.  1917 may have been “ultimately tragic” but it remains “ultimately inspiring” for those who want such revolts to break in the better direction.