WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University by RICHARD HIL

WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University
RICHARD HIL
NewSouth Publishing, 2012, 239 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Universities were better in the olden days, says Dr. Richard Hil in Whackademia.  As an Essex University student in the 1970s, Hil joined the Socialist Workers Party (which expanded his political horizons) and the Campaign for Real Ale (which expanded his waistline) whilst his lecturers stimulated his intellectual growth.  With 25 years behind him as an academic in Australian universities, however, he has seen the excitement of higher education stifled by corporatisation and its business model which treats education as a commodity to be sold, a degree as a “passport to a business career”.

The market assault on higher education in Australia was begun by the federal Labor government in the 1980s under the guise of ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ and as an attack on ‘elitism’ and a sheltered workshop of pampered scholars who were not paying their way in Australia’s capitalist economy.

Under Labor’s ‘reformers’, the university workplace was redefined by the values of “economic rationalism, commercialisation, managerialism, corporate governance and other outgrowths of neo-liberalism”, says Hil.  Bureaucracy and corporate jargon dominate - all the crud of Key Performance Indicators, performance reviews, ‘quality assurance’, marketing and promotions, and micro-management of academics presided over by all-powerful corporate managers.

In a context of declining government funding, universities search for revenue streams, the most lucrative being full-fee-paying overseas students, whilst entry requirements for domestic students are eased and ‘soft-marking’ and ‘soft assessment’, especially for the semi-literate, compromise quality in the quest to reduce drop-out rates and keep the university’s market share of students, and their dollars, up.

The transformation of universities from places of intellectual passion into dull commercial enterprises designed to serve industry has seen the economic imperatives of the capitalist economy determine which courses survive.  As universities become managed by the corporation for the corporation, the curriculum increasingly suits vocational, market-oriented ends.

As the Business Council of Australia higher education spokesperson and accountant at one of Australia’s largest accountancy firms, demanding a lock-step customer-supplier business ethos, succinctly put it, “I am your major customer – I take 750 of your product each year”.  The liberal arts, especially, are on the endangered list unless they can be tethered to the ‘creative industries’ of visual design, media, publishing and advertising.

For Australia’s 120,000 academics, they have become cogs in a grinding knowledge machine.  Research has become a distant dream as class sizes expand, bureaucratic monitoring and reporting dogs every day and an administrative burden flourishes.  Academics are “overworked, burnt out, not coping, running out of energy, stressed out, not sleeping, and plain knackered”.  The 67,000 casual teachers have the bonus of poor job security.  Meanwhile, like other corporate CEOs, Vice-Chancellors prosper, soaring into the million dollar salary atmosphere.

Hil argues for a return to a university of community, collegiality, fun, soul, interest and delight.  To a republic of ideas and debate where critical thinking and clear communication matter most.  To education for active citizenship in a vibrant democracy.  To a campus that is “critic and conscience” of capitalist society’s unjust status quo.

Academics, like cats, are difficult to herd but, starved of sustenance by government budgets, sedated by forms and tranquilised by bureaucracy, there has been regrettable success in disciplining them.  As Hil’s entertaining book shows, however, there is a way out beyond just complaint – activism, small and large, for education as intellectual discovery, for education for social change.

EUREKA: The Unfinished Revolution by PETER FITZSIMONS; and EUREKA STOCKADE: A Ferocious and Bloody Battle by GREGORY BLAKE

EUREKA: The Unfinished Revolution
PETER FITZSIMONS
William Heinemann, 2012, 696 pages, $49.95 (hb)

EUREKA STOCKADE: A Ferocious and Bloody Battle

GREGORY BLAKE
Big Sky Publishing, 2012, 249 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Labor’s Foreign Minister and history buff, Bob Carr, has dismissed it as a ‘local tax revolt’ and the Liberal Party has stoutly ignored it but the political importance of the gold miners’ Eureka Stockade in 1854, the closest thing Australia has had to an armed insurrection, deserves more than the short shrift it gets from Australia’s politicians who are the beneficiaries of the democratic reforms won through armed struggle by working people, as two new books on Eureka by Gregory Blake and Peter Fitzsimons show.

The discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851 sucked half the male population of the British colony away from their city and farm jobs and, facing massive wage rises for those left, the squattocracy (the rural ruling class) and the urban capitalists got their colonial government to impose a tax, through a license fee, on the miners to, as Fitzsimons notes, force the diggers back to work for their proper masters.  The tax also pumped a handy £50,000 per month into the government itself, prompting one journalist to note that ‘the Government is the greatest Gold Digger after all’.

Exploited by a tax (paid in advance, gold or no gold), oppressed by police (“uniformed thugs with guns”, says Fitzsimons), chained like beasts to trees and logs if caught without a licence during digger-hunts, denied justice in corrupt courts, their grievances not listened to by government, the tinder was set.  The spark was the connivance of a bent coroner and magistrate in absolving a pub owner and mate from the murder of a miner, and the prosecution of three miners for arson when the pub was torched by angry miners.

When a 12,000-strong miners’ meeting protested by burning their licenses, government officials ordered a license-hunt by mounted police, this time with drawn swords, who arrested seven miners, and by newly-arrived British soldiers with fixed bayonets who fired on the miners.  Incandescent with fury that the government had abandoned all restraint, most miners switched from faith in deferential petitions and ‘moral persuasion’, taking to ‘physical force’ and erecting a defensive stockade on a small hillock called Eureka.

Politicised through English Chartists (working class political radicals), the armed miners united around a manifesto of demands for democratic reforms to Victoria’s parliament of the rich which was elected by just 4,000 propertied men of a total population of a quarter of a million.

Governors La Trobe and Hotham, writes Blake, feared this “conspiratorial democratic political agenda”.  The authoritarian Ballarat Goldfields Commissioner saw demands for the abolition of the license fee as ‘a mere cloak to cover a democratic revolution’, writing of the need to teach a ‘fearful lesson’ about the price of rebellion to any other Victorian democrats.  Hotham had been overheard, as he departed England, to say ‘a little blood-letting would not do the unruly gold-miners any harm’.

When least expecting it (naively thinking the authorities would respect the Sabbath), and consequently with only 120 miners in the stockade, the attack came on Sunday, 3 October, overwhelming the stockade in just twenty minutes.  Around 60 miners were killed, most, notes a rightly indignant Fitzgerald, after resistance had ceased - “the worst of the murderers, for that is what they have become, are the police”.

To justify what Fitzsimons calls its “killing frenzy”, the government tried 13 prisoners for High Treason but could not find a jury of common men willing to convict any of them, so strong was popular sympathy for the miners.  With Governor Hotham’s moral authority listing badly in a sea of popular outrage, Hotham was forced to give the miners reform rather than face revolution, conceding all their demands (abolition of the license fee, granting the miners’ a vote and wider male suffrage not long after).  To ease Hotham’s pain, his own Commission of Inquiry into Eureka also noted that the economic returns from increasingly difficult mining were less than the usual wages the miners could earn and that this would drive them back to their old jobs better than armed troopers.

Democracy, on bourgeois terms, also turned out to be not so bad as feared.  Peter Lalor, leader of the rebels, was elected (minus one arm lost in the battle) to parliament in 1856 where he spent three conservative decades as a Minister of the Crown and strike-breaking mine-owner opposing further democratisation.

Blake, alas, makes little of the politics of Eureka.  His turgid history dismisses the historical relevance and class conflict interpretation of Eureka as driven by the “rigid political ideology” of Marxism but lead-footed doctrine better describes Blake’s own history of Eureka.  It is a myth, Blake says, that poorly armed, “innocent gold miners” were confronted by a “tyrannical government” which “brutally slaughtered” them in a “fearsome massacre” and his aim is to redeem the government, police and soldiers in an “affirmation of Australian nationhood” through Eureka.

Ultimate government responsibility for crushing the revolt was, pleads Blake, a “necessity” when faced with insurrection.  Government officials were poor, helpless cogs in a war dynamic when faced with a political challenge to their rightful authority, whilst the police have been victims of unwarranted “prejudice and vilification”.  The blood-lust behaviour of the soldiers (such as repeated use of the bayonet on the wounded) was “perfectly consistent” with what an army has to do against an “insurgency”.  Blake’s swooning over gun calibres and associated militaria betrays his intention of normalising Australia’s war brutalities.

As for the miners, says Blake, they have been romanticised as underdog heroes.  They brought on their  own heads the state’s military response by aggressively arming for war with guns aplenty and a sturdy fortress.  Fitzsimons shows, however, that the stockade was “a long way from impregnable” and that the rebels’ guns, pikes and theatrical sword props faced a “devastating” firepower disadvantage from the  276 well-armed attackers, including cavalry, with 200 in reserve and 850 more, plus artillery, on the way.

Fitzsimons is not ideologically hamstrung by Blake’s revisionist militarist nationalism although he does share the limitations of the nationalist analytical framework, promoting Eureka, along with the Anzacs at Gallipoli, as part of the ‘birth of a nation’ through bloodletting.

Eureka, in Fitzsimons’ telling, is much more than Blake’s narrow “history of a battle” – it is the history of class struggle.  The conservative columnist, Gerard Henderson, as noted by Fitzsimons, has lauded Eureka as a rising by small businessmen ‘against iniquitous taxes and over-regulation that was stifling their creation of wealth’ but this, whilst technically correct (the miners were independent, petit-bourgeois producers in economic competition with their claim-jumping rivals), misses the point.  The miners united, by manifesto and arms, for economic justice and democratic political rights, as have slave, peasant, national liberation and proletarian rebels, a political process of universal relevance to all oppressed and exploited classes, not just Henderson’s self-employed, small-time capitalists.

Fitzsimons wants his book to be “read like a novel” and this is how it is best read – for the artistic flavour of the drama of a stirring political rebellion by flawed but passionate common people against the power of the privileged.  As Mark Twain put it, Eureka is the ‘finest thing in Australasian history.  It was a revolution … a strike for liberty … a stand against injustice and oppression ... a victory won by a lost battle’.

THE PRICE OF VALOUR: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Gallipoli Hero, Hugo Throssell, VC by JOHN HAMILTON

THE PRICE OF VALOUR: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Gallipoli Hero, Hugo Throssell, VC
JOHN HAMILTON
Pan Macmillan, 2012, 393 pages , $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Stunning his home-town audience of patriotic Australians in 1919 with his statement that ‘the war has made me a Socialist’, Captain Hugo Throssell, one of nine Australian soldiers to win a Victoria Cross for supreme bravery at Gallipoli in 1915, made headlines, and enemies, on the anniversary of the signing of the Allies’ World War 1 peace treaty with Germany, says John Hamilton in his biography of Throssell.

The civic authorities of the town of Northam in Western Australia listened with increasing disbelief as Northam’s own war hero went on to denounce war for enriching armaments makers, war profiteers and rival national capitalist classes in their competition for territory, markets, resources and profits.

Throssell, the privileged son of a conservative State Premier,  had married Katherine Susannah Prichard, the journalist and feminist who went on to fame as a novelist and founder of the Communist Party of Australia.

Throssell, the dashing cavalry officer, who, in the first flush of battle, wrote how it was ‘most glorious’ to see a bayonet charge and what a ‘wonderful thing’ it was to see men running through an artillery bombardment, had become war-weary and disillusioned after seeing his mates killed and after suffering severe mental injury himself.

With what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, Throssell’s days were filled with nervousness and headaches (he had taken a head wound) and his nights were tortured into sleeplessness by what he had seen at Gallipoli and by the death of his brother who had signed up with Hugo in the belief that war was a thrilling adventure.

Prichard’s communism, and her profound love for a handsome, vital, selfless man, helped Throssell make sense of his ghastly war experiences.  Reading Engels may not have been easy – ‘Hell, girl, what the blazes does this mean?’, he would holler – but ‘usually our political discussions ended in love-making’, wrote Prichard.  Throssell, without becoming a party member, accepted Prichard’s political views as his own.

Australia’s political police put Throssell’s radicalisation down to ‘his wife’s influence’, or ‘his mind perhaps having been affected’ by the cerebro-spinal meningitis he contracted during the war.  Throssell’s biographer hedges his bets, saying it is possible that the brain injury Throssell received from a botched, war-time sinus operation made him “more vulnerable and easily influenced”.   Socialism, apparently, can only be understood as a psychological disorder, the product of a weakened mind.

Throssell, however, knew his own mind – on the back of his will he wrote ‘I have never recovered from my 1914-18 experiences’, shortly before committing suicide by his army pistol in 1933.  He also added an appeal that ‘my wife and child get the usual war pension’.  Owing £10,000 with just £10 in the bank, Throssell’s financial disasters during the economic Depression had been exacerbated, writes Hamilton, by his “enemies at work within the government” who helped ensure his economic projects were costly failures, and by conservatives in the Northam Returned Soldiers and Sailors League who got the government to remove Throssell from his job as soldiers’ representative on the government’s Discharged Soldiers’ Settlement Board.

The Repatriation Department added insult to tragedy by disputing the Coroner’s finding that Throssell’s war wounds were the cause of his suicide.  Prichard angrily defended her husband who ‘believed he would be ensuring a pension to me and my son by his last act.  I consider that his “grateful country” made it impossible for my husband to live.  He thought he had to die to provide for his wife and child’.

It was not until 1999 that a “modest memorial the size of a backyard barbecue” was erected to Throssell in Northam by his ‘grateful country’ whilst during the Depression, Throssell had been forced to try to pawn his Victoria Cross but was offered only 10 shillings for it – the ‘price of valour’ for a war hero who had, as his son, Ric, said later when donating Throssell’s medal to People for Nuclear Disarmament, ‘declared his commitment to peace’.

Throssell has not been well served by official history, nor by his biographer, Hamilton, whose conventional war narrative focuses on Throssell the warrior not the socialist and which includes a disapproval of Throssell’s decision to choose a patriotic occasion of military celebration to denounce war – “not the time nor place”, says Hamilton – but what better time or place could there be.  It took political courage and Throssell had just as much of that as he had bravery on the battlefield.

CLANDESTINE IN CHILE by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

CLANDESTINE IN CHILE: The Adventures of Miguel Littin

By GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
New York Review Books, 2012, 116 pages, $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

‘The most hated man in my life’, declared the casual-dressed, bearded, non-conformist Chilean film director, Miguel Littin, was the balding, near-sighted, clean-shaven, Uruguayan business tycoon who accompanied Littin’s every step on his secret return to the Chile of military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, in 1985. 

Littin’s true story, told to, and retold by, the Chilean novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, recounts how a false passport, voice coaching, weight loss, plucked eyebrows, new hair-do and ‘fake wife’ transformed Littin into ‘what I wanted least in the world to be: a smug bourgeois’, in order to disguise his re-entry to Chile to direct an underground documentary about the dictatorship.  Littin, a socialist who headed the pre-coup nationalised film industry, had only escaped execution during Pinochet’s coup through the help of a neutral military officer ‘who happened to be a film buff’.

Twelve years after the 1973 US-orchestrated coup, which assassinated the democratically-elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende, and installed Pinochet’s torture regime and a radical free market economic orthodoxy, Littin, one of five thousand permanently banned Chilean exiles, spent six risky weeks filming in Chile, protected by the Chilean underground, narrowly surviving exposure, his own carelessness with passwords, his impetuousness and being tailed by undercover police. 

Littin’s first impression on his return to Chile was one of ‘material splendour’ but the ‘ragged miners’, the poor of the slums, and the child beggars and unemployed peddlers in the shadows of the gay lights of Santiago revealed economic squalor.

So too, the apparent civilian calm – ‘armed policemen were more in evidence on the streets of Paris or New York’ – was deceptive.  Just out of visitors’ sights were the junta’s shock squads in the subway stations, water-cannon trucks on side streets and ‘secret’ police conspicuously present with their short-cropped hair.

This apparatus of repression, and a night curfew, kept many Chileans passive as individuals but collective protest and armed resistance were a daily occurrence.  From the general strike which preceded Littin’s arrival, to the protest hunger march he filmed.  From the poor woman who kept a photo of Allende hidden behind one of the Carmelite Virgin, to the Catholic nun who ran secret missions to and from Chile, including couriering the last reels of Littin’s film  to Europe.  From the young rebels who carried out innumerable ‘anonymous deeds’, to aristocratic Chileans in regime-fooling BMWs who saved Littin from sub-machine guns at roadblocks.

Littin found a supportive writer in Marquez, the novelist himself a friend of Allende, who had announced he would desist from writing as a protest against the coup until the Pinochet dictatorship had fallen.  This impractical gesture was rescinded in 1981 with Marquez’s novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which also marked a turn from the political to the personal in his writing, but, as Francisco Goldman notes in his introduction, Clandestine in Chile offered a chance for Marquez to stick one to the General.  Pinochet felt the blow and seized and burnt 15,000 copies of the book imported into the country.

The rest of Goldman’s introduction, however, is best avoided.  The professor of literature, a “post-revolutionary pessimist” embarrassed about his own radical political past of “idealism and naïve revolutionary dreams”, distorts the book as an illusory attempt by two ageing socialist has-beens to recapture the “political vigour, conviction and ardour” of their immature youth, an “absurdist” farce in which Littin and his film crews “never seem to be in any real danger” with Marquez pontificating as deluded propagandist for left-wing political “fanatics” such as Allende.  A different book entirely to the actual one about the genuine spirit of opposition to capitalist tyranny displayed by the quietly heroic Littin and Marquez.

RICHARD WRIGHT: The Life and Times by HAZEL ROWLEY

RICHARD WRIGHT: The Life and Times

By HAZEL ROWLEY
University of Chicago Press, 2012 (first published 2008), 626 pages, $38.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Despite being the first best-selling black writer in American literary history (with Native Son in 1940), Richard Wright found that ‘my being a rather well known writer did not help me any’ in lessening the prejudice he faced in the US.  His fame, in fact, so goaded some whites to put him more firmly in his racial place that he fled into voluntary exile to France from 1947.  Hazel Rowley’s masterful biography of Wright recreates the writer whose life and literature was marked by bigotry, violence and disillusion.

Born in 1908 in a wooden shack in Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of slaves, Wright had a stormy childhood, trapped by a puritanical Seventh Day Adventist religion, menial jobs working for ‘nigger’-taunting bosses, and the threat of violence.

Books and writing were his intellectual escape, and Chicago his geographical route out of “semi-feudal conditions in the rural south to the steel and stone grind of modern industrial capitalism” with its own special discrimination, magnified by the Great Depression.

Marxism became Wright’s university, through the Communist party-organised John Reed Club of proletarian artists and writers.  Wary at first, Wright found that communists were the only white people who showed sincere interest in black rights.  A member from 1932 to 1944, the Communist party was central to his life, though never an entirely smooth fit.  Although Wright loyally survived numerous twists and turns of Moscow-dominated political and literary policy, he was seen by hard-liners as an untrustworthy “wayward individualist”.

As Harlem correspondent in New York for the party’s Daily Worker,  he resented having to write propaganda and preferred to put his creativity into his novels.  Until now, he said, black writing had been  ‘the voice of the educated Negro pleading with white America for justice’, an approach he set out to exorcise through “urban toughness”, “graphic realism” and “emotional power”.  Native Son featured Bigger Thomas, a tough, bullying hoodlum, a rapist and murderer, the “angriest, most violent anti-hero ever to have appeared in black American literature”, says Rowley. 

Not all liberals, black or white, appreciated, or understood, where Bigger Thomas was coming from.  They lamented the novel’s lack of positive characters and absence of sympathetic white people.  Some of Wright’s party comrades were also ill-at-ease with his portrayal of Communists in the novel and they attacked the book with the Stalinist vitriol of the literary ideologue.  Wright lapsed from active membership in response.

His next book, American Hunger, took a bitter biographical tour of racism in the south and north, and also included a scathing attack on the Communist Party for its reaction to Native Son, for its slavish obedience to Moscow and for its hostility to ‘independent-minded individuals’.  There was some justice in his anti-communist broadside but also much unfairness - as Rowley notes, Wright’s “picture of the Communist Party was not balanced.  He wrote with the righteous anger of a betrayed lover”.

Whilst  Moscow was unsubtle about Wright’s defection (calling him a ‘renegade’ whose works display ‘ever-growing signs of the putrefaction common to American decadent literature’), the FBI salivated at the prospect of a Communist apostate who might prove useful for Cold War propaganda and as an informer.  However, given that another major factor for Wright’s break with the party was its downgrading of  the civil rights struggle in favour of the war effort during World War 11, the FBI rapidly cooled towards someone whose disagreement with the Communist Party was that it was ‘not revolutionary enough’, as an agent put it, ‘with respect to the advancement of the negro’.

Wright was never fully assimilated into the rest of the fold of prominent ex-communist intellectuals who contributed to the 1949 Cold War bible, The God That Failed, by British Labour MP, Richard Grossman.  Wright remained concerned about how anti-communism was being used to clamp down on civil liberties and free expression by radicals of any stripe or colour and he declined Grossman’s invitation to contribute to an updated book.

When State Department officials threatened their troublesome new anti-communist ally with a career-damaging show trial before Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, Wright vowed never to testify, and when he found out in 1960 that it was the CIA that was behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had co-opted Wright by funding and publishing him, he was pained that for years “he had in fact been a propaganda tool for the CIA”.

Wright died in mysterious circumstances in 1960, aged just 52.  Although speculation that the FBI or CIA were involved remains just that, the sudden absence of a talented writer who was a fervent critic of racism in the US was happily to the benefit of the capitalist secret police and their political masters.

Wright’s narrative power as a writer is well served by Rowley’s story-telling rhythm whilst her political assessment of Wright is judicious with only infrequent lapses when Wright’s communist decade is distorted through his unfairly negative, latter-day anti-communism.  In the end, though, even this ideological filter could not screen out the blot of racism from the American capitalist tapestry which Wright had portrayed with force and artistry.

BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History by FLORENCE WILLIAMS

BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History

By FLORENCE WILLIAMS
Text Publishing, 2012, 338 pages, $34.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The reason women have evolved breasts, says science journalist, Florence Williams, is for feeding and protecting the health of infants and not as sexual objects, the usual reason advanced in a field of science for so long dominated by breast-fancying men.  The natural history of the breast, however, is threatened by an unnaturally toxic world.

Breast milk, for example, contains a suite of industrial additives, many of them known or probable carcinogens, never meant to be ingested by mothers or passed onto their infants.  These include flame-retardants, perchlorate (a jet-fuel ingredient), DDT, polychlorinated biphenyls (industrial solvents), mercury, lead, benzene and arsenic.  From paint thinners and toilet deodorisers, they come.  From electronics and furnishings.  From food and from cosmetics.

Phthalates, which guarantee cancer in mice, are ubiquitous in human lives.  Used as scent binders in personal hygiene products, and as a softening agent in plastics, phthalates migrate into human tissue, with a special fondness for the fat-laden breast.  Their partner in cancer is Bisphenol A (BPA), an ingredient of polycarbonate plastic which is perpetually to hand in plastic bottles, plastic toys, rubber gloves, food cans, CDs, mobile phones, shopping receipts and dozens more household objects.

This deadly duo saturate the breast, the site of most tumours in women, and they are amongst the prime chemical suspects for the doubling of the incidence of breast cancer since the 1940s.  Better diagnostics and other post-1940s risk factors (such as oral contraceptive use, ageing, obesity, early puberty, older age of first birth and a smaller number of pregnancies) explain only a small part of this increase.

Left in the frame is the increase in chemical exposure, especially to chemicals which mimic oestrogen and other hormones and which increase vulnerability to cancerous mutation or errors from breast cell replication.  Breast cancer is most common in the developed world which has the highest household presence of toxic chemicals.

This breast-hostile environment pits health against capitalist profit and its government guardians.  BPA, for example, generates annual profits in the US of $6 billion as well as breast cancer.  “The phenomenal power of the chemical industry”, says Williams, ensures a lax regulatory environment allowing the 82,000 different chemicals in use, with 800 more added each year, virtually free reign from government oversight.

Standard business and government policy is to assume that all chemicals are safe until proven otherwise.  Adequate testing is not required whilst food, drugs and cosmetics are exempt from labelling for biologically-active synthetic chemicals.  The long latency between chemical exposure and cancer, allows a chemical industry to cynically “sow seeds of scientific doubt” about the link between chemicals and cancer.

Government reluctance to harm corporate profit also smooths the way for tumours through public health crises.  Obesity, and a diet high in fats and low in fibre, increases the risk of breast cancer but little government action, if any, is taken against the food industry to counter the five thousand commercials, half about junk food, which the average American girl will watch during her childhood.

The same irresponsible corporate and government attitude has marked the rest of the unnatural history of breasts.  For post-menopausal women, the ill-fated Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) assisted only around 10% of menopausal women whose symptoms were clinically serious whilst the other 90% were subjected to HRT’s dangerous dose of synthetic hormones because it is “more profitable to do so”.  The 26% increase in breast cancer associated with HRT use was the human cost of greedy pharmaceutical companies doing business.

As with menopause, so too is ‘micromastia’ (small breasts) a concocted ‘disease’ requiring a profitable technology (a global market of $800 million for breast implants) in a tale of “marketing and mass hysteria” over breast envy.  Mastectomy patients account for only 20% of silicone gel injections or implant surgery but the ‘vanity’ majority bear the health burden of complications such as toxic ruptures (especially if the implant is secretly made from cheap industrial-grade silicone), plus a recipe of re-operations, costly MRIs and reduced ability to detect early breast cancer.

Infant formula rounds out the depressing theme of corporate greed and government negligence.  Breast is best for infant nutrition, for disease protection, for cognitive development (formula milk is as detrimental to child IQ as lead in gasoline and paint) and for immunological future-proofing (the 800 species of bacteria in human breast milk establish essential colonies of pathogen-fighting gut flora).  Formula companies, however, seek to crash this monopoly by exploiting the guilt that can arise from mothers who give up breast-feeding because of soreness and mastitis.

Williams concludes that it is folly to try to individually safeguard one’s family from chemicals and from synthetic breast components.  Government, and chemical and medical companies, she says, “need to change the way they test, manufacture and market” their potentially lethal products.  She is right - keeping abreast of the profit motive is the biggest challenge to women’s health under capitalism.

GINA RINEHART (Adele Ferguson) and THE HOUSE OF HANCOCK (Debi Marshall)

THE HOUSE OF HANCOCK: The Rise and Rise of Gina Rinehart

By DEBI MARSHALL
William Heinemann, 2012, 367 pages, $35.95 (pb)

Gina Rinehart: The Untold Story of the Richest Woman in the World

By ADELE FERGUSON
MacMillan, 2012, 490 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

How do you become the richest woman on the planet?  First, choose your parents well and then pursue wealth with ruthless greed.  Gina Rinehart, the Australian mining billionaire ($29 billion net wealth), did just that and two new books on Rinehart explore her world of privilege, profits and power.

Rinehart, both authors agree, is a “carbon copy” of her father, Lang Hancock, whose chance discovery in 1952 of the world’s biggest iron ore field in the Hammersley Ranges near his vast (inherited) sheep station in Western Australia saw him amass enormous wealth from selling the mining rights to Rio Tinto from which the “royalties flowed like Bollinger” (2.5% on every tonne of iron ore) to the Hancock family company - $20 a second, every second, in perpetuity, totalling hundreds of millions of dollars to date.

As a child, Rinehart “wanted for nothing”, and on Hancock’s death in 1992 she inherited his wealth and mining assets without a pick or shovel swung in sweaty effort.  Father and daughter also shared a belief that, as Hancock put it, ‘the greed of capitalism is the only driving force there is’ whilst Rinehart’s business acumen (“rat cunning”, Marshall calls it), plus Rinehart’s obsessive guard over her wealth, has turned daughter, like father, into a wealthy, right wing, politically influential mining magnate.

Rinehart does not like to share her wealth – with governments (through mining or carbon taxes), with asbestosis victims (from Hancock’s old asbestos mine at Wittenoom), with charities (she is a philanthropic tight-wad) or with her employees (she wants to turn the top third of Australia into a low tax, low regulation ‘special economic zone’ with cheap, imported African and Asian ‘guest’ labour).

To protect her riches, Rinehart has taken to court a string of business partners, her own accountants, managing directors, engineers and geologists, many lawyers, her deceased second husband’s former mistress, the billionaire children of Hancock’s original business partner, and, in bitter rifts over the family inheritance, her own father, children and stepmother (Rose Porteous).

Porteous, Hancock’s housekeeper and third wife, was seen by Rinehart as ‘that Filipina prostitute’ (‘she was no cleaner’, said Rinehart) who “snared a multi-millionaire twice her age”, spending the family fortune and threatening Rinehart’s inheritance and status as heir apparent.  The “personal feud between two very rich women” over Hancock’s estate extended to a coronial inquest into Hancock’s death during which Rinehart paid six-figure sums to witnesses to dish dirt on Porteous for allegedly hastening Hancock’s death through harassment and dodgy cooking.  Although Porteous waltzed off with a $50 million haul of assets, Rinehart won the main prize – control of the company and ownership of the mining royalties.

The dynastic soap opera continued when Rinehart, as sole trustee of a $3 billion family trust for her four children, sought to shift their inheritance vestment date by half a century to 2068 when they would be in their nineties, and thus retain the trust money for future investments and their profit streams for herself.  The children’s court case to remove Rinehart as trustee saw Rinehart, with no apparent irony, lecturing her privileged children on their display of ‘greed, jealousy and a selfish sense of entitlement’, reminding the ungrateful offspring that ongoing trust dividend income ‘could have kept you in expensive homes, endless holiday travels, and [your] increasingly very privileged lifestyle for life, without you having to work’. 

Rinehart’s litigious vigilance over her wealth, aided by soaring iron ore prices and massive growth in Asian demand for iron ore, made Rinehart a billionaire in 2006 with much more to come - Marshall cites business commentator, Alan Kohler, on how, for example, the Hope Downs iron ore deposit will produce ‘a royalties income stream of $45 million … a week’ for Rinehart from Rio Tinto.  The Roy Hill iron ore deposit will also funnel $2 billion a year in royalties to Rinehart and make her the richest person in the world.

Rinehart is devoutly right wing, inheriting Hancock’s Thatcherite conservatism as well as his wealth.  She shares Hancock’s disregard for the health dangers of asbestos mining, his promotion of nuclear power (and nuclear explosions to mine iron ore), and his contempt for trade unionists, ‘eco-nuts’, welfare recipients and Aboriginal land rights.  Rinehart, like Hancock, believes that “meddlesome governments” with their ‘red and green tape’ are a threat to the capitalist religion of free enterprise. 

Rinehart funds climate change denialists and puts them on company boards.  She believes that all journalists are card-carrying communists and, whilst her wealth “ensures the ear of those in power”, she seeks to further her agenda through media share ownership.  Rinehart has bought governing board positions at Fairfax Media and Network Ten, with the aim of publicly influencing politicians who are sensitive to right wing pressure from traditional media.

Although Rinehart cooperated with neither biographer (she could not ensure they would echo the Gospel according to Gina), both books usefully add visibility to the reclusive Rinehart, showing, between heavy fillings of dynastic saga and ‘human interest’ padding, Rinehart as having the lavish lifestyle, selfish arrogance and demanding nature of the spoilt, born-to-rule aristocrat of money.

Both books, however, also share an almost fond fascination, and a business reporters’ awe, for a super-wealthy business woman, with Ferguson justifying it as catering to the “public’s insatiable appetite to know everything about the rich and famous”, a hunger more manufactured than real.

Although both books tread lightly around the political issue of whether Rinehart, as symbol of capitalist success, is a good thing for society, they concur that, on a personal level, Rinehart, surrounded by “scheming business rivals” and bought or ideologically slavish politicians, is “a lonely figure”, virtually friendless.  If Rinehart, for whom ‘beauty is an iron mine’, were ever to stop living and breathing money and power, what would be revealed would be the massive emptiness at the heart of the billionaire capitalist.

OVERDRESSED: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by ELIZABETH L. CLINE

OVERDRESSED: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

By ELIZABETH L. CLINE
Penguin, 2012, 244 pages, $37.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Every year, Americans buy 20 billion garments, mostly from mass market clothes-makers such as Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Wal-Mart and Target, and then throw away 13 million tons of it says a reformed clothing-addict, Elizabeth Cline, in Overdressed.

Charity shops can’t soak up the excess with less than 20% of thrift-shop clothing donations on-sold and most of the rest going to landfill, where, with half our clothes made out of plastic in the form of polyester and other oil-based synthetics, half of it will sit for hundreds of years before degrading.  This waste of a non-renewable fossil fuel resource is just one of the environmental costs of budget fashion.

Water is also wasted (2 trillion gallons globally), global warming is fuelled by the greenhouse gas emissions from fibre production (which requires 145 million tons of coal a year), pollution from toxic chemicals used in bleaching, dyeing, water-proofing and wrinkle-proofing is endemic, arable land for food is lost to cotton-growing, and sheep farming for wool causes soil erosion and biodiversity loss.

This ecological burden is the result of a competitive race by clothing capitalists to produce cheap and to sell the low price garments in high volume to maximise profits.  To assist this, the “continuous consumption” of ‘must-have’ fashion trends is “industry determined, created and destroyed arbitrarily in the interest of turning a profit”.  Quality is also reduced to pad profit.  The cheaper the garment or shoe, the quicker it falls apart and needs replacing whilst, to further shave costs, natural fibres have been replaced by cheaper polyester and all fabrics have become thinner and lighter with durability and reparability sacrificed.

Domestic economic costs, too, are high with apparel manufacturing one of the fastest dying industries in America, losing 650,000 jobs in the last decade and the textile industry shedding a further half million jobs.

The human rights costs of budget fashion are also steep as cheap foreign labour is almost universal with 98% of America’s clothing imported (41% from China and the rest from other low wage countries).  A Chinese garment worker earns only one quarter of what an already lowly-paid US garment worker gets, a Dominican one eleventh, a Bangladeshi one thirty-eighth.  The overseas garment worker’s wage makes up just 1% of the US retail price of the clothing they produce.  Child labour and sweatshops, sardine-living in factory worker dorms, fire-trap factories and jailing of union activists have blighted the countries contracted by US clothiers to make their clothes.

To counter the bad public relations, and to end the boycotts by the US college fashion market, US clothing companies announce voluntary codes of conduct and factory audits for its overseas suppliers and then dishonour them by pre-announcing inspections, or setting up model ‘demonstration’ factories to reassure nosy Western investigators like Cline. 

The grim cost of looking trendy is well-documented by Cline but she attributes blame not just to the “profit-hungry producers” but also to consumers who demand cheap clothes.  Cline’s solution is ‘ethical fashion’ with people willing to pay much more for fair-trade certified clothing which meets international labour standards, plus a revival of home sewing, mending and alteration skills.

Consumers, however, shouldn’t have to wear the economic, moral or skills burden of good clothes.  The right to wear good clothes needs to break from market logic including the expensive niche sector of fair trade clothes.  This does not mean fashion being reduced to a universal scruffy socialist look, rather it means a socialist reorganisation of the clothing industry to ensure that the basic human right to affordable, quality clothing doesn’t get stitched up by clothing capitalists making money.

FALLOUT FROM FUKUSHIMA by RICHARD BROINOWSKI

FALLOUT FROM FUKUSHIMA

By RICHARD BROINOWSKI
Scribe, 2012, 273 pages, $27.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011 was no accident, says Richard Broinowski in Fallout from Fukushima.  Siting a nuclear reactor on an “active geological fault line where two of the earth’s tectonic plates collide” was courting catastrophe from an earthquake and tsunami like the one that duly happened in the Pacific in March that year.

As official Japanese reports added after the disaster, the powerful Japanese nuclear industry, immunised from critical scrutiny by the “cozy ranks of politicians, bureaucrats, academics, corporate players and their media acolytes”, ensured that the Fukushima plant was under-prepared for foreseeable risks.  The reactor core meltdowns in Units 1, 2 and 3, and damage to Units 4, 5 and 6, which all released a “toxic stew of radioactive isotopes”, were therefore no accident.

Before the tsunami swept aside inadequate protective concrete walls and knocked out the emergency generators, the earthquake itself had resulted in radiation leaks and critical damage to reactor core cooling systems.  The desperate attempt to cool the cores by pumping in millions of litres of seawater was unsuccessful and the freshly irradiated seawater wound up back in the sea, contaminating fish stocks.  Dangerous levels of radiation were detected as far away as Tokyo.

All of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors pose the risks of Fukushima.  In an earthquake and tsunami prone country, they share the same “supposedly quake-resistant design” of Fukushima and human error in complex technological systems is almost inevitable.  Nuclear calamity is the predictable consequence.

Also predictable was the response to Fukushima by the nuclear establishment - denial of meltdown or radiation release, delay in providing information, suppression of bad news, and downplaying of the health risks.

When the Japanese Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, eventually cancelled plans to build an extra 14 reactors (taking nuclear from 29% to 50% of total energy supply) and announced a policy to subsidise renewables (which comprise just 1%), his own “apparently progressive” Democratic Party of Japan forced his resignation and replacement by a more nuclear-compliant Yoshihido Noda.

Whilst the ostrich response, head-in-sand, may have been the preferred position of Fukushima’s Tokyo Electric Power Company (the largest energy company in the world), and of the other nine big Japanese energy companies and their government protectors, the Japanese people spoke up.  Huge anti-nuclear rallies forced the shutting down of all Japan’s existing reactors for safety checks and few have come back on line against strong local opposition.

Construction of new reactors has also been suspended in response to “deep public suspicion and concern” (80% of Japanese voters support ending nuclear power) coupled with the financial realities of escalating capital costs, wary insurance providers, and repair, clean-up and compensation costs (compensation alone from Fukushima is estimated at between US$74-260 billion).

Broinowski sees a future of “terminal decline” for the nuclear industry in Japan, and an increasingly fragile official pro-nuclear consensus in the rest of the world, with at least some states, such as Germany, keen to steal a march on emerging renewable energy business opportunities.  Broinowski’s solution, however, also depends on “commercial engagement” with a renewables future rather than the publicly-owned and run renewables enterprise needed to switch from nuclear and fossil fuels to clean, green energy.

If some of Broinowski’s book has the measured tone of a diplomatic briefing (Broinowski was a long-time Australian government diplomat) it makes for a very handy pocket reference guide to the déjà vu history of nuclear folly, including the long saga of official denialism and myopia about the health dangers of the nuclear cycle.

Here Broinowski sheds his bureaucratic cool, especially when he turns his gaze on Australian uranium mining.  Japan is the second largest market for Australia’s uranium (which comprises 40% of the world’s uranium deposits) and Australian uranium mining companies including the big two, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, and their Labor and Liberal government flunkeys, must wear some moral stain for Fukushima, for the global nuclear energy industry, and, courtesy of colander-like ‘safeguards’, nuclear weapons proliferation.

The conservative, pro-nuclear media, in particular, goad Broinowski.  In response to Fukushima, the Murdoch press supplied the sneering Andrew Bolt and a bizarre Greg Sheridan, who accuses nuclear opponents of being ‘Greens/Taliban fundamentalists seeking to de-industrialise the West’.  With the less rabid but equally pro-nuclear think-tank, the Lowy Institute, providing ‘respectable’ cover, this cheer squad provided the vocal accompaniment to the main game - making nuclear energy someone else’s problem whilst selling them the deadly raw material and cashing the cheques.  Ethics never has been the strong suit for Australian capitalism.

DANCING WITH EMPTY POCKETS: Australia’s Bohemians by TONY MOORE

DANCING WITH EMPTY POCKETS: Australia’s Bohemians

By TONY MOORE
Pier 9, 2012, 378 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Their pockets may have been empty but Australia’s bohemians have been rich with desire to shake up bourgeois dignity and social conformity through cultural revolution.  As Tony Moore recounts in his splendid Dancing with Empty Pockets, Australia has had a vibrant, dissenting subculture of bohemians from its earliest days.

Marcus Clarke, the author of the first great Australian novel, For The Term Of His Natural Life, “ate, drank and scandalised his way about Melbourne in the 1860s and 1870s, setting up a string of underground literary clubs, mocking respectable society and keeping one step ahead of his creditors”. 

Following Clarke were the writer, Henry Lawson, who embraced a radical nationalism built on “disrespect for authority, irreverence, and unease with respectability”, and the painter, Norman Lindsay, whose “art of pagan pleasure” was “libertine, earthy, humorous, immature, cheeky, sexual, anti-clerical”.

In the 1920s and 1930s, ‘The Noble Order of the Happy, Literary, Wise and Mad’ in Sydney set the tone of the bohemian clubs, to which women at last gained entry to the all-male bohemian world although often “on men’s terms” as promiscuous, sexual playthings.  Mass unemployment, war and fascism prompted a new wave of politically-engaged bohemians from the late 1930s such as the Adelaide University’s cape-wearing communist and artistic modernist, Max Harris.

In the 1950s, the bohemia of the ‘Sydney Push’ intelligentsia flourished with paperbacks of Kafka and Camus, black sweaters and advocacy of free love marking out the artists and inner city non-conformists who made up the Push’s small galaxy whose stars included Robert Hughes, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Wendy Bacon, Bob Ellis and Barry Humphries.

In the 1960s and 70s, the counter-cultural hippies, the New Left and other protest movements flew the subversive bohemian flag whilst punk and ‘Indie’ musicians and cyberpunk hackers have waved the contemporary bohemian banner, with The Chaser ensemble excelling with an “anarchic anti-authoritarianism, Dadaesque stunts … and flirtation with obscenity and offences against good taste”.

Australian bohemianism, whatever its historical manifestations, has some features in common - aesthetic flamboyance, eccentric lifestyle, avant-garde art, and experimentation with cultural, sexual and other freedoms beyond the pale of bourgeois morality.

Politically, too, bohemians have had a shared liking for anarchism, delivering an apolitical cynical detachment from the non-committal comfort of the bar-stool.  Bohemians who embraced the left were prone to divorce - Lawson became a patriotic militarist, a middle-aged Max  Harris “dispensed conservative contrarian opinion in the [once-loathed] Murdoch press” and an anti-socialist Barry Humphries joined the board of the CIA-funded magazine, Quadrant.

Political elitism was also a shared bohemian trait with many bohemians regarding themselves as a “natural aristocracy” above the wasteland of the suburbs whose working class residents they saw as artistic philistines good only for a sneering condescension as conformist ‘Alf and Daphnes’.

Many bohemians would also shoulder their subversive cultural arms to seek “personal elevation within the bourgeois society they denounced”.  As Honore Balzac observed of the ancestral 1840s Parisian bohemians, their enclaves were ‘a vast nursery for bourgeois ambition’ and Australia’s bohemians have displayed a similar “talent for self-promotion”, exploiting the bohemia brand to carve out a space for the bohemian avant-garde in the capitalist cultural market which is perpetually in search for next big thing no matter how rhetorically hostile to capitalism.

The political limitations of bohemianism stem largely from the class position of its practitioners – as Moore explains, bohemianism is a “rebellion undertaken mainly by the young bourgeois in a period of their career when they feel free from the restrictions of the social class they were born into or in which they might end up”.  Cultural playtime under capitalism has definite time limits before the logic of the market kicks in.

Some bohemians have tried to retain their oppositional principles as they began their long march through the institutions of media, politics and academia.  Wendy Bacon practices progressive journalism, Bob Ellis became the “eccentric artist-in-residence to the Labor tribe” and the “free-floating cultural socialism” of Phillip Adams coexisted with his membership of the Commonwealth film and arts bureaucracy.

Red-blooded socialism was rarely a long-term option for most bohemians, however.  Most believe only in ‘epater les bourgeois’ (‘shocking the bourgeois’) rather than its overthrow.  Not only did socialist activism ‘take up too many evenings’ (as the bohemian aesthete, Oscar Wilde, put it) but its collectivism, discipline and structure was too antagonistic to the hedonistic and individualistic bohemians with their penchant for “partying over party”.

Although Moore acknowledges that bohemianism is “a safety valve for discontent rather than promoting focused political change”, he celebrates bohemianism’s subversive potential to push against “capitalism’s demands for work discipline, social order and the sovereignty of market forces”, whose cultural settings under the “conservatism of John Howard, and the narrow managerial materialism of Labor’s new generation of leaders” has ensured a strong future for bohemian dissent in Australia.

Although Moore struggles to pin the “dynamic, ever-changing tradition” of bohemianism down definitionally, his analytically sharp and narratively bright book shows that Australia’s bohemians, although they may not have had too many answers, have asked some very good questions.

NAZIS ON THE RUN by Gerald Steinacher

NAZIS ON THE RUN: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice

By GERALD STEINACHER
Oxford University Press, 2011, 382 pages, $20.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The Odessa File,  Frederick Forsyth’s 1972 novel, popularised the idea of the ‘Nazi-hunter’, Simon Wiesenthal, that a powerful, secret organisation of the Nazi elite, Odessa, organised the escape from Europe of prominent Nazis after World War 11, primarily to Argentina, where they plotted to revive global Nazism.  This, says Professor Gerald Steinacher in Nazis on the Run, is a myth.

The devoted escape managers of the defeated Nazis were actually to be found in the Vatican, the Allied intelligence services and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).  With communism the new, official, post-war enemy, a “Cold War political shield” protected from justice tens of thousands of prominent SS officers and other war criminals who were responsible for the Nazi machinery of Jewish genocide but who possessed the redeeming virtue of being zealous anti-communists.

Nazi war criminals hid amongst the hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons in the chaos of post-war Europe as they exploited an overburdened Red Cross refugee service to escape.  The Red Cross was the reluctant, de facto post-war authority for issuing overseas travel documents and identity cards.  With just the testimony of two witnesses sufficient to establish identity, escaping fascists clubbed together in massive, easily perpetrated, identity fraud.  Red Cross field workers did not deliberately help the Nazis to escape but Red Cross senior echelons bore moral responsibility, or at the very least were guilty of gross negligence, argues Steinacher, for collusion.

Paul Ruegger (ICRC President from 1948), for example, was aware of the scandal but chose not to intervene.  Ruegger was of aristocratic background, a conservative Catholic and an admirer of Mussolini whilst his wartime predecessor had pro-German sympathies, was latently anti-Semitic and shared the strong anti-communist convictions of Ruegger.  Their politics allowed a wave of war criminals to escape with Red Cross transit papers, amongst them Adolf Eichmann (the “bureaucrat of mass murder”) and Josef Mengele (the Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’).

The ICRC covered its backside by arguing that its moral standing as a neutral humanitarian intermediary mandated assistance to all regardless of nationality, race, religion or political opinion.  Or, apparently, war crimes, it could be added.  The Red Cross had never been strictly neutral - its infamous failure to speak out against the Holocaust (for fear of endangering its ability to carry on aid work in German-occupied Europe) was outdone in moral failure by its eyes-open assistance to fleeing Nazis.  The Red Cross, concludes Steinacher, “allowed itself to be used as a weapon in the Cold War”.

The Catholic Church also another Nazi-friendly Cold War enlistee.  Whilst Catholic monasteries hid tens of thousands of war criminals from Nazi Germany and its fascist European satellite states, the Vatican’s refugee relief commission procured visas.  Thousands were provided by President Juan Peron’s fascist groupie regime in Argentina, sold on the Vatican’s character reference that the escaping fascists were ‘anti-Bolshevik fighters’.

The Vatican’s fear of socialism, which had seen unproblematic Church relations with the anti-socialist Mussolini, saw it unite with escaping Nazis to oppose the threat of post-war communism in Roman Catholic heartland, Italy, which had the strongest post-war communist party in Western Europe.  Religious anti-Judaism also eased the Church’s conscience about its failure to assist Holocaust victims.

The final plank in the post-war, anti-communist redemption of Nazis was US military and civilian intelligence.  Swiftly abandoning the tracing and arrest of fascists and Nazis under war-time accords, the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps used Vatican Nazi-escape ‘ratlines’ to smuggle out those it deemed useful for the new Cold War.  Agents from German military counter-intelligence and the Gestapo were in great demand as were Nazis with technical and scientific expertise.  One beneficiary was Wernher von Braun, the designer of the V2 rocket which terrorised Britain and Holland, who was an SS officer in charge of a missile factory that starved were worked to death thousands of forced labourers and concentration camp inmates.  Von Braun helped Americans to be the first on the moon and that is what mattered.

Steinacher’s painstaking documentation of dozens of detailed case studies of fascist war criminals saved by US intelligence, the Catholic Church and the Red Cross justifies his portrait of the West’s anti-communist Nazi rescue operation as a “story of expediency and hypocrisy in service of the Cold War”.

ALL THAT I AM by Anna Funder

ALL THAT I AM

By ANNA FUNDER
Hamish Hamilton, 2011, 369 pages, $24.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

‘Hitler’s hatred began with us’, says the German playwright, Ernst Toller (in Anna Funder’s historical novel, All That I Am) of the revolutionary socialists and pacifists who, through mutiny and general strike brought the first world war to an end for Germany in 1918.

Toller (writer, socialist leader and Jew), Dora Fabian (feminist and Toller’s lover), Ruth Wesemann (Dora’s cousin) and Hans Wesemann (Ruth’s husband and journalist) were all radicals, members of Germany’s Independent Social Democratic Party, a left-wing split from the formerly Marxist but now safely respectable Social Democratic Party).  They believed their post-war revolution ‘would change autocratic, war-mongering Germany forever’ and usher in ‘freedoms of every kind’.

Hope remained even after the Social Democrats had mobilised troops, disaffected war veterans and the Nazi Frei Korps to bloodily crush the revolt, and even endured after Hitler took power in 1933.  Full comprehension of what Hitler had in store for his opponents, however, eventually dawned on them and arrest, interrogation, jail and exile followed.

Troubles dogged the exiles in their London flat where they trod the fine line between anti-fascist resistance and the British government’s shameful prohibition on refugees engaging in political activities under the threat of sending them back to Nazi Germany and certain death.  Nazi political police hit-squads also stalked them and, under pressure of harm to themselves or family, betrayal looms.  One betrays ‘for money and protection’, one suicides and others are murdered by the Gestapo.  Ruth escapes, winding up in Bondi Junction, Australia.

Based closely on real characters and events, Funder’s debut, Miles Franklin Award-winning novel was sparked by an oral history she recorded with the real Ruth (Ruth Blatt), who taught Funder’s German teacher the German language.  Funder’s novel resurrects the courage of those who fought for the ‘Other Germany’ and it wraps their undoubted bravery (and occasional failure) in  steadily building dramatic tension.

As with Funder’s book on East Germany (Stasiland), however, the political fails to reach the same high standards as the literary.  Politics was crucial to stopping the rise of Hitler but the reasons for the failure of what Funder’s characters want (an anti-Nazi ‘Three-Fold Red Front’ of ‘the Social Democrats, the Communists and us’) are not explored and are contradicted by facile, throw-away lines which equate revolutionary left with reactionary right (all are repressive jailers, all are anti-democrats, all are ‘deceivers of the working class’).  This literary glibness gives no right of reply to Germany’s Marxists, does not offer any analysis of how Stalinism perverted their choices, and misses the chance to tease out the ideological and strategic turmoil, and final tragic disunity, of the German anti-Nazi left.

Funder’s political preference is for the left-liberal radical reformism of her main characters.  Her social ideal is Australian ‘decency’.  There might be room for questioning that ‘decency’, however, as Funder herself deplored, in an interview, the context that “I was writing this as children seeking refuge here were being locked up indefinitely in prison camps in our suburbs”, the victims of a ‘moral blindness’ which is the crux of Funder’s novel.

Although All That I Am veers more towards the psychological thriller than the artistic interweaving of the political and the personal, Funder’s literary honouring of the “extraordinary courage” of “otherwise forgotten” people “who bravely resist authoritarian powers” is well served by her most worthy novel.

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.