SLICK WATER: Fracking by ANDREW NIKIFORUK

SLICK WATER: Fracking – and One Insider’s Stand Against the World’s Most Powerful Industry

ANDREW NIKIFORUK

Greystone Books/David Suzuki Institute, 2015, 350 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

The fracturing of rocks to mine more fossil fuels was born with the oil business, writes the Canadian journalist, Andrew Nikiforuk, in Slick Water.  During the world’s first oil boom in Pennsylvania in the 1850s, highly volatile nitro-glycerine and other explosives had been used, with lethal risk, on sluggish wells to turn them into gushers by creating new fractures to channel blocked oil to the surface.

 

The coal seam gas (CSG) [or coal bed methane (CBM)] industry joined the perilous fracturing party as, ironically, a safety measure to vent methane from coal pits to reduce the hazard of explosive methane disasters in the coal mining industry.  Now, the deadly coal-mining by-product, methane, has been transformed into an allegedly friendly fuel, disarmingly re-christened as ‘natural gas’.

 

Decades of “wild experimentation” in the CSG technology of hydraulic fracturing (fluid injection, under pressure, into rock), commonly known as ‘fracking’, has included underground nuclear explosions, and a kaleidoscopic use of toxic chemicals such as hydrochloric acid, arsenic, formaldehyde, napalm, rocket fuel, diesel oil and solvents.

 

One inherent consequence of fracking is wayward fracks resulting from what is essentially the application of brute force to geology.  The fracking scientists and engineers have never been able to predict or control the length or direction of the induced fractures, allowing the migration of explosive methane and poisonous frack fluids ‘out of zone’, invading areas many kilometres away via groundwater.

 

The result has been dying crops, diseased livestock, exploding homes, flammable water and a noxious parade of mutagens, carcinogens, endocrine disruptors and chemical irritants.  Accompanying them have been massive truck convoys, earthquakes, and water, air and noise pollution.

 

These outcomes are at stark odds with what is promised at the kitchen table by fracking company representatives bearing fat chequebooks to pay landowners for leasing their land to CSG drillers.  Those who object are bullied into silence by high-powered lawyers with cash compensation in return for confidentiality agreements and gag orders.

 

Hush money was not an option, however, for Jessica Ernst, a qualified scientist and environmental consultant for major fossil fuel companies.  When the $30 billion oil and gas giant, Encana, fracked community aquifers, with typically disastrous consequences, near her home in Alberta, Canada, the CSG industry roused a formidable opponent.

 

In 2007, Ernst launched a $33 million lawsuit for damages against Encana and its provincial government enablers in the petro-state of Alberta.  Warned that the case might consume the rest of her life and every last cent, Ernst vowed, nevertheless, to press on, her main goal the public exposure of how fracking ‘poisons water and divides communities, and captures our energy regulators and elected officials’.

 

Encana, its paid-for community allies and the state regulators, played dirty.  They tried to discredit  Ernst as mentally unstable (she had spent a year in a psychiatric hospital ward suffering from anxiety and flashbacks over her sexual abuse as a child).  They used personal threats and intimidation (one of Ernst’s pet dogs was decapitated, whilst the counter-terrorism police accused her of being an eco-terrorist).  They deployed bureaucratic resistance (making her freedom of information request a lengthy, expensive and bitter farce).

 

As her legal suit stretches on, Ernst continues to speak to thousands of potential fracking victims in north America and overseas, inspiring advances and victories in restricting, banning or laying community siege to the frackers.

 

Nikiforuk’s book is an extensively detailed case-study of the making of an activist.  Ernst did not start out as an environmental radical, already opposed to fossil fuels and the undemocratic collusion of industry and governments.  It was the sour reality of fracking, and Ernst’s sheer doggedness and self-sacrifice, that has turned her into a subversive, pivotally placed to expose a “dangerous and extreme technology” whose sole aim is to extend the shelf-life of harmful fossil fuels for corporate profit.

ON STALIN'S TEAM by SHEILA FITZPATRICK

ON STALIN’S TEAM: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics

SHEILA FITZPATRICK

Melbourne University Press, 2015, 364 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Joseph Stalin could not have been the brutally efficient tyrant he was without some help.  He had at his service a team of loyal auxiliary dictators, as the University of Sydney history professor, Sheila Fitzpatrick, explores in On Stalin’s Team.

 

There were a dozen men in Stalin’s leadership group, the Party’s top decision-making body (the Politburo).  Most familiar in the West were Nikita Khrushchev, the post-Stalin Soviet leader and exposer of Stalin’s crimes, and Vyacheslav Molotov, foreign minister and Stalin’s second-in-command who was jokingly nicknamed ‘stone-bottom’ by his peers (from Leon Trotsky’s withering reference to Stalin’s Politburo as ‘the Party bureaucracy without souls, whose stone-bottoms crush all manifestations of free initiative and free creativity’).

 

The muster of revolutionary veterans on Stalin’s team included Sergo Ordzhonikidze (“charismatic and hot-tempered”), Andrei Malenkov (the “quintessential apparatchik”), Andrei Andreev (listening to Beethoven on his portable gramophone on road trips to conduct Party purges), Lazar Kaganovich (a ‘200% Stalinist’ with a taste for shouting, swearing and hitting subordinates) and Anastas Mikoyan (a canny survivor able to duck trouble).

 

Wherever repression was needed, “the team joined in, a gang of schoolyard bullies” - they signed off on lists of party members for whom the secret police had recommended the death sentence, and they travelled the provinces to preside over party meetings which resulted in the arrest of regional party leaders.

 

It is, says Fitzpatrick, a mistake to, as Trotsky did, dismiss Stalin’s lieutenants as second-rate nonentities for they showed energy, zeal and initiative in carrying out Stalin’s orders.  They were not totally robotic.  They risked censure (and worse) by defending their bureaucratic corner in jostles over budgets and the pace of economic transformation.  They tried to save friends and colleagues from Stalin’s mass terror, and they wavered over the expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet Union.

 

Team members had reservations about the arrests and scapegoating of ‘bourgeois’ engineers and other ‘wreckers’ for the failings of Stalin’s policy of rapid industrialisation.  Stalin’s post-war anti-Semitic turn in search of new enemies met with team members’ “silent disapproval”.  In private conversations amongst themselves, they could be maliciously critical of Stalin.

 

This dissidence was, however, feeble, ineffectual and cowardly.  Even after Stalin’s death in 1953, which the team welcomed, they dutifully paid public homage to Stalin as a great leader even if he made occasional ‘mistakes’.

 

With an eye on reputation management, they could conveniently pin the guilt for the scope and savagery of the mass terror on fellow Politburo member, Lavrenty Beria (head of the secret police), as a bad influence on Stalin, even though, argues Fitzpatrick, Beria was “the boldest and most radical” of the post-Stalin reformers.  When a commission set up to review Stalin’s terror reported that, between 1935 and 1940, two million people had been arrested, with 688,000 shot, for ‘anti-Soviet’ activity, the Politburo had Beria executed, absolving their own complicity in Stalin’s political slaughter.

 

The team had been justifiably fearful of themselves falling victim to Stalin’s manic punitive suspicion (some were, indeed, ‘eliminated’) but fear was not the main glue binding the team to Stalin – they shared his values and beliefs in their perverted vision of ‘building socialism’.

 

Stalin’s team do, however, find a measure of redemption through Fitzpatrick’s method of historical exposition which prioritises the characters and personal drama within Stalin’s team.  She acknowledges that this risks humanising her subjects with cosy, ‘at-home-with’ vignettes but she argues that this is not in principle unacceptable, that she is an historian not a prosecutor for the anti-Stalinist cause.

 

This is tricky historiographical territory, however, if it leaves out, as Fitzpatrick does, the broader analytical context of the societal interests that personal actors represent and serve.  In post-revolutionary Russia, wracked by war, blockade, backwardness and isolation, the party-state bureaucracy became a politically and materially privileged stratum whose protector was Stalin.  His team was the elite of the elite, committed to preserving their status by waging violence against the principles of socialist democracy, equality and internationalism.

RED PROFESSOR: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose by MONTEATH & MUNT

RED PROFESSOR: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose

PETER MONTEATH and VALERIE MUNT

Wakefield Press, 2015, 373 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Australia’s secret police, ASIO, had codenames for those in the Commonwealth Public Service it suspected of spying for the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  One of them was ‘Professor’.  Was it Fred Rose, ask the Flinders University academics, Peter Monteath and Valerie Munt, in their biography of the Australian communist and anthropologist.

 

The 1954 Royal Commission into Espionage, called by the conservative Prime Minister (Robert Menzies) just before an election to capitalise on the defection of the Russian spy (Vladimir Petrov) in Australia, found nothing to warrant criminal prosecution of Rose (or, indeed, any of the suspects hauled before the Commission), despite ASIO’s feverish snooping.

 

Innocence did Rose no good, however, as he was tarnished by judicial insinuation as an ‘unsatisfactory’ and ‘unreliable’ witness thus confirming Rose’s view that the Commission ‘subverted the principle of trial by jury’ and was intended to ‘smear liberals and progressives with lies and rumours’.

 

Rose, born in London to Tory parents, had been radicalised at ‘Red Cambridge’ by the failings of capitalism during the 1930s.  Nazi racism, in addition, sparked his academic interest in anthropology, and a moral and political  rejection of ‘bourgeois anthropology’ as pseudo-scientific gloss for imperialism’s ‘civilising mission’.

 

Rose pursued his scientific studies in Australia where his “scholarship and political activism converged” as he examined how Aboriginal Australians coped with the imposition of a capitalist economic order, particularly its mining and pastoralist arms.  Rose opposed assimilationist policy in favour of Aborigines ‘adhering to their own culture and way of life’ based on indigenous ownership of land.  He found a receptive political home in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), which he joined in 1942.

 

As anthropology was still then an ‘amateur’ science, poorly served by universities, Rose had to earn his crust elsewhere, first as a government meteorologist, then as a senior public servant with a special focus on the development of northern Australia.

 

ASIO’s obsessive anti-communism, however, cost Rose career promotions, his public service job and any prospect of a university profession in the country.  His professional lifeline was emigration to East Germany where he headed up anthropology at Berlin’s Humboldt University.

 

With this move, however, came another commitment, one willingly entered into by Rose, to spy for the East German secret police, the Stasi, in defence of what he saw as a socialist state.  Rose was not alone in this – at its peak, the Stasi employed one full-time spy for every 180 citizens, not counting its even larger number of contacts and informants like Rose.

 

There was no cloak and dagger, no seductive allure of the international man of mystery, in Rose’s undercover life.  Rather, his was the workaday, low-level observational domestic reporting on colleagues, students, friends and family. 

 

Rose had material and professional reasons to be grateful to his new host country but there was a socialist alternative available to him as a Marxist dissident, or at least as an academic who steered clear of complicity with the Stasi.

 

For Rose, however, who sided with the Socialist Party of Australia after the pro-Moscow hardliners split from the de-Stalinising CPA in 1969, there was too much political capital invested in his new neo-Stalinist homeland for him to take a more self-critical stance of his undercover role in its defence.  ASIO must share much of the blame for this, however, because their career-wrecking, character-assassinating frame-up of Rose forced him into the arms of their Cold War opponent.  

 

Nevertheless, Rose, who died in 1991, could have rejected both ASIO and the Stasi, and left his reputation as a Marxist anthropologist, and an activist for Aboriginal rights, unclouded by false allegations of, and real activity in, assisting the anti-democratic states the political police serve.

THE DIRECTOR IS THE COMMANDER, Anna Broinowski

THE DIRECTOR IS THE COMMANDER

ANNA BROINOWSKI

Viking, 2015, 324 pages

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

In Pyongyang in 2012, wedged in a car between her North Korean Workers Party minders on a sweaty, 40 degree, trip to meet the Stalinist north’s leading film directors, actors and composers, the Sydney film-maker, Anna Broinowski, takes a surreptitious spritz of perfume, to the delight of her foreign film crew who spy the label ‘Kim’ on the bottle of cologne - ‘you have a perfume named after the Dear Leader!’.

If only they knew, writes Broinowski in The Director is the Commander, that the ‘Kim’ in the label refers to the Kim Kardashian from the West’s “trashy celebrity culture” and not to North Korea’s harsh rulers (Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and the current Kim Jong Un), they wouldn’t be laughing at all.

Broinowski is the only Western film-maker ever granted total access to the North Korean film industry which has “built one of the most successful propaganda machines on earth”.  The visit resulted from a spontaneous career decision by the employment-strapped, “between projects”, freelance documentary director who had “spent her twenties steeped in Marx and Billy Bragg” and was now campaigning against a polluting coal-seam-gas (CSG) mine in her local public park in suburban Erskineville.

An ABC producer had given Broinowski a smuggled copy of Kim Jong Il’s cinema manifesto, The Cinema and Directing, and Broinowski had an inspiration.  The Hollywood-loving Kim Jong Il, she notes, had himself made 1,400 films which were, she says, “funny – in a bad way” because of their melodramatic acting, jerky camera moves, didactic dialogue and out-of-sync dubbed sound as their North Korean casts would randomly swell into song and deliver turgid, ten-minute death speeches extolling the greatness of Kim. 

Could the techniques of the North Korean propaganda films, “whose very oddness gave them a unique appeal”, be harnessed to attract viewers to a non-conventional documentary and help stop the local CSG mine, Broinowski wonders?

Such a film might also help break off a chink or two from the wall of Western derision and hostility that surrounds all things North Korean.  Broinowski has no illusions about the human rights abuses, rigid conformity and cult of personality that pervade North Korea where even inadvertent failure to parrot the regime’s ridiculous slogans could brand someone an ‘ideological criminal’ and invite a (sometimes one-way) ticket to a ‘re-education’ gulag.

North Korea’s reputation is grim enough without being supplemented by the fabrications that Western propaganda routinely forges, says Broinowski, but is there some place between the regime’s giant propaganda façade and the West’s “beyond evil” view of North Korea where brainwashed automatons live in abject misery and eat grass to survive?

She finds some aspects of North Korean reality not unappealing - “capitalism has been turned off” and with it the visual and aural noise of cars, advertisements, plastic bags, video games, fast food, leaf-blowers and crystal meth addicts slumped in pools of their own vomit.  “This would never happen in Pyongyang” becomes her “new righteous mantra” as she ruefully reflects on such urban blights when back in Sydney.

This somewhat flippant upside, however, is spoiled by the sense of menace Broinowski experiences in the North Korean background – the constant surveillance, the censorship of what she can and can’t film, and the anonymous ‘Man in Black’ taking notes in the corner whenever Broinowski meets her North Korean colleagues for interviews and discussion of her anti-CSG mini-film, The Gardener.

She takes hope, however, from the occupational camaraderie between the Australian and North Korean film crews, and from the joking, profanity, flirting and friendliness that escapes from beneath the routinely sunny propaganda monologues delivered by her well-rehearsed interviewees.  This reinforces Broinowski’s aim to “humanise the North Koreans … and make the case for cultural diplomacy over military threats and sanctions”.

Her documentary, premiered in 2013, “reproduces the key tropes of the North Korean propaganda movie in the middle of Sydney – a suffering working class heroine, people randomly bursting into song, sentimental nature metaphors, two chaste star-crossed lovers and an evil capitalist who comes to a sticky end”.  Contained in a longer critical documentary (Aim High In Creation!) about the making of The Gardener, Broinowski hopes it will be more art than a crude parody of the North Korean movie house-style.

She realises, however, that “the combination of Kim Jong Il and coal seam gas was always going to be a stretch”, and, sharing her doubts, are some of her Sydney anti-CSG activists who were a little perplexed and made uneasy by “linking their cause to a totalitarian regime”, whilst conservative commentators gloated in the opportunity to launch into their own favourite propaganda chorus on the sins of socialism and environmentalism.

Others, however, embraced the documentary for its novelty, surrealism, humour and emotional warmth - and for its excellence as political cinema.  All these virtues are reinforced by Broinowski’s book, with its irresistibly bright and breezy tone, and its challenging probe into the nature of propaganda, both totalitarian-state and liberal-capitalist.