INK IN HER VEINS: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer by SYLVIA MARTIN

INK IN HER VEINS: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer

SYLVIA MARTIN

University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016, 328 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

In 1939, a young Australian woman grabbed the international headlines when she threw red paint from a thermos flask onto the doorsteps of 10 Downing Street, whilst distributing leaflets hidden in copies of the Ladies Home Journal, to protest the blood that the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had on his hands for selling out Spain and Czechoslovakia to European fascism.

 

Aileen Palmer was fined five shillings for her dissent but worse was to come for her rebellious ways, as the University of Tasmania’s Sylvia Martin discusses in her biography of the anti-fascist, communist, poet and lesbian.

 

The daughter of the prominent, left-wing Australian literature figures, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Aileen joined the Communist Party of Australia in the early 1930s, spurred by Depression-era economic crisis, fascism and war.

 

Palmer was in Barcelona as a translator for the upcoming Olimpiada Popular (‘the People’s Olympics’), organised by Spain’s left-wing Popular Front government to counter the forthcoming Nazi Olympics in Berlin in 1936, when the fascists’ assault in Spain abruptly cancelled the proletarian games.  Joining the volunteer International Brigades as an interpreter for the British Medical Aid Unit, Palmer put her political convictions, linguistic skills (fluent Spanish, French, German) and youthful drive at the service of the Spanish Republic against the Franco/Hitler/Mussolini military attack.

 

The up-close pain and death that came to her with each lorry-load of bodies was a harsh initiation into adulthood for the teenage Palmer.  Between savage offensives, however, time dragged and tempers frayed in the personality-chafing, close proximity of her medical team.  Class tensions (working class ambulance mechanics versus Cambridge-trained doctors) and political tensions (Communist versus non-Communist volunteers) exacerbated the difficulties.  Yet Palmer always regarded Spain as the political highlight of her life.

 

Although her return to Australia after the second world war saw Palmer continue her political and literary activism (against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War), she was increasingly blighted by mental health problems.

 

Post-traumatic stress disorder from her war experience (‘the unbearable noise within’ her head, as a sympathetic sister poet put it) combined with bipolar disorder to create manic-depressive mood-swings and psychotic episodes.  This pot was kept brewing by the “tangled web of the Palmer family’s emotional dynamics” in which Palmer felt “submerged resentment” towards her parents, who under-valued their daughter’s chosen art form of the poem.

 

To further compound her psychological distress, Palmer’s lesbianism remained clandestine, deemed by contemporary social mores “to be sick or unnatural”, making her sexuality feel distasteful even to herself.  Palmer’s ‘shock treatments’ (including Electro-Convulsive Therapy) involved harrowing convulsions, coma and memory loss, and often made her mental state worse rather than better.

 

Palmer died in 1988 in a psychiatric nursing home, aged 73.  There were no obituaries, no tributes.  Sylvia Martin’s book (although overly-reliant on heavy chunks of Palmer’s diary) puts this to rights for Aileen Palmer, socialist and ‘poet of conscience’.

NAZIS IN OUR MIDST: German-Australians, Internment and the Second World War by DAVID HENDERSON

NAZIS IN OUR MIDST: German-Australians, Internment and the Second World War

DAVID HENDERSON

Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016, 197 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Australia’s then conservative Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, said that it would be “absurd to intern refugees and anti-fascists when they were on the Allies’ side” but, writes La Trobe University historian, David Henderson, in his case-study history, Nazis in our Midst, this is exactly what happened in Australia during World War 11 as German Jews and anti-Nazis were detained along with Nazis in Australia’s five internment camps.  Most of the 1,500 German-Australian internees were the innocent victims of racial prejudice or espionage hysteria simply because they were German.

 

Military intelligence justified blanket internment because they saw refugees as ‘excellent cover for agents’ or as susceptible to blackmail by Hitler’s Nazi regime threatening their relatives in Germany.  The Australian press was vigorously pro-internment - ‘this is no time for squeamishness in dealing with foreigners in our midst’, honked the Hobart Mercury, for example.

 

Both the Menzies and Labor governments used broad internment powers to respond to a public sentiment that had reanimated latent World War 1 Germanophobia with paranoia about Nazi fifth columnists.  In this toxic atmosphere, the wildest denunciations about disloyalty were treated by the security agencies as good coin, including gossip, rumour, personal animosities, conflicts between neighbours, professional rivalries, even a fondness for German music composers.

 

Appeals tribunals offered scant scope for remedy.  These quasi-judicial bodies had a legal veneer but the hearings were held in secret, specific allegations by (mostly anonymous) informants were not disclosed and could therefore not be tested under the usual rules of evidence, a presumption of guilt applied to the internee, and judges could only make non-enforceable recommendations to the Attorney-General for an internee’s release.

 

The appeals process was “at best an unequal struggle, at worst a sham”, says Henderson, noting the discrepancy between a war ostensibly fought for liberty, democracy and the rule of law versus the legal-face-saving travesties of justice that accompanied internment.

 

The outcomes for those unjustly interned (years of monotony, morning roll calls, weather extremes, overcrowding, social stigma and long-term “damage, trauma and loss”) were vastly disproportionate to any actual domestic Nazi threat.  There were fewer than a couple of hundred full-blown German Nazis in Australia, whilst any nationalist hankering for Germany amongst Anglicised German immigrants was largely sentimental nostalgia.

 

No matter how diligently the Auslandsorganisation (the foreign arm of the German Nazi party) cultivated recruits from Germans living in Australia, their returns were meagre.  The Nazis’ takeover of Australia’s German Clubs (including celebrations of the Führer’s birthday and Hitler’s beer-hall putsch, swastika flag-flying and Nazi salutes) yielded few political gains amongst the Club membership, although the visible display of Nazi rituals and propaganda mistakenly fed suspicions amongst Australian authorities that German-Australian communities were “outposts of the Third Reich”.  They weren’t.  No German-Australian internee was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage, whilst only 77 internees were deported after the war.

 

Henderson generally strives for non-committal ‘balance’ in his treatment of internment but he does bloody his knuckles against historians who suggest that the Australian security agencies’ obsession with the Red Menace rather than fascism led to a rushed implementation of dragnet internment of Nazis which also netted the innocent.

 

Henderson’s message is clear - beware governments who grant themselves broad, sweeping powers and ask us to trust that they will not abuse them, he says.  The political temptation to be seen to be doing something muscular at the time of a ‘national security’ crisis will almost certainly result in harmful overreaction.

THE DIRTY GAME: Uncovering the Scandal at FIFA by ANDREW JENNINGS

THE DIRTY GAME: Uncovering the Scandal at FIFA

ANDREW JENNINGS

Arrow Books, 2016, 305 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

In 2014, the unravelling of the empire of Sepp Blatter, the multi-millionaire president of world football, began.  Blatter fretted as he presided over that year’s Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) Congress in Brazil as the corrupt, money-flushed bribe-takers and expense fraudsters from the world’s national and regional football associations, flanked by mounted police, fought their way through protesters who were angrily chanting ‘we want schools and hospitals FIFA-style’.  The next year, eight of Blatter’s thieving peers from the FIFA elite (its Executive Committee) were arrested by police, and Blatter, himself, was forced to announce his impending retirement.

 

How had it come to this?  In The Dirty Game, the British investigative reporter, Andrew Jennings, hangs out FIFA’s dirty laundry.  Jennings played a crucial role in the crumbling of FIFA’s criminal enterprise by providing confidential FIFA documents to the FBI identifying corrupt FIFA officials.

 

Jennings locates the rise of FIFA corruption to 1974, when the head of Brazilian football, João Havelange, the darling of South America’s many military dictators and a bit-player in Brazil’s organised crime network, was elected FIFA president, funding his vote-buying through pilfering $6 million from the Brazilian Federation for Sport which he headed and treated as his personal ATM.

 

Blatter became understudy (FIFA General Secretary) to Havelange and, when he succeeded Havelange as president in 1998, he applied his master’s lessons, such as the power to sign, with no counter-signature, FIFA cheques to himself, to family, to friends and to those needing to be bribed.

 

As big corporate money moved in on global football and its centrepiece World Cup, the scope for major corruption expanded and opened up lush pastures for Blatter and his acolytes to graze on, including fraudulent travel and accommodation expenses, black market rackets with World Cup tickets, and a host of tasty perks and fringe benefits.

 

Their biggest revenue stream, however, was bribery - expensive gifts, suitcases of cash, brown bags stuffed with dollars, cheques made out ‘pay to bearer’ - for their votes on World Cup hosting, sponsorship and broadcasting rights.  All monies received were hidden in FIFA’s “opaque financial reports” and, of course, laundered through their off-shore, tax-haven accounts.

 

There are many corrupt fingers in the corporate-fattened FIFA financial pie but special mention must be made of two master FIFA crooks, Jack Warner and Chuck Blazer.

 

The World Cup self-enrichment of the Trinidadian, Warner (president of CONCACAF, the Central and North American regional football federation), was extensive, including his theft from Australian taxpayers for their 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids which was “in a class of its own”, says Jennings.  Warner wangled a cheque for $462,200 from Football Federation Australia for an ‘upgrade’ to his bogus ‘Centre of Excellence’, purportedly established for Caribbean soccer development but which was, in reality, an expensive leisure and entertainment complex, built and run by thieving $30 million from FIFA and CONCACAF.

 

Warner also took bribes from Blatter to fund his Caribbean business and political interests in return for the three dozen votes he controlled from the region’s micro-states shoring up Blatter’s re-election prospects.

 

The American, Chuck Blazer (CONCACAF’s General Secretary), trousered over $400 million of FIFA and CONCACAF money by automatically garnisheeing 10%  of all CONCACAF television and marketing revenues, supplemented through unspecified ‘commissions’ and ‘monthly fees’.  This financed every dollar of Blazer’s lavish living costs, including luxury apartment rent ($18,000 a month) in Trump Tower in New York.

 

It was Blazer who, when tumbled by the FBI, pulled the plug on FIFA.  A grotesque glutton, Blazer feared, more than anything else, a diet of jail food for the rest of his life, and he sang like Pavarotti, turning informer on dozens of his FIFA cronies.

 

Facing his own come-uppance is Blatter, whose secret salary, expenses and bonuses of around $4 million a year came courtesy of his vast powers of patronage, dispensed through multi-million dollar football ‘development grants’, World Cup ticket boondoggles and the provision of tasty freebies and generous bonuses to the global FIFA crime family to buy their loyalty.  The FIFA fish rots from the head.

 

Jennings’ book focuses on the detailed forensics of how a dogged journalist uncovered FIFA corruption rather than developing a broad analysis of the money culture of FIFA but Jennings deserves praise for his patient pursuit of the corporate exploiters and the financial bloodsuckers from the world’s soccer bureaucracies who engorge themselves off the people's game.

PARTY ANIMALS: My Family and Other Communists by DAVID AARONOVITCH

PARTY ANIMALS: My Family and Other Communists

DAVID AARONOVITCH,

Jonathan Cape, 2015, 309 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Party Animals, a memoir by David Aaronovitch, columnist with Britain’s establishment newspaper, The Times, seems, at first blush, to be a critical but sympathetic account of the lives of the socialists, including Aaronovitch and his parents, in the post-war Communist Party of Great Britain.  In Part Two of his book, however, Aaronovitch warms to the role of bitter ex-Communist and gives us the “real story” of what he sees as a monstrous, self-deluding ideology.

 

David’s father, Sam, a poor, atheist Jew, became a Communist in 1934 to combat poverty and fascism, and spent 25 years as a leading Party official.  Soap-box, loudhailer and self-education were his tools of choice, and, by all accounts, he was “charming, inspiring, a great teacher, a wonderful public speaker …”.  David’s mother, Lavender, from an upper class family, was likewise a tireless Party stalwart.  Whatever their illusions in the Soviet Union, Sam and Lavender were not ridgy-didge Stalinists – they were, rather, “people who cared about the downtrodden and the oppressed” and they devoted their lives to building a better world.

 

David Aaronovitch followed in his parents’ politically-outsized footsteps, as did many other baby-boomer ‘red diaper babies’ (in the fifties, “a third of the membership of the Party still had parents who were Communists”).  Despite regretting some “eccentricities” (no Beano comics because the publisher was non-union), Aaronovitch concludes that his Party upbringing was “not a poor heritage, but an oddly rich one”. 

 

Now, however, Aaronovitch is older and wiser and he unpicks the “comfortable assumptions” he held in his younger years about his parents and their politics.  Like a recovering alcoholic fervently severing all ties to the demon drink, Aaronovitch, the recovering Marxist, renounces his socialist addiction, discovering that strikes are awful, that his father led a campaign to censor lurid and violent US comics, that the Party harboured spies, and that it is a slippery slope between Stalin and a hypothetical British communist government which would eagerly “sentence dissidents to slave labour in the Welsh salt mines”.

 

Rather than openly tub-thump his neo-conservative/neo-liberal epiphany, however, Aaronovitch seeks to explain his political volte-face through the mysteries of “the psyche” as they played out in his family’s relationship pathologies and traumas.  Sam’s energetic adultery made his real family dysfunctional, says Aaronovitch, and it explains Sam and Lavender’s steadfast commitment to their substitute, idealised ‘family’, the Party, despite all its communist wickedness.

 

Aaronovitch’s rejection of his parents’ transgressions of infidelity and wilfully blind party loyalty accounts, he says, for his rightwards political trajectory.  Thus does Aaronovitch rationalise his anti-socialist spittle-flecked, ‘God-That-Failed’ anger as caused by psychology, not his political choice to go the full Thatcher.  In Party Animals, we get discount psychoanalysis not measured political analysis.