Politics

Graham Freudenberg, who has been at the centre of federal and NSW Labor politics for more than forty years, has now written his political memoir. Elegantly presented by his publisher, A Figure of Speech details Freudenberg’s life story, from his childhood in Brisbane to his early career in journalism, a rite of passage to London, and the vicissitudes of life in politics.

The fears and tensions in the aftermath of September 11 created an unusual political climate in the US, in which it became possible for the government to lead an invasion without having to explain precisely why. Nobody seemed to quite know who or what was guiding the administration as it led the charge for war: was it utopian neo-conservatives trying to reshape the world in America’s image? Was it isolationist hawks trying to wipe out an old foreign foe? Was it oil-hungry Texans? Was it paranoid security advisers, regretful of their failures and with a new bent for pre-emption, no matter how distant the threat?

The cliché of the South Pacific as a tropical paradise is contradicted by the hellishness of the Melanesian/Polynesian political scheming that characterises most of the region. It is a form of scheming that would make Byzantine politics appear like the polite equivalent of an election for office in the Country Women’s Association. From Port Moresby to Suva, political élites hide behind a fraying façade of democratic governance while slyly engaging in corruption, crime, venality and spite in their dealings with each other and with the citizens they pretend to govern. Many are adept at manipulating the language of anti-colonialism to colonise their own peoples. The ramshackle states they have constructed cannibalise public resources, including resources donated by overseas governments and aid agencies. The South Pacific is becoming a zone of indefensible human suffering. This can be seen in the collapsed ‘state’ of Nauru, the recent violent civil conflicts in the Solomon Islands and Bougainville, and the looming governance crisis in Papua New Guinea. Fiji illustrates the South Pacific’s ‘hell in paradise’ theme vividly with its two coups in 1987 (led by Sitiveni Rabuka) and the even worse misfortunes of the Chaudhry Government in May 2000 at the hands of the notorious George Speight.

Martin Krygier’s deft, discursive prose could persuade anyone except an ironclad ideologue that it is exhilarating as well as healthy to examine one’s prejudices and complacencies. Krygier is also a writer possessed of a frank openness that gives credence to the idea that you can judge a book by its cover. I suspect he’d also enjoy the piquancy of maxim busting. The cover of Civil Passions is a particularly beautiful one: a detail of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 1338–40 fresco, the Allegory of Good Government. Its Giottoesque precision and its colour – those luminous Sienese pinks and reds – would be reason enough to use it. But there is a deeper fitness to the choice, and it has to do with what Krygier describes as his destined mode of being: one of hybridity.

In the last twenty years, the belief in a transformative left – socialist, communist, whatever – has collapsed more comprehensively than at any time since its beginnings in 1789. The Western working class is overwhelmingly oriented towards individual life, acquisition and consumption; the working class of the developing world has not developed major radical parties in the face of substantial repression of trade union organisation; faith in central planning, market socialism, interconnected cooperatives and the like drained away in the late 1970s, and no alternative plan for running the economy is on the table. 

The parameters of the twentieth century have, in the hands of historians, proved rather malleable. The need to contextualise the ‘End of History’, and a belief that eras are less arbitrarily and more accurately defined by events than by calendars, justified Eric Hobsbawm’s chosen bookends to his acclaimed Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (1994). Harvard historian Stephen Graubard, in his magisterial exploration of the transformation of the American presidency during the twentieth century, extends the reach of the century into the twenty-first – a continuity justified by the redolence of the strategies pursued by George W. Bush to those of Ronald Reagan. For all the present incumbent’s protestations of paradigm shifts necessitating new approaches and responses, Graubard convincingly posits him among the twentieth-century presidents.

Campaigning during the 1912 US presidential election, the great labour leader and socialist Eugene Debs used to tell his supporters that he could not lead them into the Promised Land because if they were trusting enough to be led in they would be trusting enough to be led out again. In other words, he was counselling his voters to resist the easy certitude that zealotry brings; to reject a politics that trades on blind faith rather than the critical power of reason.

On the face of it, this book represents a strange project: to elaborate for the reader’s consideration the moral beliefs of a man whom the author judges (and judged in advance, one suspects) to be shallow, inconsistent, lacking moral and intellectual sobriety, and to have failed so often to act on the moral principles he repeatedly professes that he can fairly be accused of hypocrisy ... 

Chalmers Johnson, who began his career in the US Navy and became a consultant to the CIA, is one of the most respected American experts on East Asia and international affairs. Over the past few years, he has emerged as a significant academic critic of the Bush administration, and what he sees as a dangerously reckless escalation of US imperialism and militarism.