Politics

There is a paradox in the title of this book, The Power of One, by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. It is an accurate description on one level, because the powerful whistleblowing that led to demands for stronger regulation and accountability in Big Tech was indeed the courageous choice of a lone individual, the author, an American engineer and data scientist. But as the book underscores, Haugen’s whistleblowing was successful – in that it achieved impact and she has walked away relatively unscathed – because of the ecosystem that surrounded her. Lawyers, media advisers, journalists, politicians, and civil society helped her to speak up and then amplified her calls for change. The whistleblowing that Haugen documents might more accurately be described as the power of a community dedicated to ensuring that one voice reaches the minds of many. 

The political scientist Karl Deutsch once said that a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past. These two new accounts of the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine, and the nationalist distortions of that history, would seem to bear him out. Vladimir Putin’s historical arguments for the war against Ukraine are widely accepted by his fellow countrymen and women, prompting the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar to argue, in War and Punishment, that this ‘imperialist’ history is ‘inherently addictive’ and ‘our disease’. But this is not a vice unique to Russians: the Australian historian Mark Edele points out, in Russia’s War Against Ukraine, that Ukrainian governments have also indulged in a ‘clumsy politics of memory’ by celebrating anti-Semitic, anti-Polish, and anti-Russian nationalists.

'It is too early to say’ was the legendary response of Zhou Enlai when Dr Henry Kissinger asked him about the effects of the French Revolution – proof, if needed, of an ancient culture acknowledging the long cycle of history. Except Zhou misheard. As Chas Freeman, the retired foreign service adviser at that historic meeting revealed many years later, Zhou assumed that Kissinger was talking about the 1968 student protests in Paris, not the storming of the Bastille. It was, said Freeman, a mistake ‘too delicious to invite correction’.

Paul D. Kenny’s impressive and engaging book is a corrective to the well-established body of work on populism. This corpus grew in tandem with the most recent successes of populism that have been a feature of contemporary liberal democracies in the past decade, and are a source of anxiety to many who care about democracy and value pluralism.

Having worked for the Democrats in the United States and as chief of staff to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Bruce Wolpe has credentials. Few in Australia are better placed to examine the implications for Australia, and particularly the Labor government, of a possible Trump return in 2024. 

The historian Jordana Silverstein’s masterful new book, Cruel Care, begins with an account of the Murugappan family. Many Australians will remember this family: the hard-working parents seeking asylum from Sri Lanka, and their two Australian-born children, taken from their home in Biloela by the Australian government at five o’clock one morning in 2018. The family was detained for four years in Melbourne and Perth and on Christmas Island. The case was so drawn out that, in the rare photographs released to the public, we saw the children growing up. Their treatment was illogical, unjust, unkind, and expensive, and provoked a sharp emotional response from the public.

When Justice Anthony Besanko released his judgment on the Ben Roberts-Smith versus Fairfax defamation case on 1 June, there was a lot more riding on his decision than the reputation of the principal parties and who would be landed with the eye-watering legal bills. Had the verdict gone against Fairfax, its reporters, Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters, and, to a lesser extent, Dan Oakes, would have struggled to return to or resurrect their careers. Defeat would have had a chilling effect on genuinely probing investigative reporting. In the face of such a decision, media organisations and editors around the country would have thought long and hard about letting their journalists pursue well-connected and well-resourced public figures, let alone defend their findings in court. But there was more at stake than that. The ‘defamation trial of the century’ was also widely, if inaccurately, regarded as a war crimes trial by proxy. While Roberts-Smith was not on trial for any of the crimes McKenzie and Masters alleged that he had committed or facilitated, had Justice Besanko found that the reporters had defamed him it would have made the pursuit of war crimes charges against Roberts-Smith more unlikely, or more difficult. The sense of relief at Besanko’s judgment was near universal. It not only emboldened the nation’s investigative reporters and their editors but also opened the way for the full and free pursuit of those members of Australia’s Special Forces credibly identified by the Brereton Report (2020) as having committed war crimes in Afghanistan.