Tim Hollo brings a broad experience – as a musician, political adviser, political candidate, community activist, and chief executive of the Green Institute – to Living Democracy, a synthesis of political, economic and philosophical ideas, directed to revolutionising the approach of community activists to meeting the ecological crisis and transforming societal organisation and governance.
Hollo conceives of traditional forms of governance – from traditional parliamentary democracies to authoritarian forms and from socialist to the embrace of capitalism – as anti-ecological and removed from implementing the wishes of people generally, in favour of those of a narrow governing class and the desires of extractivist corporations and their lobbyists.
Hollo draws on the writings of Italian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci for a vision of the way in which prevailing (anti-ecological) norms are maintained through a network of values, myths, stories, caricatures and received common sense ideas as well as the coercive forces of state agencies. As a guide to action, Gramsci’s ideas lead to an emphasis upon the re-writing of such prevailing ideas through communication and community action as a path to changing the way society works and building new pathways to a new way of societal functioning from which the book’s title is derived, namely, a living democracy.
Hullo’s title refers not only to a different form of society but the process of creating that new order of things, namely, the practice of living democracy. Hollo draws on great systems’ theorist, Donella Matthews, for the proposition that seeking to control individual elements of an existing system will often make matters worse. The key is to change the paradigms and power structures of the system.
Hollo traces many of the myths of anti-ecological thought to the writings of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, particularly, the latter’s view of human nature as giving rise, in the absence of strong central government, to a life that was nasty, brutish and short. A modern articulation thereof is Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, in which the absence of private property is said to lead to a prisoner’s dilemma in which every individual strives to maximise their individual yield, and, in doing so, depletes and destroys the common resource.
In refutation of Hardin’s simplistic thesis , Hollo points to Nobel prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s study of actual commons’ management in history. Ostrom’s study identifies the way in which commons have operated over historical epochs according to complex series of rules which ensure that everyone benefits and the common resource is preserved. Hollo points to the way in which economics textbooks and university courses still promote Hardin’s evidence free and refuted view of history and human nature because it reinforces the underlying view of human nature on which the prevailing defence of anti-ecological capitalism is based.
In the same way, Hollo calls out the famous 1968 Stanley Milgram psychology experiment in which participants were instructed to inflict electric shock torture on other human beings in order to induce skill learning and Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison experiment and its famous production of abuse of prisoners in a fake prison environment. Hollo points out that, despite the results of both experiments having been exposed as affected by academic fraud, they continue to be promoted in academic circles, inter alia, because they support a view of human nature, convenient to adherents of strong central government, as nasty and brutish.
Hollo challenges the prevailing concept of selfish man on which much of capitalist and anti-ecological thought is based with the idea of people working together to create plenty to be shared rather than scarcity to be exploited. Much of this derives from Ostrom’s seminal study of commons’ management demonstrating that people can and do manage shared resources effectively to create better results for everyone dependent on the resource.
Hollo’s approach also draws upon modern understandings of Darwinian evolution as being more than the individualistic triumph of tooth and claw which gave rise to the crude visions of Social Darwinism. Hollo draws upon the work of turn of the twentieth century Russian political philosopher and evolutionary thinker Pyotr Kropotkin, who pointed to the way in which, in nature, groups and individuals engage in mutual assistance giving rise to patterns of co-evolution and symbiosis.
Hollo also draws upon the modern biological writings of Lyn Margulis whose work articulated the way in which even primitive mono-cellular organisms are the product of symbiotic cooperation between even more primitive organisms and how complex organisms including the human body depend on symbiotic relationships for the individual organism to survive. Where would we be without our gut bacteria? Nowhere is the simple answer.
Hollo describes the natural world as working as a series of cycles working on a series of timescales in which all elements play a role in defining how the cycle operates and evolves. He gives to these natural phenomena the name “panarchy”, reflecting that all elements play a role in the natural governance process.
Hollo also draws upon human history for a vision of alternating states between populations managing their own common resources, themselves, on the one hand, and the rise of centralised power structures by which the commons are enclosed and devoted to the enrichment of the powerful few, on the other. In this, he seizes upon the work of a number of authors including agrarian anthropologist James C Scott, who describes the rise of centralized kingdoms who sought to coerce their subjects into living cheek by jowl in cities so that they could be exploited and controlled and the periodic breakdown of these hierarchical communities by ordinary people resisting and escaping to re-establish agrarian communities ruled in cooperation by the members of the communities.
According to Hollo and his sources, human history does not indicate, despite its prevailing articulation, that centrally ruled, hierarchical societies are the necessary result of time’s arrow.
Hollo’s posited methodology for creating a living democracy is for people to create their own structures for cooperating – in defiance of capitalism’s desire to create scarcity – to create plenty by sharing resources and making their own rules for the way in which these enterprises are governed. He gives examples such as “No Buy” campaigns; city farms; suburban libraries; and cooperative recycling ventures.
As a political example, Hollo refers to the short lived and bloodily suppressed Paris Commune of 1871. Hollo also draws on more contemporary examples. Since 2015, Barcelona en Comu, a citizen’s democracy group seeking to boost an economy of social and environmental justice and to democratize institutions so that people can decide on the city they want has exercised municipal power in Barcelona including through the office of mayor, Ada Colau, who had worked for many years as a housing and anti-evictions activist.
Hollo’s more extraordinary modern example is the Kurdish nation known as Rojava created in north eastern Syria, at the same time as battling ISIS, on the principles of democratic confederalism. Rojava brings together three autonomous regions based on principles articulated by jailed (by Turkey) Kurdish leader, Ocalan. Rojava describes itself as creating a model of democracy that might actually bring stability to a war-torn region as well as battling ISIS.
Dissatisfaction with different existing models of government, whether left or right in their ideological principles, is not irrational. However, the instinctive tendency, normally, is to shrug one’s shoulders, eschew the task of creating new societal models and to make the best of whatever system with which one happens to be stuck. It is now, however, nearly 35 years since James Hansen addressed a congressional committee on a hot summer’s day in Washington to warn of a coming global warming. Since, despite the passage of that 35 years, governments of all persuasion, despite their professed best intentions, are unwilling or incapable of making the necessary changes to reverse the planet’s trajectory to unlivability, the question of the best form of government to make rational decisions about the community’s best interests presents itself with renewed urgency.
For Hollo, transforming society and its governance is more rational and feasible than persuading imperfect government to do the right thing.
On our present trajectory, it is hard to argue that he is wrong.
A panel session with Rachel Franks and Nick Cowdery at the BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival at the State Library of NSW at 3.30 pm on Saturday, 10 September 2022.
Thank you to Catherin Menage and her team for putting on the festival and inviting me to be part of this session.
Thank you to Nick and Rachel for having me as part of the session.
Thank you to Rachel for producing such a wonderful book and the interesting discussion that Nick and you have already provided.
I want to say a few words about Rachel’s book. I will say quite a bit about Barry’s book. And, hopefully, I can mention the third book in the trifecta of your reading about the death penalty, a book published by Mike Richards in 2002: The Hanged Man.
So, to An Uncommon Hangman and Nosey Bob Howard.
I think it is very important that we write and read and know about the death penalty. The death penalty is cruel and inhuman and gruesome. It often results in botched killings. Even as late as 28 July, this year, prison officials in Alabama spent three hours puncturing holes in Joe Nathan James with needles and slicing him open with scalpels searching for veins into which to make the lethal injection.[1] It is easy to go into denial and gloss over the cruelty involved in the State killing a person in cold blood.
Second, it is easy to regard the past as a different country and believe that capital punishment was accepted by everybody in the olden days. Rachel writes about, in An Uncommon Hangman, some of the more prominent campaigners to abolish the death penalty in New South Wales and also identifies that, on very many occasions, there were very strong campaigns for mercy for particular persons condemned to death. The death penalty was and will always be controversial and we should never forget that.
Third, An Uncommon Hangman, in covering the life of the official hangman in NSW for over thirty years and the persons he executed over those years provides an excellent social history of NSW, during that same period. The circumstances of the victims; the circumstances of the perpetrators; the methods of investigation; the reactions of society; the campaigns for mercy; as well as the circumstances of the executions all tell us much about how life was lived in the second half of the 19th century in Australia.
Fourth, while it takes a special person to want to be an executioner, Rachel reminds us, through the perspective of Nosey Bob, that everyone in society is responsible when the State kills but everyone involved can always try to deflect the blame to others. The hangman is only carrying out the judge’s command. The judge is only giving effect to the jury’s verdict. The jury are only doing what the law and the judge requires of them. And the Executive Council, the government of the day, when they refuse mercy, are only allowing the law to take its course. We must always remember that, when the State kills, it kills in the name of all of us. We are all responsible.
Thank you again, Rachel, for your contribution to scholarship in this area.
I, now, turn to The Penalty is Death, edited by Barry Jones AC.[2] Barry turns ninety on 11 August, this year. Some of us may be too young to have spent our childhoods watching Barry perform as an absolute super quiz star on Bob and Dolly Dyer’s[3] massively popular show, Pick-a-Box. Barry has been declared a national living treasure by the National Trust.
Barry has been a lifelong campaigner against the death penalty. In the lead up to the hanging of Ronald Ryan, on 3 February 1967, Barry was secretary of the Victorian Anti-Hanging Committee and, with many other Victorians at the time, did everything he could possibly do to convince the Victorian government led by Henry Bolte to relent and spare Ryan’s life.
In the wake of Ryan’s hanging, Barry Jones carried on the campaign for abolition in Victoria. As part of this campaign, he edited a book called The Penalty is Death which was published in 1968 by Sun Books,[4] a publishing venture of three former Penguin employees, Geoffrey Dutton, Max Harris and Brian Stonier. Barry was a member of the Victorian Parliament in 1975 when abolition of the death penalty passed through both Houses and became law. His speech in that debate is one of the additions to the second coming of The Penalty is Death.
About two years ago, a friend of mine, Frank Mannix, sent me a copy of the 1968 edition of The Penalty is Death. I was transfixed. It was an amazing collection of the best writing against the death penalty ever written. Charles Dickens, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, the great American advocate, Clarence Darrow, and, among many others, the Italian philosopher, Cesare Beccaria, writing way back in 1764. Beccaria was both an economist and philosopher and his book, On Crime and Punishment, argued for a rational approach to punishment as opposed to seeing it as divine punishment. In the wake of Beccaria’s writing, Tuscany abolished capital punishment in 1786 and Austria did the same thing, a year later. Meanwhile, as Rachel’s book points out, a fleet of British prison ships were bound for Botany Bay on a mission to establish a 179 history of hanging people by the neck until they were dead.
As I worked my way through the chapters, an unusual but not surprising thing happened. The 50 year old glue gave way and the book began to go to pieces in my hands. I took to carrying it around in a rubber band to avoid losing the pages and my place in the book.
It was then that I had the idea that this book needed to see a new lease of life. It was such a valuable collection of works that it needed to be made available to a new generation of readers and students and activists. I wrote to Barry and told him I wanted to arrange for a new edition of The Penalty is Death. He was very supportive. I found out that Macmillan had swallowed up Sun Books in 1981. So, I wrote to Macmillan. After several attempts to make contact and some inquiries around the traps, I found somebody, there, who told me that there was no impediment to a new edition being produced. All the permissions and copyright vested in Barry.
I then made inquiries of typesetters. It turns out that skilled people can scan a hard copy of an old book and turn the PDF obtained into a Word document that can then be edited. I obtained quotes from printers. Best of all, I found a publishing editor who, for a very moderate fee, took all the logistical questions off my plate.
Barry Jones worked tirelessly re-writing and updating all the introductions to the chapters and his over-view chapter at the beginning. We added Barry’s speech in the Victorian Parliament and a speech by our third author, Mike Richards, made on the 50th anniversary of Ryan’s death.
I found three terrific people each to write an excellent foreword for the new edition. Michael Kirby AC CMG wrote a brilliant piece linking the movement towards abolition and the growth of international human rights. Richard Bourke, a wonderful Australian barrister from the Victorian bar who has spent the last twenty years based in Louisiana working on death penalty cases in the south of the United States, wrote about his own experiences in witnessing the execution of his client, Jackie Elliott, in Texas in 2003 and the profound, soul-deep sense of how wrong capital punishment was that he felt at the time and ever since. And Julian McMahon AC, who acted for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, wrote about the men that inspired him in his efforts to oppose the death penalty including Barry Jones, Michael Kirby, Richard Bourke and Jack Galbally. The latter’s great persistence saw him introduce a Bill to abolish the death penalty into the Victorian Parliament, fifteen times, between 1956 and 1974.
Capital Punishment Justice Project, the organisation of which I am chair, raised over $40,000 to pay for the costs of publishing the new edition. As you can see, Scribe agreed to badge the book and have been fantastic in arranging for distribution. I think that, wherever you live in Australia, there is a good chance that The Penalty is Death will be in your local bookshop at this moment. Barry Jones has generously donated the royalties from the sale of the book to CPJP.
The Penalty is Death was launched by Kerry O’Brien at Parliament House, Brisbane, on 1 August, this year, as part of celebrations to mark the anniversary of the abolition of capital punishment in 1922. Queensland was the first jurisdiction in the British Empire so to abolish the death penalty.
That is my story and the story of the Book. I want to share with you a few gems from some of the famous writers whose work is collected in The Penalty is Death.
In his foreword, Richard Bourke quotes Reinhold Niebuhr for a phrase that becomes more and more relevant as I grow older: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must have hope”.[5]
Sir Ernest Gowers chaired the Royal Commission into the Death Penalty in the UK from 1949-1953. He explains why he has come to the conclusion that, in a consideration of any discussion of the death penalty, the onus must be on retentionists to justify their position on utilitarian grounds. After setting out a number of very good arguments, he says:
“Perhaps, the turning point was when I learned what a large number of applications there were for the post of hangman. Any State institution, I thought, that inspires ambitions of that sort in its citizens and satisfies some of them …surely does need to justify itself on utilitarian grounds.”[6]
George Orwell wrote an essay about a hanging he witnessed as a member of the Imperial Police in Burma. He describes the image of the prisoner walking in front of him the forty metres to the gallows. And then he says:
“And, once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
“It was curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we are alive … He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.”[7]
That is a very powerful passage in a very powerful essay. There is a further passage towards the end of the essay that undermines the impression that one can get from some descriptions of some executions. Everybody, including the prisoner, tries to act in a dignified manner. The result of those efforts should not be allowed to detract in any way from the torture involved in every second a condemned prisoner spends on death row. Orwell writes, as he describes the party returning to the main part of the prison from the gallows:
“The Eurasian boy who was walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing smile: ‘Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man) when he heard that his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright …”[8]
I hope you will take the opportunity to read The Penalty is Death. It will provide you with many insights about an issue that remains of huge practical relevance to Australians as we found out in 2015 with the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Australians travel a lot and, when we go to countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, China, Taiwan, Japan and Pakistan, to name just a few, we are in jurisdictions where the domestic law imposes the death penalty. When we look at countries which are abolitionist or have long term moratoria in place, we feel encouraged that the death penalty is coming to an end. But, when we look at the countries which retain and implement the death penalty, we realise that much more than half the world’s population live under the threat of being sentenced to death. But it is not just that capital punishment might affect a fellow Australian or even someone near and dear to us. Capital punishment is a moral challenge to all of us. While any one person remains threatened by the death penalty, a deep wrong remains upon the earth and we are challenged as to what we can and will do about it. The death penalty is wrong at all times and in all places.
In the time left, I wanted to speak a little about another amazing book, The Hanged Man, by Dr Mike Richards. Mike did his PhD on Ronald Ryan’s 1967 execution. He focussed on the machinery of law and government and researched and wrote about every step in the process that led to Ryan’s death at the hands of the law. The results of this research are amazing. The reader gets to see Justice John Starke, before and after he imposes the sentence of death, and to hear His Honour’s reflections on whether he could have done more to save Ryan’s life when he spoke to Cabinet. The reader gets to see into the heart of the protest movement taking every legal and political step to change the government’s mind or to prevent that mind from having its way. The reader gets to follow the debate in Cabinet as Sir Henry Bolte guides the process to its inevitable result and to obtain his much-desired object of an execution on his watch. One gets to hear what the governor of the prison said to the staff at Pentridge about how to treat the prisoners in the hours following Ryan’s execution.
Having obtained his PhD, Mike realised that the most important person was missing from his thesis. So, he embarked on another exhaustive (and, no doubt, exhausting) research project to find out everything he could about the hanged man, Ronald Ryan.
The Hanged Man starts with Ryan writing his last letter to his wife and daughters on a roll of toilet paper and it ends, nearly four hundred pages later, with his execution. In the intervening pages, however, we still receive the detailed documentation of the legal processes that brought Ryan to his death. But we also get to read about his childhood; his wardship with the Department of Children’s Welfare; his early adulthood working in the timber industry and competing in cycling road races and running the amateur club that ran those races; his early crimes as an adult; his rehabilitation in prison; his courtship; his marriage; his role as a father; his career as a serious break and enter operative and addicted gambler; his escape; his time on the run; his capture; his trial; and the manner in which he faced his death.
The execution of Ronald Ryan says a lot about our history including about the places from where we have come as Rachel’s book, indeed, spells out for us. It tells us the dangers of populist politics. It should remind us that we are just one atrocity away from an ugly debate about restoration. The Hanged Man is the definitive account of how that execution came to pass. I think we should all try to read it.
These are three amazing books. I feel privileged to have said a few words about each of them. Despite my best efforts, I doubt I have done them justice.
[6] TPID, page 82: Earlier, at page 72, Sir Ernest reveals that the evidence at the Royal Commission indicated that the number of applications averaged five per week.
Author: Ian Cobain Publisher: Portobello Books[1] Reviewer: Stephen Keim
The subtitle of The History Thieves is Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation. It is a history of the obscene lengths to which the British State has gone to ensure that the public is denied transparency concerning the actions of the government, both domestically and in its overseas operations. The History Thieves is also a history of the wrongdoing which the lack of transparency has managed to hide from the British public and from the work of historians.
“The History Thieves has much astounding material to put before the reader. It is both a history of secrecy in the United Kingdom but, also, a history of shameful things that were withheld from the public but which have been since revealed”
The obsession for secrecy was able to be satisfied prior to the second half of the nineteenth century without need for legislative restriction because the number of public servants was limited; they came from a restricted range of backgrounds; and the system of patronage by which officers were employed meant that it was simply not the done thing to talk out of term.
However, as the need grew for a larger public service, officers were recruited from a larger range of backgrounds who were not bound by the class loyalty that had enforced secrecy in the past. The need for more formal controls led to the passing of the first Official Secrets Act in 1899 and even more restrictive legislation in 1911. Section 2 of the 1911 Official Secrets Act prohibited the unauthorized disclosure or receipt of any official information. Fittingly, the passing of the Act, in each case, was accompanied by misleading statements by the responsible ministers in the House of Commons and very little publicity. Nothing to see here, the public was assured.
The opening pages of the introduction to The History Thieves describes two British government intelligence officials arriving at the offices of the Guardian newspaper in London to oversee the destruction of several of the Guardian’s computers. The computers held thousands of documents which detailed how a British agency, Government Communications Headquarters, and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency, had conspired to, and largely succeeded, capture every digital communication that was being sent or received by anyone at any time.
This destruction was both pointless and illustrative of the deep logic that underlies the British government’s centuries-old thirst for secrecy. It was pointless because the officials and the government knew that the same information was held in other computers in the United States and could be published without reference to the Guardian. Nonetheless, the officials and the government knew that secrecy allowed governments to get away with things that would not be tolerated if they were conducted openly. And the officials and the government knew that no punitive action, however petty, was wasted in communicating the message that breaking down the walls that kept things secret would never be tolerated.
“There is also a paradox to the revelations contained in a book on what government secrecy attempted to hide from us. While the revelations astound us, there may always be more and worse matters which we have not yet discovered”
Cobain’s title, The History Thieves, makes the important point that government secrecy, not only, allows governments to do things that they would not dare to do openly but that it also prevents both professional historians and the public from constructing a full picture of the country’s history. Even where the wars and atrocities conducted by the British government, eventually, become known, often by chance, the revelation of such atrocities, years after the fact, falls far short of their being publicly known at the time the events took place. Even the careful documentation by books like The History Thieves or the coverage of the revelations in the mass media for a few days when the revelations occur fails to make such events, withheld for so long, enter the public mind and become part of the public’s consciousness. The image we have of a country’s past actions is carefully built up by repeated experience and frequent retelling by our parents, our friends, by ourselves and by countless reflections published in newspapers, books and visual media. Few such articles will focus on the British contribution to starting the Vietnam war or British officers, literally, holding Kenyan subjects’ feet to the flame. Many more will remember the much more favourable images of a young Queen’s grace in the years after her coronation or British support for and participation in the Nuremberg Trials, thereby, establishing new principles of international law, in each case, occupying a similar period of history.
There is also a paradox to the revelations contained in a book on what government secrecy attempted to hide from us. While the revelations astound us, there may always be more and worse matters which we have not yet discovered.
That said, The History Thieves has much astounding material to put before the reader. It is both a history of secrecy in the United Kingdom but, also, a history of shameful things that were withheld from the public but which have been since revealed. And it does set out examples of incidents where the full story has not been revealed: where many of the most important documents were systematically destroyed or remain in the vaults of intelligence agencies still too damaging to the country’s reputation to reveal.
Reading The History Thieves yields a totally different history of the UK in the period since the end of the Second World War to that passed off as the whole truth during the period to which the history relates.
I mention, briefly below, three aspects of that history which were deliberately withheld from the eyes of the public and which are narrated in the pages of The History Thieves. The examples reveal how effective the attempts to maintain secrecy were. They also reveal atrocities that could not have been committed if the public had been aware of what had happened.
Soon after the end of that war, still in 1945, the British armed forces started what became, eventually, the Vietnam War and which continued until the capture of Saigon on 30 April 1975. The British not only committed its own weary troops but re-armed forces of the Vichy France and Japan, who were not only erstwhile enemies but many of whom may have been war criminals for whom Australia was engaged in setting up courts to hear such allegations. To ensure that France did not lose its colonies in Indochina, the British government started a war against the nationalist forces of Vietnam, the Viet Minh.
The nature of the way in which the war was conducted may be judged from the orders given which included instructions to use the maximum force available to ensure wiping out any hostilities we may meet. If we use too much force, no harm is done. As Cobain observes, this displayed ruthless disregard for civilians.
“The story of attempts of British government lawyers and their clients to hide the truth from coming out during the litigation is almost as lurid”
From the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, Britain fought a totally secret war in Oman against the mainly nomadic Jebelis people of the Dhofari Highlands in the south of Oman. Putatively, the UK was acting in support of the Sultan of Oman against his own subjects but, clearly, the war was to maintain the UK’s own interests including its access to valuable oil supplies and export markets. As part of their tactics in suppressing a rebellion, the British poisoned wells, torched villages, destroyed crops and shot livestock. They developed new torture techniques for use in interrogation which included the infliction of noise which became part of the interrogation techniques used later in Northern Ireland. Areas occupied by civilians were turned into free-fire zones. No journalist was allowed to visit Oman after 1962. No official ever mentioned the war in a way in which it could be reported. As Cobain observes, no wonder the British wanted to keep this war secret.
The discovery of systematic British atrocities in Kenya is, itself, a fascinating story which began with British lawyers engaged in acting for Kenyans who had suffered injuries from previously unexploded ordnance left over from the struggle against the Mau Mau insurgency prior to independence in December 1963.
But, when the lawyers spoke to their clients about encounters with unexploded bombs, they also heard repeated stories from elderly Kenyan citizens about well organised atrocities committed by British forces occurring on a previously unimagined scale. Amazingly, this information had remained secret from the British public until the lawyers started taking statements in 2001.
The stories told by the plaintiffs were lurid. Jane Muthoni Mara was 15 years old when two men held her down and a third raped her with a heated bottle. Paul Nizili said that, while he was in British captivity, a colonial official known as Luvai castrated him with a large pair of pliers. Wambagu Wa Nyingi had never joined the Mau Mau but was imprisoned for nine years. He recalled being knocked unconscious in an incident where nine prisoners were clubbed to death.
The story of attempts of British government lawyers and their clients to hide the truth from coming out during the litigation is almost as lurid. Every attempt was made to have the action dismissed on technical grounds such as an argument that the UK could not be responsible for what the Empire did in Kenya because Kenya is now a different country.
Affidavits were sworn arguing that every document had been handed over. It was only when the few documents that had been provided were shown by expert historian witnesses to reveal the existence of large numbers of other documents did the government begin to come clean.
Eventually, the action was settled favourably to the elderly Kenyan plaintiffs but disclosure of the files led to a hunt for other hidden files concerning other parts of the Empire and has revealed further systemic suppression of the truth about British actions in its colonial domains.
The History Thieves is a fascinating read. More importantly, it is a story that needs to be told and remembered.
Author: Elaine Pearson Publisher: Scribner[1] Reviewer: Stephen Keim
Elaine Pearson was born in Sydney but grew up in Perth. In November 1998, she completed her law degree at Murdoch University.
A graduate job with a leading law firm on the Esplanade or St George’s Terrace was not for Pearson. She found and applied for a volunteer job – funded by the Australian government – with a small anti-human trafficking NGO based in Bangkok, Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW). She was successful but part of the deal turned out to be that, if she could pay her own way to Geneva, she could take part in an activists’ side meeting being held at a United Nations conference taking place in Geneva at the same time.
So, Pearson’s first real day at work was not working on document disclosure for a huge piece of litigation but, rather, to listen, transfixed, to activists debating the correct approach to human trafficking, namely, whether all sex work is bad and should be prevented (including, if necessary, restricting the rights of trafficked women) or whether solutions should be addressed from the perspective of the trafficked woman including respect for her right to remain in sex work if she so chooses.
So began Pearson’s, by no means finished, career as an international human rights activist. Chasing Wrongs and Rights follows Pearson’s career for the next two decades. The book has merits as a personal memoir, and a story of adventure, punctuated with her experiencing arrests and other personal dangers. However, it is also a study of the international human issues on which Pearson has worked over those years; the difficulties in overcoming human rights abuses; the long time spans over which work must be done to achieve success; and the careful approach to methodology, a human rights worker must use, to avoid making bad situations worse. And it teaches how important it is to treasure the victories when they happen.
Chasing Wrongs and Rights also pays homage to very many admirable men and women with whom Pearson has worked. These people include her colleagues in various organisations but, also, include victims of human rights abuses who have been sufficiently brave to stand up and fight for their own rights; the rights of their families; and the rights of others.
After two years with GAATW, Pearson obtained a position with a larger (and much older) organisation, Anti-Slavery International. While still working on human trafficking and slavery issues, Pearson got to investigate the problems, firsthand. Her work involved conducting interviews in Africa and Europe looking at the problems, in the places from which women are trafficked with false promises of opportunities for good jobs and good pay, and at the destinations at which these women arrived where their passports were taken from them and they had no choice about where they lived or the work they did.
The world of international human rights abuses continued to expand for Pearson. In 2007, she was appointed Asia Deputy Director at Human Rights Watch (HRW) working out of New York.
Many of the issues on which Pearson worked at HRW are issues which have concerned and fascinated me over the last decade and a half. Pearson charts her work on human rights abuses in Sri Lanka, occurring both before and at the end of the civil war. She, particularly, focuses on the Sri Lankan government’s actions in citizen disappearance. Pearson, poignantly, relates her conversations with mothers of the disappeared, who continue to protest every day for accountability and justice.
Pearson discusses HRW’s work in the Philippines documenting and reporting upon now-former President Duterte’s extra-judicial murders in that country. Pearson describes Duterte, up close, but her most personal writing is reserved for the courageous Leila De Lima, one of the few politicians to oppose Duterte. The amazing and fearless de Lima continued to issue press releases and campaign from her place of pre-trial detention on trumped-up charges. And Pearson paints an amazing word picture of the equally brave Clarita Alia, of Davao City, who lost four sons to Duterte’s killing squads in that city. Pearson, herself, gave evidence against Duterte in a hearing in the southern Philippines.
Pearson also deals with her visits to Manus Island and her conversations with Kurdish writer and refugee, Behrouz Boochani. She discusses her research into the failure to provide proper care and support for mentally ill prisoners in Queensland and Western Australia.
One of the most fascinating chapters deals with Pearson’s work to save Bahraini soccer player, Australian permanent resident and political refugee, Hakeem al-Araibi. He faced extradition by the Thai government to Bahrain to face imprisonment. The incident involved the Australian Federal Police, acting on an extant Interpol red notice issued by Bahrain, [2] notifying Thai authorities of Hakeem’s travel to Bangkok (with his wife for their honeymoon).
The incident is also notable for the contribution of former Socceroo, Craig Foster, saving Hakeem’s freedom and, possibly, his life. Foster travelled to Bangkok and then to Europe to raise the alarm with football fans and football authorities across the world. Pearson credits Foster’s contribution [3] as pivotal and none would doubt that it was. Foster’s continuing work for human rights[4] must have him well on the way to becoming a living national treasure.[5]
Chasing Wrongs and Rights is a book for our times. In a world where so many bad things happen, empathy fatigue is a constant threat. It is important to remember that things can be done and that people, like Pearson and the many people discussed in Chasing Wrongs and Rights, are doing things. We can help a little where we choose. Indeed, as Pearson’s life and writings show us, there may even be a lifelong career in it. It may mean spurning those long sought after offers from our most admired law firms but – as Chasing Wrongs and Rights and Pearson’s experience shows – taking the path less travelled can, sometimes, lead you a long way.
Author: Terri Janke Publisher: NewSouth Books Reviewer: Stephen Keim
In the early nineties, Terri Janke found herself studying law in Sydney at the University of New South Wales. She had been born, and grew up, in Cairns in far north Queensland. She was not a perfect law student and dropped out during her third year. Dropping out of university is not always the worst thing that can happen to a person. Janke ended up working at the Australia Council for the Arts for its Aboriginal Arts Board. In this role, Janke found her abiding interest in intellectual property and what it could and could not do to protect First Nations culture in Australia. ln this way, when she returned a few years later to complete her degree, Janke escaped the expectations that weigh heavily upon many an Indigenous Law Student that they will serve their social purpose in life by becoming criminal lawyers.
Janke’s heritage is complex befitting Australia’s mix of Indigenous and immigrant cultures. Janke has both Meriam and Wuthathi (among others) strands to her Indigenous heritage along with Malay and Philippines origins.
Having discovered the law of intellectual property at the Australia Council, Janke’s social purpose in life has turned out to involve understanding more deeply the inadequacies of intellectual property law, particularly, to meet the needs of Indigenous Australians and to work to overcome those adequacies in every possible way.
Janke graduated in 1995; started her own law firm in 2001; and completed her doctoral thesis in Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (“ICIP”) at the Australian National University in 2019. True Tracks is Dr Janke’s doctoral thesis adapted for the general reader.
The title of the book, True Tracks, is taken from a set of principles intended to lay down best practice for ethical engagement with Indigenous people, particularly, when dealing with Indigenous culture and Indigenous information and knowledge.
The name for the set of principles has a more interesting origin. Janke recounts how she addressed a seminar in her home town of Cairns and found her image and her story and the cultural descriptor, cultural crusader, on the front page of the next day’s edition of the local newspaper, the Cairns Post. On an ensuing flight to the Torres Strait, a Torres Strait woman recognised Janke from the newspaper and began a conversation. Fearing condemnation for being too big for her boots, Janke was surprised and gratified to receive only praise from the Auntie who told Janke to stay on track; to listen to her heart; and that she would, in her work, lay down true tracks for the future. Janke has obtained inspiration and security of heart in the words of the Auntie.
There are ten True Tracks principles but they have, as the Auntie predicted, provided the basis for other sets of protocols developed by Janke, working for different organisations and agencies, to guide the ethical engagement with Indigenous persons and their cultural property across many different fields of endeavour.
The principles are relatively short and accessible but the moral imperatives they carry are clear to the reader. They comprise the need for respect; self-determination and empowerment; free, prior and informed consent which is dependent on ongoing consultation and engagement; maintaining the integrity of the cultural property; ensuring secrecy and privacy where that is appropriate and necessary; proper attribution; built in benefit sharing; the maintenance and strengthening of Indigenous culture; and the recognition and protection of ICIP rights.
Janke lists different aspects of Indigenous cultural heritage or ICIP as falling within the fields of artistic works; literature; performance; languages; knowledge; cultural property (including objects held in museums); human remains; immovable cultural property such as sites and places; and documentation of Indigenous people and culture.
Janke having explained the concept of ICIP and the content of the True Tracks principles in the opening chapter, each subsequent chapter of the book involves a case study of the state of protection for Indigenous cultural heritage in a different field of endeavour. Chapter 2 deals with property in Indigenous languages; chapter 3 with the visual arts; and chapter 4 with Indigenous architecture and Industrial design.
Each chapter pursues a similar methodology. The operation of intellectual property protections within the existing law, to the extent they are relevant to the particular field of endeavour, is carefully explained. The deficiencies of the existing legal protections are also explained. Generally, the elements of Indigenous cultural heritage are not protected. In many areas, this is because, under the existing law, no one owns the heritage or the knowledge. Despite the importance of Indigenous languages to the communities who traditionally have spoken them, no intellectual property exists in the language or the individual words of the language. So anyone can take an Indigenous word and appropriate it to their commercial or other use without permission or even consultation. In many areas, the valuable community knowledge is unprotected but the act of stealing the heritage creates things which are protected by the law. Thus, the performance of a traditional dance may not be an artistic work capable of protection but the filming of a performance creates property in the resulting film protected by the law which can not only be exploited by the film-maker but which can exclude the original dancers and the community who preserved the dance over many generations even from accessing that film.
Each study then looks at the way in which the law’s deficiencies have expressed themselves in the particular field. In many cases, the issues go back to the beginnings of the colonising of the Australian continent. Aboriginal objects, and even human remains, have been collected and removed to museums, in Australia and overseas. Aboriginal words have been collected in notebooks by anthropologists who now have exclusive rights to the contents of the notebooks. Aboriginal stories have been collected and republished in books the copyright of which now belongs to the collecting author. On many occasions, the expropriation has been, and is still being, done without any compliance with the True Tracks principles, that is, without respect, consent, consultation, attribution or any sharing of the benefit.
In each of the fields, however, Janke documents the steps taken to supplement the law with agreements and protocols based on the True Tracks principles. In each field of endeavour, Janke, not only, documents shameful incidents of cultural theft but, also, recounts examples where activists have confronted those who would act, exploitively, and brought them to heel. There are also many stories of individuals and organisations who have consulted Janke and other Indigenous lawyers for guidance and who have, willingly, developed their own best practice guidance implementing the True Tracks principles. Consultation carried out over time with the communities to whom the cultural knowledge belongs has led to the deficiencies of the underlying law being supplemented by agreements which have protected the interests of the communities while allowing for mutually beneficial use of various forms of knowledge and information and creative endeavour.
The surprising thing for the reader is that True Tracks becomes much more than a study of the deficiencies of the law and the ways in which those deficiencies may be addressed. It becomes a series of narratives of heroic endeavour in which a new beneficial paradigm has been created and of the positive benefits which have flowed therefrom. But it has also become a guide to the rich field of creative work being carried out by Indigenous Australians in the fields of painting; craft; education; architecture; linguistics; music, dance, environmental management and regeneration; cooking and gastronomy and business and many more.
The reader comes away with a list of Indigenous authors that one must read and a list of Aboriginal performers to whom one must listen and whose videos one must watch, as well as a number of arts and craft exhibitions that one must simply not miss.
Thus, in the chapter on Indigenous languages, not only has Wiradjuri woman and author, Tara June Winch, written a highly decorated novel called The Yield, she has promoted aspects of the Wiradjuri language in her book in a way that respected the community to whom the language belongs. Her respect and consultation for the owners of the language has led to a strengthening of the community’s pride in itself and its sense of well-being. A different less respectful approach is likely to have had very different impacts both for Winch and the Wiradjuri people, everywhere. Other Indigenous writers include Dr Jared Thomas: Calypso Summer and Songs That Sound Like Blood and Anita Heiss: Yirra and her Deadly Dog Demon and River of Dreams.
A heart warming story of struggle involves the copyright to all of Albert Namatjira’s artworks. In what seems to have been a thoughtless act, in 1983, the Public Trustee of the Northern Territory sold those rights to a private publisher for $8,500. A large number of people and institutions, including lawyers and filmmakers, ran a campaign that led to that copyright being, voluntarily, returned in October 2007 to a trust created to benefit Namatjira’s family. A careless wrong of the past had been righted by persuasion.
Indigenous recording artists working closely with communities include Shellie Morris and Jessie Lloyd. Dance companies such as Bangarra Dance Theatre and NAISDA College are, of course, well-known for performing and developing traditional dances with the support and permission of traditional communities.
True Tracks also provides the names and websites of artisans, tourism operators and bush food producers who are working in their respective fields producing authentic product respecting the cultural property on which they draw and applying the True Tracks principles of respect, consultation, prior informed consent and sharing of benefits.
Something deeper and more pervading also emerges. The reader, gradually, learns that the concept of ethical dealing with First Nations people is not only something for the filmmaker about to journey into the Outback to shoot a documentary or the music producer about to sign up a talented group from Cherbourg. And, gradually, the reader learns that acknowledgement of traditional owners is not something merely for formal occasions. And, gradually, the reader learns that being a Wuthathi man or a Turrbul or Quandamooka woman is not something for show but rather goes to the very heart of a person’s sense of self. We should acknowledge country and its traditional ownership, every day. We can remind ourselves to do this by incorporating it in our signature blocks and on our home pages. We can be interested in whose country we are on when we travel and very conscious of whose country we tread upon when we are at home or at work.
I am indebted to Dr Janke. True Tracks has taught me much: many things of which I am now aware and other things that I will perceive more clearly with time and reflection. True Tracks is a fascinating read as well as a scholarly work. I recommend it, highly.
Author: Ignazio Silone Publisher: Signet Classics (1986) Reviewer: Stephen Keim
I have a friend who works in North Queensland at a community legal centre. He is about my age and we go back a long way. This friend shares my passion for left wing causes and, in particular, my opposition to the death penalty, anywhere, at any time, for any reason. We share tidbits in which we think the other may be interested. Silone’s classic 1936 novel, Bread and Wine, something much more than a tidbit was shared with me by my friend, almost a year ago.
In a recent period of unexpected free time, I found the book lying on a nearby shelf and I am very glad that I took the opportunity to read it, almost then and there.
Bread and Wine was first published in 1936 in Switzerland in the German language with the German title, Brot und Wein. The novel is set in the poor region of the Abruzzi in southern Italy and was very successful, when first published, as a revealing portrait of the injustices being perpetrated by the Mussolini’s fascist regime. It centres around the experiences of Pietro Spina, a socialist activist, who has returned, without permission of the authorities, from exile and has been given the task by the Party to organise the poor peasants of his home region in the service of the Revolution.
The reader meets a very ill Spina in an early chapter being hidden by a supporter, Cardile, in his barn. Cardile summons, with a degree of deception, the local doctor, Nunzio, an old school friend of Spina to provide treatment and medicines. Nunzio is reluctant, at first, having abandoned any expression of radical ideas as a necessity for professional advancement and self-preservation. But, for a time, Nunzio, inspired by Spina’s words and example, provides the necessary treatment and, with Cardile, devises the plan that Spina will disguise himself as a priest, Don Paolo Spada, while he recuperates in the extremely poor hillside village of Pietrasecca.
The result is that, for the course of the novel, at least, the main protagonist is a reluctant priest attempting to preach rudimentary ideas of socialist revolution to an utterly sceptical group of old poor peasants. Irving Howe in his introduction to the 1986 Signet edition, characterises those parts of Bread and Wine where the action occurs in a rural setting (which is almost the whole of the novel) as having a feel and style of allegory. I would go further and suggest that Don Paolo Spada’s efforts at avoiding any priestly duties while raising visions of a better more just future with his rural audience carries a feel of Moliere’s, Le Médecin Malgre Lui, and is within touching distance of farce on many occasions.
Howe identifies the central themes of Bread and Wine when he describes Silone’s work as portraying the competing visions of the socialist promise of socialist liberation and the Christian promise of spiritual transcendence. Howe describes Silone’s choice as a writer as seeking to pursue both visions despite the tension which exists between them.
While this may be the central tension in Bread and Wine, Silone manages to give expression to many different visions of reality. The peasants, when challenged, articulate a reasoned acceptance of their reality which has persisted for generations. What is the point of struggling to change a fixed reality, they say. When a disappointed Spina reflects upon their responses to his provoking questions, he finds it hard to fault the peasants’ logic.
Many characters debate the choice between conformity and resistance in the context of an unjust and repressive regime. Spina, as Don Paolo, is a voice in favour of action as is his old and respected, but generally sidelined, teacher, Don Benedetto. But there are many voices for conformity among the townspeople whose positions also carry persuasion.
There are ironies flitting back and forth between Silone’s own life and the action in Bread and Wine. Spica, in the novel, is raised by his grandmother because his parents died in the earthquake which struck the region in 1915. Silone’s father died in 1911 but his mother was killed in the earthquake.
Don Paolo, as progressive priest, comforts and restores a young activist, Luigi Murica, who had, after severe beatings at the hands of the regime’s police force, been seduced into becoming a police informer against his socialist comrades. Don Paolo assures Murica that he is forgiven and that he trusts him by telling Murica that he is not a real priest. Strangely, it was revealed by research in the 1990’s that Silone, himself, had been a police informer in the 1920s and that he broke with the police when his younger brother died as a result of torture and beatings at the hand of the carabinieri. In forgiving Murica, was Silone forgiving himself for his own actions?
Spica speaks a number of times in the novel concerning the matters that compelled him to return from exile despite the risks that carried for both his safety and his freedom. Remaining outside his country and outside the struggle was pointless, says the character. Silone, on the other hand, remained in exile and, no doubt, by writing and publishing Bread and Wine, was a much more effective opponent of the fascist regime than if he had returned.
There is no doubt that both the author and the main character had become disillusioned with Soviet communism and the Italian communist party’s slavish devotion to the latest directive of the Soviets which same devotion it demanded from its members. When Spica receives some policy papers arguing approval of the great purge and show trials then being set up in Moscow, he glances at them and puts them in the fireplace. When pressed by his party leader in Rome, Spica declines to grant his approval. His argument, in support of his refusal, is one of a need for plurality of thought and critical judgment, even in the course of a socialist revolution. None of this dulls Spica’s own passion to resist the government and to work and organise for the betterment of the conditions experienced by the ordinary people even at risk to his safety and his life.
The position of the Church is characterised by its complete surrender to the fascist party in power and the support it gives to that government by turning up to key public events and in other ways. For this, it is condemned. But Spica’s experience as a fake priest gives him an insight into the comfort that ordinary people demand and, even despite his best efforts to refuse to cooperate, take from their clergy. As Don Paolo, Spica comforts and inspires people, especially, young people and women, in ways he could never achieve as a socialist organiser, alone. He changes people’s lives, positively, for the good and he receives devotion, even love, from many including the two young women, Christina and Bianchina, both of whose lives he has dramatically touched. And when Spica sees a real priest in action, Don Girasole, he is impressed by how much good a poor hard working priest does for his community including in areas for which the government has responsibility but fails to act with compassion or empathy.
It is 25 years since the Signet edition was published and 75 years since the first edition of Bread and Wine was published, albeit, in German. In some respects, it has become quaint and, no longer, relevant (although every avowed socialist who broke with Stalinism in the 1930s will always have huge Brownie points from me). In other respects, Bread and Wine retains a timeless quality. For me, Bread and Wine was not about the competing visions of the socialist promise of socialist liberation and the Christian promise of spiritual transcendence identified by Howe. It was more about the luxury of principles when we do not have to put them into action and the varied human responses of those who have to live through some kind of challenge or repression. When our beliefs have the potential to cost us dearly, or even a little, there will be no right answer and everyone will respond in their own way. For some, preserving professional advancement or the safety of oneself and one’s family will take precedence. Others may choose their principles and, perhaps, even martyrdom, whether Christian or socialist or both. And all, hopefully, will learn something along the way, perhaps, even from those who hold different views and make different choices to ourselves.
Just over a year ago, my brother, L, gave me a book by a twentieth century, American pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty. Taking into account my knowledge of such things, the odds were that this would be a gift that broadened my horizons.
Mr. Rorty was born in 1931. By 1999, he had been studying, teaching and writing philosophy for almost half a century. Philosophy and Social Hope is an anthology of previously published essays, a sort of greatest hits selected with an eye to the needs of the general reader.
Rorty aims to bring that general reader to a sense of pragmatist philosophy by sharing his own journey to becoming a believer and purveyor of that same philosophy. Rorty’s parents were friends of John Dewey , the leading American pragmatic philosopher of his time. Rorty’s father had almost accompanied Dewey to Mexico City for the Dewey Commission which heard evidence and produced a report declaring Leon Trotsky innocent of the scurrilous allegation of crimes levelled against Trotsky by the Soviet Union and its leader, Josef Stalin.
Rorty’s parents were, themselves, followers of Trotsky, opponents of Stalinism and active socialist campaigners who worked on the campaign of Norman Thomas , the Socialist Party’s campaign for President. Rorty imbibed socialism and a sense of social justice, as a twelve year old living with his parents in the Chelsea Hotel and being roped into running errands for his parents and the campaign.
But he also loved rare wild orchids; sought them in their hiding places in the mountains of north-west New Jersey where he and his parents also lived and studied their botany, back in New York at the 42nd Street public library. While he was a one person cheer squad for his wild orchids, Rorty felt touches of shame suspecting that such an esoteric, personal passion might not quite meet the approval of the now murdered Trotsky and his socialist followers.
When Rorty first got to read philosophy, at the ripe age of 15, at the University of Chicago, he was attracted to Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy and the idea that there were absolutes by which the good and the true could be measured. He was equally attracted to Plato’s idea that a chosen few could reach the hallowed state that came with the knowledge of those absolutes. It resonated with his arcane knowledge and love of his wild orchids. It was, essentially, an anti-democratic idea.
This meant that he sneered at the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey whose principle that growth was the only moral objective was seen as empty and shallow in the post Hitler world in a University philosophy department peopled by brilliant Jewish refugees from the Nazis. This, conveniently, placed Rorty in an intellectual rebellion against the philosophy favoured by his parents and their left wing friends.
But, though for five years, Rorty worked on his love affair with Platonism, he found himself dissatisfied with the idea of absolute values. It was one thing to believe in absolutes. It was impossible to establish what they were or to find a method which would convince others that what you thought might be the criterion for what was good should also be accepted by them as that criterion.
And so twenty-year old Rorty started his journey back to the approaches and the philosophy that that had been favoured by his parents and their friends. He found his way back to the pragmatism of John Dewey and William James .
Rorty spends some time, in the Introduction to Philosophy and Social Hope explaining the difference between philosophers like himself, usually, bad-mouthed by others as “relativists”, and everyone else who may be broadly grouped as followers of Plato and Kant. Relativists do not accept the distinction (made by Plato and other Greek philosophers) between the way things are, in themselves, and the relationships they have with other things, especially, to human needs and interests.
One result of abandoning the underlying nature of things is that “anti-Platonists” like Rorty find no benefit in searching for eternal unchanging values that apply in all situations across time and culture. It is in this sense that Rorty is a disciple of John Dewey.
The area in which pragmatism is most attacked as relativism is in the area of moral philosophy. If there are no absolute values against which actions may be judged, say the critics, there is no reason to seek good rather than evil. Rorty’s reply is that, for pragmatists, the moral struggle is continuous with the struggle for existence. What matters for Rorty is the devising of ways of diminishing human suffering and increasing human equality and increasing the chance of each human child to start life with a real and equal chance of human happiness. Rorty adopts the view that the objective of a better future is the best moral guide.
Happily, for Rorty, he felt that this view also made room for idiosyncratic personal pursuits such as the love of wild orchids along with future creating activities such as social activism.
Rorty says that many of the values which are posited as representing underlying and eternal values are merely habits of past generations, the actions of our ancestors, that we most admire. Thus, if we are attracted to the principle that all human beings are brothers and sisters as representing an eternal value, we are simply reflecting the fact that recent generations held this principle as a religious belief. A different religious culture would produce adherents of radically different eternal values.
Rorty makes two points which might be called concessions. First, he acknowledges that there is no means of rational argument by which a pragmatist and a Platonist can convince the other of the validity of their own point of view so as to settle the difference between them.
Second, he acknowledges that another pragmatist, and German philosopher, Martin Heidegger , is his example, may choose Nazism as the solution to the moral struggle: as the path to a better future. Rorty, himself, regards increasing equality and equality of opportunity as the way to increase human happiness and to strive to make the future better than the past and the present.
Rorty explains, in response to charges that pragmatism leads to relativism and on to moral nihilism, that a follower of pragmatism does not believe that all values are equal. Rather, his pragmatism leads to beliefs about the importance of increasing human happiness by increasing equality of opportunity. From Rorty’s perspective, Nazism is not just as good, in terms of values, as a socially progressive form of democracy. But, as with any other source of moral values, pragmatism does not provide a means by which Rorty can persuade Heidegger that his adherence to Nazi values is inherently wrong including in terms of the pragmatic philosophy which they share. Indeed, Rorty denies that any philosophy, necessarily, leads to a particular set of political beliefs.
Ironically, the limited claims made by Rorty’s pragmatism to prove to others that their idea of truth or virtue is wrong makes Rorty’s pragmatism a little like the famous dictum attributed to Socrates in which the philosopher claimed an advantage over others who claimed to be wise through the self-knowledge that he, Socrates, knew that he knew nothing. That is, one of the advantages of pragmatism is that it does not claim to unveil eternal truths. Such claims are at the heart of Platonic philosophy, claims upon which such philosophers cannot and do not deliver.
Rorty explains that pragmatists refuse to distinguish between a justified belief in a proposition and a true belief. William James stated that, when we say that a belief is true, we are saying that it is a belief that has proved itself useful for definite assignable reasons. Rorty goes on to say that, because humans can only operate in their environment, a belief will only endure (and prove useful) if it takes into account the constraints of that environment. A belief that I can engage in unaided flight will cease to be useful the moment I leap from a tall building. In contrast, a belief in the physics of powered flight will prove useful every time I need to travel interstate for work or pleasure. In this context, says Rorty, nothing is to be gained by hypothesising a truth and reality independent of human existence. There is no point in hypothesising a world outside Plato’s world inside the cave .
Some of the chapters of Philosophy and Social Hope, including those from which the above summary has drawn, explain the essential notions of pragmatic philosophy and canvass different aspects of those underlying principles. Other chapters, however, seek to apply the pragmatist approach to different aspects of society.
In discussing legal questions, Rorty suggests that pragmatic philosophy had made its contribution to the law in previous generations and been accepted by most legal practitioners. Most lawyers had rejected legal formalism, the idea that, in any case, the right answer could be achieved by applying previously established principles to the facts of that case.
In discussing statements by Ronald Dworkin and Richard Posner and other contemporary writers, Rorty argues the orthodoxy of the proposition that, subject to the acceptance that coherence of the law is a source of advantage, the law cannot be explained by any overarching legal theory.
Rorty also points out, using some of John Dewey’s more inspired writing, that pragmatism, along with its philosophy, has a visionary tradition that will find expression in those cases where legal principles and the surrounding political environment are shaken to their foundations. Rorty describes such cases as being based on a conviction that the political waters badly “need roiling”.
Rorty uses as his examples, Brown v Board of Education of Topeka ; Roe v Wade and, writing in the nineties, Rorty predicts the case of Laurence v Texas 539 US 558 (2003) which struck down the respondent’s anti-sodomy law. Rorty describes the decisions as deciding, respectively, like it or not, black children are children, too; like it or not, women get to make hard decisions, too; and, like it or not, gays are grown-ups, too. Pragmatic philosophy explains that seismic decisions cannot be explained or justified by a new super-theory of law. Rather, they are the result of, and contributions to, a visionary tradition in which lawyers have happened to enter into an open-ended dispute about the basic terms of social life.
Rorty also turns to discuss education in the light of contrasting views expressed by Allan Bloom and E. D. Hirsch in the late 1980s on the subject of what our schools and universities should teach. Bloom’s contribution to the culture wars still simmers, today, thirty years later. His Straussian values led him to prescribe a heavy dose of classical texts for his leaders of the future and to attack the analysis of society’s structures on race and gender based themes. Rorty’s response reflected both his pragmatic philosophy and his own progressive democratic values. It was the role of secondary schooling, in particular, to inculcate into the adults of tomorrow the products of past learning and thinking. But colleges and universities should not be constrained to a similar task. Tertiary education should help its students find their own values and thinking and individuality by which they can question past orthodoxy and contribute to a new set of orthodoxies for the society in which they will work and live. Only by such questioning and re-formulation can a democratic society enrich and strengthen itself.
Rorty is an interesting writer who challenges and expands the belief structures of his reader. He is well-read and is agile at bringing the results of his learning to each controversy with which he wrestles. On and off, I read Philosophy and Social Hope for most of the year. It was mainly commitments to work that made the read so interrupted. Willingly, however, with smart phone and Wikipedia by my side, I kept coming back to the text and the task.
Richard Rorty, that descendant of the Social Gospellers, has indeed expanded my horizons. My brother must feel pleased with his efforts and the results of his gift.
Author: Jane Mayer
Publisher: Scribe
Reviewer: Stephen Keim SC
In a sign that my allotted time is ebbing away even more quickly than I had imagined, I notice that my review of Ms. Mayer’s previous great work, The Dark Side , was completed on New Year’s Day, 2010. I could have sworn it was last week or, at most, last month. I became an instant and inveterate fan of Mayer’s work from the moment I opened her work on the misdeeds of Dick Cheney during his War on Terror committed while his boss, George Bush, looked on or, more pointedly, averted his eyes.
Indeed, there are more recent signs of the ebbing of days. Scribe published Dark Money during 2016. I purchased my copy in late 2016 with enthusiasm and grand intentions to read it, that night. But work and life and other books got in the way and it took until another Christmas to turn that last page; read the final paragraph; wander through the acknowledgements; and even explore the end notes. Nothing was diminished by the delay. The significance of Dark Money and its implications for our democratic processes won’t go away, any time soon.
Dark Money’s epigraph is a famous quote from Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis which states that a country may have democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few but that it cannot have both. The thesis of Dark Money is that America is choosing the latter of the two alternatives.
Dark Money starts and ends with Charles and David Koch, the Koch brothers, heirs to an oil fortune and heirs to right wing fringe politics. The lesson of Dark Money is that, by mobilising their fortunes and utilising the same dishonest tactics, and often the same operatives, used by the tobacco industry to deny and obfuscate the science that linked tobacco to cancer, the brothers have pushed their fringe ideas into the mainstream.
Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David, invented an improved process for refining petrol from crude oil. Hounded by the major oil companies using patent enforcement litigation, Fred took his skills, first, to Stalin’s Russia and then used them to assist Hitler’s Germany to rebuild its industrial capacity. He also, eventually, achieved a $1.5 million judgment in the courts against the oil majors.
By 1960, Fred Koch was extremely wealthy and poured money into the John Birch Society . The Society categorised the de-segregation decision in Brown v Board of Education as sufficient to justify the impeachment of Chief Justice, Earl Warren; admired the anti-communist policies of Benito Mussolini; and regarded welfare as a plot to lure rural blacks to the city to foment a vicious race war. The Society marketed their ideas like commercial organisations selling product but also advocated and used the secretive and deceptive methods of the communists they hated and saw under other people’s beds to achieve their objectives.
The brothers took over their father’s money; his penchant for political activism; and many of his right-wing ideas. David ran as a candidate for the Libertarian Party candidate in 1980. His candidacy was a way of getting around campaign financing laws in that, as a candidate, he could donate as much as he liked to his own campaign. Presaging the deceit which was to come, the Party’s slogan was that it had only one source of funds: “You”. Instead, $2 million came from David Koch, more than 60% of what the Party spent in that campaign. The 1980 campaign led Charles Koch to say that politicians are only actors and that he wanted to supply the themes and the scripts. In the thirty-seven years which have passed since then, massive progress has been made on that ambition.
The Koch brothers have been able to leverage their own money by convincing other very rich families to donate to their projects. Dark Money also documents the actions of other right wing warriors who have used their billions to change political orthodoxy in America.
Mayer devotes a chapter to the scion of the Mellon banking, Alcoa aluminium and Gulf Oil family, Andrew Mellon Scaife , who died in 2014. Scaife pioneered the use of funding foundations with neutral names whose purpose was to manufacture, at the behest of the provider of funds, and promote, right wing ideas and to attack long established and non-partisan bodies like the Ford Foundation as hopelessly liberal and biased. One such body founded by Scaife was the Heritage Foundation. By this single stratagem, repeated several times with the endless support of funds, a few very rich people managed to re-define the political realm by defining the centre as left-wing and liberal and, thereby, categorising the previously fringe ideas of the right as just one side of the mainstream spectrum. These were strategies that the Kochs would use to manipulate perceptions in many different policy areas.
Dark Money documents the work of millionaire industrialist, John M Olin, whose Olin Corporation polluted the company town of Saltville, Virginia, by pouring 100 pounds of mercury into its waterways, every day. Olin Corporation became an early target of the EPA after it was legislated into existence in 1970. Olin’s affront at being challenged by government agencies on his company’s record of dangerously polluting the environment in which his workers lived and worked motivated him to destroy the power of any government to challenge the way rich people like him did business. This is a common theme in Dark Money. Almost universally, the policies that the very rich pursue, conveniently, benefit their ability to make and keep even more money without being called to account.
Mayer documents the case of a Koch Industries employee, Donald Carlson, who was employed to do the dirtiest jobs, cleaning up the most toxic chemicals. Carlson died of leukemia in February 1997. Because Carlson worked with benzene, his employer was required to offer annual blood tests. But, for four years, from 1990 to 1994, the company hid from Carlson the information that his blood counts were abnormal. The case also illustrates the legal tactics used by the Koch companies and many of their allies. The cases are defended with no dollars spared; no admissions are made; and, eventually, a mean settlement is offered with confidentiality clauses to hide the truth. Mayer also documents the prosecution and conviction of Koch Industries for false reporting of the their benzene emissions and the public relations campaign they ran against Sally Barnes-Soliz, the environmental technician and whistle blower, who had compiled the truthful returns and observed that falsified versions had been filed, instead.
As part of a grand strategy to change the values of society, Olin used his Olin Foundation to pour huge sums of money into supporting the work of particular academics, whose views and work were known to be right wing and who were already established at major educational institutions, thereby, establishing extreme conservative beachheads in respectable educational institutions. The Olin Foundation gave money to Allan Bloom whose best-selling book on higher education described rock music as commercially pre-packaged masturbation fantasy. It also funded Dinesh D’Souza , a pioneer of the right’s use of the term political correctness to denigrate all political discourse that does not agree with it. As I write, D’Souza is denigrating the survivors of the Parkland School shooting massacre for having the temerity to speak out on gun control. The Foundation also funded whole departments provided the School in question was prepared to create a department that specialised in a right wing version of traditional disciplines. For example, the Foundation spent $68 million underwriting the growth of a previously fringe discipline, law and economics, and, between 1985 and 1989, underwrote 83% of the costs of law and economics programs in American law schools. The project reflected the strategy used to create new orthodoxy by pretending not to upset the old orthodoxies. By using the term, “law and economics”, Olin avoided appearing overtly ideological. Nonetheless, the practitioners of the new discipline understood that their role was to replace existing legal orthodoxy with extreme conservative views about the function of law and its role in society.
In 1976, Charles Koch wrote what he called a blueprint for the libertarian movement. Among his prescriptions was the need to use all modern sales and motivational techniques. In 1984, he created a body called Citizens for a Sound Economy. Though bankrolled by wealthy industrialists including the Koch brothers, Citizens for a Sound Economy looked from the outside as a community organisation formed and operated by concerned citizens. Within a few years, Citizens for a Sound Economy had 50 paid operatives across 26 states organising events, buying television time and running campaigns promoting the Koch brothers anti-tax, anti-government agenda. Citizens for a Sound Economy provided the blueprint which was used, over future decades, repeatedly, on many issues dear to the heart of rich conservatives, by which wads of money were used to create the impression of grass roots organisations. “Astroturf” became a particularly apt term to describe this mechanism and these organisations. (In August 2016, Fueling US Forward was launched with Koch money to promote fossil fuel usage. The tactics of the new entity including using gospel music concerts as a bait and switch method of persuading Afro-Americans that their well-being would be ensured by more fossil fuel usage which would keep their energy costs low.)
Citizens for a Sound Economy, itself, was AstroTurf for hire. Mayer quotes public records which show that a procession of companies, including Exxon and Microsoft made donations to Citizens for a Sound Economy which were followed by Citizens for a Sound Economy running a false citizens’ campaign on issues of financial importance to the donor.
By the time, Barack Obama was inaugurated on 20 January 2009, the machine created by the Koch brothers and their wealthy allies had been developing for over two decades. The Introduction to Dark Money describes a meeting held just over a week later in Indian Wells, California. Charles and David Koch had summoned many of the richest and, certainly, the most right wing conservative businessmen in the country, including eighteen billionaires, to a weekend meeting. It was at that meeting that Republican tactics were decided for the next eight years. There would be no compromise; no acceptance that Obama had won; no move to the centre; no attempt to build a bigger tent into which more politicians and supporters would be welcomed. The Party would take a much harder line against any form of regulation and whatever Obama tried to do would be opposed.
In a later chapter, Dark Money traces the origins of the Tea Party Movement, a movement for which the Kochs have always disclaimed responsibility. Many trace the origins of the idea to a rant by a former futures trader, Rick Santelli, on CNBC. Mayer points out that much of the infrastructure for the Tea Party had already been put in place by the Koch movement’s Astroturf organisations and even the idea was expressed earlier than Santelli’s rant by Rush Limbaugh whose show was largely funded by Mellon Scaife’s Heritage Foundation.
By the 2014 mid-term elections, the Kochs had financed their own system of accumulating electoral data that was so good that the Republican Party organisation was forced to do a deal to be able to use it. One Koch operation engaged in recruiting and training candidates while another had paid organisers able to be deployed into any hard fought electoral contest. In this way, the Koch organisation was able to supplant the GOP organisation from outside.
The expenditure of $300 million by the Koch organisation led to the prize of Republican control of the Senate. The new majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, had spoken at a recent Koch brothers donor summit and had bowed and scraped to Charles and David Koch, saying that he did not know where the party would be without them.
After the mid-terms, McConnell hired a former Koch Industries lobbyist as his chief policy director and launched a war on the Environmental Protection Agency. The evidence would suggest that McConnell has been fighting for Koch causes ever since.
Dark Money closes before the 2016 presidential election. The Koch organisation announced at the beginning of 2015 that it would be spending a staggering $889 million in the campaign almost matching what both major parties would be each spending.
The Kochs never endorsed Trump. But Trump was persuaded to appoint Mike Pence as his running mate. The vice president is a long-time associate and ally of the Kochs, receiving their donations, exchanging staffers and delivering on policy. Pence who was in charge of the transition was the key factor in so many Koch allies heading government departments including Betsy de Vos (the de Voses get a chapter in Dark Money) in education and Scott Pruitt in the EPA.
In 2018, Charles Koch has got to writing the scripts for politicians like Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence. There are many more politicians receiving their lines from the same sources as those two. But the Kochs have achieved much more. They control, through their funding of AstroTurf organisations, much of the background noise against which politicians must do their jobs. They provide the carrots, in the form of electoral funding, and the stick, by way of funding opponents in both primary and general elections. They run many academic faculties and control much of the news media. Their steady stream of self-interested and dishonest propaganda gushes from a myriad of different outlets.
The Kochs appear to fear nothing except that people hear the truth about their attempts and actions to subvert democracy in their own interests and their own ugly image.
Only a few brave journalists, wonderful writers like Ms. Mayer, publishers like Scribe and concerned citizens such as we are stand between the Kochs and the world dominance they crave.
And, if public life in America is polluted by the money of plutocrats, is Australia untouched by such things? The evidence would suggest that similar (if not the same) forces seek to manipulate Australian politics and that some Australian politicians are equally in awe of them.
I strongly recommend Dark Money to a reader in America, Australia, indeed, anywhere in the world. Ms. Mayer speaks with the benefit of exhaustive research but she speaks in a quiet voice. The facts pile up, the excitement and horror build, and the narrative emerges.
Despite the importance of the message, Ms. Mayer writes in human terms. Her characters stand out on the page. Above all else, Ms. Mayer is a wonderful writer. Dark Money is a wonderful story, beautifully and endearingly told.
Barbara Kingsolver is, of course, a very accomplished writer of fiction and non-fiction. The Poisonwood Bible had been very popular in, and received encouraging reviews from, Ladies Literary Societies close to me without ever quite piquing enough of my interest to make me invest the time to read it. It awaits.
I had in fact given a copy of The Lacuna to D. for Christmas in 2009.
As it turned out, I read a completely different copy, years later. It was urged upon me by our daughter, L. I was busily reading as much of Mexican literature, travel writing and history as I could in the gaps of an otherwise demanding life.[1] This was a book about Mexico and I would love it, she said.
So, with a respectable semblance of hesitation, I took L.’s advice.
The Lacuna is about Mexico. And a lot more. Some authors, without ever having met me, know how to pander to all my prejudices. Ms. Kingsolver is one of them.
She is still doing it.
Her wonderful article written in the wake of Trump’s election victory is an example of that excellent pandering.
The Lacuna commences in 1929 on a fictional Mexican island called Isla Pixol. It is possibly in the Gulf of Mexico, possibly, off the coast of the State of Tabasco.
The novel’s main protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, is 13 years of age. He lives with his mother, Salome, an enthusiastic but not particularly successful gold digger on her boyfriend, Enrique’s hereditary hacienda which takes up most of the island. Salome left Virginia, bringing Harrison with her, in the hope and belief that Enrique would marry her and keep her in the agreeable lifestyle of the wife of a rich man. The reality had turned out to be less fulsomely romantic.
Left largely to himself, Harrison learns to make tortillas and pan dulce, the soft bread from which you make sweet buns, from Leandro, the Indios cook at the hacienda. Harrison learns more than just cooking while helping Leandro in the kitchen. He learns to use goggles and becomes obsessed with the underwater world. He discovers the lacuna, perhaps, a lava cave or cenote, emerging at the shoreline above the lowest low tide but below many other tides. A cave filled with water for much of its length but connecting back to the surface, a long underwater swim inland. Risking his life to drowning, many times, Harrison eventually has sufficient breath and strength to find the lacuna’s other end. He finds the human bones of an ancient mausoleum or sacrificial site.
His discovery was complete just a day before Salome resolved to make their escape to Mexico City. Enrique was away and would be enraged. Salome had a new target for her charms, a man that Harrison christened Mr. Produce the Cash.
The Lacuna is complex in its structure and its narrative methodology. The early chapters are told by an omniscient narrator who refers in the third person to the boy and his mother. The reader learns, however, from an archivist’s note at the end of that first chapter, that Harrison Shepherd is the author of the piece, albeit, talking about himself in the third person. It was written nearly twenty years later by an older Harrison who was, by then, an accomplished author.
But, for reasons which the archivist does not disclose at that point, the autobiographical project stalled. The following chapters do not come from the accomplished author but are the contents of Harrison’s diary, written, at first, by the fourteen year old but developing in age and maturity with the diarist.
The archivist points out that the diarist, like the autobiographer whose work we have already read, eschews the first person perspective. The author of the diary is almost invisible, never talking about himself but, continually, describing those matters and events that fall within his point of view.
As the book proceeds, the archivist shows more of herself and her concerns in life. Eventually, the reader comes to know how important her role has been in Harrison’s life and how much Harrison meant to her.
Ms. Kingsolver’s method works. It lends immediacy to events which span a long period of time. In the latter chapters, it produces poignancy, as the diarist and the archivist give their respective points of view revealing that they seldom spoke to each other about what they really felt or thought.
In Harrison Shepherd, Ms. Kingsolver has created her eye witness to history.
It starts with Mexico City in 1930. Harrison finds out about the politics of the time and the history of a nation. He shops in Coyoacan, then, on the outskirts of Mexico City. At the Melchor market, Harrison sees a woman with a startling face with ferocious black eyes who reminds him of an Aztec queen. He is told that the queen is married to a much talked about painter.
Not by coincidence, Harrison travels to the National Palace on the Zocalo in the centre of the city where the much talked about painter is painting his latest famous mural. A crisis occurs in that the specialist plaster mixer has not turned up to work. Harrison steps up to the mark and, using his pan dulce skills, mixes perfect plaster; makes himself indispensable; and earns the nickname “Sweet Buns”. The double entendre makes every man who hears it laugh.
Through this stratagem, Ms. Kingsolver inserts her witness into the lives of the famous couple, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The work is interrupted when Rivera goes to San Francisco to make murals for the gringos but the connection has been made.
The Lacuna is not just a novel about 1930s Mexico through the experiences of its most famous artistic couple. The author has a much broader vision than that. Harrison has an American father who works as a public servant in Washington. Having an ever present son has never been convenient to Salome and it becomes less convenient in Mexico City.
Conveniently for the novel, his mother decides to send Harrison, by the long train journey,[2] off to his father’s care in Washington where he goes to the Potomac Academy, an American boarding school. Again, he gets to do chores for a cook and this lets him walk the streets of Washington with Bull’s Eye, an equally poor but much more street savvy student at the Academy. Harrison gets to witness the poverty and politics of Hoover’s America close up and, through Bull’s Eye’s family connections, gets to go inside the Bonus Army encampment at Anacostia Flats composed of protesting veterans and their families and meet one particular family, husband and wife and new born babe, there.
Only weeks later, he is again close to the action as the protesting veterans and their families are attacked by police and soldiers; and driven from their encampment; which is then set on fire. At least two protestors die with over a thousand injured. Harrison gets to witness America at its most cold-hearted.
A volume of the diary is lost at this point. The record is interrupted. The archivist is unable to provide an explanation. The reader never gets to hear what happened to the passion that Harrison had been developing for his fellow traveller of the Washington streets. Was it unreturned and unrequited, as Harrison was fearing in the last pages of the previous volume, or did love blossom only to be quelled by family intervention or terrible tragedy? We can only guess.
The record resumes nearly three and a half years later, in late 1935. Harrison is back in Mexico City and again in the employ of Mr. Rivera. The scene has moved to the Twin Houses in San Angel, also then on the edges of Mexico City and across the road from the San Angel Inn, the old Carmelite monastery (that became a hacienda) where Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata met to divide Mexico between them in 1914 when each of their stars were, for the moment at least, in the ascendant. Leandro’s lessons are still serving Harrison well. He is now in charge of the cooking, using the tiny kitchen to produce the culinary delights that allow Frida and Diego to do the entertaining for which they are also famous.
More important even for the writer of an historical novel than the ins and outs and comings and goings of the relationship between the two painters, the diarist is very well placed to observe the forced itinerant and famous revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, when he arrives with his wife in early 1937.
Trotsky lives in Coyoacan in the Kahlo family house, the Casa Azul. Harrison is sent to work at the Blue House and provides a close up view of the man known for his fiery writing and for giving rise to a movement that has specialised in factionalism.[3] Harrison is there to witness and record with some delicacy the affair between Frida and Leon. When the Trotskys move a few blocks away to Avenida Viena, still in Coyoacan, Harrison goes with them and witnesses the hearings of the Dewey Commission; survives the unsuccessful machine gun attack by Mexican Stalinists led by painter, David Siqueiros; and is nearby when Ramon Mercader launches his fatal attack with an icepick. The fictional version of Mercader is a talentless devotee of Trotsky who manages to get close to the great man by asking Trotsky to look over a manuscript that he has written.
And, if that is not enough history for a novel to retell in personal and intimate terms, Harrrison, in the aftermath of Trotsky’s death, washes up in Asheville, North Carolina[4] and becomes a successful writer. The years of keeping a careful diary had serves him well. He lives a solitary live with only a house and bookkeeper/stenographer, Violet Brown, to keep him company, on occasion.
But history, in post war America, did not give a quiet life to writers who had once worked with a famous revolutionary and it was not long before the writer is testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee and not much longer before criminal charges are likely to be on their way.
At a time like this, when in a difficult situation, a person needs some kind of loophole, some kind of lacuna.
The historical novelist plays an important role. They get to re-tell history, selectively, and to personalise it for the reader. They are less constrained than the historian to subject headings and chosen themes.
History is so immense, however, that every historian must, herself, be selective. With every passing minute history is occurring on every square metre on the Earth and beyond. Most history is unrecorded and precious little that is recorded is retold by historians. Even the history we live through is subject to choices. As I write, I may have to choose between attacks in London and attacks in Kabul to read or care about. And, if I choose both, I must ignore other tragedies and other happenings, both comic and bizarre, which are occurring at the same time. Nonetheless, the historical novelist’s ability to choose is less constrained and can be more easily fitted to an artistic or normative agenda.
In the end, then, Ms. Kingsolver’s choice of historic events: progressive artistic Mexico; working class America desperate, down but not out and with the spirit to protest; and the oppressive, obsessive madness of McCarthyism (which changes in degree but never goes away, completely), though not necessarily more selective than the choices that historians make, every day, in their work, is more adapted to her artistic intentions.
Ms. Kingsolver has brought together events of which the reader may never have heard; events of which the reader may have been aware but never thought about; and events that the reader may have pondered but never in terms of real people experiencing hope and feeling joy and suffering pain and disappointment.
Ms. Kingsolver makes history a personal experience. Her characters live on the page such that the reader feels that she can reach out and touch. Harrison Shepherd tries to make himself invisible but we grow to know him through his experiences and his veiled reactions. As the archivist, Mrs. Brown, reveals herself, the reader feels the irony that perfuses her relationship with Mr. Shepherd. Not only do they not tell but they never guess at what the other feels.
L. was right to urge the book upon me. I had walked the streets of both Coyoacan and San Angel and was delighted to read more about them. But The Lacuna offers and delivers to the reader much more than a road trip to Mexico. It spans but thirty years and two countries. Yet it provides an understanding of events and of people that still resonate. It offers also an understanding of values and actions that are important in our time.
Ms. Kingsolver has that knack of filling the lacunae that permeate our understanding of ourselves and our world.
[3] The old saw is that, if you have two Trotskyists in a room, you will have at least three factions.
[4] The place where Zelda Fitzgerald met her tragic death in a fire.
Author: Nicholas Cowdery (with Rachael Jane Chin) Publisher: NewSouth Publishing[1]
Nick Cowdery was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for the State of New South Wales in 1994. At the time of Cowdery’s appointment, the Premier of New South Wales was John Fahey and his Attorney-General was John Hannaford. Cowdery would grace the office for 17 years until 2011. His decision to resign was, effectively, forced by the ire of the then government,[2] with legislation passed and deliberately retained which would have deprived Cowdery of most of his pension if he had stayed in the role beyond his sixty-fifth birthday.
Cowdery’s career as a lawyer has covered most available roles. He worked as a public defender in Papua New Guinea in his first year of practice in 1971. He served as an acting judge from 1988 to 1990. He had an extensive practice at the private bar practising particularly in the areas of criminal law, administrative law and commercial law taking silk in 1987 and then served as DPP for 17 years.
Cowdery has written extensively on matters of law reform and legal policy including the earlier monograph, Getting Justice Wrong: myths, media and crime in 2001. Since 2011, Cowdery has continued working including by teaching prosecutors in developing countries around the world the principles and processes which align the role of public prosecution with the values of the rule of law.
Frank and Fearless, at one level, is the story of a number of interesting cases that crossed the desk of the DPP during the 17 years during which Cowdery was appointed to that office. At another level, Frank and Fearless is a story of the role of the DPP and the implications that it has for any person who is appointed to fulfil that role. In his introduction, Cowdery states that he knew that every decision he made would make somebody unhappy. If he decided to prosecute or appeal, the accused or the prisoner would feel aggrieved. But, if he exercised his discretion against taking action, victims and the supporters of punishment would, in turn, feel aggrieved. Cowdery also explains that, despite his normal human reactions to vexed situations that came before him, he was bound to make decisions, professionally, in accordance with the available evidence and the law.
So, at another level, Frank and Fearless, is about the dilemmas and the problems facing the criminal law. The interesting cases which feature illustrate those dilemmas in all their acuteness. The perspectives of victims and their families; the strengths and fallibility of expert evidence; the different light arising from circumstantial evidence; and the hard cases of assisted dying are workshopped by the cases featured. Cowdery manages to convey both the human and the responsible prosecutor’s perceptions of the facts at each point in the telling. He is also able to convey the perspectives of others, accused persons and victims, at all points in the narrative.
The title, Frank and Fearless, is well chosen. Frankness and fearlessness are required of all advisers and all decision makers. They are essential to those who provide legal advice or make legal decisions. They are essential to any person performing the role of DPP. Cowdery is probably the person most famous for displaying those qualities in the role of DPP for most of the readers of this book. He was a controversial DPP because he exercised the guaranteed independence of his office to make fearless decisions and he articulated the lessons he learned in the office to inform the public as to ways in which the laws could be improved. Cowdery understood the emotions of the families of victims but he never let public criticism deter him from honestly exercising the role of the office or from making the correct decision on his assessment of the evidence and law.
Frank and Fearless is, therefore, an insider’s account of a turbulent period in law and politics. Cowdery explains his decisions and his actions and there is no doubting that the book justifies his actions and condemns many of those politicians and journalists who chose to attack him and to obstruct his work. Cowdery, however, eschews anger. His account of his time in the office and his work carries with it a sense of calmness and a feeling that, however strongly the author may disagree with others’ actions and words, he can still empathise with those others and understand the emotions that cause them to take a particular course.
Among the cases studied, the prosecution of those responsible for the death of Michael Marslew highlights the need for the interests of victims and their families to be properly recognised in the prosecution process but also highlights the pressures placed on prosecutors and the Courts by victims and relatives airing their frustrations in public media campaigns.
Several cases involving different examples of assisted dying highlight the complexities of using the existing law to achieve a humane result but also the need for careful law reform in the area.
The principle that no one is above the law is showcased in the prosecution of Patrick Power SC, Cowdery’s deputy director at the time of his arrest, for possession of child pornography, and the prosecution of Minister of the Crown, Milton Orkopoulis, for child sex offences. The case studies, however, also show the pressures that come from many directions when a high profile person is suspected of having committed criminal offences.
The ultimately unsuccessful prosecution of Gordon Woods for the murder of his girlfriend, Caroline Byrne, raises the dangers of over zealousness on the part of a Crown Prosecutor.
Cowdery’s co-writer, Rachel Jane Chin, is a lawyer and a journalist as well as a documentary writer having published a book in 2011 on one of the cases discussed in Frank and Fearless, the successful prosecution of fringe national water polo player, Keli Lane, for the death of her missing baby, Tegan.
As an outsider, the reader will have little opportunity to discern exactly what the co-writer has contributed to the work. One might suspect, however, that the professional author, Chin, may have assisted with the structure of the book in which a topic is dealt with in a chapter, apparently, to a settled conclusion with the suspect either convicted or not pursued only to have the same case emerge afresh in a new chapter when an appeal or a fresh evidence discovery has thrown a new light on the case and re-awakened the narrative and re-focussed the issues to which the case gives rise.
In one sense, Frank and Fearless is a must read book because its principal author has made a great contribution to public life in Australia and his perspectives are very valuable. But, between them, Cowdery and Chin have produced a fascinating narrative in which important lessons are woven without diminishing for a moment, indeed, enhancing the entertainment value of the work.
Frank and Fearless comes highly recommended from this reviewer.
[1] Imprint of University of New South Wales Press Ltd [2] The Attorney-General of that government was John Hatzistergos, now a judge of the NSW District Court. The premier was Kristina Keneally.
