All posts by Brian Martin

Brian Martin is professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and vice president of Whistleblowers Australia. He is the author of a dozen books and hundreds of articles on dissent, nonviolence, scientific controversies, democracy, information issues, education and other topics.
economics, health, politics, science

Covid control: a critical view

Remember the years of the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020-23. Around the world, governments imposed lockdowns, recommended social distancing and handwashing, and mandated mask-wearing and vaccines. Were these measures justified. Were they beneficial?

            Views about Covid-control measures are highly polarised. The mainstream view, supported by most governments, health authorities and major media organisations, was that the control measures were essential to deal with the deadliest infectious virus in a century. From this point of view, those who protested against lockdowns, refused to wear masks and were not vaccinated were a threat to public health.

            In the early months of the pandemic, I was disturbed by commentators who said governments and health authorities should speak with one voice. Delving into the arguments about many other issues involving public health, it is not always obvious what position is “scientific”. I thought of nuclear power, fluoridation, pesticides, vaccination and nuclear war, which I had studied in some depth. A key feature of the debates on all these issues is that they are not just about science, but also involve ethical, political and economic dimensions.

            Yet during Covid, we were repeatedly advised to “follow the science”, as if science is a single entity, indisputable and the only thing to be considered. What if “the science” is questionable? What if important human values are at stake?

Polarisation

There was something else peculiar about clashes over Covid-control measures. Opponents were often assumed to be right-wing lunatics, to be dismissed along with President Trump and his suggestion to use bleach. This was strange. Traditionally, those on the political left are critical of capital, of multinational corporations, yet suddenly they were backing vaccination mandates, which enriched several highly profitable pharmaceutical companies.

            I was surprised not to see more figures identified with the left, or with “progressive” political stances, being critical of lockdowns and vaccination mandates. Perhaps I wasn’t looking hard enough, because recently I discovered an impressive book by two scholars, self-identifying with the left, who offer a devastating critique of the mainstream response to the pandemic. The book is The Covid Consensus, written by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, each having extensive scholarly CVs. Here I’ll spell out some of their arguments, not as an endorsement but to highlight important arguments that have been absent from most coverage of Covid politics.

WHO’s advice

Covid came to world attention early in 2020. Several experts in the spread of infectious diseases, notably British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, forecast that this new virus was deadly, potentially with a high death rate. The virus emerged in China, and soon the Chinese government imposed draconian controls, locking down part of the city of Wuhan. Governments around the world copied the Chinese response, going beyond it to impose national lockdowns. The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic, and supported the lockdown response.

            Here’s the strange thing, pointed out by Green and Fazi. In 2019, before anyone knew about the coronavirus, WHO prepared recommendations for responding to pandemics, and advised against lockdowns. Why? Because there was no good evidence that they worked to contain spread of the pathogen, and they had serious impacts on people’s lives. Yet within a few months, WHO basically forgot its own advice and got on board with government responses, with Chinese government impositions as the model.

A curious consensus

Green and Fazi point out the incongruity of Western governments adopting the authoritarian Chinese approach. But perhaps it wasn’t all that strange, given trends towards more authoritarian controls in many countries.

            Note the title of Green and Fazi’s book: The Covid Consensus. The “consensus” they talk about is an apparent unanimity of opinion by government officials, health authorities and the mass media. That’s exactly what disturbed me too: not only the absence of debate, but the attempt to muzzle any dissent from orthodoxy.

            How did the virus originate? The official line was that it was a “natural” process, a bat virus that was adapted to humans via an intermediate host, at a wet market in Wuhan. The fact that Wuhan was the location of a laboratory where bat viruses were being genetically modified seemed suspicious, but somehow dismissed, labelled a conspiracy theory, though if the source of the coronavirus was an accidental release from a lab, there was no conspiracy about the origin, only about insisting on it being a natural process. It was more than insisting. Soon there was a campaign to discredit and censor the lab-leak theory. Green and Fazi give details, presenting this as a revealing example of the way any questioning of the Covid consensus was treated.

            While the dangers of Covid were hyped, it seemed little account was being taken of who was in danger. From the earliest months, evidence revealed that the elderly and those with other health problems were at heightened risk. This wasn’t just a slightly increased risk. The risk of dying for people over 80 was thousands of times as great as for children. To put it another way, Covid posed little danger to healthy children. Despite this demographic discrepancy, in most countries the standard measures taken against Covid were applied across the board. Children were locked down and given vaccines, just like their grandparents.

            However, Covid control measures did pose a risk. Schooling was disrupted, especially for those less advantaged. Being kept inside, away from friends, had a detrimental psychological effect. Rates of domestic violence soared. The economic consequences were severe, especially for those without secure employment and the possibility of working from home.

“In sum, the focus on a disease which overwhelmingly affected the elderly had caused the growth of serious medical conditions among the young. The young had been assaulted from all sides: politicians had decided to take a sledgehammer to their education, their economic futures, and their mental and physical health.” (p. 372)

            In looking at any public health measure, it only makes sense to consider both the benefits and the costs, in terms of lives and wellbeing. Yet in the panic about Covid, only one side of the ledger was considered important: the benefits of reducing Covid mortality and morbidity. The costs of control measures were hardly mentioned.

Dissent

Many medical professionals were uncomfortable with this. Prominent dissent was led by three distinguished scientists who promoted what was called the Great Barrington Declaration.

Its basic idea is simple. Protect the vulnerable — the old and health-compromised — but let the young and healthy continue their lives unhindered, allowing them to contract Covid, develop immunity and thereby be safe to visit and care for those at risk. But rather than this viewpoint being seen as a basis for discussion, the response was to try to discredit its authors and censor its proponents. This is just one example of the way that the “Covid consensus” — the view of most governments and health authorities — was, in practice, the “Covid dogma,” a belief system ruthlessly promoted and imposed.

            Green and Fazi provide detailed information about several other features of this belief system. It included mask mandates despite the lack of good evidence that masks worked against a viral disease like Covid. It included treating vaccines as saviours, despite arguments that mass vaccination had never before been able to control a pandemic.

Harms

However, the most serious feature of the Covid consensus was what it didn’t address: the harms caused by control measures. The lockdowns had a drastic effect on people around the world, and it is the “around the world” part where Green and Fazi’s account excels. Lockdowns caused damage to health and welfare in affluent countries, by limiting exercise, interrupting schooling, harming mental health and exacerbating economic inequality, but elsewhere the impacts were far worse. Green and Fazi give special attention to impacts in Africa, as well as India, South America and elsewhere.

            The Covid control measures were rolled out across the world with little concern for differences in demographics, health services and livelihoods. It was a one-size-fits-all approach.

“Having pressured African nations to follow a disastrous lockdown route which was contrary to the WHO’s own 2019 report on the need to balance economic factors in responding to a pandemic, the international community abjured itself of responsibility for the debt crisis that was produced.” (p. 333)

            Covid was not nearly as great a threat in Africa, because elderly people were a smaller proportion of the population. The younger cohorts were not at great risk from Covid itself, but were devastated by control measures. A large proportion of African people live from precarious work, and suddenly their livelihoods were trashed by lockdowns. Children who normally would have spent most of their time outdoors, and healthily so, were trapped inside for months, even years, with no opportunity for education, social interaction or play. Meanwhile, many parents relied on income from selling goods in open-air markets, and these were closed down, throwing them further into poverty. Overall, the impacts of Covid-control measures were devastating.

“It’s hard to make sense of so much destruction, throwing out of the window proclaimed policy priorities such as protecting the rights of women, girls, and children, reversing inequalities, and reducing poverty which had been the cornerstone of global health for several decades. Children locked up for months at a time without being allowed out in Angola. Medical facilities shredded to target a disease which isn’t even a major factor for most Africans. Futures destroyed. Debts accrued, making the prospect of climbing out of this awful cavern ever harder. All in the name of ‘global health’.” (p. 336)

Forgone options

As soon as the pandemic began, doctors began testing drugs that seemed promising as therapies. Several repurposed drugs, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, showed promise. These had been used for decades for other conditions, with an excellent safety profile. They were non-toxic, but there was a “problem”: they were non-expensive. Soon there was a campaign by health authorities to condemn these drugs and the doctors who prescribed them, a campaign supported by much of the mass media.

            Instead, individuals who contracted Covid were advised not to treat it at all, and to stay home until they needed hospital care. Green and Fazi note that this recommendation was unprecedented for responding to an infectious disease.

            Then there was vaccination, seen as salvation. Green and Fazi note that vaccination made sense for the elderly and unhealthy, for whom the benefits could outweigh the risks, but for young and healthy people, at little risk from Covid, the potential harms from Covid vaccines might be greater. Despite this huge disparity in benefit-risk profiles, vaccines were recommended for everyone, and often mandated, with serious consequences for those who refused, including loss of jobs.

Liberty

That the authoritarian Chinese government could impose lockdowns was perhaps not surprising. What was surprising is that governments elsewhere, including those with reputations for defending civil liberties, adopted the same repressive policies. In some countries, individuals were beaten or arrested for venturing outside during lockdowns. Protesters were met with a stiff police response.

            Free speech went by the wayside. Social media platforms took it on themselves, often with government encouragement, to censor those who challenged the official line. Some dissident scientists and doctors had their accounts closed suddenly.

            Green and Fazi propose several explanations for why the Covid consensus developed, including that it represented a continuation of political trends towards authoritarianism and that it accelerated the widening of economic inequality. Explaining the Covid consensus is not a problem for those who subscribe to it: for them, it is simply a matter of protecting health.

            Green and Fazi’s critique makes most sense as a comprehensive picture, which means it’s sort of like a gestalt switch, seeing things entirely differently. Consider features of the conventional view.

  • Covid poses an extraordinary threat to human lives.
  • Urgent steps need to be taken to deal with the threat.
  • The only viable path is to limit the spread of the coronavirus, through lockdowns, masking and social distancing, until vaccines are available.
  • Anyone who questions this view is a threat to human health.

Green and Fazi’s critique challenges every one of these features.

  • The threat from Covid was exaggerated.
  • There are other viable ways to respond to the threat, including repurposed medicines and targeted protection.
  • The adverse health impacts from lockdowns and vaccines are much greater than officially acknowledged.
  • Questioning of dominant viewpoints should be welcomed.

Green and Fazi repeatedly acknowledge that they are not experts in medical matters. Still, they cite a wide range of scientists and doctors to back up their arguments. (Their references are given in an online supplement to the book.)


Toby Green

            They provide a powerful case, but it has been largely ignored. Why? The obvious explanation is the very Covid consensus that they analyse. Dissidents are typically just ignored or, if they become too influential, attacked. I can only hope Green and Fazi’s perspective gains enough attention to warrant a careful reply.


Thomas Fazi

“Some things are clear: mechanisms of social control and coercion have increased, inequality has expanded enormously, and in that context China’s exemplar of an authoritarian capitalism that neoliberalism had also been constructing for many years looms uncomfortably nearby. The winners have been massive corporations and their managers, government spooks, political autocrats and their cheerleaders, and authoritarian monopoly capitalism — and there’s nothing much that’s progressive about that as far as we can see.” (p. 434)

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

See also:
“A Covid cure?”
“Who’s afraid of The Real Anthony Fauci?”

democracy, social dynamics

Life and luck

Our lives are shaped by chance events. This has wide ramifications.


Where I didn’t get a job

            In 1974, I was finishing my PhD thesis at Sydney University and applied for a lectureship in physics at Murdoch University, in Perth, which was taking its first students the next year. Bruce, the foundation professor of physics at Murdoch, visited Sydney and interviewed me. He thought he would be able to make two appointments, and he later told me that I was his #2 choice. But when Bruce got back to Perth, it turned out he was able to make only one appointment. Instead of moving to Perth and throwing myself into creating innovative physics curricula, I was to have a very different career. Was I lucky or unlucky?

            Much of our life is outside our control. It starts with birth. As is often said, no one chooses their parents. You might be lucky to be born into an affluent, loving family, or unlucky to be born into poverty and abuse.


Would you be lucky to be this baby?

            When you meet the love of your life, your closest friends and your work colleagues, luck seems to play a big role. It often boils down to what seem to be chance meetings, chance introductions, chance opportunities.

            Think of one of your best friends. What would it mean to have met them without chance being a factor? Maybe this would involve you searching databases, across many countries, to find the ideal person to be your friend. But then you’d probably need to move far away to be with them or spend a lot of time online with them. Would they be receptive? Usually, it’s far easier to make friends with people you just happen to meet.

            Then there’s tragedy, for example a terrible car crash. I’ve heard people say, regarding a serious accident, “If only I hadn’t decided to go out that night.” Seldom do they say, “If only I had gone through that intersection ten seconds later.” A few seconds can make all the difference.

            If these sorts of thoughts interest you, there’s far more in The Random Factor by social scientist Mark Rank. He provides so many examples that you might wonder whether anything isn’t due to chance. Consider the solar system. If the earth had been a bit hotter or colder, or with a different chemical composition, life might not have developed. Rank tells of the asteroid that collided with the earth 66 million years ago, a massive catastrophe wiping out the dinosaurs and enabling mammals to proliferate. If the asteroid had missed the earth, or even just impacted in a different location, humans might never have emerged.

            Next, there’s birth. The creation of a new human is an amazing process of combining genetic materials from parents, and the result is fairly random unless you’re a test-tube baby. There are also numerous sources of randomness for each of us after birth. How you develop depends on the people around you, parents and others, and chance occurrences such as what teachers you have and what country you live in.

            In the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of nuclear weapons were tested, spewing tonnes of plutonium into the atmosphere. If you happen to breathe in a microgram of insoluble plutonium oxide, you might end up with lung cancer. Bad luck!

            In some spiritual traditions, events are preordained, so what seem to be chance events are planned at some level. Perhaps past, present and future are fixed and we are just moving through the universe. Rank, however, adopts a scientific worldview in which randomness is a fundamental feature of reality.

            Random events that affect other people can also affect you. Hitler applied to attend art school but was rejected. It was a near thing. If he had been accepted, there might not have been Nazi rule in Germany, World War II or the Holocaust. Blame it on the art school!


What if Hitler had succeeded in his art career?

            In October 1962, the world came close to global nuclear war. The governments of the US and the Soviet Union clashed over Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba. Rank describes several crucial decisions during the crisis when Soviet personnel prevented launching nuclear missiles.

Beliefs about chance

Rank challenges some common beliefs about chance, such as that luck evens out in the long run. To the contrary, good fortune tends to lead to more good fortune, and bad to more bad, in what is called cumulative advantage or disadvantage. In the US, a person born male, black and in poverty is far more likely to be arrested, often leading to a downward spiral.

            Despite the crucial role of randomness in human lives, many people believe that hard work always pays off. Rank argues that this is misguided, giving examples of people who end up badly despite their utmost efforts. The belief in hard work paying off is especially prevalent in the US, the country with the highest level of individualism and, not coincidentally, the highest level of economic inequality among industrialised societies.

            It may be especially difficult for those who are well off, successful in their careers and admired by peers to accept that good luck played a crucial role in their lives. It is more flattering to believe good fortune is deserved. In the academic world, receiving a sizeable research grant is a source of pride and failing to obtain grants a source of disappointment, even shame, yet studies have shown that luck plays a significant role in grant success: the outcome depends sensitively on which assessors are chosen to evaluate an application. Tell that to a successful applicant!

            Rank argues that recognising the role of luck in social outcomes provides a rationale for policies to support the poor and disadvantaged, for example through a guaranteed annual income. He uses the ideas of political philosopher John Rawls to make this argument, but it is really simple: if chance events, such as who your parents are, are influential in life outcomes, then no one deserves to live in poverty. The same line of thinking leads to the conclusion that no one deserves great wealth or great fame.


Mark Rank

Uses of randomness

There’s another possible use of randomness, not addressed by Rank. It can serve as a tool for generating better social outcomes, by countering bias and self-interest.

            One example is choosing members of a court jury. Why choose jury members randomly from the population, members without special expertise, rather than rely on trained and experienced judges? One rationale is that it reduces corruption. Jury members go back to their lives outside the court after a single case, meaning they are less easy to bribe than a sitting judge. A second rationale is the process of deliberation. After hearing the evidence, jury members discuss the case and seek to arrive at a consensus. This process is valuable for raising, assessing and reconciling a variety of views.

            What about other decision-makers, like politicians? The ancient Greeks chose many of their leaders using sortition, aka random selection. In ancient Athens, they used a device called a kleroterion to randomly select jurors and public officials. According to David Van Reybrouck, author of Against Elections, random selection is the authentic form of democracy, whereas representative government serves privilege.

            The idea of sortition has been resurrected in recent decades with the use of randomly selected groups of citizens to deliberate on policy issues such as euthanasia and climate change. This is a form of participatory democracy, known as deliberative democracy, in which citizens deal with issues directly, in contrast to only relying on elected representatives. In Ireland, citizens’ assemblies help the parliament and government develop policies on contentious issues such as abortion and marriage equality. In various countries, citizen juries have helped establish government budget priorities and land use policies, as well as addressing issues such as aged care and vaccination policies.

            There’s much more going on, for example systems for selecting applicants to schools and universities and for panels to design electoral systems. The point here is that random selection can be used to overcome bias and corruption.

            Some people live in mansions while others are homeless. Barbara Goodwin in Justice by Lottery proposed that housing be assigned randomly: every five years, everyone would be reassigned to a different house.


Your house?

It sounds crazy, but it has one important feature. If you knew you might end up in terrible lodgings, you’d want to push for a basic minimum of housing quality. Randomness thus could become a motive for greater equality. Actually, Goodwin’s hypothetical society named Aleatoria is based on periodically reassigning, by chance, not just housing, but also jobs and other assets. In her “total social lottery,” the regular redistribution of roles and rewards serves to counter the initial random distribution of assets — parents, talents, etc. — at birth. Goodwin uses Aleatoria to make the case for equality.

            Randomly allocated housing isn’t coming any time soon, but as a thought experiment it is illuminating. It’s an example along the lines of Rank’s: pondering the role of chance in our lives potentially can make us more supportive of those in need and more grateful for what we have.

            After I didn’t get the physics lectureship at Murdoch University, my life followed quite a different trajectory. Decades later, by chance I talked with the fellow who obtained the one physics lectureship there back in 1975. He said, “Brian, you’re so lucky you didn’t end up here.” Well, maybe so, but there have been too many other chance events along the way to know for sure.

            Another thought. If I had gone to Murdoch, then decades later I might never have noticed or read The Random Factor or written a blog post about it, and you wouldn’t be reading it now. How lucky is that?

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela, Lyn Carson, Mark Diesendorf and Julia LeMonde for useful feedback.

economics

The copyright monster

Copyright has gotten completely out of control, serving the rich at the expense of the poor.

            These days, it’s very easy to become a creator. Just send a brief memo to the boss, or take a photo. Automatically, you hold the copyright to these “creations,” and the associated rights last a long time, for 70 years after you die.

            Suppose your selfie happens to be in the background of a shot in a blockbuster movie. You can sue for infringement of your copyright. Good? Well, not so much, because movie producers now take precautions to avoid incidental infringements, which means they avoid real-life backgrounds, because pictures, designs, videos and much else might be seen and make them legally liable.

            It’s crazy and it keeps getting worse. Who benefits?

            Back in the 1990s, I became interested in what’s called “intellectual property” (IP), which includes copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets. What’s involved in all of them is that something that can be used by many people at the same time, like an image or text, is subject to restrictions. If you write a few lines of doggerel, all your friends can read it and so can you. This is unlike a pair of shoes or a bicycle, which are forms of property that can’t be used by others when you’re using them.

            The more I learn about IP, the more absurd it seems. And of all the forms of IP, copyright is the most absurd. These days, no effort is required to acquire copyright. You have it automatically, without registration, in every text you send to a friend and every photo you take. And why? What is the purpose of copyright?

Rationales

The most common justification is that authors, and creators more generally, deserve some return from their intellectual labour. On the other hand, the official justification, for example as spelled out in the US Constitution, is to stimulate the production of creative works for the good of all. The trouble is, in practice these days, copyright doesn’t achieve either of these ostensible purposes, and is more likely to work against them.

            One way to appreciate this is by studying the history of IP. For this, you need go no further than a new book by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu titled Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs.

This is one of the most entertaining and illuminating treatments I’ve seen. You might not think that stories about English publishers in the 1700s and US court cases in the 1800s would be of interest, but they tell an amazing story of struggles over copyright. Along the way, they also tell about patents, trademarks and trade secrets, but copyright is the focus, appropriately so because it is the most ridiculous form of IP.

          Initially, in England, copyright was not about benefiting authors but rather protecting the profits of book printers. Given widespread acceptance of copyright today, this is hard to grasp. Authors were never the intended beneficiaries, but claiming that they were became a way to justify copyright.

            Bellos and Montagu present a vivid account of what they call “copyright creep.” The protection started out covering just books, then engravings and later photographs and recordings. In many countries today, murals and graffiti can be copyrighted, so if you take a photo of one, you’ve infringed its copyright. Then there are business directories and computer programs.


David Bellos

            Copyright creep also involved the spread of copyright to most of the world. In the 1800s, US copyright law only protected works by US authors, so US publishers freely printed novels by the likes of Charles Dickens and US theatre companies freely staged musicals by Gilbert and Sullivan. In the late 1900s, however, the US government realised the enormous profits to be obtained from IP and set about insisting that other governments, like China’s, introduce strict laws. Why? Because nearly all IP payments flow from the poor to the rich and from other countries to the US.


Alexandre Montagu

            IP is basically a restraint on trade. “Copyright protection flows disproportionately to large enterprises more likely to use it to stifle innovation than to promote it.” (p. 288) It’s weird that IP has been imposed via trade agreements that, in the popular mind, are about free trade. Bellos and Montagu give several examples of periods when copyright protection was limited, generating bursts of creative activity.

            One of the most significant examples of copyright creep was in 1909, when the US Congress passed a law that continues today and went further than merely permitting employers to hold the copyright of works produced by their employees. They became, legally, the authors:

“Today, the vast majority of commercially viable copyrights belong not to people, but to large, impersonal empires in the book, film, music and software fields — and in the mangled language of copyright law, these entities are now the authors of the works they distribute …” (p. 198)

            Bellos and Montagu note that creators centuries ago depended on patrons, for example the princes who sponsored figures like Mozart. Then came a period where creators could potentially make a living from royalties from their work. But things have come full circle, and most of today’s creators — think writers, composers, computer programmers, scientists — are employees. Most of their income comes from their salaries, not returns from copyright, which are skimmed off by their patrons, namely their employers.

            There is so much interesting material in Who Owns This Sentence? that it is hard to make a selection. One of my favourite chapters is “Misinformation campaigns,” in which the authors tell about the efforts by big corporations to convince consumers and school children about the importance of copyright, offering one falsehood or misleading statement after another. In recent years, there has been a flowering of efforts to counter “misinformation,” but I’ve never seen efforts to tackle IP misinformation. No prizes for guessing why.

            Although Bellos and Montagu provide copious notes on their historical sources, they give little attention to criticisms of copyright by contemporary authors. I thought for example of Peter Drahos, who argues that IP should be relabelled “monopoly privilege” to better indicate its function, Debora Halbert, whose penetrating works show the dysfunctions of IP, especially copyright, and David Vaver, whose caustic commentaries on copyright rival those of Bellos and Montagu. Who Owns This Sentence? is a wonderfully revealing history but not so much a survey of anti-copyright research.

“Copyright is now the principal regulatory tool for industries of great size that are mostly located in the ‘old rich’ countries, chiefly Britain, the E.U. and the U.S. Yet it is either an irrelevance or just an irritation to the vast majority of creators working there or anywhere else. It generates trifling income for all but a handful among them, and it limits their recourse to the works of others in arbitrary, whimsical, and often unforeseeable ways.” (p. 331)

Alternative paths

In Bellos and Montagu’s history of copyright, they identify crucial points where powerful interests benefited and henceforth fiercely protected their flow of windfall gains. If a few court decisions or international agreements had been different, today’s copyright regime might be less irrational. This is a useful perspective, but it amounts to a suggestion for copyright reform, to make a bad system somewhat less bad. Bellos and Montagu perhaps prefer to be seen as cautious.

            A more radical proposal is to abolish copyright altogether, at least in terms of making money from it. That would mean that creations would immediately enter the public domain, the commons.

How then would creators make a living? This begs the question, because the overwhelming majority of today’s creators have salaries; it is employers, who are not creators, who benefit from today’s creators, and from many other creators long dead. Nevertheless, continuing this line of thinking, an alternative is the widespread introduction of a Universal Basic Income, so everyone has enough to live. Creation could then be largely separated from financial gain. This would mean that novelists would write to express themselves and please others; programmers would write code to serve users; researchers would investigate drugs to serve human health; and so forth.

            Bellos and Montagu point to one area of human endeavour that has always remained exempt from copyright: mathematics. Formulas like E=mc2 cannot be copyrighted, or patented for that matter, which allows their unhindered use for further scientific research. Imagine how constraining it would be if scientists had to pay royalties to Einstein’s estate every time they used one of his equations. Freedom from copyright can unleash creativity. Why not allow other domains to flourish in the same way?

            How could a change towards a saner system come about? Bellos and Montagu discuss the free software movement, but there is much more going on, and many possibilities for action. On a personal level, the immediate possibility is direct action, namely using copyrighted works as a form of civil disobedience. If enough people challenge corporate owners, their powers dissipate. This is what occurred when US film producers took legal action against downloaders, generating a huge backlash.

            More generally, given that IP serves the rich and hinders creativity and social benefit in many domains, opposing IP can be considered part of a challenge to economic inequality. Perhaps a way forward is for social movements to put opposing IP on their agenda. A good start would be wider awareness of the tortured history of copyright so well canvassed in Who Owns This Sentence?

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Kelly Gates and David Vaver for valuable comments.

economics, nonviolent action, politics

Economic warfare, US style

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was met by military resistance and by another response, an economic one, led by the US government. Russia’s foreign assets were frozen, and most banks refused to process Russian transactions. This was open economic warfare, of a scale unprecedented in recent times for an economy the size of Russia’s.

            Companies pursue profits, of course, and in times past would continue their operations despite wars. Famously, US companies like Ford and General Motors maintained operations in Nazi Germany. Since then, the world economy has been internationalised, and there is much greater mutual dependency, for example with products made from components in different countries. In most cases, trade continues between countries even when their governments clash.

            To understand what made the economic measures used against Russia possible, the go-to guide is Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s book Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. It is a penetrating study of how the US government, due to historical accidents, gradually discovered ways to exploit others’ economic dependencies, and used them in an increasingly unrestrained manner.

            The story begins with electronic communication. Although the Internet is designed to be resilient to disruption, the algorithms for routeing messages favour speed, which means most of them go through a few nodes, most of which are physically in the US. This includes banking communications. The US government can exert leverage on foreign banks by threatening them with exclusion from communications. This includes Eurodollars, which are dependent on the same communication systems.

            For example, the US government pressured SWIFT, a bank-clearing system, to serve its demands.

“SWIFT had been transformed from a politically independent organization, which was supposed to help protect banks from government regulation, into an all-seeing servant of the U.S. state, whose knowledge mapped out the hidden world of international financial transactions.” (pp. 65–66)

            A US agency, OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control), can bend foreign banks to its will by blocking them from operating in the US and from working with US-regulated banks (e.g., Citibank) to make dollar-denominated transactions. Other banks avoid anything to do with a “designated” (targeted) foreign bank for fear they would also be targeted and lose access to trades in US dollars.

            Another part of the story is surveillance of electronic communication by the National Security Agency, which expanded from anti-terrorism to economic surveillance, of both enemy and ally states, and of companies like Microsoft and Google. Some of this was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. No one is protected from snooping and demands for access to information: “… not just foreign terrorists but American multinationals found that they fell outside the zone of protection.” (p. 153)

            The authors argue that the weaponising of economic measures was not planned but rather used in an ever-widening fashion. They go through a series of case studies. The measures taken against the Iranian economy are eye-opening. They include isolating Iran from global banking and preventing it receiving payment for exports. I was amazed to read that Brian Hook of the US State Department pressured the captain of an oil tanker carrying Iranian oil, offering him a multi-million-dollar personal payoff (a bribe) for steering the ship to where it could be impounded, furthermore threatening sanctions against him personally if he refused.


Brian Hook

After Iran, there was the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Then there are the economic measures designed to hobble the Chinese economy, for example preventing the import of the most advanced chips produced in Taiwan.

            Underground Empire is an engaging, informative and well-referenced account. The authors write from a US perspective but are critical of weaponising the economy, in part because if such measures are overused, they encourage countermeasures and may eventually undermine US dollar dominance. As the US government has exercised its financial power, other governments and businesses have had more incentive to develop alternatives, including their own centralised networks.

“The United States had made itself too powerful to be trusted — it couldn’t credibly promise that it wouldn’t break its word to business under a different administration or a different interpretation of the rules.” (p. 76)


Henry Farrell

            In an intriguing twist, Farrell and Newman are part of their own story. In 2019, they wrote an article about “weaponised interdependence,” with the intention of warning the US government against using its leverage on global finance coercively. Instead, their ideas were used by the Trump administration as a guide to flexing its power.


Abraham Newman

Corporations squeezed

It’s not often that we can think of multinational corporations as victims. As Farrell and Newman explain, businesses built up networks to serve their interests, but then the US government used these networks for its own purposes, putting businesses in awkward situations. They tell about Microsoft’s cloud computing business and how the US government made things difficult for the corporation.

“Yet even if the cloud seemed to exist nowhere and everywhere at once, U.S. companies like Microsoft were bound by U.S. law. American authorities demanded data on foreigners, threatening harsh penalties for American companies that did not comply, while ordering them to keep their compliance secret. These authorities also believed themselves entitled to seize industrial quantities of data from these companies overseas, without warrant and without informing the businesses, let alone the users, of what was happening. That made life nearly impossible for Microsoft and its competitors. How could foreign governments and foreign businesses trust Microsoft to keep their data private in the future?” (pp. 153-154)

And it’s not just the US government. Governments in China and the European Union have joined in. In this high-level economic warfare, businesses have been caught in the crossfire. Business leaders used to think nationalisation was the biggest danger. “Now, they are coming to understand that powerful, wealthy countries present the greatest risks.” (p. 147) Businesses might like to remain neutral, to make profits in all markets, but when the pressures become too great, they feel forced to choose sides.

            The biggest story is not Iran or Russia but China, now the prime target of US government economic warfare because it is the strongest challenger to US economic dominance.

But by waging economic warfare, the US government risks strengthening its competitor.

“One of China’s great weaknesses in building its own empire was that other countries, businesses, and ordinary people couldn’t trust it: it took advantage of them whenever it suited.  … If countries and businesses believed that the United States would deploy its power ruthlessly against them, then they might see little difference between it and its adversary.” (p. 190)

            Underground Empire has a great deal of fascinating detail, and offers a deeper understanding of many world events than any number of media stories. On the other hand, Farrell and Newman examine economic warfare only at the level of governments and large corporations. They do not mention workers, trade unions or citizen campaigners. Do they have any influence?

Nothing new?

Weaponising the economy is nothing new. In the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund imposed “structural adjustment programs” on Third World countries around the world, which continue to siphon wealth from the poor to serve the rich in First World countries. Long before this, the British empire exploited its colonies through trade policies, so that, according to Shashi Tharoor in Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, colonial rule led to a drastic decline in wealth in India, while benefiting British manufacturers.

            Gene Sharp in part two of his classic 1973 book The Politics of Nonviolent Action lists 198 methods of nonviolent action, in three main categories: (1) protest and persuasion; (2) noncooperation, including many types of strikes and boycotts; and (3) nonviolent intervention, for example fasts, sit-ins and alternative institutions. In the category of noncooperation are “actions to suspend economic relations”, which include actions by consumers, workers, owners, financial institutions and governments. Most relevant here are actions by governments, including embargoes by international sellers and buyers.

            Sharp’s method #89 is severance of funds and credit. He writes,

“Economic pressures can also be exerted by cutting off the opponent’s sources of money, such as salaries, appropriations, loans and investments. This may be done by individuals, firms, or governments. In certain American colonies [in the 1700s], the assemblies withheld appropriations for the salaries of governors and judges as a means of keeping them from acting too much out of line with the assemblies’ political wishes.” (p. 239)

            Sharp presented nonviolent campaigns as challenges to dictatorship, war, genocide and social oppression — not as tools by powerful groups to serve their own interests. Nevertheless, he included examples of how methods of nonviolent action have been used for other ends. The method of severance of funds and credit was used by whites in the US against blacks who pushed against segregation.


Gene Sharp

            Method #93 is blacklisting of traders.

“During wartime or during a policy of embargo, one government may seek to block indirect transfer of embargoed good through firms or individuals in a neutral country by prohibiting trade with them as well as with the enemy country itself. … These were standard United States practices during World War II.” (pp. 244-245)

They seem to have become standard more recently, though war has not been declared.

            Method #96 is international trade embargo, which

“is a combination of the international seller’s embargo and the international buyer’s embargo. It involves a total prohibition of trade with the opponent country, or a near-total ban, exempting perhaps medicines and the like.” (p. 246)

One of Sharp’s examples is the 1962 embargo of Cuba by the US government.

            In economic warfare, there is an underlying violent foundation: property, including money and the economic system generally, relies on the power of the state for protection. If banks simply cleared out deposits and said, “tough luck,” what could depositors do? They rely on governments to protect their investments, to provide compensation or impose penalties on renegade banks and any others who violate the rules of the economic game.

But what happens when powerful governments are the rule-breakers, when they seize assets without compensation, impose tariffs in violation of trade agreements, and threaten banks from trading with the “opponent,” outside of wartime? When rule-makers become blatant rule-breakers, this undermines the legitimacy of the entire system, and can provoke resistance. This is what Farrell and Newman warn about and describe.

            Sharp writes that “International embargoes of all three types have not produced many notable successes.” (p. 248) Whether US-government-initiated embargoes will succeed or be counterproductive remains to be seen.

So what’s new about the methods described by Farrell and Newman? In recent decades, multinational corporations have built up international networks unprecedented in scope and influence, networks encompassing trade, banking and technology, serving their own interests. What’s new is that the US government has found ways to exploit these corporate networks for its own ends, sometimes at the expense of the corporations, in ways not previously possible. Underground Empire is essential reading for understanding this new facet of political economy.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Susan Engel and Abe Newman for valuable comments.

emotions, media, social dynamics

Anxious young people?

A recent news story is titled “Young adulthood is no longer one of life’s happiest times“. What’s causing an increase in depression and anxiety among young people?

            Years before Covid, university support staff told me about a huge increase in the number of students with problems. What was causing it? Without a ready explanation, I assumed it was the breakdown of community, which I had read about.

            Most people used to live in families, neighbourhoods and workplaces that provided a stable structure for their lives. However, these stable social structures, which can be called community, gradually began to break down. To find jobs, people moved away from where they grew up, sometimes moving repeatedly. This meant, in many cases, moving away from childhood friends, grandparents and long-time neighbours. Arguably, the market economy has been the primary driver behind the breakdown of community. People were less connected with those around them.

            Without the moorings of old-fashioned community, what came next? For some, this was a liberation from narrow-minded conservatism, one that held people back, forcing them into rigid social roles. But for others, the new fluid society was unnerving and threatening, giving rise to mental problems.

            There are other explanations for the increase in young people’s problems. The role of the media is one. With television, children began seeing vastly more graphic images of violence. Another factor is the increasing awareness of climate change, an existential threat to human thriving, felt especially by the young who bear little responsibility for it.

            Richard Eckersley alerted me to the high levels of distress among young people, and the importance of figuring out why this is occurring despite material affluence. Through a series of publications, he has tried to raise awareness about youth unhappiness as a window into deeper problems with Western societies.

Jonathan Haidt’s view 

Years ago, when I was co-ordinating a class on happiness and doing some research in the area, I read quite a few books and articles about happiness, looking especially for ones grounded in research. One of my favourite books in this area was by Jonathan Haidt: The Happiness Hypothesis.


Jonathan Haidt

He surveyed “ancient wisdom” from religious and spiritual traditions in China, India and Europe, examining them in relation to current psychological research. Overall, the past ideas stand up very well. They still provide valuable guides to a life worth living.

            It was with this background that I obtained Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, in which he offers a bold explanation for young people’s distress. Its basic ideas are straightforward, and are in two distinct areas.

            The first idea concerns growing up in the real world, face-to-face, offline. Haidt argues that children in the US, increasingly since about the 1970s, have been overprotected. Compared to previous generations, parents are more likely to drive their children to school, oversee their play, arrange a heavy schedule of activities overseen by adults, and in general never let children out on their own without adult supervision. Haidt calls this safetyism, and argues that it prevents children from learning how to manage risks, organise activities with other children, and overcome anxiety.

            Ironically, many of the parents who hover over their children had very different upbringings, walking or cycling to school and spending hours in unsupervised play. In Wollongong, there is traffic congestion around the time schools let out in the afternoon due to parents driving to pick up their children.

            Haidt argues that children need to undertake activities on their own, including ones with some degree of danger, for full development of their capacities. By taking risks, within reason, people learn to judge what risks are worth taking. By learning from failures, people develop resilience. Haidt is not talking about big risks like jumping off a building but smaller ones like falling while riding a bicycle, and relationship risks too.

            The concept of overprotection is well known in disability circles. People with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, certainly need protection from dangers, but they also need opportunities to explore the world, to go shopping, ride buses and trains, meet people, get out of the house. Living a full life requires taking some risks, with one’s body, career and relationships.

Online dangers

Haidt’s second main idea is that children are being exposed to too many risks online, before they are ready. Social media companies are driven by the search for profits, mostly from online advertising. The longer users spend on a site, the more money the company makes, so they design apps to keep users hooked.

            What’s the real problem here? It’s not using a telephone to talk with a friend. It’s using a phone to go online, and this started in about 2010 to 2015, when smartphones swept the world. This is when it started to be common to see people of all ages staring at their phones while walking. It’s when people started checking their phones first thing in the morning and the last time at night, and hundreds or thousands of other times. Social media apps are designed to be addictive, and many people succumb.

            Years ago, when riding the bus or train, most passengers would be talking with friends, staring out the window, or reading. Now most of them are on their phones. I’ve seen parents wheeling a baby in a pram while staring at their phone. Sometimes the baby has a phone too.

            Haidt argues that being online, on social media apps, can be bad for mental health. There are many reasons for this, including social comparison, cyberbullying, pornography and video game addiction. But not everyone is at the same risk. Youngsters, ages 10 to 15, whose brains are still developing, may be most vulnerable.

            “My central claim in this book is that these two trends — overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world — are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.” (p. 9)

            “We are misallocating our protective efforts. We should be giving children more of the practice they need in the real world and delaying their entry into the online world, where the benefits are fewer and the guardrails nearly nonexistent.” (p. 83)

What to do?

If widespread use of social media is harmful to young people, or at least some of them, what should be done? Haidt covers a range of possibilities, including government regulation, school policies and parents’ initiatives. Many of these are likely to be contentious.

            On the surface, the challenge seems impossibly large. Smartphones are widely used, including by ever younger children. Furthermore, when so many adults are addicted to their phones, modelling behaviour for their children, the task seems even more formidable.

            Haidt sees the challenge as a collective action problem. Individuals acting alone face enormous obstacles. When a young student doesn’t have a phone because their parents won’t allow it, and all the other students have one, the phoneless student becomes an outcast, and only the most psychologically strong can persist as a nonconformist. It’s far easier if a group of parents deny phones to their children, so they can form a phoneless friendship group. And easier still if the school bans phones entirely, as some have, with positive results, Haidt reports.

            Haidt presents four key reforms:

“1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence” (p. 290)

            Here I’m not going to try to assess these and other proposals presented by Haidt, many of them in collaboration with Lenore Skenazy, who deserves to have been listed as a co-author of several chapters. No doubt some will defend smartphone use and social media participation. The challenge for critics of Haidt’s proposals is to explain the many trends he reveals showing a sharp uptake in anxiety and depression among young people, especially girls. Here is one of the many graphs presented by Haidt.

            The Anxious Generation will succeed to the extent that it helps trigger a debate about young people’s mental health, and what can be done to improve it. Meanwhile, I would encourage parents and grandparents to read the book themselves. Yes, it’s a long book, but it is well written, often engaging. It might be worthwhile to obtain a print copy and spend the time to read and ponder it, all the while having a respite from staring at a screen. However, screen-lovers can turn to https://www.anxiousgeneration.com.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Richard Eckersley and Anita Johnson for useful comments.

reputation

When you’re defamed

What would you say if you received a message like this?

I’m a high school teacher. A group of parents held a public meeting, which the principal attended, and made serious allegations about my performance, including uncomplimentary slurs, some even involving my family. What can I do? I thought of contacting a lawyer, but too many of them are just in it for the money. Henry

This is one of the hundreds of emails I’ve received from people distressed because their reputations have been hurt. “Defamation” is the general term for harm to someone’s reputation. Slander is the verbal variety while libel is the written or broadcast type.

            It wasn’t my intent to become an adviser to people who’ve been defamed. For years I was in contact with people at the other end of the story: they had been threatened with a legal action for defamation, or been sued. Often this served as a method of censorship.

            Suppose you discover some corrupt activity and plan to report it. The person you were going to expose threatens to sue you if you say anything. This often happens to whistleblowers.

            In 1996, I decided to write a leaflet to inform whistleblowers about defamation matters, and obtained comments from a range of individuals to make it as accurate as possible, including from a leading defamation barrister. Putting it on my website, soon it was being accessed more than anything else I had ever written. This was when the World Wide Web was becoming popular, and my leaflet provided practical information, in contrast with many legal treatments. It was titled “Defamation law and free speech.”

            Soon I was receiving queries from numerous people, with diverse and often disturbing stories about their concerns about being silenced by defamation threats and actions. But along with these messages came a different sort of query, from people who had been defamed and wanted to know what to do about it.

I’m a career coach and see clients at a room in my home. One of them wrote a comment online saying “I saw him for a consultation. What to expect? He’s obese and his place is a mess!” Admittedly, I’m a little overweight but I keep my consultation room neat and tidy. Do I have grounds to sue?

            A decade later, I wrote a short article, “What to do when you’ve been defamed.” It’s convenient to give people a link to an article rather than repeat the same advice. Each case is different but there are commonalities.

            As the years have gone by, the frequency of defamation queries has dropped off, I presume because the amount of information on the web has grown and my articles are no longer as high on web searches. Recently I was scanning my old paper files, came upon a thick folder of queries about being defamed, and decided to upload samples of my advice, with the queries anonymised. My advice is monotonous in one way: I always say something along the lines of “Don’t sue!”

            Most media attention to defamation is about high-profile cases, such as the suits launched by Ben Roberts-Smith and Bruce Lehrmann. Ironically, each of these legal actions greatly damaged the reputations of the individuals who sued, a phenomenon that can be called defamation backfire.

            Roberts-Smith and Lehrmann are exceptions. Few individuals whose reputations have been harmed ever go to court, and few members of the public are aware of a huge undercurrent of distress about being defamed. That’s what I discovered through the stories of correspondents who wanted advice on what to do about it.

            I often say, don’t sue unless you have a lot of money and don’t mind losing it. There are other options. At least that’s my advice in “Being defamed Q&A”.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

military, politics, tactics

Outrage management in Israel-Palestine

Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli military attack on Gaza generated enormous rage and despair throughout much of the world. To understand these reactions, it is helpful to examine the tactics commonly used by powerful perpetrators of actions perceived as unjust.

            In the long-standing conflict in Israel-Palestine, supporters on each side have perceived their opponents’ statements and actions as threatening and dangerous. Then came the 7 October attack by fighters from Hamas, the governing body in the Gaza Strip, and the Israeli military’s assault on Gaza. Much of the discussion about these events has been about the rights and wrongs of the two sides, including acts of violence, ways to stop the war, arguments for and against Zionism and Hamas, Israeli settler colonialism, Hamas’ terrorism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, two-state and other options for conflict resolution, and the history of the conflict.

            A different perspective on these events can be obtained by examining tactics used to reduce or increase public outrage. In a sense, in parallel with the fighting, there is a different sort of struggle, over people’s understanding of what is happening.

Outrage management

Most people are angry, distressed or upset when they witness an obvious injustice. For example, if someone shoots into a peaceful crowd, this can cause public alarm, anger and distress: this is unprovoked killing, which few people treat as acceptable. Perpetrators commonly take steps to reduce adverse responses to their actions. This can be called “outrage management,” namely influencing people’s feelings in response to a potentially upsetting action.

            A murderer can do this by concealing evidence, so no one knows what they did. If they are accused, they can claim it was an accident or that they were provoked. When a powerful group — for example a government or corporation — is responsible, it has more potential tools to reduce outrage. These tools or methods can be classified into five categories.

  • Cover-up: the actions are hidden from wider audiences
  • Devaluation: the target is denigrated and demonised
  • Reinterpretation: the meaning of the action is altered by lying, minimising consequences, blaming others and/or framing it as appropriate or justifiable
  • Official channels: formal processes are used to give an appearance of justice without much substance
  • Intimidation: participants and observers are threatened or harmed.

How these methods work is, in most cases, straightforward. When an action is hidden, people don’t know about it and so can’t be upset. When a target is devalued, what is done to them doesn’t seem so bad: murdering an esteemed brain surgeon is worse than murdering a serial killer. Reinterpretation techniques change the way people think about an action. Intimidation can affect whether someone decides to do something. The method of official channels, in contrast, can be counterintuitive. When an issue is referred to expert panels, appeal bodies or courts, many people think justice is being done. However, when perpetrators are powerful, official channels often are slow, procedural and target low-level agents with minimal consequences, with the result that public outrage dies down but little of substance happens.

            The same five types of methods are used by perpetrators and their allies in a wide variety of actions, including censorship, sexual harassment, industrial disasters, massacres, demonising of refugees, wartime bombing of civilians, torture and genocide. This is called the backfire model, because if the methods to reduce outrage fail, the perpetrator’s actions can become counterproductive. There is a body of writing applying this model to diverse issues.

            To complete the picture, it is useful to consider counter-tactics, used by targets and their supporters, to increase public outrage over injustice. These are reversals or counters to the five types of methods noted above.

  • Exposure of the action, countering cover-up
  • Validation of the target, countering devaluation
  • Interpretation of the event as an injustice, countering lying, minimising, blaming and framing
  • Avoiding or discrediting official channels; instead, mobilising support
  • Resisting intimidation.

            This framework — five methods that can reduce outrage from injustice, and five counter-methods that can increase it — can be applied to both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict, going back decades. The events on and after 7 October have highlighted the use of these methods, some of which have gone into overdrive. Because the framework applies in a more obvious way to the Israeli military assault, I will cover it first, with examples of each of the methods. Then I’ll address the Hamas attack using the same framework, showing some distinctive differences in the methods used.

            This examination is far from comprehensive, for two main reasons. First, the volume of material about each of the two atrocities is so great that only a few examples can be given. Second, new information will be revealed in the future, in the coming years or decades. Although atrocities can be limited in time — Hamas’ 7 October attack was over in a day — disputes over what happened and its meaning can continue for a very long time. For example, the Turkish government continues to deny the Armenian genocide a century after it occurred.


Armenian genocide

The tactics of outrage management can be deployed before, during and after the events. Accordingly, the treatment here can be considered a preliminary assessment, one that will require revision and updating as new information becomes available. Furthermore, by the nature of cover-up, some relevant information may never be publicly known.

The Israeli military assault on Gaza. 1: Reducing outrage

Soon after Hamas’ 7 October attack, the Israeli government initiated a military response that targeted both Hamas and the wider Gazan population and infrastructure. Information about the consequences of this military response triggered anger and despair in many parts of the world, threatening to harm the reputation and operations of the Israeli government. Therefore, it is predictable that the government and its supporters would take measures to reduce adverse reactions to the military operation.

            Cover-up In many previous cases of mass killing, perpetrators have made serious efforts to hide their actions from wider publics, at least from ones that might be opposed to it. What is unusual about the Israeli assault on Gaza is that so much of the operation — bombings, targeted killings, destruction of hospitals, denial of food, and much else — has been revealed to a wide range of audiences. This is a prime reason why the level of international protest has been far greater than from many previous atrocities.

Although many of the consequences of the assault have been exposed, nevertheless some Israeli actions have received little or no attention. For example, compared to the huge publicity about the hostages taken by Hamas, there is almost no attention to what might be deemed Israeli de-facto hostage-taking, with thousands of Palestinians arrested and imprisoned without being charged or tried. There is little media attention to claims that Palestinian prisoners have been ill-treated, even tortured. There have been reports of Israeli shooters targeting civilians, military targeting of water infrastructure, and obstruction of humanitarian efforts, that have received little attention in mainstream media internationally. The Israeli military does not publicise these actions and targets some of the journalists who expose them (see below under the category intimidation). Some foreign media organisations do not report these sorts of actions.


Gaza water well

            When there are reports about Israeli military actions that challenge its official narrative, how can we say cover-up was involved? It is useful to think of secrecy as an onion, with many layers. Some information is known only to an inner core, some to a slightly larger group, and so on, with ultimately some information broadcast to large audiences. Some features of the Israeli military assault are known but given little attention. Cover-up is a process with many players. The Israeli military and government can try to hide or downplay some information; so can international media, especially those sympathetic to the Israeli cause.

            Devaluation For many Israelis, Palestinians are considered inferior, as people whose lives do not matter as much as the lives of Israelis, and some Israeli figures have attempted to dehumanise Palestinians. Dramatic examples of this sort of attitude were cited in the South African application for proceedings before the International Court of Justice, accusing the state of Israel of genocide, for example the Prime Minister referring to “monsters” and “barbarians” and the Minister of Defence referring to “human animals.” Law for Palestine provides a comprehensive list of Israeli incitement to genocide, in which devaluation plays a crucial role.

            Another aspect of devaluation is labelling Hamas as a terrorist organisation. “Terrorism” is a loaded term, normally only applied to non-state groups, although scholars argue that state terrorism is far more deadly than non-state terrorism. The Israeli government has killed far more Palestinians than vice versa, yet Israeli operations are seldom called terrorism. Some Israeli figures have talked of all Gazans as Hamas, thereby applying the stigma attached to Hamas to the entire population.

            Reinterpretation Powerful perpetrators commonly try to reduce outrage by explaining, or explaining away, their actions, by lying, minimising, blaming or framing. When the Israeli military targeted al-Shifa Hospital, it claimed its purpose was to destroy a Hamas command centre located underneath the hospital. However, evidence supporting Israeli claims was questioned, suggesting that the official rationale for the attack on the hospital was a lie.

            Israeli government spokespeople have repeatedly assigned responsibility for their assault on Hamas, specifically on the 7 October attack, which is the reinterpretation technique of blaming. They have called their actions a defence of Israel against aggression, which is the reinterpretation technique of framing.

            Official channels When other methods of reducing outrage work well, powerful perpetrators may feel no need to invoke official channels. This can change when calls for accountability become exceptionally strong. The Israeli military’s killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers on 1 April 2024 was publicised internationally and seen as especially egregious because those killed were White Westerners, not Gazans, and were involved in humanitarian efforts, which made them harder to devalue. As information came out that their WCK convey was well marked and the Israeli military had been notified about its route, the usual reinterpretation technique of claiming it was a mistake was insufficient.

            The response of Israeli authorities was to dismiss two military officers and reprimand two others. This followed the usual pattern of powerful perpetrators who are exposed: a few lower-level individuals are given relatively mild penalties, but policymakers are exempt from investigation or stricture. In the WCK case, the inquiry was in-house, run by members of the perpetrator group, and accordingly had less credibility than an independent inquiry. Either way, formal inquiries can serve to suggest that processes are operating to address the injustice, so continued protest is not necessary.

            Another sort of official channel is statements by leaders of other governments criticising the Israeli government over its assault on Gaza. US President Joe Biden has been widely reported in the media as expressing US government displeasure with Israeli actions. This seems to respond to protests demanding US government action. However, this public rhetoric gives only the appearance of addressing popular concerns, given that even as Biden spoke, the US government continued to supply weapons to the Israeli military.

            Intimidation Speaking out against the Israeli military assault is potentially risky, depending on the circumstances. Over a hundred journalists in Gaza have been killed, injured or arrested, suggesting that exposing the events poses a threat to the Israeli operation, and also indicating how dangerous it is to do this. In some countries whose leaders back Israel, in particular Germany and the United States, protesters against the assault on Gaza have been arrested.

***

This brief overview indicates how the Israeli military and government, and their backers internationally, have used five methods — cover-up, devaluation, reinterpretation, official channels and intimidation — that can serve to reduce public outrage over the assault on Gaza. However, given the huge level of opposition, it can be said that these efforts have been only partially successful. The assault on Gaza led to a drastic decline in international support for the Israeli government.

Generating outrage over the Israeli military assault on Gaza. 2: Increasing outrage

To understand the limits of efforts to reduce public outrage, it is useful to look briefly at five counter-methods that increase outrage.

            Exposure As noted, what is distinctive about the Israeli assault, compared with many other atrocities, is the massive media exposure. This can be attributed to two factors. First, Israel-Palestine has long been high-profile in the Western media compared to other equally deadly conflicts elsewhere, which scholar Virgil Hawkins refers to as “stealth conflicts.”

Second, the widespread use of video devices, along with communication channels, has made it far easier to circulate vivid portrayals of killing and destruction to international audiences. The continuing flow of images and information has been crucial in generating public outrage outside Israel.

            Validation Although Palestinians are devalued within Israel, internationally this is not quite the same despite demonisation of Muslims in many places. Stories of personal loss and trauma, that feature in some news reports, make Palestinians seem as human as anyone else, and powerfully counter devaluation. References to children who have been killed or who are dying from starvation are especially influential because children are widely perceived as innocents.


Palestinian boy in Gaza refugee camp

            Interpretation The killing and destruction have been portrayed as extreme and disproportionate to anything done by Palestinians. Labelling the Israeli assault genocide is an interpretation of what is happening, especially controversial because Jews were the primary target of the Nazi genocide, and potent for the same reason, as it is tragically ironic to imagine descendants of genocide becoming agents of one. (See also “Genocide reflections“.)

            Official channels It is difficult to assess the role of official channels in dampening or promoting public outrage. Much of the international protest in support of Gazans has been to pressure governments to act, and as such is an appeal to official channels, seemingly with limited effectiveness. The South African submission to the International Court of Justice, alleging genocide, is also an official channel but, in the context of ongoing killing and destruction, seems to have contributed to public awareness and concern.


International Court of Justice

            Resistance Within Gaza, efforts to document killing and destruction, and to provide relief, have continued despite the dangers. This resistance to intimidation has been crucial to maintaining outrage internationally.

Hamas’ attack on 7 October. 1: Reducing outrage

Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians, and the taking of hundreds of hostages, can be analysed using the same categories. This is not an assessment of the morality or effectiveness of the attack, but rather of the methods used by Hamas to reduce outrage from its actions.

            Cover-up Hamas did little to hide its attack.

            Devaluation By its actions, Hamas treated Israeli lives as tools in a struggle. In the wider Palestinian population, there are examples of derogatory attitudes towards Israelis.

            Reinterpretation Hamas put out a statement presenting its motives for the attack, putting its attack in the context of the history of Israeli displacement and killing of Palestinians. This was an attempt at framing, at getting audiences to see its actions from its perspective. However, it did not deny killing many hundreds of Israelis and kidnapping hundreds more.

            Official channels Hamas had no capacity to use expert panels, inquiries or courts to give an appearance that justice was being done concerning its actions. There is no evidence that Hamas penalised any of its members for their actions on 7 October.

            Intimidation After 7 October, Hamas had little capacity to threaten or hurt those who exposed or condemned its actions. One possible source of leverage was its hostages, but there is little evidence of threats to hurt or kill them.

            In summary, Hamas had little capacity to reduce outrage over its actions on 7 October 2023, and seemed not to use even what small capacity it had, for example by devaluation or intimidation. It might be concluded that one purpose of the attack was to generate public anger. It can be argued that Hamas leaders knew their attack would lead to a massive Israeli military response, which in turn could generate support for the Palestinian cause, but at the expense of many Palestinian lives.

Hamas’ attack on 7 October. 2: Increasing outrage

In response to Hamas’ 7 October attack, the Israeli government and sympathisers worldwide undertook a major effort to generate public outrage, an effort that was highly successful, especially in terms of public opinion and support from governments internationally. Looking at the methods used to increase public outrage shows some unusual features.

            Exposure Given that Hamas had done little to hide its attack, it was straightforward for Israeli authorities to publicise it. The attack became a number-one news story in many parts of the world, with coverage continuing for weeks afterwards. The exposure was aided by the high profile of Israel-Palestine in international coverage of conflicts, and by the sympathies of many journalists and editors worldwide. This was a prime story for generating outrage: the killing and kidnapping of a large number of innocent civilians.

            However, there was a twist to this campaign to publicise Hamas’ atrocity: cover-up by Israeli authorities of some aspects of the events. According to some reports, which received little attention, many Israeli deaths during the attack were caused by the Israeli military as it sought to kill Hamas fighters. This was per the “Hannibal directive,” by which Israeli military priorities are to prevent the taking of hostages even at the expense of the lives of Israeli civilians. The implication is that publicity about Hamas’ attack was incomplete, leaving out the role of the Israeli military in causing hundreds of Israeli deaths.

            Validation Publicity about Hamas’ attack was effective in highlighting that the Israeli victims had moral worth, especially through stories about individuals, both the dead and the kidnapped. Giving personal details and photos of the Israeli victims made their humanity vivid, so audiences could empathise and feel sorrow. Little attention was given to the fact that many of the Israelis killed were military personnel; it is easier to see civilians as innocent.


Israeli hostages

            Interpretation It was straightforward to interpret Hamas’ attack as unjust, as an unscrupulous assault on innocent civilians. This was the frame that dominated most media coverage. Nevertheless, there were several unusual features of the pro-Israeli interpretation techniques.

            One of the claims about the attack was that Hamas had cut off the heads of babies, something even more horrible than killing adults. However, several investigative reports concluded that there was no good evidence for this claim. Another claim was that Hamas endorsed mass rape as a weapon of war. This also has come under question. These claims could be examples of lying or exaggerating to generate public outrage.

            In early 2024, the Israeli government made allegations against UNRWA — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, which was playing a crucial role in providing humanitarian aid to Gazans — including that some of its members were involved with Hamas’ 7 October attack. In response to these allegations, many governments suspended funding of UNRWA. However, the Israeli government failed to provide solid documentation for its claims, which thus could be another example of lying to increase public outrage. It also involves the technique of devaluation, of guilt by association, namely of UNRWA by association with Hamas and its attack.

            Another reinterpretation technique was treating the 7 October attack as unrelated to previous history, in particular Israeli attacks on Palestinians and their livelihoods, notably the 1948 Nakba, in which thousands of Palestinians were killed and more than half a million were driven from their lands, to which they have been unable to return. This is a framing technique, seeing events from a perspective justifying a heightened Israeli military response.

            Avoiding official channels; mobilising support Because Hamas had no access to official channels that might dampen reactions to its 7 October attack, there was no need for Israeli authorities or campaigners to avoid or discredit official channels. Instead, their main approach was to mobilise support, which they did with remarkable effectiveness in the days after the attack, with the help of massive media coverage generating popular sympathy for Israelis and Israel. Mobilising support also extended to governments, with government leaders around the world condemning the attack. This might be thought of as a use of official channels not in the usual pattern by powerful perpetrators to reduce outrage through delay, technicalities and dependence on experts — the factors that commonly make formal procedures cause popular outrage to subside — but in a different pattern, by the targets of attack to give legitimacy and support for popular feelings of sympathy and support.

            Resistance In the aftermath of 7 October, the threat from Hamas to people in Israel and their supporters was minimal, except for one crucial group, the hostages. The Israeli government and its allies did not let this threat inhibit their condemnation and, soon after, its armed response.

***

In summary, after 7 October the Israeli government and its supporters domestically and internationally, in government, media and civil society, used the full range of methods to generate outrage over Hamas’ attack. What is different from the usual pattern is that in responding to the attack, the Israeli government and its supporters used some methods characteristic of perpetrators of injustice, including cover-up, reinterpretation techniques of lying and reframing, and launching a massive operation of reprisal.

            This difference from the usual pattern can be partly explained by the fact that Hamas is the weaker party in the conflict with the Israeli government. In the wider context, Hamas was not a “powerful perpetrator” in the sense of being able to deploy a full gamut of methods to reduce public outrage over its actions. Instead, its attack almost seemed designed to backfire, a pattern peculiar to non-state terrorism. In contrast, the Israeli military attack on Gaza was a clear case of a powerful group taking action against a weaker one, with the Israeli actions widely seen as disproportionate to anything Palestinian civilians had done, so the use by the Israeli government and its supporters of all the methods of reducing public outrage is not surprising.

Conclusion

In the vast volume of commentary on Gaza since 7 October 2023, there has been little attention given to the methods used by the Israeli government and its supporters on the one hand, and by Palestinians and their supporters on the other, to manage public emotions about and responses to the events. In this struggle over outrage, campaigners on each side support those they portray as the worthiest victims. This manifests in efforts to highlight despicable actions taken by those on the other side. Being seen as a victim becomes a claim for moral worth.

            This struggle over worthiness in part relies on current events, but it also has a strong historical dimension, as each side draws on its interpretation of the past to advance its current claims. Zionists repeatedly draw on the legacy of the Holocaust as making them worthy victims decades later, and for identifying antisemitism as an especially grievous form of hatred. Israelis also point to a history of Palestinian violence against Israelis, including terrorism by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Hamas.


Auschwitz

Palestinians, in contrast, draw on the legacy of the Nakba and a history of oppression by Israeli occupiers, including discrimination, displacement and killings.


Nakba

            The outrage-management analysis here has focused on the events on and after 7 October in Israel-Palestine, but there is much more to the struggle. In several countries, there have been fierce disputes over responses to events relating to Gaza, for example concerning media coverage, arms exports to Israel, humanitarian relief for Gazans, government statements about Israel and Palestine, allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia, claims about genocide and responses to it, and protests on university campuses and responses to them. In many of these clashes that are inspired by events in Israel-Palestine, it is possible to analyse the role of outrage management, with the same patterns involving the methods of cover-up, devaluation, reinterpretation, official channels and intimidation, and counter-methods.

            One serious limitation of any study of outrage management is incomplete information. Given that cover-up is an important tool, often it is only much later that a fuller analysis can be undertaken, after archives are opened, interviews undertaken in a different era, and pieces of evidence put together into a coherent picture.

            However, full information may never be available, or at least not uncontested. The struggle over outrage, over the memory and meaning of events, can continue for years or decades. The significance and implications of both the Holocaust and the Nakba, both more than 75 years ago, continue to be contested, as campaigners use interpretations of them in today’s struggles. For this reason, the analysis here is necessarily preliminary, subject to revision and updating. The struggle over outrage is never over, and impossible to escape.

Brian Martin, bmartin@uow.edu.au

My thanks to Jungmin Choi, Alex Christoyannopoulos, Jørgen Johansen, Anita Johnson, Janet Mayer, Alison Moore, Erin Twyford and Stellan Vinthagen for useful advice and comments.

military, politics

Nuclear insanity

In the early 1980s, when the mass movement against nuclear war was at its height, a satirical poster offered light relief. Ostensibly from the US Office of Civil Defense, it listed instructions in case of nuclear attack. After five preliminary and sensible-sounding instructions, number 6 stated “Immediately upon seeing the brilliant flash of nuclear explosion, bend over and place your head firmly between your legs.” Finally, number 7: “Then kiss your ass goodbye.”

            The poster’s black humour drew on the assumption that no one would survive a nuclear strike, indeed that no one might survive a global nuclear war. That was my view too, until I started investigating more deeply, and concluded that nuclear war would not necessarily be the end, certainly not in Australia. But it would still mean catastrophic levels of death and destruction.

            By the end of the 1980s, the worldwide anti-nuclear movement had collapsed, in part due to exhaustion and loss of media interest, and in part due to the end of the Cold War and the immediate threat of nuclear annihilation. But there were still thousands of nuclear weapons, held by quite a few governments. The threat hadn’t gone away, but most people had simply lost interest.

            A new book by Annie Jacobsen, titled Nuclear War: A Scenario, is an attempt to reignite concern. It is engaging, in a morbid sort of way. More on the book shortly, but first a bit about my involvement with the issues decades ago.

Nuclear war: the end?

In the early 1980s, I was working as a research assistant in applied mathematics at the Australian National University, and active in the peace movement. Also working at ANU was Des Ball, in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. Des was a sort of insider dissident. He had access to military intelligence, and used it to write exposés about US bases in Australia and their role in nuclear war-fighting.

            Des challenged my assumption that nuclear war was the end, leading me on a journey towards a different conclusion. Nuclear war would be an unprecedented disaster, but most likely a significant proportion of the world’s population would survive. I wrote about my change in viewpoint in Truth Tactics.

            Des and I talked about writing a book about the consequences of a nuclear attack on Australia. Des would write about targeting and I would calculate the likely death toll from blast, heat and fallout. Recently I was going through my old files and discovered folders with newspaper clippings about Australia as a nuclear target, booklets about civil defence (how to increase your odds of surviving an attack), and computer programs. To calculate the likely path of fallout from nuclear strikes, I needed figures for wind speeds and directions. I contacted the Bureau of Meteorology and obtained magnetic tapes with this data, and wrote a program to extract it.

            The prime targets in Australia were the US intelligence bases at Pine Gap, Nurrungar and North West Cape, and maybe some other installations. Canberra, where I then lived, is the national capital and a possible target. Back then, one of the main demands of the Australian peace movement was to get rid of the US bases, because they were a key part of the apparatus for fighting a nuclear war. Des’s writing gave substance to the movement’s concerns. (For up-to-date information about US bases in Australia, see publications by Richard Tanter and others at the Nautilus Institute.)


Pine Gap, in central Australia

            By writing about the consequences of a nuclear attack on Australia, Des and I hoped to raise people’s concerns. Well, our project never went very far, I think because it was becoming bigger than I anticipated, and I had other projects. But I did develop a keen interest in the effects of nuclear war. My 1982 article “The global health effects of nuclear war” was widely read. Around that time, new research showed that smoke and dust from nuclear strikes and firestorms, lofted into the upper atmosphere, would block sunlight, leading to cold and darkness, possibly for years. This effect, called nuclear winter, could cause mass starvation. Nuclear war wasn’t going to be a fun time. We knew that already. It was with this background that I read Annie Jacobsen’s book.

A scenario

Nuclear War: A Scenario is an attempt to raise the alarm. And it does so, quite effectively, though with some problems.

Jacobsen’s scenario starts with the firing of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from North Korea.


North Korean ICBM

US satellites immediately pick up the heat signature from the missile launch and the information is sent to secure stations. Before long, it is apparent the missile is aimed at the US, at Washington DC: it’s a nuclear attack, though a rather unlikely one, with no obvious motivation. Still, it is an excellent choice for a fictional scenario.

            Jacobsen tells what happens next second by second, and then minute by minute, taking us into decision-making forums in the US and, to a lesser extent, Russia and elsewhere. In developing the scenario, Jacobsen interviewed dozens of nuclear experts, military commanders, civilian leaders and others, with the result that the sequence of events comes across as all too realistic in its technical and human detail.


Submarine-launched ballistic missile

        But even before the ICBM arrives, another target is hit. A North Korean submarine has snuck close to the California coast and launches a missile whose payload, a nuclear weapon, hits the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, causing a nuclear meltdown, releasing vast quantities of radioactivity into the environment, far more than produced by the nuclear weapon. A farmer, at a distance, uploads a video of the explosion, and panic ensues across the country.


Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant

            In telling the story of this imagined nuclear war, Jacobsen pauses along the way to provide “history lessons” and technical information, covering for example the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, control systems, decision-making processes, radiation sickness, and the effects of explosions.

            The graphic horror of nuclear war comes after the one-megaton nuclear weapon in North Korea’s ICBM hits Washington DC. Jacobsen lists what is destroyed, for example the Pentagon and the Lincoln Memorial, and the human effects, with bodies liquefied, skin flayed and people fried alive. For example, for those not immediately incinerated, “The X-ray light of the nuclear flash burns skin off people’s bodies, leaving their extremities a shredded horror of bloody tendons and exposed bone. Wind rips the skin off people’s faces and tears away limbs. Survivors die of shock, heart attack, blood loss.” (p. 165).

            Most of the book covers the first 72 minutes. The US military launches a massive strike against North Korea, killing millions. Because US ICBMs, to reach North Korea, must travel over Russia, Russian leaders think they are under attack, and fear their missiles will be destroyed before they can be launched. To prevent being “decapitated,” they launch them in an all-out attack against the US, which returns fire.

            Meanwhile, the North Korean attack isn’t over. A nuclear bomb, contained in a satellite, explodes high over North America, generating a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that shorts out circuits over most of the continent, and electricity supplies all close down as a result. Only military communications, designed to survive EMP,  remain uninterrupted.

A few quibbles

Jacobsen’s scenario vividly shows the possibility of a nuclear attack that triggers an escalation into global nuclear war, and the horrific consequences of such a war. In giving technical and human detail — for example, the US president being whisked away from Washington DC, and heated arguments about who is in command of nuclear forces — the scenario comes across as completely credible in its specifics, as exactly what might happen.

            The scenario is mostly from the US point of view. Nearly all the experts and officials who Jacobsen interviewed are from the US (and nearly all male), so it’s not surprising that the scenario mainly gives a US point of view with the US being the target of an unprovoked attack. Yet, historically, US leaders have repeatedly considered using nuclear weapons, for example against China in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1970s. Furthermore, the US has been the trailblazer in developing nuclear weapons, with the Soviet Union playing catch-up and others following suit. The scenario, in contrast, paints the US primarily as the victim rather than an instigator or provocateur.

            In Jacobsen’s scenario, technological systems work remarkably well. The initial North Korean ICBM unerringly hits Washington DC with devastating consequences. The reality is that no one knows how well these weapons systems will operate in wartime because they have never been tested in battle conditions. Some missiles may fizzle or explode on launch.

Many are likely to miss their targets, exploding in the countryside with relatively few casualties. It’s also possible that some individuals involved in a nuclear crisis may decide not to escalate, but Jacobsen has all the soldiers involved following orders, from the top commanders to those tasked with firing missiles from land, sea and air.

The end?

In the scenario, the focus is on the US, Russia and Europe, all of which are pulverised as they expend their entire nuclear arsenals in the fear of having them destroyed before they can be used. Jacobsen repeatedly states or implies that this means “the end.”

  • “the end of civilization as we know it” (p. xii)
  • “… this is how it ends. With Armageddon. With civilization being destroyed.” (p. 238)
  • “Only time will tell if we humans will survive.” (p. 289) 

 

Jacobsen writes, “The fundamental idea behind this book is to demonstrate, in appalling detail, just how horrifying nuclear war would be.” (p. 298). In this, she undoubtedly succeeds. However, highlighting the horrors of nuclear war has never been shown to be an effective way to induce governments to give up their arsenals.

            If a nuclear winter lasts years and causes most of those who survive nuclear attacks to die of starvation, then things will be grim indeed.

            In a few sentences, Jacobsen summarises what happens in the rest of the world. “In this scenario, in all but a small region of the Southern Hemisphere (including Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and parts of Paraguay), widespread famine grips the Earth.” (p. 288). She cites a study that concludes that five billion or more people might die in a nuclear-winter-induced famine. Horrific indeed, but this still leaves two or three billion alive, and they wouldn’t all be in the South Pacific and South America. Maybe India and sub-Saharan Africa?

            It so happens that this year, a study was published about post-nuclear-war survival in New Zealand. The author, Wren Green, was the leader of a team that, back in the 1980s, did an earlier study of the effects of nuclear war on New Zealand. The country isn’t likely to be attacked. It is buffered from nuclear winter effects by being in the southern hemisphere and surrounded by ocean. It has an agricultural surplus. Even so, life would be very difficult due to the major loss of imports, especially transport fuels, medicines, vehicles and electronics (including computers and phones). But a functioning society could potentially re-emerge and continue. Does New Zealand count as the survival of civilisation?

If societies were better prepared for major shocks, like economic collapse and pandemics, their capacity to recover from nuclear war would be greater.


Can you find New Zealand?

            Another quibble: Jacobsen assumes that after a nuclear attack, there will be “mayhem”: panic, chaos, a breakdown of social order.

  • “Democracy will be replaced by anarchy. Moral constructs will disappear. Murder, mayhem, and madness will prevail.” (p. 105)
  • “There is mayhem, everywhere.” (p. 171)
  • “Widespread chaos, violence, and anarchy have begun.” (p. 219)

Views about social breakdown may reflect fictional portrayals, such as the Mad Max movies and the dystopian novel and film “The Road”. However, since the 1950s, studies of actual disasters, including aerial bombing, have shown the contrary: most people behave rationally; they don’t panic, and many do what they can to help others.

Final remarks

Despite these limitations, there is much to learn from Jacobsen’s scenario. One important point is that governments have made extensive preparations for the survival of political and military leadership, but not the population: in the US, “there is no federal agency to help citizens survive a nuclear war per se.” (p. 100). In my slim collection of Australian material on civil defence, nothing is more recent than 1985.


Annie Jacobsen

            Jacobsen points to the shortcomings of the theory of deterrence, the idea that having nuclear weapons ready to use will deter attacks. She repeatedly highlights a problem: when deterrence fails, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down: the theory doesn’t work.

            Every figure Jacobsen interviewed said nuclear war would be horrific. The weird thing is that many of these figures were heavily involved in developing and maintaining nuclear arsenals. Is preparing for mass annihilation sane?

            Jacobsen doesn’t report interviewing any peace activists or peace researchers. She even says, in the scenario, that people realise “that no one did anything substantial to prevent nuclear World War III.” (p. 268). This is wrong. For decades, millions of citizens have campaigned against nuclear weapons and nuclear war. They are our best hope to prevent the sort of scenario that Jacobsen has so vividly portrayed.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Anu Bissoonauth-Bedford and Wren Green for valuable comments.

Postscript, 22 June 2024

As a courtesy, I tried to let Annie Jacobsen know about this commentary on her book. On her website, the only apparent way to make contact was through her comments page. I prepared this short comment:

Having studied the effects of nuclear war since the early 1980s, I was fascinated to read Nuclear War: A Scenario. It comes across as convincing in its details, but there are also some limitations as discussed in my blog post “Nuclear insanity” (https://comments.bmartin.cc/2024/06/12/nuclear-insanity/).

However, when I tried to post this comment, a message popped up:

This was the first time my IP address had been flagged this way. After more investigation, eventually I noticed that there had been no comments since 9 May, and guessed that no more comments were being accepted. It would have been nicer to receive a message saying comments were closed. And even nicer to be able to make contact.

military, politics, tactics

Genocide reflections

The mass killings in Gaza have been called genocide. This got me thinking about other genocides, and how they are similar to or different from what’s happening in Gaza.

                  For years, I have read articles and books about genocide. It is a particularly horrific phenomenon that needs to be studied and addressed. It is a challenge for those, like me, who support nonviolent methods of resisting aggression and repression.

                  According to the United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide refers to intending to destroy all or part of an ethnic, religious or national group. Technically, then, the mass killings in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 do not constitute genocide, because the targets were members of the same national and ethnic group. The Cambodian killings could instead be called politicide. However, most scholars diverge from the Genocide Convention definition, instead applying the term genocide to any state-sponsored mass killing aimed at destroying groups of civilians.


Raphael Lemkin, the prime force behind the UN Genocide Convention

                  Some scholars are genocide specialists, devoting their entire careers to examining genocide in general, or specific ones. I have never been such a specialist, but I developed a framework for understanding the tactics used by powerful perpetrators of injustice, and found it applied to genocide, one of the greatest injustices of all.

                  In this framework, called the backfire model, powerful perpetrators commonly use five types of methods to reduce public outrage. They cover up their actions, devalue the targets, reinterpret events by lying, minimising, blaming and framing, use official channels to give the appearance of justice, and intimidate or reward people involved. I and others applied the model to censorship, sexual harassment, police brutality, massacres and torture.

                  I knew this model of outrage management would apply to genocide. For example, the Nazis used all these methods in their extermination of Jews, Slavs and others, known as the Holocaust, keeping the killing programme secret, devaluing their targets, and denying the extent of their culpability. The model would certainly apply, but given the massive documentation of the Holocaust, I decided to examine a different genocide, where it was more feasible to get on top of the evidence, and picked Rwanda.

Rwanda, 1994

In the course of studying the Rwandan genocide, I read about ten books and lots of articles, keeping an eye out for methods used by perpetrators to reduce outrage. It was shocking to read so much about the genocide. I knew it was bad, but it was much worse than I had imagined.

                  Rwanda is a small landlocked country in central Africa that had been a Belgian colony. The Belgian rulers introduced a formal racial distinction between the Hutu and the Tutsi, though they lived among each other and intermarried, and put Tutsi figures in charge, though they came from a much smaller group. These racial groups became a toxic legacy after independence, when Hutu politicians controlled the Rwandan government.

                  In 1994, the death of the president of Rwanda triggered a sudden and massive assault on the Tutsi minority, and on Hutu “moderates,” with over half a million people killed in a matter of months. Reading about the genocide, I learned several things that usually receive little attention.

                  Rwanda is the most Christian country in Africa. The genocide involved Christians killing Christians, some of them slaughtered in churches where they had sheltered. Yet the worldwide Christian community paid little attention to the implications of this shocking violation of Christian precepts.


Aftermath of the killing of thousands of people in a Rwandan church

                  Before the genocide, the Rwandan government had been at war with Tutsi exiles based in the neighbouring country Uganda. Many other genocides have occurred during wartime, including the genocide of the Armenians during World War I and of the Jews during World War II. War seems to facilitate the unleashing of military force against civilians.

                  In Rwanda in 1994, there was a United Nations peacekeeping force, introduced to constrain the outbreak of war between the Rwandan government and the Tutsi rebels, who called themselves the Rwandan Patriotic Front or RPF. After the genocide started, the RPF recommenced its attacks. The war was on again.

                  I found ample evidence of cover-up, devaluation and other methods of reducing outrage over the killings. For example, Western governments withdrew their nationals, thus aiding in cover-up. The head of the UN peacekeeping force, Canadian soldier Roméo Dallaire, desperately appealed to the UN for greater support and for permission to defend civilians, given that peacekeepers are normally expected to use force only to defend themselves. Dallaire’s hopes were dashed. Amid the worst killing, the UN withdrew most of the peacekeeping troops from the country.

                  Meanwhile, other governments did nothing to stop the ongoing massacres. Only the French government belatedly organised a military intervention, whose main purpose was to protect the killers.

Bangladesh, 1971

When India gained independence in 1947, it was accompanied by a horrific breakup, called the Partition, leading to the creation of Muslim-dominated Pakistan, which was divided geographically between West Pakistan (today called Pakistan) and East Pakistan (today called Bangladesh), separated by 2000km.

India operated as a parliamentary democracy, but Pakistan suffered from authoritarian politics. In 1971, the military ruler of Pakistan, General Yahya, called elections. To his surprise, a party in East Pakistan, the Awami League, won the majority of seats and should have become the government. To stop this, Yahya sent troops to East Pakistan that began a massive killing operation.


Yahya Khan

                  Most of the people in East Pakistan were Muslims, but there was a significant Hindu minority, perhaps 13 million people. They were prime targets in the killing. Soon there was a vast tide of refugees, mostly Hindus, fleeing East Pakistan for safety in India. Within a matter of months in 1971, there were nearly ten million refugees, while hundreds of thousands of people were massacred in East Pakistan.

                  In writing about this story, I’m relying heavily on Gary Bass’s book The Blood Telegram. Bass did extensive interviews and studied archives. There was a rich lode of information about the US role. President Richard Nixon secretly taped all his conversations, and those with national security advisor Henry Kissinger were especially revealing.

                  In Dacca (now Dhaka), the major city in East Pakistan, staff in the US Consulate witnessed the slaughter of Bengalis by West Pakistan troops. They reported their observations to the State Department in increasingly desperate terms. The consul general, Archer Blood, supported his staff, using the word genocide to describe the killings. They were supported by State Department staff in Washington DC.

                  Meanwhile, the Indian government and press were in an uproar about the killings and the refugees. Likewise, in the US, there was considerable media coverage. Senator Ted Kennedy, who obtained reports from the Dacca consulate, attacked the Nixon administration.

                  Lots of people knew about the killings, but this had little impact on US policy, because Nixon and Kissinger saw General Yahya as their friend, and they hated India and its prime minister Indira Gandhi. They were using Yahya as a go-between to engage with the Chinese government for the first time since the 1949 revolution. It was a strange configuration. Nixon and Kissinger supported a military dictator who was massacring his citizens, made friends with China’s Communist rulers, and were intensely hostile to the major democracy in Asia, India, which turned to the Soviet Union for arms and diplomatic support. Nixon and Kissinger illegally organised arms shipments to Yahya’s government and encouraged Chinese leaders to mount a military threat to India.

                  As in every genocide, things were more complicated than apparent on the surface. As the killings continued in East Pakistan, Bengalis organised a guerrilla resistance, supported by the Indian military. As the refugee numbers increased, and public pressure increased, Indira Gandhi prepared for war with Pakistan. When it happened, it took only two weeks for Indian troops to take Dacca, ending the genocide and enabling East Pakistan to become the independent country Bangladesh.

                  Nixon and Kissinger furiously condemned the Indian government, and cynically used the United Nations as part of their campaign. Yet, as Bass tells the story, the role of Nixon and Kissinger in supporting Yahya and one of the worst genocides in the twentieth century has largely been forgotten.


Kissinger and Nixon

Other genocides

Wars over the past century have killed more civilians than soldiers, and genocides may have killed even more than wars. Yet many genocides receive little attention.

                  Who now remembers the genocide in Indonesia in 1965-66, a pogrom of Communists and others, with over half a million people killed? Western governments did nothing to stop the killing. As documented by Vincent Bevins in his book The Jakarta Method, the US government helped the killers. This “benign bloodbath” was welcomed by Western anti-communist leaders.

                  The record shows a remarkable lack of interest by foreign governments in intervening against genocide. During World War II, Allied leaders knew about the Nazi death camps, such as Auschwitz, and could have ordered bombing of the camps or rail lines leading to them. But they didn’t. They prioritised defeating the Nazis over ending the mass extermination.

                  Nor were the Allies all that concerned about civilian lives. In the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan during the war, civilians were the main casualties, despite this doing little to hinder the enemy’s war efforts. Some scholars have pointed to similarities between this bombing and genocide, but there seems to be little interest in examining strategic bombing through the lens of genocide.

                  Some of the greatest human disasters in the past century were in Communist states, especially the Soviet Union and China, where millions perished in purges and famines. These atrocities were covered up. The famine in China resulting from the Great Leap Forward, initiated in 1958, resulted in tens of millions of deaths, but information about this only became known outside the country decades later. Inducing famine, as in the case of Stalin’s ruthless policies against Ukraine in the early 1930s, can be a genocidal tool.

                  The human rights group Article 19 published a revealing report titled Starving in Silence, arguing that famine can usually be avoided when there is a free press. This helps explain why, in India, there have been no famines since independence, whereas famines have ravaged several African countries with authoritarian governments.

                  After the Gulf War in 1991, in which the Iraqi military was driven out of Kuwait, economic sanctions were placed on Iraq, leading to mass deaths due to hunger and disease, with perhaps two million people dying as a result over the following decade. In a widely publicised exchange, Madeleine Albright, US ambassador to the UN, was asked whether the deaths of half a million children in Iraq was a price worth paying for keeping Saddam Hussein’s regime in check. She answered yes.


Madeleine Albright

                  Finally, it is necessary to mention colonialism. European militaries invaded, conquered and occupied much of the rest of the world — North and South America, Africa, Asia and Australia — leading to the mass death of Indigenous people due to war, disease and cultural destruction. On a per capita basis, deaths due to colonialism probably outnumber all other mass killings.

                  Despite the carnage, governments today are prepared for even greater slaughter. Every government with nuclear weapons — US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — is poised to kill millions of civilians, and some of these governments reserve the right to launch a first strike. Nuclear arsenals are commonly justified as deterrence against aggression, but in human terms they are a form of collective insanity, a willingness to be prepared to kill millions of people. The Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons came into force in 2021, but none of the governments holding them seems to care.

Gaza, 2023–24

The Israeli military assault on Gaza, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, has generated outrage worldwide. What lessons are there from earlier mass killings?

                  One important difference is the role of cover-up. From Nazi Germany to Indonesia to Rwanda, perpetrators and their supporters have tried to hide killings from wider audiences. But the killings in Gaza are in the glare of publicity, which is a key reason for the much greater public uproar. Nevertheless, it is plausible that future exposés will reveal Israeli actions even worse than those now reported in the media.

                  In nearly every genocide, there is devaluation of the targets. There is ample evidence of contemptuous Israeli attitudes towards Palestinians, for example as documented in the South African application to the International Court of Justice alleging Israeli responsibility for genocide in Gaza.

                  When mass killings are exposed, perpetrators and their allies provide explanations, or rationalisations, for their actions. I’ve called this reinterpretation, and it includes lying, minimising, blaming and framing. Lies include the claim that Hamas cut off the heads of babies. The Israeli government blamed Hamas’ 7 October attacks for its attack on Gaza, and framed the assault as defending against terrorists.

                  The US government has publicly warned the Israeli government about its actions, meanwhile providing arms for the Israeli military. In this context, foreign governments are a sort of official channel, giving the appearance of providing justice without much substance. The United Nations has been impotent.

                  Finally, there is the tactic of intimidating critics of the Israeli military attack on Gaza, including campaigns in several countries against critics of Israel, and the killing of journalists in Gaza itself.

                  According to the backfire model, counter-tactics to increase outrage include exposing the injustice, validating targets, interpreting actions as unjust, not relying on official channels but instead mobilising support, and resisting intimidation and rewards. Protesters against killings in Gaza have been using all these methods, including circulating information, humanising Palestinians through personal stories, emphasising the injustice of mass killing of Palestinian civilians, organising public protests, and standing up against threats. For more on this, see “Outrage management in Israel-Palestine.”

**************

                  Reflecting on genocides past, present and future can be demoralising. It seems that social institutions are set up to be humans’ own worst enemies. But there are also many examples of sustained efforts to oppose domination, exploitation and killing. Just don’t rely on national leaders to be our saviours.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

For valuable comments, thanks to Mark Diesendorf, Jørgen Johansen, Janet Mayer, Michael McKinley and Dalilah Shemia-Goeke.

health, personality, politics

The doubling danger

Think of someone you hate, someone you detest in your gut. Then ask yourself, is there anything about them that reveals something about you, something you’d rather not admit to yourself? What a frightening thought! It’s even more frightening when this hated other has the same name as you, looks like you or is like you in some other way.

            Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger delves into this eerie psychological domain. A “doppelganger” is a double, a person like you except with all the features you dislike or don’t want. Imagine encountering your doppelgänger.

In popular culture, this psychological dimension is often missing, and a doppelgänger is merely a lookalike. Klein’s analysis goes beyond appearances.

            Klein is an accomplished researcher, writer and social critic. She wrote the book No Logo, which exposed the ubiquitous process of commercial branding that has been taking over the world, and told about challenges to it. She later wrote The Shock Doctrine, about how powerful corporations zoom into areas hit by disasters — war, hurricanes — to make supersized profits. In several books, she has presented passionate arguments for action on climate change.

            As a prominent intellectual with a well-defined persona as a social critic, a scourge of neoliberalism, it might seem that Klein’s identity was both well-established and secure. But then she encountered a different Naomi, and many people confused the two of them.

            The other Naomi, Naomi Wolf, became a public figure with her first book, The Beauty Myth published in 1990, and was hailed as a next-generation feminist.

Later, Wolf went down a different path, which became especially distinctive during the Covid pandemic, when she endorsed views that, to Klein, seemed absurd and dangerous. Wolf started supporting what are conventionally called right-wing views, like gun-owners’ rights.

            People saw public statements by Wolf and unintentionally attributed them to Klein. This caused Klein to have strange feelings, as if Wolf were her evil twin, saying things she abhorred. Klein became fascinated and, with her usual energy for in-depth study, began exploring everything she could find about doppelgängers, including mythology, psychological analyses and fiction. There are novels and films about doubles. A well-known example is Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a man retains his youthful looks while a painting of him, hidden away, ages instead. Klein probed many such stories, looking for insights into her own situation.

            Doppelganger is a long book. After writing best-selling books focusing on big issues like capitalism and climate change, it might seem self-indulgent to analyse a personal issue about an apparent real-life double. When there are so many pressing concerns in the world, ones for which Klein has well-developed capacities to explore, why bother with a seemingly trivial matter?

            Well into Doppelganger, Klein provides answers to this question. She finds the presence of doubles in ever wider facets of human life. She gives special attention to Covid. As noted, Wolf, during the pandemic, promoted some unorthodox ideas. Klein, in contrast, pretty much adhered to the standard line, conveyed by medical authorities, about lockdowns, distancing, masks and vaccines. To Klein, it seemed that Wolf was a mirror image of herself, adopting views that were an evil inversion of her own.

            But Klein, ever critical of her own thinking, wondered whether her mirror self had something to offer. By rejecting entirely any challenge to orthodox views about Covid, was something being lost, some insight into the dominant position? This is a crucial question for Klein and for the reader, and I think it’s an important one. But before addressing Klein’s big-picture examination, there’s one aspect of her treatment of Covid I need to mention.

Covid matters

Klein, by adopting the authorities’ position concerning Covid, is able to position Wolf and other Covid critics as delusional and dangerous, putting their own freedoms above the health of others. Klein sees this as individualism, a feature of neoliberal society, running rampant over collective concern about everyone’s welfare. But there is another way to frame this clash of worldviews.

            Throughout the pandemic, not all dissident views prioritised individual rights over collective welfare. Consider, for example, the Great Barrington Declaration, initiated by three accomplished medical researchers and signed by hundreds of thousands of health professionals. They supported protecting the vulnerable, the aged and the immune-system compromised, while letting Covid spread among the young and healthy, to whom it posed little threat. The young and healthy would develop natural immunity, which comes from having the disease, and could then safely contact the aged and infirm.

            Klein does not mention the Great Barrington Declaration, nor that its leading figures came under fierce criticism and were censored. For the purposes here, there is no need to examine the pros and cons of the declaration, only to note that Klein’s contrast between community-minded Covid orthodoxy and individually selfish Covid heterodoxy can be questioned. Furthermore, Covid-control orthodoxy involved many things that separated people from each other, including lockdowns, masks and distancing. Pandemic policies were devastating for many social-movement campaigns, inhibiting collective action. Klein does not address such perspectives but instead focuses on what she sees as Wolf’s aberrant beliefs.

            When examining contentious public issues, especially ones where credentialed experts play a big role, there’s a trap involved. Such issues include pesticides, genetically modified organisms, microwaves, fluoridation — and vaccination. On such issues, establishment experts are contrasted with citizen opponents, such as Wolf, who supposedly know nothing, and it is easy to dismiss all opponents as ignorant. But on every such issue, there are highly knowledgeable dissident experts. To understand the debate, it’s necessary to delve into both science and politics rather than assuming dominant experts are right and opponents are both ignorant and wrong.


Naomi Klein


Naomi Wolf

Projection

There is a psychological process called projection that involves taking a part of your own psyche and attributing it to others, in other words projecting it onto others. For example, every person has both masculine and feminine aspects, but some men are so repulsed by their feminine side that they project it onto women — and gay men. Homophobia can be thought of as a toxic form of this sort of projection.

            There’s also a parallel process called introjection, which is incorporating another’s psychological features into one’s own psyche. Demagogues take advantage of both processes. Followers project their own strength onto the great leader, and introject weakness and dependence.

            Klein’s idea of a Mirror World is that it can be a distorted version of unwanted parts of ourselves. This is a vivid way of describing projection, individual and collective. Referring to political views classified as left or right, Klein notes that when the left drops an issue, it is sometimes taken up by the right, and then the left further distances itself from the issue. She notes that the left supported official Covid control measures due to “the torrent of lies coming from the conspiratorial right” when it should have done more questioning.

            Klein offers a low-key critique of identity politics, saying that the left, by focusing obsessively on differences and using jargon, alienates many of those outside the university set. “Moreover, when entire categories of people are reduced to their race and gender, and labeled ‘privileged’, there is little room to confront the myriad ways that working-class white men and women are abused under our predatory capitalist order.” (p. 127) Klein supports coming together in a common cause rather than asserting identities.

Genocide and Jews

Moving on from Covid politics, Klein explores other domains where doubling can provide insights. One of them is genocide. Klein tells about her experiences as a Jew, learning about the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of the Jews, and presents a parallel between colonialism and the Holocaust, one that had been developed by a series of writers.

            When colonialists settled in “new” lands, what are now the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, they justified their activities as taking over empty territories, empty of people of value. In Australia, this was the legal doctrine of terra nullius, a land owned by no one. The indigenous people were treated as non-owners, so their lives and cultures could be disregarded. Today this is called “settler colonialism” because settlers took over the land and pushed out the inhabitants, in contrast to colonialism in places like India and Indonesia where Europeans ruled but did not displace the native population.

            By the time Hitler came on the scene, much of the world had been colonised this way. But Hitler had the same idea, called lebensraum, of creating land for the chosen people, the Aryans of Germany. It meant clearing the land of its existing population, of Jews and Slavs. In this way of thinking, the Holocaust was not a unique event but rather a continuation of the European colonial project, turned inwards against other Europeans rather than outward towards other continents.

            Klein offers this perspective with the added insight of doubling. Just as Indigenous people were the dangerous doubles of settler colonialists, so Jews were the dangerous doubles of Aryans in Nazi Germany.

            Then there is the question of Israel, itself a settler colonial society, in which Palestinians were killed or expelled to make room for Jewish settlers. This took place during the creation of Israel in 1948 and has continued ever since. It’s not quite the same as earlier forms of settler colonialism, but there are similarities. In Klein’s telling, Israelis, or rather Zionists, have a doppelgänger — the Palestinians whose lands and livelihoods they have taken over. And if one’s double is seen as the repository of one’s own unacknowledged bad side, one option is to attack it.

            Doppelganger was published on 12 September 2023, shortly before the 7 October attack by Hamas and the subsequent Israeli military assault on Gaza, which many informed observers have called genocide. But there was an earlier allegation about genocide of the Palestinians, during an Israeli military attack on Gaza in 2014. At this time, Klein notes, her double Naomi Wolf had spoken against the assault, using the loaded word “genocide,” and encountered a storm of abuse for such sacrilege. It was after this experience, especially during Covid, that Wolf turned to a different constituency, becoming the darling of right-wing talk-show hosts.


Rwandan genocide

            Klein ends Doppelganger with a heartfelt plea to join together with others to address the urgent problems facing humans. This might be seen as a continuation of her campaigning on climate change, but she has arrived at this point by an unusual route, one through her personal double Naomi Wolf and through an examination of doubling through art and politics.

            In her journey through doubles, Klein covers many other topics, including autism, US political strategist Steve Bannon, personal branding, conspiracy theories, digital doubles, feminism, Jew-hatred, novelist Philip Roth, and social media cancellations. She highlights the value of studying and learning from those with whom you strongly disagree. Accordingly, you need not agree with Klein at every step, or even very many of them, to learn from her journey and to apply the lessons to your own.


Not the way Doppelganger ends

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

For useful comments, thanks to Antoine, Anu Bissoonauth-Bedford, Jungmin Choi and Erin Twyford.

Further reading: two highly critical commentaries on Klein and Doppelganger

Toby Rogers, “In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein scapegoats Naomi Wolf for the sins of Klein’s father”

Naomi Wolf,  “Is Naomi Klein ‘Othering’ Me Due to Family Ties’ Multi-Millions in Vaccine Money?“