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

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

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?“

media

An X account takeover

Someone took over my X account and tweeted in my name. I tried to regain control but couldn’t. Was an X insider involved?

On Sunday 5 November 2023, I received an email from X saying there had been a new login to my account.

It was from a computer in Sydney using Chrome with Windows, so I knew it wasn’t me: I live in Wollongong and use Safari with a Mac. I knew I needed to do something about it. A minute later, there was an email from Twitter saying my password had been changed.

            It seemed that my X account had been hacked. For convenience, I’ll refer to whoever did this as the hacker.

            Immediately, I submitted a request on the X webpage to change my X password, as recommended in the first email. This was supposed to generate an email to me with a confirmation code. But, after a few minutes, no email had arrived. I tried again. Still no email. Then a third time.

            Next stop: Mimecast, the university’s email filtering system. I went to my Mimecast area where all filtered messages to my email address can be inspected, but didn’t see any email from X.

            I tried to log into my X account but couldn’t. So I went to the X page to submit a support request, using the drop-down menu to say my account had been compromised. I included screenshots of the two emails I had received (above), plus a description of my problem. Here’s the bottom of my request.

Within seconds of submitting this request, I received an email saying I had control of my account. But I didn’t. This had to be an automated message.

            The University of Wollongong’s IT support service is called IMTS, Information Management and Technology Services. I contacted the IMTS support line and talked with Leon (not his real name), who was on call even though it was Sunday morning. He helped by giving me advice about the Mimecast area, which processes incoming emails, but couldn’t find anything from X.

            I rang my friend Marg (not her real name), who knows a lot about Twitter. She looked on X and didn’t see any tweets from my handle. She wondered, as I had already wondered, whether this takeover of my account was related to the takeover of my university email account a few weeks earlier, used to spam lots of people in my address book.

            A bit later, I received an email from X with a code for my request to change my password. Why had it taken so long to arrive? The code didn’t work, but I assumed it had been superseded by my later requests. I waited, trying each code as it arrived. Eventually one wasn’t rejected as wrong. Instead, the message said it had expired.

            My next password-change request was rejected because I had made too many requests. I gave up for the day.

            How could someone in Sydney take over my account? A brute force attack is implausible. My password was eight characters, nothing predictable.

Because I’ll never use this password again, here it is: 179583h5. I used this password only for Twitter, not other services. I never shared it with anyone, and it was not on my computer. Had someone installed a key logger on my computer? That seems unlikely given that I hadn’t logged into X since September.

            Marg had promised to let me know if the hacker had made any tweets on my account. On Wednesday, she rang to say there had been one, and sent me a screenshot.

For years, nearly every one of my tweets has contained a link to one of my recently published articles or blog posts. The hacker’s tweet on my account was so unlike anything I had ever tweeted as to be bizarre. Since this tweet, Marg tells me, there have been more about cryptocurrency.

            After a few days had passed, it was time to again try changing my X password. At 8.30pm on Wednesday 8 November I put in a request. It took 60 minutes for the confirmation email to arrive, and by then it was too late. I tried yet again Thursday morning, with the same result. Each time, the confirmation code arrived exactly 60 minutes after my request.

As a result, each password-change attempt was rejected.

An inside job?

Several things made me wonder whether more was going on than meets the eye. Let me sum them up.

  1. Someone took over my account despite there being no obvious way for them to obtain my password.
  2. Within seconds of every time I submit a request to X, an email from support@twitter.com arrives.
  3. These emails arrive so quickly that it’s obvious no one has looked at my requests. These automated replies falsely say I have access to my account. Each such reply is identical.
  4. Emails containing confirmation codes for my attempts to change my password, sent from info@x.com, take a long time to arrive, so they time out.
  5. On four occasions when I timed how long it took for one of these emails to arrive, it was exactly 60 minutes, even though my password-change requests were at different times of the day, when presumably delays due to online traffic or spam filtering would be different.
  6. Searching the web, I’ve been unable to find anyone else who has had similar problems.

            This evidence pretty much rules out problems due to regular processes of either X or Mimecast.

            When all plausible explanations are ruled out, it’s time to consider ones that are implausible a priori. Here’s one worth considering.

            The takeover of my account could have been by a hacker, an X insider, or someone with connections with a hacker or X insider. The hacker/insider programmed a one-hour time delay for messages from info@x.com to my email address, so my password-change attempts time out, and a standard false response from support@twitter.com to my support requests.

A precedent

In July 2020, there was a massive hack of Twitter accounts. Many prominent individuals, such as Elon Musk and Joe Biden, were targeted. The hackers used their control to send tweets soliciting Bitcoin payments that were never returned.

            My experience fits this template, with the difference that it’s not high profile, so X has no awareness of it. This means it’s harder to have my access returned. If you have suggestions, let me know.

Postscript

On 17 November, I received an email saying my X account had been suspended.

That was fine with me, because my account was being misused. I was in touch with a friend who was giving me assistance. Curiously, her X account was suspended within minutes of when mine was suspended.

Since then, I’ve been unable to regain access to my account or to figure out what’s going on. Periodically, I request to change my password. The confirmation code always arrives exactly 60 minutes later, which might as well be never.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

corruption, politics

Corruptions of power?

Does power corrupt or is something else going on?

When the Green Party was set up in West Germany in the early 1980s, it had a radical platform of ecology, nonviolence, social justice and grassroots democracy. It included a radical plan for candidates elected to parliament: they would serve only one term of office, then step aside for another candidate. But that’s not the way it turned out. Several of the initial Green members of parliament decided to continue in office, flouting the party principle, seemingly in favour of their own careers. Was this a case of power leading to corruption?

            Time to quote the famous saying by Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It is widely quoted because it seems to capture something often observed in politics, and beyond. Have you ever known a mild-mannered colleague who, on becoming the boss, became an oppressive bully? But is there any research to confirm informal observations about what power does to people, research that might back up Acton’s saying?

            For decades, I’ve been fascinated by studies of power, and read books and articles by various authors. For example, Pitirim Sorokin and Walter Lunden in their 1959 book Power and Morality provided data that government and business leaders were much more likely to commit serious crimes than the average citizen. This sure fits Acton’s saying.

            Among academics, one of the most-cited books is Power by Steven Lukes. It is an insightful analysis of concepts, proposing that it is useful to view power in terms of one, two or three dimensions.

The one-dimensional view is the one we usually think of: the capacity to make others do things they don’t want to, for example the power of a boss to instruct an employee. The two-dimensional view includes what’s called non-decisionmaking. Sometimes employees don’t need to be asked. They try to anticipate what the boss wants and do it, without any conscious decision-making process. The three-dimensional view includes structural arrangements. A workplace run with a hierarchical system of bosses and subordinates sets the agenda for all decision-making.

Klaas’ view

A recent book by Brian Klaas challenged my long-standing views. In Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, Klaas raises a number of objections to the power-corrupts narrative. What if those seeking power were more prone to corruption? What if the earliest Green politicians were the members keenest to become candidates and obtain positions of status and influence? This would be a different process: it would be positions of power being especially attractive to those individuals most easily corrupted.

            Corruptible also challenged my view that books about power are pretty boring, of interest only to specialists. Corruptible is entertaining. Klaas travelled the world interviewing a range of people, including brutal dictators, trying to figure out what makes them tick. And he tells fascinating stories about corrupt individuals.

Recruitment to positions of power

Consider a police department, one where some officers are venal and brutal, taking opportunities to steal and to lord it over others. Think of the officer in Minneapolis in 2020 who held down George Floyd, while he cried out that he couldn’t breathe, for nine minutes until he died. This became infamous, but unfortunately there are lots of other incidents, large and small, in which officers abuse their power.


The beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police, 1991

            Is the problem that police, because they have power, become corrupt, or is it that corruptible individuals are attracted to joining the police? Klaas describes revealing research findings showing how some police job advertisements are more attractive to bullies.

            The usual response to police abuses is to institute training, to try to change the behaviour of the officers who have been hired. Klaas describes a different, additional idea: spend more effort recruiting individuals who are different, who normally would not be attracted to a police career, such as gentle, compassionate, honest individuals who are reluctant to use violence. The idea is to avoid recruiting people who are attracted to the sort of power wielded by police.

            Maybe the Greens should adopt this approach: encourage the members who are least interested in leadership roles to become candidates for office. Dream on!

Don’t (always) blame the powerful

Klaas offers another challenge to the idea that power tends to corrupt: he notes four things that are commonly overlooked when examining the actions of people in positions of power. The first is “dirty hands.” When Green parliamentarians have to choose between two evils, their vote will cause harm no matter what choice is made. In Australia, the Greens had to decide whether to support or oppose weak legislation on climate change. They either disappoint their supporters for compromising or are condemned for being blockers. Klaas tells of cases in which rulers have had to make decisions and, whatever choice they made, people would die. Not nice, and not about power corrupting.

            Another thing commonly overlooked is that those in power have more opportunities to do bad, so they look worse than others. Earlier I mentioned the study by Sorokin and Lunden about political and business leaders being higher than average in criminality. Maybe this wasn’t because they were corrupted by power but because they had the power to get away with murder.

            Yet another factor is that people in positions of power are closely observed, so they seem to be up to more mischief. Green parliamentarians receive a lot more scrutiny than ordinary members of the party, so anything they do that’s wrong is more likely to be discovered and publicised. Again, greater scrutiny of the powerful might give the mistaken impression that power corrupts. Klaas summarises his analysis:

“Corruptible people are drawn to power. They’re often better at getting it. We, as humans, are drawn to following the wrong leaders for irrational reasons linked to our Stone Age brains. Bad systems make everything worse. Yet, our intuitions about power can be flawed and mistaken. Four phenomena — dirty hands, learning, opportunity, and scrutiny — make it seem that power makes people worse than they actually are. We sometimes confuse the effects of power with intrinsic aspects of holding it.” (p. 148)


Brian Klaas

But power does tend to corrupt

After canvassing many challenges to Lord Acton’s comment about power, Klaas finally addresses it, and he agrees with him: power does tend to corrupt. Klaas cites studies showing that gaining power makes behaviour worse, with powerholders interrupting and stereotyping others more, and being more hypocritical.

            Klaas says that “for decades, the scientific literature on how power affects us was limited,” but he missed the work of one important researcher in the field, David Kipnis, who carried out careful experiments that showed the psychological effects of having power over others. For example, it makes the powerholder think their subordinates are not autonomous and hence deserve less respect, making them even more vulnerable to exploitation.

What to do

Most academic writings on power focus on analysis, on what it is and how it operates. Klaas does something else: he gives a lot of attention to solutions to the corruptions of power. As well as arguing for the recruitment of individuals who are less susceptible to temptation, he recommends choosing decision-makers by lot, called sortition, like the selection of jurors for a trial. With random selection, power-seekers have no better chances of being chosen than anyone else.


Me boss. You not.

            Yet another option is rotation of office-holders. This is just what the German Greens initially planned: elected parliamentarians would serve only one term of office. The Greens couldn’t do it on their own, but what if all parliamentarians were allowed only one term? This would cut corruption, because those in office for short periods are less susceptible to special interests.

            Decades ago, I corresponded with an unusual political activist in the US. He sent me leaflets and bumper stickers with the slogan “Re-elect nobody.” His idea was that voters should always vote against whoever was in office. If enough did this, members of Congress would serve only one term. Predictably, his idea never caught on. And it’s crazy to imagine the members of any parliament legislating to restrict their terms of office. They’re not likely to listen to anyone, even if Klaas has a great idea for getting better people into positions of power.

            Klaas notes that there are far more studies of disasters than of successes. Assuming for the moment that the Australian Greens opposing a carbon-price scheme in 2009 was a poor decision, Klaas’s point is that there has been much more attention to it than to good decisions by the Greens. He argues that as well as examining the results of decisions, there should be audits of decision-making processes.

“Better people can lead us. We can recruit smarter, use sortition to second-guess powerful people, and improve oversight. We can remind leaders of the weight of their responsibility. We can make them see people as human beings, not abstractions, before the powerful turn them into victims. We can rotate personnel to deter and detect abuse. We can use randomized integrity tests to catch bad apples. And if we’re going to watch people, we can focus on those at the top who do the real damage, not the rank and file.” (p. 246)

            I’ve mentioned just a portion of the fascinating material in Corruptible. Even so, there is one topic about which I would have liked more: getting rid of positions of power altogether. It’s often assumed that hierarchies are inevitable, and someone has to be the boss. But there are many examples of cooperative endeavours in which no individual has a great deal of formal power. This is a big topic, so I’ll just mention consensus decision-making techniques, worker co-ops like Mondragon in Spain, participatory budgeting like in Brazil, and all sorts of voluntary groups.

            So imagine this. The Greens, instead of trying to get their own members elected to parliament, push for a different sort of decision-making system, one in which no individuals have a great amount of power. Well, it hasn’t happened yet, but it can be added to the agenda for those concerned, like Lord Acton, with power and corruption.


Lord Acton

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Comment from “Alicia Verde,” who has close familiarity with the Greens New South Wales

The Greens have historically had fewer problems with power and corruption than other major parties. Our grassroots focus helps reduce these problems.

         However, in the Greens NSW we do occasionally experience those who abuse power, both those who are corrupted by power and those who are already corrupt and seek power for its own sake.

         As the Greens NSW Party grew, the career path to becoming an MP (member of parliament) became easier and more attractive, potentially attracting those who desire power, including those who want power for power’s sake. This is far more evident in the two larger Australian political parties for obvious reasons. This defined career path has led to several instances of prospective and elected MPs abusing power.

         Any new political party with no guarantee of electing an MP is less attractive to those who are driven to seek power.

         Greens NSW enshrined grassroots democracy in its constitution, rather than an MP-focused perspective. That was early on in our formation. I believe it would have been more difficult to achieve this with the current number of MPs.

         In the Labor Party and the Liberal-National Party Coalition, power rests in their party rooms, caucuses and party elites. In Australian politics, the Greens NSW are unique in successfully seeking to devolve power from MPs to grassroots membership at the heart of our constitution and processes.

         The Greens NSW constitution facilitates dealing with toxic MPs by any local group bringing a proposal to a state delegates council (held six times a year) that can reprimand or, as happened on at least one occasion, force an MP to resign. This is despite MPs having considerable soft power (instinctive deference to MP opinions) within the party. There is constant pushback against soft power due to a significant commitment to a non-hierarchical structure. Though this isn’t easy, the Greens’ consensus decision-making model can be effective in dealing with power-related toxicity, far more so than in the other major parties, that either rely on popular votes or have a structure that effectively silences voices from the membership.

         Yes, power does tend to corrupt, and yes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s inherent that MPs start to believe their own media, while sycophants prop up their egos. However, it really gets toxic when external groups with vested interests become involved, such as via political donations, which the Greens don’t take from corporations. These donations enshrine and feed power imbalances; the corporations need the imbalance to protect their influence. This is a really corrosive problem in Australian and Western democracies, corrupting even those who are not “power-hungry.”

         Given inherent problems with power corrupting groups, it is the robustness of the structures and processes underpinning organisations that count to derail the corrosive aspects of power.

         In Greens NSW, what helps to ensure that a non-hierarchical perspective is not eroded over time is the constitution and the willingness of state delegates councils to dictate policy, reprimand abuses or over-reach, plus party members’ wariness of those in power and of power itself. This has enabled maintaining policy positions on many very difficult issues and reduced the “protecting my re-election prospects” agenda where MPs are conflicted in difficult situations.

         On limited terms for MPs, this was contemplated in Greens NSW but rejected as it also serves to end the careers of some really great MPs. It can be a double-edged sword.

         Randomly selecting MPs would be effective if it were also for the entire parliament but this would mean abandoning our Westminster system for something far more progressive, which is not an option in the next few years I imagine! Sadly!

media, politics

Are US conservatives the new defenders of free speech?

On 12 July, Matt Taibbi made a post on Racket News with the title, “Where have all the liberals gone?” Taibbi is a journalist who has provided exquisite analyses of a range of issues over the years. I was especially impressed with his cutting examination of the Global Financial Crisis in his 2010 book Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America. In recent years, on Racket News, he has provided running commentaries on US politics. One of his special interests is censorship.

            In his 12 July post, Taibbi opened with an account of US government documents revealing that the FBI had forwarded requests to various platforms — Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter — asking for certain topics to be censored. The FBI’s requests were made on behalf of the SBU, the Ukrainian security agency. As Taibbi put it, censorship had been outsourced to a foreign power.

            This wasn’t the only example, just a particularly striking one. Taibbi referred to many other instances in which the US government has requested private companies to undertake censorship.

            The government documents revealing this were released by a committee of the US House of Representatives. Here’s the cruncher: a majority of the committee members were Republicans. Taibbi was shocked and aggrieved. Then he posed his key question: “where are the rest of the ‘card-carrying’ liberals from the seventies, eighties, and nineties — people like me, who always reflexively opposed restrictions on speech?” Liberals who Taibbi calls “card-carrying” were those fully committed to liberal values.

Liberals and conservatives

In the US, a liberal is on the political left and a conservative is on the right, and these more or less align with Democrats and Republicans. Compared with other countries with representative governments, the whole US political spectrum is skewed to the right — uniquely, there has never been a significant socialist party in the country — but that does not detract from Taibbi’s concerns. Through his own experience over decades, he perceives that the liberals, who used to be at the forefront of anti-censorship efforts, are now complacent or supportive of the government aiding censorship.

            At the conclusion of his short article, Taibbi put out an invitation: “I’d like to hear from anyone who has an explanation, a personal testimonial, anything. Comments are open to everyone here.”

            I had my own ideas about what has been going on, and thought to add a comment. But by the time I got around to it, there were already 2500 comments. Would one more be noticed? Anyway, I was uncertain about what I would say. What follows is not a rigorous argument backed by extensive documentation, but rather an exploratory effort, an exposition of possibilities, perhaps better described as speculation, as a set of ideas that might be worth pursuing in greater depth.

Questioning the premise

Taibbi’s question assumes some sort of affinity between being a liberal and being anti-censorship. But is this correct? In wartime, there is massive censorship, and it is especially severe against opponents of war. It’s more than censorship: war resisters during US wars have been prosecuted and imprisoned. Many major wars were conducted under Democrat administrations: World War I, World War II and the first years of the Korean and Vietnam wars. These administrations were not reluctant to censor dissent and to imprison war resisters.

            War seems to be a unifier, at least for the state, against critics. How does this relate to the left-right political spectrum? Traditionally, this spectrum refers to workers versus capitalist owners, in a quasi-Marxist sort of analysis. Those on the left back the working class whereas those on the right back the capitalist or ruling class. The trouble is that many issues do not map neatly onto this spectrum. War is one of them. Prior to the First World War, socialists imagined that workers would refuse to fight, in international solidarity against rulers. But instead, most workers’ parties supported their own governments. Propaganda, pioneered by the British during the so-called Great War, helped mobilise support for the war.

            In subsequent decades, some on the left were active in pacifist movements, but some on the right supported isolationism, opposing US involvement in foreign wars. That same configuration has continued, in various forms, into the 2000s.

            Rather than assuming liberals have some special affinity with free speech, an alternative idea is that both liberals and conservatives are keen to defend their own free speech while being ready to censor opponents. This idea is highlighted by the title of a revealing book by free-speech campaigner Nat Hentoff: Free Speech for Me — but Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.

            Hentoff’s perspective raises a new set of queries. How can we explain patterns of censorship? A preliminary hypothesis is self-interest: groups with the power to censor do so against those who threaten their interests.

Threats and censorship

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, many in the US government saw communism as the greatest threat. Communism, Soviet-style, was left-wing, so most US government surveillance, harassment and repression was against communists and their perceived allies. Joseph McCarthy launched his crusade against communists in government and beyond, and this spilled into universities and Hollywood, among other areas. During that time, the most powerful forces in the US targeted those associated with the left.

            In the late 1960s, one of the biggest issues in the country was the war in Vietnam, and it was against communists, so the antiwar movement was treated as left-wing. But this had little connection with the classic left-right dichotomy based on labour versus capitalists. The other big issue in the 1960s was racism. Like the antiwar movement, the civil rights and black power movements had little logical connection with the labour-capitalist framework, though in practice campaigners in these movements can find affinities with labour activists.

            The FBI, under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, targeted any group seen as a threat to security. Whose security? It was later revealed that the main targets in the 1960s were antiwar activists and blacks. Somehow, these groups were seen as being on the left. It might make more sense to see antiwar activists as anti-state and blacks as threats to white supremacy.

            Taibbi remembers what it was like back then, when liberals defended free speech, and when the targets of censorship and repression included antiwar and civil-rights campaigners. But perhaps that configuration was not inherent in the positions of these groups, but depended more on who had power and who threatened it.

Friendly fascism?

Bertram Gross’s book Friendly Fascism was published in 1980. Gross, who had worked in the US government at a policy level in the 1940s and 1950s, saw signs of a US version of fascism. Gross saw the essence of fascism not in the racism and brutality of regimes in Germany, Italy and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, but in something else: an alliance between big business and big government. Much of his analysis applies today.

            It’s not necessary to accept Gross’s full picture to see that the ties, in the US and beyond, between business and government have become ever stronger, with powerful industries heavily involved in making the policies that affect them, and government running foreign policy to serve US business interests. Highlights include structural adjustment programmes to pressure governments of poor countries to adapt their economies to serve international capital, and pressure to impose expansive rules for intellectual property, again serving the interests of big capital.

            If there is an alliance between, or rather interpenetration of, big government and big business, what then is the role of the distinction between left and right? On many issues, there are differences between liberals and conservatives, between Democrats and Republicans, but many of these differences are more cultural than related to political economy. Both sides support neoliberalism or what used to be called monopoly capitalism. How does this play out in relation to censorship?

            In addition to the left-right political dimension, there is another distinction, between statist and anti-statist orientations. On the left, statists support big government, the welfare state and benevolent paternalism. Anti-statists on the left, in contrast, support local empowerment of communities, what has been called neighbourhood power, and workers’ control and community self-reliance.

            On the right, statists support aid to corporations, military power and police power against workers and activists. Right anti-statists, in contrast, support markets, small business, limited government regulation, and local initiative. Right anti-statists include libertarians. Note that the libertarian tradition in the US is far stronger than in nearly any other country.

            In this rough classification of statist and anti-statist orientations, I’ve left out connections with big business. If big government and big business are symbiotic in the US, then anti-state positions become more complicated: anti-state can become, in part, anti-big-business. This clashes with the usual idea that the right is pro-business.

Covid politics

The arrival of Covid-19 was a shock to the political system. Political leaders treated the pandemic as an emergency that warranted the most severe restrictions on freedoms outside of wartime. In terms of political economy, this can be thought of as the state exerting its power against dissent, in alliance with several powerful corporations, notably in the pharmaceutical and tech industries.

            There is extensive evidence of censorship, in the US and elsewhere, of views contrary to the official line concerning the pandemic and control measures: lockdowns, masks, vaccines and the origin of Covid. Platforms including Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube censored heterodox commentary, including correct information — such as about adverse events from vaccines — that clashed with the dominant narrative. The US federal government and various agencies aided in this effort. Claims about disinformation were used to justify silencing dissent. Beyond censorship, scientists and doctors who questioned orthodoxy were targeted, with their online accounts cancelled, their medical privileges revoked and their jobs threatened.

            Where were the liberals, those Taibbi thought of as the traditional defenders of free speech? The answer to this question, it seems, is nowhere. Liberals were the most enthusiastic backers of control measures. The left’s negativity about capitalists, in this case mainly the pharmaceutical and tech industries, seemed to have evaporated. Or perhaps the left, being supportive of government experts, always endorsed mainstream medicine and was hostile to natural alternatives.

            But there was opposition to the orthodox line: individuals who questioned mask mandates and refused Covid vaccines. And in the US there was some pushback by figures in the media — and they were mostly associated with the political right.

            When President Donald Trump came out in support of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid, he was ridiculed by defenders of orthodoxy. Trump’s role may have contributed to the assumption that questioning official medical views was the preserve of the right. Later, when there were rallies against lockdowns, the media pointed to the presence of fascists, dismissing the entire movement as right-wing, indeed lunatics. Today much of the US left lacks a strong anti-corporate thrust.

Moral foundations

Given that the right has traditionally supported big business, the next question is why certain figures spoke out in defiance of Covid orthodoxy. I don’t know the answer. One possibility relates to the difference in values between conservatives and liberals, as elucidated by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues. According to Haidt, liberals are more likely to prioritise care, fairness and liberty. Care is also a conservative value, but not to such a high level. During the pandemic, control measures like lockdowns could resonate with liberals’ care impulses. But what happened to liberty, another moral foundation prized by liberals?

            Although looking at values is intriguing, I don’t think it provides that much of an explanation, because each value can be interpreted differently. What about care for those adversely affected by lockdowns or vaccinations?

Polarisation

Here’s another possibility. When a few individuals identified with the right challenged Covid orthodoxy, it became convenient to tar all critics as right-wing. After this, the highly polarised state of US politics — see Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized — took over. If some individuals seen as right-wing challenged pandemic rules, liberals instinctively adhered more strongly to them, backing their views by stigmatising those on what became the other side. How much this was about Trump and how much about political views deserves investigation.

            What then of the mass media and social media platforms? Why did they line up with Covid orthodoxy, taking measures to silence critics? Does this mean they don’t want to be associated with the right? Maybe not. Maybe they just went along with the dominant perspective, which is nearly always pro-big-business.

            In looking at this issue, it’s useful to note that few individuals were highly informed about the evidence and arguments. Not many members of the public studied scientific papers on both sides of contentious issues like lockdowns, masks and vaccines. Most followed the lead of authorities, most commonly dominant medical and government authorities, but in some cases counter-authorities, scientists and public figures who questioned the dominant view.

Scientific controversies

For decades, I’ve been studying scientific controversies, for example over nuclear power, pesticides, fluoridation and vaccination. There is little qualitatively new about Covid controversies. Whenever experts line up with the most powerful groups with vested interests — governments, corporations or professions — there are attempts to suppress expert critics of the dominant view. That’s just what happened with Covid. The main difference is the tarring of Covid critics as right-wing. Is there any precedent for that?

            Consider social movements in US history. Predictably, the labour movement has been seen to be on the left, because that’s how left and right are conceptualised. But what about movements not obviously connected to the labour-capital framework? The peace movement has been treated as left-wing, and so has the civil rights movement.

            Perhaps more related to Covid is the environmental movement. Historically, you might think it aligns more naturally with conservative politics, because conservation — protection of the natural environment — is about the preservation of traditional values. This was indeed a strand of the environmental movement, at least until the 1960s, when environmentalism became associated with radicalism. Paradoxically, resisting changes in long-standing relationships became seen as radical, whereas accepting radical change caused by industrialism was seen as a conservative value.

Fluoridation

Of all the issues I’ve studied, the one with the most parallels with Covid politics is fluoridation, the adding of fluoride to water supplies to reduce tooth decay in children. Studied in the 1940s and promoted by the US Public Health Service beginning in the 1950s, fluoridation was pushed mainly by campaigners in the dental profession and governments. And there was opposition.

            How might fluoridation line up on a left-right political spectrum? It’s not immediately obvious. Although some companies stand to make money from fluoridation, it’s not a big money-spinner. One important industrial connection is with sugary-food manufacturers: dietary sugar contributes to tooth decay, so it’s convenient to instead blame a lack of fluoride. Another connection is with the aluminium industry, which generates toxic fluoride wastes: fluoride being seen as beneficial takes the pressure off industrial polluters. Given these vested interests, you might think that anti-fluoridationism would be seen as left-wing.

            But no, there was another factor. Fluoridation was promoted by governments, and in the US this triggered opposition by some right-wing groups, including the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan.

The American Dental Association used this to link anti-fluoridationists with right-wing extremists (and with those labelled health nuts), and this association stuck despite the lack of an obvious tie with conservative politics.

         If fluoridation had been initiated twenty years later, after the rise of the environmental movement, it’s possible that fluoride would have been seen primarily as a pollutant to be opposed. In this alternative history, anti-fluoridationism might have been painted as left-wing rather than right-wing. The implication is that categorising issues politically can depend on the times, rather than being inherent in the issue.


This page is from a 1965 issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association, introducing a dossier on opponents of fluoridation, including the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, various fringe groups and a few respectable doctors and scientists who were tarred by association.

Conclusion

Matt Taibbi asked, in essence, “In Covid times, where are the anti-censorship liberals?” In other words, why have figures on the right in the US taken the lead in opposing censorship? I started by questioning the assumption that, in the US, the left has an automatic affinity with free speech, noting that in wartime, the left and right are equally likely to support censorship.

            Another explanation for patterns is that groups defend their own free speech but not that of political rivals. Throughout the Cold War, anti-communism was dominant in the US, so leftists were prime targets for silencing. But that was decades ago, and on many issues the framework of labour-versus-capital provides limited insight.

            Furthermore, strangely, the left is no longer automatically suspicious of big business. During the pandemic, Big Pharma had the greatest stake in control measures, especially vaccination, and in silencing critics. Contrary to the usual assumption about political alignments, certain voices associated with conservative politics were most prominent in supporting free speech in the face of government and big tech censorship.

            It might be argued that stigmatising challengers to Covid orthodoxy as right-wing extremists was a convenient manoeuvre that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a country with highly polarised politics, issues that are not inherently left or right can nevertheless end up being identified with one position, and tribal tendencies accentuate the tendency.

            This explanation is speculative, and there are quite a few anomalies, for example left-wing voices defending free speech against Covid-related censorship. For deeper understanding, a more comprehensive historical and political analysis would be needed. In any case, whatever your preferred answer, Taibbi’s question is a good one.


Matt Taibbi

Brian Martin, bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Jungmin Choi, Sue Curry Jansen, Julia LeMonde, Susan Maret and Lorraine Pratley for valuable suggestions.

Comment by Sue Curry Jansen

I agree with much of what you say in this post. In my view, the counter-currents of contemporary U.S. censorship debates are mind-boggling. Left-Right, Liberal-Conservative hardly expresses it. The billionaire donors behind the scenes have captured both sides as political campaigns for any national office are insanely expensive with national media among the major beneficiaries of the largesse. The misnomer “populism” is attached to the polarization and the so-called culture wars keep the fires burning.

A recent book review I wrote comes close to identifying what I think is at stake. It is not whether speech is to be protected, but whose speech. The U.S. right wants to maintain the status quo ante by silencing the emergent voices of historically marginalized groups, banning books, controlling curricula and negating educators’ and librarians’ professional expertise and autonomy, funding extreme right-wing speakers on campuses in hopes of inciting violence that will backfire against the left, controlling women’s bodies, fighting gay and trans rights; while the left has imposed speech codes on campuses in attempts to peacefully integrate higher education and avoid sanctions from equal opportunity commissions. It has created feminist, ethnic, and gay studies courses or majors, avoided hosting speakers opposed to diversity/multiculturalism, and when possible influenced major media to give greater voice to historically marginalized groups, especially in light of the Black Lives Matter Movement. In so doing, it has played into the hands of the right as shown by these college free-speech rankings.

The solution, as most college administrators and librarians have affirmed, is freeing free speech: that is, modeling open, civil, debate in a search for truth. Unfortunately we are way past that. The mainstream U.S. press is in a similar bind as indicated by this thoughtful analysis by the editor of The New Republic.

Comment by Lorraine Pratley

I agree that “…groups with the power to censor do so against those who threaten their interests.” In the case of Covid, liberals closed ranks with the pharmaceutical industry because their views were aligned. The liberal mindset can be attributed to the nature of the educated middle classes, who wield social power through ideological influence in academia, media, public service, and government. Seeking a ‘rational’ and ‘inclusive’ society that reinforces their livelihood and status, they value their opinions as superior to the “uneducated masses”, many of whom look to outsider populists like Donald Trump. Hence the calls to restrict the speech of those they see as a threat to liberal society.

Taibbi’s confusion is somewhat naive. Even before Covid, liberals barely ever objected to the industry-funded model of scientific research in medicine, food and agriculture (bear in mind, even public ‘healthcare’ is merely state-subsidised Big Pharma-based medicine). Liberals often play a role in furthering corporate and imperialist interests, in collaboration with the Right, exemplified by their role in garnering public support for the racist Northern Territory intervention in 2007 ostensibly in order to protect children, and for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 under the pretext of liberating women. Liberals’ embrace of identity politics is a distraction from class politics and class-based solutions, both for the oppressed and the working class as a whole.

As for the organised Left, led by the union bureaucracy, it has long been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry and the prevailing scientific research grant paradigm. Public sector white collar workers, who now represent a significant portion of the modern labour force, tend overwhelmingly to be hesitant to challenge dominant scientific paradigms. Indeed one in 16 working Australians is a registered (AHPRA) health professional, in addition to vast numbers in education, academia, and the public service. These sectors are also overrepresented in union density. These people, along with their union leaders, whether conscious of it or not, ended up favouring medical industry interests over human health.

[See Lorraine’s “Anatomy of the Covidian-Left“.]