Category Archives: politics

politics, social dynamics

What is it about identity?

Identity politics is a complex and challenging topic. How can we make sense of it?

For decades, I’ve spent a lot of time examining the problem of war along with systems of domination like dictatorships and economic exploitation.

            Then, more recently, I started to hear more and more about identity politics, with a focus on interpersonal bias. What was it all about, and what made a person’s race, gender and sexuality so important? Well, of course, discrimination and oppression are important.

            I spent years on committees raising awareness about sexual harassment and learned about its damaging effects on targets, mostly women. But it isn’t obvious to me how prioritising one’s identity makes a difference to the problem of sexual harassment.

            Then there’s the issue of free speech. For decades, I’ve studied suppression of dissent. In the academic scene back in the 1980s, the most common targets were scholars on the left. I went out of my way to document the stories of a few right-leaning academics who came under attack. It seemed good sense to defend everyone’s right to free speech, even, or especially, those I disagreed with. A common commitment to dialogue and debate seems a good way to protect those with less power.

            But then there was a new development: cancel culture, in other words, censoring people because of their views. In many cases, the cancelling was directed at those with conservative views. The attacks were coming from the left. Or at least that’s according to media coverage. I couldn’t be sure because I didn’t see many cases up close. Meanwhile, I am in touch with whistleblowers, who continue to suffer reprisals. They speak up about corruption, which is seldom connected with identity politics.

            With this background, I tried to learn a little about the topic. With the help of friends, I came across some insightful books. I still don’t understand everything going on, but these books have helped.

            For each one, I start with a summary and then list a series of points that struck me as important. Most of this material is extracted from notes I took about each book just after I read it. The books are presented in chronological order of publication. Along the way, “politically correct” has been superseded by “woke.”

Jeff Sparrow, Trigger warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right (Melbourne: Scribe, 2018)

Sparrow provides an engaging analysis of political correctness (PC) and politics. As he writes, “This book is a polemic, a deliberate attempt to challenge conventional wisdom.” (p. 10) He argues that the right has deployed anti-PC rhetoric to its advantage. This is, he says, because so much of the left has abandoned direct action and mass participation. Instead, representatives of the left — occupying positions in politics, universities or culture — speak on behalf of the masses. Sparrow calls this “delegated politics.” And there’s something else. These left figures look down on the masses, attributing to them regressive attitudes towards women and minorities. Sparrow calls this “smug politics.”

            The main focuses here are the US and Australia, with a brief treatment of Britain and Brexit. The book proceeds as an account of developments in left and right politics in the US and Australia, covering topics familiar to anyone who has followed them over the years.

            For me, the most insightful sections are about how the right has adopted its own form of identity politics while castigating the left over PC. Sparrow’s main complaint is about how the left, in its weakness relying on delegated politics, has lost the orientation to building mass movements.

            He refers to the “delegated left” which speaks from a position of assumed ideological superiority, alienating those on the outside and preventing a more inclusive politics. Sparrow is no friend of the right but wants to understand how right populism has become so successful.


Jeff Sparrow

  • Progressives in the US supported “science” but then sometimes equated “technical expertise with political expertise — to imply that social issues had already been scientifically settled — and that anyone who disagreed was, by definition, an illiterate or a fool.” When progressives couldn’t influence society, they blamed people for being stupid. (101)
  • Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd and US president Barack Obama didn’t recognise the importance of rage in the culture-war dynamics. The right was able to channel people’s feelings that their lives were coming apart into anger at cultural elites and support for candidates backing neoliberalism, which damaged traditional cultural ties, completing the circle. (113-114)
  • “Advocates of delegated politics presented identity as a fixed category, a basis for political organising. They claimed that race, gender, sexuality, and other ‘identities’ correlated with particular political ideas, attitudes, and demands that wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t be embraced by those without the lived experience of that identity.” (132)
  • Identity politics became the left’s conventional wisdom, with social change seen as coming from “wealthy and powerful figures serving as a proxy for the dispossessed.” Just when economic divisions among the oppressed were so great, the left couldn’t recognise them. (151)
  • Change agents were expected to admit their privileges before doing anything to address social problems. Privilege-checking could be endless, postponing activism and solidarity. The focus on microaggressions implied oppression resulted from individuals rather than social structures. “Intersectionality might, then, have been intended as a radical critique of identity politics, but in practice it reinterpreted identity in an even more paralysing fashion.” (159-162)
  • Call-out culture, in which activists mount campaigns over minor transgressions, often operated using social media, was a result of and contributed to the left’s marginality, in which it lacked the connection with mass struggles against which concerns could be assessed. (163-164)
  • Trigger warnings and safe spaces reflected a concern about inflaming trauma that made mass campaigns problematic: campaigns provoked bigots, whose reactions might be psychologically damaging. Therefore, only well-prepared elites were in a position to lead progressive politics. (175-176)
  • The Global Justice Movement and the Occupy movement were direct-action, participatory movements, but were not greeted with enthusiasm by the delegated-politics left, which was oriented to representation. Strikes are participatory, but are treated as a threat by those committed to representative models, because they challenge the authority of elected leaders. (230-231)
  • “For if ‘democracy’ was taken to mean representation, it was entirely democratic to prevent the sexist, racist, and homophobic masses from interfering with progressive politicians.” (234)

Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The rise of victimhood culture: microaggressions, safe spaces, and the new culture wars (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Campbell and Manning describe three cultures: honour, dignity and victimhood. In an honour culture, status is associated with physical bravery, personal reputation is highly important, and insults can lead to personal retribution. In a dignity culture, public reputation is less important, and people are less likely to take offence. In a victimhood culture, people are highly sensitive to insults and emphasise their victim role.

            Each culture is characteristic of particular social conditions. Victimhood culture emerged in elite US campuses and spread beyond. It arises when status differences are small, equality is prized, and appeals can be made to authorities. The social conditions for victimhood culture overlap with some aspects of honour and dignity cultures.

            Campbell and Manning provide many examples, trying to be neutral observers, noting that what seems sensible within one culture can seem harmful or ridiculous to those immersed in another. Their analysis serves as a criticism of victimhood culture, though they have a whole chapter defending a particular approach that separates sociology from pursuing social justice. This is a valuable study to help understand what’s happening in a range of domains and on various issues.


Bradley Campbell

  • Victimhood is a moral status based on suffering/need, treated as a virtue, so privilege is, in contrast, a vice. Saying “check your privilege” is like honour-culture shaming of cowards. (22-23)
  • Microaggression complaints involve going to authorities. Calling actions “aggression” makes them seem worse than “merely rude, awkward, or ignorant”, and as part of systematic oppression. This labelling is used to win over third parties. (47)
  • The social conditions for microaggression complaints are the same as victimhood culture generally: egalitarianism (also in hunter-gatherer societies), reliance on third parties (also in repressive regimes), minorities resenting slights (common but, in many situations, nothing can be done about them). Also relevant: weak ties. In universities, students see themselves as social equals, and live under the aegis of bureaucratic authorities. (65)
  • Victimhood culture’s interpretation of harm is so expansive as to be incomprehensible to many others, while those immersed in victimhood culture can’t understand other perspectives. “Not only is everything that is harmful and oppressive bad, but everything bad is harmful and oppressive.” (95)
  • “Calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces are as much of an aspect of victimhood culture as are microaggression complaints. They too evince a strong tendency to emphasize victimization and to rely on third parties. Their success illustrates a tendency to defer to victims, to accept their definition of the situation, and to privilege their requests. And they are part and parcel of a language of victimhood that exaggerates harm and emphasizes vulnerability. Words and images are violence, disagreement is a threat, and some victimized groups need special protection from it all.” (97)
  • A “purity spiral” involves infighting between activists and victim groups, as a small minority seeks to be holier than thou, displaying zealotry and condemning or expelling deviants for ever-more-minor transgressions, while most others go along with it for fear of becoming targets themselves. (168)
  • Few cultures value free speech, but victimhood culture is especially hostile to it, blurring the difference between speech and violence, scrutinising all forms of speech (far more than honour culture) and seeking retribution against anyone who causes offence. (216)
  • In victimhood culture and honour culture, there is high sensitivity to slights, but in honour culture individuals deal with it themselves whereas in victimhood culture there is appeal to authorities. However, when campus authorities refuse to act, student activists may try to prevent speakers from speaking. (229)


Jason Manning

Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Elite capture: how the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else) (London: Pluto Press, 2022).

This fascinating analysis of identity politics proceeds in a rather indirect way, by developing the concept of elite capture. This involves segments of a challenging group being brought into a privileged position, leaving the structure of oppression unchanged. Táíwò uses the concept of “rooms” in which discussions occur. Only some people are in rooms for the relatively privileged, and deference to representatives of marginalised groups (“deference politics”) in these rooms is a distraction from the more important task of challenging injustice outside, beyond these rooms. In other words, identity politics can get in the way of joining together, with all resources, to develop strategies against the major problems in the world.

            Táíwò draws heavily on Amílcar Cabral, Lilica Boal, Paulo Freire and a few other activist-writers, and devotes much space to racism and related politics. Part of the book is about the exploitation of poor countries, including structural adjustment programmes and their successors, and challenges to this exploitation.

            Elite Capture is short and hard-hitting, yet restrained in its careful intellectual exposition. Táíwò argues in favour of constructive politics, of building the alternative.


Olúfémi Táíwò

  • “We should respond to the problems of elite capture, and the racial capitalism that enables it, not with deference politics but with constructive politics. A constructive approach would focus on outcome over process: the pursuit of specific goals or results, rather than mere avoidance of ‘complicity’ in injustice or promotion of purely moral or aesthetic principles.” (12)
  • Value capture is the process of stripping the full complexity of values down to a simplified version that serves particular purposes and interests, such as capitalism stripping human values down to profit. Other examples are the gig economy and social media’s use of likes. These simplified metrics can overshadow other values such as pride in one’s work. (52-53)
  • “A prime example of deference politics is the call to ‘listen to the most affected’ or ‘center the most marginalized,’ now ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles.” Doing this means giving authority/attention to whoever is in the room that fits the designated category, regardless of their experience or knowledge. Most of the politics of deference occurs among elites in “classrooms, boardrooms, political parties.” It doesn’t address the bigger problems outside these arenas. “This discourse … directs what little attentional power we can control at symbolic sites of power rather than at the root political issues that explain why everything is so fucked up.” (70-72)
  • Constructive politics focuses on goals and results, and less on “complicity” in injustices. “If it’s ‘epistemology’ or knowledge practices we’re concerned about, then a constructive politics focuses on institutions and practices of information gathering that are strategically useful for challenging social injustices themselves, not just the symptoms manifest in the room we happen to be in today.” “In general, a constructive politics is one that engages directly in the task of redistributing social resources and power, rather than pursuing intermediary goals cashed out in symbols.” (84)
  • The crucial issue is how work in groups relates to wider struggles; the operation of groups is important but not the only thing. (107)
  • Pain is a poor teacher. “Oppression is not a prep school.” Deference politics asks too much of the traumatised, putting them on a pedestal and hiding below. (120)

Susan Neiman, Left is not woke (Cambridge: Polity, 2023)

Neiman, a philosopher, challenges the assumption that if you’re on the left politically you must be woke, and that if you’re woke you must be on the left. She does this by examining three ideas that have underpinned the left for more than two centuries: committing to universalism (international solidarity), distinguishing power and justice, and believing in the possibility of progress. Wokeism rejects or neglects each of these and hence departs from the left tradition.

Neiman highlights two intellectual figures whose ideas have been used to sabotage left views about justice and progress: philosopher Michel Foucault and political theorist Carl Schmitt. They saw life as a struggle rather than pursuing a common cause. Neiman counters woke critics who suggest or allege that the Enlightenment should be rejected as an imperialistic European export. Left is not Woke is a sophisticated critique of the tribal side of woke politics, the assumption that identity trumps humanity.

            The introduction offers examples of woke politics and its shortcomings. The next three chapters are more analytical and theoretical, though breezy compared to much writing on these topics. The final chapter is a passionate plea to continue the struggle and not succumb to despair and cynicism. Overall, this is a potent intellectual counter to identity politics.


Susan Neiman

  • Being a victim used to be stigmatising but now has become a claim to authority. (16)
  • Being a victim may enable understanding but doesn’t necessarily do so, so it shouldn’t be an automatic source of authority. “I’d prefer we return to a model in which your claims to authority are focused on what you’ve done to the world, not what the world did to you.” (19)
  • White support for Black Lives Matter was through “a common commitment to universal justice”, not being an “ally.” “To divide members of a movement into allies and others undermines the bases of deep solidarity, and destroys what standing left means.” (31)
  • The capacity to reason is a tool against elite-based authority, in that everyone can think for themselves. Enlightenment thinkers didn’t want limits on thinking imposed by authorities. (67-68)
  • “We’ve long known that the personal is political, but when only the personal is political, we have given up hope. Changing your pronouns may feel like radical change, but the vehemence of woke arguments about the importance of pronouns is the expression of people who fear they have little power to change anything else.” (140)
  • There’s a search for general explanations for how the world works, leading to ideologies. “The dominant contemporary ideologies combine to create a fraudulent universalism which reduces all the complexity of human desire to a lust for wealth and power.” (141)
  • Neiman writes, “about progressive abandonment of three principles essential to the left: commitments to universalism, a hard distinction between justice and power, and the possibility of progress.” (142)

Yascha Mounk, The identity trap: a story of ideas and power in our time (Allen Lane, 2023; Penguin, 2024)

The Identity Trap is a powerful critique of identity politics and a defence of universal values. Mounk doesn’t like the term “identity politics” and instead refers to the “identity synthesis.” It is a sprawling collection of ideas. Mounk pins it down to seven main themes: scepticism about objective truth; the use of discourse analysis for political purposes; an intensive emphasis on identity; pessimism about progress through conventional means; laws sensitive to identity; intersectionality as an imperative; and standpoint epistemology. Mounk explains each of these with examples.

            The Identity Trap is a comprehensive analysis of the problem of identity as a basis for social progress. Mounk traces the origin of the identity synthesis, analyses the factors that enabled its rapid rise, acknowledges the value of the motives behind it — and then turns to critique. He starts with the intellectual origins of the synthesis, for example the original idea of intersectionality. According to Mounk, identity advocates took these ideas and turned them into something more far-reaching, something so radical that the original theorists don’t go along with it.

            Mounk argues that the identity synthesis, by rejecting universal values, has become counterproductive to its own goals. For example, identity advocates encourage people to think of themselves in terms of their group identities, specifically race, gender and sexuality. This is in the US. Strangely, other identities aren’t emphasised, indeed seldom mentioned, notably social class, also nationality. Not only are Black children encouraged to think of themselves in terms of Blackness, but the ideology has gone so far as to encourage white people to think of themselves in terms of whiteness. Mounk says this hinders the human solidarity needed for social progress.

            Mounk endorses liberalism in the sense of a belief in universal values. He concludes his book with suggestions for avoiding the identity trap.


Yascha Mounk

  • The left historically has been committed to universalistic principles, to overcome oppression. But this commitment has changed in recent decades. (9)
  • The identity synthesis is a lure, promising to oppose injustice. Its ideas attract intelligent people with good intentions. Yet it subverts its own goals. (16)
  • The origin of the identity synthesis was in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, when Foucault and other postmodernists rejected grand narratives, became sceptical of objective truth and universal values, and argued that discourses were key to social control (rather than top-down control). (36-37)
  • The US left increasingly focused on oppression associated with race, gender and sexuality, especially after the collapse of state socialism. This new orientation began transforming campus intellectual life, including with the rise of units examining identity. The identity synthesis grew out of influences from postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory. (75-76)
  • Intersectionality came to be used as a way to coerce activists to subscribe to the orthodoxy on a range of issues. (87)
  • Social media enabled the popularisation of a degraded version of the identity synthesis, by letting young people play with identity labels. Social media enabled identity groups to be information targets, and legacy media joined in, eventually affecting much of the US white, highly educated population. (96)
  • The identity synthesis entered the corporate sector, with diversity trainings, due to top companies recruiting students from elite universities steeped in the synthesis, spreading then to other companies. (107-110)
  • After Trump’s election in 2016, some activists, frustrated by not removing him from office, turned their attention towards other activists. Peer pressure can be oppressive; dissenters are needed to prevent dysfunction, but after Trump’s election, and the sense of external threat, dissenters were treated as traitors. (125-126)
  • Standpoint feminist ideas were popularised into three claims: oppressed groups share significant experiences; experience of oppression gives unique insights; and these experiences can’t be adequately communicated to outsiders. Standpoint feminists don’t necessarily accept these claims. A fourth claim is that members of dominant groups should defer to members of oppressed groups. Contrary to this, it’s not obvious who speaks on behalf of oppressed groups, and solidarity can be built through listening and empathising. (145-146)
  • When progressives censor ideas unwelcome in venues they control, they legitimise censorship in other arenas, including of their own ideas. (172)

Musa al-Gharbi, We have never been woke: the cultural contradictions of a new elite (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024)

Al-Gharbi analyses a group in the US that he calls “symbolic capitalists.” These individuals don’t do manual labour, but rather rely solely on their minds to make a living. They include academics, journalists, lawyers and managers, among others. They sit between the ruling class and the working class. Others have called them the new class or the professional-managerial class, among other names, and there have been debates among Marxists and sociologists about whether this group constitutes a class. By calling them symbolic capitalists, al-Gharbi emphasises how they use their intellectual skills as a resource to gain economic and reputational returns. In the US, many symbolic capitalists are comparatively well off and/or high status.

            The curious thing about symbolic capitalists is that, while being privileged, they espouse social justice, aligning themselves with those subject to prejudice and degradation. But, al-Gharbi argues, this operates only at a rhetorical level. In terms of political practice, as a group they do little to change the system, meaning they do little that might compromise their own privilege.

            Symbolic capitalists are keen on identity issues, especially gender, race and sexuality. They are keen on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which bring some women and minorities into their ranks. What this doesn’t do is change the economic circumstances of the bulk of the population.

            Al-Gharbi argues that by endorsing progressive views on gender, race and sexuality, symbolic capitalists serve their own interests, by positioning themselves as superior to the unenlightened masses and, more importantly, to other symbolic capitalists, who can be condemned as prejudiced. He examines US history and finds periodic surges of similar alarm about prejudice.

            Not only do symbolic capitalists see themselves as allies of downtrodden groups. Many of them see themselves as members of these groups. Al-Gharbi says symbolic capitalists are disproportionately white, highly educated, and heterosexual in behaviour, yet ever more are identifying as non-white, LGBTIQ and disabled.

            These claims about intellectual workers are sweeping, and if there’s any limitation to al-Gharbi’s analysis, it’s that he makes generalisations about symbolic capitalists. But, as he accepts throughout, he is one of them himself, part of the group whose actions he analyses.

            As al-Gharbi analyses it, identity politics is a preoccupation of symbolic capitalists, but not of much concern among other sectors of the population. In the US, symbolic capitalists have found a home in the Democratic Party, where they have gradually set the agenda for the party, focusing on identity issues, not on economic inequality. This has alienated ever more poor, white, working-class voters, causing some to switch to the Republicans, which seems inexplicable to symbolic capitalists.

            Al-Gharbi explicitly says he is not making any recommendations. He simply offers his analysis. We Have Never Been Woke is massively referenced and draws on a range of theoretical perspectives, especially the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu. It’s the sort of book that only another symbolic capitalist would want to read — and that is the prime target audience.


Musa al-Gharbi

  • Symbolic capitalists participate in activities that sustain inequalities, despite their rhetoric of support for causes. Woke causes are fine, but symbolic capitalists have never been woke. They have just believed they were. (20)
  • If symbolic capitalists are seen as selfish, their interests are compromised. This leads to status competition within symbolic professions over who is the most committed to the oppressed, with those not seen as being committed becoming vulnerable. (66)
  • “Symbolic capitalists love intermediaries like Uber, Grubhub, and Amazon precisely because they carry out the requisite exploitation to enable symbolic capitalists’ idiosyncratic preferences and lifestyles, but they also help create a ‘distance’ between symbolic capitalists and the workers exploited on their behalf.” (155)
  • Woke companies are radical in their words, not their deeds. They do this to attract the right sorts of workers and appeal to their customers: “… business leaders and corporations try to demonstrate that they share symbolic capitalists’ values and politics.” (213)
  • Symbolic capitalists favour social justice compatible with meritocracy. This maintains hierarchy, while enabling minorities to become elites. (216)
  • Identities that were previously stigmatised can become holders of “totemic capital,” gaining opportunities, moral authority, self-worth, and perceptions of greater merit. “In an ostensibly meritocratic system — where prestige, opportunities, and compensation are supposed to be afforded on the grounds of merit — people therefore have a strong incentive to present themselves as disadvantaged.” (251)
  • “Conspicuous antiracism, feminism, and so on have become status markers among urban, highly educated elites …” Acknowledging one’s privilege signals one’s status and hardly ever includes efforts to reduce one’s privilege. (271)
  • “… the attitudes and dispositions associated with ‘wokeness’ are primarily embraced by symbolic capitalists. Wokeness does not seem to be associated with egalitarian behaviors in any meaningful sense. Instead, ‘social justice’ discourse seems to be mobilized by contemporary elites to help legitimize and obscure inequalities, to signal and reinforce their elite status, or to tear down rivals — often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged in society.” (296)

Conclusion

There’s a lot of material in these books, much more than outlined here, with many different pieces of evidence and arguments. I don’t pretend to understand the nuances, but there seem to be a few commonalities. These authors are critical of identity politics in one way or another while being sympathetic to the goals of identity campaigners: they are opposed to racism, sexual and gender discrimination, and other forms of oppression. Thus, they might be considered sympathetic critics.

            They differ in their prescriptions for change. The question is how to pursue social justice. One theme is support for universal values, values that apply to all humans, without distinction.

            One of the areas motivating my interest in this area is free speech, including openness to dissenting ideas. From what I can tell, a focus on identity sometimes offers a pretext for censorship, but only for censorship for those on the other side. This is contrary to everything I’ve learned about how to defend free speech.

            Another area is sexual harassment. Gender is a key issue in identity politics. Yet despite the salience of gender in identity debates, pro and con, I’ve yet to see anything that helps in a practical sense in preventing, discouraging or dealing with sexual harassment. I doubt it would help to call it gender harassment.

            Finally, the problem of war. Is there anything in what Mounk calls the identity synthesis that helps challenge the war system? Or is there anything in the critiques of the identity synthesis that assists? If so, I haven’t seen it.

            Actually, there is one identity highly relevant to the problem of war: national identity. In wartime, nationality becomes an obsession. People are expected to support their leaders and troops, and enemies are stigmatised. They are foreigners, loyal to another state, to another set of rulers. Nationalism is linked to war preparations and warfighting, so perhaps, in this sense, identity is a big part of the problem. Yet with all the focus on race, gender and sexuality, nationality seems to be forgotten.

            For those concerned about war, and about other big issues like genocide and climate change, it could be that identity struggles are more a distraction than a help.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Jungmin Choi, Marina Granato, Olga Kuchinskaya, Julia LeMonde and Erin Twyford for useful comments.

economics, politics

The rich get richer

A new book explains how the rich organised to get their way.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in Britain, heralding a shift to right-wing politics. One of her notorious accomplishments was taking on the trade unions. In an extended struggle, workers’ organisations were crushed, along with the workers. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected US president and set about a similar path, taking on the airline pilots and winning. These administrations are normally seen as exemplars of a new approach called neoliberalism, hollowing out government regulation and unleashing corporate power.

            That’s the story I’ve heard for a long time, taking it for granted — until reading a new book by David Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich. Gibbs, an historian at the University of Arizona, studied vast numbers of primary documents, including manuscript collections, online archives, document collections, and memoirs. He arrived at a different assessment about the politics of this period.

            Gibbs focused on the 1970s, a turbulent period in US history, and concluded that the most significant changes occurred during the administrations of Richard Nixon (1969–1974), Gerald Ford (1974-1977) and especially Jimmy Carter (1977–1981). Including Carter seems almost sacrilegious. Normally, Republicans are seen as the party of business. Carter was a Democrat, the party of the workers, or at least of unions, and subsequent to his single term as president, he supported a range of progressive causes. However, Gibbs targets Carter as a key figure in the “revolt of the rich.”


Jimmy Carter

Background

Let’s go back a few decades, to the 1930s. This was the time of the Great Depression, and in 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected US president. Under his four administrations, and as a result of popular pressure, the government took responsibility for promoting full employment, regulating the economy, and introducing a universal pension scheme (called Social Security). This was called the New Deal.

            Gibbs calls the arrangements set in place in the 1930s the “class compromise.” It was a compromise between the interests of employers and workers, so that each received a “fair” return from their contributions to economic productivity. Corporate elites mostly went along with this. Although their power was somewhat curtailed, the US economy began growing steadily, guaranteeing regular profits. It seemed like a win-win arrangement, and many corporate leaders were committed to it.

            This all came unstuck in the 1970s. Profits declined, and inflation devalued assets held by the wealthy. Behind the scenes, some businesses supported a campaign to reduce government controls on business, aided by a group of free-market economists linked to the Mont Pèlerin Society.

Finally, Nixon was committed to a conservative economic agenda. Gerald Ford continued it and, perhaps surprisingly, so did Carter. Gibbs takes special aim at Carter for completing the unravelling of the US class compromise. In its place, the rich took control.

            Since then, the rich have taken an increasing percentage of the economic pie. In 1970, the richest 1% received less than 10% of national income. In the next few decades, this increased to more than 20%, while the wages of ordinary workers stagnated.

            Gibbs provides a careful and detailed analysis of how this happened. Along the way, he offers quite a few observations that require a rethinking of conventional wisdom.

            In the usual way of economic thinking, then and now, inflation is seen as a significant problem, and central banks see it as a priority to bring down inflation when it’s too high. Gibbs says high inflation is a special threat to the wealthy, because it devalues their assets. In contrast, most ordinary workers are not so greatly affected, because typically wage rises compensate for increased costs. Gibbs’ analysis has changed how I think about the continual obsession with controlling inflation.

            In 1973, the cartel of international oil producers called OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, dramatically raised the price of oil, causing massive economic disruption in oil-importing countries, including the US.

The “oil shock” is usually seen as completely out of the control of the importers, but Gibbs provides evidence that the US government was complicit in it. The Saudi government signalled to the Nixon administration a willingness to limit OPEC price increases, but this initiative was spurned. The reason? The Shah of Iran was a special US ally, and US corporations benefited from the Shah’s purchases of weapons. Also, oil company profits increased.

A planned revolt

According to Gibbs, the shift to the right initiated in the 1970s was not a natural consequence of economic challenges for which there was no alternative. Instead, there was a strong push for the changes, mostly out of sight. It included economists, notably Milton Friedman, who provided a rationale for “freeing the economy” from government control. It included expanded funding for thinktanks that tried to influence policy and the media. It included efforts to change public opinion. Corporate leaders still committed to the class compromise gradually came on board.


Milton Friedman

            An important part of the operation was forging a coalition. Right-wing operatives sought to bring new constituencies into their orbit. One of them was evangelical Christians, who became a new power bloc. There was no automatic connection between Christian doctrine and economic policy; building links was a political task and achievement.

            The shift to the right also involved foreign policy. The 1970s were during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was seen as the main military and political rival to the US. During the 1970s, businesses pushed for arms expenditures and anti-Communist intellectuals argued to end the policy of détente — mutual accommodation between the US and Soviet governments — and replace it with confrontation.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 provided a rationale for this switch though, according to Gibbs, Afghanistan had little strategic significance. In the process of militarisation of US foreign policy, the arms business and anti-Communist intellectuals were brought into the conservative movement.

            At various times during the 1970s, making changes that benefited the rich seemed necessary to stabilise the economy, prevent recession or otherwise stave off disaster. Gibbs argues that there were alternatives. These included taxing the wealthy, cutting military expenditure, and letting moderate levels of inflation continue. None of these were seriously considered.

Social movements

In most thinking about the 1960s in the US, the focus of attention is the rise of new social movements: students, feminists, environmentalists and others. These were movements challenging systems of power, and challenging them from below.

Gibbs redirects attention to a very different sort of social movement, one serving the rich, backed by wealthy interests, and operating not in the streets but mainly behind the scenes. According to Gibbs, this right-wing movement was crucially important in permanently changing the distribution of wealth and political power in the country, yet it was and remains far less well known. He calls it “one of the most orchestrated, carefully planned, and well-financed political campaigns in history” (p. 78).

            There were several reasons why this right-wing mobilisation was so effective. It was backed by wealthy interests and used a process called fusionism to bring together diverse groups, including businesses, politicians, intellectuals, arms manufacturers and evangelical Christians. The leaders of right-wing movement were good at strategy: they learned from their mistakes. And it was met with little resistance.

            The US left at the time was fractured, focused on several different issues, and not organised to defend collective interests. From the point of view of power-holders, this sounds like the old method of divide and rule, largely self-inflicted.

“The most noteworthy characteristic of social movements during the 1970s was the lack of strategic vision or long-term planning or any recognition that these things were even important. While the New Right and its corporate/evangelical allies were pursuing fusion in their quest to undermine the class compromise, their opponents on the left were moving in the opposite direction, dividing themselves into multiple factions that were unable to present a common front in defense of their collective interests.” (p. 97)

Whether or not you agree with Gibbs’ assessment of US politics in the 1970s, his analysis shows the value of re-examining the past and questioning conventional ideas. The rise of the right in the US is commonly attributed to the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who took office in 1981, succeeding Carter.


Ronald Reagan

Yet Gibbs suggests Reagan received most of the credit for the rightward shift due to his political style, and that Reagan cemented what Carter had started. Gibbs sums up:

“The United States experienced an extended episode of social, economic, and international crises in the 1970s, which were finally resolved during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. The end result of these crises was a redistribution of wealth and income favoring the wealthy classes, combined with renewed use of military power projection overseas. The decade produced a fundamental shift away from the regulated capitalism associated with the New Deal toward a new order of laissez-faire.” (p. 198)


David N. Gibbs

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Anu Bissoonauth-Bedford and Suzzanne Gray for helpful comments.

economics, health, politics, science

Covid control: a critical view

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

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

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

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

Polarisation

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

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

WHO’s advice

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

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

A curious consensus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dissent

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

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

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

Harms

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

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

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

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

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

Forgone options

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

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

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

Liberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Toby Green

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


Thomas Fazi

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

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

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

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.

military, politics, tactics

Outrage management in Israel-Palestine

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

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

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

Outrage management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Armenian genocide

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

The Israeli military assault on Gaza. 1: Reducing outrage

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

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

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


Gaza water well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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


Palestinian boy in Gaza refugee camp

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

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


International Court of Justice

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

Hamas’ attack on 7 October. 1: Reducing outrage

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

            Cover-up Hamas did little to hide its attack.

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas’ attack on 7 October. 2: Increasing outrage

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

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

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

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


Israeli hostages

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Conclusion

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

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


Auschwitz

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


Nakba

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

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

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

Brian Martin, bmartin@uow.edu.au

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

military, politics

Nuclear insanity

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

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

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

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

Nuclear war: the end?

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

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

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

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


Pine Gap, in central Australia

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

A scenario

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

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


North Korean ICBM

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

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


Submarine-launched ballistic missile

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


Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant

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

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

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

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

A few quibbles

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

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

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

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

The end?

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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


Can you find New Zealand?

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

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

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

Final remarks

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


Annie Jacobsen

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

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

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

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

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

Postscript, 22 June 2024

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

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

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

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

military, politics, tactics

Genocide reflections

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

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

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


Raphael Lemkin, the prime force behind the UN Genocide Convention

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

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

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

Rwanda, 1994

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Bangladesh, 1971

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

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


Yahya Khan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Kissinger and Nixon

Other genocides

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Madeleine Albright

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

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

Gaza, 2023–24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

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

health, personality, politics

The doubling danger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Covid matters

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

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

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

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


Naomi Klein


Naomi Wolf

Projection

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

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

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

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

Genocide and Jews

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

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

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

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

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

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


Rwandan genocide

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

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


Not the way Doppelganger ends

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

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

Further reading: two highly critical commentaries on Klein and Doppelganger

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

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

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“.]