An opening montage blends images of an atomic fireball, tanks in the streets, burning villages, crowds tearing down statues and leaders being saluted by military parades. Historian Timothy Naftali speaks through it all: at its peak, he says, the cold war touched every continent, shaping the decolonisation of empires and transforming domestic politics in the great cities of Europe, North America and Asia.

As Knappenberger acknowledges, the series is “insanely audacious.” It features original footage of critical moments, interviews with people who lived through worst of them, and commentary from around a hundred historians and political insiders, many of whom were directly involved in the crises. Lessons have been learned from documentary-maker Ken Burns, with talking heads presented as dramatis personae. It’s all about managing tone and pacing so that reflections from the present create depths of field for visually evoked scenes from the past.

Knappenberger achieves something of the Burns effect in bringing out an at-times unbearable sense of how these events were experienced by those caught up in them. Rapid montages conveying the scale and density of the upheavals are counterposed with sustained evocations of the experiences of those caught up in them.

Hiroshima, considered a purely military target by the US government, had a civilian population of 350,000. Prewar photographs show carts and bicycles in narrow streets spanned by arching lamps, a place of small traders and modest resources. People who were living in the city as small children deliver their testimonies steadily, quietly — though, as one of them says, visibly working to sustain his composure, “I hate to remember those days.”

Howard Kakita, aged seven, was on his way to school with his five-year-old brother when the warnings started. The explosion came as they returned to their grandparents’ house, which was obliterated. They dug themselves out of the rubble and fled the city through the ruins and carnage. Keiko Ogura’s brother told her he had seen something drop from one of the planes flying over, a tiny thing, which did not fall directly, but was caught for a while in the slipstream of the aircraft before arching down. Then came the flash, the loss of consciousness and the awakening to a world in which “everything was broken.”

The effect of the blast on human bodies creates scars in the memory. Corpses turned to ash on contact. The river was full of them. It’s hard to watch, and to listen to these accounts, as it should be. They are a necessary corrective to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, with its brief, stylised evocation of the horrors, firmly subordinated to the main story of an American hero and his tribulations.

Is it even possible to see such a disastrous train of events from “both sides?” That, surely, is the question we were left with by the cold war that followed. For the first time in history, two global superpowers were frozen in a deadlock of mutually assured destruction. The rush to catastrophe was paralysed by symmetry.

That, at least, was one version of the narrative. But mutually assured paranoia, the more complex and confusing side of things, was anything but paralysing. The belief in an enemy working in secret on unimaginably evil weaponry provokes an overriding conviction that your own side must secretly work on something equivalent or preferably more lethal. This is the “hot” equation behind the cold war.

With technological escalation seemingly taking on a life of its own, no one could comprehend the scale of what was being created. The American government’s messaging was all about survivability — backyard fallout shelters, “duck and dive” drill for schoolchildren — as if a small wooden desk might be an effective shield.

The language used at the time betrays a pitiful divorce from reality. A military officer flippantly describes a planned thermonuclear test as something that will make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers. The monstrous Bikini Atoll explosion, with 7,000 times the power of the Hiroshima blast, give its name to a new provocative style of swimwear.

“Institutional Insanity” is the title of the episode that deals with all this. It is as if the human brain simply isn’t coping with the consequences of its own activities. No one really knew what they were doing, comments nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, and testing became a kind of game for hyperactive experimentalists.

In interviews recorded before his death last year, Daniel Ellsberg recalls joining “the smartest group of people I ever did associate with” at Rand Corporation, men seen in contemporary photographs relaxing with their feet up on their desks, sleeves rolled up, smoking. But it is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, grimacing in close-up as he advises on enemy psychology, who gets the last word in this particular sequence. “That was a documentary,” says Ellsberg.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev took a leaf out of the Strangelove manual. With an arsenal that couldn’t catch up with massive overreach of his opponents, he sought to weaponise American fears by making exaggerated claims, mounting the covert Active Measures program, which spread misinformation through news media and other forms of public communication.

Against this backdrop, the achievement of Khrushchev’s ultimate successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, in defusing the collective psychosis was extraordinary, whatever his political failings from the Russian perspective. Polarised views of Gorbachev’s legacy remain one of the deepest challenges to the West’s comprehension of post-Soviet Russia. Putin’s pronouncement that the break-up of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the modern era has driven the new wave of military aggression that now confronts us.

One of Turning Point’s great strengths is its engagement with the complexities of moral arbitration, which are explored in the extensive commentary offered those in a position to offer genuine insights. Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, now a professor of international affairs in New York, gives an account of the secret speech of 1956, in which Khrushchev made public the scale of the purges of the Stalin era and condemned the cult of personality that had poisoned Soviet politics.

Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and other books on American cold war policy, delivers an excoriating analysis of the thinking behind interventions in Guatemala, Chile and Iran. Covert operations like these were one of the defining elements of the cold war; we get insider views of the activities of the CIA and its Soviet counterpart from dissidents now free to tell the tale and bring into focus some of the minor players who shaped events.

The cult of personality accounts for much of the evil in the modern political world, but an excessive focus on these figures is a problem in itself, as we are learning with the media response to Trump in America now. A personality-driven view of history glosses over the influence of those in the supporting cast — the secret service directors, spies, foreign policy advisers, diplomats, propagandists, journalists — and, it must be stressed, the voting public, who allow themselves to be swayed by flagrant manipulation.

Are we returning to the cold war? That question runs through Turning Point, culminating in the final episode on Ukraine. “History is not history,” says journalist Lesley Blume, “but we are in an ongoing tide.” •

The post Roaring back appeared first on Inside Story.

In the latter case, probably not. Yet it is in so many ways both the most intriguing first choice — who, after all, would expect the creator of James Bond to allude to the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Charles Secretan? — and the most portentous revision. The decision to eschew the clumsy homage and instead appropriate the dull name of an American ornithologist underscores Fleming’s ruthless pruning of anything that might unnecessarily adorn the instrument he created in 1952.

That creation, and the long story of its making, is at the heart of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an immense biography by Nicholas Shakespeare. Building on earlier efforts by John Pearson (1966) and Andrew Lycett (1995), the book was prompted by the Fleming estate’s willingness to give Shakespeare access to unreleased archival material that illuminates the real-life source material embedded in the Bond novels. That openness may also have been the estate attempt to adjust the dominant view of Fleming as a man who, where he is not defined by Bond, is derided as a misogynistic, alcoholic wastrel with a penchant for whipping who showboated during the second world war and spent postwar summers in Jamaica fantasising about British grit, foreign villains and sexual conquest in exotic locales.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man has plenty of whipping and wantonness, but it adds nuance to a life whose early years seem to have been spent in guileless and unknowing preparation for important wartime work — work for which he turns out to have been unusually gifted. In fact, it is the observation of one journalist — that Fleming, in this moment, with all his gifts and talents finally in use, was a “complete man” — that gave Shakespeare his title.

But what freight it brings to the book: an intimation of comprehensiveness underscored by its bulk and the vivid cultural history woven through it; an implied claim to being definitive bedevilled by the persistent haze of uncertainty around Fleming’s war record. Then there is the dramatic portent — that Fleming, even as he created the character that secured his fame, was somehow lesser or incomplete in those postwar years.

But perhaps that was merely a reversion to form. Fleming’s early life was monied but grim. His miserly Scottish grandfather was a banker who had survived considerable bereavement (three siblings had been buried before he was born, and three more, plus his mother, would follow by the time he turned fifteen) to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Robert Fleming’s greatest stroke of luck, however, was to be a constituent of a young Winston Churchill, who called on him for donations and provided in his friendship a glow of respectability for Robert’s sons, Val and Philip, whom Churchill nicknamed the “Fleming-oes.”

Val, elected a Conservative MP in 1910, fathered four sons — Peter (1907), Ian (1908), Richard (1911) and Michael (1913) — with socialite Evelyn Sainte Croix Rose, whom he had married in 1906. But his influence as a father was defined by his absence. After war broke out, he joined Churchill’s regiment, trained alongside the future prime minister, and was killed while serving on the Somme in 1917.

Robert Fleming is said to have bellowed in grief at the news, Evelyn painted every room in the house black, and Churchill wrote an obituary for the Times, a copy of which, framed and hung above Ian’s bed, gave the eight-year-old a nightly reminder of the greatness that he could never hope to match.

Val’s estate, meanwhile, gave Evelyn enormous wealth, but in terms that invited her to endure a lifetime of dutiful widowhood: should she ever remarry, the money would be immediately transferred to her children. She responded by elevating her dead husband “from an absent, pipe-smoking, deer-stalker to an iconic figure in the clouds with whom she alone enjoyed privileged communication,” writes Shakespeare, in one of many deft summations.

Controlling, insecure and extravagant, she played her boys off against one another, guilt-tripping them and blackmailing them with threats of disinheritance, pulling out all the stops to ensure they might never suffer the consequences of taking responsibility for their actions.

For Ian, this manifested most acutely in endless reprieves from failure and ignominy, and repeated diversions from paths that might well have led him away from Evelyn. He was pulled out of Eton ahead of trouble over a relationship with a girl and sent to Sandhurst with hopes of joining the Black Watch infantry battalion. Out less than a year later after contracting gonorrhoea in a London brothel, he was dispatched to the Tennerhof, a private school in the Austrian town of Kitzbühel, with freshly adjusted plans that he would pursue a diplomatic career.

Distance from Evelyn allowed promise to flower: linguistic versatility, some artistic ambitions, an engagement to a Swiss woman. But on his return his mother stomped on all these green shoots. After his failure to find a position in the Foreign Office she intervened to get him a job at Reuters, where he made a decent fist of covering a famous Soviet show trial of six engineers employed by a British machinery manufacturer. Then he was off again, moving at Evelyn’s insistence to join a firm of merchant bankers in the City.

Fleming had little to no interest in commerce and even less in maths: “I could never work out what a sixty-fourth of a point was,” he wrote. Yet he flourished to the point of becoming a partner at another firm only eighteen months later. The succession of environments into which he had been dropped had given him a charming veneer that allowed him to adapt and conform while keeping people at a safe distance. Even the jaded journalists he tried to scoop in Moscow had been disarmed to the point that they were willing to help him with his boss: one vouched that Fleming was “a pukha chap.”

The elite education and time spent among the privileged had also knitted Fleming into every club and network that was worth knowing about, giving him vast contacts and points of reference that he wielded readily. The “stockbroker” Fleming would talk to clients about investment strategy, wine and dine them at an appropriate club or hotel, and then turn them over to the pointy heads and bean counters in the office who could make the money flow. On the surface (and, to some, that was all there was), all this made Fleming a Wodehouse character: paid too much to do too little, all charm and glamour and self-obsession.

And yet, Shakespeare suggests, Fleming had by this time planted “miscellaneous seeds.” He could speak several languages, had solid journalistic experience, and was friendly with several notably crotchety press barons. He had contacts and networks across the financial, commercial and intelligence worlds. He even had literary credentials, via the reflected glow of elder brother Peter, who had become a successful travel writer, and his own efforts as a collector of first editions of books that had “signalised a right-angle in the thought on that particular subject.”

The book collecting might not have seemed helpful when war broke out in 1939, but the miscellaneous seeds sprouted once Fleming was recruited to the Department of Naval Intelligence as a personal assistant to its director, rear-admiral John Godfrey. His ability to deal with the press and with people — not least his irascible boss — made him indispensable. His myriad contacts became invaluable. His knowledge of distant worlds and their connections made him insightful. But perhaps most surprising of all was his creativity.

In this vein he was much like Churchill, whom Fleming grew to resemble with his polka-dot bowties and “daily prayer” memos (“Pray, could you find out…”). Under Godfrey, Fleming brainstormed all sorts of schemes, many impractical and far-fetched, to gain an advantage over the enemy. For every hare-brained idea — to have a fake U-boat captain send messages in glass bottles railing against the Third Reich, to create a fake treasure ship packed with crack commandoes (which sounds suspiciously like the Trojan horse) — there was something promising. Perhaps most notable was what Fleming took from a little-known novel, The Milliner Hat Mystery: the germ of what became Operation Mincemeat, a successful tactical deception of the Axis powers.

Placed at the near-centre of British intelligence efforts, Fleming had a wide ambit of activity that Shakespeare believes to have extended to a role in the creation of America’s foreign intelligence service. He was hardly the “chocolate sailor” some contemporaries called him. Godfrey certainly thought highly of his assistant. He called Fleming a war “winner” who was owed a debt that could never be repaid, and Shakespeare adds to this the findings of other historians: “It has taken time to realise how central Ian Fleming is,” says one. “What he was doing touched on so much of the war,” says another.

But ascertaining exactly what Fleming touched, and how lightly or heavily, is difficult. Even the claim to Operation Mincemeat is made via inference, analysis of stylistic tics and coincident timetabling. Secrecy is the issue. With friends and colleagues, Fleming was generally reticent about his wartime service; bar the blurred fantasies of the Bond books, he left few hints of his activities. Shakespeare adds to this the need for confidentiality during the war and, later, during the cold war, when archives were both weeded and closed to access. Then there is the material simply lost to time — damaged, forgotten, burned — and the records that are exaggerated or simply mistaken.

None of this is unusual, yet at other times Shakespeare strains to explain Fleming’s absences from records, or even to gainsay what exists and inveigle Fleming’s way in. “Simply because Ian is not listed in the minutes of a high-level meeting,” he writes at one point, “does not mean he was not there in the room.”

Enough well-documented rooms exist to make arguments like this unnecessary. The array of material Shakespeare proffers is enough to convince this reader, at any rate, that Fleming was an active, engaged, important and unconventional wartime player. While Shakespeare labours the point, it also serves to establish a key fact about Fleming’s literary efforts: while James Bond was depicted in a cold war world, with its dubious moralities and shifting principles, he was fundamentally a creature of the second world war and its starker divides between allies and enemies, good and bad.

The oft-made comparison with John le Carré has never been to Fleming’s advantage, but Shakespeare draws out so many connections, echoes and resemblances between Bond and the second world war that any comparison between Bond and George Smiley or between Fleming and le Carré seems like a category error. In fact, given Shakespeare’s attention to literary antecedents, the better comparison is between Bond and characters such as Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, Richard Hannay and perhaps even Sherlock Holmes — Britons who, with vigour, smarts and a willingness to do violence, save the world.

Shakespeare is a restless writer. As though to jolt the reader awake, lengthy passages of third-person past-tense narration suddenly crystallise into the first-person present as he tracks down a long-lost colleague of Fleming’s or a vague acquaintance or — in more self-indulgent moments — the descendent of some vague acquaintance. These moments fold into the story of Fleming’s life the story of the stories — of the Pearson and Lycett biographies of Fleming, and of Shakespeare’s biography.

Shakespeare quotes people crowing about their efforts to mislead his predecessors or their determination to shut up shop: “Poor Pearson,” Godfrey writes, of Fleming’s first biographer, “is like a famished man gazing, his mouth watering, into the butcher’s and confectionary shop windows and having to be content with a stale turnip (or swede) from the greengrocer.”

Shakespeare doesn’t conceal his similarities with Pearson, noting his own eager anticipation of new discoveries. But he adds in the dynamics of his interviews, poignant notes about the contingency of historical research, and observations about the dark material at the heart of the Bond novels.

In one scene he arrives in the rain outside a bungalow at Milton Keynes to interview the last surviving member of 30AU, a wartime intelligence gathering unit set up under Fleming’s influence and operating, effectively, under his command. Bill Marshall is ninety-four years old and feels a decade older. He tells Shakespeare he is a week early but beckons him inside anyway. “Later, I am glad I got the date wrong,” Shakespeare adds. “Bill Marshall will be hospitalised five days after our conversation. Had I come at the right time, I would never have heard what he tells me.”

Inside, Shakespeare listens as Marshall — who only days before has received the Légion d’Honneur and a letter from Emanual Macron praising him as a hero — confesses to murder:

On 26 June, Bill watched as German snipers fired through the windows of a hotel, killing one medical orderly and shooting another through the knee as they attended wounded American soldiers in the street. It was raining when the German riflemen surrendered. Another witness told Nicholas Rankin how not long afterwards he had seen their blood flowing in the rainwater.

Bill grows quiet, withdrawn. “I shot four Germans in cold blood.”

“What did you feel?’

“Nothing. How do you feel seeing two men trying to attend being shot?”

What happened next, whether he was reprimanded or Returned to Unit, he does not say. He has said enough. I think of another character who inherited Bill’s licence to kill. This was the compost out of which James Bond emerged.

Much as he had come into his own, Fleming was in an invidious position by the end of the war. Bound by secrecy, he could not dispel or rebut jibes about him being the “Sailor of the Strand.” He was carrying considerable emotional turmoil: his brother Michael had died in 1940 as a prisoner of the Germans; a serious romantic relationship with Muriel Wright, begun in 1935 in Austria, had come to an end with her death in a German bombing raid in 1944. He could too easily see a future in which the skills and talents he had wielded so well went to waste. He was hardly alone in this plight: in the United States, Allen Dulles described his return to the legal profession as an “appalling thing” after heading a spy network. “Most of my time,” he wrote, “is spent reliving those exciting days.”

Where Dulles went to the CIA, Fleming returned to journalism. In 1945, he took a position in the Kemsley newspaper group, handling a network of foreign correspondents. A journalist Shakespeare interviews recounts how Fleming sat in front of a canary yellow map of the world equipped with tiny flashing light bulbs — one for each man.

Shakespeare cautiously ventures that this might have been cover for continuing intelligence work, but the whole portrait has the tragic comedy of a Graham Greene novel: Fleming’s use of naval intelligence lingo with his journalists, his retention of a code and cipher book in his office, the derisive whispers of younger colleagues that his vaunted contacts were nothing but old duffers. Then, of course, there are the corporate machinations: Fleming took the position with Kemsley, which also owned the Sunday Times, on the intimation that he might become the paper’s editor and the hope that he might even get a seat on the company’s board. He also fantasised that the foreign news service he was managing might one day become a rival to Reuters — at which point Fleming would be a press proprietor in his own right.

If true, it was only ever to be a sideline, for alongside a salary of £225,000 in today’s pounds Fleming negotiated an iron-clad policy of two months of paid holiday each year. He would spend those months in Jamaica, at the rather uncomfortable bungalow he had built and initially named “Shamelady Hall” before choosing a name that harked back to a wartime operation — Goldeneye. Here, in daily bursts of 2000 words, he wrote Bond.

In Shakespeare’s telling, the novels came shortly after a burst of disappointments and disillusionments. Fleming’s hopes of advancement at Kemsley had vanished; his long-term paramour, Anne Charteris, had been divorced from her husband and fallen pregnant (again) to Fleming, necessitating a hasty marriage that neither of them much wanted. With fatherhood imminent, wedlock complete, he was looking back to a life he once had and could still have had — in intelligence, on one hand, but also in literature.

Signs of Fleming’s desire for this life recur in the book, especially during Fleming’s time attending the Tennerhof. There, according to Shakespeare, the youthful Fleming was steeped in European history and literature and imbued with ambitions to write a serious novel in the vein of James Joyce or Thomas Mann. He made attempts to act on those ambitions, planning but then aborting a co-authored translation of Paracelsus and, in 1928, self-publishing a volume of poetry titled The Black Daffodil only to become deeply embarrassed by it. “He took every copy that had been printed and consigned the whole edition pitilessly to the flames,” wrote one of Fleming’s friends.

A factor in Fleming’s constant withdrawals, Shakespeare argues, was his elder brother’s success at writing. “Of course, my brother Peter’s rather brilliant as a writer,” Fleming would say, “but I wouldn’t know how you set about writing a book myself.” In the postwar years, however, his attitude changed. One prompt was his belief that he could better his brother’s effort at an adventure novel; another was his sense that he would not be trespassing on his brother’s turf if he did so. Then there was a sense of resentment, aggravated by his failed hopes at Kemsley, as friends, acquaintances and other writers churned out thrillers and spy novels that, in many cases, claimed experiences and actions Fleming saw as his own to write about — the gag of secrecy notwithstanding.

Perhaps too there was a sense of how he might slip that gag: Shakespeare posits that Graham Greene’s difficulties with the intelligence services — it was felt he drew too closely on his first-hand knowledge — may have influenced Fleming to increase the fantastical elements of the Bond stories even as he drew on the real-life material of his wartime experiences and insights. “I think he wrote the books primarily because he had a great deal of knowledge of things like this within him, and he had to get it out,” says one acquaintance.

It is a conflux of influences that Shakespeare presents with considerable verve. He plays with the book’s internal clock, changes style and tone, moves into scenes and back out of them, and in doing so creates vivid juxtapositions and drama. The chapter on Bond’s first appearance on the page follows immediately on Fleming’s decision to marry to create the convincing argument that Bond was an escape for Fleming as much as for an exhausted postwar Britain:

Suddenly, as he floated over the reef [at Goldeneye], above barracuda he had named after battleships, Ian saw an exhilarating path back to bachelorhood — by creating a contemporary naval hero in the tradition of Drake, Morgan and Nelson, loyal to the Crown, who would reaffirm England as a world power, wipe out the shame of the Burgess–Maclean defection, and re-establish SIS as “the most dangerous” Secret Service in Russian eyes. And he would be a bachelor. “If he were to marry and settle down he would be of little value to the Secret Service.”

A chapter later, Shakespeare is looking ahead again, foreshadowing how Bond would consume Fleming. It was not only that Bond’s fame quickly came to define his author’s public persona; it was also that Fleming became reliant on Bond. Advised that it was no good to write just one book, that he had to “hit the nail again and again with the same hammer until it’s driven into the head of your potential public,” Fleming became a factory working on a one-year schedule, the brunt of the work to be done during a spell at Goldeneye.

Fleming went into this routine clear-eyed, seeing it as wholly compatible with his working life as well as a path out of financial difficulties caused by a spendthrift Anne. As he wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape during negotiations over Casino Royale, “I am only actuated by the motives of a) making as much money for myself and my publishers as possible out of the book, and b) getting as much fun as I personally can out of the project.”

But the fun, in Shakespeare’s telling, dwindled as the money poured in. Lawsuits over film and television rights, accusations of plagiarism, negative reviews and laughter from friends all corroded this late-life literary success. Then there was Fleming’s knowledge that, at some point, he would run out of material. Philip Larkin famously detected in the posthumously published Octopussy (1966) an allegory for how Fleming had used his war experiences as treasure off which to secure his heart’s desires — Bentleys, caviar, Henry Cotton golf clubs. It was acute insight that Shakespeare agrees with. “This was the draining exchange,” he writes. “Once Ian gave birth to Bond, he relied heavily on the hard-earned secret capital of the war. Each book was a different slice of stolen gold until the material ran out.”

The poor quality of Octopussy and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), also published after Fleming’s death, suggests Shakespeare’s assessment is right. But at play in the preceding Bond books too is a sense of Fleming butting up against the limits imposed on a writer tilling in a single genre. For Your Eyes Only (1960) abandons the novel form in favour of the short story, one of which — the horribly titled “Quantum of Solace” — eschews gunfights and villains in favour of a parable about marital compassion delivered after a disappointing dinner party in a manner reminiscent of Somerset Maugham. The response to this deviation was lukewarm at best.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), meanwhile, is unique among the Bond novels for being framed by a meta-fictive introduction from Fleming, for adopting the first-person perspective of a woman, and for its brutally sleazy and violent story. The book contains the most rounded and complex of Fleming’s female characters, but its reception was so virulently hostile that Fleming, taken aback, suppressed a paperback edition, refused to allow anything but the title to be used in the film adaptations, and went back to his safe patch with the Bond that followed, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963).

One might wonder whether Fleming still yearned to write something that his younger, more highbrow self would have been proud of, and whether he had come to believe that, thanks to Bond, he could not. If so, it is all the more tragic for being a knowing compromise signalled by the early change he had made to the draft of Casino Royale.

A homage to a nineteenth-century philosopher was never going to fit into that work, into that world, and Fleming saw it quickly. He slashed a blue line through Secretan and above it wrote a new name. His protagonist would introduce himself bluntly, almost monosyllabically: “Bond. James Bond.” •

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
By Nicholas Shakespeare | Harvill Secker | $42.99 | 830 pages

The post Grand days appeared first on Inside Story.

Labor had long endorsed AUKUS, but now a Labor PM was standing beside US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Rishi Sunak to announce how it would be implemented. The political symbolism was sharp; what had previously been endorsed by Labor was now being wholeheartedly embraced.

Soon after, former prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club to drop a rhetorical depth charge. He called the Albanese government’s embrace of AUKUS Labor’s “worst international decision” since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription. Suddenly the debate opened up, and since then doubts and criticisms of AUKUS — among them my book The Echidna Strategy — have barely let up. As former Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese put it during Adelaide Writer’s Week in February, the anti-AUKUS argument is now reasonably complex and sophisticated while the pro-AUKUS position rarely rises above platitudes.

In the two-and-a-half years since the deal was announced, we have not once heard — either from the Morrison government or its successor — what the order for eight nuclear-powered submarines is actually designed to achieve. With neither a prime minister nor a senior minister providing any kind of strategic rationale for the deal, the case for AUKUS has not advanced beyond clichés and truisms about “deterrence.” Apart from pacifists, everyone is in favour of deterrence; the debate is solely about how we deter, and on this point the pro-AUKUS side has barely engaged.

Still, for all the strength of AUKUS scepticism, it seems unlikely to have any perceptible impact on government policy. Foremost among the reasons is the fact that major-party support for AUKUS remains steadfast: neither Labor nor the Coalition is likely to move away from AUKUS because they have nothing to gain by doing so.

AUKUS was conceived by a Liberal-led government, and the Liberal Party typically feels that national security is its electoral strong suit. So, barring a major reversal in the practical implementation of AUKUS (more on that in a moment), it is difficult to see what they could gain by revising what they regard as a signature policy initiative. Former prime minister Scott Morrison recently said that history would record AUKUS as the best decision his government made.

Of course, it’s not unprecedented for subsequent leaders to walk away from policy stances championed by their predecessor. But Peter Dutton was defence minister when AUKUS was conceived so he is closely associated with the policy and will stand by it.

Is Labor support for AUKUS more fragile? A heated debate took place at the party’s national conference in September last year, but ultimately a resolution backing the initiative passed with a comfortable majority. Former Labor leader Kim Beazley was moved to describe AUKUS as a “core Labor value,” evoking a sense of grassroots support and deep historical resonance. Beazley called the conference vote “the most significant move in the party since the 1963 Labor Federal Conference,” which dealt with the establishment of the North West Cape naval communications station.

But there is reason to doubt the sincerity of Labor’s conversion. Before AUKUS, no senior Labor figure had ever campaigned for nuclear-powered submarines. Indeed, support for such subs was a fringe position even in the Australian strategic debate. Then, in September 2021, the Morrison government gave the Labor opposition less than a day’s notice before announcing AUKUS. Labor, fearing a khaki election, instantly threw its support behind the initiative.

By any measure, it was a lightning-fast conversion on a huge policy question. And it seemed to be based largely on political calculation rather than deep principle or historical affiliation. Beazley’s “core Labor value” declaration looked like an attempt at what American political strategists call “astroturfing” — political elites creating an artificial semblance of grassroot activity.

But even assuming support for AUKUS inside the Labor caucus is a mile wide and an inch deep, does that matter for the future of the project? Perhaps less than we might think. Major political questions are never decided purely on principle or on the careful weighing of policy alternatives divorced from party-political considerations. Politicians can change their minds, but they change them faster if arguments align with incentives. At present, that’s simply not the case.

Prime Minister Albanese has spoken openly about his plans to entrench Labor in office for several terms to guarantee its reforms can’t be undone (as was the carbon price) by the Liberals. To win successive elections, he and his senior ministers appear to believe that Labor should never give Australian voters reason to doubt its national security credentials. And the cost of providing that reassurance is, for the moment, manageable.

AUKUS spending is not expected to peak for some years. Of a total project cost of between A$268 billion and A$368 billion, the government expects to spend A$58 billion over the next decade, but with less than a quarter of that sum due in the first five years. In budgetary terms, therefore, the decision is easy. Why offer the opposition a stick with which to beat the government at the next election when avoiding that fate costs the government so little?

Labor doesn’t even have an incentive to encourage debate about the deal by having the prime minister or defence minister give a major address. Policy wonks want such a debate, but who gains? What powerful political force would be quieted by a prime ministerial statement? Critics of AUKUS are unlikely to be satisfied; supporters just want to see the project go ahead.

This reflects two things about the structure of Australian politics: first, the number of people who care about defence policy is tiny, and so government doesn’t feel an urgent need to be accountable; second, the number of key decision-makers in defence and foreign policy can be counted on one hand. Unlike in the United States, no alternative base of power exists in the legislature to encourage accountability.

But political incentives change, and this project will rise or fall on its practicalities. Once a steady drip of news reports about cost overruns and program delays begins, internal critics will emerge. (The latest worry concerns the capacity of US shipyards to fill Australia’s order while keeping the US navy itself supplied with new subs.) There are AUKUS sceptics in the parliamentary Labor Party, but scepticism will need to turn to disaffection and resentment. When ministers and parliamentary secretaries see their budgets sliced while AUKUS is fed, internal grumbling may begin.

What else could crack Labor’s AUKUS consensus? The most immediate threat, if he takes office next year, will be Donald Trump. It’s unlikely Trump even knows what AUKUS is right now, but if he’s confronted with its existence he may reel. Australians remember his blistering response when prime minister Malcolm Turnbull described to him a refugee resettlement agreement that his administration had inherited from Barack Obama. It was a testament to Turnbull’s deft handling of the call that the president didn’t renege on what he described as “the worst deal ever.” Goodness knows what he will make of an agreement that makes the US navy smaller so a foreign navy can grow larger.

Presently, Australia is responding to the prospect of a second Trump term in much the same way as America’s other allies — lots of fretting and crossed fingers but precious little policy change. The assumption appears to be that if Trump wins, allies are in for another rough four years before the situation returns to “normal,” much as it did when Biden replaced Trump.

That interpretation requires a good deal of optimism and a peculiar reading of recent history, yet it remains the prevailing view. It is remarkable to recall that Australia proposed AUKUS to the Biden administration just a few months after the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. Our government was evidently so convinced that this outrage, and the president who had provoked it, were aberrant rather than an expression of enduring change that they almost immediately proposed to his successor the most dramatic upgrade to the ANZUS alliance since it was signed in 1951.

While media and political attention is focused on whether AUKUS can be delivered, in the background lurks a strategic question: even if we can get AUKUS done, is it even a good idea? That’s the issue The Echidna Strategy focused on. Australia’s biggest strategic asset is distance — Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney — yet the AUKUS submarine project is effectively an attempt to compress that distance when we should be exploiting it. If China ever wants to project military force against Australia, let it traverse the vast oceans that separate us. There is no pressing reason for Australia to project military power to China’s near seas and onto its landmass.

Such arguments have no purchase on either major party right now, but the real job of books like mine is to open the “Overton window” — to make the unthinkable thinkable. When AUKUS begins to sink under the weight of its misdirected ambition, political leaders will look for new ideas. An alternative defence strategy exists that is prudent and affordable, not weighted with ideological baggage from either extreme, and based on realistic assumptions about the future of Chinese and American power in our region. •

The post Spiky questions remain for AUKUS proponents appeared first on Inside Story.

The Allies’ trial of Japanese wartime political and military leaders was intended to lay the foundations of a new, peaceful and democratic Japan by punishing the militarists who had led the country into a disastrous conflict. The notion that victors could judge the vanquished evoked controversy, both within Japan and internationally; yet in the late 1940s the pioneering Japanese feminist Kato Shizue could confidently write that “intelligent Japanese long ago decided that the punishment of the war criminals was inevitable, and they think the verdicts were just.”

Today, feelings are very different. Japanese conservative politicians (including prominent members of the present government) rail against what they label the “Tokyo Trial View of History,” which they blame for instilling a darkly masochistic view of the nation’s history in the minds of the Japanese population. The late prime minister Shinzo Abe was particularly emphatic in denying that the men convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East should be regarded as criminals. The seven who were executed for war crimes following the Tokyo trial — as well as others convicted and given lesser sentences — are among those commemorated in the Yasukuni Shrine, where right-wing politicians and some senior military officers go to honour the spirits of the dead. As political scientist Gary J. Bass argues in his monumental new book Judgement at Tokyo, “the Tokyo trial misfired and fizzled,” revealing “some of the reasons why a liberal international order has not emerged in Asia, despite the wishes of some American strategists.”

The paradoxes at the heart of the Tokyo trial began to be visible well before the International Tribunal opened its hearings on 3 May 1946. Bass’s book starts by guiding readers through the concluding stages of the Pacific war and the impassioned debates among allied leaders about the treatment that should be meted out to the vanquished. (US secretary of state Cordell Hull was among those who initially favoured summary executions of Hitler and Japan’s wartime prime minister, Tojo Hideki.) A central figure in the early part of Bass’s narrative is Henry Stimson, US secretary of war at the time of the defeat of Germany and Japan, who played a key part in creating the conceptual framework that underlay both the German Nuremberg war crimes trials and the Tokyo trial.

In Nuremberg and Tokyo, the wartime leaders of the defeated nations faced three classes of criminal charge. Class A was the crime of waging (or conspiring to wage) aggressive war; Class B covered the war crimes set out in the existing Geneva Conventions, including mistreatment of prisoners of war; and Class C encompassed crimes against humanity. The difficulties lay in Classes A and C. There were no legal precedents for prosecuting people for waging aggressive war, nor for crimes against humanity, and even within the victorious allied nations some leading legal commentators were concerned that the trials were imposing newly invented laws retrospectively on the defeated.

The horrors revealed at Nuremberg helped to embed the notion of crimes against humanity both in public consciousness and in international law. But in Tokyo the key charge (though not the only one) was the crime of waging aggressive war — an offence for which no one had ever been prosecuted before the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and for which no one has been prosecuted since.

As Bass vividly shows, unease and disagreement about the moral and judicial basis of the International Tribunal’s proceedings haunted the Tokyo trial. Even Sir William Webb, the acerbic Australian judge who presided over the International Military Tribunal, privately questioned whether waging aggressive war could be treated as a crime, though he managed to suppress these doubts sufficiently to concur in, and hand down, the tribunal’s guilty sentences on all the twenty-five defendants who survived the trial. (Two died during the proceedings, and another was found mentally unfit to be tried.)

A further obvious paradox of the Tokyo trial was the fact that Emperor Hirohito, in whose name the war had been fought and hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers had gone to their deaths, never appeared in court. By the time Japan surrendered, the US government had decided that it would be politically expedient to retain the emperor as symbolic leader of the new Japan. Despite protests from Australia, he remained immune from prosecution.

Judgment at Tokyo, though, is not a dry analysis of judicial principles and legal arguments. It is a vivid blow-by-blow account of the trial, filled with colourful characters and moments of farce as well as tragedy. The Tokyo tribunal, though dominated by the colonial powers, was more international than its Nuremberg counterpart. Its eleven judges represented the United States, Canada, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, China, India and the Philippines, and each judge brought with him (they were all men) his own experiences, professional training and personal prejudices. They spent their time in war-devastated Tokyo living an isolated existence in the Imperial Hotel, and relations between them were often tense. Chinese judge Mei Ruao took a deep dislike to Indian judge Radhabinod Pal; the British judge, Lord William Patrick, was derisively dismissive of his Filipino counterpart, Delfin Jaranilla. They were united, it seems, only in their shared aversion to the court’s president, William Webb.

Yet this is not a simple litany of fractiousness and failure. What the Tokyo trial achieved, in very difficult circumstances, was the collection of a mass of vivid and often searing evidence of the horrors of war, including of many conventional war crimes: among them, the massacres and mass rapes of civilians in the Philippines and China, the mistreatment and killing of prisoners of war, and the brutal forced labour inflicted on tens of thousands of Southeast Asians and of allied prisoners of war on the Thai–Burma Railway and elsewhere.

While taking readers through this evidence, Judgement at Tokyo also points out the silences: most notably, the absence from the trial of any serious discussion of Japan’s use of biological warfare in China. The US and Soviet authorities were well aware of this dark story but made sure that it was kept out of the trials because they were busy trying to obtain knowledge of Japan’s biological techniques for their own purposes.

Bass explores not only the events of the trial itself but also the subsequent destinies of the judges — particularly the very different fates of Mei Ruao and Radhabinod Pal. Mei, who had been appointed to the court by the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, decided hesitantly to return to mainland China in 1949 and throw in his lot with the new People’s Republic of China. Ironically, he fell foul of the communist authorities because of his fierce criticism of Japanese war crimes at a time when China’s government was trying to improve the country’s political relationship with Japan. He was publicly condemned during the Cultural Revolution and died soon after — only to be elevated to the status of national hero under current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whose nationalist rhetoric echoes Mei’s own insistence that China should never forget the wartime horrors inflicted on its people by Japan.

The Indian judge Pal, on the contrary, famously wrote a dissenting judgment that sweepingly rejected the right of the International Tribunal to judge the defendants. (Later, he also questioned the Nuremberg judgements and the reality of the Holocaust.) Pal’s lengthy statement of dissent made him the hero of the Japanese right, who feted him on his later visits to Japan and have cited his judgement ever since as justification for their own revisionist views of the war.

Judgement at Tokyo is based on a mountain of court records, government archives and interviews with the descendants of the judges and defendants, and Bass skilfully weaves all this together into a fascinating narrative. Despite the scale and scope of the book, though, there is one odd lacuna. It barely mentions a crucial counterpoint to the Tokyo trials: the story of the 4000-odd Japanese soldiers and military auxiliaries who were found guilty of Class B and C war crimes in trials held throughout East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, of whom almost 1000 received the death sentence.

As Utsumi Aiko and other Japanese scholars have pointed out, these were the most tragic of the war crimes proceedings, for many of those who received the harshest sentences were low-ranking auxiliaries — some of them drafted from Japan’s colonies of Taiwan and Korea into the violent world of the Japanese wartime military only to be abandoned to their fate by the collapsing military machine that had recruited them.

As Gary Bass shows, the Tokyo trial had far-reaching implications for Japan and its Asian neighbours. Its fundamental flaw was its shakily based attempt to define the waging of aggressive war as a crime. The spectre of double standards and retrospective justice raised by this concept has never been laid to rest. This in turn allows historical denialists today not only to dismiss the trial as “victors’ revenge” but also, by extension, to whitewash the history of the war and depict the Tokyo defendants as innocent martyrs to a just cause. And the growing influence of that denialism, as Bass trenchantly observes, risks shackling Japan to a narrative of the war that is both “morally odious and historically dubious.” •

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
By Gary J. Bass | Picador | $39.99 | 912 pages

The post Victors’ justice? appeared first on Inside Story.

He’d been born in Mississippi in 1968 and lived there in his formative years, so obviously he was a racist. He’d been raised in New Jersey, where he played centre on his high school football team, and then went on to play rugby in college, so of course he was brutish and crude. He had spent twenty-eight years in the US Army and had been in combat, so surely he had killed people.

Obviously, of course and surely, Brent Cummings eludes these reductive inferences. In An American Dreamer, Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the Washington Post, unfurls Brent’s inner complexities and outer contradictions.

Brent appeared fifteen years earlier as an army major in Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, an embedded account of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, and Finkel’s long connection to him has built the foundation for a work of gripping intimacy. An American Dreamer gets inside Brent’s skull, and those of his wife Laura and neighbour Mike, to capture the emotional landscape of contemporary American life from three diverging vantage points.

Brent is now working stateside at a college with his retirement from the army looming. His soul is troubled. He feels his country has lost its way in the last couple of decades, as if he’s come “out of one war and into another” against enemies on the home front. In a revealing slip, he remarks that the earlier time “felt… clean. No that’s not the right word… It’s slipping.”

What the pollutant might be is not clear to him. Trumpism is part of it. Despite being “probably more Republican than Democrat, probably more conservative than liberal,” he loathes the man for his egotism, ill-discipline and bullying more than for his policies. But the problem runs deeper: Brent has lost confidence in his country’s goodness and shared purpose. “Everything was fraying. That’s what it felt like.”

Brent’s concerns have more to do with meaning than with material or political realities. His belief in American virtue and progress is shaken, and while that abstract dream is disintegrating a real one disturbs his sleep. Not the post-traumatic image of desert horrors we might expect but a chorus of mocking voices from a profound darkness.

His sense that the ground has shifted under him is reinforced by a series of bafflements. He is shocked by the lack of support he receives from colleagues when he challenges the use of a confederate flag on an insignia, upset by activist attacks on his beloved military, appalled by the unthinkable assault on the Capitol. He finds himself in a vanishing middle where the mental habits of a lifetime, grounded in ideas of honour and fair play, have lost their traction. “Am I the one who’s wrong? Am I the one who’s missing something?”

Laura and Mike play second and third fiddle to Brent, but Finkel gives voice to them with the same empathic immediacy. Laura’s main register is anxiety rather than disorientation. She fears violent crime, feels a rising sense of menace in her neighbourhood and worries about the fate of her intellectually disabled daughter when she is no longer around.

Mike, for his part, overlays fear with anger, going full-bore MAGA while railing against the “socialist and communist” treachery of the Democrats. Why Mike, a quadriplegic of modest means, would set aside his early doubts about Trump and come to see him as his infallible saviour is a mystery. His political conversion creates tension with his neighbours, a microcosm of the severing of connections that has played out across the country.

Finkel is a wonderful guide to the inner terrain of his characters. He shows rather than tells, keeping their dialogue and the private thoughts behind it direct and relatable. Brent in particular is brought to vivid life through confrontations with events that confound him. Very occasionally these episodes seem a little forced, notably in the parallels between an encounter with the security wall on a visit to Jerusalem and Trump’s border wall. Mike’s characterisation can also appear ever so slightly two-dimensional by comparison with Brent’s, but the book as a whole is a triumph of compassionate and sympathetic attention.

Finkel inhabits Brent in a rare way, better than a life-long friend could hope to do. More a finely tuned recording instrument than a buddy, he makes no attempt to elevate Brent, hide his flaws or turn him into a morally instructive Everyman. He is an ordinary guy, standing somewhere on the slippery hump of the political bell curve, but he is also a creature of a specific time, place and tradition, not just a symbol of averageness. Witnessing his puzzlement at how things have changed, we might wonder how much his sense of loss comes from occupying a political centre that cannot hold and how much it is a sign that he is getting older and his generation is being unseated.

We hear so much about the growing polarisation of American life. Books like this one help to humanise the conflict, not only by plucking individuals from their political tribes but also by exploring the quieter emotional dimensions of their experience. Beyond the primal fears and hatreds, Finkel suggests, there are people seeking solutions to big, existential questions about purpose, meaning, legacy and value. An American Dream shows us that behind all the yelling and distrust and there is vulnerability and hope. •

An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country
By David Finkel | Scribe | $36.99 | 256 pages

The post “Am I the one who’s missing something?” appeared first on Inside Story.

This state of affairs came to an abrupt end with Russia’s all-out invasion on 24 February 2022. Not only did the fighting reach deep into Ukraine’s heartland, but life far behind the frontline also became militarised. Russia frequently bombards civilian infrastructure as well as cities in a type of terror warfare intended to break the will of Ukraine’s defenders. There is no longer any hinterland.

How long will this slaughter last? In August last year I warned against overly optimistic expectations, writing that “supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support.” Another six months on it is even clearer that patience and endurance will be needed if we want to see Ukraine survive and strive. We have to stop thinking in terms of short and decisive campaigns. This war has become a war of attrition.

Like Vladimir Putin, we need to think in the geographical and historical categories of what historian Timothy Snyder has memorably called the “bloodlands” — the vast territories between Russia in the east and Germany in the west, with Ukraine in the middle. This viewpoint expands the time horizon dramatically. The last three wars fought in this region were far from short campaigns. The first world war’s “eastern front” lasted from August 1914 to March 1918. The wars of the Romanov succession began in Central Asia in 1916 and elsewhere in 1918, only ending, depending on the region, in 1920, 1921, 1922 or even 1923. The German Soviet war — constantly invoked by Putin both in the run-up to the war and during Russia’s continuing cultural mobilisation — extended from the (northern hemisphere) summer of 1941 to the spring of 1945.

Hence, the normal duration a full scale military conflict in this part of the world seems to be three to four years. Ukraine has survived two so far.

But it’s not just the region’s history that suggests a long haul. Once battle lines are fully entrenched, conventional war takes time. The first world war’s western front was bogged down in costly trench warfare, with massive casualties but little territorial gains, for four years.

By the time the second world war rolled around, military specialists in all armies had found the technical means to overcome trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. And yet it took the Allies close to a year after the invasion of Normandy in 1944 to defeat Germany, a country under assault from the east by the steamroller of the Red Army, from the south by the United States, British Empire forces and the Free French, and from the air by indiscriminate attack by the combined power of the US and British air forces. Both Ukraine and Russia are in much stronger positions today.

Historical analogies are miserable predictors. But they matter when historical actors think in and through them. Putin is an avid reader of history, constantly pondering where he fits in. He thinks in categories and time-spans informed by Russia’s historical experience.

While he didn’t expect Ukraine to resist so effectively and survive the initial onslaught, he had long prepared his country for a drawn-out conflict with the outside world. One indicator is the effort his regime spent on making Russia’s food system relatively independent of outside supplies. At a time when everybody praised the virtues of globalisation and international networks of trade and mutual dependence, Putin insisted Russia should be able to feed itself.

As a recent study points out, this is the kind of food system you build when you expect a long-term confrontation that might throw your country back on its own resources. Putin embarked on it over decades, at a time when barely anybody in Europe could imagine a war of this magnitude on the continent.

Putin also entrenched his dictatorship, also an anticipation of war. First came the slide towards authoritarianism that began on the first day of his presidency. More recently came its acceleration. The death last week of opposition figure Alexei Navalny is just the latest escalation of a massive crackdown that began in 2021 and quickened with the start of the all-out war in 2022. Russia is now a full-blown dictatorship.

Thus entrenched in the Kremlin, Putin expects the democracies of Europe to have the shorter breath. The way Ukraine has become a political football in US domestic politics might well feed this expectation.

We need to appreciate that this is Putin’s theory of victory: to pound Ukraine with artillery and air attacks; to bleed the defenders white by sacrificing large numbers of his own citizens; and to wait until “the decadent West” loses interest and returns to business as usual, depriving Ukraine of the weapons and economic support it needs to defend itself.

As things stand, he might well be proven right. As I wrote a year ago about the then unlikely prospect of a Russian victory:

Winning the war would require Russia to ramp up its military production and mobilisation of manpower and increase the quality of its training and leadership. It could do that over the long run, just as the Soviet Union did during World War II… It could do so particularly if some of the countries which today are sitting on the fence decide to defy the United States, NATO and the European Union and circumvent or ignore sanctions; the United States reverts to isolationism; NATO disintegrates into squabbles between its members; and the European Union implodes among disagreements between old and new, and rich and less prosperous nations.

This pessimistic scenario has not yet come to pass. Yes, Russia currently has the whip hand. It has massively increased its armaments production, found ways around sanctions and continued to field large numbers of men while avoiding all-out mobilisation. Meanwhile, the United States has shaped up as the weakest link in the chain of democracies supporting Ukraine.

But Russia has not won yet. Ukraine still has “a viable theory of victory,” as two leading military analysts recently wrote. Its military has become expert at war by attrition, which it fights intelligently, minimising its own losses while maximising the enemy’s. Supplied adequately, it will become even better at this terrible art, denying Russia victory and eventually turning the tide.

For this to happen, though, Ukraine needs the continued support of the outside world: from NATO countries, from the Europeans and from friends further afield, such as Australia. But these friends need to appreciate that this war is now a war of attrition. And those wars are not won in a day or a season.

What about negotiations? A strong commitment to long-term support should unite all friends of Ukraine, no matter whether they think that ultimately the war will end in Kyiv’s forces retaking all occupied territories, if necessary by military means (the current official Ukrainian position), or in a negotiated settlement of some sort, with compromises on both sides.

There are indeed models for a negotiated peace which, while painful, might satisfy Ukraine and guarantee its safety rather than simply giving Russia breathing space to rearm for the next assault or the chance to insist on Ukraine’s unconditional capitulation. The much-discussed “West German” solution is one such proposal. It proposes that Ukraine be divided into a democratic west with some of its eastern territories occupied or even annexed by Russia. The west would be integrated into NATO and the European Union and developed with a massive aid program similar to the Marshall Plan. This is certainly not an acceptable solution for either side at the moment, but it might well become one once exhaustion eventually sets in.

The key term here is “eventually.” Negotiating now only aids Russia in its imperialist and anti-democratic goals. Forcing Ukraine to negotiate at a moment when, with delayed and insufficient support from its democratic friends, it is on the defensive amounts to asking a democratic nation to surrender to a dictatorship. Negotiations are best held from a position of strength. If not backed by the ability to resist and indeed to inflict damage, talks with a militarily stronger opponent quickly lead to a loss of territory and sovereignty.

The Ukrainians learned this lesson in 1918 when they signed the first treaty of Brest–Litovsk with the Germans and Austrians, who subsequently occupied the country and squeezed out food reserves to feed their own war effort. The Russian Bolsheviks learned the same lesson shortly thereafter, when, devoid of the fighting force they themselves helped dissolve, they had to sign a punishing peace with the Germans just to get out of a war they could no longer fight. And, in an instance of remarkable historical justice, the Germans learned the same lesson in 1919, when they could do nothing but sign the famously unfriendly Versailles treaty.

Ukraine needs to be helped to avoid such a situation and negotiate from the position of strength, if a negotiated settlement will indeed end this war. •

The post Russia’s war against Ukraine: a longer view appeared first on Inside Story.

When the International Refugee Organization sent him to faraway Australia in 1948, it probably sounded like an adventure. But the nineteen-year-old found himself doing back-breaking work in an isolated mine surrounded by dense Tasmanian forest. He would later tell government officials that it was “200 years behind European working conditions.”

After a year, Jakob decided he was finished with capitalist Australia and would return to the Soviet Union. Many of his peers were unimpressed by his decision — it even sparked a brawl during which he was stabbed. But his pro-Soviet migrant friends considered him a true patriot. Celebrating with them and a little drunk, the young refugee boasted that he would give the Soviets intelligence on Australia and go to Korea to fight the Western capitalists.

Unbeknown to Jakob, his audience of friends and acquaintances that night included two spies: a Soviet MVD colonel and an undercover agent for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO. Concerned by their informant’s report, Australian security officers began keeping an eye on Jakob. They followed him all the way to the docks when he sailed for the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with the West and full of praise for his Soviet homeland, he was considered a threat to Western security.

This is not the familiar refugee story told in countries like Australia: a story of desperate, hard-working migrants who gratefully become loyal contributors to their new homeland. Jakob had certainly been desperate — he became a forced labourer at just fourteen — and, for the most part, he had worked hard in Australia. But the war and displacement produced complex, shifting identities that didn’t simply disappear when the shooting stopped. And life in the West didn’t always live up to its promises.

The second world war had left forty million or more people displaced in Europe. Some wanted nothing more than to return to their homes, but for others, particularly those from now Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, the home they had left no longer existed. As the International Refugee Organization worked to solve this “refugee problem,” thousands of Russians who had lived through the war in East Asia were being displaced by China’s communist revolution.

Most of these refugees, whether in Europe or China, were stridently anti-communist. Many had good reason to be, having lived as exiles after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution or through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The views of “White Russians” and Eastern Europeans who considered their homelands “captive nations” would fit neatly into the West as the fresh storm clouds of the cold war built on the horizon. Increasingly, each Soviet refugee was a propaganda victory for the West: these were individuals choosing freedom, expressing hatred of communism by voting with their feet.

Some, however, harboured more ambivalent views. A few could even be called “Red”: communists, socialists, trade unionists or, most commonly, pro-Soviet patriots who were proud of the victorious Red Army and their homeland’s achievements since the communist revolution. “Displaced persons,” known as DPs, were resettled primarily in countries that now defined themselves as the anti-communist West, with the largest contingents going to the United States, Australia, Canada and Israel.

The lives and experiences of anti-communist DPs — the refugees who became model migrants in the West — have been chronicled in the rich scholarship on postwar migration that has proliferated since the 1990s. Yet Soviet refugees with left-wing views, DPs like Jakob who did not fit the model, have remained essentially invisible.

Surveillance and the persistent shadow of espionage were central parts of their lives in the West. Former or current Soviet citizens who were Russian speakers and left-wing sympathisers threw up multiple red flags for Western intelligence organisations, which often struggled to understand their traumas, experiences and intra-community politics. Many had been socialised in the Soviet Union, their political views shaped by complex lives in Europe and China.

In the cold war West, their ideas took root in new ways. Ideological convictions — that the world could be better and fairer, or that the worker’s lot was difficult — mingled with personal ones, shaped by memories of lost homes, murdered family members or forced labour. These ideas made them potential threats, forcing them to negotiate the incursions of state security into their everyday lives.

In many ways, it is because these refugees loomed so large in the eyes of intelligence agencies that we struggle to catch sight of them. The lives of “ordinary” people are often difficult to locate in official records, but that marginalisation was compounded by cold war anti-communism and surveillance.

Left-wing Soviet DPs had particular cause to recede from view by lying about their politics and backgrounds or simply keeping their own counsel. They knew they were being watched; most were aware that both the state and other migrants regarded them with suspicion; very few recorded their experiences. History maintains a sense of irony, though: the very surveillance dossiers that marginalised these migrants can now provide the historian with a window into their worlds.

Intelligence agencies are notorious for their secrecy and reluctance to reveal the details of even decades-old operations. When they do reveal information, it is typically on their own terms and in the service of their public image — take, for example, the declassification of the CIA’s Canadian Caper operation, which formed the basis of the film Argo.

In some cases, researchers can appeal to legislation. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act provides a well-trodden path to accessing FBI and CIA files. A similar provision in Canada allows requests for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s files. But both have, to differing degrees, proven limited in recent years. Britain’s MI5 is subject to very few access measures, releasing files only as it chooses. Further, its release policy targets higher-profile individuals, leaving the files of more ordinary subjects unknown and unknowable for historians.

By comparison, access procedures in Australia are quite liberal. A dedicated application process via the National Archives of Australia provides greater access to security files if one is sufficiently patient. These dossiers are still redacted, equivocal and frustrating, but they provide unique glimpses of a left-wing presence among the DPs. Presumably, similar migrants ended up elsewhere in the West.

Though they had chosen life in the West rather than the East, and in some cases had experienced the worst that Soviet communism had to offer, these migrants continued to align themselves with the political left. For the most part, they were not activists. They tended not to join Australian political parties and their ideas did not often fit neatly under labels like “communist,” “Marxist” or “Trotskyite.”

Their views were idiosyncratic patchworks rather than refined political doctrines, reflecting lives lived across East and West in turbulent times. Their experiences of Soviet terror and state support, Nazi and Japanese occupation, concentration camps and forced labour often informed their understanding of the twentieth century’s prevailing political philosophies more than books or manifestos. Their politics played out at street-level: in living rooms, church halls, night clubs, theatre groups, factory floors and discussions over glasses of wine (or vodka) at parties.

Though some refugees chose Australia specifically for its distance — the furthest they thought they could get from the Soviets — the cold war arrived there, too. By 1948, as the revolution in China compounded still-heightened fears of invasion by neighbouring Asian countries, anti-communism gained a firm foothold in Australia.

As the historian David Lowe has written, the cold war was “Australianised” with settler-colonial anxieties about maintaining white racial homogeneity and preventing territory loss. Australia saw itself as part of the English-speaking world but was surrounded by a decolonising Asia-Pacific region with a growing socialist and communist presence, and so sought the security of close ties with Britain and the United States.

One result was the formation of ASIO in response to American concerns about Australia’s lax security and a Soviet spy ring in Canberra. Domestically, the cold war flared in 1950–51 as Australian troops were shipped to Korea and prime minister Robert Menzies attempted to ban the Communist Party. A referendum on the ban saw the public drawn into an increasingly heated debate about communism, national security and civil liberties.

Similar tensions were sparked in 1954 by the defections of Soviet officials (and spies) Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov — an incident soon christened the Petrov affair. Vladimir Petrov had socialised extensively among Soviet migrants in Sydney and many of them waited with trepidation as ASIO investigated and a royal commission enquired.

Both moments were cold war watersheds for Australians, a time when debates about communism and espionage hit close to home. But they hit even closer for Soviet refugees as their homelands and the ideologies they had lived under and knew intimately were discussed in daily newspapers and nightly news broadcasts. Many of the refugees knew Petrov personally; the affair played out in their lives in distinctive ways, providing new, rich layers to our history of this event.

The Petrov affair’s most iconic and enduring moment — Evdokia Petrov, her husband having already defected alone, being escorted across Sydney’s airport tarmac by two Soviet couriers — was heightened by thousands of anti-communist Eastern European migrants. They turned out to protest what they saw as the forcible return of a terrified Russian woman to a dire fate in the Soviet Union. Many had themselves felt at risk of a similar fate, in Europe’s DP camps, and arrived with placards and raised voices to warn Australians and their government of the Soviet Union’s cruelty.

These anti-communist exile groups existed alongside and often in conflict with smaller communities of left-wing migrants. For some, joining a left-wing group related more to opposing diaspora norms — their vitriolic anti-Soviet rhetoric and strong attachment to the church — than cold war politics. Less conservative social mores and better entertainment often helped too, especially for young refugees. But whether they intended it or not, many were then cast into cold war conflicts.

Sydney’s left-leaning Russian Social Club brought DPs into the orbit of the broader Australian left and the Petrov affair. A corresponding Social Club was also set up in Melbourne, in 1952, though it seems to have been short-lived. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet embassy officials stationed in Australia, who were often working covertly as spies. A host of left-wing Jewish organisations were also established by, or drew in, postwar migrants, such as the Jewish Councils to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism in Sydney and Melbourne, the Volkscentre in Darlinghurst and Kadimah in Carlton.

Left-wing migrants often participated across multiple groups and sometimes became involved with Australian-run organisations as a result. The typical “communist front” groups which proliferated across the West — Australia–Russia societies (later renamed Australian–Soviet friendship societies) and peace councils — were also hubs for left-wing Soviet refugees. The Melbourne friendship society even had, for a time, a DP as chairman. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet officials but also attracted Australian surveillance, and thus, interactions with spies on both sides.

Most put down roots in Australia, establishing themselves in new communities and becoming neighbours, friends, fellow churchgoers and colleagues of both other migrants and those born in Australia. Some shifted between communities, burying their earlier years, and some became more conservative with age. Most were naturalised, giving up Soviet passports or statelessness in favour of Australian citizenship — though, again, they pursued this in order to access specific benefits, rights or stability just as often as a desire to become Australians.

With naturalisation, they became Australian voters. Soviet refugees’ voting patterns are near impossible to ascertain, but both Labor and Liberal parties tried to some extent to cultivate migrant votes. Few of the left-wing group (even if pro-communist) appear to have associated directly with the Communist Party of Australia, but some refugees joined or maintained connections to the Labor Party.

But not everyone settled down. Australia was not typically a refugee’s first choice, and some moved on to other countries, such as Canada or the United States. Some never made it past the two-year work contract, deported for absconding from their assigned employment. Others did their best to get themselves deported: one way to obtain a cheap ticket back to Europe.

The other way, for Soviets, was voluntary repatriation. The Soviet Union wanted its “stolen” DPs back and Soviet citizens who wanted to return could often do so at Soviet expense. Repatriation figures were only ever a tiny fraction of the tide of Westward migration during the early cold war — between 1947 and 1952, some twenty-eight Soviet DPs returned from Venezuela, twenty-two from Argentina, sixteen from Canada, nine from South Africa and only two from the United States. Nevertheless, they reflected the fact that life in the capitalist world could also be harsh, especially if you were a refugee.

In Australia, the two-year work contract was often a catalyst and some, like young Jakob, left soon after completing it, homesick and dissatisfied. Others remained longer, even decades, before making the decision to repatriate. China Russians could also return if they secured the appropriate paperwork, though the Soviets likely would not foot the bill. Nevertheless, some did repatriate.

But whether they chose to stay in Australia or not, many Soviet refugees lived through the early years of the cold war in the West. As these battle lines were drawn, they had to pick a stance: leave politics behind and remain quiet, become anti-communist “cold warriors,” or accept the surveillance and suspicion that came with life as a pro-Soviet “enemy alien.” •

This article is adapted from Ebony Nilsson’s new book Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

The post Red flags appeared first on Inside Story.

Among the various negative consequences of a vainglorious attempt to implant Western-style democracy on the banks of the Tigris is the empowerment of Iran as a regional force. Prior to 2003, Iran had barely recovered from a debilitating 1980–88 war with Iraq. Its efforts to spread power and influence across the region were constrained by war wounds and a weak economy. After 2003, however, Iran found itself the principal beneficiary in a Middle East power game gone badly wrong.

Overnight, it acquired an oil-rich client state, Iraq, on its western flank and a virtually unimpeded gateway for spreading Shiite influence across the region via surrogates including Hezbollah, its client in Lebanon, and an embryonic and ultimately lethal relationship with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Not all the fallout from the disastrous American intervention in Iraq was negative. The Arab Spring of 2010–12 raised hopes, all too briefly, that autocratic regimes like those in Syria would succumb to popular uprisings, partly driven by social media.

Over time, though, autocrats reasserted themselves. In the process, Iran’s influence continued to spread. In Syria, for instance, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bolsters Bashar al-Assad’s regime against ongoing civil conflict.

The upheavals following the Iraq war also helped to facilitate Russia’s re-engagement in the Middle East. Moscow has become a significant player across the region with relationships that extend from Syria, where a Russian intervention helped to save Assad’s regime, down into the Gulf.

Russia’s renewed influence includes what is effectively a security pact with Iran and a push to sell arms into a region already awash with armaments. Acknowledging the weakened and weakening US position in the region, Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have improved their ties with Moscow.

Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Russia, China and Iran have mutual security ties. They have conducted joint naval exercises in the Arabian Sea. China is heavily dependent on Middle East crude oil. It’s a far cry from 1972, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sent Soviet advisers packing and tilted his country towards the West, and America in particular. That year marked a nadir of Soviet influence in a region broadly regarded by Moscow as its sphere of interest — a nadir from which Vladimir Putin’s regime has sought to recover.

If the historian Barbara Tuchman had been alive to update her magisterial critique of American foreign policy, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, she would surely have included the Iraq invasion in her summation of misguided policies with far-reaching consequences.

This brings us to 7 October 2023, the day Hamas militants broke of a Gaza security cordon in which Israel had assumed, wrongly, they were contained. The massacre of combatant and non-combatant Israelis has had, and is having, metastasising effects across the region. In many cases, though not all, Iran is a common denominator.

This is not to say that Tehran doesn’t have legitimate security interests in a hostile Middle East environment. But its support for disparate players ranged against America’s client, Israel, is a principal cause of the current mayhem.

Without Tehran’s backing, it is doubtful Hamas would have been in a position to carry out its brazen 7 October incursion. Absent Iran’s military training, arms and diplomatic support, Hezbollah in Lebanon is unlikely to have become the force it is.

In Yemen, Iran’s nurturing of the Shiite Houthis enabled its client to withstand brutal efforts by Saudi Arabia to bomb its forces out of existence. In recent weeks, Tehran’s supply of cruise and anti-ship missiles and drones has given the Houthis the capacity to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, through which 15 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade usually passes.

Iran’s regional power play brands itself as an “arc of resistance” aligned with its Shiite co-religionists in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria (whose heterodox Alawite rulers represent a branch of Shiism), and with Sunni fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza. This is resistance primarily to Israel, but also more broadly to efforts by the United States to assert itself in a region where its credibility has been eroded by mistakes like the Iraq war and virtually unconditional support for an Israel whose treatment of the Palestinians fuels resentment.

Long gone are the days when Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state at the time, could broker a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Now Kissinger’s latest successor, Antony Blinken, shuttles forlornly between Israel and Arab capitals constrained by his own weak president and the prerogatives of American domestic politics in an election year.

The Biden administration has been shown incapable of restraining Israel’s merciless attacks on Gaza, which have left more than 25,000 Gazans killed, according to the Hamas health ministry, and vast swathes of the enclave uninhabitable. American cover, direct or tacit, for Israel’s brutal tactics against Hamas has further stretched Washington’s credibility in the region.

On the other hand, support for Hamas among Arab regimes is tepid, if not hostile. This attitude has been conditioned by concerns that Hamas’s version of radical Islam, incubated in Egypt in the 1920s, will spread and thus create an internal threat for those regimes.

Self-preservation is the prime concern of the hereditary rulers of oil-rich Gulf states, but at the same time they can’t ignore the horror among their populace at what they are witnessing on their television screens. The Biden administration’s resistance to calls for a ceasefire has strained relations with traditional allies, like Jordan, the majority of whose population is of Palestinian origin.

The continuing spillover from the generations-old conflict between Israel and Palestine has also intensified a shadow war far beyond the Gaza Strip. Evidence of this can be seen, on the one hand, in Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders in Syria and Lebanon and its elimination of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, and, on the other, an upsurge in attacks on American bases in the region.

Meanwhile, it is hard to see a realistic conclusion to the Israel–Palestine conflict as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s prime minister. For virtually his entire political career Netanyahu has sought to frustrate reasonable efforts towards a resolution of the issue. At every turn, whether in office or in opposition, he has contrived to stymie a process that might lead to a reasonable compromise.

Since his earliest days in politics he has been a sponsor of Israeli settlers in the territory occupied in the 1967 war. The number of settlers has reached a point where it will be virtually impossible to unscramble the settlement egg without risk of civil conflict in Israel itself. Some 500,000 Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank and another 200,000 in Arab East Jerusalem; many are militant Zionists who believe they are occupying the biblical home of the Jews.

Netanyahu has been a godfather of this process both from the perspective of his own ideological attachment to a Greater “annexationist” Israel and out of political expediency. In his continued efforts to hold on to power and avoid possible jailing for corruption he has aligned himself with some of the most extreme elements in Israeli politics.

His reluctance to countenance a “two-state solution” if and when the guns fall silent is consistent with his opposition over many years to an accommodation with the Palestinians except when it has been politically expedient for him to show some flexibility.

He is a prime minister on borrowed time. It is highly likely, even inevitable, that once the Gaza war subsides Netanyahu will be obliged to step aside. An inquiry into events leading up to 7 October, including intelligence failures, will almost certainly hold him accountable.

None of this is to suggest the Palestinians are blameless. A weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has contributed to a vacuum being filled by more radical elements. It might be an inconvenient detail, but if elections were held in the Palestinian territories today Hamas would almost certainly prevail, credited with its resort to armed struggle.

What then are the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians under the two-state formula discussed over many years? This is the holy grail of Middle East peacemaking and, like the holy grail, it is likely to remain mythical.

That is unless America and its allies in Europe and the Middle East are willing to impose a formula on Israel and the Palestinians. The only way that will happen is if Washington puts Israel on notice that financial aid, military assistance and diplomatic cover will be jeopardised if it doesn’t engage in realistic steps towards formalising a Palestinian state.

Since this is highly unlikely under any reasonable political scenario, the Israel–Palestine conflict will remain an open Middle East sore with the likelihood, even the certainty, that terrible events will erupt from time to time. As we’ve seen in recent months, these events — and the ever-present risk of a much wider conflagration — will test not only America’s resolve but also that of the international community.

The risks are manifest. In an American election year, with the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, a volatile situation in the Middle East may well become even more incendiary. While it is not in either America’s or Iran’s interest for the conflict to escalate out of control, that possibility can’t be excluded given both the circumstances and personalities involved.

We can but speculate as to America’s response to the events of 7 October if Trump had been in the White House, but it is most unlikely that he would have had a calming influence. Biden may have been ineffectual in constraining Israel, but Trump could well have made a bad situation a whole lot worse.

Then there are Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Both sides of American politics have said Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability would constitute a red line. In the event of his winning the presidency, would Trump resist pressure to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s facilities as it creeps ever closer to acquiring the ability to manufacture and weaponise a nuclear device?

It was Trump who abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. The single most irresponsible foreign policy decision of Trump’s administration, it undid an agreement aimed at persuading Iran that its interests would be better served by desisting from enriching weapons-grade uranium.

All this means that even when the Gaza war is over, a proxy war between Iran and the United States and its ally Israel will persist, made worse by an erosion in America’s ability to influence events or stop its principal ally from pursuing policies detrimental to Western interests more generally.

With the Middle East in turmoil, history tells us that once a thread is tugged from a regional tapestry things can unravel, and unravel fast. These are perilous times. •

The post March of folly appeared first on Inside Story.

In the absence of traditional naval warfare, the rationale for maintaining large naval forces has rested largely on the idea that trade routes must be maintained. Most of the time this argument has relied on an analogue of Lisa Simpson’s tiger-repelling rock — the claim that the very existence of large navies is the reason trade flows so smoothly.

Now, however, the catastrophe in Gaza has spilled over into a conflict in the Red Sea. The Houthi rebel movement in Yemen, backed by Iran and opposed to the United States and Israel, has begun attacking ships in the Red Sea, deterring many from travelling through the Suez Canal. One estimate puts the fall in traffic at 30 per cent.

Despite the claims of naval advocates, the Houthis were not deterred by the presence of the large naval force set up to counter them. Combined Task Force-153 was established in 2022 by the Combined Maritime Forces in the Middle East to “specifically address maritime threats in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.” News reports speculated that the goal of the task force was to counter the Houthi threat.

Evidently, this goal was not achieved. After unsuccessfully attacking Israel itself (in response to the invasion of Gaza, which in turn responded to the Hamas terror attacks, which in turn…), the Houthis began attacking Israeli-owned ships in November, and have since steadily increased their range of targets to include most commercial shipping.

The United States and Britain have responded with an impressive expansion of their naval forces, including a carrier strike group, Typhoon fighter jets and submarine-launched cruise missiles. Houthi drones have been downed and Houthi bases and military launch sites targeted with air strikes.

The effectiveness of this response remains to be seen. In the absence of ground forces, air strikes have rarely compelled an adversary to surrender. And the last attempt to keep the Suez Canal open by force, undertaken by Britain, France and Israel in 1956, ended in a humiliating fiasco which produced the opposite of its intended outcome.

But let’s suppose that the continued presence of this naval force is sufficient to deter or destroy Houthi attackers and allow normal shipping to be maintained. Is this benefit sufficient to justify the required expenditure on naval forces?

If the United States decided not to maintain the forces necessary for an operation of this kind, it could save the cost of one of its eleven carrier battle groups. With a naval budget of US$220 billion a year, that would be a saving of US$20 billion a year.

But what if the canal remained closed? When a land or air route is interrupted by armed conflict, the usual response is to take a longer way around. (The tragic consequences of not doing so were illustrated by the destruction of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014.)

In the case of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, the long way around is via the Cape of Good Hope, an extra distance of around 2000 nautical miles (or about 15 per cent) in the distance from Europe to Asia. About 12 per cent of world trade normally uses the canal, so the average shipping time for all goods would rise by around 2 per cent if the canal were closed. Even for traded goods, shipping costs are only about 7 per cent of the final price, so any impact on global inflation would be imperceptible.

We can look more directly at the costs by considering estimates that the cost of a round trip from Europe to Asia would increase by “up to” US$1 million. With about 8500 round trips per year, that’s a cost of at most US$8.5 billion. On that figure, even if the threat posed by the Houthis remains indefinitely and the current force manages to keep shipping flowing, the costs to the United States would far outweigh the benefit to global shipping.

But is protecting the shortest routes for global shipping so crucial an objective that it can’t be compromised, regardless of costs? It’s worth considering some alternatives.

Protecting global shipping is a form of foreign aid. For the cost of a carrier battle group the United States could nearly double its entire overseas development aid budget, saving many millions of lives. Alternatively, the money could be spent at home, for example on repairs to America’s crumbling transport infrastructure system or on making its schools safe for children to attend.

At least the United States is big enough and rich enough to afford an annual US$20 billion subsidy to the shipping industry. The same can’t be said for Britain, a smaller and poorer country experiencing a public sector crisis. Role-playing as a global maritime power is an exercise in imperial nostalgia Britain can scarcely afford.

Similar points apply to Australia, where we have spent around $500 billion this century on our navy, largely justified by the supposed need to protect vital shipping routes. We would be better off spending much of this money on improving our domestic transport system or meeting vital social needs in health and education.

More generally, the only use of military and naval force that should be treated as unquestionably necessary is self-defence against invasion. All the other supposed benefits — creating jobs, projecting power and protecting trade routes — should be subject to the same cost–benefit test as other expenditure. Many, perhaps most, military expenditures would fail that test. •

The post Maritime mathematics appeared first on Inside Story.

Even now, as Israeli forces push deeper into southern Gaza, the exact purpose of Israel’s approach is far from clear. Although Israeli leaders claim to be targeting Hamas alone, the evident lack of discrimination raises real questions about what the government is actually up to.

Is Israel’s eagerness to shatter Gaza a product of the same incompetence that led to the massive failure of the Israeli military to counter Hamas’s attack on 7 October, the plans for which ended up in the hands of Israeli military and intelligence officials more than a year earlier? Is wrecking northern Gaza and now southern Gaza a prelude to sending the territory’s entire population to Egypt, as proposed in a “concept paper” produced by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry?

Whatever the ultimate goal, Israel’s collective devastation of Gaza raises deep moral problems. But even judged purely in strategic terms, Israel’s approach is doomed to failure — and indeed, it is already failing. Mass civilian punishment has not convinced Gaza’s residents to stop supporting Hamas. To the contrary, it has only heightened resentment among Palestinians. Nor has the campaign succeeded in dismantling the group ostensibly being targeted. Fifty-plus days of war show that while Israel can demolish Gaza, it cannot destroy Hamas. In fact, the group may be stronger now than it was before.

Israel is hardly the first country to err by placing excessive faith in the coercive magic of airpower. History shows that the large-scale bombing of civilian areas almost never achieves its objectives. Israel would have been better off had it heeded these lessons and responded to the 7 October attack with surgical strikes against Hamas’s leaders and fighters in lieu of the indiscriminate bombing campaign it has chosen.

But it is not too late to shift course and adopt a viable alternative strategy for achieving lasting security, an approach that would drive a political wedge between Hamas and the Palestinians rather than bringing them closer together: take meaningful, unilateral steps towards a two-state solution.

Since the dawn of airpower, countries have sought to bomb enemies into submission and shatter civilian morale. Pushed to their breaking point, the theory goes, populations will rise up against their own governments and switch sides. This strategy of coercive punishment reached its apogee in the second world war. History remembers the indiscriminate bombing of cities in that war simply by the place names of the targets: Hamburg (40,000 dead), Darmstadt (12,000) and Dresden (25,000).

Now Gaza can be added to this infamous list. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has himself likened the current campaign to the Allies’ fight in the second world war. While denying that Israel was engaging in collective punishment, he pointed out that a Royal Air Force strike targeting Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen killed scores of schoolchildren.

What Netanyahu left unmentioned was that none of the Allies’ efforts to punish civilians en masse actually succeeded. In Germany, the Allied bombing campaign, which began in 1942, wreaked havoc on civilians, destroying one urban area after another and ultimately a total of fifty-eight German cities and towns by the end of the war. But it never sapped civilian morale or prompted an uprising against Adolf Hitler, despite the confident predictions of Allied officials. Indeed, the campaign only encouraged Germans to fight harder for fear of a draconian postwar peace.

That failure should not have been so surprising given what happened when the Nazis tried the same tactic. The Blitz, their bombing of London and other British cities in 1940–41, killed more than 40,000 people and yet British prime minister Winston Churchill refused to capitulate. Instead, he invoked the civilian casualties in rallying society to make the sacrifices necessary for victory. Rather than shattering morale, the Blitz motivated the British to organise a years-long effort — with their US and Soviet allies — to counterattack and ultimately conquer the country that had bombed them.

In fact, never in history has a bombing campaign caused the targeted population to revolt against its own government. The United States has tried the tactic numerous times, to no avail. During the Korean war, it destroyed 90 per cent of electricity generation in North Korea. In the Vietnam war, it knocked out nearly as much power in North Vietnam. And in the Gulf war, US air attacks disrupted 90 per cent of electricity generation in Iraq. In none of these cases did the population rise up.

The war in Ukraine is the most recent case in point. For nearly two years Russia has sought to coerce Ukraine through wave after wave of devasting air assaults on cities across the country, killing more than 10,000 civilians, destroying more than 1.5 million homes and displacing some eight million Ukrainians. Russia is clearly shattering Ukraine. But far from crushing Ukraine’s fighting spirit, this massive civilian punishment has only convinced Ukrainians to fight Russia more intensely than ever.

This historical pattern is repeating itself in Gaza. Despite nearly two months of heavy military operations — virtually unrestrained by the United States and the rest of the world — Israel has achieved only marginal results. By any meaningful metric, the campaign has not led to Hamas’s even partial defeat.

Israel’s air and ground operations have killed as many as 5000 Hamas fighters (according to Israeli officials) out of a total of about 30,000. But these losses will not significantly reduce the threat to Israeli civilians, since, as the 7 October attacks proved, it takes only a few hundred Hamas fighters to wreak havoc on Israeli communities. Worse, Israeli officials also admit that the military campaign is killing twice as many civilians as Hamas fighters. In other words, Israel is almost certainly producing more terrorists than it is killing, since each dead civilian will have family and friends eager to join Hamas to exact revenge.

Hamas’s military infrastructure, such as it is, has not been meaningfully dismantled, even after the much-vaunted operations against the al-Shifa hospital, which the Israeli military alleged Hamas used as an operational base. As videos released by the Israel Defense Forces show, Israel has captured and destroyed the entrances to many of Hamas’s tunnels, but these can eventually be repaired, just as they were built in the first place.

More important, Hamas’s leaders and fighters appear to have abandoned the tunnels before Israeli forces entered them, meaning that the group’s most important infrastructure — its fighters — survived. Hamas has an advantage over Israeli forces: it can easily abandon a fight, blend into the civilian population, and live to fight again on more favourable terms. That is why a large-scale Israeli ground operation is also doomed to failure.

More broadly, Israel’s military campaign has not deeply weakened Hamas’s control over Gaza. Israel has rescued only one of the 240 or so hostages taken in the 7 October attack; the other hostages freed have been released by Hamas, showing that the group remains in control of its fighters.

Despite large-scale power shortages and extensive destruction throughout Gaza, Hamas continues to churn out propaganda videos showing civilian atrocities committed by Israeli forces and intense battles between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops. The group’s propaganda is distributed widely on the messaging app Telegram, where its channel has more than 620,000 subscribers. By the count of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (which I direct), Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, has disseminated nearly 200 videos and posters every week from 11 October to 22 November through that channel.

The only way to deal a lasting defeat to Hamas is to attack its leaders and fighters while separating them from the surrounding population. That is easier said than done, however, especially since Hamas draws its ranks directly from the local population rather than from abroad.

Indeed, survey evidence shows the extent to which Israel’s military operations are now producing more terrorists than they are killing. In a 14 November poll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank conducted by Arab World for Research and Development, 76 per cent of respondents said they viewed Hamas positively. Compare that with the 27 per cent of respondents in both territories who told different pollsters in September that Hamas was “the most deserving of representing the Palestinian people.” The implication is sobering: a vast portion of the more than 500,000 Palestinian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four are now ripe recruits for Hamas or other Palestinian groups seeking to target Israel and its civilians.

This result also reinforces the lessons of history. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most terrorists do not choose their vocation owing to religion or ideology, although some certainly do. Rather, most people who become terrorists do so because their land is being taken away.

For decades, I’ve studied the most extreme terrorists — suicide terrorists — and my study of 462 people who killed themselves on missions to kill others in acts of terrorism from 1982 to 2003 remains the largest demographic study of these attackers. I found that there are hundreds of secular suicide terrorists. Indeed, the world’s leader in suicide terrorism during that period was the Tamil Tigers, an openly anti-religious, Marxist group in Sri Lanka that carried out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad — the two deadliest Palestinian terrorist groups — combined. What 95 per cent of the suicide terrorists in my database had in common was that they were fighting back against a military occupation that was controlling territory they considered their homeland.

From 1994 to 2005, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups carried out more than 150 suicide attacks, killing about 1000 Israelis. Only when Israel withdrew military forces from Gaza did these groups abandon the tactic almost entirely. Since then, the number of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has grown by 50 per cent, making it even harder for Israel to control the territories in the long run. There is every reason to think that Israel’s renewed military occupation of Gaza — “for an indefinite period,” according to Netanyahu — will lead to a new, perhaps larger wave of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.

Although the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has many dimensions, one fact helps clarify the complex picture. Virtually every year since the early 1980s, the Jewish population in the Palestinian territories has grown, even during the years of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. The growth of settlements has meant the loss of land for the Palestinians and increasing concerns that Israel will confiscate more land to resettle more Jews in the Palestinian territories. Indeed, Yossi Dagan, a prominent settler and member of Netanyahu’s party, has urged the creation of settlements in Gaza, where the last settlements were removed in 2005.

The growth of the Jewish population in Palestinian territories is a central factor in fomenting conflict. In the years immediately after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, the total number of Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza numbered only a few thousand. Israeli–Palestinian relations were mostly harmonious. No Palestinian suicide attacks and few attacks of any kind occurred during this period.

But things changed after the right-wing government led by the Likud Party came to power in 1977, promising a major expansion of settlements. The number of settlers increased — from about 4000 in 1977 to 24,000 in 1983 and to 116,000 in 1993. By 2022, about 500,000 Jewish Israeli settlers lived in the Palestinian territories, excluding East Jerusalem, where an additional 230,000 Jews resided. As the settlements grew, the relative harmony between the Israelis and the Palestinians dissipated. First came the creation of Hamas in 1987, and then the first intifada of 1987–93, the second intifada of 2000–2005, and continuing rounds of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis ever since.

The near-continuous growth of the Jewish settlements is a core reason why the idea of a two-state solution has lost credibility since the 1990s. If there is to be a serious pathway to a Palestinian state in the future, that growth must come to an end. After all, why should Palestinians reject Hamas and support a supposed peace process if doing so means only more loss of their land?

Only a two-state solution will lead to lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians alike. That is the only viable approach that will truly undermine Hamas, and Israel can and should unilaterally press forward with a plan, taking steps on its own before negotiating with the Palestinians. The goal should be to revive a process that has been dormant since the last negotiations failed in 2008, fifteen years ago.

To be clear, Israel should couple this political approach with a military one, engaging in limited, sustained operations against the Hamas leaders and fighters responsible for the atrocities of 7 October. But the country must adopt the political element of the strategy now, not later. Israel cannot wait until after some mythical time when Hamas is defeated by military might alone.

Those who doubt that a two-state solution can ever be reached are right that immediately resuming negotiations with the Palestinians would not reduce Hamas’s will to fight. For one thing, the group is an avowed proponent of eliminating Israel. For another, it would be one of the biggest losers in a two-state solution, since a peace deal would almost certainly involve the prohibition of armed Palestinian groups aside from Hamas’s main internal rival, the Palestinian Authority, which would likely enjoy renewed support and legitimacy if it secured an agreement that the majority of Palestinians supported. And even if a two-state solution is achieved, Israel will still need a strong defence capability, since no political solution can completely eliminate the threat of terrorism for years to come.

But that is why the goal now should not be to immediately put forward a final plan for a two-state solution — something that is simply not in the realm of political possibility at the moment. Instead, the immediate objective should be to create a pathway for an eventual Palestinian state. Although sceptics claim that such a pathway is impossible because Israel has no suitable Palestinian partners, Israel can in fact take crucial steps on its own.

The Israeli government could publicly announce that it intends to achieve a state of affairs where the Palestinians live in a state chosen by Palestinians side by side with a Jewish state of Israel. It could announce that it intends to develop a process to achieve that goal by, say, 2030, and will lay out milestones for getting there in the coming months. It could announce that it will immediately freeze Jewish settlements in the West Bank and forgo such settlements in Gaza through to 2030 as a down payment that demonstrated its commitment to a genuine two-state solution. And it could announce that it is willing and ready to work with all parties — all countries in the region and beyond, all international organisations, and all Palestinian parties — that are willing to accept these objectives.

Far from being irrelevant to Israel’s military efforts against Hamas, these political steps would augment a sustained, highly targeted campaign to reduce the near-term threat of attacks from the group. Effective counterterrorism benefits from intelligence from the local population, which is far more likely to be forthcoming if that population has hope of a genuine political alternative to the terrorist group.

Indeed, in the long run, the only way to defeat Hamas is to drive a political wedge between it and the Palestinian people. Unilateral Israeli steps signalling a serious commitment to a new future would decidedly change the framework of and dynamics in the Israeli–Palestinian relationship and give Palestinians a genuine alternative to simply supporting Hamas and violence. Israelis, for their part, would be more secure, and the two parties would at long last be on a path towards peace.

Of course, the current Israeli government shows no signs of pursuing this plan. That could change, however, especially if the United States decided to use its influence. For instance, the White House could apply more private pressure to Netanyahu’s government to curtail indiscriminate attacks in the air campaign.

But perhaps the most important step that Washington could take now would be to jump-start a major public debate about Israel’s conduct in Gaza, one that allowed alternative strategies to be considered in depth and that brought forth rich public information for Americans, Israelis and people around the world to evaluate the consequences for themselves. The White House could release US government assessments of the effect that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is having on Hamas and Palestinian civilians. Congress could hold hearings centred on a simple question: is the campaign producing more terrorists than it is killing?

The failure of Israel’s current approach is becoming clearer by the day. Sustained public discussion of that reality, combined with serious consideration of smart alternatives, offers the best chance for convincing Israel to do what is, after all, in its own national interest. •

The post Israel’s failed bombing campaign in Gaza appeared first on Inside Story.

But Kissinger’s pleasure was surely mixed with bitterness at the outpouring of vitriol from the anti-imperialist left, who have long condemned him as a war criminal who deserves prison rather than praise. Marking the centenary birthday, Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC said he wanted to talk about “the many, many people around the world” who didn’t get to live even to the age of sixty because of Kissinger. He should be “ashamed to be seen in public,” Bhaskar Sunkara and Jonah Walters wrote in the Guardian.

They and many others trotted out the usual charges from his days as top foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: brutally and unnecessarily prolonging the Vietnam war, bombing neutral Cambodia, trying to help overthrow a democratically elected leader in Chile, greenlighting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, abetting genocide in East Pakistan, winking at state torture and killings in Argentina, and more.

The former secretary of state has heard this line of criticism for half a century, and the evidence suggests that it stings. Deeply protective of his honour, he has typically reacted angrily to challenges to his integrity and intelligence. In early 1970, for example, at Johns Hopkins University, a student asked whether he considered himself a war criminal — presumably referring to heavy civilian casualties in the Vietnam war. Kissinger walked out and refused to speak there again for the next twenty years.

In later years, his reaction to such questions changed very little. What did change was his willingness to be put in situations where he could be asked such questions. Being grilled about “crimes” was something that happened only when Kissinger was taken by surprise.

In 1979, for example, British journalist David Frost shocked Kissinger by posing hard-hitting questions about the bombing and invasion of Cambodia. Frost suggested that the policies Kissinger promoted had created conditions that led to the Khmer Rouge takeover and the genocide that left up to two million Cambodians dead. After the first taping, an irate Kissinger complained long and hard to the top brass at NBC, who leaned on Frost to go softer on the famed diplomat in the next taping.

There is little evidence that his skin has thickened since then. In 1999, when Kissinger was plugging the third and final volume of his memoirs, British journalist Jeremy Paxman challenged him about Cambodia and Chile. Kissinger answered, testily, and then walked out. At a State Department event in 2010, historian Nick Turse asked him about the number of Cambodians who were killed in the US bombings. “Oh, come on,” Kissinger said angrily. When Turse followed up later, Kissinger became sarcastic — “I’m not smart enough for you,” he said — and stalked off.

Last month, when Kissinger sat down to talk about his hundredth birthday with his long-time friend Ted Koppel, former host of the popular television show Nightline, he probably expected a softball interview like the ones the American media usually serve him. But Koppel felt obliged to point out that some people consider him a war criminal. He brought up the bombing of Cambodia, intending to suggest that Kissinger had valid strategic reasons for supporting it. “You did it in order to interdict…,” Koppel said, heading to the explanation Kissinger has always given: it was not so much Cambodia that was being bombed, and certainly not Cambodians, but North Vietnamese supply lines.

Kissinger heard only criticism. “Come on,” he interjected in an irritated tone. When Koppel tried to press him on the price Cambodia paid, Kissinger again interrupted with “Come on now.” For Kissinger, the topic is not worthy of discussion.

As this exchange indicates, Kissinger’s belief in his own righteousness is unbudgeable. In his view, then and now, the bombing of Cambodia was a strategic necessity. He long claimed, falsely, that bombs hit areas “either minimally populated or totally unpopulated by civilians.” In fact, American bombs killed and wounded tens of thousands of innocent Cambodians who were simply trying to live their lives in their own villages.

It’s not that Kissinger wants to argue that the costs of his (and Nixon’s) policies were worthwhile. He prefers to ignore the costs altogether. To him, counting the lives lost, in Cambodia and elsewhere, is a distraction. What matters is that the policies he advocated, in his perception, prevented American deaths and led to a more peaceful world order that saved millions of lives — indeed, potentially saved humanity from nuclear conflagration.

Detractors obsessed with the costs are, in his view, disingenuous and even deranged. In the 1970s he sneered at anti-war protesters as driven by “self-hatred.” Dismissing their arguments as irrational, he has said that leftists just want to “feel sorry for themselves.” Those who talk about his alleged criminality, in his view, merely show their “ignorance.” If you question the bombing of Cambodia, he told Koppel, you simply don’t want “to think.”

Hurt and resentful at being denounced, Kissinger has as little empathy for his critics and their perspectives as he had for the Cambodians and others who bore the brunt of his choices. If he had shown anything other than smug indifference to the price paid for his diplomacy, he might have diminished some of the zeal of his tormentors. But he remains locked in a maximalist position: unwilling to express any remorse, he ensures that his antagonists see only his guilt. •

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Her causes are many and diverse, but linked by a unifying thread: always, Sylvie sides with the oppressed. For nearly sixty years she has fought for women’s rights, refugee causes, and for anyone whose treatment she deems unfair. Perhaps the best measure of her conviction is that she holds fast to causes, even at risk of personal cost.

Sylvie traces her radical roots to her Jewish paternal grandparents, David Leber and Rivka Szaladajewska, whose motivating creed was social and political change. Rivka was born on 26 September 1896 to an observant Jewish family in the Polish city of Łódź. She would later reject religion, and her family her, but she maintained a cultural and social connection to Judaism, working at the Grosser orphanage for Jewish children in the central Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski. Her fierce commitment to the politics of the left, at a time when Jews were among the most prominent advocates for social democratic causes in eastern Europe and Russia, was another point of connection to her Jewish heritage.

David Leber was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, on 10 January 1887. While the details of his early life are sketchy, he was motivated from a young age by the tenets of social democracy. He was schooled first at a yeshiva, but left religious education to embrace Bundism, the influential secular Jewish movement that agitated for social and labour reform.

Bundism led David to Russia, and trouble. The February revolution of 1917 saw Bundists and Mensheviks align in a union of social democratic parties. When the February, or Menshevik, revolution was supplanted in October by the more radical Bolsheviks, the Bundists who supported Menshevism became pariahs, dismissed by the new regime as ineffectual gradualists and enemies of the communist state.

Though not a Menshevik himself, David was damned by association. His link to the Menshevik cause appears to have led to his arrest and deportation to Siberia. An accusation that he had sought to assassinate a public official may have been the pretext for his arrest. Whether or not he escaped from Siberia or was released, he is thought to have been rescued from the Soviet Union on a British ship.

Now back in Poland, David found work as a waiter, and met Rivka. Worsening anti-Semitism prompted them to leave their homeland for France in 1922. Rivka was pregnant when they made their way west, and a son, Samuel, was born in Paris on 3 December 1922. Against Jewish custom he was not circumcised, and David and Rivka didn’t marry until twelve years after his birth, with Rivka keeping her maiden name. Her choice to be known as Rivka Szaladajewska was both a stab at patriarchal custom and an affirmation of identity. Others might have seen the Polish suffix “jewska” as a millstone, but not her.

David and Rivka became part of a Parisian left-wing milieu that included other Jewish émigrés, among them the Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, with whom they became good friends. John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were part of the same circle. David and Rivka brought their passions with them to Paris: they were united in their dislike of conventions for which they saw no purpose and in their commitment to social democratic principles and secularism. David continued to see these beliefs as inherent in Bundism: his experiences in Russia didn’t dim his enthusiasm for the Bundist approach to social change. A manifestation of his commitment to community and history was his involvement in founding the Medem Library in 1929, which is still the most important site of Yiddish learning in Europe.

David and Rivka were two of the thousands of Jews ensnared in 1942 by Operation Spring Wind, in which officials of the Vichy French state cooperated with the Nazi regime to arrest foreign and stateless Jews living in France. The operation was the first step in a plan to send Jews east to Auschwitz and their deaths. The two of them were arrested on 16 July in the infamous Vél d’Hiv round-up, interned at the Drancy transit camp in Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 24 July as part of convoy number 10. They were killed at Auschwitz, probably later in 1942, though when exactly isn’t certain. Rivka is thought to have taken her own life, throwing herself on an electric fence after she learnt that she was to be a victim of one of Josef Mengele’s depraved experiments.

Two years earlier, when the Germans marched on Paris, Rivka and David’s son Sam was a seventeen-year-old school student living with his parents in the 20th arrondissement. His response to the German advance was to cycle to the port of Royan on the Atlantic coast in the hope of finding passage to England. This plan failed and he returned to Paris, where he remained until November 1941, when David and Rivka compelled him to leave the city for Lyon in the zone libre, where he lived with friends.

German occupation of the zone in November 1942 prompted Sam to move to Grenoble, where he worked as a lathe turner before being corralled into the Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française, a national service scheme imposed on French youth by the Vichy state. Released from this obligation in mid 1943, he managed to avoid another, more insidious labour scheme — the Service du Travail Obligatoire, which sent young French men to Germany as indentured labour — by joining the Resistance in late 1943 or early 1944.

For life as a maquisard, Sam chose the stirring alias Serge Rebel, his new surname a testament to his task and heritage: Rebel is the anadrome of Leber. From David and Rivka he had inherited a commitment to the ideals of Bundism and socialism. He had joined the SKIF, the youth wing of the Bundist movement, in 1931, the year he turned nine. A strong anti-communist streak may have been another inheritance, though his opposition was fed also by his own experiences.

During the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, he had travelled to Spain to fight with the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist forces. He was turned away on account of his youth, but took from the war an understanding that communists had undermined the Republican cause by concerning themselves more with anarchists than fascists.

His dislike of communism hardened when the French Communist Party, echoing Moscow’s line, adopted a neutral position at the start of the second world war, a stance he thought amoral and hopelessly naive. Later, in the Resistance, he objected to the division of the organisation along communist and anti-communist lines as a needless distraction. In his thinking, communists too often missed the point of the fight. And the point of any battle was to act, not to posture.

In the Resistance Sam worked in intelligence and sabotage. He and his fellow maquisards couldn’t spare explosives to destroy railway tracks so prised them out of position, ensuring that carriages travelling the tracks at Grenoble, an important railway junction connecting different parts of France, would tip over. Precious explosives were reserved for attacking factories that sustained the German war effort. In one instance, Sam recalled, bombs were used to kill German soldiers, but more often their targets were objects rather than people, collaborators aside. For traitors, direct violence always seemed justified.

Sam served with the Resistance until the liberation of France. His rewards were the Croix de Guerre, citations for brave conduct and good service, and a bullet wound, sustained during a firefight with German soldiers in March 1944, which led to three months in hospital, a shortened leg and a permanent and painful limp. Several decades on, Sam was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which doctors linked to spinal damage caused by his limp.

In later years Sam mentioned his war rarely, and usually only when pressed. School students and Holocaust historians sought him out for interviews, seemingly surprised to find a decorated maquisard living in McKinnon in suburban Melbourne. Sam obliged these requests, with humility and a trace of bemusement. He had fought the war against fascism as a solemn and obvious duty, a position that precluded the shaping of recollections as personal achievement. The fact he was speaking in his third language, after Yiddish and French, may also have shaped his responses, which could seem blunt.

“Sometimes an action went wrong and people got killed and things like that,” he told two interviewers in the 1980s. Nazi collaborators, he added, were “interdicted” on their way to or from work. These answers, on first reading dispassionate and perhaps even callous, did not reflect the man. Rather, they hint at Sam’s lifelong and noble belief in the primacy of the collective cause over the claims of the individual.

After the war Sam returned to Paris, a city that had visited both kindness and cruelty on the Lebers. His parents had found blessed sanctuary there in the 1920s; twenty years later, it was the place of their betrayal. He met Madeleine Benczkowski, and they married in 1948. His new wife, also French-born of Polish Jewish heritage, had been born in Paris on 20 January 1926. Her parents, Herschel and Chaya Benczkowski, had emigrated west from Poland in the years after the first world war.

Herschel was murdered at Drancy in 1942. Madeleine, her brother Sam and their mother Chaya survived the war thanks to the people smugglers who spirited them from Paris to Lyon, where they lived under false names and Madeleine was able to earn money as a furrier’s apprentice. In Madeleine’s vocabulary, “people smuggler” could be a term of endearment and a pejorative. She knew three types of people smuggler — humanitarians, money-makers and “bastards” who betrayed Jews to Nazis. The Benczkowskis’ saviour was a humanitarian and a money-maker, having taken payment in jewellery.

Sam and Madeleine began their married life in Paris as tailors, making men’s trousers from home. Their daughter Sylvie was born on 30 May 1950. The next year they resolved to emigrate to Australia, their decision to leave France prompted by the Korean war and the threat of another world war. They considered Canada, but chose Australia on the advice of Rose and Leon Goldblum, Sam’s cousin and her husband, who were living in Melbourne and recommended the city as a good, safe place to raise children. Rose and Leon were Auschwitz survivors. A preference for a warmer climate may also have influenced Sam and Madeleine’s choice. The Lebers sailed on the Italian ship Sydney, arriving at Station Pier, Port Melbourne, in February 1952.

The family settled into Australian life in Grey Street, St Kilda, within a milieu that offered comfort and connections to the world from which they had come. Melbourne in the 1950s, and St Kilda in particular, was home to a community of French-speaking Jews from France and Belgium. In their company Sam and Madeleine found friends with whom they shared a common language and aspects of a common heritage. As for so many other migrants across time and place, such connections to the familiar were a sustaining tonic in difficult years.

Before the war, Madeleine had hoped to be an accountant, Sam an engineer. After the war, steady work and a safe home were aspiration enough. Madeleine sought work as a jewellery shop assistant but was rejected on account of her French accent, so she returned to what she knew, working from home as a seamstress. Sam worked as a toolmaker, and fitter and turner. He joined the Australian Metal Workers’ Union: the union movement, and the postwar Australian Labor Party, reflected some of his Bundist ideals.

For Sylvie, the initial contrast between life in Paris and life in Melbourne was less abrupt than it was for her parents. She spoke French at home and Yiddish at her kindergarten at the Bialystoker Centre at 19 Robe Street, St Kilda, which served also as a hostel for Jewish migrants and refugees from Europe. The Alliance Française, where Sam and Madeleine borrowed French-language books, was on the same street. Such was Sylvie’s immersion in this European milieu that she knew little English when she started at St Kilda Park Primary School. Daniel, her brother, was born in 1959.

***

If Sam, who died in 2011 aged eighty-eight, was an “activist,” he probably didn’t recognise it. His engagement with the political was not a conscious choice but the manifestation of a commitment to social democratic ideals; in his conception, actions gave honour and worth to thoughts. To be political, if that’s what others called it, was simply his way of being.

Sylvie has followed the same path, her activism inseparable from her work and passions. In this regard she is her father’s daughter. Madeleine, who died in 2015, was a quieter social democrat than her husband: she voted Labor and hoped for a society ordered on fairness and merit rather than money and privilege, but was not overtly political.

In 1979 Sylvie and her friend Eve Glenn formed Girl’s Garage Band, a seven-woman punk rock band with Sylvie on bass guitar, Eve on lead guitar, and Fran Kelly, not yet an ABC journalist, on vocals. The band became better known as Toxic Shock, the name a pointed reference to the bacterial syndrome associated with tampon use that at the time was harming and killing many women. The band’s 1981 single “Intoxication,” written by Sylvie, protested at the complicity of tampon manufacturers in the prevalence of the syndrome.

Through Toxic Shock, Sylvie could voice specific protest, rail against the patriarchal nature of the punk and post-punk scenes and the music industry generally, and express her passion for music. Give-Men-a-Pause, a women’s music show she hosted on 3RRR in the early 1980s, offered another stage to voice thoughts on life and music. In a 2015 article about the contemporary Australian popular music scene, she wrote of her enduring love for playing and listening to music, and her dismay at the persistence of the boys’ club that Toxic Shock strove to disrupt.

For Sylvie, music has been a passion, a motivation and, on occasion, a refuge from horror. In Queensland in 1972, some years before forming Toxic Shock, she was raped and very nearly murdered. She has written with compelling honesty of these crimes, the toll they have taken on her mind and body over half a century, and her determination always to fight back lest “the bastards win.”

Her response to the assault might be described as Leberian, for its hallmarks are concern for others and a remarkable and enduring capacity to resist. Initially she sought to shield her parents from the attack, worried that they, as European Jews who had lived through the war, had experienced enough anguish. Later, her understanding of the Lebers’ commitment to social justice motivated her to speak publicly about what she had suffered. A year after she was assaulted, she and a group of friends founded Women Against Rape, Victoria’s first rape crisis centre, housed within the Women’s Health Centre on Johnston Street, Collingwood. Women Against Rape supported victims in every way possible, while advocating simultaneously for legal change and community education.

Sylvie is a passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, the experiences of her parents and grandparents having taught her something of the pain and indignity of being denied a home. When Arne Rinnan, captain of the infamous MV Tampa, made his last voyage into Australian waters before retirement, Sylvie and other Melbourne members of the Refugee Action Collective took to a small boat so that they might approach his cargo ship and salute him for his role in rescuing imperilled refugees during the Tampa affair of 2001. Rinnan’s moral example elicited an idiosyncratic touch: to signal her admiration, Sylvie fashioned a placard decorated with a love heart. Love, Sylvie believes, “is a revolutionary emotion.”

Sylvie named her daughter Colette Anna — Colette for the pioneering French author and feminist, and Anna for a great aunt who survived Auschwitz. Colette is a social worker, committed to many of the same causes as her mother. She works to prevent violence against women, and argues for the rights of refugees, including protesting their abysmal treatment by Australian governments, Liberal and Labor. Colette is another Leber ratbag, which makes her mother proud. It’s in the blood. •

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Kurkov is right. Reading books about this war can have a soothing effect. Only once we look up from the pages that have captured our imagination are we propelled back to the awful knowledge that Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. Blood keeps flowing. People keep getting injured and killed. A country is being destroyed. There seems no end in sight.

Looking at the pages in front of them, historians have another experience as well. Trained to read for argument and to classify books into schools of thought, they begin to think about the books dealing with this war as part of its “historiography” — a corpus of texts engaged in a discussion with each other attempting to understand the past and its meaning for the present.

To see a historiography forming while the event it describes is still unfolding is unusual. Normally decades, even centuries, pass before historical schools solidify around a particular event. In this respect, the literature on Russia’s war against Ukraine resembles the historiography of Stalinism in its formative stages, but its historiographical schools are developing much faster in our present, pressurised environment.

Somewhat schematically, we can distinguish five schools of thought about the origins of this war. One group of writers sees the West at fault, and particularly NATO. Another blames Russia and the Russians, opponents of peace and democracy. A third group sees Russia’s imperialist past at the core of a war that expresses the legacy of a lost empire and the failure to overcome its culture. A fourth group, the intentionalists, focus on Vladimir Putin and his perhaps irrational, or at least idiosyncratic, motivation for waging war. A final group sees the war as a struggle between dictatorship and democracy reflected in Putin’s attempt to quash any potential challenge to his rule, at home or abroad. The war, on this reading, is part of Putin’s “preventive counter-revolution.”

There are, of course, combinations of these viewpoints. Blaming NATO can go together with a notion of Russia’s ongoing imperialism: given the latter, the argument goes, NATO should have abstained even more emphatically from expanding into Russia’s supposed backyard. Russia’s imperialism and continued quest for a great power status can be linked, in turn, to its hostility to Ukraine’s quest for democracy. Intentionalists, too, can see Putin as drawing on a wider Russian culture of imperialism, which can go hand in glove with a quest for dictatorship and therefore preventive counter-revolution.

Perhaps the most well-defined position in the debate on the war’s origins is the first: blaming NATO for provoking the conflict by expanding into Russia’s “sphere of influence.” This path has been taken most prominently by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. As critics of this view have pointed out, it has its history backwards. It was not when NATO enlarged into Eastern Europe that Russia became aggressive but when it showed weakness — by failing to agree on a response to the accession hopes of Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, for example. Moreover, it is difficult to see Putin’s aggression, “riddled” as it is with “irrationalities,” as some kind of logical response to a putative Western threat.

NATO-blaming has recently lost some of its dominance over public discourse. But it continues to be popular on the far left, sometimes amended to an opposition to both Russian and NATO imperialism. Beyond the extremes lingers the view that, whatever bad things happen in the world, “the West” must be to blame.

Historian Philipp Ther is clearly affected by such sensibilities. He feels “comfortable” in the company of “leftists,” he writes in the introduction to his latest book, and he feels that “the West” (whatever that might be) has lost its way. The multiple crises we encounter today, including the war against Ukraine, are part of a “wrong turn” in economic policy after 1989–91. “The West lost the peace” after the end of the cold war, he says, because it became self-satisfied and embraced unfettered capitalism (or “neoliberalism,” defined as the conglomerate of “liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, the reduction of state influence on the economy, and global financial capitalism”).

NATO expansion, then, is not at the centre of Ther’s argument in How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War. A social historian, Ther is much more interested in political economy than international relations. He flags in his introduction that he feels uneasy about NATO expansion, and at one point suggests Russia should have joined the alliance. But he hastens to add that his critique is “absolutely not meant to relativise Russia’s attack on Ukraine.” The latter “deserves the full support of the West and the entire world — otherwise Russia’s pursuit of a multipolar world order with a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe will instead lead to maximum global disorder.”

Elsewhere in his book, Ther declares Russia’s enduring “imperial legacy” to be the core cause of the war. The early 1990s might have been a moment to cast off the legacy, but it passed, first because of Boris Yeltsin’s shelling of a recalcitrant (and imperialist) parliament in 1993 and then because of the rouble crisis in 1998, “when most of the Russian middle class sank into poverty again.” The latter is something of an overstatement, as a middle class continued to exist thereafter, but Ther’s overall point is well taken: “Neither of these traumatic moments had anything to do with the expansion of NATO or the EU; they were domestic problems first and foremost.”

Rather than an outcome of international relations, Russia’s trials and tribulations were part of the global malaise Ther is exploring. His great bugbear is the failed prophet of the “end of history,” Francis Fukuyama, whom he sees as the chief ideologist of Western triumphalism; his intellectual hero is the sociologist Karl Polanyi, analyst of the “great transformation” of the long nineteenth century.

Like Polanyi in the interwar years, Ther argues, we find ourselves at the tail end of another transformative period: the one that ran from 1989 to 2022. This transformation had two aspects — post-Soviet transformation in the former Soviet empire and “late-capitalist transformation in the West” — and they were held together by a shared framework of “neoliberal globalisation.”

Far from being the end of history, this period was one of profound economic, social and political upheaval, with winners and losers dotted around the globe, both between countries and within them. The claim that unfettered capitalism would somehow lift all the boats, making us all more prosperous, happy and democratic, turned out to be a pipedream at best and ideological obfuscation at worst.

Instead came the global financial crisis, followed by the annus horribilis of 2016, with Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and the Brexiteers’ in Britain. Then the “one-two punch of the pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since 1945… brought to an end the era for which historians have not yet found a name.” In line with Polanyi, Ther proposes calling the period from 1989 to 2022 “the age of transformation.”

Transformation to what? We don’t yet know, but it might not be good. Overall, Ther is quite pessimistic, but he does hope that his exploration of the history of our present will help open up “new opportunities for a progressive politics and society,” a political thrust that fits in well with other recent attempts to reconstruct the social democratic project for the twenty-first century.

To Ther, this is an existential quest. Like the unfettered capitalism of the nineteenth century, he fears that the new age of transformation might lead to some kind of fascism. The pendulum, to use his metaphor, having swung all the way towards a neoliberal abandonment of state protection, is now swinging back the other way. But Ther’s pendulum, in a hard-to-visualise twist, can swing in two ways: “left towards democratic socialism, or right towards fascism.”

Does any of this explain the war against Ukraine? Not really. Ther struggles to make Russia and Ukraine fit his explanatory scheme. True, the economic crisis triggered by Gorbachev’s reforms and deepened by the breakdown of the Soviet Union “plunged much of Russia’s population into destitution and misery,” which is never a good foundation for a democratic polity. But the same was true for Ukraine, which became democratic. And while Ukraine’s economy remained sluggish, Russia’s has grown by leaps and bounds since Putin came to power.

Neoliberalism, then, is of little use as a scapegoat for Russia’s aggression. Instead, Ther evokes a combination of the preventive counter-revolution argument and the anti-imperialist paradigm. Putin’s goal, he argues, is “to rewrite the end of history — with the creation of a new Russian empire.” The “larger dimensions of the conflict” also include the confrontation between “an authoritarian system” (Russia) that has evolved into a “hard dictatorship since Putin’s second term,” on the one side, and a country (Ukraine) that “has continually moved in the direction of liberal democracy ever since the Orange Revolution, and especially since 2014.”

Ukraine is far more democratic than Hungary, an EU member. Its governments have repeatedly transitioned smoothly and peacefully after elections, “something that unfortunately cannot be said for the USA since the storming of the Capitol.” Putin’s war on Ukraine is “also a war on democracy,” Ther writes, a “declaration of war against the EU and a free Europe.”

By evoking imperialism, a global transformation of capitalism, and a systemic confrontation between dictatorship and democracy, Ther avoids the position of authors who find the origins of this war in Russia’s national character, its history or its culture. I have argued elsewhere against such views as ahistoric and simplistic. Mikhail Zygar’s recent magnum opus War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance, can serve as evidence of some of their shortcomings: it is the book of a Russian democrat, a Russian anti-imperialist and a Russian enemy of this war. Were the arguments about Russia’s national character as militaristic, imperialist and anti-democratic correct, he should not exist. And yet he wrote a book — a long and eloquent one at that.

Zygar is a Russian intellectual, and he knows it. And he’s an anti-imperialist. His book is framed as a long letter to his Ukrainian friend Nadia, at whose house in Bucha — the scene of one of this war’s massacres — he wrote much of his earlier book, All the Kremlin’s Men. “Nadia no longer speaks to me,” he writes in distress. “Because I am Russian, she considers me an ‘imperialist.’” He hopes his book will change her mind, and the minds of his compatriots: “Nadia, I am not an imperialist, and I am writing this book so that others will not be either.”

War and Punishment is made up of two, very different, parts. In fact, it is two books pressed into one volume. The first is a series of historical essays on major moments in Ukrainian–Russian relations that have been turned into myths in both Russian and Ukrainian historiography. They include Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s ill-fated alliance with Muscovy against Poland in 1654, which Russian historians have used to claim that Ukraine voluntarily subjugated itself under Moscow’s tsars; Ivan Mazepa’s alliance with Sweden against Peter the Great in 1708, which was declared a “betrayal” by Russian imperialists; Catherine the Great’s destruction of the remnants of Cossack Freedom; the life and work of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet of the nineteenth century; the Ukrainian revolution and Ukraine’s independent state at the end of the first world war; the Great Famine, or Holodomor, of the early 1930s; and nationalist resistance against German and Soviet occupation during the second world war.

Zygar provides a fresh and readable account of the historical background of each of these episodes and how they persist as anti-Ukrainian myths in Russian historiography.

Like anti-Russian authors, then, Zygar is well aware of the imperialist mainstream of Russian culture. His book is an attempt both to condemn it and to reconstruct, or strengthen, its anti-imperialist counter-current. Like anti-fascist German intellectuals after 1933, and for similar reasons, he is scathing about the culture in which he grew up:

Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war. It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labour. We failed to spot just how deadly the very idea of Russia as a “great empire” was… We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, “great Russian culture” belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.

But his reaction is not to treat Russia as some kind of historical anomaly but to change what it means to be a Russian. “Russia as an empire has been consigned to the past, as a direct and irreversible consequence of the war,” he writes. What remains, however, is imperialism, a mindset, an emotional state, that needs to change, not just because of what it does to others, but also because of how it deforms Russia and the Russians:

Imperial history is our disease; it’s inherently addictive. And the withdrawal symptoms will hurt. But this is inevitable. We have to return to reality and realise what we’ve done.

We have to learn this lesson. To stop believing in our own uniqueness. To stop being proud of our vast territory. To stop thinking we’re special. To stop imagining ourselves as the centre of the world, its conscience, its source of spirituality. It’s all bunk.

Decolonising the Russian mind means democratising the country. Or, put the other way, democratisation can only succeed with the defeat of the imperialist mindset, which legitimises the subjugation of citizens as subjects:

We must strip the state of the right to impose its own view of the past on us. We have to roll up our sleeves and completely reinterpret our history, or rather the history of the peoples who fell victim to the empire…

Looking back, we see a horrific sight; our ancestors, indoctrinated to believe they were victors, were themselves victims. They were forced to kill, to rejoice in the killing, to take pride in the killing. And they were good at it. They were proud; they got high; they wrote beautiful poems, songs, and books glorifying blood and violence, the crunching of bones. And they forgot it was their own blood, their own bones.

This position is a radical departure from Russian liberal thought, both past and present, which often remained deeply imperialist (and racist), while espousing individual autonomy and democratic governance for Russians. At the same time it builds on anti-imperial Russian thinkers and the work of critical historians working, for example, in the now illegal organisation Memorial.

The second part of Zygar’s book is very different. It tells an integrated story, with a huge number of characters, reminiscent of the big Russian novels the title alludes to. This story begins in 1991 and ends in the present. While readers with little background in Russian and Ukrainian history will benefit greatly from the punchy and often inspired historical vignettes of the first part, they will likely get lost in the details of the second. It provides political history in its purest form: a tangled web of personalities and the relations between them; a history of power, corruption, loyalty and betrayal; and a history of powerful men and women: politicians and powerbrokers, oligarchs and gangsters, businesspeople and soldiers. In between, we learn about the unlikely rise of the comedian-turned-politician-turned-wartime-leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

This focus on personalities, their relations and the complex history of events over three decades — the same decades covered by Ther’s great transformation — sits somewhat uneasily with the framing of the book as an exploration of Russian imperialism. Given that many actors in Ukraine also pursued their own interests, connected to Russia as much as to Ukraine, the emergent story of oligarchic politics is much more messy than the subtitle of the book suggests: this is not just a story of Russian oppression and Ukrainian resistance.

When it comes to explaining the outbreak of the all-out war in 2022, Zygar is an intentionalist: the fourth emergent school of the history of this war. Intentionalists focus on the decision-makers and their motives. My own recent book, informed in many ways by Zygar’s earlier work, was intentionalist in this regard: while I saw, again like Zygar, Russian imperialism as one of the underlying structural causes, I also argued that the timing of the invasion becomes intelligible only when we understand that Putin, his seventieth birthday approaching, was looking for a legacy. He had spent the Covid years in splendid isolation, stewing in his own juices and reading Russian imperialist history. He wanted to get into the history books as an empire builder alongside Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin.

Zygar tells a similar story, but he sees Putin driven less by his own historical ambition than by domestic politics. Spooked by the failed Belarusian revolution of 2020–21, the Russian president decided to remove the most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. Putin’s agents poisoned Navalny on 20 August 2020 but the attempt on his life failed. Evacuated to Germany, Navalny launched a counterattack: a YouTube video with the results of his team’s investigation into the poisoning, which was watched by some twenty million people at the time.

Navalny returned to Russia on 17 January 2021, triggering anti-regime protests and his own arrest. Two days later his team released a video about a private palace owned by Putin on the Black Sea coast. “This revelation,” writes Zygar, “strikes perhaps the most powerful blow to Putin during his entire reign. The video is watched by 120 million people, that is, almost the entire adult population of Russia.” Demonstrations have to be clubbed out of existence “Belarus-style.” The “damage to Putin’s credibility is colossal,” and he fears losing control. It is in this context, Zygar argues, that Putin’s administration is beginning to hatch new war plans: Ukraine can serve as the successful little war that saves Putin’s rule.

This is why Putin returns to history and, with the help of his former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, writes his notorious July 2021 essay on the alleged historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians — the historical treatise that part one of Zygar’s book is trying to counter. It is a historical justification for the coming war, but not its origin. The origin is the attempt to forestall revolution at home.

Here, then, Zygar partakes of the final emerging school of thought on the origins of this war: that it is an attempt at preventive counter-revolution. As the Australian political scientist Robert Horvath has argued, Putin has long attempted to immunise his regime against the “colour revolutions” that seemed to be breaking out periodically both in Russia’s immediate vicinity and further afield.

One way to link this anti-revolutionary quest to aggression against Ukraine is to see Ukraine as a vibrant democracy at Russia’s doorstep and hence an example of what could be for the domestic opposition. The problem with this interpretation is that there was no renewed democratic revolution in Kyiv in 2022, and hence no reason to quash it.

Zygar’s interpretation is closer to Horvath’s original reading: Putin went to war not because Ukraine posed a democratic threat to his rule but because he faced a democratic threat at home. The war was a distraction: an attempt to reignite the imperialist jingoism of the Crimea annexation of 2014 that propelled Putin’s approval ratings upwards.

Two interpretive problems remain. For one, Putin didn’t order the invasion when he needed the distraction but well after the domestic crisis had passed. The 2021 protests were well and truly over by the time he published his Ukraine manifesto in the middle of that year. By early 2022, when he sent in his troops, there was no challenge to his regime.

Second, as Zygar documents himself, the war plans were hatched in secret. If the regime as a whole was under threat and the war was part of an attempt to prevent revolution, it is hardly credible that even Putin’s closest advisers were not aware of the war plans even at the eve of the invasion.

Be that as it may: Putin’s invasion on 24 February 2022 started a new historical epoch. As Ther points out, that might well be true for the globe as a whole but it is certainly true for Russia and Ukraine. At the centre of this new epoch is the war, its history being written as events unfold.

We already have military history in the more narrow sense of the term: an appreciation of unfolding events at the frontline; analyses of the technical aspects of the fighting, the evolution of tactics and weaponry; and a focus on what lessons professional soldiers can learn from this fighting. More readable for non-specialists are initial narrative accounts of this war. Among the steady stream of these, some are penned by historians but more by journalists. The latest addition is Andrew Harding’s A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine, an account of the battle of Voznesensk in March 2022.

Harding’s slim volume is a gem. A masterpiece of journalistic storytelling, it has the qualities of a good novella. It may be the most readable book about this war published to date. Based on interviews with some dozen survivors of the battle — soldiers and civilians, men and women, Russians and Ukrainians — the book tells a tale of survival and resistance on Ukraine’s side as well as aggression and frustration on Russia’s. It also explores the sometimes unclear loyalties, and indeed identities, of both Russians and Ukrainians, and doesn’t shy away from unsentimental depictions of war crimes.

Harding’s book thus explores some of the complexities of the real history of this war without falling into relativism: it is clear that Harding’s sympathies are with the defenders rather than the aggressors and that he doesn’t find it difficult to distinguish between the two. He leaves us with the despondent nightmares of his interviewees. They are haunted, he writes, “by the notion that this conflict may never end, and by the fear that Russia’s capacity to absorb suffering and its unflinching willingness to continue inflicting it will eventually enable it to grind out some kind of victory.”

As Ther warns, such an outcome would be catastrophic. It can be avoided if Ukraine’s friends in what is left of the democratic world stay the course. The biggest threat to Ukraine’s independence today derives from phantasies that this war might be stopped if Russia were to be accommodated by reasonable diplomacy. As Zygar notes, Russia in its current configuration cannot be accommodated. Defeat, not victory, might set Russia on the path Zygar proclaims with grim optimism: “Future generations of Russians will remember with horror and shame the war that Putin unleashed. They will marvel at how archaic hubris came to dominate the minds of twenty-first-century people. And they will not tread the same path if we, their ancestors, bear the punishment today.” •

How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War
By Philipp Ther | Translated by Jessica Spengler | Polity Press | $36.95 | 304 pages

War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance
By Mikhail Zygar | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | $34.95 | 424 pages

A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine
By Andrew Harding | Bonnier | $32.99 | 160 pages

The post Writing the history of the present appeared first on Inside Story.

Remarkably, that report was written not in February 2022, on the eve of the full-scale Russian invasion predicted by Western intelligence, but a century earlier, on 7 February 1922. The coincidence underlines both the scope and one of the themes — continuity across time — of Calder Walton’s ambitious and thought-provoking new book, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West.

Stretching from 1917 to the present day, Spies covers the intelligence contest between Russia, Great Britain and the United States that extends over more than a century. Perhaps surprisingly, Walton argues that Russia has invariably been one step ahead of the West. Especially before 1945 and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian intelligence services were an underestimated threat. Dating back to the conspiratorial traditions of the Cheka, the secret police created by Lenin, they were simply better spies and used deception more effectively.

The greatest, perhaps even “epic,” achievements of Soviet foreign intelligence occurred in the 1930s and during the second world war. Soviet agents penetrated the highest levels of government and the security services in Britain and the United States.

Walton, a distinguished British historian currently at Harvard, covers well-trodden ground but his analysis is sharp. Soviet agents like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Laurence Duggan and Ted Hall (in the United States), and the Cambridge Five, Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs and George Blake (in Britain) are all familiar to scholars in the field, but Walton’s discussion is enriched by his engaging prose, his access to fresh archival records (some only declassified in 2022), and his sketching in of the military, political and cultural tapestry into which espionage was woven.

Although the intelligence provided by MI5 defector Kim Philby cost the lives of dozens of Allied agents, among other things, its immense potential value to the Soviets (and incalculable damage to the Allies) was undercut by Stalin’s paranoia or hubris. For the Soviet leader it was a case of “too good to be true.”

Stalin’s suspicion of disinformation was also evident when his spies warned of Germany’s imminent invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. He dismissed the warning from the celebrated spy Richard Sorge, whom he called a “lying shit,” and his pencilled response on the report of a German agent inside the Nazi regime (which I still recall seeing in the British National Archives) was “Fuck him.”

Stalin’s failure to believe the warnings about Hitler’s attack didn’t apply to material Moscow was receiving from spies who had penetrated the Manhattan Project in the United States. Stalin knew well before Harry Truman did that America was developing the atom bomb and, as is well known, expressed no surprise when the American president informed him of a new super weapon at the 1945 Potsdam conference. He also knew of the Venona operation, to which I’ll return, six years before Truman or the CIA.

For the United States, the cold war began in 1947. Three pivotal documents — the Truman Doctrine, the National Security Act (which created the CIA) and the text of Cominform’s “two camp” thesis — all appeared in that year. For Walton, however, it began with the Bolshevik revolution. In the 1920s, the Cheka had a division of officers coordinating foreign operations (and more than 100,000 agents inside Russia); at the time, MI5’s counterespionage unit had just five officers. In 1929 the US secretary of state shut down the government’s code-breaking agency because “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” In 1936, a decision to open an MI6 station in the British embassy in Moscow was thwarted because it was “liable to cause embarrassment.”

By the beginning of the second world war, Walton wryly notes, Soviet intelligence “had more graduates of British universities than Britain’s own intelligence services.” Despite the wartime alliance against Germany after 1941, the Soviets intensified their espionage; Western intelligence operations, especially from Bletchley Park, were meanwhile preoccupied with the Nazi threat and dutifully ignored the Soviet Union.

The one exception was the Venona project. This ultra-secret operation was launched in 1943 to decode cables sent from Moscow to its embassies and went on to expose networks of Soviet spies operating in the West. (These included Walter Clayton’s KLOD network in Australia, which Walton doesn’t mention.) Although MI5 and MI6 had fewer than 200 officers between them in 1947 while the KGB was soon employing about 200,000, the process of redressing the imbalance had begun.

But the Russians were unrelenting. Despite the Venona crackdown, they set about interfering in Western elections. In one of the more startling revelations in Spies, obtained from Russian archival records, Walton contends that Stalin colluded with the Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 US presidential elections, Henry Wallace, formerly Roosevelt’s Soviet-friendly wartime vice-president. Wallace appears to have secretly liaised with Stalin, who aligned himself closely with Wallace and vetted some of his campaign material. This, according to Walton, turned Wallace “into an asset for Stalin, if not a recruited Soviet agent.”

That may be an overstatement, but it at least confirms that the far more extensive election interference conducted by Russia in favour of Trump in 2016 (and before then in support of Gerald Ford in 1975) was not unprecedented. It was part of the arsenal of “active measures” against Britain and the United States that included bribery, forgery, misinformation, assassinations and the planting of deep-cover “illegals.”

Walton also probes the Soviet Union’s main adversary, the United States. American covert operations, termed “back-alley actions” by secretary of state Dean Rusk, became the weapon of choice in postwar Washington. They stretched from the CIA’s intervention in the 1948 Italian elections to the CIA-backed coups against democratically elected governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Dominican Republic (1961), British Guiana (1962), Iraq (1963), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1975) and many more, to the proxy war in support of the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan (from 1980). One fact of which I was unaware is that a secret annex of the Marshall Plan channelled reconstruction funds to the CIA for clandestine political-warfare activities in postwar Europe.

Walton’s most chilling, and disturbing, account of covert action concerns the American destabilisation of Congo and its complicity in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s popular, left-leaning president, in 1960. Walton cites Eisenhower telling his national security adviser, Gordon Gray, that he was “very eager indeed that Lumumba be got rid of.” Lumumba was got rid of and the brutal, corrupt and despotic — but US-friendly — Joseph Mobutu ruled Congo (later Zaire) for the next thirty years. (In a wonderful vignette, Walton describes MI6’s head of station in Congo, Daphne Park, who helped coordinate Lumumba’s murder but who “looked, and acted, like Miss Marple from Agatha Christie’s novels.”) By taking in Africa, the Middle East, Latin and South America, Walton emphasises the global dimension of this long intelligence war.

The roles of high-ranking Soviet defectors to the West and moles working within the Russian intelligence services were crucial in the great cold war struggle, and their stories are compellingly told. Once again, most are familiar and well documented: Walter Krivitsky, a foreign intelligence officer who was eventually assassinated by Soviet intelligence (1941); Igor Gouzenko, who first exposed Moscow’s atomic espionage (1945); Oleg Penkovsky, perhaps the most prized agent, who played a pivotal role in the Cuban missile crisis (1962); Oleg Gordievsky, whose intelligence helped avert a nuclear first strike codenamed Able Archer (1983); Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected with a tranche of Moscow’s innermost intelligence secrets (1992); and Alexander Poteyev, who escaped an assassination attempt on US soil (2020).

A surprising omission is Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, who defected from the Soviet embassy in Canberra in 1954 and provided immensely valuable intelligence over the next five years. It was Vladimir who revealed the whereabouts of the “missing diplomats,” Burgess and Maclean, a revelation absent from Walton’s extensive discussion of the Cambridge Five. ASIO is also absent from the text (and index), though listed in the glossary, and Australia, despite its membership of the unprecedented Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, is similarly overlooked.

What are treated in some detail are the continuities. Boris Yeltsin dismembered the KGB, but the security services reconstituted under former KGB officer Vladimir Putin have retained and expanded their power. As Walton writes, the FSB and SVR (the domestic and foreign agencies) “inherited the KGB’s infrastructure, archives, agents, skill set, ideology and operational approach.” Only the acronyms changed.

Similarly, the cold war didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Diverting its attention to counterterrorism after 9/11, the West failed to appreciate that the Russian security apparatus was becoming even more aggressive or that a revanchist Putin would use asymmetric espionage — hijacking the internet to disseminate disinformation, for example — to Russia’s advantage.

Once again, the West had to play catch-up. By 2019, 77 per cent of Kremlin staff had a background in the security services. Intelligence in Russia was intensely politicised, as it always has been, which helps explain why the planned swift invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, based on prewar intelligence analysis and briefings that could not contradict Putin, was a failure.

Christopher Andrew — that doyen of intelligence historians with whom Walton collaborated on his history of MI5 — calls Spies “a masterpiece,” but it does contain errors. Russian tanks never “rolled in” to Prague to enable the Czechoslovak coup d’état in 1948, and nor was it a “military takeover” (unlike 1968); it was engineered by the NKVD — the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs — and the local Communist Party. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg never “confessed to spying,” and nor was Julius “a Soviet agent in Los Alamos”; he coordinated a New York–based spy ring and engaged in industrial rather than atomic espionage. Stalin’s death in March 1953 did not “bring the Korean War to an end”; the reasons for the armistice signed three months later lay elsewhere. During Gordievsky’s exfiltration from Moscow, crisps, not soiled nappies, were thrown from the car window at the Finnish border to deter sniffer dogs; the nappies did exist, but were changed on top of the car boot directly over the hidden Gordievsky to successfully foil Soviet guards and Alsatians — an improvisation perhaps unique in espionage history.

Notwithstanding these quibbles and Walton’s questionable conclusion that “the age of the secret service is over,” Spies brims with insights and fascinating details, encompassing a full century in a global setting, and should attract an audience otherwise unacquainted (beyond film and TV) with the murky world of espionage. •

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West
By Calder Walton | Simon & Schuster | $34.99 | 625 pages

The post The spies who went into the cold appeared first on Inside Story.

Deterrence’s conceptual framework developed around nuclear weapons. This is deterrence of a special kind, because of the absolute nature of the weapons and how hard it is to use them to win a war given the threat of retaliation in kind. We can see the caution this induces at work in the Russo-Ukraine War. NATO has not engaged directly on Ukraine’s behalf; Russia has not attacked NATO countries.

Israel also practises nuclear deterrence. It has its own arsenal, which it prefers not to talk about. It is geared to deterring Arab governments, and now Iran, from starting wars intended to destroy the Jewish state. As with all nuclear deterrence, it does not require demonstrations of what the weapons can do or a readiness to use them. All that is required is for potentially hostile governments to be aware of what could happen if an inter-state war escalates too far.

For lesser contingencies, including the threats posed by Hamas operating out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon, deterrence looks quite different. It is not based on absolute weapons and nor does it offer constant relief from danger. There is no guarantee of success and so when it fails, if only slightly, it must be restored. It is more like a fence that easily breaks but can then be mended than a solid brick wall. Unlike nuclear deterrence, there can be no sole reliance on threats but instead a readiness to respond forcefully to any challenge to bring home to adversaries the folly of attacking Israel.

It is this deterrence that failed on 7 October 2023 and may never be restored. An enemy so irredeemably hostile that it will always be looking for ways to attack, whatever the severity of the likely response, appears beyond deterrence. Instead of deterring Hamas, Israel now wants to eliminate it as a political and military force, but any relief achieved by this approach might also be only temporary.

WHY DETERRENCE?

Before it became so dependent on deterrence, Israel sought to control threats directly by maintaining a substantial presence in Gaza and Lebanon. The costs of maintaining that presence proved too high.

In the case of Lebanon, Israel became fully engaged in the 1970s after the Palestine Liberation Organisation, having been kicked out of Jordan, took up residence there in 1970. Because Lebanon was being used to mount raids, Israel occasionally entered its territory to push the guerilla bases further away from its northern border. Then, in 1982, it entered in force, moving north until it laid siege to Beirut. The aim was to push the PLO out (with some success) and also to install a government willing to make peace with Israel (in which it failed completely). Hezbollah in its current form is a lasting consequence of those events.

The Israeli Defence Forces, or IDF, eventually withdrew to a strip of southern Lebanon, which they policed with a Christian militia. In 2000, after Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak decided the presence there was doing more harm than good, they withdrew unilaterally. Hezbollah concluded that this was a great victory and a result of its constant harassment.

Five years later Israel left Gaza, again unilaterally. Ariel Sharon, a hardliner who had made his career by being tough on Arabs and was most responsible for the debacle in Lebanon, decided as prime minister that the effort to hold on to Gaza was futile because Israel’s position could only be sustained at an inordinate cost. He ordered withdrawal. In the face of protests from their residents, the IDF closed down the settlements. (Sharon suffered a stroke and went into a coma before he could reveal what he had in mind for the West Bank.)

The withdrawal was not negotiated with the Palestinians. No plans were made for what could follow. There were hopes that Gaza might turn a corner, replacing its seething resentment at occupation with economic development, but such hopes didn’t last long. Within two years Hamas was in control, first as a result of an election victory and then having won a short civil war with the Palestinian Authority.

With only rejectionist parties active in the territory, and no interest in coexistence with Israel, Hamas turned Gaza into its base, using all available resources, including those obtained from Iran, to manufacture rockets and build tunnels for smuggling supplies and getting fighters into Israel.

DETERRENCE BY DENIAL OR PUNISHMENT

With two implacably hostile neighbours in positions to attack Israel at any time, and having abandoned the idea that they could be occupied, deterrence became the centrepiece of Israeli strategy.

Deterrence is usually described as taking one of two forms. The first is deterrence by denial, which basically means that, whatever the target’s aggressive intent, it will be unable to act upon it because it will be thwarted if it tries. The other is deterrence by punishment. In this case the target can act on hostile intent, and even do some real harm, but the punishment will be severe, and whatever the gains the costs suffered will be far higher. When an adversary is not deterred, and decides to attack, the costs must be sufficient to ensure that it does not try again. In this way deterrence can be restored.

Israel follows both forms of deterrence. For denial it constructs large fences to prevent incursions into its territory. But the fences couldn’t stop rockets fired by Hamas or Hezbollah. So Israel also developed an elaborate and advanced air defence system — the Iron Dome – to prevent rocket attacks doing too much damage. The population can also use air raid shelters to protect them from rockets that get through.

The success rate of this system is impressive but not complete, and the attacks are cheaper to mount than to stop. So Israel normally seeks to add to the price for the perpetrators with air raids on the places from where they have been launched. There is always an element of punishment.

The punishment comes in three forms. First, it attempts to assassinate those responsible, whether political figures or military. Israel’s many “targeted killings” may have disrupted the enemy’s command structures and operations in the short term, but their long-term effects are at most marginal. Other commanders step up to take the place of those killed, and there is no guarantee they will be less capable or effective.

Second, the IDF targets the military assets that make the attacks possible. Again, this can make a difference in the short term but in the long term more rockets can be built, more tunnels dug and more fighters recruited.

Third, because these assets are to be found in the middle of urban areas, often deliberately near schools and hospitals, civilians will suffer. Israel denies that it engages in collective punishment and the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the name of self-defence and military necessity, it is not a war crime to attack areas where civilians may be present if armed units are also there. Hamas can be blamed for fighting out of such populated areas and Israel urges civilians to move away from areas where fighting is likely to be intense.

But intense strikes against military targets, especially involving tunnels believed to be below occupied buildings or individuals hiding in residential areas, are going to involve many civilian casualties and wider suffering. For onlookers the distinction between collateral and deliberate damage is often hard to discern.

Another feature of deterrence is that it appears as all stick and no carrot. There is no reason in principle why negative threats can’t be combined with positive inducements, but it is not a requirement of the strategy. And if the threats are working, there is less reason to find incentives to encourage a potential adversary to coexist peacefully.

DOES IT WORK? (I) HEZBOLLAH

In July 2006 Hezbollah conducted a raid into Israel, combining rockets fired into border towns and an attack on an Israeli patrol that left three soldiers dead and two abducted to Lebanon. A failed rescue attempt led to three more deaths. Israel refused Hezbollah’s demand to swap Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails for the abducted soldiers. It responded instead with air and artillery strikes, against not only Hezbollah military targets but also Beirut airport and other civilian targets. It launched a land attack against well-prepared Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon that turned out to be costly and difficult.

Eventually the United Nations arranged a ceasefire. Much later the remains of the two soldiers were returned as part of a prisoner exchange. The operation was widely considered a failure in Israel, having exposed the country’s weaknesses to rocket attacks and a determined militia. Yet Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the Israelis had killed up to twelve of his commanders and went on to make an interesting comment about the initial operation.

On the question of whether Hezbollah’s operation would have proceeded if it was felt there was “even a 1 per cent chance” it would lead to a war like the one that eventuated, he responded, “I would say no, absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military, and political reasons.” Israel had been waiting for an excuse for a planned attack, he added — yet this admission, and the fact that there have been clashes since but nothing quite comparable, has been taken as evidence that deterrence can perhaps work.

But while Hezbollah is undoubtedly antagonistic towards Israel, it is less so than Hamas. One reason for this is that Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese political system. While it is the most substantial force in that country, it still has to be responsive to factions and persuasions that are less interested in its feud with Israel, and to present itself as serving Lebanese interests. With the country in an economic mess, aggravated by the massive blast at the Beirut port in 2020, and still being run by a caretaker government, it is in no position to cope well with a war with Israel. Nor is Israel angling for a war with Lebanon.

This is not straightforward Israeli deterrence. Hezbollah’s agenda is as much set by Iranian considerations as Lebanese. It sent its fighters into Syria during the civil war there, for example, where they worked (not particularly effectively) with Iranian and Russian forces to prop up the Assad regime. (It is perhaps worth noting that the Sunni Hamas did not support Assad.) It depends on Iran for its military assets, including its large number of missiles, which are much more capable than those of Hamas. It has no particular incentive to go to war with Israel other than as part of a larger Iranian project.

DOES IT WORK? (II) GAZA

The Gaza experience has been different. Ever since Hamas took over the territory, the periods of calm on the border have been few. Clashes have varied in intensity and frequency, with big ones every few years. Each case involves rocket fire by Hamas (and its junior partner, Islamic Jihad) and air and artillery strikes by the Israelis; the casualties are starkly asymmetric, with those on the Palestinian side far greater than those on the Israeli, especially for civilians.

The suffering of Palestinians in these flare-ups leads international organisations, governments and campaigning groups to denounce Israel for acting disproportionately. Other than in 2021, when unrest spread to Arab communities in Israel, supporting protests have been held in the West Bank and elsewhere, but not much more. After weeks of fighting, a ceasefire of some sort has been struck and nothing much has changed once the fighting subsided.

The regularity of the clashes suggests that deterrence has worked poorly in Gaza. From the Israeli perspective the priority has mainly been to show that it is not rattled by provocations and will respond forcefully each time. These responses were described by some Israelis as “mowing the lawn,” a phrase capturing the idea of an indefinite conflict containable by occasional forceful action.

Part of the shock of 7 October was that the Israeli government had convinced itself that its approach was working, to the extent that it was starting to ease the restrictions on Gaza. Islamic Jihad was a problem, but Hamas didn’t seem too interested in any more violence. What happened then, in Israeli eyes, was a failure not only of intelligence but also of deterrence, and the extent of the failure meant restoring deterrence no longer seemed an option.

The response followed the same pattern as before, except with more intensity. Many individuals connected with Hamas and in particular the attacks of 7 October have been targeted and killed. Military infrastructure has been hit mercilessly, and the consequences of Hamas’s actions have been brought home to the suffering population far more ferociously than in past episodes and with far more civilian casualties and general distress. Despite Hamas’s original provocation, this has led to international anger and demands for a ceasefire.

We can question whether deterrence was ever operating effectively, but it certainly isn’t now. Israel has no interest in persuading Hamas not to attack again. It wants to make sure that it never has the capacity to do so.

But it does need to deter Hezbollah, and in practice Iran. The latter’s network, including the Houthis in Yemen, has been busy. So far, much of that has been largely posturing, with the aim of demonstrating what might happen if the war continues at its current pace. In this respect it might be argued that the deterrence offered by Iran/Hezbollah has failed because Israel has pressed on regardless with its ground war, though they might claim that they are tying down Israeli forces that might otherwise be used against Hamas.

If Hezbollah did want to get involved, it would have had more effect if it had done so early on. Israel is now geared up for a two-front war, including evacuating people from the border with Lebanon and restocking the Iron Dome. This doesn’t mean Hezbollah won’t get involved, especially if the accusations of letting Hamas down start to worry its leadership. But the key decisions will be taken in Teheran, which will have to consider whether this is the issue with which to take on the United States. A tweet from Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi — “Zionist regime’s crimes have crossed the red lines, which may force everyone to take action” — suggests that no decision has yet been made.

The pressure will also grow on other Arab countries to do more than issue statements, especially those like Saudi Arabia that have already “normalised” relations with Israel or were preparing to. It is hard to assess how they will act, but if they look ahead they should see a significant role for themselves in shaping the new order that might yet emerge.

NEXT STEPS

Israel’s land invasion of Gaza was undertaken despite US misgivings and Saudi objections — one a country on which Israel relies, the other that it has been courting. The foreign ministry has insulted the numerous countries supporting the ceasefire resolution in the General Assembly, and refused to talk to UN secretary-general António Guterres because he saw equivalence between the unprovoked attacks on Israel’s people and the ruthless response undertaken in the name of self-defence.

Israel can note that it is hardly the only state in the region that puts its security needs above humanitarian considerations. The past decade has seen extraordinary loss of life in the battles against Islamic State and in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the last two with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths). But the pressure on it to stop will only grow. Israel is used to treading a lonely path, and it may find its position gets lonelier. As with its previous wars, it will be resisting pressure for a ceasefire until its objectives have been achieved.

Can its objectives be achieved? That is not yet a given. Information on what is going on in the battles in northern Gaza and towards Gaza City are sketchy, so it is unwise to speculate. It is also unclear how much humanitarian assistance will be able to get into Gaza in these conditions, and whether countries like Qatar are still potential mediators, including in efforts to get hostages released. In all of this, the biggest uncertainty away from the battlefield and the potential widening of the war is the future governance of Gaza.

Israel has been forced to look beyond deterrence. It has concluded that it is dealing with an entity that has never truly been deterred and can’t be deterred in the future. Wilder elements in Israel may fantasise about pushing all the Gazans out of the territory, but that is not a serious option. This is where the other flaw in Israel’s deterrence strategy becomes painfully evident. It has not been accompanied by a more positive political strategy. The only long-term vision Israel offers is a Gaza without Hamas. The chaos and instability that would result if Gaza were turned into an ungovernable space without anyone in charge would serve nobody’s interests. A way will have to be found to fill the space.

Given how Israel has defined its objectives, success for Hamas simply requires surviving in a commanding position in Gaza. Even if it is forced to evacuate its positions, Hamas will not disappear. It represents a strong political tradition in the Arab world, and regardless of what happens to it over the coming weeks it will have the capacity to regenerate and to return to power if there is no alternative government in place.

There is no evidence of great love for Hamas among Gazans, and at some point they will reflect on the missed opportunities to develop the territory and the wisdom of its constantly provoking Israel into attacks that it is unable to mitigate. Nor is there much respect for the Palestinian Authority, which is generally considered to be inept, corrupt and unable to stand up at all to the Israelis. Though constitutionally the PA’s return to Gaza would seem the best option, this would be greeted suspiciously in the best of circumstances and even more so if it arrived behind Israeli tanks. Any government installed by Israel would lack legitimacy and would be a natural target for assassins.

If Israel can’t find a government for Gaza, someone else will have to. Here the main initiative will have to come from the Arab world, probably in concert with the United States. This seems to be what many analysts anticipate happening after this war. It is possible, for example, to imagine at some point a multilateral conference including the main Arab and Western players, with Israel on the sidelines, given the job of coming up with a viable government for Gaza and managing the influx of aid necessary if the territory is to recover from the traumas of the past weeks and look to possibilities for future development. It would also need to consider both Gaza’s internal security and how to stop it causing trouble to its neighbours (Egypt as well as Israel) in the future.

In principle, this process could be confined to Gaza, but Arab governments are unlikely to cooperate unless the future of the West Bank is also tackled. The trade that Israel faces in return for insisting that Hamas plays no part in the territory’s government is that the “two-state solution” is put back on the agenda. Most Western governments have already been quite explicit on this matter.

Netanyahu has been around long enough to know that dismissing the two-state solution out of hand isn’t realistic, even though he has built his career on subverting the idea. That’s why he was content to leave the rejectionist Hamas in charge in Gaza as he made life difficult for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The encroachment of settlements on the West Bank has made the prospect of a viable Palestinian state there seem even more remote.

All one can say is that this war changes a lot. When the two-state solution has come up, as it did for example in the prewar talks with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu has paid lip service to the idea and pointed to the rivalry between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to show why progress is impossible.

But that excuse won’t work if a way can be found to get Hamas out of Gaza. Netanyahu is unlikely to be on the scene for much longer. After all this, Israel’s Western and Arab partners are not going to want to let the situation drift away into catastrophe again. If there is to be any resolution of the current conflict, the starting point will be taking the fate of Gaza away from both Hamas and Israel. •

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It’s true that the country’s military-authored 2008 constitution gave the civilian government no effective oversight of the military and other security services. But while Suu Kyi’s lamentable defence of its actions before the International Court of Justice in 2019 did her no harm domestically, it brought her international celebrity to a shuddering halt, alienating democratic governments around the world. Foreign aid continued to flow, but Western investment dried up as corporations registered the reputational risk of operating under a regime tainted by horrific human rights abuses.

At the time, like other Myanmar analysts, we considered a military coup unlikely given the cosy, profitable arrangement the military had designed for itself under the 2008 constitution. But a more general principle should have given Suu Kyi pause for thought before she travelled to the Hague: authoritarian leaders, and bullies more generally — including Myanmar’s military leaders — see compromise or acquiescence as weakness.

We weren’t surprised when the National League for Democracy was re-elected with a thumping majority and seemed set to consolidate its power. In the light of the hardship and abuse of the long years of miliary government, Suu Kyi’s win offered at the least a glimmer of hope.

Yet her government’s second term was cut short even before it started. On 1 February 2021, the first day of the new parliament, the military commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing, ended a decade of reforms and semi-democratic rule and returned the country to the authoritarianism of the pre-2011 era. Suu Kyi was arrested and returned to her former role as political prisoner, as were the president and other National League for Democracy leaders.

As we wrote on the day of the coup, Myanmar’s people had enjoyed a decade of increased political and economic freedoms. The military was therefore likely to encounter “uncooperative subjects” as it sought to reimpose authoritarian rule.

That proved to be an understatement. The early opposition to the coup, nonviolent, almost festive, filled the streets of Yangon and other cities and towns around the country. The protesters were watched closely by the police, and sometimes the military, but little action was taken. A civil disobedience movement took hold, with striking or uncooperative workers paralysing major parts of the economy. Doctors, teachers, university lecturers: they all voiced their opposition to the military’s strangling of the government.

A month into these nonviolent protests the security services launched a more forceful response. Indiscriminate live fire into the crowds killed and injured protesters. National League for Democracy politicians and other protesters were arrested and tortured to death. A grim new chapter of reprisals and crackdowns had begun.

Under these conditions, opposition to the junta transformed from open, nonviolent action, with the risk of being abducted or shot, to an armed underground movement. The disparate militias of the newly formed People’s Defence Force are playing the key role, often supported by ethnic armed groups long opposed to the military.

The country descended into civil war — not only in the remote borderlands, where fighting led by ethnic armed groups has smouldered since independence in 1948, but also in the main cities and, perhaps most importantly, in the normally docile central dry zone populated by the numerically dominant Bamar (Burman) majority. This is the heartland from which the military usually draws much of its political strength and recruits.

A parallel National Unity Government was established, and the National League for Democracy’s UN ambassador managed to retain his position despite repeated attempts by the military junta to remove him.

The Myanmar people, their dreams having been so brutally dashed, are unlikely to accept a return to the uncomfortable compromises of the 2008 constitution. The army, having so carelessly discarded its comfortable and lucrative relationship with Suu Kyi’s League, now faces a popular and determined opposition implacably opposed to allowing it any role in government.

The catastrophic error of judgement by Min Aung Hlaing and the military leadership hasn’t only devastated much of the country. It has also destroyed any chance of peaceful coexistence between military and civilians for the foreseeable future.

This unravelling of constitutional rule made it necessary to revise our book. Our assumption had been that the National League for Democracy would govern for another five-year term, in coalition if necessary with some of the ethnic minority parties. The chance that another party would emerge to dominate Myanmar politics seemed remote, particularly while Suu Kyi remained at the League’s helm, and nor were the military-backed parties likely to cobble together a governing coalition.

We had a provisional agreement with our publishers to issue a second edition in the lead-up to the anticipated 2025 election, but these decisions are always conditional on first edition sales and other factors. Now the book required much earlier updating. Routledge accepted our proposal to accelerate the process, and the result is a fully revised second edition, just published, with extra chapters on education, health and the coup in historical context.

One difference in the new edition is that it draws on (and links to) articles published by the growing number of open-access policy outlets that provide fast — in some cases almost instant — research findings and analysis of regional issues. For Australian academics working on Myanmar politics these include the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Strategist, the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, the Australian Institute of International Affairs’s Australian Outlook and the Australian National University’s East Asia Forum. The Conversation also provides an invaluable space for academics to reach a more general audience with short research-based articles, and Inside Story publishes longer essays.

While these outlets don’t provide all the rigour of refereed journal articles, they overcome the delays in traditional academic publishing that can be frustrating for academics analysing contemporary events. Having this political analysis available much more quickly and free of charge is crucial, particularly when dealing with a region like Southeast Asia where local academics, analysts and members of the public are much less likely to have access to paywalled journal articles and books.

We are particularly pleased that help from our contributors’ institutions has enabled us to make the book available for download free of charge. We see it as a crucial social justice issue that the contributors’ analyses are freely available to readers in Myanmar, Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, with much of the world’s focus understandably on conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, the Myanmar crisis has been relegated to footnote status. Although the United States’ BURMA Act earlier this year raised hopes of more international support for the opposition movement, little progress is evident.

Myanmar’s military continues its brutal campaign of attacks on civilians, including the burning of villages and indiscriminate air strikes on civilian targets. A single attack in central Myanmar in May killed more than 160 people, including children.

While the privations and suffering of the Rohingya that we described three years ago have spread across much of the rest of the population, we should not forget the terrible situation of that community. Over a million Rohingya refugees have spent more than six years in Bangladeshi border refugee camps at the mercy of criminal gangs, their already tiny food rations further reduced in recent times.

As investigations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity slowly wind their way through the International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, and courts in Germany and elsewhere, the Rohingya and Myanmar’s wider population experience no respite.

The top generals have been excluded from most diplomatic engagement, and are only welcomed by Russia, China, North Korea and a few other authoritarian regimes. Even ASEAN, which has tended to tolerate a fair bit of bad behaviour in Myanmar, recognises that the military regime in Naypyitaw presents a reputational risk for the entire region. An empty seat at ASEAN symbolises much wariness about legitimising the violence and devastation unleashed by the coup and sends a signal, albeit a weak one, to other autocratic regimes.

Like Ukraine, Myanmar is suffering the consequences of terrible decisions by ruthless, isolated leaders. As we look ahead it is crucial that we don’t ignore the crimes of these despots and the need to find just outcomes.

The answers will usually be found on the ground, in the hard slog of defying dictatorial rule. But let’s not ignore the contributions that can be made by democratic states prepared to resolutely oppose these dictatorial regimes. A concerted international effort to support the National Unity Government materially, diplomatically and militarily could easily alter the dynamics in Myanmar. •

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Rightly, a barrage of words has been fired to describe Hamas’s recent attacks: atrocious, abhorrent, despicable, outrageous, inhuman, nihilistic. They are all well chosen. The biggest shock lay in the assault’s surprise, brutality and short-term success. How could the much-vaunted and feared Israeli intelligence and defence establishment be caught out so badly?

Martin Indyk, who served twice as the US ambassador to Israel, suggested a “total system failure on Israel’s part.” Through sophisticated spying Israelis are accustomed to knowing exactly what the Palestinians are doing. Israel has built a very expensive wall between Gaza and its side of the border. How was it possible, Indyk asked, for “a ragtag band of terrorists” to beat the “mighty” Israeli intelligence community and defence forces? The answer, in part, “was hubris — an Israeli belief that sheer force could deter Hamas, and that Israel did not have to address the long-term problems.”

Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to the late Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, spoke of Israel’s two-layered strategic failure. Netanyahu and his current coalition, “the most extreme ever,” downplayed or ignored warnings from several Arab states about Palestinian grievances. Netanyahu pursued the illusion that even under his draconian policies — which have long turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison” — Hamas would abstain from the sort of attacks that might jeopardise its hold on power in Gaza.

Haaretz journalist Amira Hass argued that Israeli security forces neglected the defence of communities near the Gaza Strip because they were preoccupied with “defending the settlers in the West Bank, their land seizures, and their rites of stone and altar worshipping.” Such neglect, she said, was inherently connected to one of the chief goals of Netanyahu and his religious Zionist supporters, accelerating the de facto annexation of most of the West Bank and increasing the settler population there. Haaretz editorialised that the government had left the Gaza border communities unprotected as “the IDF provided security for every settler whim.”

Netanyahu has been an ardent champion of West Bank settlements, the growth of which makes the idea of a viable Palestinian state fanciful. He has desisted from annexing (at least) large chunks of the occupied West Bank only because of likely US disapproval. UN figures show that in the ten years to 2022, the population of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, grew to around 700,000. The settlers live illegally in 279 Israeli settlements across the West Bank, including fourteen settlements in East Jerusalem.

The company Netanyahu keeps should give considerable pause for thought. On 1 March this year the head of a pro-settler party, Netanyahu’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, called for the Palestinian West Bank village of Huwara to be “erased.” This followed a settler rampage through the village that one Israeli general described as a “pogrom.” A US State Department spokesperson described Smotrich’s comments as “irresponsible… repugnant [and] disgusting.” Undeterred, Smotrich followed up by declaring that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.”

Last August, Netanyahu’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, exhibited a similar sneering condescension, declaring that his family’s right to move around the West Bank “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

Israelis mourning their dead might reflect on the awful reality that, stretching back to the 1980s, Israeli governments have provided limited funding and intelligence assistance to Hamas, at first seeing the Islamist organisation as a useful counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under the quixotic Yasser Arafat. This assistance continued after the formation of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s nominal partner in any “peace process.”

Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy, commented recently that Netanyahu’s various governments ended up weakening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas — who wanted to negotiate — while strengthening Hamas, which has vowed Israel’s destruction. Hirsh quoted Gilead Sher, chief of staff to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who has said that Netanyahu’s policy to “nearly topple” the Palestinian Authority fostered Hamas’s “sense of impunity and capability.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Hamas calculated, correctly, that its break-out in Gaza and Israel’s inevitably harsh response would freeze steps towards normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the Gaza attacks the Saudis issued a statement accusing Israel of ignoring their repeated warnings of an explosion “as a result of the continued occupation and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights.” Martin Indyk commented that the image of American weapons in Israeli hands killing large numbers of Palestinians will ignite a “strong reaction” around the Arab world. President Biden’s whistle-stop visit to Israel has done nothing to dampen that reaction.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas political leader who lives in exile in Qatar (Hamas’s military commanders are based in Gaza) explained the motivation for the Gaza attacks as a profound sense of frustration and defeat. But Hamas’s embarrassment of Israel comes at an unimaginable cost to the people of Gaza. The Economist has calculated that the scale of Israel’s bombardment — 6000 bombs dropped in six days, compared with 2000 to 5000 per month across Iraq and Syria during the American-led air campaign against Islamic State from 2014 to 2019 —  suggested that “the definition of military targets is being stretched to breaking-point.”

On 10 October, the Israeli Defence Forces’ Major General Ghassan Alian declared that “Human animals must be treated as such… There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, weighed in, asserting at a press conference that all citizens of Gaza were responsible for the Hamas attack. “It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”

Such nonsense points to the glaring double standard in some commentary about Gaza. Hamas’s rule is rightly derided as brutal and authoritarian, yet there seems an expectation that ordinary Palestinians should miraculously rise up and overthrow it. In the New York Review of Books Fintan O’Toole wrote that “Hamas’s knowing provocation of Israel’s wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend shows that Hamas cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemy’s.” That is the sickening truth.

Ben Saul, head of international law at Sydney University, has argued that Hamas should be held accountable for its “atrocious war crimes.” He added, though, that Australian defence minister Richard Marles’s claim that Israel was acting within the rules of war indicated only that Marles was “poorly briefed.”

One stark Israeli violation, Saul wrote, was its medieval “complete siege” of Gaza, with no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. “A sixteen-year blockade has already debilitated Gaza. This latest turning of the screw is unlawful and could constitute the war crime of starving civilians. It could also be unlawful collective punishment if it aims to retaliate against all Gazans for Hamas’ sins.”

Running against Netanyahu in the Israeli 2019 general election, the former Israeli army chief Benny Gantz released a campaign video boasting that during the 2014 Israel–Gaza war, “parts of Gaza were returned to the stone ages.” Gantz is now part of the emergency war cabinet and is no doubt keen to finish the job. Israel clearly has the capacity to level what is left of Gaza city, killing many (more) thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, including Hamas and other Islamist militants.

That might trigger a wider war. Martin Indyk has commented that if the Palestinian death toll rises, “Hezbollah will be tempted to join the fray. They have 150,000 rockets they can rain down on Israel’s main cities.” Even if that doesn’t happen, the question of “what now?” only comes sooner. If Hamas is obliterated, what then? Who will rule Gaza? The Israelis? They tried that once before, with unhappy results. The Palestinian Authority? It struggles to maintain its shaky rule in the West Bank.

Whatever the future, it will be troublesome, to say the least. In one way or another we will all pay a price. •

The post Netanyahu’s war appeared first on Inside Story.

Now their voices can be heard, clearly and sometimes passionately, in journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s A Stranger in Your Own City, published this year to coincide with the invasion’s twentieth anniversary. This is a compelling, challenging, disturbing and ultimately illuminating account of what happened to the people of Iraq and their homeland over the two decades after they were invaded and conquered. It exposes the ignorance and demolishes the myths and false assumptions of many Western policymakers, think-tank analysts, pundits and correspondents — myths that Howard clung to in his speech.

Abdul-Ahad grew up under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, an absurdly quintessential Third World tyrant. It was a time of futile and costly wars with Iran and Kuwait and the West, of repression, poverty and hardship exacerbated by foreign sanctions. It was a period that made many Iraqis optimistic that the Americans would bring change.

If Abdul-Ahad — an architect and army deserter at the time — shared that optimism, it quickly faded on the day American tanks rumbled into Baghdad in April 2003. He watched with dismay as US marines pulled down a statue of Saddam one of them had draped in the American flag. He had thought the facade of liberation would last at least a day, “but no, with all the arrogance of every occupying soldier throughout history, [the marine] covered the face of the defeated dictator with the flag of his victorious nation; briefly, but long enough to seal the fate of the invasion in the eyes of many.”

The next day, after a chance meeting with a correspondent from the Guardian, Abdul-Ahad was hired as a fixer and translator and eventually a reporter — in which job he embarked on a journey through a country he increasingly couldn’t recognise, a devastated human and physical landscape of unspeakable brutality, destruction, indignity and corruption. He felt like a stranger in a foreign land.

Whatever optimism his fellow Iraqis felt when the Americans arrived soon dissolved, too, eroded by the occupiers’ sheer inefficiency and shattered by the first car bombing. Abdul-Ahad witnessed and reported on many such atrocities in the coming years, so many that “they are all welded in my head into one newsreel of charred human remains mixed with shreds of tyres and crumpled debris.”

Instead of peace, the US occupation unleashed something terrible, imposing a political system that gave power and the spoils of office, along sectarian and ethnic lines, to a “coalition of corrupt, imbecilic religious warlords to rule the country for the next twenty years and create one of the most corrupt nations on earth.”

Militias — “hundreds of cells with hundreds of motives” — emerged soon after the invasion. Many were criminal gangs; others sought simply to protect their neighbourhoods; still others were nationalists humiliated by foreign occupation. Later came Iraqi and foreign jihadis chasing fanatical dreams of a pure Islamic state. The occupation ultimately transformed what had been a fissure between Shias and Sunnis into an abyss.

In Baghdad and elsewhere, men with guns controlled every aspect of life, even as the United States and its allies deluded themselves they were bringing democratic progress. A year after the invasion, “people started uttering the unthinkable, that maybe life under Saddam was better.”

Abdul-Ahad takes his readers through the bomb-shattered suburbs, shrines and markets of Iraqi cities and towns, across barricades and streets awash with sewage, to meet ordinary Iraqis — teachers, doctors, soldiers, refugees. With a reporter’s eye for detail and ear for a telling quote, he brings us their faces and voices. His writing is wry at times, sometimes caustic, usually sensitive but not sentimental.

A bridegroom in a mixed Sunni–Shia marriage recounts his wedding day — a perilous military-style operation to get the wedding party across militia checkpoints — and describes “my bride and her relatives yellow with fear.”

We meet a schoolteacher, a man with a cheerful face struggling in a collapsed education system, who insists to his students that Iraq is not a sectarian country, and who limps to and from class, the result of having been shot three times because he spoke out against the clerics and urged his students not to join their militias.

We join a dreary queue at the passport office where fear and anxiety fill the air. A Christian man in his sixties, a teacher accompanied by his three daughters, insists the official writes his occupation in his passport. But there is no space for profession on the new passport form. The teacher insists his occupation be included because he wants a visa to go to Australia. Don’t worry, a man in the queue tells him, no country will give Iraqis a visa anyway. A big-bellied bureaucrat openly boasts that he takes bribes — “I only take $500” — to speed up the passport process.

In the cramped waiting room of a medical clinic, a gaunt psychiatrist with a soft reassuring voice describes how “the pressure, the war, the economic situation, fear, anxiety — all chip away at patients’ resistance.”

A Sunni militia commander, a middle-aged man with soft brown eyes, acknowledges having rejoiced when Saddam fell, but also having then joined the insurgency: “As time passed, and the occupation became more visible, patriotic feelings inside me grew greater and greater. Every time I saw the Americans patrolling our streets, I felt ashamed and humiliated.”

Abdul-Ahad takes us into the courtroom for Saddam’s trial, the former dictator slowly and deliberately entering the room, sighing and sitting down “with the air of one settling down to a day’s work.” We learn how, after his hanging, Saddam’s corpse was flown to the house where prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was celebrating his son’s wedding: “The grotesque pettiness of Iraq’s new masters ran rampant as the shroud was pulled back to allow guests to photograph the corpse.”

On a sweltering and humid day we go to a Baghdad morgue, where crowds of anxious relatives press against the fence to find and reclaim the bodies of family members. The morgue is stacked with corpses, mostly the victims of death squads, and there’s no room for the crowd to enter, so officials improvise a “hellish slideshow” on a computer monitor that families watch in silence as pictures of the mutilated dead flicker on the screen.

Two years after the invasion, Iraq was sliding towards civil war, a conflict more complex than the West’s binary narrative of Sunni versus Shia. As Abdul-Ahad points out, this war included “a wide range of localised schisms and fault lines, feuds based on class or geography or long-dormant tribal feuds.”

These rifts were exacerbated by the Americans, who, “like conquerors, aimed to simplify their occupation by breaking it into components,” using Shias to fight Sunni insurgents, and in the process entrenching and exacerbating sectarianism.

Six years after the invasion, Maliki had concentrated unaccountable power through patronage, shadowy intelligence services and all-encompassing corruption. Security officers took bribes from families to release their sons from detention and torture, and then sometimes killed them anyway.

By the invasion’s tenth anniversary, Islamist jihadis had entered this ghastly scene, seeking to impose an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam not only in Iraq but in Syria and across the Middle East. Abdul-Ahad travelled to Syria to meet the groups who called themselves ISIS and were consolidating their power. He met an ISIS commander who spoke of his dreams of a borderless Islamic state: “I can’t remember much else of what he said in the meeting because I was terrified and trembling with fear.”

By the middle of the following year, ISIS had swept into western Iraq and on to Mosul, Iraq’s second city, where Maliki’s “brave new army” collapsed, partly out of a justified fear of the ISIS fanatics and partly because all-pervading corruption had eaten out its heart. Recruits who had paid to be enlisted to escape lives of dismal poverty found their wages stolen by their officers. Non-existent “ghost soldiers” padded out the payroll.

When ISIS captured Mosul many welcomed their discipline, administrative efficiency and promise to restore basic services and end corruption. Instead, the extremists turned Mosul into a huge prison controlled with brutality and viciousness. “They brought terror into our hearts and inside our own homes,” said one resident. “I feared my neighbour, my brother and my son… They used to say Saddam’s regime was brutal. Well Saddam was a picnic compared to them.”

The brutality of ISIS prompted many men to join the army, which was supported by US air power. Abdul-Ahad joined these soldiers — young but old before their time; devoted to war yet cynical about their senior officers — as they fought to reclaim Mosul. They were brave and selfless, too, but also capable of the worst acts of barbaric cruelty.

Abdul-Ahad portrays them dispassionately, with gritty, graphic, courageous reporting. While his writing is clear and compelling, at times it is so confronting that it’s hard to read — as when he describes captured ISIS prisoners being tortured for no purpose “beyond the primordial imperative to exact pain and revenge and prove to the soldiers that they had defeated ISIS.”

Having humanised the people he encounters — victims and perpetrators alike — he then goes beyond his masterful on-the-ground reporting. Placing these human stories in a wider political and social context, he demolishes the myth that the quick military success of US forces was subsequently marred by ill-advised decisions and a lack of planning for the second phase of the US adventure — the occupation and handover. In his 2013 speech, Howard understated these failures as “problematic.”

That’s not how Abdul-Ahad sees it. He argues that the occupation was bound to fail not because of lack of planning but “because a nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy. No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation.”

A Stranger in Your Own City also debunks another central tenet of the pro-invasion narrative — that Iraq’s main religious sects are monoliths that had either uniformly supported and benefited from Saddam (the Sunnis) or uniformly opposed and suffered under him (the Shias). It’s another element of the narrative that Howard endorsed in his retrospective speech, declaring in coldly passive language that “it was inevitable that after Saddam had been toppled a degree of revenge would be exacted.”

Despite all that he has witnessed and Iraq has endured, Abdul-Ahad sees signs of hope in an outburst of popular dissent by euphoric young Iraqis in 2019, known as the Tishreen Uprising. While it failed to bring down the post-2003 system, it showed how young people led by secular activists recognised the US-bequeathed democracy to be a kleptocracy of fossilised hierarchies and archaic bureaucratic rules, with a security system of violence, torture and killings. The Tishreen protesters saw themselves as victims of a “terrible con perpetrated by those professing to defend them and their sect against the ‘other’.”

“Tishreen showed the power of the people when not cowed by sectarian fears,” Abdul-Ahad writes, “and indicates that the post-2003 state can no longer satisfy its own people.” He concludes that the failure of Iraq’s leaders to heed the warnings of Tishreen will lead to their demise. •

A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad | Hutchinson Heinemann | $59.99 | 480 pages

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I was lucky enough to work with Ken Inglis and friends on Dunera Lives: A Visual History, published in 2018. The book is an attempt to tell something of the Dunera story through 500 images, one of which attracted far more comment than any other. This was a grainy black-and-white photograph from Bern’s collection taken on 14 December 1938, a month after the anti-Semitic violence of Kristallnacht.

The photo shows fifteen-year-old Gerd Bernstein (Bern’s original name), dressed in a suit, raising a glass to his family. His mother Helena, father Otto and maternal grandmother Sophie Maas sit at a table in their Berlin home at Wielandstrasse 17. A picture of young Gerd hangs on the wall.

The faces most exposed to the camera are those of grandson and grandmother. Gerd looks thoughtful and hesitant, even sad, while on his grandmother’s face I see both love and terror — love for him, and terror about what the future holds for her Jewish family. The next day Gerd left Berlin on a Kindertransport, bound for Britain. On 17 December, alone in Britain just two days after leaving home for a strange and unfamiliar country, he turned sixteen.

His parents survived the war despite his father Otto’s imprisonment in Theresienstadt concentration camp from 1942 to 1945. Otto was the sole survivor among the hundred people with whom he was transported to Theresienstadt; Sophie died there.

After the visual history appeared, Bern and I discussed readers’ reactions to this photograph and the intense, heavy sadness it prompted in many, me included. Bern would have none of it. He thought this response muddled, our emotions skewed by knowledge of the Holocaust.

In Bern’s mind, this photograph showed a moment in the life of his family, no more and no less. To view the photograph through the lens of the Holocaust was a mistake, and he made a point of reminding me that in 1938 the Nazis had not yet embarked on the systematic destruction of European Jewry.

Bern’s position on the photograph reflected his historical preferences. The substance of any history, Dunera’s included, is in the detail. He saw history through a lens that allowed little room for the floating of partly conceived ideas and none at all for speculation, no matter how worthy the intention. If there were a place for emotion, it was after the facts were established. Perhaps his approach could be called traditional. I can’t imagine Bern thinking much of the modern belief that histories can be retold on the basis of emotions.

Whatever the merits of Bern’s approach, it made him a wonderful informant. His view of the past as the stuff of hard facts meant that he spoke only about what he knew. If he didn’t know the answer, he said so. If he thought the question irrelevant, he made that clear too, then explained why. He punctured myths, of which Dunera has more than its share, and raised questions that forced historians and others to think anew about key moments in the story.

Recently I asked him about an incident that looms large in Dunera history and memory. On the voyage to Australia, British guards treated the internees with calculated brutality in a gross, and in some cases criminal, dereliction of duty. The Dunera canon tells that guards, as part of this sustained assault, forced internees to walk over broken glass strewn across the deck of the ship.

The glass was there, Bern told me, but he doubted it was placed deliberately, and he and others simply stepped around it. While the weight of evidence about this incident is against him, I know that Bern, as a historian of the Dunera, never spoke idly. On that basis alone, his account demands consideration.

Ken Inglis cherished Bern’s clarity and commitment to accuracy. They corresponded from the start of Ken’s Dunera project — which also led to a second book, Dunera Lives: Profiles, in 2020 — exchanging emails regularly until Ken’s death in December 2017. Their voluminous correspondence, now part of the Inglis Dunera papers at the National Library of Australia, reveals two scholars in respectful and admiring conversation, one testing notions and ideas, the other encouraging or discouraging those possibilities.

While Bern was an oracle on Dunera, on one aspect of the story he had no answers. When the Dunera internees arrived in Australia, most were incarcerated first at Hay in western New South Wales. Because the camps there could house only 2000, around ninety-five of the internees, seemingly chosen at random, were taken instead to Tatura in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, along with other men who had travelled on the Dunera and been deemed dangerous by British authorities.

Bern was part of this Tatura rump, and there he stayed for the duration of his internment, which lasted until January 1942. Thus, he knew nothing of camp life at Hay. Ken would chuckle at this inconvenience, suggesting that Bern had been remiss in not arranging his internment to suit the needs of future historians.

Bern exerted a strong influence on the writing of the two volumes of Dunera Lives, saving us from mistakes and misinterpretations, and suggesting lines of enquiry that emerged as themes in the books. He was our most prolific and important informant. If our telling of a story differed from the one he knew, he always gave our version a fair hearing. On the odd occasion, we might even have convinced him.

On other occasions, not at all. In Dunera Lives we took a strong line on Winston Churchill’s role in the Dunera affair. While Churchill’s wartime government would later issue an apology of sorts to the Dunera internees for the appalling treatment they suffered, by that time many had already concluded that British liberalism was a chimera. Bern was of the opposite view. He held that Churchill had no choice but to act as he did, and that to suggest otherwise was to allow historical judgement to be derailed by the luxury of hindsight.

This position was entwined with another view to which Bern stuck fast. The Dunera had delivered him to Australia, where he made a rewarding and productive life. As he said often, there was nothing for him in postwar Europe, whereas in Australia, as a young man with energy and purpose, he was able to embrace education and new beginnings, free of the restrictions and prejudices that had shaped his life in Germany.

For Bern, his good fortune was the story, and this mattered more than issues such as the question of Churchill’s culpability. He thought the Dunera the luckiest thing to ever happen to him. Perhaps the fact that his parents survived the Holocaust also influenced this position.

Bern was an unusual Dunera boy in other ways, too. While happily Australian, he maintained strong links to his homeland. He returned to Berlin and Germany often, visiting past haunts and chasing up friends. He continued to speak and read German, and listened to German news on the radio. A couple of years ago Bern wrote to tell me about the Exilmuseum in Berlin, after he had heard mention of the nascent institution on a German radio program. He wondered if the museum’s curators would be interested in learning about the strange story of the German and Austrian exiles who in 1940 found themselves interned in rural Australia. They were.

For other Dunera boys, such engagement with Germany and Austria was anathema. Their wartime experiences and knowledge of the Holocaust poisoned their feelings for the land of their birth. Many never returned to Germany and Austria; many chose to avoid Germanic culture and language.

Bern too knew the pain of persecution and the tragedy of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism forced him and his mother to flee Germany for Britain. Hitler’s regime murdered his grandmother and imprisoned his father. But never did he allow the pain and injustice of the past to determine the direction of his life. It was a remarkably brave choice, and one that not all Dunera boys were able to make, or even wanted to.

Bern’s longevity conferred a sad and perhaps unwanted title. He was the last Dunera boy in Australia, and among the last anywhere. It is thought that there is a Dunera boy alive in France, and another in New York, and possibly others of whom my colleagues and I don’t know, though it is unlikely that these “unknowns” would number more than one or two.

Bern accepted his position with grace, acknowledging the dubious honour as a responsibility rather than a burden, which surely it was. To the best of my knowledge, he never refused a request for an interview, and was diligent in answering questions from scholars and members of the Dunera diaspora. Perhaps he saw duty in these tasks; the Dunera had led him to a good life in Australia, and provided both a scholarly purpose in his later years, and enduring friendships.

On what proved to be his last weekend, Bern travelled to Melbourne, where he delighted in the company of Peter Danby’s family. Danby, originally Peter Danziger, was also a Dunera boy, though the friendship was older than that, the two having met in Britain. Bern was accompanied by Peter and Joanna, two of his three children. The Brent–Danby friendship is now carried by the next generation.

In September 2022 I took the British author and activist Jennifer Nadel to meet Bern in his Canberra home. Jennifer’s father, George Nadel, was a budding scholar when he was deported to Australia on the Dunera. She knows little about his internment, but enough to realise that George’s postwar silences hid deep trauma. For Jennifer, Dunera has been a difficult and painful word.

Aside from their Jewish heritage, George Nadel and Bern had little in common. George was born Austrian, Bern German. Both had a passion for history, though they were driven by differing approaches and emphases. George, who went on to found and edit the venerable journal History and Theory, was an academic who practised history in more formal worlds and ways than Bern. If Bern were ever a reader of that journal, I imagine him warming more to the history than the theory. Bern saw the Dunera as a ship of salvation; for George, the Dunera seems to have heralded only misery.

And yet both men survived the Dunera, and by 2022 Bern was one of very few people anywhere in the world who could talk directly of the experience. Through Bern, Jennifer was given a privileged glimpse of a past about which George never spoke. As we drove away from Bern’s home, she said that his German-accented English, and certain of his mannerisms, evoked fond thoughts of her father.

When I wrote to Jennifer to tell her of Bern’s death, she immediately recalled his bearing and presence, and the importance to her of their meeting. Bern’s willingness to act as a conduit to the past, to talk openly and directly about Dunera, helped many people like her to better understand the story and their part in it. In so doing he aroused emotions. I wonder what he made of that.

Jennifer described meeting Bern as a privilege. It’s the right word. To have known, talked and corresponded with him was a privilege, and something I cherish. Ruhe sanft, lieber Bern. •

The post A Dunera life appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet the decade as we know it started much earlier than 1930. As Tara Zahra argues in her new book Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars, the retreat from liberalism and international cooperation in Europe and the United States began during the first world war and then intensified when postwar hunger and deprivation drove combatant populations away from the ideals of internationalism and cooperation that had once appeared unstoppable.

From the late nineteenth century, global flows of people, money, goods and ideas crossed borders faster than ever before, as new technologies transformed transportation, communication and refrigeration. Tens of millions of Europeans were on the move, a vast majority of them emigrating to North and South America.

But the war suddenly shut down these globalising forces. As Zahra writes, “European countries devoted all of their destructive energies to damming international flows of people, supplies and intelligence.” The results were catastrophic and far-reaching. Hundreds of thousands of Central Europeans starved to death. In Germany, which relied on imports for about a third of its food supply, imports declined by 60 per cent. Poor seasons and the loss of men to the front killed domestic harvests. In Berlin, food prices rose to 800 times their prewar level.

The crisis was similar in the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although less dependent than Germany on food imports, Austria’s agricultural output fell by almost half. Hungary lost a third of its harvest, and officials stopped sending food to nearby Viennese workers who depended on it. Food rationing exacerbated people’s hunger, and queuing at food depots became a full-time occupation.

Manès Sperber, a ten-year-old in Vienna, recalled long wartime nights of queueing in the cold and wet only to find that “the ‘Sold-out’ sign would be put up just as you finally managed to reach the threshold of the shop.” By the end of the war, Viennese were surviving on just 830 calories a day. “To obey the food laws is equivalent to suicide,” one middle-class Viennese woman wrote in her diary in 1918. Indeed, it was women who led the protests against the food shortages — protests that often turned violent — across Europe. Police sent to quell the protesters often joined in instead.

Zahra uses her exceptional skills as a historian to show how globalisation (not a term in use at the time, though certainly a phenomenon traceable to the nineteenth century) and its demise divided and politicised millions. She shows how the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, long a focus of her scholarship, left Austria adrift. The Paris Peace Treaty cemented the collapse of the imperial order and its fragmentation into warring economic units. Once the largest free-trade zone in Europe, Austria lost much of its food supply and raw materials to the economic nationalist policies implemented by its new neighbours, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

“Of the fragments into which the old empire was divided, Austria was by far the most miserable,” League of Nations official Arthur Salter wrote in 1924. In his memoir The World of Yesterday Stefan Zweig lamented the disappearance of Austria as a centre of cultural and intellectual cosmopolitanism, represented by its multinational, multilingual and geographic diversity. The empire had stood in for the whole world not only because of its diversity of population and languages, but also because of its economic self-sufficiency. Now, it had become a head without a body.

Across Europe, back-to-the-land movements emerged as one of the more popular solutions to the food crisis. Supporters from both sides of politics were keen to develop economic self-sufficiency among local populations as a bulwark against future threats and to boost national economies. Autarky became a unifying goal for populations who had experienced hunger and humiliation.

As Zahra writes, “The importance of food security was seared into the bodies of hungry citizens.” In Italy, land was occupied by returning veterans and women, angry they had not received acreages promised in return for their wartime sacrifice. In Austria, calls for the “inner colonisation” of rural land by unemployed men and women appeared to offer the promise of food, jobs, houses and dignity; in reality, unwanted minorities (Slavs and Jews) were expelled from borderlands to free up space. Later, the same ideas were incorporated by the Nazis into the imperial concept of Großraumwirtschaft (greater area economy), which they used to justify their annexation of lands to Germany’s east and the expulsion of millions.

The settlement movement gained even more followers after the Great Depression, as disillusionment with capitalism spread. Faced with bad soil, bad weather, insufficient skills and an almost complete lack of infrastructure, these efforts weren’t always successful.

Women fared the worst. One of Zahra’s most significant contributions is her focus on the experience of women, who often faced the greatest of anti-globalism’s excesses. The back-to-the-land movement was about not only a return to the land but also a return to traditional gender values. Women were expected to work for up to fourteen hours a day doing backbreaking farm labour and unpaid domestic tasks alongside their children to free men up for paid work.

Mass politics on both sides blamed globalism for the drastic decline in living standards, and governments colluded in deflecting blame for the crisis in civilian mortality onto outside forces. Many European countries seemed on the brink of a socialist revolution, a threat that became a reality for a short time in Hungary and Germany, generating counter-revolutionary violence on the right, as fascists and socialists clashed openly in city streets.

As Zahra shows throughout Against the World, the search for scapegoats often led to Jews, who were perceived as “emblems of globalisation par excellence.” Forced by discrimination and persecution into jobs that demanded mobility — as pedlars and traders, for example — they were seen as perennial outsiders, facilitators of global networks of commerce, finance and trade, rootless and without loyalty to the state.

“Jews were targeted as symbols of international finance, unchecked migration, cosmopolitanism, and national disloyalty,” Zahra writes, with alarming echoes of today. German leaders disseminated a “stab in the back” legend that attributed the German and Austrian defeat to internal traitors, namely Jews and communists (the two were often conflated) working for foreign interests.

After Russia’s Bolshevik revolution, the twin “global” threats of Judaism and Bolshevism led to vicious attacks on the Jewish Hungarian population. These pogroms were even more violent in Poland and the Ukraine. Between 1918 and 1921, between 40,000 and 100,000 Jews were killed, around 600,000 displaced and millions of properties looted or destroyed.

Jews were the group most affected by the “epidemic of statelessness” that followed the postwar collapse of empires and the creation of nation-states. These emerging states engaged in a violent new form of political engineering designed to create nationally homogeneous populations. Minorities were persecuted, murdered, expelled or, at the very least, actively encouraged to emigrate; “reliable” citizens were called home or prevented from leaving.

These efforts to purify national populations helped to invent a new kind of migrant: the refugee. In response, a new League of Nations Refugee Commission was created, one of the myriad international commissions and organisations that descended on Europe after 1918 to help those worst affected by the war and its aftermath. The International Save the Children Fund, the Near East Relief Committee and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee were just some of the agencies on hand to assist the vast number of stateless people and refugees created by new and closed borders.

Adding to the chaos from 1919 was the Spanish influenza pandemic, which killed as many as thirty-nine million people worldwide, reinforcing political elites’ desire to tighten borders against “diseased” foreigners. In the United States those foreigners were often imagined as Eastern European and Jewish. The 1924 Johnson–Reed Act introduced “national origins” quotas, effectively reducing immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to America to a trickle.

While it had once been relatively easy for European (though not Asian) individuals fleeing poverty, war or persecution to find refuge in the United States, the closed borders of this new era of anti-globalism left millions in limbo. Ellis Island, repurposed as a detention centre, was emblematic of this shift. The Austrian writer Joseph Roth imagined a Jewish migrant’s fate in 1927: “A high fence protects America from him. Through the bars of his prison, he sees the Statue of Liberty and he doesn’t know whether it’s himself or Liberty that has been incarcerated.”

One of the strengths of Against the World is Zahra’s interest in how the people of the period — the activists, visionaries, nationalists and industrialists invested in globalism, and its discontents — saw the world and themselves in it.

Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian Jewish feminist, is one of the more fascinating characters to accompany us throughout this history. We meet her at the beginning of the book as she oversees the annual meeting of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Budapest. For the delegates, internationalism was crucial to the project of enlightening and emboldening (white) women across the globe.

An early pacifist, Schwimmer spent her life attempting to find ways towards world peace. She appears initially as somewhat naive and opinionated, yet also hopeful. By 1919, a victim of anti-Semitism and sexism, refused a passport to leave Hungary, she is forced to smuggle herself first to safety in Austria and then to the United States, where her application for citizenship is denied. Her transformation from “citizen of the world” to “stateless refugee,” writes Zahra, “was emblematic of the fate of internationalism in interwar Europe.”

In one of the more bizarre encounters Zahra describes, Schwimmer convinced the industrialist and anti-Semite Henry Ford to charter a peace ship to end the war, an expedition that failed amid the derision of American journalists. Ford’s politics were self-serving and contradictory: an anti-globalist who relied on migrant labour, he made his workers perform their assimilation in an eccentric ceremony that involved climbing into a giant papier-mâché “melting pot” in national dress and, moments later, “graduating” in American clothing singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Ford also enforced his own back-to-the-land lifestyle for his company employees, demanding his workers move out of the cities and plant gardens to grow food. Yet he was global in his business aspirations, exporting millions of his cars overseas, including to the Soviet Union, and building plants across the globe. His virulent anti-Semitism also found an international supporter: Hitler praised him in Mein Kampf.

Others who make an appearance include Gandhi, whose own program of self-reliance, or swadeshi, Zahra includes within her anti-globalism frame. Gandhi’s determination to free India from Britain’s imperial chains and its subordination in the global economy resonated around the British empire, including in Ireland, where boycotts of British food caused an economic tariff war between the two countries.

“In a world of falling prices, no stock has dropped more catastrophically than International Cooperation,” the journalist Dorothy Thompson lamented in 1931. When Zahra sat down to write this book in 2016, Donald Trump had just been elected president and Britain had voted for Brexit: “There was a refugee crisis, and populist, right-wing parties were winning elections across Europe with anti-migrant platforms.” Covid and the war in Ukraine followed. (Zahra doesn’t mention here the tensions with China or the wars in the Middle East, equally destabilising.) Globalisation’s future, she writes, appeared uncertain.

Zahra’s neat binary of globalism and anti-globalism might bother some, but I found Against the World a refreshing and intelligent account of a period studied perhaps more than any other. This is a book about the fragility of democracy in the face of economic breakdown. Millions across the political spectrum faced hunger, homelessness, financial ruin and family separation in the wake of the first world war. Both the left and the right offered alternatives to the havoc wreaked by reliance on the global economy.

There are clear differences between the anti-globalisation movements of the interwar years that empowered fascism and those of our own times. But there are clear echoes in today’s widespread disenchantment with democracy’s ability to combat the inequalities associated with lost jobs, farms and homes; with the capacity of our international institutions to mediate conflicts; and with foreign competition and free trade. The other frightening echo is in the easy politics of fear, which sees the world’s most vulnerable cast out by demagogues seeking easy targets.

It’s hard to imagine how a world turned inwards will be able to tackle the biggest global challenges of our time. “The earth heaves,” warned a pessimistic John Maynard Keynes in 1919, “and no one is aware of the rumblings.” •

Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars
By Tara Zahra | W.W. Norton & Company | $57.99 | 400 pages

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The explanations for this attitude tend to focus on these countries’ past connections with Russia and irritation with the West more than their lack of sympathy for Ukraine. The governing African National Congress in South Africa, for example, recalls Soviet support in the long struggle against apartheid. India has found Russia a useful strategic partner in the past and a source of advanced weapons. China and Russia entered into what was described in glowing terms as friendship “without limits” prior to the full-scale invasion.

The West, meanwhile, has been criticised for its focus on Ukraine’s plight compared with its relative indifference to the humanitarian catastrophes of the ongoing wars in Africa and the Middle East. During the war’s early stages the Biden administration framed the conflict as one between democracy and autocracy, which did not impress many of the relatively autocratic governments in the Global South. Lastly, members of the Global South consider the United States and its allies, notably Britain, hypocritical about a “rules-based international order” given their actions in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.

Yet this narrative has become more nuanced over the course of this year. Partly this is because of efforts by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Biden administration to mend fences with these countries. Partly the shift reflects irritation with Russia over its stubborn and wholly unrealistic stance on what might serve as the basis for a peace settlement. A third factor is the harmful impact of Russia’s actions on food and energy prices.

For all these reasons, countries in the Global South are starting to find an equidistant position harder to sustain and are starting to take diplomatic initiatives of their own. These may be harder for Russia to resist than those sponsored by the West.

The “Global South” is one of those convenient shorthands that can keep conversations on international relations going without the need to list lots of different countries. If taken too seriously — as if it represents a homogeneous group with a shared agenda — the label can soon become misleading. It is the latest in a sequence of attempts to group countries according to what they are not instead of who they are.

During the cold war the countries that deliberately stayed outside the main alliances became part of the Non-Aligned Movement. They eventually combined with states with a policy of neutrality (such as Sweden and Switzerland) to become Neutral and Non-Aligned. Those many developing countries outside the main blocs were lumped together as the Third World because they were part of neither the First capitalist world nor the Second communist world.

Once the cold war was over these labels appeared dated and unhelpful, doing little justice to the variety and agency of these countries. It also became apparent that several of these countries that were behind the West on many key economic indicators were nonetheless showing considerable dynamism. Not only were they catching up but they also had shared interests distinct from those of the West. The most important of these countries were identified as the BRICS, standing for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

As well as the group’s growing economic importance it also included the world’s most populous countries. Although it had started as a convenient shorthand, BRICS eventually became a political entity with its own summits. Each of its members tended to complain about attempted US “hegemony” and argue for more multipolarity. Their dislike of America’s regular resort to economic sanctions was reflected in proposals for the “de-dollarisation” of the world economy.

BRICS excludes countries in similar positions, however, including the populous Indonesia and the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, and is already debating whether to invite more members.

The West has its own institutions, of course, including NATO and the European Union, both of which have grown in size since the end of the cold war and provide a degree of integration that is absent from other regional institutions (such as ASEAN and South America’s Mercosur). A Group of Seven industrialised countries (the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan) meets annually, always with the European Union and usually with other invited friends and relations.

The G7 was the G8 until Russia was expelled after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, with one consequence being there is one less place for diplomatic communications between Russia and the West. The obvious place for that contact, the UN Security Council, has been paralysed by Russia’s veto.

One other grouping is large enough to bring together the main international players more inclusively than either the G7 or BRICS. That is the G20, formed in 1999 in response to an economic crisis but now with a wider agenda. It is made up of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union. Indonesia hosted the latest of the G20’s annual summits; India will host the next.

This is an altogether more complicated picture than simply “the West” versus “the Rest,” or one in which, other than the permanent members of the Security Council, few other states count. The complexity of this evolving international system has become more evident as countries work out their responses to the Russo-Ukraine war.

A common complaint from non-Western countries mirrors that of internal critics of Western support for Ukraine: far too much effort is going into stoking the fires of war by sending arms to Ukraine and not enough into “diplomacy” to end the war. A persistent hope is that “dialogue” might find a commonsense way out of the morass.

This line has appealed to those who wish to sound progressive even while supporting a vicious, nationalist aggressor state, or “realists” who take it for granted that at some point Ukraine will concede territory to Russia. Those taking this view also tend to assume that the United States is in the position to get a deal done because it can lever Kyiv into a compliant position.

This was always a dubious proposition. It would not be a good look for Biden, and certainly would be divisive within the alliance, to attempt to strongarm Ukraine into an unequal treaty that Russia would probably not honour anyway. Most importantly, Putin has not offered any encouragement to those urging active negotiations.

Early in the war the two sides were exploring a possible settlement, looking for language on the Donbas, Crimea and neutrality with which the two sides could live. That proved elusive, and the Ukrainian position hardened once Russian atrocities were revealed as troops abandoned their positions close to Kyiv. Now Putin demands that Ukraine agree to the permanent loss of territory unilaterally claimed for Russia, which is even more than it currently occupies. That is not going to happen.

The peace camp has thus faded in the West. The most serious proponents argue that preparations must be made for when the time is ripe, accepting that this is not yet and must await changing attitudes in Kyiv and Moscow. The agreed Western stance follows Ukraine’s: Russia’s behaviour, along with its claimed objectives, means that there is no basis for negotiations. The only development that is likely to shift Russian views is evidence that it is losing the war, and so the main effort needs to be put into helping Ukraine with its military operations.

This position has created a gap that many non-Western countries have been eager to fill, casting themselves in the role of peacemakers. The process began last February when China stepped forward with its proposals. Because of Xi Jinping’s “no limits” partnership with Putin, and his accompanying anti-NATO rhetoric, these were treated sceptically. Zelenskyy, however, appreciated at once that, taken at face value, they were more favourable to Ukraine than Russia. The core principles — staying in line with the UN Charter and respecting national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international humanitarian law — give no support to seizing the territory of a neighbouring state and bombing its cities. The plan was followed up by a discussion between Xi and Zelenskyy and closer diplomatic relations between the two.

Brazil, African countries, and most recently Saudi Arabia have since taken similar initiatives. The last of these was Brazil’s. Although it condemned the Russian invasion, it has not supported sanctions against Moscow or sending arms to Ukraine. After president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva welcomed Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to Brasilia and objected to Western arms deliveries as prolonging the war, he came under heavy criticism. He then declined an invitation from Putin to visit Russia, but repeated “Brazil’s willingness, together with India, Indonesia, and China, to talk to both sides of the conflict in search of peace.”

Lula da Silva has not spoken directly to Zelenskyy and now seems disillusioned. His initiative made little headway, leading him to conclude that neither Putin nor Zelenskyy were ready. “Brazil’s role is to try to arrive at a peace proposal together with others for when both countries want it,” he has said.

Africa’s initiative was announced by South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa on 16 May. In June, representatives from South Africa, Egypt, Senegal, Congo-Brazzaville, Comoros, Zambia and Uganda visited both Ukraine and Russia. The mission was not a great success. As the delegation arrived in Kyiv it was struck by Russian missiles. Then, when they met with Putin on 17 June, the Russian president showed no interest in a plan that required accepting Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders. One South African academic, Professor William Gumede, observed that the African leaders were humiliated: “Putin didn’t even bother to listen to the delegation, basically interrupting them before they’d even finished speaking, implying there was no point in discussing anything as the war would continue.”

This visit was followed in late July by the Second Russo-Africa Summit in St Petersburg, which had been postponed from October 2022 when it would have taken place in Ethiopia. At one level, Russia might have counted the summit a success, with forty-nine delegations attending, although this only included seventeen heads of state (compared with forty-three at the first summit in 2019). But some of the continent’s most important leaders were present, including Ramaphosa and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

One of the odder features of the event was that Yevgeny Prigozhin was also in St Petersburg, also meeting with African leaders, apparently not in disgrace after his recent mutiny against the Russian defence ministry. Prigozhin’s Wagner group has a significant presence in the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali and Sudan (and now potentially Niger).

The summit came not long after Russia had decided to abandon the deal that had allowed Ukraine to export grain (some 32.8 million tonnes last year) from its Black Sea ports, on the grounds that Western sanctions restricting the export of Russian grain and fertiliser had not been lifted (though these are actually exempt from sanctions). The end of the deal means that shortages will grow and prices rise.

At the summit Ramaphosa and other African leaders pleaded with Putin to restore the initiative, the lack of which was already causing hardship on the continent, but to no avail. When Putin offered to donate some grain free to the neediest countries, the South African leader thanked him politely and then added that he and his fellow leaders “are not coming here to plead for donations for the African continent… our main input here is not so much focused on giving and donating grain to the African continent.”

Nor did the summit see any progress on peace negotiations. Putin had no objections to the African mission continuing, but he offered no hope that he was changing his position or withdrawing his transparently false claim that the West had really started the war.

Adding further to the chill, Putin acknowledged after the summit that he would not be travelling to Johannesburg for the BRICS summit, which started on 22 August, as this was less “important than me staying in Russia.” The real reason was that the South African government could not guarantee Putin would not be arrested and sent to The Hague.

The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Putin, issued in March, for the war crime of deporting Ukrainian children, is restricting his ability to travel. South Africa, along with 122 other states, has ratified the Rome Statute and is obliged to arrest Putin if he shows up in their jurisdiction.

The South African government did try to find a way out of this predicament, arguing to the ICC that arresting Putin would be tantamount to a declaration of war and would undermine peace efforts. In the end it had to abandon this effort. Without a guarantee of immunity, Putin clearly decided it was too risky to travel. Instead he will join the summit by video while foreign minister Sergey Lavrov will represent Russia in person.

The developing frustration with Russia was reflected in the most important peace initiative thus far — a two-day summit in Jeddah on 6–8 August, hosted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (normally referred to as “MBS”). Saudi Arabia is another country with which Russia has been trying to improve relations. In particular, the Saudis have cooperated on oil production cuts to raise prices. Although Western nations encourage countries to buy Russian oil only below a US$60 ceiling price, for now it is selling oil at closer to US$65, helping push up revenues.

The Biden administration has also been making moves to improve relations with the Saudis, despite starting in a critical mode because of the kingdom’s human rights records (and especially the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018). It is actively engaged in an effort to get Israel and the Saudis to establish diplomatic relations. MBS’s sympathetic view of Ukraine was evident when Zelenskyy was hosted in May at an Arab summit, also in Jeddah. There the Ukrainian president urged Arab leaders not to turn “a blind eye” to Russian aggression.

Following that summit the Crown Prince called a large international conference and invited Ukraine but not Russia. Even more notable was that the other invitees (some forty states) didn’t appear to find this a turn-off. It was no surprise that the United States and the European Union turned up, but the presence of China, India and South Africa was significant. Had it been the other way round, and Russia had been invited and not Ukraine, this would have been considered an enormous diplomatic defeat for Kyiv and its supporters.

Russia made clear that it was unhappy with its exclusion. Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov grumbled that without his country the talks had not “the slightest added value.” He described the meeting as “a reflection of the West’s attempt to continue futile, doomed efforts” to mobilise the Global South behind Kyiv. At the same time he insisted that Russia remained open to a diplomatic solution to end the war, and would respond to any sincere proposals.

Around the same time, a New York Times journalist asked Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov whether Russia wants to occupy new Ukrainian territories. “No,” he answered. “We just want to control all the land we have now written into our constitution as ours.” Yet that land includes not only Crimea but also the territories of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, not all of which are currently occupied by Russia. “There are currently no grounds for an agreement,” added Peskov. “We will continue the operation for the foreseeable future.”

By contrast, the Ukrainian delegation was pleased with the event. Zelenskyy’s head of staff, Andriy Yermak, spoke of “very productive consultations on the key principles on which a just and lasting peace should be built.” No consensus position had emerged, but the conversation between the different viewpoints was honest and open.

Zelenskyy has said that he hopes that the Jeddah gathering will be a step on the road towards a global peace summit, possibly to be held later in the year. He has framed the talks as following the ten-point peace plan that he presented to the G20 last November. Saudi Arabia’s media ministry emphasised the importance of continuing consultations to pave the way for peace. Working groups are being established to consider some of the specific problems raised by the war.

China’s representative at the Jeddah meeting, Li Hui, was described by an EU source as having “participated actively” in the sessions. He had not attended another informal meeting in Denmark in June.

Also present was India’s national security adviser, who shared the consensus view: “Dialogue and diplomacy is the way forward for a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict. There is a need to uphold territorial integrity and sovereignty without exception by all states… India has regularly engaged both Russia and Ukraine at the highest levels since the beginning of the conflict and New Delhi supports a global order based on principles enshrined in UN Charter and international law.”

India will be hosting the next G20 meeting in Delhi on 9–10 September. Unlike South Africa, it has not signed up to the ICC, so Putin would not be at risk of arrest should be decide to attend. He cannot, however, expect a warm reception, and should it come to talk of peace he will find little sympathy for his insistence on annexing a large chunk of Ukrainian territory. None of the leaders, other than Xi and perhaps Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, the host, will be keen on bilateral meetings with the Russian president.

Russian aggression was condemned at the last G20 meeting in Bali, which Zelenskyy attended. Putin is already seeking to prevent a similar communiqué emerging out of the Delhi summit. A preliminary meeting of G20 finance ministers in July failed to agree to a communiqué because Russia and China objected to a reference to “immense human suffering” and Western states would not sign one that did not condemn the aggression.

Should Putin decide to attend the G20, the event may serve to underline Russia’s isolation as much as its power. He has annoyed countries that now have significant clout in international affairs — countries that make a point of not following an American lead — by insisting on terms for ending the war that contradict the principles of the UN Charter and pursuing strategies that push up energy and food costs for all countries at a time when most are struggling economically. This behaviour has created an opportunity for Zelenskyy to improve relations with these countries and ensure that future peace initiatives are more likely to fit in with his vision than Putin’s.

For that reason we should not expect any early breakthroughs. Much still depends on what happens militarily. But it would be too cynical to dismiss the current diplomatic initiatives as being irrelevant. They reflect the changing character of international relations as Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia and other countries demonstrate their political muscle, and also the continuing importance of the UN Charter as one of the few fixed normative points.

We are moving from the idea of a mediated peace, in which a country able to talk to both Moscow and Kyiv, such as Turkey or Israel, tries to broker an agreement that leaves both sides with honour satisfied, to a process that involves developing global pressure on Putin to back away from his stubborn insistence on Russia’s right to annex Ukrainian territory. •

This article first appeared in Sam and Lawrence Freedman’s Substack newsletter, Comment Is Freed.

The post Putin’s isolation intensifies appeared first on Inside Story.

That triumph, and Pétain’s subsequent success in controlling a mutiny among his troops, gained him considerable prominence. He was named Marshal, a rarely awarded honorific title rather than a formal military title, in 1918. Commander-in-chief of the French army in the interwar years, he twice served briefly as war minister before being appointed ambassador to General Franco’s Spain. He was recalled to Paris in 1940 to take up the position of defence minister but quickly found himself leading the wartime government.

It was this government that would notoriously suspend the French constitution, dissolve parliament and grant him plenipotentiary powers as head of state. In this capacity, Pétain signed an armistice with the Nazi invaders and initiated a policy of collaboration. Three-fifths of France was occupied from 1940 until 1942, then the whole territory. For his role, Pétain was tried in 1945 for treason.

Why was this eighty-four-year-old military figure, effectively a political novice, appointed to the top job? Historian Julian Jackson considers this question early in his new book, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain. An authority on mid-twentieth-century France, Jackson’s best-known books include France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (2001), The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (2003) and A Certain Idea of France: A Life of Charles de Gaulle (2018).

The urgent need for a new prime minister arose from the rout of the French army by the Germans and the growing political pressure for a settlement with the invading forces. Paul Reynaud, France’s president at the time, “lacked the authority” to resist the push for an armistice, writes Jackson, and when it came to naming a new prime minister the choice was between two generals anxious to settle with the Germans.

Of the two, Maxime Weygand, now the army’s commander-in-chief, was a monarchist and therefore unacceptable to Reynaud. Pétain, meanwhile, “had never been associated with disloyalty to Republican governments.” Pétain was also “revered,” writes Jackson, prudent in his associates, and considered a humane commander.

Harbouring political ambitions, Pétain had “kept in touch with events in Paris” while in Spain; and it was the “impending catastrophe of defeat” by the German army that “gave him his opportunity.” Rumours of a Pétain government had spread during the final years of Reynaud’s presidency, and Pétain had been accused of participating in a plot to achieve this end.

Appointed to form a government on 16 June, Pétain was not granted full powers until 10 July, when parliament reconvened in the central French town of Vichy. “The very next day,” writes Jackson, “Pétain issued a series of ‘constitutional acts’ which effectively made him a dictator and put Parliament into abeyance.”

Tellingly, Pétain had topped an opinion poll in 1935 “to discover who would make the most popular dictator for France.” But he had not been the figurehead of a single faction during the 1930s and 1940s. The left had some distrust of him, but generally went along with his image — the aura of military success, the handsome looks and noble bearing that “seduced crowds” — until the suspension of the constitution.

“Pétain’s tragedy,” says Jackson, “was to be an unremarkable person who had come to believe in his own myth.” Those who didn’t believe the myth were the most cynical of his supporters. His close aides considered that he was influenced by the last person he spoke to on an issue. Pierre Laval, the government’s most enthusiastic supporter of collaboration with Germany, thought Pétain deserved only to be a bust on a mantelshelf. His vanity and his public persona, in other words, led him to be eminently manipulable. But his position as the head of the regime inevitably made him responsible for its actions.

Kidnapped by the Nazis in August 1944, not long after the Allies began their push into France, Pétain was held in Germany ostensibly for his own protection. Jackson recounts the grimly amusing story of Germany’s pretence of a French “government in exile,” not to mention the absurdity of the behaviour of its members and of Pétain’s eventual “release.” In what his defenders presented as a “gesture of noble heroism,” he insisted on returning to postwar France to defend himself before the French population.

Pétain’s trial was held in 1945, very soon after Germany’s surrender. The war hadn’t yet ended, and Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government was barely a year old. Finding “legally robust procedures” for trials after the liberation was imperative but difficult, Jackson writes. Politicians accused of treason in the prewar Third Republic had been judged by the Senate sitting as a High Court, but “it was not even yet decided whether France would keep the same constitution, and most members of the Senate elected under it had voted Pétain full powers in 1940.” A new High Court was created to try the Vichy leaders.

The reputation of the Paris judiciary had been “severely compromised” during the war. The Bar had been purged of its Jewish members, and its remaining members recused themselves on the grounds that impartiality would be difficult for them. Further complicating the picture, both the judge presiding over the preliminary interrogation and the prosecutor in the trial had “murky” wartime pasts. The former was undistinguished in legal circles and probably out of his depth. The conduct of the trial did not maintain decorum.

And what was Pétain to be tried for? Eventually, he was indicted for signing the armistice, for the constitutional acts that made him a dictator, and for “abominable racial laws.” But no evidence was brought concerning this third matter, and Jackson devotes a whole chapter to “The Absent Jews.” France had to wait until 1995 for Jacques Chirac’s acknowledgement of French responsibility for the deaths of 75,000 Jews.

Pétain was eventually convicted of “collusion with the enemy” — treason, that is. Jackson recounts the trial in detail. He profiles the lawyers, jury members and witnesses, and draws on the court record and other contemporary documents to create a blow-by-blow account of the debates. More horrifying than amusing, the proceedings reveal the judicial chaos of post-liberation France.

But what of Jackson’s title, for which he thanks a friend? Did the court action against Pétain really put France on trial? This is the question that pervaded the trial and pervades the book.

From the moment of liberation, de Gaulle insisted that France was a nation of resisters that had been betrayed, in Jackson’s words, “only by a handful of traitors who needed to be punished.” To understand this belief, we need to remember that the Gaullist resistance was a nationalist movement, and ideologically conservative. We also need to remember that de Gaulle’s principal aim from 1944 on was to have France recognised as a participant in the war effort and accepted among the Allies at the negotiating table for decisions concerning postwar Europe.

Jackson is sympathetic with this account, deeming it “necessary.” But it was necessary only in the relatively short term; in the longer term, it has been a major cause of France’s difficulty in coming to terms with its history. It surely lends respectability to the national nostalgia for a “certain idea of France,” a nation — notably not a “state” — whose “greatness” would rest on its ideological and cultural homogeneity.

As Jackson remarks elsewhere, France’s wartime population consisted of resisters — a small number at the start, more towards the end — a great number of supporters of Pétain and Vichy, and many people on the fence, waiting to see how the cards would fall. Even if attitudes had been more homogeneous, France could not be tried, if only because a criminal trial necessarily focuses on the accused person and his or her intentions, as was reiterated several times during the proceedings.

At the same time, some prominent intellectuals acknowledged at the time that France as a whole shared some responsibility, that “each of us was complicit,” in the words of one. One of the defence lawyers argued that “if Pétain was guilty so were the French — so was France,” thus suggesting the grounds for an exoneration of the accused. But neither the armistice, nor the abuse of the constitution, nor France, nor even the “widely shared complicity” of the French in the actions of Vichy was on trial. Hence the prosecutor’s insistent focus on the person of Pétain.

The title promises more than the book can give. In what sense was this trial a “case” of putting France on trial? Granted, we may be dealing only with a metaphor, but the metaphor is not apt. When the French judge their own actions under Vichy, it is for collaboration in all areas of social and economic policy. But collaboration does not figure in the penal code.

Under an alternative construal, “case” might refer to a case study, and hence to the work of the book itself. Jackson suggests this in the introduction when he tells us that the trial affords an opportunity “to watch the French debating their history.” In this sense, Jackson’s research serves “as an example” to those “future historians” whom the prosecutor invokes as doing a different kind of work from the court’s: “We are not historians,” he insisted to his colleagues.

Importantly, case studies acknowledge the singularity of each case. This is also the task of historical research. It is in these terms that we can identify the achievement of Jackson’s book; it is an admirable narrative history whose accomplishment lies in its detailed scrutiny of the particularities of Pétain’s trial and the specific aftermath of its verdict.

The final part of France on Trial demonstrates the continuity from the anti-republican sentiment of the 1930s, through the Pétain cult of the war years, to the persistence of extreme-right politics in France in the present day. It is not paranoid to trace this continuity as far back as the Dreyfus affair — not only because of the persistence of anti-Semitism but also because the nefarious role of the army was central.

For Jackson, “the Pétain case is closed” because the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen has walked away from her father’s fidelity to Pétain. But her more radical niece has not; and this, together with far-right figure Éric Zemmour’s strident anti-Muslimism, leaves me more sceptical than optimistic. Pétain and Vichy governed France; they have been the names of a long strand in France’s “civil war.” If those names no longer attract a following, so much the better, but their echo persists. •

France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain
By Julian Jackson | Allen Lane | $55 | 480 pages

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In Russia, what was already an increasingly autocratic regime has ramped up its repression and increasingly shrill propaganda to such an extent that some informed observers are viewing it as fascist. In Ukraine, Kyiv’s second big counteroffensive is under way, but the enemy troops have dug in and are fighting hard to hold on to the territories they managed to occupy in 2022. The counteroffensive is making progress, but it is agonisingly slow.

NATO’s decision to promise membership to Ukraine — but only once the war is over — has perversely increased Russia’s incentive to continue fighting, especially with the possibility of a Trump victory in next year’s American election. The longer Russia maintains its aggression, the longer Ukraine remains outside NATO; a Trump presidency might well herald a fracturing of support for Ukraine among its allies. And as long as Putin remains in power, and as long as his army can sustain the ongoing significant losses, Russia is likely to remain in the war.

Along the way, analysts have got many things wrong. From predicting Russia wouldn’t attack (just before it did), to assuming a quick breakdown of Ukraine’s defences and disintegration of its government, to making optimistic predictions about the instability of Putin’s regime: real developments continued to confound the futurology so prevalent in the commentary.

I mustn’t exclude myself from this critique. A month into the conflict, I published a short piece outlining possible scenarios about how this war would end. Like others, I couldn’t imagine the conflict still raging a year and a half later. Like others, I underestimated Russia’s economic resilience in the face of sanctions (although the full impact of these measures is only being felt now). “Given the sanctions regime,” I wrote, Russia will retain the capacity to resupply its troops for “months at best.” That was way off the mark.

I did better with the scenarios I offered. The first was escalation, by which I meant a tactical nuclear strike or, worse, a nuclear attack on NATO. I didn’t think that was terribly likely, but I wasn’t confident enough to rule it out altogether. Luckily, I was right. While such a course of action remains a possibility, sabre-rattling rather than action has so far prevailed.

The escalations we have seen, however, are significant. The blowing up of the Kakhovka dam caused catastrophic environmental damage and human and material losses for Ukraine. The heavy use of landmines will contaminate the country for years, and maybe decades, to come. And the continual air and artillery attacks on civilian targets are degrading Ukraine’s infrastructure and kill or maim its people in significant numbers.

But Russia’s most consequential escalation has been in the sphere of trade: its continuing attempts to shut down Ukraine’s grain exports are an open attempt to hold the world hostage with the threat of famine.

In effect, what we have seen is my second scenario playing out. “Russia,” I wrote, “will destroy as much of Ukraine’s military and civilian infrastructure as possible, broaden attacks on civilians to increase the costs of this war for the government of Ukraine, and threaten nuclear war against anybody who wants to intervene.”

The point of this brutality was to push Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy “to the limit of what he thinks his people can endure.” Thus far, however, neither Zelenskyy nor Ukraine’s population as a whole has cracked under the pressure. Instead, the defenders have become further embittered and many of their friends abroad increasingly convinced that support for Ukraine is essential.

On the other side of the frontline, too, Putin acted as I feared: he persisted in his war and escalated it considerably.

Back in March 2022, I saw some signs that both sides might be willing to bring the conflict to an end through negotiations. Such optimism has fully evaporated. After the liberation of Bucha in April last year and the detection of appalling war crimes committed by the occupiers, negotiations with Russia before a complete withdrawal is politically impossible. And it is now clear, anyway, that Russia was never really interested in negotiations.

With the battle of Kyiv lost by April 2022, one of Putin’s options was to annex the occupied regions in Ukraine’s east and south, and dig in his troops and declare victory in an attempt to save face at home and blame the ongoing war on Ukraine. He did the former, including in territories his troops don’t control. But he didn’t do the latter. He has clearly no intention of exiting this war.

I ended that piece last year with the least likely scenario: that “Putin’s long-suffering underlings would stage a coup against him.” No such thing happened, of course. Instead, the political elite rallied around Putin, who continued to be the final arbiter of their squabbling. The spectacularly bizarre Wagner uprising was not, as sometimes suggested, an attack on Putin and his system but rather an attempt by one player to elevate his own position, protect himself from competitors and prevent the integration of his lucrative private army into the state’s military. Its resolution reflects a paramilitarised regime in which the state’s monopoly of violence is threatened but not destroyed.

That analysts, journalists, pundits and scholars have often failed to predict the course of this war isn’t surprising. No predictive science exists to be called on, and historical analogies are a poor guide to the complexities of quickly evolving situations. We should therefore be careful not to get ahead of ourselves. Assumptions that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is already doomed, that the Wagner mutiny is a sign that Putin’s grip on power is seriously shaken, or that Russia’s disintegration is just around the corner — all these might well end up on the long list of wrong predictions this war has generated. They might also turn out to be right, of course, but making policy decisions on the basis of such shaky expectations is foolhardy.

At this stage in the conflict, too much is still up in the air. Some time is still left in this year’s fighting season. The extent to which Ukraine’s armed forces have managed to seriously degrade Russia’s military capability at the frontline might not yet be evident. New weapons are still arriving, bolstering Ukraine’s fighting potential. What’s going on inside the Kremlin is opaque, with outside observers having difficulty discerning whether a serious crisis of power is brewing.

Rather than dreaming of some magical diplomatic solution, a sudden victory by Ukraine or a sudden disintegration of Russia to bring this war to a quick end, supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support while carefully and probably secretly planning for all contingencies. •

The post Russia’s war against Ukraine: an eighteen-month stocktake appeared first on Inside Story.

Since the US-supported president Ashraf Ghani fled the capital, the economy has shrunk by 20 per cent or more. Around twenty million people are short of food, and an estimated 3.2 million children are malnourished. Some rural people are reportedly selling organs or even children for cash to survive. Others have streamed into relief camps near provincial capitals for meagre rations.

For its part, the Taliban leadership seems less focused on dealing with this crisis than applying its interpretation of sharia law to social behaviour. It bears down chiefly on women and girls, restricting or even stopping their access to work and education or movement outside the home.

Behaviour like this is the reason the world hangs back from helping the country recover from war. Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran and Qatar have kept their embassies running in Kabul, and India rejoined them in August last year. But none of those countries has formally recognised the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate, and nor has any other Muslim-majority country. Australia and other Western countries maintain cautious communication with the Taliban through diplomatic posts in Qatar, and in the United States’ case through occasional fly-ins or third-country meetings.

Around US$9 billion of the former regime’s foreign funds have been frozen by the United States, several European countries and the United Arab Emirates. After seventy top economists, including Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, urged president Joe Biden last August to let the Afghan central bank tap the reserves — and stop the “collective punishment” of the Afghan people — the United States set up a foundation in Switzerland to allocate half of the reserves in American banks (US$3.5 billion) to pay for humanitarian supplies and electricity from Central Asian neighbours.

But what more can and should the outside world do to alleviate the suffering and starvation of the Afghan people — and beyond that, influence the Taliban towards the more inclusive interpretations of Islam, especially in the treatment of women and religious minorities, that apply in so many other Muslim nations?

In The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left Pakistani-American scholar Hassan Abbas suggests that the immediate prospects for reform in Afghanistan are not great, but that the West must try anyway.

He opens his book by describing how contact between the Taliban and the United States in Qatar from 2012 first acquainted Western officials with some of the figures who were destined to emerge in top positions in the new emirate. After Donald Trump became president in early 2017, this contact developed into negotiations for a US withdrawal.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a seasoned diplomat of Afghan origin, was appointed leader of the American team, and in January 2019 he was cleared by secretary of state Mike Pompeo to offer a drawdown of US forces to zero. In July that year, Trump imposed a nine-month deadline for an agreement. With no gains to show from pulling out of the Iran nuclear pact and talking to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump needed a deal before the 2020 election.

The Taliban persuaded the Americans to agree on a complete pull-out, including from the huge Bagram air base near Kabul. In return they promised that Afghanistan would not become a base for terrorist attacks on the United States or its allies, and that US forces and their local helpers could withdraw without harassment. Rather less firmly, they also pledged to enter power-sharing dialogue with Ashraf Ghani, and to look after Shia and Hazara minorities and allow female education.

Trump got his peace deal in February 2020, though it was signed in Doha rather than, as he’d hoped, at Camp David near Washington. He overruled Ghani’s objection to the release of 5000 Taliban prisoners as part of the deal. With withdrawal by May 2021 pledged, the Taliban suspended action against American forces and concentrated instead on attacking Kabul’s army. By the time Biden formed his administration, Taliban fighters controlled most of the provinces and were closing in on Kabul. Ghani dithered and postured, losing any opportunity to bargain.

Biden decided not to abandon Trump’s agreement, though he shifted the final departure date to 11 September 2021, exactly two decades after the 9/11 attacks by Afghanistan-based al Qaeda. After a trillion dollars, 2448 Americans killed, 20,722 wounded and many more traumatised, Biden said, a changed outcome was highly unlikely even if America stayed another hundred years.

The reality, says Abbas, is that “the Taliban outlasted the Americans.” Afghans were disabused of any faith that the West and their favoured Kabul politicians would save them. “The glorious myth of the ability of foreign intervention to install a democratic order” was comprehensively debunked.

Parallel with the negotiations in Doha, the Taliban were undergoing successive leadership changes. In tracking these shifts, Abbas give us important insight into the make-up and views of the men now in charge of Afghanistan.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the secretive but charismatic Ameer ul-Momineen (Leader of the Faithful) during the Taliban’s first spell of government in the 1990s, resurrected the movement after it was ousted by the Americans and the Northern Alliance in late 2001. Around 1995, he had boldly entered a museum in Kandahar, the country’s second city, taken out a rarely seen cloak said to have been worn by the Prophet Muhammad, and put it on before an amazed and adoring crowd.

In 2013, a little over a decade into the new insurgency, Omar became ill and died in a Karachi hospital. His death was kept secret by the Taliban and their mentors in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, while succession plans proceeded. The natural successor might have been Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Omar’s young brother-in-law, but he was viewed with suspicion by the ISI because he’d opened contact with a brother of Mohammed Karzai, the then US-backed president in Kabul. He was also out of the picture: the ISI had arrested and jailed him in 2010.

In his absence, Mullah Akhtar Mansour was proclaimed the new emir in 2015. A mullah though he was, he was known for his worldly appetites, heading frequently to the Gulf to “buy perfume” — in other words, enjoy Russian sex workers — and hosting Gulf sheikhs for falcon-hunting. It was under his leadership that the Taliban made their first breakthrough in Afghanistan’s north, seizing the city of Kunduz.

Mansour’s term as emir ended when an American drone strike killed him on the road back to Quetta, his Pakistani hideout, after a stay in Iran. The ISI helped target him, Abbas says, so that US forces struck him on the road, rather than at a tea-stand halt, to avoid civilian casualties. With this “help” from the ISI the United States may have lost an emir more inclined to deal with Kabul.

Succession came down to one of Mansour’s two appointed deputies. The victor, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, then fifty-five, was one of the few mullahs who actually knew the Qur’an and hadiths (sayings of the Prophet), though his interpretations diverged from those of most Muslims elsewhere. Apparently strict and calm, Abbas reports, even now he doesn’t know how to use a mobile phone.

Hibatullah retained Mansour’s other deputy, Sirajuddin (or Siraj) Haqqani, a military commander regarded by US intelligence as an ISI asset, who to this day has a US$10 million bounty on his head. One of Omar’s sons, twenty-six-year-old Mullah Yaqoob, was added as second deputy. Baradar, added as a third deputy in 2018 after his release by the Pakistanis at Washington’s request, was soon assigned to the Doha negotiations.

Two years after its return to Kabul, the new Taliban emirate has two centres of power. Hibatullah resides in Kandahar, surrounded by equally conservative mullahs in a council known as the Rahbari Shura. This is the ultimate power centre, akin to the supreme theocratic figure in Iran.

The other centre is the government in Kabul. Unlike its counterpart in Tehran, it isn’t the product of any form of popular election. Its most powerful figures are Siraj Haqqani and Yaqoob, who seized the interior and defence ministries respectively in August 2021 and remain entrenched there.

The prime ministership went to a seventy-year-old mullah, Mohammad Hassan Akhund, regarded as safe hands by Hibatullah. The important qualifications for the job, according to Abbas, were being in Pakistan’s good books, having been in the Taliban councils in Peshawar or Quetta shura and, having studied at the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary, being of like mind with Hibatullah.

Akhund heads a cabinet of mostly Pushtun conservatives, nearly half of whom are on a UN terrorism blacklist. His government did become a little more diverse when deputy ministers were added, notably deputy economics minister Abdul Latif Nazari, a member of the Hazara ethnic minority who holds a PhD in political science, and deputy health minister Hassan Ghyasi, a medical doctor who is also Hazara.

From the time of the Doha peace agreement until their first weeks after entering Kabul, the Taliban purported to have changed since the 1990s, when women were forced into the all-enveloping burqa, and executions and amputations conducted in public were substituted for sport. Siraj Haqqani even told readers of the New York Times in February 2020 that “killing and maiming must stop,” that the Taliban would work for a new inclusive political system, and that women would have the “right to work” and the “right to education.”

There have been glimmers of progress since the takeover. Taliban fighters guard the Shia minority’s mosques and festivals. Women in the cities wear headscarves, as they would anyway, rather than the burqa, and women have been appointed heads of maternity hospitals and gynaecological schools. A contest to head the Afghan Cricket Board became a “fistfight,” suggesting that attitudes towards sport had changed from when the first Taliban regime expelled the Pakistan soccer team with shaven heads for wearing shorts on the field. Hibatullah has also issued a fatwa against forced marriage and the disinheritance of widows.

Mobile phones and social media are allowed. Indeed, Taliban spokesmen have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. With seven million Afghans using the internet — “a necessity of the people,” one minister has said — the regime accepts that this particular tide of modernity can’t be ordered back. A new 100,000-strong regular army and a 140,000-strong police force, many with shaven faces, have been formed. Foreign correspondents are allowed to stay in Kabul, and often get interviews with government figures.

Yet if the promises on taking Kabul seemed too good to be true, that’s because they were, according to Abbas. In December 2021 women were told they must be accompanied by a male relative when travelling medium to long distances. Girls’ schools for grade six (age eleven) and above were subsequently closed.

In June last year, a book by chief justice Mullah Abdul Hakim (with a foreword by ) emphasised the absolute authority of the emir, and entertains no notion of a representative mechanism. Modern (non-religious) education was causing all the country’s problems, he wrote, so education had to be inherently religious. Women could only be wives and mothers, and their intellectual inferiority meant they could never be the emir. They had to be taught at home by family members, and must never study alongside men; if they had to leave the house, the teacher must be a woman.

In October, a government guidance said girls shouldn’t take college entrance exams for subjects like economics, engineering, agriculture, geology and journalism, which were deemed “too difficult.”

Abbas sees two minds at war here, with the conservative clerics advising so far prevailing, to the dismay of more progressive elements. It doesn’t help that some Western media call this “a return to traditional Islam” — it isn’t, he says. The Taliban “routinely mix up their tribal norms with Islam” instead of following sayings of the Prophet such as “Education is incumbent on every boy and girl.” Once again, women are the victims of war, Abbas writes. “They have become the bargaining chip, their liberties the sacrifice.”

And what of the Taliban’s other promises?

On security, the main terror threat comes from the regional branch of ISIS, known as the Islamic State in Khorasan. Its suicide bombing amid the crowds outside Kabul’s airport on 26 August 2021 killed 170 Afghans and thirteen American soldiers, and it has also targeted the Shia and Hazara minorities where it can. The Taliban are said to be seeking aid from the Americans, including signals intelligence, to fight the ISK; outflanked in extremism, it worries that its now-idle fighters might gravitate to the radical group.

But old Taliban friendships persist. In July last year, a CIA drone strike killed the visiting al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Kabul residence where he was apparently a guest of interior minister Siraj Haqqani. The muted response of the government showed its embarrassment.

While the ISK, with its many foreign members, might struggle in Afghanistan, a worsening security problem is blowing back on the Taliban’s old puppet-masters in Pakistan. A wave of terror bombings by the Taliban’s counterpart, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, is aiming to establish an even purer (to its mind) form of Islamic rule in the country whose name means “Land of the Pure.”

As for inclusion, the Taliban resisted bringing figures from the former US-backed government into even symbolic roles. But Hamid Karzai, the former president, and Abdullah Abdullah, a former chief minister, continue to live in Kabul. The Hazara ethnic minority fares better than during the first Taliban period, when they were victims of a genocide that saw desperate journeys to foreign asylum — some to Australia by boat — but Abbas notes Hazara lands reportedly being taken by Pashtuns and Hazara being excluded from relief supplies.

Economic stringency is affecting the Taliban as well, and helping moderate figures. Baradar has come back into the picture as head of economic policy with oversight of the finance ministry. Though not an economist, his Doha background makes him best suited to approach foreign partners and donors.

Another frontman is a foreign ministry spokesman, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, who grew up in New Zealand, speaks fluent English and may be a son-in-law of the late emir Mansour. As part of this effort to improve their image abroad, the Taliban have invited foreign correspondents to witness the drive against opium cultivation.

Overall, Abbas says it’s too early to declare that anything resembling a “New Taliban” has arrived. The regime is a toxic mix of “religion gone sour,” patriarchy, tribalism, nationalism and ethnic rivalry — all surrounded by baleful geopolitical rivalries: Saudi Arabia vs Turkey vs Iran; India vs Pakistan; the United Arab Emirates vs Qatar. But change might happen over the next five years as the Omar-era old guard retires.

This is very much an interim book, breezily written, more journalistic than academic, with necessarily vague attributions to the Taliban, diplomatic, intelligence and army figures whom Abbas quotes. It is strong on the who, how and where, less so on the “why.” The explanation of the Taliban’s theology derived from the Deoband school in Northern India could be a lot clearer: Abbas assumes a knowledge of the Salafi and Wahhabi purist schools originating in the Arab world in making a distinction about the Taliban.

But Abbas does buttress his contention that holding back doesn’t help anyone. The Taliban are the de facto government, and the West recognises regimes with equally atrocious human rights records elsewhere. Distinguishing between engagement and endorsement, Abbas argues that only through “creative engagement” can the Taliban be influenced effectively. He concludes: “Not engaging is going to support the view of hardliners that the world is against them — and consequently they will rise further within the organisation.” •

The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left
By Hassan Abbas | Yale University Press | $34.95 | 305 pages

The post Enigmatic pariah appeared first on Inside Story.

Ben Roberts-Smith was already the most famous and celebrated soldier of his generation. During multiple operational tours in Afghanistan, he had won the Victoria Cross, the Medal for Gallantry and the Commendation for Distinguished Service — making him the most highly decorated Australian serviceman since the second world war.

After retiring from the army in 2013, Roberts-Smith had done an MBA and traded his $120,000-a-year soldier’s pay packet for a $700,000 package as Queensland manager of the Seven Network. Venerated as an exemplary role model in war and peace, he was named Australian Father of the Year in 2013 and served as chair of the National Australia Day Council from 2014 to 2017.

During his research in Afghanistan and Australia, Masters had heard claims that Roberts-Smith was not quite the paragon of virtue that political leaders, powerful business figures and the Australian public had come to embrace. There were mutterings that he was a headstrong bully, that the circumstances in which he had won his medals were dubious and that he had been involved in multiple battlefield abuses. But there was nothing concrete.

The meeting in the privacy of the Hyatt Hotel rose garden had been arranged as an opportunity for the former soldier to rebut various criticisms being levelled by his old comrades, rather than as an inquisition. “While I was obliged to ask difficult questions, which is the job of a journalist, I was in a mood to mediate,” Masters, an admirer of Australia’s special forces and supporter of their engagement in Afghanistan, would write. But while Roberts-Smith had begun by revealing himself to be “articulate, measured and persuasive,” the conversation soon degenerated into anger and vitriol.

The war hero went to war on his accusers. He blasted some of the soldiers who had served with him as cowardly, incompetent and toxic. He said his critics were driven by jealousy and were smearing him with lies. He was “vicious” in his angry rebuttal of their accusations. As Masters later watched the two-metre-tall figure in the tailored business suit depart, he would reflect: “My overwhelming impression… was that Ben Roberts-Smith VC, MG was not behaving like a man with nothing to hide.”

A few days later, Masters received a late-night call on his mobile phone from an anonymous source on an encrypted line, who said: “He kicked this bloke off a cliff. As his face spun down, it smashed against the wall and his teeth sprayed out. The bloke who saw it can’t get the image out of his mind. He said he had to get away from Ben Roberts-Smith. It was not the first time he said this stuff happened. RS is a bloody psychopath.” After Masters pursued further details from sources, “the outline of a shocking story emerged, cruel to the point of abomination.”

He realised he was on the cusp of perhaps his biggest story since the 1980s, when he had exposed the French government’s involvement in the sinking of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior and revealed the police corruption in Queensland, helping to trigger the Fitzgerald royal commission. But the former Four Corners star was now a freelance journalist and writer with limited resources. “I needed an ally,” he would concede.

And so began one of the most formidable partnerships in the history of Australian investigative journalism — Chris Masters and the Age’s Nick McKenzie. Despite being thirty-three years younger than Masters, McKenzie had a CV to rival if not surpass that of the man who had once mentored him as a cadet journalist. After two decades of spectacular investigative journalism, McKenzie had won an unprecedented fourteen national Walkley awards for journalism and twice been named Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year.

Their six-year collaboration delivered a series of shocking revelations about the conduct of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan and a marathon defamation trial that ended last month with a finding by Justice Anthony Besanko in the NSW Supreme Court that Ben Roberts-Smith was a liar, a serial bully and a war criminal. Besanko found it was “substantially true” that the VC winner had been involved in the murder of four unarmed Afghan prisoners and civilians, had intimidated and threatened court witnesses to hide the truth, and had lied repeatedly in his sworn evidence.

Despite Roberts-Smith’s decision on Tuesday to lodge an appeal in the Federal Court challenging Besanko’s findings, the dramatic conclusion of the case has starkly framed the prospect of years of sensational war crimes prosecutions that are likely to shred the reputation of our armed forces at home and abroad and scar the Anzac mythology that has been a cornerstone of our national identity for more than a century. The failure of Roberts-Smith to hide what Besanko found to be true must give new impetus to the work of the Australian Federal Police and the Special Investigator appointed in the wake of the internal defence department inquiry into war crimes in Afghanistan headed by NSW judge and army reservist Major General Paul Brereton.

Brereton reported in 2020 that there was credible evidence that thirty-nine Afghan non-combatants had been unlawfully killed by or at the direction of Australian special forces, “which may constitute the war crime of murder.” His report identified twenty-five current or former Australian soldiers who were “alleged perpetrators — either as principals or accessories.” Brereton described one of the unspecified incidents he investigated as “the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history.”

Had Besanko found in favour of Roberts-Smith, it would likely have dampened if not derailed the cumbersome process of bringing appropriate criminal charges against those identified by the Brereton inquiry. It would have re-energised the many powerful voices who continue to argue that whatever happened in Afghanistan should be left behind in Afghanistan. And it would certainly have discouraged the media from further interrogating matters that might risk ruinous defamation costs.

Instead, the chief of the defence force, General Angus Campbell, this week declared that thoroughly investigating those Australian soldiers accused of war crimes in Afghanistan was “utterly critical” to Australia regaining moral authority at home and with its allies. Campbell, who deserves great credit for initiating the Brereton process in 2016 in the face of strong military and political opposition, told the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s journal the Strategist that it was also imperative to deal more broadly with “the breadth of the cultural professional issues” that had been highlighted by the inquiry.

“Our operational capability is in large part about our capacity to win the friends and partners who will stand with us in conflict,” he said. “We need to be a force that people want to serve in, but also to join with in partnership across nations. We have never fought alone. We never want to fight alone. What a tragedy if because of real or perceived lapses in our military conduct we found ourselves alone.”

While the tenacious partnership between Masters and McKenzie secured victory in what became the biggest and, with costs now estimated to be as high as $35 million, the most expensive defamation case in Australian history, it would not survive the final reckoning. Their plans to jointly write a book about the saga unravelled. According to Masters, he and McKenzie “worked well together as investigators, but regrettably could not coordinate the writing” of a joint book.

That apparently amicable literary separation has now delivered two compelling accounts of the partnership that complement and illuminate each other — Nick McKenzie’s Crossing the Line and Chris Masters’s Flawed Hero. Both are powerful, passionate and often moving narratives infused with the personal impacts of fighting the most protracted and enervating journalistic battle each of them had ever experienced. Had they lost, it would have been a serious setback late in the illustrious career of seventy-four-year-old Masters. For Nick McKenzie, it would have been the end. He writes that he could not have coped professionally with the failure and, aged forty-one, would have quit journalism.

The two journalists reveal how perilously close they thought they came to losing. While they were sure of the accuracy of their reporting and the details of the atrocities they had helped to uncover, they concede that they faced an uphill battle proving it to the standard required for a defence of truth in a civil defamation case.

To succeed, it was essential to persuade soldiers who witnessed the abuses to agree to give evidence or, if they were compelled to appear, to tell the truth about what they had seen. When the case began, they were pessimistic about the prospects of persuading even those soldiers who were appalled by what they had seen and supported their reporting to willingly give evidence. They were sure Roberts-Smith had the upper hand at the start of the hearings and held it until close to the end.

Had the hearings not been delayed many months by the intervention of Covid, they felt it unlikely they would have had enough time to persuade reluctant witnesses to cooperate. But in the end, the defendants called twenty-one serving and former soldiers, and it was the compelling testimony of a number of them that ultimately defeated Roberts-Smith’s claims.

For both journalists it was, before the final victory, a deeply disillusioning experience. For Masters, who had spent decades working closely with special forces and growing to admire their dedication and professionalism, this was especially so. Beyond the shocking evidence of the multiple murders of unarmed prisoners and civilians, there was what Liberal MP and former SAS captain Andrew Hastie would describe as a pervasive “pagan warrior culture”: rookie soldiers “blooded” by being ordered to kill Afghan captives, “throw downs” in which radios or weapons were planted on the bodies of unarmed victims to pretend they were legitimate battlefield casualties, and “kill boards” kept by SAS units with targets of Afghans to be killed. “It amounted to a descent into the depravity we fight against,” writes Masters.

For McKenzie, seeking justice for the most famous of the victims became a driving force. Ali Jan was the innocent farmer and father of six who was visiting the village of Darwan in Oruzgan province to buy flour and a pair of shoes for his young daughter on 11 September 2012 — the eleventh anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks in New York — when Australian soldiers swooped on the village. Justice Besanko would accept the evidence of multiple witnesses that after he was handcuffed and questioned, Ali Jan was taken to the edge of a nearby cliff and kicked off by Ben Roberts-Smith, who later ordered the execution of the helpless and badly injured farmer.

In 2019 McKenzie travelled to Afghanistan to meet Ali Jan’s widow, Bibi Dhorko, who was desperately struggling to support her young family after the loss of her husband. “One of the soldiers who’d been at Darwan the day Ali Jan died told me something just before I made the trip to Kabul,” he writes. “I’d thought about it ever since. Ali had lived a relatively meagre existence confined to a few villages, a cluster of kin and a daily struggle to survive. Once the story of his death was exposed in our newspapers, it had viscerally exposed the barbarity of those few Australian soldiers who had gone rogue… In death, Ali had reinforced to my war-bitten source the sanctity of human life, even in conflict. This was why the laws of war mattered. Maybe that was Ali’s ultimate legacy.”

As much as the Roberts-Smith saga showed the best of Australian journalism through the determined work of our finest investigative reporters, it also showed the worst of Australian journalism in the outrageously partisan conduct of rival media organisations. They not only failed in their professional duty to help expose the scandal but also worked hard to undermine the credibility of the fine work done by McKenzie and Masters, gormlessly joining the Roberts-Smith cheer squad.

“I can’t say I handle well being beaten up by fellow reporters,” Masters writes. “My view is that there is a shared responsibility. We work first for the public, so there should be some shared values and purpose.” He derides in particular the reporting of the Murdoch press: “The Australian’s reporting on the war crimes now under scrutiny, and especially on Ben Roberts-Smith, was flimsy and partisan. Probably because they had not done the work, because they were incapable of catching up and had an ingrained oppositional stance to Fairfax, and because they could not resist the spoils of a drip-feeding by Roberts-Smith’s lawyers.”

The magnitude of Roberts-Smith’s fall from grace has been amplified by the heights to which he was elevated in popular perception, in large part a product of jingoistic and uncritical coverage in the popular media. Chris Masters dubbed him the Anzac Avatar — the superman soldier whose fame and legendary battlefield exploits made him the embodiment of Australia’s self-perception as a nation of rugged, fearless and independent individuals.

“Craving identity,” Masters writes, “Ben Roberts-Smith found the shape of who he wanted to be in the persona of the killing machine. The special forces operative, amped in popular media to superhero veneration, became a poster boy. We could not help ourselves. The seven-foot-tall and bulletproof Anzac avatar assumed that pedestal.” This, says Masters, is where it went “monstrously wrong.”

Ben Roberts-Smith was one of four Australians to win the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan. Why was he the household name when most Australians would be unaware of the three other Australian soldiers who also won the highest award for gallantry, let alone know their names? How many know the story of Trooper Mark Donaldson who rescued a wounded Afghan interpreter under heavy fire, or Corporal Daniel Keighran who drew enemy fire away from a wounded colleague, or Corporal Cameron Baird who was killed in action storming an enemy-controlled building?

While it was central to Roberts-Smith’s case to portray himself as the victim of a reckless media smear campaign, Masters points out that the complaints about the soldier “originated not from the pampered, irresponsible media but from battle-hardened colleagues.”

Both McKenzie and Masters argue persuasively that Australians rightly dismayed by the scandalous misconduct within the ranks of our elite forces in Afghanistan should be heartened by the fact that the truth would probably never have been revealed without the courageous stand of many decent and professional soldiers appalled by the actions of their comrades.

Says McKenzie: “It was the good men and the moral soldiers of the SAS who stood up and told the truth in court.” Masters writes: “There are soldiers in Australia’s Special Air Services Regiment who have moral as well as physical courage. While those who spoke endured condemnation from many of their brothers, it is hoped that some glancing consideration might be given to the probability that they saved their regiment. Had these revelations erupted as a scandal that was unforeseen and not self-reported, the SASR would have been lucky to escape disbandment.”

As Australia braces for years of traumatic testimony with the twenty-five potential war criminals identified by the Brereton inquiry facing prosecution, we might hope that the courage and decency of those who called out the renegades and forced the reckoning will be the narrative that begins to salvage the tarnished honour of our armed forces. •

Crossing the Line: The Inside Story of Murder, Lies and a Fallen Hero
By Nick McKenzie | Hachette | $34.95 | 488 pages

Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes
By Chris Masters | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 592 pages

The post Unfriendly fire appeared first on Inside Story.

In his provocative new book, Russia Against Modernity, Alexander Etkind argues that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of a single, broad historical pattern. It is the last gasp of a failing, kleptocratic petrostate for which external aggression is a natural move. Rather than the Ukraine war itself, Etkind is interested in the conditions within Russia that have culminated so calamitously.

In what is more a pamphlet than a treatise, Etkind combines brevity and playfulness with a degree of erudition that other works covering the Russia–Ukraine conflict seldom manage, melding political economy, history, demography, social theory and social psychology. That range reflects Etkind’s eclectic polymathy: a native of St Petersburg (then Leningrad), he grew up in the Soviet Union, completed two degrees in psychology at Leningrad State University before earning a PhD in Slavonic cultural history in Helsinki, and has variously taught and researched — in faculties of sociology, political science, languages, history and international relations — in St Petersburg, New York, Cambridge, Florence and Vienna.

This smorgasbord of disciplines is reflected in his previous books: an analysis of Russia’s practice of imperialism and internal colonisation; a history of psychoanalysis in Russia; memory studies of the Soviet gulag and the second world war; and Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources. The latter, which foreshadows a central theme of Russia Against Modernity, argues that the drive to accumulate resources has long had a corrosive effect on societies, and on the planet.

Etkind’s big-picture approach means this is not a book to read for a detailed narrative or analysis of the events that led up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022. Nor will you find much discussion of Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, NATO, Russia–Ukraine relations or Ukrainian history, or of the course of the war itself.

Most explanations of the Ukraine war tend to give primacy to either external or internal factors. The “externalists,” for want of a better word, include those who claim the war is a natural outcome of unwise/reckless NATO expansion. Going further, some even buy the Kremlin line — despite all evidence to the contrary — that the West’s fundamental, if unstated, goal is to weaken or destroy Russia.

At the other end of the externalist spectrum are those, including many Ukrainians and East Europeans, who believe an inherent imperialism is demonstrated by Russia’s aggression towards former territories. Some attribute this to the size of the country, its innate political culture, the “Russian psyche” or, in its crudest renderings, a kind of Russian DNA.

“Internalists” emphasise the domestic drivers of the war — notably an authoritarian state’s need to legitimise itself through nationalist and revanchist propaganda. In this view, the Ukraine war and other militaristic posturing or adventures are cynically deployed to further the interests of the elite. For some, Ukraine presented a threat to the Kremlin because it offered a democratic alternative. A handful on the left claim that the war’s roots lie in the ambitions of Russian oligarchs vying to capture Ukraine’s valuable natural and other resources.

Some analysts, of course, combine or reconcile internal and external elements in explaining the war, but Etkind is rare in drawing together multiple threads and focusing on general trends. It isn’t always clear whether he wants us to take the picture he presents as Constable-like realism, an Impressionist canvas or even a satirical cartoon. In parts, the book feels like a Dali-style exploration of deeper, unconscious truths, leaving the reader feeling that Etkind is getting at something without being clear quite what.

Etkind’s main idea is that the Russian state and society is an exemplar of “paleomodernity,” following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in championing “grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature.” For Etkind, Putin’s war is not only a “special operation” against the Ukrainian people, their statehood and culture; it is also “a broader operation against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor.”

If paleomodernity — a conglomeration of steel, oil and gunpowder — reached its apotheosis in the twentieth century, then its twenty-first-century antithesis is “gaiamodernity,” a higher form of civilisation where small, sustainable, democratic and feminine are beautiful, and racial, sexual and intellectual diversity are cherished. Etkind seems to see this nightmarish scenario for Tucker Carlson or Sky After Dark’s pundits as both a utopia to be dreamed of and a kind of immanent social order, destined to emerge, echoing Hegel’s and Marx’s systems of thought.

Etkind’s key take is that the “oiligarchs” and bureaucrats running Russia saw this “advance of history” as an existential threat to its oil and gas exports, which make up a third of Russia’s GDP, two-thirds of its exports and half the state budget. The money was crucial to the stability of Russia’s currency, crucial for its military spending and crucial for maintaining the elite’s luxurious lifestyle. It was also the chief driver of corruption, inequality and declining social and demographic indicators. All of this fed popular disillusionment, growing authoritarianism and elite paranoia and the ideologies supporting aggression.

As an archetypal petrostate, Etkind argues, Russia is afflicted by the resource curse, whereby an economy as a whole underperforms because a single commodity is so dominant. Initially, in the 2000s, rising oil prices underpinned Putin’s success in restoring economic growth. The populace gained a welcome sense of stability after the economic and political turmoil of the “wild nineties,” leading many to accept the gradual erosion of civil liberties.

By the 2010s, however, not only were Russian incomes falling but so were a range of social and economic metrics. By 2021, life expectancy had fallen to 105th globally, per-capita health spending to 104th and education spending to 125th. Russia had the fourth-highest carbon emissions globally and among the highest rates of suicides, abortions, road deaths and industrial accidents.

Thanks largely to embezzlement, post-Soviet Russia witnessed the fastest rise in inequality ever recorded. Its income inequality was among the world’s highest and by 2021 it led all major countries in inequality of wealth: 58 per cent of national wealth belonging to the top 1 per cent, well above Brazil (49 per cent) and the United States (35 per cent). More than a fifth of Russia’s citizens, meanwhile, lived on less than US$10 a day, and the middle class had been hollowed out.

In excess of three trillion dollars had been stolen and squirrelled away abroad — more than the total financial assets legally owned by Russian households. “Economists from Harvard and Moscow alike believed that economic growth would be the source of all good in Russia, that accumulated wealth would trickle down to the poor, that the rising tide would lift all boats,” writes Etkind. “In fact, it lifted only the yachts of the rich. The boats of the poor leaked, and they drowned in the tide.”

The wealth gained from being the world’s biggest exporter of energy funded an enormous state machine, particularly a military, security and law-enforcement apparatus accounting for fully one-third of the budget. Russian military spending increased by a factor of seven between 2000 and 2020, compared with a factor of two in Germany and 2.5 in the United States. In the end, though, corruption has hobbled the Russian war effort in Ukraine and sanctions have stranded assets held abroad, including the mind-boggling superyachts of Putin, his top officials and Russia’s tycoons.

Etkind doesn’t really explain why the military–security sector became so bloated, beyond its being a very big trough for corrupt snouts. Most observers would point to Putin’s own reliance on and favouritism towards cronies from the sector — the so-called siloviki, or people of force — on top of his belief in restoring Russian greatness and the need for a strong repressive apparatus to quash dissent.

Etkind treats war as more or less a natural outcome of Russia’s political economy. The more a “parasitic state” relies on natural resources, the less it invests in human capital. The lower the human capital, the greater the state’s dependence on resource extraction. It accumulates gold, limits internal consumption, pursues domestic oppression and, sooner or later, launches a war of aggression. Yet this is only part of the picture, and doesn’t hold true for Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Qatar or other petrostates.

Some of Etkind’s most interesting, albeit speculative, chapters deal with the interplay between Russia’s political economy, its demographic decline and issues like gender inequality and homophobia. The latter have become a common theme of state-sponsored propaganda: TV pundits talk about fighting a degenerate West where genders proliferate; patriarchs and priests equate the war on Ukraine with fighting those Satanic “gay parades.”

Partly because of very high divorce rates, children are raised by only one parent, usually the mother, in one in three Russian families. Etkind pushes the envelope when he posits the growth of “fatherlessness” as a cause of authoritarian tendencies, as some postwar German theorists did in the case of Nazi Germany. High rates of domestic violence — which was actually decriminalised in 2017 in a nod to patriarchal opinion — have been another symptom of social dysfunction.

Etkind also highlights “granny power” as another bulwark against modernity: the heightened role of babushki (grandmothers) in many three-generation households, he says, imbues children with backward-looking and authoritarian ideas and attitudes. The three-generation household, with overburdened mothers and absent fathers, is a product of the inadequate incomes, housing, childcare and pensions generated by the parasitic petrostate, as well as men’s much lower life expectancy (sixty-five years, compared with women’s seventy-seven).

Etkind points to other elements of Russia’s demographic catastrophe — world-leading abortion rates, high rates of emigration among the young and educated — as signs of lack of trust and faith in a future governed by a corrupt and authoritarian state. “The birth rate,” he writes, “was the ultimate manifestation of public opinion.” A lot of these demographic problems were also present in the Soviet years, serving as a kind of canary in the mine presaging the Soviet Union’s decline.

Perhaps more telling, and more of a blow to male egos among the Russian elite, is Etkind’s suggestion that the homophobia prevalent in officially sponsored propaganda stems from the practice of bullying (dedovshchina, or the grandfather rule), often involving rape, in the military. And these super-wealthy grandfathers in the Kremlin, who Etkind notes are a generation older than Zelensky’s leadership circle in Ukraine, are natural allies of the impoverished grandmothers of the Russian suburbs, sharing the inherent conservatism of the three-generation family.

Etkind coins the term “stopmodernism” to describe Russia’s “special operation” against gaiamodernity. The war in Ukraine is just one weapon in its arsenal, alongside climate denial, election interference and others. Decarbonisation represents a huge challenge to Russia’s interests, and although Putin’s regime has played along at times with moves towards curbing emissions, it has also played a spoiler role. The biggest “gaiamodern” threat to the wealth of Russia’s elite have been the moves towards zero emissions by the European Union, its chief market for gas and oil, including the Transborder Carbon Tax announced in 2021.

Etkind also suggests that the 2009 Climategate hacks of emails, which purported to show climate change to be a conspiracy among scientists, was of a piece with Russia’s more recent hacking and online-disinformation efforts (including via Prigozhin’s infamous troll factories) to support right-wing politicians in the United States and Europe.

Etkind’s brushwork becomes a bit Dali-like in drawing lines between the petrostate’s political economy and motivations for the war, yet he makes some plausible points. He argues that rampant inequality led the elite to create fables to explain its privileged position and place blame elsewhere. He says that the kind of mystical nationalism encountered more and more frequently among the elite, including Putin, is a reworking of the idea of a chosen people to explain the fateful chance that endows some countries with an abundance of natural wealth.

The idea that Russia has a special, even divine, historical role is far from new — it featured in tsarist and Soviet times — but Etkind would no doubt argue that current conditions have given it greater appeal and currency.

For Etkind, conspiracy theories are a key part of the myth-making. He seems convinced they are a psychopathology and not just the cynical outpourings of a well-funded propaganda machine. Whatever its cause, the propaganda and media machine have become increasingly anti-American, Eurosceptic and homophobic, with “stopmodernism” encrypted into news channels, reality shows, sporting events and beauty contests. The very same people you might meet on a weekend in a posh Mediterranean hotel spend their working hours cursing “gay Europe” in Moscow TV studios.

Etkind paints Putin’s speech justifying the February 2022 invasion not just as an apotheosis of myth-making and conspiracy peddling, but also as a deadly rationale for genocide. For Putin, he writes,

Russians and Ukrainians are essentially the same, but some Ukrainians are Nazis and therefore different. The Americans had turned [Russia’s] Ukrainian friends into Nazis, the opposite of the Russians, who defeated Nazism and disliked the Americans… Putin was effectively declaring war against the US and its allies, not against Ukraine. Ukraine was not even a proxy: it did not exist, it was a terra nullius.

Ultimately, however, despite all these systemic factors, Etkind comes close to surrendering to a different kind of analysis by putting the onus on the personal: namely, Putin got bored and started a war. “A wiser tyrant would have deferred his inevitable end for another few years, even a decade. Impatient and bored, Putin was the unexpected nemesis of Putinism.”

A richer canvas might also have coloured in links between the authoritarian and corrupt Putinist system and his hubristic miscalculations about Ukrainian strength and resolve, Western unity and Russian military strength. This broader account might also help explain why a petrostate that in 2021 sent three-quarters of its gas exports and two-thirds of its oil exports to the European Union decided to risk all with the invasion.

Russia Against Modernity ends with a picture of the future: Russia will inevitably lose the war and begin a process of defederation. Its constituent national minorities, indigenous peoples and diverse regions will at last — after a long but hopefully not bloody transition period — gain real autonomy and democracy and move towards a gaiamodern world, leaving behind the petrostate that has exploited them. One can’t help feeling that this is more utopian dream than sober analysis, however much we might hope elements of it come true.

Sceptics may ask whether Russia is really so different from some or many developed capitalist societies in terms of the evils and dysfunctions Etkind outlines. I suspect he would say that they/we all cling to elements of paleomodernity to differing degrees, exemplified in different political and social forces competing with the gaiamodern. He would add that, as a petrostate, Russia is a more extreme and different kind of polity in terms of its interest in thwarting gaiamodernity.

Russia Against Modernity is a useful corrective for some on the left (and far right) who are instinctively suspicious of American actions and see merit in claims that Ukraine is a “proxy war” by NATO against Russia. Systemic factors in Russia are more than enough to explain the war, without having to disentangle the history of NATO enlargement or the contribution of Western blundering in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. As I have argued elsewhere, while we can debate the wisdom or morality of these actions, none represented a serious threat to Russia. And Etkind is right to see Ukraine’s treatment of Russian speakers and other internal issues as more of a “fetish” among the Russian elite, as he puts it, rather than a serious factor.

Etkind’s work is also valuable because he is a Russian with an intimate understanding of the country and broad international experience who brings to bear serious intellectual firepower. In one section, “The Unbearable Lightness of Western Pundits,” he beautifully skewers so-called experts like Niall Ferguson and Adam Tooze who pointed to Ukrainian weaknesses and the inevitability of Russian victory just before the 2022 invasion. Another target is international relations guru John Mearsheimer, who more or less justified the invasion by saying that, if Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would suffer “existentially.” Russia now has both Sweden and Finland rushing to join NATO, while Ukraine, of course, had no near-term prospect of membership.

One thing common to these generalist historians, economists and foreign policy wonks is a lack of real expertise in Russian or Ukrainian history and politics. That’s why it is vital to listen to independent Russian (and Ukrainian!) voices on the war, as well as real Western specialists. Only a few of the latter make excuses for Putin’s regime and many would see merit in the broad thrust of Etkind’s argument.

Likewise, the Russian democratic opposition almost unanimously sees the war as generated by systemic internal problems. They would agree with Aleksei Navalny, whom Etkind lauds as the champion of exposing corruption, in blaming the war on Russia’s “endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.” •

Russia Against Modernity
By Alexander Etkind | Polity Press | $30.95 | 176 pages

The post Russia’s war with the future appeared first on Inside Story.

Similar scenes were repeated across the peninsula on that Kara Gun (black day), as units of the Soviet internal security forces surrounded Crimean Tatar towns and villages. From there, the captives were sent by rail 3000 kilometres to Central Asia, and mostly unloaded in eastern Uzbekistan. Soon, the entire Crimean Tatar population of nearly 200,000 people had been removed from their homeland.

Nearly 8000 Crimean Tatars died on the weeks-long train journey. The rest were forced to live in abysmal conditions in “special settlements” for the next decade. Tens of thousands — almost half of them, according to the Crimean Tatars — died of hunger, cold or disease during the first few years of exile.

To justify this collective punishment, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin falsely accused the Crimean Tatars of mass collaboration with the Nazi occupation, which had just ended. It’s true that some Tatars did collaborate — as others had in many places during the war — but many more fought bravely in the Red Army and partisan units. Six received Hero of the Soviet Union medals, equivalent to a Victoria Cross.

Shevkiye’s father Dzhemil was one of the men still with the Red Army at the front, fighting the same Nazis his people were accused of aiding.

A more likely explanation for the Soviet move is that the paranoid Stalin wanted to clear his country’s borderlands of Turkic or Islamic peoples in advance of a possible war with Turkey (which never happened). The Crimean Tatars were one of many peoples from the country’s periphery considered suspect and transported en masse to Central Asia or Siberia: others included Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, Balkars and Karachai, as well as ethnic Koreans, Volga Germans and Finns.

The Crimean Tatars’ forced exile was but the latest chapter in a poorly known story that is as bleak and tragic as those experienced by many indigenous peoples following conquest and colonisation. It has rightly been described as genocide, not least by the Russian parliament in the heady, democratic days of 1991. The Tatars’ tale forms a crucial backdrop to understanding the current war in Ukraine, and its possible resolution.

That war really began when Russia invaded Crimea in February 2014. Troops in unmarked uniforms, dubbed “little green men,” fanned out from Russia’s Black Sea Naval Base in Sevastopol (leased from Ukraine) and seized key government buildings and installations. A few weeks later, after a sham referendum, Russia annexed the peninsula. It has been under occupation ever since.

Since Ukraine blunted Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, a big question hangs over whether Ukraine can mount a successful counteroffensive and go as far as retaking Crimea. And if it can’t, will it have to give up Crimea as part of a peace deal? The Tatars’ fate, as an indigenous people recognised by Ukraine and internationally, must be considered in such calculations.

Vladimir Putin portrayed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as the long-awaited and rightful “return” of the peninsula to its proper home. “In the minds of people,” he said, “Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.” But that was pure fantasy, akin to saying that Australia — or the Irish Republic — always was and will be British.

In fact, Putin’s was the second Russian annexation of Crimea. The first was in 1783, not long before Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet landed on Gadigal country in Sydney Cove. The first Russian annexation followed a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire, whose overlordship was acknowledged by the Tatars’ Crimean Khanate, a state with a rich culture dating back to 1441.

The Crimean Khan’s palace, at Bakhchysarai, circa 1840, as painted by the Swiss-born Italian artist Carlo Bossoli. Wikimedia

Tsar Catherine’s 1783 annexation breached a treaty with the Ottomans that had left Crimea independent, just as the 2014 annexation violated treaties that pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and recognised Crimea as part of Ukraine.

Before the 1783 takeover, the Crimean Tatars formed the vast majority of the peninsula’s population, with hardly a Russian in sight. The core group was made up of Turkic-speaking Kipchaks, who had settled before the Mongol-Tatar conquest in the thirteenth century, which gave them their name. (Crimea comes from a Turkic word Qirim, meaning moat or fortification.) But many descendants of invaders and settlers over nearly two millennia — Scythians, ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Byzantines, Genoese, Venetians and others — had merged to form the Tatar ethnicity.

After the takeover, the new Russian masters turned Tatar peasants into serfs, confiscated communal lands, and destroyed centuries-old mosques and bazaars. Almost half the Tatar population left after Tsar Alexander II blamed them for Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war and called for their removal from the peninsula in 1857. Their share of the population fell from nearly 80 per cent in 1850 to around a third by 1900, then to less than 20 per cent by the outbreak of the second world war.

A sense of Tatar nationhood nevertheless put down strong roots. Soon after the 1917 October Revolution in Petrograd, an elected Tatar assembly  proclaimed a Crimean People’s Republic with a vision of a multiethnic “Switzerland” for the region. Its national congress, the Qurultay, was elected by universal suffrage, with women able to vote — a first in the Muslim world and ahead of many Western countries. But the Crimean Republic was suppressed by Bolsheviks, who had emerged as the victors after Russia’s three years of bitter civil war.

Soviet Russia’s first leader, Vladimir Lenin, saw the need to gain the loyalty of the diverse nations of the vast Soviet Union by encouraging their cultures and inclusion in government. Under this “indigenisation” policy, Crimea became an autonomous republic subordinate to the Russian Republic, with Tatars taking leading roles. The communists promoted Crimean Tatar schools, theatres and publishing. Stalin’s purges and forced collectivisation of farms took their toll in Crimea as elsewhere, but Tatars’ sense of nationhood was further cemented.

Following the 1944 deportation, however, evidence of the Crimean Tatars’ presence was largely wiped out. Authorities changed upwards of 2000 Tatar names for towns and villages to Russian names. Shevkiye Dzhemileva’s village of Ayserez was renamed Mezhdurechye (“between the rivers”). The influx of Russian and Ukrainian migrants means that more than 90 per cent of all the current Slavic residents of Crimea now come from families who arrived after the Tatars’ expulsion. Stalinist officials explicitly sought to make “a new Crimea with its own Russian form.”

Deported Crimean Tatars working in a logging camp in Siberia in 1952. Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance/Wikimedia

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Crimean Tatars were banned from returning to their homelands, unlike most of the other Soviet “punished peoples,” such as the Chechens and other Tatar populations, who were fully rehabilitated. The Crimean Tatars embarked on a thirty-five-year campaign for the right to return, the most concerted movement of dissent in the history of the Soviet Union.

The Tatars defied the regime’s efforts to make them assimilate with other Turkic and Muslim peoples in Central Asia. Although it was a thoroughly nonviolent movement, jail sentences were handed out to hundreds of activists. Its foremost leader was Shevkiye’s baby brother, Mustafa Dzhemilev, six months old at the time of the deportation. Dzhemilev was a veritable Nelson Mandela of the movement, imprisoned six times and undertaking a 303-day hunger strike.

This struggle forged an even stronger national identity centred on the trauma of the Sürgünlik (exile) and a yearning for the lost homeland. Other displaced peoples have trod a similar path, including the Jews after the Shoah and the Palestinians following the Nakba (Catastrophe).

The Tatars finally won the right to return in 1989, just as the democratic reforms unleashed by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev were taking off. Crimea had long before become part of Ukraine, transferred from the Russian republic to Kyiv by Stalin’s heirs under Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.

When Ukraine became independent in 1991 many Crimean Tatars fulfilled their dream of returning to the peninsula. The 2001 Ukrainian census (the most recent) recorded some 240,000 Tatars, or 12 per cent of its population. Many faced numerous obstacles, however, and ended up in poverty, living in shantytowns and unable to reclaim their families’ former houses.

Yet the Crimean Tatars made progress. In 2001 the Ukrainian parliament enacted a consultative role for their representative body, the Mejlis, giving it a status similar to that proposed for Australia’s Voice to Parliament. They became ardent supporters of the newly independent Ukrainian state.

Fifty-six per cent of Crimean residents had supported leaving the Soviet Union in the 1991 independence referendum. Opinion polls over several years leading up to the 2014 annexation showed well under half in favour of leaving Ukraine and joining Russia.

Russia’s sham referendum just eighteen days before the 2014 annexation claimed that a wildly implausible 96 per cent of voters wanted to join Russia.  But even if there were now a majority preferring Moscow over Kyiv, the real history of Crimea undermines any Russian claims to the peninsula based on population. The Russian majority was created on the blood, bones and tears of the Crimean Tatars.

For the Tatars, Russia’s occupation has brought back the bad old days. The United Nations and other organisations have documented arbitrary detentions, torture, expulsions and harassment of Crimean Tatar (and ethnic Ukrainian) activists and protesters. Many have fled Crimea, and Tatar leaders claim that hundreds of thousands of Russians have moved in, contrary to international law on occupied territories.

Muslim communities have been attacked and religious literature burned. Members of the remaining Crimean Tatar population have been pressured to renounce their Ukrainian citizenship. Tatar-language media outlets have been denied re-registration. Tatars have also been subject to forced mobilisation into the Russian army, a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Russian authorities outlawed the Tatar Mejlis as an “extremist” organisation in 2016. The International Court of Justice upheld a challenge to this ban in 2017, but Russia has ignored the verdict.

Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive during the northern summer will be crucial to its chances of pushing Russian forces out of all or most of its territory. Even if Ukraine succeeds in the east and south, though, Crimea could be a much harder nut to crack. Some fear that Putin’s prestige is so tied up with his seizure of Crimea that he might resort to nuclear weapons rather than lose it.

With such concerns in mind, some pundits argue that Ukraine should or will be forced to make a deal in which Crimea is handed to Russia. But the permanent cession of Crimea would simply be a reward for aggression, an outcome that 141 countries in the UN have already rejected, affirming that “no territorial acquisition resulting from the use of force can be recognised as legal.”

Were Crimea to stay under Russian occupation, either permanently or in a Cyprus-like frozen conflict, it would be a dagger pointed at Ukraine. Its protected position makes it an ideal launchpad for renewed invasions and threatens Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.

Practical geography also explains why Crimea’s future outside Ukraine would be difficult, as Khrushchev recognised in 1954. The largely arid peninsula relies on water pumped by North Crimea Canal, 100 kilometres from the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, which supplied 85 per cent of its fresh water before 2014.

The canal’s flow was cut after the annexation, causing severe shortages, but then restored after the 2022 invasion of southern Ukraine launched from Crimea; along with creating a “land bridge” to Russia, the canal was undoubtedly an objective of the invasion. That link was highlighted again by the recent destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which controls the flow to the canal.

An equally strong argument against Russian control is the fate of the Crimean Tatars. After overcoming dispossession, deportation and genocide to slowly re-establish themselves in their homeland, they fear being left once again under the thumb of a Moscow regime they view as a longstanding oppressor.

Are they to be cast aside again in the interests of realpolitik? Should not indigenous people have a casting vote on the fate of their homeland? In the words of Shevkiye’s granddaughter, Elmaz Asan, “Crimea is no bargaining chip in a geopolitical game; it is my homeland and I will not give it up, just like my ancestors did not.” •

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That firepower wasn’t enough. In a succinct summary of his judgement yesterday, Justice Anthony Besanko found that three newspapers — all of them part of the Fairfax group at the time — and their journalists had established the “substantial truth” of their reports that Roberts-Smith had murdered and assaulted unarmed Afghan prisoners. A Victoria Cross–winning war hero was instantly labelled a war criminal.

Notably, Justice Besanko accepted as true the report that Roberts-Smith had kicked an unarmed and handcuffed captive, Ali Jan, backwards off a cliff and then ordered a subordinate soldier to shoot him dead. Further details will emerge when the full 1000-page judgement is published on 5 June. A further fifty pages containing sensitive national security details goes to a more select readership.

What next? Roberts-Smith remains a free man. The defamation case was not a criminal trial. A judge finding substantial truth on the balance of evidence in a civil trial is not the same as a judge or jury finding guilt beyond reasonable doubt in a criminal case, as some of Roberts-Smith’s former colleagues in the Special Air Service Regiment were quick to point out.

The Seven Network — whose owner Kerry Stokes paid for Roberts-Smith’s legal expenses over 110 days of hearings as well as those of some supporting witnesses — has said Roberts-Smith continues in his job of managing the network in Queensland, though on leave, pending review.

Lead counsel Arthur Moses SC asked for and received stay of judgement to consider an appeal. An estimated $25 million has already been spent by the two sides; whether Stokes wants to put up more of his money remains to be seen. The defence side will seek to claim its share of this from Roberts-Smith and “third parties” (entities controlled by Stokes). So the Perth-based magnate could be up for most of the legal bill.

Will he quit or double down? If an appeal does proceed, it could delay a final resolution of the civil action for another year or more.

Watching it all closely will be the Office of the Special Investigator, or OSI, the war crimes unit that was revealed during the trial to be examining Roberts-Smith’s actions in Afghanistan. Will an appeal be an obstacle for the OSI if it is thinking of a move against the former soldier?

The OSI was set up after the defence force inspector-general, Justice Paul Brereton, found “credible” evidence that twenty-five current or former special forces personnel participated in the unlawful killing of thirty-nine individuals and the cruel treatment of two others during the Australian army’s deployment in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. Where the evidence justified it, the OSI was charged with launching prosecutions.

Under a former secretary of the federal attorney-general’s department, Chris Moraitis, and with former Victorian Supreme Court justice Mark Weinberg as special investigator, the office has a powerful array of federal police and legal investigators hard at work. Its first fusillade came in March, when a former SAS soldier, Oliver Schulz, became the first Australian serviceman or veteran to be charged with the war crime of murder, in his case for the alleged killing of an Afghan man in Uruzgan province in 2012. Schulz, who was given bail, is expected to be tried next year or in 2025.

Some other governments that fought in Afghanistan, including Britain and Belgium, are believed to be closely studying the Australian model. The OSI has also opened a close liaison with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, an important move because Australia, as a signatory to the Rome Statute setting up that tribunal, must show it is vigorously investigating and prosecuting any war crimes or crimes against humanity committed by its own armed personnel or citizens. Otherwise, the ICC is entitled to launch cases itself, with Australia having to hand over the suspects.

We also now know that the United States warned Canberra in early 2021 — via a US embassy defence attaché to Australian defence force chief General Angus Campbell — that the human rights violations detailed in the Brereton report might oblige the US military to suspend cooperation with Australian special forces under US legislation known as the Leahy Amendment.

Some might find this threat a bit rich given the United States’ counterinsurgency record and the character of some local forces it has sponsored, but the American military for many years cut contact with the Indonesian special forces, Kopassus, over its killings and abductions of government critics. That Australia now risked being tarred with the same brush must have been a shock.

With the Americans watching and Brereton having found credible evidence of specific war crimes, the Morrison government had little choice but to follow the judge’s recommendation for a formal criminal investigation. Now, with a federal judge finding “substantial truth” in the allegations against Roberts-Smith, the current government has added interest in the OSI’s work.

A finding for Roberts-Smith would have been a strong warning light for the OSI. The light has turned green, though the OSI would need to feel confident it has the high standard of proof required for a successful prosecution. It must be encouraged by the fact that former members of the tight-knit SAS have moved from being anonymous sources for the Fairfax journalists to protected and indemnified witnesses for Brereton, and then to in-camera sworn witnesses before Justice Besanko.

That these soldiers have risked ostracism to testify does, to a large extent, save the “honour of the regiment” for the SAS. Since Brereton, the unit has also been intensively retrained in the rules of war. The warped command system described by Brereton, whereby seasoned non-commissioned officers came to overawe both the younger lieutenants and the captains above them, has also been tackled.

But the question of responsibility doesn’t end with the soldiers committing the alleged offences. Fellow soldiers didn’t come forward. Officers failed to monitor their soldiers closely, signed off on falsified reports of enemy encounters, or implicitly condoned the practice of planting “throwdowns” (weapons or radio sets) on the bodies of killed civilians.

One of the most sickening allegations against Roberts-Smith was that he murdered a one-legged Afghan man and took his prosthetic leg back to base as a war trophy. In an unauthorised bar on the main Australian army base in Uruzgan known as the “Fat Ladies Arms,” Roberts-Smith and other soldiers used this leg as a beer-drinking horn.

The existence of this bar, flouting the rules against alcohol on operations, can hardly have escaped the attention of any of the officers or non-commissioned officers running the operation. That this breach of orders was tolerated perhaps shows the leeway afforded the SAS troops.

In the wake of the Brereton report, at least two serving or retired generals tried to hand in medals won as commanders in Afghanistan but were asked to hold off. ADF chief Angus Campbell’s decision to withdraw the unit citation from special forces personnel who’d served in Afghanistan was overruled by Peter Dutton as defence minister.

This week in Senate hearings, Campbell said a review handed to defence minister Richard Marles two weeks ago had considered whether “a small number of persons who held command appointments” should lose medals or honours. Campbell himself was commander of the Middle East task force covering Afghanistan in 2011–12, regularly visiting Australian troops in the field from his base in the United Arab Emirates, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his role. Pushed by independent senator Jacqui Lambie, a soldier for ten years, Campbell said he was himself included in the review.

A wider responsibility rests on the political leaders and policy advisers who sent soldiers into an unwinnable conflict in which forty-one would be killed and many more injured, and after which dozens would commit suicide and others, partly for want of control and discipline, seem likely to face imprisonment.

Kim Beazley, newly appointed chair of the Australian War Memorial council, faces some immediate challenges. Two of his predecessors — Kerry Stokes and former defence minister Brendan Nelson, who appeared as a character witness for Roberts-Smith — left an unexploded bomb: an exhibit of Roberts-Smith’s combat gear and material extolling his heroism.

It may be tempting to simply remove the display. But rather than a historical airbrush, an exhibit about the Brereton inquiry and the OSI might better suit the times. Even Charles Bean, the AWM’s founder, included the 1918 rampage in 1918 by Anzac troops against Palestinians at Surafend in his official history of the first world war.

A sad reminder that the whole operation was never really about the Afghans came when the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade withdrew its embassy from Kabul at the first sign of US withdrawal, two months before the city fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Thousands of Afghans who had worked with Australian forces or agencies were left at risk of vengeance.

This week Australia’s former inspector-general of intelligence and security, Vivienne Thom, reported on their plight to the government. Responding, ministers including Marles, foreign minister Penny Wong and attorney-general Mark Dreyfus blamed the Morrison government and said criteria for asylum would be expanded. But Afghans have been given only until the end of November to apply — how they would do that in the absence of an embassy is unclear — and the program will close at the end of May next year.

Brereton’s recommendation that Canberra not wait for the end of investigations and trials to pay compensation to Afghan victims and bereaved families was put in the too-hard basket eight months later when the Taliban took Kabul.

The dust of Uruzgan, as sung about the Australian diplomat who performs under the name Fred Smith, will keep blowing in. •

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But Besanko’s incendiary finding early yesterday afternoon that Ben Roberts-Smith, the most highly decorated and revered Australian soldier since the Vietnam war, was “a murderer, a war criminal and a bully” — as the headline in the Age instantly trumpeted its victory — is a watershed moment for the future of investigative journalism and, more profoundly, for the future of our military forces, upon whose reputation much of our national self-esteem has been cultivated for more than a century.

Besanko ruled that Roberts-Smith murdered or was complicit in the murder of multiple unarmed civilians while serving in Afghanistan. He found, on the balance of probabilities, that Roberts-Smith kicked a handcuffed prisoner off a cliff in 2012 before ordering another soldier to shoot him dead. He further found that in 2009, the SAS corporal ordered the killing of an elderly man found hiding in a tunnel in a bombed-out compound and, during the same operation, murdered with a machine gun a disabled man with a prosthetic.

The decision was not a criminal conviction but a civil judicial determination of truth on the “balance of probabilities.” But the reputation of Victoria Cross and Medal for Gallantry winner Roberts-Smith lies in tatters, along with that of the Special Air Service Regiment, with which he served, and the troubled Australian deployment in Afghanistan for which he was once a poster boy. And an air of grim foreboding hangs over the coming Afghanistan war crimes prosecutions in which Roberts-Smith is front and centre among many soldiers accused of grave abuses.

Roberts-Smith’s decision to sue for defamation must go down as one of the biggest own goals in history. As Age reporter Nick McKenzie pointed out after the verdict, the journalists had not wanted to go to court and neither had the SAS soldiers forced to give evidence against their former comrade. Roberts-Smith gambled that by taking defamation action he would intimidate and silence his media accusers. Instead, he simply amplified massively the damaging publicity in a case that dragged out over five years, thanks to Covid, and ended by vindicating his accusers.

Had Roberts-Smith simply professed his innocence and rejected the allegations in the Age reports, however damning they were, the media coverage would likely have subsided until the findings of the Brereton inquiry evolved into war crimes prosecutions, a process that clearly still has a way to run. At that point, if charged, he would have been judged alongside others accused of equally heinous crimes, with perhaps a better opportunity to introduce mitigating evidence and supportive witnesses — instead of flying solo into the sun in the civil courts.

Nine Entertainment, dating back to when it was known as Fairfax Media, has been rightly applauded for backing its journalists in this case. Had it lost, it would likely have been up for the bulk of the costs of the two legal teams — estimated at as much as $25 million — aside from any award of damages. (Another $10 million is estimated to have been spent by the Commonwealth on its representation in the case.) Even with an expected costs order in its favour, Nine is likely to finish out of pocket to the tune of several million dollars. But given the gravity of the matters at the heart of the stories, the company really had no choice but to stand and fight, for the sake of its own reputation as much as that of its star journalists.

The modern history of media defamation cases in Australia, including at Fairfax, has been mostly about negotiating early settlements and quick payouts to avoid the potentially crippling costs of going to trial and losing — a fact that often has only emboldened litigants whose misconduct was a proper target of journalistic investigation but who have plenty of money to stare down the media and muddy the waters with writs.

Had Nine lost to Roberts-Smith, the fallout would likely have been very serious for the future of investigative journalism in Australia. The huge financial toll would have made all publishers and broadcasters even more wary about tackling big stories challenging high-profile, well-resourced entities, more likely to fold than fight when their journalism was challenged legally, and probably less enthusiastic about investing the big bucks needed to employ and deploy good investigative journalists.

The decision in the defamation case has no formal bearing on the war crimes proceedings, which is why defence minister Richard Marles was able to escape yesterday with a brusque “no comment” on the civil matter when his office will undoubtedly be consumed with analysis of the fallout from the case. But the intense publicity surrounding the trial and its shocking conclusion will sharpen expectations of a timely and thorough interrogation of the conduct of Australian forces in Afghanistan, which is now a full-blown national scandal and an international embarrassment.

On the steps of the court after the verdict, Nick McKenzie — whose formidable career and reputation also hung in the balance with the trial’s outcome — rightly pointed out that the decision involved one soldier not his entire regiment, many of whose members had bravely spoken out about his conduct. “I’d like Ben Roberts-Smith to reflect on the pain that he’s brought on lots of men in the SAS who stood up and told the truth about his conduct,” McKenzie said. “They were mocked and ridiculed in court. They were bullied. They were intimidated.”

But with many other SAS soldiers under active investigation for murder and other very serious war crimes, and with the brutal and ugly culture of the unit drawn in graphic detail during the defamation hearings, the future of the SAS Regiment is in serious question if not untenable. It is painfully evident that much of the behaviour that led to the alleged atrocities thrived under an elitist and secretive code. Some SAS members were clearly emboldened to believe they could act with impunity and in defiance of international law.

The indications that multiple offences occurred over many years in Afghanistan calls into serious question not only the failure of the SAS commanders to maintain discipline but also the lack of supervision by the entire command structure of the Australian Defence Force.

Just as the misconduct of a minority has tarnished the reputation of the entire SAS and all those who fought with courage and dedication in Afghanistan, so too has that misconduct cast a shadow over the reputation of the entire ADF, its proud legacy in two world wars and multiple other conflicts, and its claim to be the repository of the hallowed Anzac spirit and a standard-bearer of the Australian character.

The problem has been compounded by sections of our defence establishment who have resolutely defended Ben Roberts-Smith and denounced the work of those journalists who dared to challenge his record, not least within the previous leadership of the Australian War Memorial. Most egregious among them was former AWM director and later chairman Brendan Nelson who, after the first reports appeared in the Age, accused the journalists of running a scurrilous and unfounded campaign against the SAS and Roberts-Smith in particular.

“Australians need to understand that we have amongst us a small number of real heroes and Ben Roberts-Smith is one of them,” Nelson declared. “I say to the average Aussie, if you see Ben Roberts-Smith, wave and give him a thumbs up.” When he appeared as a witness in the Federal Court two years ago, Nelson said he had been cautioned by a senior member of government about his effusive support for the soldier, and went on to say that he had rung Roberts-Smith after reading the story about him: “I told him I’d read the story, I knew it was about him. I told him that I believed in him. I was very sorry that such an article should be published about him.”

The $25 million question is how Ben Roberts-Smith will foot the bill for his and Nine’s costs in the likely event that the court orders him to pay. It has been reported that his boss and principal backer, Seven Network magnate Kerry Stokes, lent him $2 million to pursue the action against Nine. Stokes, who was chairing the AWM board when the case was launched, yesterday expressed disappointment with the decision and appeared to try to dismiss it as a disagreement between soldiers.

“The judgement does not accord with the man I know,” Stokes said. “I know this will be particularly hard for Ben, who has always maintained his innocence. That his fellow soldiers have disagreed with each other, this outcome will be the source of additional grief.”

It has been reported that the Stokes loan to Roberts-Smith was secured with his Victoria Cross medal. If so, this could well prove one of the worst commercial decisions in the shrewd businessman’s career.

As I have written previously, it would be politically and morally untenable for a soldier found to have committed murder to be allowed to keep a Victoria Cross — and an insult to the memory of all other VC winners. If Roberts-Smith’s right to wear the VC is revoked for dishonourable conduct, the medal will have little value beyond that of a historical curiosity, and certainly won’t be worth the $1 million-plus that Kerry Stokes has generously paid to acquire other Australian VCs for the AWM.

The court victory is another feather in the illustrious cap of veteran journalist Chris Masters but it cements McKenzie’s place as the pre-eminent Australian investigative journalist of his generation, if not all generations. Over two decades he has exposed a succession of scandals in Australian public, corporate and criminal life, but none more serious or consequential than the rot at the core of Australia’s armed forces. •

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Freud’s interpretation hinged on the mythology of vultures — including the ancient belief that they were exclusively female and impregnated by the wind — and the frequent depiction of the Egyptian goddess Mut with a vulture’s head and an androgynous body. He argued that Leonardo was preoccupied with vultures and had concealed one in the blue drapery of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which hangs in the Louvre.

There was one small problem. The bird Leonardo recalled was not a vulture but a kite, a creature with no special mythic significance or any hint of sexual ambiguity. The error, made by a German translator of Leonardo’s writings, undermined Freud’s thesis and demonstrated the challenges of doing psychoanalytic interpretation at a distance. When the subject cannot be put on the couch, the already dangerous work of psychic excavation becomes even more hazardous.

This embarrassment might have led Freud to abandon psychobiography altogether, and indeed the general view has been that he did. In the monumental, twenty-four-volume Standard Edition of his work, his English editor and translator James Strachey wrote that “this monograph on Leonardo was not only the first but the last of Freud’s large-scale excursions into the field of biography.”

But that claim only stands if a notorious study of US president Woodrow Wilson written by Freud with American diplomat William Bullitt is brushed aside. This act of repression has been sustained for more than half a century by charges that Bullitt was a reductive amateur who was driven by personal animus towards Wilson and exaggerated Freud’s involvement.

Patrick Weil’s new book, The Madman in the White House, overturns this received view. Weil, a distinguished French political scientist, has written a captivating analysis of the history of the Wilson psychobiography that doubles as a biography of Bullitt. Along the way it vividly documents the shifts in American engagement with Europe from the first world war through the cold war from the standpoint of high-level diplomacy.

The book combines a masterful grasp of political history with original archival research and a humanising appreciation of the quirks and foibles of the dramatis personae. It does much more than resolve the status of a largely forgotten book about Wilson, also making a case that prevailing beliefs about responsibility for the failure of the post–first world war peace are mistaken. More broadly, Weil demonstrates how much personality matters in politics. “Democratic leaders,” he writes, “can be just as unbalanced as dictators and can play a truly destructive role in our history.”

William Bullitt emerges as a kaleidoscopically colourful and complex personality who witnessed the defining events of the first half of the twentieth century up close. After a brief period as a journalist, he was recruited in his twenties to work under Wilson during the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles. He served as the first American ambassador to Moscow and as ambassador to Paris, helped to negotiate the Korean armistice and advised Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan. He played major diplomatic and policy roles in both world wars and mingled with the political and cultural A-list: Wilson, Roosevelt and Nixon; Churchill and Lloyd George; Clemenceau and de Gaulle; Hemingway and Picasso; Lenin and Stalin (or “Stalin-Khan,” as he referred to him).

Bullitt’s life wasn’t all memos, starched collars and negotiation tables, and it had many Gatsbyesque elements: tumultuous marriages, hosting a Moscow soirée with performing seals and a champagne-drinking bear, enlisting in his fifties in the French army, landing upside down in a plane in a Leningrad swamp, and being shipped home to the United States from Taiwan in a coffin following a spinal injury.

Woodrow Wilson (standing) in New York after returning from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Alamy

There was also a dark side, with depressions, impulsive actions and a tendency to self-destruction, including a fall from a horse that he attributed to an unconscious wish. These symptoms led him to meet with Freud in Vienna for personal psychoanalysis in 1926, beginning a long association that saw the two become unusually close and Bullitt playing a role in helping Freud escape the Nazis via the Orient Express.

Their book project grew out of Bullitt’s plan to write a study on diplomacy that would include psychological analyses of world leaders, with Woodrow Wilson as one case. Bullitt had fallen out with Wilson over his failure to have the Treaty of Versailles ratified by the US Senate in 1919, despite Wilson having been a visionary architect of the treaty and its proposal of a League of Nations to secure global peace. He saw Wilson’s apparent inability to make concessions with Republican senators at critical moments as a colossal sabotage of what Wilson himself had created, an exercise in “strangling his own child,” and he ascribed it to Wilson’s character flaws.

This was a widespread view at the time: Keynes described Wilson as a “blind and deaf Don Quixote.” Freud agreed with his general assessment, once describing Wilson as “the silliest fool of the century if not all centuries” and Bullitt as “the only American who understands Europe.” The two men hatched a plan to collaborate on a study that would focus on Wilson alone.

Psychobiography is often viewed — and sometimes practised — as an exercise in armchair speculation and hatchet work unencumbered by evidence, but the dissection of Wilson’s character was anything but. Freud, perhaps stung by the Leonardo fiasco, insisted on collecting and analysing a substantial body of information on Wilson; Bullitt obliged with not only his extensive first-hand working experience but also interviews with several of Wilson’s high-ranking colleagues, hundreds of pages of notes, and countless diary entries from Wilson’s personal secretary. Then, at least on Bullitt’s telling, he and Freud met and communicated frequently over a period of years to formulate a shared understanding of Wilson’s psychodynamics and edit drafts of one another’s chapters.

The essence of their formulation was that Wilson lived in the shadow of his idealised father, a Christian minister, whom he believed he could never satisfy or equal. This father complex was shown in his driven approach to work, his tendency to present a Christ-like persona when defending his views, his moralising streak, his unwillingness to brook criticism or compromise when he took principled stands on issues, and his passivity towards paternal figures — a stance that led to bitter fallings-out with erstwhile good friends that haunted him for decades.

Bullitt and Freud attributed Wilson’s failures in delivering on Versailles and the League of Nations to this incapacity to make necessary accommodations at the last hurdle. They also drew attention to his tendency to defer to some national leaders during the earlier negotiations to the detriment of the treaty, including allowing Britain to make the excessive demands for postwar reparations that contributed to German resentment.

After extensive reworking over a period of years, the Wilson manuscript was completed in 1932, each chapter signed off by both authors. And yet it was not to be published until 1967. The reasons for the delay initially included Bullitt’s desire not to endanger his employment prospects in future Democratic administrations, a wish not to hurt Wilson’s widow, and an awareness that Wilson’s once tarnished reputation had been restored by mid-century, making a critical study unwelcome. Later, in the 1960s, Bullitt found it difficult to find a publisher and to obtain permission to publish from Freud’s estate. Freud’s daughter Anna, whom Bullitt had helped to rescue from Vienna in 1939, was deeply concerned to protect her father’s legacy and sceptical of Freud’s involvement in the book; she insisted on making numerous revisions, which Bullitt refused.

In the end, the book appeared to a chorus of critical reviews. Erik Erikson, the leading light of psychobiography at the time, attempted to block publication on receiving an advance copy. The book was criticised for being spiteful towards Wilson, repetitive, and clumsy in its psychoanalytic formulations and therefore unlikely to have been genuinely authored by Freud. Bullitt, who died only six weeks after publication day, must have felt crushed.

With the reputation of Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study going down in flames, the question of Freud’s co-authorship might have gradually lost what little intellectual interest it still held, especially as the published manuscript appeared lost or destroyed. Enter Weil, who rediscovered it in the archives at Yale University in 2014.

The Madman in the White House reports two significant findings. First, Freud’s heavy involvement in writing the book is now undeniable, established by his signature on all chapters and evidence of extensive revisions and annotations. Weil backs up this textual evidence with other quotes from Freud that express an unambiguous sense of personal ownership of “our book.” Critics who charged that Bullitt had deceptively Freud-washed his own work are mistaken.

Second, and perhaps just as importantly, Weil shows that Bullitt made several hundred revisions to the “final” manuscript prior to publication. Some of these edits are largely cosmetic: omitting one section on a political conflict that no longer seemed topical, updating some psychoanalytic terminology, and removing some very dated ideas about masturbation and castration anxiety. But many edits were substantive, involving removal of references to Wilson’s supposedly homosexual orientation. This inference didn’t imply conscious awareness or overt behaviour on Wilson’s part, and Freud believed everyone was to some degree bisexual, but Bullitt must have judged the claim too contentious to put in print.

Weil presents these discoveries with scholarly thoroughness but also with a light touch that makes the book a delight to read. Despite his implied criticism of the psychoanalytic establishment’s reception of the Wilson psychobiography, he defends the relevance of psychological insight to the understanding of political leadership. He accepts some of the contours of Bullitt and Freud’s analysis but disagrees about the nature of Wilson’s father dynamic. Joseph Wilson was a less perfect father than his son imagined and had a cruel tendency to humiliate him, Weil suggests. In his view, Woodrow’s political and interpersonal conflicts stemmed from his sensitivity to public humiliation more than anything else. Such an interpretation, invoking wounded narcissism and pathological autonomy rather than father or Christ complexes and latent homosexuality, certainly has a more twenty-first-century feel to it.

Whether or not readers are open to this kind of analysis, Weil makes a powerful case for the role of personality in politics. He closes with a counterfactual history of a Europe in which Wilson had not failed to deliver on his idealistic vision. British and French financial and territorial demands on the Germans following the first world war would have been moderated and less punitive, diminishing German bitterness. Squabbling nations would have been dissuaded from armed conflict. American intervention in the second world war would have been triggered earlier by security guarantees to France. So much carnage might have been averted had the men in charge been less damaged and better able to understand and regulate themselves at critical times.

Woodrow Wilson was in no real sense a “madman” and Bullitt and Freud were hardly unbiased observers. Even so, their book was a significant historical attempt to demonstrate how the psychology of individual leaders can have collective reverberations. With some caveats, Weil would probably agree with the basic sentiment he attributes to Bullitt, that “the fate of mankind was determined over millions of years by geography, over hundreds of years by demography, over tens of years by economics, and year over year by psychology.” His book is a brilliant historical investigation of an early attempt to reckon with those year-by-year influences. Both as a work of scholarship and as a sweeping, almost novelistic tour of twentieth-century political affairs, it deserves a wide readership. •

The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson
By Patrick Weil | Harvard University Press | US$35 | 400 pages

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The exercise was presumably designed to make Canberrans feel good about the controversial $550 million project. Cranes hovering overhead and massive earthworks front and rear will invite many uneasy glances at a building that has nestled for decades at the foot of Mount Ainslie as if it grew of its own accord out of the ancient earth.

Of course it did not. As Michael McKernan showed in his history of the memorial, Here Is Their Spirit (1991), between the official announcement of the site in 1923 and the opening of the building by prime minister John Curtin in 1941, hurdles and setbacks tested the faith of its most ardent supporters. Even in 1941, the building was incomplete: the exhibition galleries were opened to the public but the grounds and commemorative areas, including the Roll of Honour and the Hall of Memory, took several more decades to finish.

All those struggles might be forgotten, but the project was once regarded with such trepidation by federal authorities that it was held to a budget — £250,000 — that was manifestly inadequate even for the modest, restrained building that Charles Bean, one of the memorial’s founders, had dreamed of. He had imagined a memorial on a hilltop: “still, beautiful, gleaming white and silent.”

Politicians, though, were more interested in memorials in their local districts than a national memorial most of their constituents would never see. After a vexed and abortive architectural competition, a design for the national memorial was agreed upon in 1929, but with the onset of the Depression the project had to be shelved. Finally, in February 1934, the building contract was awarded to Simmie & Co., a firm that built many of Canberra’s early public and commercial buildings.

It’s long been a fancy of mine that the land itself tried to reject the building being raised upon it, calling up malevolent spirits to cast spells over it. For starters, the winter of 1934 was the wettest then on record. Next, the foundations took much longer to excavate than expected because the trial holes dug during the tender period had not revealed how hard and rocky the site really was. Quizzed over delays in the project, Simmie’s principals complained that they had been “grossly misled” in this regard.

The building was declared weathertight and ready for occupation in November 1935, but after all that effort the result — a long, low construction of garish red bricks from the local brickworks — was embarrassingly basic. The beautiful Hawkesbury sandstone cladding that lends so much quiet beauty to the building had not yet been applied, and influential observers complained it looked “squat” and “prison-like.” Building plans were hastily altered to raise the height of the walls, and later the dome, causing more headaches for Simmie.

Despite these inauspicious circumstances, a doughty bunch of about twenty-five staff began preparing to move themselves and their families from Melbourne to the infant capital, along with 770 tons of objects, paintings, photographs, books, archival records and stores. These had been stored and exhibited in leased premises in Sydney and Melbourne.

Staff arrived in November 1935. While deputy director Tasman (Tas) Heyes moved into a house provided in Forrest, south of the Molonglo river, director John Treloar made what he called a “private arrangement.” After several previous stints living in Canberra, his wife Clarissa had refused to move this time and remained in Melbourne with their four school-age children. Treloar set himself up in the memorial with his suitcases, a wardrobe and a single stretcher. He was not a man with elaborate personal wants; as a staff clerk on Gallipoli in 1915 Treloar had slept and worked in the same dugout and took advantage of the short commute to work punishing hours. This he now proceeded to do again. Although not a cold or humourless man, austerity suited him.

It had been a wet weekend, and from his house in Forrest late on that Sunday afternoon, 12 January 1936, Tas Heyes was keeping an uneasy eye on the sky. In those near-treeless days you could see far across Canberra, and it was obvious that a storm was gathering over Mount Ainslie. He and Treloar had inspected the memorial building on the previous Friday evening after heavy rain and found water seeping in through an unfaced brick wall on the lower-ground floor where the library would be. Cases of collection material stood nearby, ready for shelving. The water seepage had not been serious then, but now, when Heyes found that the storm had blotted out all sight of the memorial from his home, he got into his car.

In January 1936, just as everyone was settling in, those evil spirits decided as a final gesture to turn on one of Canberra’s cataclysmic summer storms. Today, staff in Canberra’s cultural institutions fully comprehend the power of these events, but in 1936 the memorial’s building was piteously vulnerable and the newly arrived Melburnians quite innocent of the harsh extremes and occasional violence of the weather on the high plains south of the Brindabellas.

John Treloar was already there, of course, along with two watchmen, Thomas Aldridge and George Wells, at their change of shift. Mount Ainslie was the centre of a terrific cloudburst, and from its slopes torrents of water were descending. The stormwater drain on its lower slopes had overflowed and water was washing silt and debris down to Ainslie, Reid and Braddon, and becoming trapped in the excavation around the memorial. The building’s lower-ground floor was below the watercourse and water was advancing into the building, sweeping down passages and up to the cases containing precious war records.

Another war: the AWM’s first director, John Treloar, shown here shortly before his secondment to the military in 1941. Ted Cranstone/Australian War Memorial

Many of the cases were raised from the floor on timber baulks, but this precaution had ceased when the building had been declared weathertight, and now several hundred cases were in immediate danger. The three men on site needed help, but none of the staff at that time had home telephones, so Aldridge drove off to gather them from their homes, leaving Treloar and Wells to scavenge timber to make platforms for the cases.

Scarcely had they begun this task when Aldridge returned, having abandoned his car where it had become bogged even before he got out of the grounds. By now, more water was sweeping into the building across a landing that had been built at a rear entrance to help bring in large objects. Treloar and Aldridge tried to dig a ditch to divert the water, but, as Treloar later reported, “the rocky ground defied the shovels which were the only tools we had.” They tried to wreck the landing but it was too well built.

Leaving his men to struggle with the records cases, Treloar phoned the fire brigade and was told that the chief fire officer could send men to pump water out of the building but only if it reached six inches, and they could not help move records or exhibits. Soon after, the telephone service broke down, leaving the three drenched and desperate men isolated. At this point, Tas Heyes finally made it through.

It was growing dark and the building in its primitive state had hardly any lights. Water was washing under doors and through unfinished sections of the roof. The waste pipes of wash basins and drinking fountains, as Treloar said later, “threw into the air jets of water several feet high.” Water was about to enter the room where the works of art were stored. It was impossible to move the cases in time, and improvised squeegees proved to be hopeless. Using chisels and their bare hands, Treloar and his staff tore up the floorboards at the entrance to the room, and the water, which was now creeping around the edges of the art cases, escaped beneath the building. Heyes set out in his car in another attempt to round up more staff to help; by 8pm about a dozen men were on the site and a few oil lamps had been obtained.

The worst was over. Manholes over drains were opened and water swept into them. Staff continued to clear the building of as much water as was possible, working in the dark with only improvised tools. By 1am Treloar decided to suspend work. The men were exhausted and most had been wet through for hours.

Treloar later told a colleague that the suit he had been wearing that day was ruined, a rare reference to himself and his personal comfort. Where he slept for the rest of that night isn’t known, but Heyes, a friend and colleague for many years, probably took him back to his house. Forrest had received no more than an ordinary shower of rain.

The next day the Canberra Times carried long reports of the flood. Six inches (more than 150 millimetres) of rain had fallen on Civic and the inner north in ninety-five minutes. The paper had rarely had such a dramatic local event to cover.

The memorial’s misfortunes were ignored at first in favour of the dramatic rescue of motorists stranded on Constitution Avenue, the many roads that were scoured or washed away, the five feet of water in the basement of Beauchamp House (a hotel in Acton), the “pitiful” state of Miss Mabbott’s frock shop in Civic, and the washed-out gardens and drowned chickens in Ainslie. These local calamities mattered more than what had happened at the memorial, of which the paper finally gave a brief report the next day. Few people really knew what went on in this strange new building anyway.

Monday 13 January at the memorial was a heavy, depressing day of mopping up, opening hundreds of cases and separating the wet from the dry. Two to three inches of water had entered the building. Some 2648 books were damaged and 719 had to be rebound. Among the most valuable was a large collection of histories of first world war German military units, which Treloar described to a newspaper reporter as “irreplaceable.” More than 700 cases of archival records were damaged, as were 10,327 photographic negatives. Thankfully paintings had been stored on their edges in crates so that only the frames were soiled, but 389 were damaged and 300 had to be remounted.

In the end, the damage was not so bad. The museum objects, stored on the upper floor, were untouched. Some of the damaged records were duplicates and, as Treloar reassured his board of management, water-stained books would not be less valuable as records, and the pictures when remounted would be “as attractive as formerly.”

Prints existed of some of the negatives, and the emulsified surfaces of the negatives had fortunately been fitted with cover glasses to protect them. Most of the records cases had been stored on timber two or three inches above the floor, although Treloar bitterly regretted his decision to abandon this practice shortly before the flood.

The salvage operation was instructive and useful in many ways. Treloar was enormously capable, but he liked to consult experts and tried to keep himself abreast of practices in museums, galleries and libraries in Australia and overseas. Here was a chance to call in some help and renew important associations. Leslie Bowles, a sculptor who often worked with the memorial, travelled from Melbourne to advise on the treatment of some battlefield models affected by the flood. Although Kodak and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research were contacted for advice on the treatment of the negatives, Treloar soon turned to an expert from the Photographic Branch of the Department of Commerce in Melbourne.

The paper items needed the most treatment. A hot-air blower was obtained for the soaked documents, and eight local teenage girls arrived with their mothers’ electric irons on the Thursday after the flood. Treloar had been advised that the best way to fully dry and flatten the documents, newspapers and pages of books was to iron them, presumably with a piece of cloth over the paper. This was to be the job for the next few weeks for Enid, Ivy, Agnes, Betty, Jean, Thelma, Stella and Gwen.

The eight had been recruited through the Canberra YWCA, whose secretary had had many applications for the curious engagement. They were paid under the award for government-employed servants and laundresses, but surely never was a laundress entrusted with such a strange and delicate task. How anxiously Treloar must have watched them go about their work.

Some of the damp documents were part of the memorial’s collection of unit war diaries — not soldiers’ private diaries (although the memorial had a fine collection of those as well) but official records kept by each military unit. For Treloar, they were probably the most important part of the collection and he knew them intimately. They were mostly created on the battlefront, and it would have been agonising to imagine them engulfed by muddy water in the very building created to house and protect them.

Support and commiserations poured in. Arthur Bazley, assistant to official historian Charles Bean, phoned Treloar from Sydney to offer any help he could, using his Sydney contacts. Bean, on holiday in Austinmer, wrote to Treloar that he and Heyes “must have this comfort, that you know that all concerned are so aware of your carefulness and forethought, that their only feeling will be one of sympathy.” Federal interior minister Thomas Paterson, who had responsibility for the memorial, telephoned to find Treloar still lamenting the cases stacked directly on the floor; “an officer could not expect to be a prophet” was his kindly advice to the director.

After all the years of work and worry, Treloar was not present at the opening of the memorial on Armistice Day, 1941. He was in uniform again, based in Cairo managing the collecting effort for yet another war, leaving Tas Heyes to organise the ceremony.

The first Anzac Day at the memorial was held in 1942, the national ceremony having previously been held at Parliament House. With so many Australians fighting abroad and with the enemy at the nation’s doorstep, Anzac Day in the nation’s capital had never been so sombre (and wouldn’t be again until 2020, when Covid-19 restrictions forced the cancellation of traditional commemorations).

No veterans’ march was held that year, and Anzac Day sports were cancelled. The Canberra Times editorialised that the day found Australia a “battle station.” Anzacs “now stood guard on their own land” and any honour owed them was never so much due as on that day. It was to be a day “not of works but abiding faith.”

At the memorial a twenty-minute ceremony held in the commemorative courtyard was attended by a mere 600 people. Around them were bare walls: no Roll of Honour yet, and an empty Hall of Memorial. A single aircraft flew low overhead. Weatherwise, the morning was cool and overcast but there was no rain. •

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The deal developed by the RAN’s vice-admiral Jonathan Mead and his project team, and accepted by the Albanese cabinet, is like a boy given carte blanche in a toy shop: we’ll have three to five of the US-model Virginia-class subs; then eight or more of the British follow-on to the existing Astute-class, to be built in Adelaide.

Albanese insists that Australian “sovereignty” will be paramount. But until 2033 or so, Australia will be protected in large part by US Navy and Royal Navy nuclear submarines patrolling out of the RAN’s Cockburn Sound base near Perth. The base will be expanded at a cost of $1 billion to accommodate them.

Only in 2033 will the RAN get its first nuclear-powered submarine, a Virginia-class boat transferred from the United States. It is unclear whether this — or the next two, three or four subs — will be new or second-hand. That will depend on how quickly the two US shipyards building the Virginia-class can ramp up production beyond the two per year demanded by the US Navy and concerned members of the US Congress.

To this end, Biden is asking Congress for US$4.6 billion. Canberra will be putting in A$3 billion, with a bit of that going to the British submarine yard at Barrow-in-Furness.

Rather than building new slipways, the extra capacity will be created by introducing a nightshift at the American yards. With US unemployment at a record low and the yards paying somewhat miserly wages to new staff, that might be hard to achieve. Australia is also hoping to rotate workers from Adelaide into the US and British yards to gain experience.

American experts think the transferred submarines will be second-hand, probably from the third and fourth production “blocks” commissioned since 2014. This means some will have as few as fourteen years remaining of their thirty-three-year reactor life when they are transferred in 2033 and beyond.

The price tag is put at somewhere between A$268 billion and A$368 billion over thirty years. The government insists that the initial $9 billion, over the next four years, won’t be felt at all: it will be met by $6 billion that would otherwise have gone to the cancelled French conventional submarines and $3 billion carved out of other defence programs. Expect protests over the latter, especially from the army, which is likely to see its heavy armour cut back.

The San Diego announcement by the three leaders has been greeted by a display of bipartisanship. The Coalition claims AUKUS as its own initiative, under the helmsmanship of Scott Morrison. But once it comes to finding the money — likely to be equivalent to 0.15 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product each year — the bipartisanship will start to fray.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has already nobly offered to support cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and aged care to fit the bill. Expect some in Labor and the crossbenches to suggest the stage-three tax cuts and the capital gains tax discount are fairer sacrifices. What better excuse than national security and the Chinese peril for breaking election promises?

The biggest loser in the short term is South Australia. It is left with only the two-year-long refurbishments of the RAN’s Collins-class conventional submarines, one by one from 2026, when the first boat, the HMAS Collins, reaches thirty years in service.

Further work depends on progress in the joint British, US and Australian design work on the Astute-class follow-on submarine, known as the SSN-AUKUS. If it is ready to build, the first steel will be cut and laid down in the early 2030s and the first submarine commissioned in the early 2040s, with the rest to follow into the late 2050s. It is unclear whether the US will build some of these AUKUS submarines for itself, or continue developing the Virginia-class successor, known as the SSN (X).

BAE Systems has taken nine to eleven years to complete each of the seven Astutes for the Royal Navy, as against just under seven years for the American yards to turn out a Virginia-class boat. That relative slowness has already given rise to doubts about the promised schedule and cost of what is an entirely new design.

“Defence does not have a strong record in this area and the navy in particular has struggled to maintain design discipline,” Peter Dean, a professor and defence expert at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre, wrote in the Nine papers. “Constant design changes have slowed projects, frustrated industry and blown out budgets,” Dean went on.

BAE Systems is also running the $45 billion program for nine Hunter-class frigates. They were originally priced at $30 billion, and the first was supposed to be laid down in Adelaide last year but work has not yet commenced. The frigate “was supposed to bring synergies by sharing the design between the UK, Canada and Australia,” wrote Dean. “But this project has blown out the budget, hit delays and fractured its initial approach as the design has constantly been modified, raising concerns about its viability.”

Former Coalition foreign minister Alexander Downer, for one, thinks the 40 per cent cost savings of building the SSN-AUKUS submarines overseas rather than in Adelaide will be tempting for a future government. “Assuming South Australia’s relative decline in its share of the national population will continue,” Downer wrote in the Australian Financial Review this week, “federal governments will become less concerned about holding a diminishing number of seats in South Australia and more concerned about how they’re going to pay for their other expensive and right-on plans.”

It’s tough, but Adelaide has declined the chance of sending a fourth generation of the Downer dynasty to Canberra.

Cameron Stewart, a former defence signals analyst who is now one of the Australian’s best strategic commentators, thinks it could go further than this, and Rishi Sunak or his successor could be in for the kind of treatment Morrison meted out to France’s Emmanuel Macron.

The decision to go for the British design is “madness,” he wrote. “After Australia has done all of the very hard work — overcoming the regulations, the red tape, the export control, the politics — in securing a system whereby we can acquire three to five Virginia-class submarines from Washington, it gives it all up. For what? To help build from scratch in Adelaide a completely separate next-generation British designed nuclear-powered submarine.”

“This all but guarantees a future nightmare of massive delays, development risk, price blow-outs and schedule nightmares — everything that we see on every first-of-type submarine project around the world,” Stewart went on. It would be better just to keep on acquiring Virginia-class submarines rather than making a “needless U-turn” to keep Adelaide and the British happy.

The long schedule at least means that if the balloon goes up over Taiwan — as feared within the next three years by the hawkish thinkers recently assembled by the Nine papers in their “Red Alert” series — conflict between the United States and China will happen without us being able to do much about it, nor China paying us much attention.

We still await a formal statement to parliament and the Australian people outlining why we need these very large submarines with the capability to cruise to China’s nearby waters and bombard it with cruise missiles. Defence of the archipelagic approaches to Australia will be left to smaller, silent conventional submarines: our own Collins-class for a while and then perhaps with some help from the Indonesian, Singaporean and Vietnamese navies. •

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Over the following two years, NATO and the German government stuck to their guns, while the German peace movement kept growing. Even larger demonstrations were held in June 1982 and October 1983, but to no avail. In November 1983 the Bundestag consented to the stationing of additional nuclear missiles on West German soil.

The Greens, who earlier that year had entered federal parliament for the first time, naturally opposed the measure. So did the Social Democrats, even though their own Helmut Schmidt, toppled as chancellor by the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl in October 1982, had defied the mass protests in 1981 and 1982 and was one of the staunchest advocates of the Pershings’ deployment in Germany. After the vote, the peace movement faltered, but the Greens, whom it had nurtured and who identified as its parliamentary wing, have remained in the Bundestag ever since.

The record numbers mobilised by peace activists in the early 1980s were surpassed twenty years later, when more than half a million protesters took to the streets of Berlin in February 2003 to demand a peaceful resolution to the conflict between the United States and Iraq. Again, the protests failed to alter the resolve of the decision-makers. The following month, the United States, supported by some of its allies (but not France and Germany), invaded Iraq. But the widespread sense of outrage soon dissipated.

Another twenty years on, Germany is again said to be witnessing a massive groundswell for peace. A prominent figure in the left-wing Die Linke party, politician Sahra Wagenknecht, called “Uprising for Peace,” the rally in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate she co-organised on 25 February, “the opening salvo of a new, powerful peace movement.”

Hundreds of thousands of people did indeed demonstrate in Berlin for an end of the war in Ukraine, but that was more than a year ago, in late February 2022. According to the police, Wagenknecht’s rally attracted a mere 13,000 protesters. The media nevertheless paid as much attention to it as they had to the February 2022 crowds, perhaps in the expectation that Wagenknecht’s prediction might come true — or maybe in response to her claim that the public broadcasters and mainstream newspapers overwhelmingly supported an escalation of the war and were trying to silence the views of the majority of Germans.

Both Berlin rallies, a year apart, were calling for peace in Ukraine, but they could not have been more different. In 2022, just three days after Russia intensified its undeclared war against its neighbour by launching a large-scale invasion, the demonstrators were demanding that Russia stop its aggression. They were waving yellow-and-blue flags and professing their solidarity with the people of Ukraine. Last month, Wagenknecht and her co-organisers asked participants not to carry national symbols, but while no Ukrainian flags were on view, some of the protesters came armed with the horizontally striped white-blue-red ensign of the Russian Federation.

In 2022, the overwhelming message, directed at Russia’s Vladimir Putin, was “Stop the war!” A year later, demonstrators demanded that Germany and its NATO allies stop supplying arms to Ukraine — in the expectation that once Ukraine was left to its own devices, Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have to sue for peace. Both crowds were a diverse lot — and included veterans of the German peace movement of the 1980s — but last month’s also featured prominent representatives of the extreme right, such as Jörg Urban, the leader of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in Saxony, and the far-right publisher Jürgen Elsässer. Wagenknecht didn’t mind: everybody is welcome at our rally, she said, provided they sincerely “ehrlichen Herzens,” want to call for peace and negotiations.

Last month’s rally was prompted by a change in government policy. In late January, after months of procrastination and debate, Germany agreed to supply fourteen Leopard 2 A6 tanks to Ukraine and allow other countries to export the German-made tank to help Ukrainians repel the Russian invaders. The Leopard is considered one of the world’s best battle tanks, and Ukraine had long demanded that its allies make this particular model available.

Germany had already delivered other military hardware to Ukraine, including thirty Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, but had shied away from supplying tanks that might enable Kyiv’s forces to go on the counteroffensive and perhaps even carry the war into Russia. And the Scholz government didn’t want to be seen to make available weaponry of a kind that the United States was keeping back.

Because of a widespread wariness about German involvement in armed conflicts, it took a while for the government to supply Ukraine with any weapons at all. Even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support for the separatists in the Donbas, the Merkel government categorically ruled out arming Ukraine.

Visiting Eastern Ukraine in May 2021, Greens co-leader Robert Habeck suggested that Germany should enable Ukraine to defend itself against the pro-Russian separatists. He didn’t have in mind tanks or heavy artillery; at most, he was referring to weapons that could be used to shoot down drones. He was roundly criticised, not only by the Merkel government but also by prominent members of his own party. With a national poll looming, he backtracked.

After Merkel’s defeat in September 2021 the new government of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats initially maintained its predecessor’s approach to Russia. In spite of American misgivings, Scholz and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock of the Greens pushed ahead with the construction of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline and continued to treat Vladimir Putin as if he could be trusted. In January 2022, when defence minister Christine Lambrecht, a Social Democrat, assured Ukraine that it had Germany’s full support, she proved her point by authorising the delivery of 5000 helmets to the Ukrainian army.

After Russia launched its full invasion, Scholz’s government abandoned the fifty-year-old doctrine that precluded weapons being provided to states outside NATO that are involved, or likely to be involved, in military conflicts. As Germany’s allies began talking about arming Ukraine with artillery, however, Lambrecht agreed only to dispatching bazookas to Kyiv. Much like the 5000 helmets, the offer didn’t seem overly generous: the weapons had been inherited by the Bundeswehr from its East German counterpart, the GDR’s National People’s Army, in 1990.

Over the twelve months since then, Scholz and his defence minister have appeared to be dragged kicking and screaming towards ramping up Germany’s military support, with pressure piled on by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his outspoken ambassador to Berlin, the Polish government, the opposition Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats’ coalition partners, the Greens and the Free Democrats.

Things changed when Lambrecht was replaced by another Social Democrat, Boris Pistorius, in mid January. Once the US agreed to supply M1 Abrams tanks, which American generals consider unsuitable for the conditions in Ukraine, Germany finally decided to deliver a very limited number of battle tanks. Still, the Scholz government is committed to treading as carefully as possible, even if that’s not how its actions were perceived by those attending last month’s rally in Berlin. They were convinced that Scholz had joined the chorus of warmongers and that it might only be a matter of time until Germany crosses another red line and arms Ukraine with fighter planes, making a third world war a realistic prospect.

A couple of weeks before last month’s rally, Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer, a faded icon of the German women’s movement, published a manifesto on the petition website Change.org. Its opening paragraph reads:

Today (10 February 2023) is the 352nd day of the war in Ukraine. So far, more than 200,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians have been killed. Women have been raped, children frightened, an entire people traumatised. If the fighting continues unabated, Ukraine will soon be a depopulated, ravaged country. And also in Europe many people are scared of an escalation of the war. They fear for their and their children’s future.

There are two reasons why it might be easy to dismiss the manifesto. One is its language. While the text acknowledges that the “Ukrainian population” — not “Ukraine,” nor the “Ukrainian people” — was “brutally attacked by Russia,” it fails unambiguously to identify victims and perpetrators. The grammatical passive voice in the first paragraph obscures the indisputable fact that women in Ukraine were raped by Russian soldiers. Civilians died in Ukraine rather than in Russia.

Wagenknecht and Schwarzer claim that Ukraine can’t win the war and that it therefore makes little sense to prolong the hostilities. They say that each day the war goes on costs up to a thousand lives and brings the world closer to a third world war, which would be fought with nuclear weapons.

The manifesto calls for immediate negotiations to facilitate a ceasefire — because that’s what half of Germany’s population wants. Such negotiations, Wagenknecht and Schwarzer suggest, would require compromises on both sides. It is hard to imagine what a Russian compromise would look like, or how the government in Kyiv could agree to anything but a withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory (or at least from that part occupied after 24 February 2022).

The other reason why the manifesto lacks credibility has to do with the ulterior motives of one of its authors. It’s no secret that Wagenknecht wants to leave Die Linke (as her husband and closest political ally, former Social Democrats leader Oskar Lafontaine, has already done) and form a new party. She is hoping that enough of those currently voting for either Die Linke or the AfD would support her brand of populism and push a new party over the 5 per cent threshold designed to keep minor players out of the Bundestag.

The slogan “Peace with Russia!” would appeal to many voters, particularly in East Germany, as would two other causes currently championed by the AfD but also close to Wagenknecht’s heart: “Close the Borders!” and “War on Wokeness!” The manifesto and the rally were thinly disguised means of gauging support for a new party.

The Change.org petition was endorsed by sixty-nine prominent Germans, most of them writers, academics or actors. Many of them would have written a very different text but felt strongly enough about the manifesto’s key message to sign it. They include, for example, Margot Käßmann, a former leader of Germany’s Lutheran Church. She doesn’t want Germany to provide any more arms to Ukraine because she is convinced that they would inevitably “escalate, extend and broaden the war, and that fears of a nuclear war are not completely unfounded.” When asked how she imagines negotiations would be initiated and proceed, she said that she wasn’t an expert on diplomacy.

Another signatory is the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, who suspects that the war is the result of a US ploy to shore up its global hegemony at the expense of Europe. Like many others who subscribe to the sentiments of the manifesto, he is convinced that his views have not been sufficiently aired by Germany’s public broadcasters and the press — or worse: “The government is readying the tools to unleash the police and, in particular, the security services on anyone who doubts the wisdom of pledging full-scale support to the ultranationalist government of Ukraine and the Biden administration,” he predicted in a recent interview.

But while Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s “Manifesto for Peace” and some of the arguments put forward by its prominent supporters are unconvincing, the manifesto can’t be readily discounted. That’s not least because around three-quarters of a million people have already signed it. It has in fact attracted more signatures than any other German petition on Change.org.

The support for the manifesto also reflects widely shared views and sentiments. According to a YouGov poll conducted last month, 51 per cent of Germans believe that their country’s supply of arms to Ukraine makes it a belligerent. Another survey, in early March, found that 31 per cent of respondents think that Germany’s support for Ukraine goes too far.

I didn’t sign Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s manifesto, nor do I believe that Germany’s support for Ukraine goes too far. But I sympathise with some of those calling for renewed diplomatic efforts to stop the killing. And I have misgivings about the hawkish rhetoric of Ukraine’s German supporters.

The demands that Germany provide more, and more sophisticated, military hardware to Ukraine is often linked to the mantra that Ukraine must win the war. That aligns with the demand that Russia must lose the war, but is quite different from the suggestion that Ukraine must be put in a position where it won’t lose the war. I cannot see why a defeat of Russia should be a necessary prerequisite for a Russian withdrawal and an acknowledgment that Ukraine’s borders must be respected. Besides, it is hard to imagine Russia, the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, conceding outright defeat.

I am astounded by the uncritical embrace of NATO by erstwhile pacifists, particularly among the Greens, as if the US-led alliance were a peacekeeping force on a humanitarian mission. The idea that its expansion, be it eastwards or northwards, would only be in the interest of global peace or that NATO is an alliance designed to promote democracy strikes me as preposterous. The Kurdish exiles extradited from Sweden to Turkey to facilitate Sweden’s joining of the alliance could testify that NATO doesn’t have a problem with autocratic regimes among its members, let alone dictatorial regimes outside NATO. That is if they live to tell the tale.

The forgetfulness of particularly those hawks who are recent converts baffles me. There have been numerous violations of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter — namely that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations” — since 1945. The US has been a regular culprit. Past American invasions should not serve as excuses for Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity — not just since February 2022 but since 2014 — but a picture that casts the US as a defender of the UN Charter is plainly wrong.

Similarly, while moves to collect evidence in order to eventually charge the Russian leadership with crimes against humanity deserve all the support they can get, it’s worth recalling that the US is among the countries that don’t recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which in an ideal world would try Putin and his generals.

The forgetfulness of Ukraine’s hawkish supporters also extends to other aspects of postwar history. They often imply that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unprecedented. It’s not. Arguably, Russia would not have dared to invade Ukraine if the West had taken a strong stance against its invasion of Georgia, its bombing of Grozny, its occupation of the Crimea and its intervention in Syria (including the bombing of civilian targets in Aleppo).

Nor is Russia the only country that has tried to bomb a European country into submission. The Greens, in particular, ought to recall NATO’s 1999 intervention in the Kosovo war and its bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which then foreign minister Joschka Fischer defended by comparing what was happening in Kosovo to Auschwitz. At the time, many Greens quit the party in protest against the decision to endorse Fischer’s stance.

Incidentally, a closer look at what happened in 1999 might be instructive in more than one sense. At rallies against the NATO bombing, left-wing pacifists marched side by side with Serbian ultranationalists, admirers of the far-right Chetniks who fought against Nazi Germany (but also against Croats, Bosniaks and Tito’s partisans).

The amnesia that characterises the current debate between hawks and doves also extends to other recent conflicts. According to the UN Development Program, the war in Yemen had caused 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021. Last year, the German government authorised arms sales to Saudi Arabia, one of the parties to that war. So much for the claim that the decision to supply arms to Ukraine has been unparalleled.

And what about Scholz’s Zeitenwende, the turning point in German policy that he announced in the Bundestag on 27 February 2022? He used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a pretext for a €100 billion funding boost for the armed forces.

Finally, I am wary of the expectation that support for Ukraine and its people must be accompanied by an endorsement of Ukrainian nationalism. At rallies in support of Ukraine I am uneasy when the Ukrainian national anthem is sung (which invariably happens during such events), not because I have anything against that anthem in particular, but because occasions when the Australian or German national anthems are sung make me similarly uncomfortable.

Similarly, demands that cultural events involving Russian artists ought to be cancelled or boycotted, or that the reading of Russian literature ought to be discouraged are not just plain stupid but also reek of a nationalism that is at the heart of many of the ills of today’s world, including armed conflict and forced displacement.

Some of those who signed Wagenknecht’s manifesto may have done so because they are critical of NATO, object to US foreign policy past and present, or believe that we eventually ought to overcome an international system based on nation-states. None of these beliefs is incompatible with empathy, and indeed solidarity, with a people attacked by a ruthless invader. Yet in many statements about the war by self-declared pacifists, solidarity is in short supply.

Take, for example, an open letter to Olaf Scholz by the mayor and twenty-one of thirty-four local parliamentarians of Freital, a town of 40,000 in the East German state of Saxony. “As a sovereign state, Germany, the federal government and you as chancellor have to make sovereign decisions for the benefit of the German people,” they tell Scholz, claiming that instead his government’s policies further the interests of “third parties.” Referring twice to “Leid,” meaning pain or suffering, they write that “our painful past” ought to teach Germans that the supply of weapons to Ukraine will simply produce further, indescribable suffering.

A generous interpretation would assume that unlike the historical Leid, “indescribable suffering” refers to the current and future experiences of people in Ukraine. According to a less generous reading, the latter is something likely to be experienced by “us,” once the delivery of tanks and other arms to Ukraine ignites a war fought with nuclear weapons.

Such a reading is supported by another statement in the letter. The authors claim that they are not prepared, as Germans, “to be involved in a third world war or to be made a party to belligerent acts in whatever form, either directly or indirectly.” Already, individuals and businesses are experiencing what they call “unacceptable consequences” — presumably as a result of Germany’s support for Ukraine.

Lacking any explicit reference to Ukrainian victims and Russian perpetrators, and devoid of empathy for the people in Ukraine, the Freital letter captures some of the sentiment fuelling German pacifism. It is not even an extreme example. It doesn’t spell out what many opponents of support for Ukraine are openly saying: that the sanctions against Russia are harming Germany’s economy and have been responsible for energy shortages and rising inflation, and should therefore be withdrawn immediately.

Am I being unfair by quoting a letter written by the members of a local parliament in which the AfD wields a lot of influence? True, regional Saxony is not representative of Germany. Neither is the man I am about to quote, although many Germans would like to think he is. Jürgen Habermas, the nonagenarian philosopher who is arguably Germany’s foremost public intellectual, intervened twice in the public debates about German support for Ukraine, first in May last year, and again after the publication of Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s manifesto, on both occasions by writing an essay for the respected Munich-based broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Habermas names perpetrators and victims. In his first contribution, he endorses Olaf Scholz’s caution rather than arguing against supporting Ukraine. More recently, he has echoed calls for a diplomatic solution and criticised the ramping up of Germany’s military aid for the government in Kyiv. His line of argument is neither simplistic nor rash. But he too seems overly concerned by what the war does to him.

He begins his first article by referring to the representation of the war in the media, which in his view has been influenced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “A Ukrainian president, who knows about the impact of images, is responsible for powerful messages.” He then concedes that notwithstanding this “skilful staging,” “the facts tug at our nerves.” He is concerned about our nerves, rather than about the very real death and destruction represented by such skilfully staged images?

In his second essay, he once more articulates Western sensitivities. “The West has its own legitimate interests and its own obligations,” he writes. Western governments

have legal obligations towards the security concerns of their own citizens and, irrespective of the attitudes of the people in Ukraine, they are morally co-responsible for victims and destruction caused by weapons from the West; therefore, they cannot shift the responsibility for the brutal consequences of an extension of the fighting, which becomes only possible thanks to their military support, to the Ukrainian government.

Although Habermas is ostensibly talking about Western governments, he appears to mean “us.” To use Margot Käßmann’s reading of Habermas’s words: “When we are supplying weapons — that’s something the philosopher Habermas has put very well — we are co-responsible for the dead. That’s not something where we could evade our responsibility.”

Might Käßmann and Habermas feel less strongly about the brutal consequences of a Russian occupation of Ukraine because they wouldn’t be broadcast into their living rooms (with the skilful stager, Zelenskyy, presumably one of the many victims of the Russian “liberators”)?

Habermas might object to Käßmann’s interpretation of his words, and would not want to be associated with either Wagenknecht or the Freital councillors. But he shares with them a call for negotiations and a conviction that such negotiations require the West to scale down, if not halt altogether, its military support for Ukraine. And the clamour for peace, whether in pursuit of cheap Russian gas or out of a desire not to be held morally responsible for the fighting, is informed by egotism.

No obvious middle path exists between abandoning Ukraine and arming the Kyiv government to the extent that its army can inflict a defeat on Russia. That is, if we assume that a solution will depend on what happens on the battlefield.

But the West has two other options. One is to do more to influence countries that have tacitly supported Putin, particularly China and India. The West would have to pay a high price if it wanted China and India to stop buying Russian coal and oil, but until we know the price-tag, it might be worth exploring that option in more detail.

The other option would be to impose meaningful sanctions in the hope that they lead to a coup against Putin. A couple of days ago, the Hamburg state government reported that last year the use of coal in Hamburg’s power stations increased by almost 15 per cent on 2021’s figure. That’s a result of Germany’s attempt to wean itself off Russian gas. But 35 per cent of the coal used in Hamburg last year was imported from Russia. So far, the sanctions are too selective to seriously hurt the Russian economy. In fact Russia’s revenues from selling oil and gas increased by 28 per cent last year.

The global climate might benefit from more wide-ranging sanctions targeting Russian fossil fuels. But any tightening would also hurt those imposing the sanctions, at least initially. Their impact would be grist for the mill for those who claim the price we pay for the war in Ukraine is already too high. The debate would further obscure the fact that whatever inconveniences we experience, and however much our sensitivities are offended, the war’s victims are the people of Ukraine.

German angst, which I discussed in a previous Inside Story essay, is clearly back, and with it the egotism that accompanied it. The current debate would benefit from a less blinkered view of the past, one that is mindful of what happened in Yemen and of Russia’s track record since the early 1990s, of unholy alliances against NATO’s bombing of Belgrade, and of the US’s insistence that its self-appointed role as global sheriff should not be subject to the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court.

It could also be instructive to revisit the peace movement of the 1980s, which is now upheld as exemplary by German pacifists and hawks alike. Then, too, many peace activists took sides in a global conflict pitting the US and its allies against the Soviet Union. Then, too, what mattered most to many of those gathered in Bonn in October 1981 were their own sensitivities, because they imagined themselves as (future) victims. And then, too, the allaying of Germans’ fears did nothing to enhance the safety of people in faraway places. •

The post The egotism of German pacifism appeared first on Inside Story.

By daylight, the city can feel like its near neighbours, Warsaw and Budapest. Stalinist buildings line the Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main boulevard, and the skyline is punctuated by the golden spires of churches. Dogs wrapped in winter jackets are out for walks, couples stroll hand in hand. But at night, once you realise the street’s illumination comes from the bobbing headlamps of pedestrians and dogs wearing glow-in-the-dark collars, it is impossible to forget the war and how it has transformed this city.

Some of the most visible changes have been to names. Russian places and heroes have been expunged from streets and squares, which have been rebaptised with Ukrainian names that better reflect the national mood. Moskovska Street, named for the Russian capital, has become Kniaziv Ostrozkykh Street, after a branch of Ukrainian medieval nobility; Piterskaya (St Petersburg) Street is now London Street. In their failed attempt to conquer Kyiv, Russia has accelerated the derussification of the city. Globally, news outlets now refer to the Ukrainian-derived “Kyiv” rather than the previously common Russian-language “Kiev.”

While the Russian advance on the capital from the north was repulsed early in the war and the front lines of battle now lie in the east and south of Ukraine, the country remains under indiscriminate attack from the sky. Civilians are at constant risk: reports come in frequently of people killed in their own homes or on streets they have known for decades. Despite a morale-lifting visit this week by US president Joe Biden, residents are tensely awaiting the anticipated anniversary bombardment.

The near-daily alarms have forced mental acrobatics of a variety that I could not previously have envisaged. Each siren that goes off — and activates a flurry of notifications on my phone, this being a truly twenty-first century war — triggers decision-making that feels life-and-death and black-and-white, and yet also very mundane.

When a siren first sounds, it typically indicates that the launch of an offensive airborne attack has been detected. Because Kyiv is in Ukraine’s central heartland, we have a window of opportunity; a heavy pause during which we track the attack’s progress through Twitter feeds and Telegram chats.

There’s usually time for me to finish my shower or brew a thermos of coffee, recognising that these attacks can trigger emergency utility shut-offs. Based on the stream of real-time updates, I decide if I will shelter in my bathroom (the safest place in my apartment, away from external walls) or in the basement shelter across the road.

Some days the attack doesn’t materialise; on others, explosions echo across the city. Later, when our mobile phones buzz to tell us the alert is over, the catch in my throat releases, and everyone moves along with their day.

Resilience is a point of collective pride. The national ballet performs to a full theatre even as the corps is thinned by displacement and enlistment. Weekends see Kyiv’s bars and restaurants packed with patrons toasting to victory (“za peremoga”) before returning home ahead of the curfew. Refusing to be cowed by cuts to electricity, venues are illuminated by candles and fairy lights, and the city hums with generators. People distribute powerbanks among their friends as though sharing cigarettes.

The city’s citizens have fashioned a new normal. Patriotism is in vogue, and Pantone’s freedom blue and energising yellow are the colours of the season. Alongside more conventional military heroes, people honour train conductors and energy workers. One of my favourite cocktail bars shakes a “Ukrainian dream” (rum, baked-apple infused vermouth and bitters) and a “return to the sun” (rum, amaretto, cardamom bitters, vanilla syrup and lemon). They taste of hope, and of supply chains from the West that have not been cut.

No blueprint exists for how best to respond to war; no guidance manual spells out which parts of life one should pause and which continue. I’ve had my hair cut by headtorch swaddled in a blanket in a dark and unheated salon, and attended candlelit concerts with packed audiences. Adaptation is the byword, and a determination that life must go on.

Ukrainians have long known war: their country’s territory has been contested for centuries, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for breakaway republics in the east have made military offensives and civilian displacement part of the everyday national narrative. But it was the launch of the full-scale invasion on 24 February last year that brought war home. Everyone remembers where they were that day, and in the terrifying weeks afterwards.

Today, Ukrainian colleagues can name the weaponry the country is requesting from its allies as though rattling off a weekly shopping list. They recite casualty statistics and updates on movement in the frontline. They give friendly advice on the nearest bomb shelter when an air-raid siren goes off.

Absorbed in conflict of a scale few imagined, the darkness of Kyiv’s night-time streets goes nearly unmentioned. Between air strikes, the bartenders keep pouring and the musicians keep playing. •

The post Kyiv, one year on appeared first on Inside Story.

For NATO, therefore, policy has become risk management. On the one hand, it wants to prevent Ukraine from losing, force Russia to end the attack and deter future aggression in, for instance, the Baltic states. Besides hobbling Moscow with sanctions, this means giving Kyiv the intelligence information and weapons to kill thousands of invading troops and gut the Russian army. On the other hand, it doesn’t want to provoke a catastrophic reaction.

While US, French and British nuclear weapons add to the inherent danger of the crisis, only Russia has been flaunting its arsenal. Its thousands of nuclear warheads, divided between intercontinental range and shorter-range “tactical” weapons, are enough to reduce Europe to ruins, slaughter several million people and shatter civilisation. Even if the Kremlin had remained silent about them, these weapons are an existential menace.

But it has not stayed silent. President Putin, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian security council’s Dmitry Medvedev allude to the potentially dire nuclear consequences of Western support of Kyiv. Further down the food chain, the state media continues its blood-curdling commentary, in some cases insanely calling for the obliteration of NATO countries.

We don’t know if the Kremlin is bluffing. But three factors seem to give substance to its threats: Putin’s character; the high stakes involved; and Russian military doctrine.

Many say the key to understanding the nuclear risk lies inside Putin’s head. Before he invaded Ukraine a year ago, observers considered him a ruthless but shrewd player of geopolitics; since then, though, he’s simply appeared reckless. And rather than Putin being the leader who has mastered the global chessboard, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US president Joe Biden seem to have Moscow’s measure.

So, we have a frustrated control freak with no conscience and a finger on the nuclear button. Perhaps he’s deploying the “mad man” card, carefully playing his hand to limit Western intervention? Or has he become a rash gambler?

Without a proper psychological assessment and a fly on the wall inside the Kremlin, it’s unclear how far a character assessment can take us. We don’t know how much authority Putin has over Russia’s nuclear forces, with reports saying he shares it with senior officials. And although he licensed the current spate of rabid nationalism, we don’t know how much he now controls it. Still, as far as we can tell, he continues to call the shots.

Another reason the nuclear threat appears credible is the high stakes involved. Russia’s status as a great power and Putin’s survival is said to hinge on victory, or at least avoiding defeat. There’s also an ideological aspect to this, with Putin and nationalist zealots arguing that the war represents a civilisational struggle between righteous Russianness and degenerate Western Satanism. This is just the sort of binary or absolutist framing suited to prepping for an apocalyptic conflict.

Finally, some experts argue Russian military doctrine adds weight to the nuclear threat. In particular, they say the idea of “escalate to de-escalate” gears Russian forces to respond to an imminent decisive defeat of its army, or to conventional air attacks on the Russian homeland, with a limited nuclear strike to compel enemies to back off. (This echoes Washington’s refusal to rule out nuclear first use, and NATO’s cold war strategy of flexible response, which encompassed the concept of nuclear warning shots.)

In other words, the Russian general staff has institutionalised a crossover between large-scale conventional war and scenarios for nuclear strikes. While this doesn’t make it automatic, the potential for escalation is baked into strategy. An extra twist is Moscow’s annexation of about one-fifth of Ukraine, suggesting the conquered regions are now considered part of the homeland and so covered by its nuclear deterrent.

Whatever its end point, the Kremlin’s nuclear threat has so far worked, at least to a degree. Fear of precipitating world war three is the main reason NATO ruled out imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and it helps explain NATO’s initial reluctance to supply long-range artillery and tanks. Today, Western fear of escalation shows in the refusal to supply Kyiv with even longer-range artillery and combat aircraft.

In each case the West has been sensitive to Russia’s supposed “red lines.” NATO has even internalised them as an essential tool for crisis management. The principal red line here separates measures intended to aid Ukraine’s defence from those threatening Russian territory.

As conceptual tools go, red lines appear objective and clear. In practice, though, they have been more subjective and elastic. While there’s still a prohibition on direct NATO combat with Russian forces, everything else has become blurred. This is partly because the distinction between defensive and offensive weapons is largely artificial, depending as much on context as on technical attributes. Even the distinction between defensive and offensive operations can be problematic when the issue is reclaiming lost land.

This matter surfaced in the debate over the supply of tanks. Were the German-manufactured Leopards intended to prevent a Ukraine defeat while the country continued to bleed out, or to aid Ukraine’s victory and put an end to the war? And what would a victory look like?

Eleven months ago, many would have judged fighting the supposedly mighty Russian army to a draw along the current front line as equivalent to a Ukraine win. Today, most Western commentators say victory requires further embarrassing the humbled Russian army and recapturing the territory occupied since February 2022. Kyiv has set the bar higher: pushing the Russian army out of the land seized in 2014.

Hanging over all of this is the future of Crimea. Controversy over the peninsula is set to reshape the debate over red lines, not least in Washington. Kyiv and Moscow are both convinced of their historical and moral right to the place, but Ukraine’s legal claim is far stronger and would provide the basis for Western support of an offensive to expel Russian forces.

A solid legal case is not the same as sensible policy, however. Assuming it could be done, would retaking Crimea be worth a (say) one-in-ten chance of triggering a nuclear holocaust?

The answer is a matter of opinion. It’s interesting that the country most vulnerable to Russian nuclear forces — Ukraine — appears the least concerned. Kyiv is the most hawkish player in the debate about reclaiming Crimea and other lost territories; it seems, on the surface, prepared to pay any price and run any risk.

This is important because, while NATO and Ukrainian interests overlap, they’re not identical. Western commentators often forget to factor in autonomous Ukrainian decision-making, and assume that Kyiv will keep its strategy within guardrails established by outsiders. But while Kyiv has good reasons not to cross its international backers, the war is about Ukraine’s independence, not its subordination to Western interests.

Ukrainians don’t picture the conflict in geopolitical terms. They see what’s right in front of them: Putin’s trashing of their country’s sovereignty and dismissal of its national identity, his willingness to seize as much of their land as he can get away with, the millions of refugees, and the savagery of the Russian army and its mercenary associates. The resulting hatred is not conducive to a restrained response from Kyiv if it identifies an opening for an offensive that sends the occupying force into ignominious retreat. Throwing the Kremlin off balance could well become Kyiv’s aim, even if that disrupts Western ideas of escalation control.

Some people don’t see this as a problem. Social media is full of keyboard warriors wanting to pour weapons into Ukraine as though Russian nuclear weapons don’t exist. Even respected commentators advocate NATO going all-in, paying little regard to the potential nuclear consequences. Some experts advise facing down Putin’s nuclear blustering like we would a schoolyard bully. For these people, Russian huffing and puffing has run into diminishing returns, becoming little more than background noise.

NATO can’t afford to be so cavalier. The consequences of being wrong are too dreadful. So it’s intensely interested in scenarios showing how and when the nuclear threshold might be crossed. Start with a projected Ukrainian counteroffensive that overruns a large part of the Russian army on the border or employs air attacks to strike deep into Russia. This would lift the stakes and speed the pace of events. The resulting strategic adjustments could be hasty and prone to miscalculation, perhaps setting the scene for a limited Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine.

NATO might then respond with direct conventional military intervention. And, almost certainly, once the Kremlin had broken the nuclear taboo, America’s preparations for nuclear war would be ramped up. A different type of escalatory dynamic would pit Moscow against Washington in a starker form of brinkmanship.

Strategists on both sides think deterrence requires convincing the opponent that they won’t back down, that they’re prepared to climb the escalation ladder all the way to large-scale global nuclear war. Adding substance to the idea are elaborate plans matching individual warheads against specific targets. This is a surreal space in which potential casualties are counted in the millions and military officers are drilled in worst-case analysis.

Increased alert levels for Russian and American forces could thus become mutually reinforcing, intensifying fears of surprise attack and inadvertently creating pressure for massive pre-emptive strikes. Misunderstandings and accidents would become more dangerous, perhaps confronting decision-makers in Moscow and Washington with a kill-or-be-killed moment.

This is the apocalyptic picture Putin tries to leverage. But apart from some loose talk, there’s no evidence he actually wants to blow up the world. He probably has serious doubts about “escalate to de-escalate,” not least in terms of cost–benefit calculations. But even if he is, in his private moments, set against radical escalation, the conflict could take on a life of its own. The stresses of responding to pressing events on the ground or in the air above Russia might crowd out yesterday’s assessments. Whatever was in his mind could be altered by unfolding events that can be neither reliably predicted nor easily controlled. He might, at last, have to put up or shut up.

The recognition that the war could turn into a bigger catastrophe has obviously not paralysed the West. Apart from the domestic political price of abandoning Ukraine, NATO is concerned about the harm to global security if it fails to resist territorial expansion underpinned by nuclear threats — harm that includes exposing more countries to Russian, Chinese and North Korean aggression, a rush to proliferation, and the nightmare of normalising nuclear warfare.

During the cold war, Washington refused to intervene in Moscow’s sphere of influence when the Soviet army crushed anti-Russian movements in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The reason for caution was fear of events spiralling into nuclear annihilation. Today, however, Washington is pushing the envelope by orchestrating military intervention inside the borders of the former Soviet Union, aiming to defeat Russia on its doorstep without tipping it over the edge. Only time will tell if it can master this necessary balancing act. •

The post Pushing the nuclear envelope appeared first on Inside Story.

What attracted less attention was the fact that many of the flag-wavers were members of the Australian chapter of the Night Wolves, a Russian biker gang that combines radical nationalism with paramilitary activities.

In a video of the incident posted by a pro-Putin activist, a prominent member of the Australian Night Wolves wears the gang’s t-shirt emblazoned with a flaming red wolf, a large white “Z” and its motto, “Where We Are, There Is Russia.” He addresses the gang’s leadership in Moscow, shouting “Brother Aleksandr Zaldostanov — greetings from Melbourne!” in Serbian. His next, muffled words, echoed by Srdjan Djokovic, have variously been interpreted as “Long live Russia!” or “Cheers, people!”

It was another small win for the Kremlin’s information warriors. Within a week, the video of this strange performance had notched up 187,000 views on the YouTube channel of the pro-Putin activist, “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov. The content has been widely circulated on the Putin regime’s propaganda platforms, which hailed Srdjan Djokovic as a hero and denounced the Western media for persecuting him for his pro-Russian sympathies.

I have followed the enablers of this incident, the Night Wolves, for many years. My interest was sharpened by my research for a book about the place of a Russian neo-Nazi movement, Russkii Obraz, in the Kremlin’s manipulation of Russian nationalism. For the leader of Russkii Obraz, the Night Wolves were an object lesson in how an extremist movement could win the approval of the regime and carve out a niche in public life.

The Night Wolves represent a minuscule fringe of Australia’s Russian and Serbian communities. But there are sound reasons to be concerned about their activities.

The most obvious is their connection to the Russian state. From their first demonstration alongside neo-Nazi groups outside Sydney’s Russian consulate in 2016, Australia’s Night Wolves have acted as conduits of influence for the Putin regime. They joined Kremlin propagandists in a social media campaign against Aleksei Navalny. They organised screenings of Russian nationalist propaganda at cinemas around the country. And they tried to intimidate an anti-Putin protester outside a Russian consulate.

No less disturbing is the gang’s relationship to their Russian mother organisation, which is connected to the Putin regime on multiple levels. As well as their close links to the security apparatus, the Russian Night Wolves are beneficiaries of extensive state support, ranging from presidential grants to real estate and free advertising. In return for this largesse, they play a major role in the ecosystem of radical nationalist groups that sustains Putin’s regime and its war against Ukraine.

Uniquely among pro-Kremlin nationalists, the Night Wolves have a mass appeal. Their motorbike shows attract large crowds and television audiences with expensively choreographed spectacles combining fireworks, motorcycle stunts and patriotic rock bands. Behind the theatrics, each show presents a narrative about the eternal struggle between Russia’s pure traditions and a demonic monster representing the West.

These warped morality tales reflect the political vision of the gang’s leader, Aleksandr Zaldostanov (“Surgeon”), who makes no secret of his imperialist convictions. He is obsessed with the idea of a “Fifth Empire,” the blueprint for a new totalitarianism proposed by the novelist and neo-Stalinist ideologue Aleksandr Prokhanov. According to Zaldostanov, the Fifth Empire will unite the legacies of four historical Russian empires — from Kievan Rus to Stalin’s USSR — into a new global power under Vladimir Putin.

Underlying this project is the classic fascist dream of a violent, regenerative nationalist revolution. The aim is to save humanity from the moral decadence brought by Western democracy, which Zaldostanov defines as “global Satanism.”

What magnifies the danger of this ideology is the paramilitary force at Zaldostanov’s disposal. The Night Wolves’ business interests include a network of private security companies that employ ex-military and security personnel. The most important is Wolf Holdings of Security Structures, which was sanctioned by the US government in June 2017 for its involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.

These veterans played a conspicuous role in Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, when they operated roadblocks, kidnapped a Ukrainian general, and stormed a naval headquarters.

Later they participated in Putin’s onslaught on southeast Ukraine. They are particularly close to the leadership of the Russian puppet state in Lugansk. A monument to Zaldostanov’s Fifth Empire, titled “A Symbol of the New Russia in the Eyes of the Night Wolves,” stands in front of the Lugansk government headquarters.

The Night Wolves have also helped to project Russian power in Europe and the Balkans. They stage regular “club runs,” long-distance motorcycle rides that serve as rallying points for local nationalists and fuel for Russian propaganda. Their security structures are the backbone of a network of “Volk Systema” martial arts clubs that claim to provide training in special forces combat techniques to police and the armed forces. Investigative reporting in Hungary, a NATO member state, suggested that this poses a real security risk.

One of the Night Wolves’ most audacious interventions was the failed coup in Montenegro on the eve of elections in 2016. A co-founder of the Serbian chapter of the gang testified that Russian intelligence agents arranged for him to visit Moscow, where he was given encrypted telephones and more than US$200,000 for weapons and recruitment.

Today the Night Wolves are deeply implicated in Putin’s war against Ukraine. In April last year, Zaldostanov hailed the invasion as yet another “battle against Satan.” The combatants include the Night Wolves’ own paramilitary unit, Night Wolves Pyatnashka. “These lads came to the Donbass with a clear motivation and an understanding of what is happening here,” writes pro-Kremlin military journalist Pavel Kukushkin. “They didn’t come to take pictures. The boys are fighting like everyone else.”

The Night Wolves’ complicity in Putin’s aggression has not gone unnoticed in the West. As early as December 2014, the US government sanctioned the gang for actions that “threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.” Canada blacklisted Zaldostanov a few months later. An EU-wide ban was imposed in July last year. It may be time for Australia to open its eyes to the Putinists in our midst. •

The post Putin’s Wolves appeared first on Inside Story.

All of us on this mission, working to help Ukraine for many years, knew just how precarious the country’s situation was. And then, in February this year, all hell broke loose with Russia’s full-scale invasion.

I’ve spent a lot of time working in Ukraine, which is the only reason I wrote Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires. My book is the outcome of an eighteen-year relationship with travelling, living and working in Ukraine at different times.

Which is why it was galling to see Mark Edele, reviewing my book in this publication, egregiously misrepresenting my motivations and credentials for writing the book, and misrepresenting my overall argument. I have no idea why he chose to do these two things, but I can put the record straight here.

Professor Edele characterises me as an “international relations academic” and suggests I rely on a theorising approach in my book. This is simply untrue: I rely on my personal observations, and my judgement as a former diplomat, to explain the slow decline in contemporary Russia–Ukraine relations. I also look honestly at the inadvertent consequences of some of Ukraine’s foreign policy choices.

Professor Edele inaccurately summarises my argument as attributing the 2022 Russian invasion to a response to NATO expansion. I do nothing of the sort: I clearly argue that Russia’s elites, headed by Putin, have unhealthy dreams of empire. Hence the subtitle of my book, arguing that this is a war of imperial expansion. Another driver is that Putin sits atop a dysfunctional autocratic system that has afforded him a jaundiced view of Ukraine’s independent path.

Yes, NATO expansion — and Ukraine’s enthusiasm to join the alliance — is a third driver of the war. But it is one Russian motivator among several, which is precisely why Professor Edele and the headline of the review article mischaracterise my work. Professor Edele in effect claims that I am arguing that a complex war arises from a single cause. I do not argue for mono-causality, and I make this abundantly clear in my book.

To Professor Edele, I remark, “It’s the empire, stupid!” Russian dreams of Soviet and Tsarist empires have collided with what Putin, Lavrov and the rest of them see as a US-led neo-imperial project.

My book examines precisely why our benign view of NATO expansion, common in my country, Britain, and probably also common in some Australian circles, is not universally held. Any honest accounting of Russian motivations to go to war in 2022 in Ukraine must factor in differing interpretations of NATO. Let’s not bury our heads in the sand over these complexities.

Over many years, I have seen with my own eyes the oscillation in Ukraine’s political identity, and the consequent deterioration of relations with Russia. I have stepped far outside the university classroom and put myself in harm’s way to see what is happening in Ukraine’s remote regions.

My book may not be to everyone’s taste, but at least get the facts right about my professional background, my credentials for writing it, the time it has taken me to accumulate my insights, and the multilayered nature of my argument. •

The post Ashes of empires appeared first on Inside Story.

Samir Puri’s Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine is one of the first kind. “Rapidity was the key to writing this book,” he admits — and it shows. Puri’s opinions, strongly expressed throughout, oscillate between sincere shock at the invasion, empathy with Ukraine and the Ukrainians, and dismissal of Ukraine and Ukrainians as khokhols (a slur he claims is harmless slang) who might be creating “legends” about their heroic self-defence but are ultimately mere “pawns” in “the unforgiving world of geopolitics.”

Orthodox international relations theory, also misleadingly known as “realism,” sees the world as an anarchic place where the strong rule and the weak obey. Russia, a former empire, is strong; Ukraine, a former colony, is weak. The rest follows. That Russia might indeed be in the process of learning that Ukraine is stronger than expected, that Putin might be schooled by “the unforgiving world of geopolitics,” doesn’t compute.

You want to rebuild an empire? A perfectly normal aspiration, according to the theory. Just make sure that you have a functioning military and adequate economic resources before you try to take over neighbouring countries. Such preparation would probably show “realism.” Russia’s current behaviour certainly does not.

Why did Putin go to war? Puri doesn’t really know. An international relations scholar, he suspects that it has to do with another great power — NATO, the European Union, the United States or a coalition of all three — having encroached on Russia’s turf. The overall argument of the book: It’s NATO, stupid!

The problem is that this theory doesn’t fit the observable facts. It is true that neither NATO nor the European Union has covered itself in glory in interacting with post-Soviet Russia. Russia no longer mattered, they seemed to believe, and thus could be ignored, or maybe even bossed around. Among many Europeans, that arrogance was coupled with the utopian notion that the post-1991 world was all about “soft power.” Tanks were no longer needed. Dependency on one source of oil and gas was fine. We’re all civilised, after all. War is a thing of the past.

Writing earlier this year, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a historian of Russia, was scathing. “Western diplomacy,” he wrote, was “by turns arrogant and incompetent.” He was right: to dangle NATO membership in front of Ukraine without a consensus in the alliance, a plan of how to achieve it, or a mechanism to ensure Ukraine’s security while the details were worked through, was “an unserious position.” Not to think about how to manage the Russian reaction was, likewise, negligent.

But Braithwaite also argued that “Putin’s military posturing around Ukraine is several degrees more irresponsible,” a qualification Puri ignores when he quotes the former ambassador.

Did the issue of Ukraine’s putative NATO membership drive Putin to war? Puri tries hard to squeeze recalcitrant facts into this mould. The Russian government has indeed repeatedly expressed its irritation and resentment at NATO enlargement. But NATO didn’t expand into Ukraine in 2021–22. Quite the opposite. Russia’s expressions of discontent convinced enough members — Germany chief among them — to oppose a NATO accession plan nearly a decade and a half before the current escalation. Ukraine was snubbed by NATO in 2008 only to be told repeatedly that the door was open “in principle.”

Anybody who had even the slightest knowledge of NATO’s internal affairs knew that these assurances were gestures towards the never-never. NATO’s approach was, indeed, “unserious.” In 2021–22, as Puri admits in passing, there were “no immediate signs of Ukraine’s admission into the alliance that Russia could say it was retaliating against.” That should have been the end of this theory. But no: Puri spends another seven pages trying to make the case that Putin’s “paranoia” was perfectly understandable.

Historians are used to reading international relations scholarship with sceptical tolerance. This discipline doesn’t rest on detailed knowledge of any one time, place or culture; instead, it tries to construct universalising models to be applied to any case.

But Puri doesn’t just simplify. He also makes mistakes, at time egregious ones. Russia’s provisional government of 1917, in place between the abdication of the Tsar in February and the Bolshevik coup in October, was not, as he claims, anti-imperial. The people in charge might have been liberals but they were also supporters of the empire. Looking askance at Ukraine’s parallel revolution and requests for autonomy, they continued to prosecute a war with imperial aims. That was indeed a major cause of the provisional government’s fall.

The (second) Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Bolsheviks were forced to sign in 1918, did not, as Puri believes, afford “Ukraine’s Nationalists a rare opportunity to make a break for freedom.” The Ukrainian People’s Republic’s declaration of independence actually preceded the treaty and Ukraine signed its own treaty with the Germans, the First Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, before the Russian Bolsheviks.

Nor did the “independent Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania” spring from Lenin’s head in 1918 or 1919, as Puri implies. They were independent anti-Bolshevik states until Stalin brought them back into the empire in 1940, and only then did they become Soviet republics. Western Ukraine was invaded by the Red Army on 17 September 1939 and annexed in November of that year rather than “incorporated into the USSR only after 1945,” as Puri believes.

There was indeed a referendum in Ukraine on 17 March 1991, but 71 per cent voted not “for independence,” as Puri writes, but for a reformed union of Soviet republics. It was only on 1 December of that year that a majority voted for independence, but in that case the figure was 92 per cent.

Kazakhs, meanwhile, might more than quibble with the claim that “Ukraine’s suffering was worse than in any other part of the Soviet Union” during the great famine. A larger share of Kazakhs died than of Ukrainians, although in absolute numbers Ukraine — a much larger nation — lost more.

Puri’s account, in other words, is deficient on both empirical and analytical levels. Unless readers are looking for quick soundbites, his book is best left on the shelf.

Journalist Anna Arutunyan’s Hybrid Warriors falls into the second category. Based on her years of reporting since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, it combines a deeply textured knowledge of ground-level politics with a well-theorised sense of how Putin’s regime works.

Arutunyan’s Putin is no master strategist. Nor is he an all-powerful dictator. He’s indecisive and relatively weak, driven along by his more dynamic (and often more radical) underlings. He rules “by signal” rather than by command, issuing “vague directives that could, depending on the recipient, be interpreted as commands or mere opinions.” More often than not, political entrepreneurs, both in Russia and abroad, have “projected onto the Russian president’s cryptic words everything they wanted to hear.” In reality, Russia’s strategy has been “confused, convoluted, unformed.”

The Crimean annexation was the result of improvisation. Contingency plans for the operation had been on the shelf for a while, but when they were activated the exact goal of the operation wasn’t completely clear. What transpired was the interaction of a planned and well-executed special forces operation (the famous “little green men,” unmarked, polite, silent and well equipped), local militias enraged by the revolution in Kyiv, which they saw as a coup, and local politicians.

The staged referendum, in which the vast majority of Crimean residents voted to join Russia, lacked validity in international law. But annexation nevertheless had a significant degree of popular support, with a 1996 Gallup poll showing 59 per cent support among Russians living in Crimea and 41 per cent among Crimean Ukrainians.

In a way, the Russian government caved in to pressures from below, breaking the pledge to respect Ukraine’s borders that it had made in both the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership with Kyiv. But while Moscow was riding a popular wave and interacting with local pro-Russian forces, it was clearly Putin’s regime that took the initiative in Crimea.

Donbas was different. Here, local initiative was key. Yes, a gang of fifty-two military veterans and second world war re-enactors trudged across the border in April 2014 and took the regional city of Slovyansk, which they would hold until the Ukrainian army pushed them out in July. True, they were led by a retired agent with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, Igor Girkin (known as “Strelkov,” or shooter), but Girkin was a freelancer at that stage.

Elsewhere, it was angry locals — a militant minority, but still locals — who were inspired by the Crimean example to take matters into their own hands. “By early May 2014,” writes Arutunyan, “miners, truck drivers, an assortment of local pensioners and shady businessmen, and an army of local and Russian adventure-seekers had set up their own pretend governments with flags, parliaments, defence ministries, militias, declarations of independence and even proto-constitutions with formal elections scheduled for later in the month.”

While their grievances were local and of long standing, these groups didn’t represent the local population. Independent opinion polls showed only 30 per cent support for secession. Also unlike Crimea, they were not guided by the Kremlin. As Arutunyan puts it, they “lacked the main thing… that they had fought for: Russia’s formal recognition and protection.”

Essentially, a militant minority — scared by the revolution that had driven president Viktor Yanukovych from office, saturated by Russian state television propaganda about “fascism” in Kyiv, and inspired by the takeover of Crimea — staged a coup and then appealed to Moscow to bail them out. But the weak dictator in the Kremlin refused. By the end of April 2014, the Kremlin had decided not to send troops to the Ukrainian mainland.

We don’t know why this decision was made, but it’s worth remembering that the European Union had suspended preparations for a G8 summit in Sochi on 3 March 2014, cancelled bilateral talks with Russia on 6 March, and begun imposing sanctions against Russian officials and companies on 17 March, 20 March and 15 April. Europe also threatened “broader economic and trade sanctions” should Russia further escalate its aggression against Ukraine.

These EU measures were synchronised with a set of executive orders by US president Barack Obama on 6, 17 and 20 March, which added sanctions against individuals in Russia’s elite. The timing suggests that the Kremlin retreated from exposed positions because it found the likely cost of escalation prohibitive.

Sanctions were indeed one of three reasons Putin changed his mind, according to Arutunyan. He also recognised that, in contrast to Crimea, Russia would have to contend with military action by Kyiv, which had announced its “anti-terrorist operation” on 15 April. And he understood that, wishful thinking aside, local support for the insurgents in Donbas was nowhere near as widespread as in Crimea.

But the tough EU and US response had a contradictory result:

Putin felt he was in a bind. Crimea had demonstrated that the Kremlin and its army was perfectly capable of decisive action — of securing an entire peninsula and enabling a parliament to vote to join Russia — swiftly and secretly, with the help of the local population. However, in the Donbas the risks were higher, the opposition greater and the support weaker. If he launched a full-blown military intervention, he would trigger a tougher Western response and quite possibly find himself trying to prop up a regime with no real constituency. Yet if he backed away entirely, he would show weakness to the Americans and to his own nationalists. He could neither advance nor abandon the Donbas project.

Thus, Russia continued to be involved in Donbas. By July 2014 the FSB and military intelligence were competing to command the Donbas insurgents in an attempt “to demonstrate their own value to the Kremlin.”

The FSB in particular became deeply embroiled in the Donbas mess. Its assessment that the revolution against Yanukovych was a CIA-inspired plot rather than a popular uprising had contributed to the decision to annex Crimea. Now it had “300 men in Donbas,” as one FSB major told Arutunyan, and was awaiting orders from Moscow. “Putin — give us orders!” they demanded. “We need just one day and Ukraine will be ours.”

The weak dictator was being bum-steered by his most devoted underlings. But he was resisting their push without being in a position to call back the FSB, which he had once led and which was full of his old comrades from KGB times. “His very power as president rested on their loyalty to him — and thus on his loyalty to them,” writes Arutunyan.

The support for the Donbas adventure went far beyond the FSB. To put a stop to it would have required a veritable purge of the power apparatus. Thus, the strange limbo in which the situation remained. Neither willing to escalate nor able to reverse, the Kremlin began imposing control over the separatist movement and its self-proclaimed “governments.”

Eventually, however, Putin did send troops. He had been hitching his political wagon increasingly to the ultra-nationalist right since 2012, when massive demonstrations against his return to the presidency had alienated him decisively from the political middle (to say nothing of the left). His new right-wing constituency supported the political freelancers in Donbas, so when Kyiv launched a successful operation to take Donbas back from the putschists, his new allies convinced him that it was in Russia’s interest to resist.

Russian troops, regular ones this time, were fighting in Ukraine by August 2014. This “covert Russian invasion of mainland Ukraine” halted the Ukrainian army’s attempt to re-establish control of Ukrainian territory. It was regular Russian troops that turned the Donbas insurgency into a frozen conflict; it was regular Russian troops that won the battle of Debaltseve in February 2015. Then the frontlines froze.

Once again, according to Arutunyan, no grand Russian strategy existed. Events were driven not by geopolitics but by the balance of power within the Russian dictatorship.

The right wing of politics, on which Putin’s regime increasingly relied, could only be contained if Ukraine could be stopped from taking back Donbas. This dynamic became self-reinforcing: the support of the nationalists, imperialists, monarchists and fascists at home required support for the Donbas rebels; the continuing existence and, as they saw it, martyrdom of the Donbas proxies propelled the domestic far right further into the mainstream. “For Putin,” writes Arutunyan, “it was paramount that these people continued viewing the West as their true enemy, and not the Kremlin itself.”

How did we get from this impasse to 24/2? Arutunyan doesn’t really know. Her account becomes much less richly textured after 2015, and in particular after 2019. Why negotiations with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president since 2019, were abandoned remains unclear. Why the decision was made to allow all-out war remains mysterious. The logic of her argument would point to some dynamic from below, some initiative by political entrepreneurs. But there is no evidence to that effect. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that the initiative came from Putin, and that it shocked even those closest to him.

Arutunyan’s explanation thus focuses on the Russian president, and his resentments and likely thought processes. The invasion, she writes, was “about one man, and his vendetta.” Earlier in the book she had dismissed such mind-reading, but what is the alternative given Putin’s centrality in Russia’s political system?

This centrality seems to have increased since 2014. The destruction of civil society, which hampered the left, might also have hampered the right. The disaster of the Donbas war, caused by freelancers, might well have made Putin more reluctant to take advice from the same or similar people. Coronavirus isolation in 2020–21 might have done the rest: Putin spent the pandemic reading history books, stewing in his resentments (about NATO expansion, about not being taken seriously), and pondering his legacy (he turned seventy this year).

Then there was Russia’s recent success in Syria, which suggested its army was top-notch. The FSB presented the Ukrainian army’s intensified training and improved equipment as a Western conspiracy to weaken and maybe destroy Russia. Yet the West also seemed weak. Maybe now was the time to solve this problem once and for all? Whatever the reasons, in the end it was Putin who pulled the trigger on 24/2.

What are the implications of Arutunyan’s analysis for policymakers confronting an aggressive Russia? She is unsure herself. “[I] gave up my futile attempts to come up with some sort of possible solution to this mess,” she writes in frustration. And she’s right: if the invasion was the result “of a Kremlin fumbling in the dark, staggering to respond to a multitude of real and perceived threats and opportunities, and proving itself largely incapable of distinguishing one from the other,” and if 24/2 was the result of an increasingly isolated and erratic dictator steaming in his own resentments and historical analogies, then rational outside action is difficult.

Arutunyan’s description of the complexity of the political environment in which Putin functions, moreover, serves to remind outsiders of how little influence their actions have on the Kremlin. This might chasten both the critics of NATO, who overestimate how much Putin was swayed by the perceived aggression of “the West,” and the supporters of sanctions against Russia, which Arutunyan’s account makes clear were just one factor, and mostly marginal, in Putin’s calculus.

What is left? For the time being, all we can do is try to support Ukraine as best as we can to give it a chance to survive and win this war. And when Ukraine is ready to negotiate with Russia, we should support this process with as much humility as we can. A lot of bitterness exists on both sides of the frontlines now, and it won’t go away anytime soon. If we take into account not just the war itself but also the rebuilding effort, we are talking about a long haul indeed.

Stamina will thus be required at a time when inflation and the climate crisis also call for sustained government attention.

Russia, meanwhile, won’t be defeated in the way Germany or Iraq were. Putin’s troops might eventually be pushed out of much or all of Ukraine’s territory, but nobody in their right mind will want to go further and march on Moscow. The regime might thus survive, more resentful than ever. Or it might be replaced by another, probably no less resentful or autocratic. In any case, Russia could require containment for some time to come. Here, too, stamina will be necessary — and a significant amount of humility about what can be achieved.

All things come to an end eventually. And maybe Arutunyan is right when she says that Russia’s younger generation will in time provide more rational leadership for this large, rich and beautiful country. The rising generation is “muzzled” but “watching, in horror” while “learning from the mistakes of this dying regime,” she writes. A “new Russia, with its own, new national identity, will eventually emerge.” Let’s hope she is right. •

Samir Puri responds to Mark Edele’s review

Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires
By Samir Puri | Biteback | $39.99 | 304 pages

Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine
By Anna Arutunyan | Hurst & Company | $44.99 | 352 pages

The post “It’s NATO, stupid!” appeared first on Inside Story.

As is often noted, this small Asian country — a country that most Australian conscripts had never heard of before they were drafted — was the target of three times the tonnage of bombs dropped during the second world war. The exact figure varies, though not significantly, and the bombing was just a part of it. The land was heavily drenched and its people poisoned by the chemical defoliant Agent Orange.

Note, too, the word “conscript.” After Vietnam there were no more conscripts, and both the books, each in its way, tell us why. Though they come to the subject from different angles, reading them together is like entering a long-overdue discussion about an ugly yet largely forgotten war, the painful reverberations of which extend to this day.

Bronwyn Rennex is the daughter of a man she scarcely knew, a man who was sent to Vietnam in 1965 when she was only a year old. Fifteen when he died in 1980, she noted in her schoolgirl diary: “Everyones really upset. I was crying all night. He died of a heart attack about 1/4 past 12 last night.” Now a woman in her fifties, an artist, curator, former part-owner of a Sydney gallery, she documents her search for the cause of his death at fifty-two and her inability to reach him when he was alive.

Life with Birds: A Suburban Lyric is also a record, as its subtitle suggests, of a kind of suburban life that has passed from contemporary reckoning. There’s the modest house set on a reasonable-sized block on the city fringes. There’s the male breadwinner and the mother who looks after the house and three daughters.

But there’s also an embroidered green silk coat that Bronwyn, the youngest, and her two older sisters think is a kimono, though the father had sent it from Vietnam. “Coming from the suburb of North Ryde — a land of wood panelling, beige carpets and wall units filled with clown statues and crystal trinkets — the coat didn’t just seem from another place, it was from another planet.”

By the time her father returned, Bronwyn was four, old enough to pretend to be a dog, “growling and tearing at the bottom of his trousers with my teeth, while he tried to hug Mum.” She didn’t think much of this stranger, and a stranger he largely remained.

John Rennex’s early death was not just a shock but also placed a great strain on his widow. At one level, though, she must also have been relieved. In the letter Elsie Rennex wrote to the veteran affairs department in pursuit of a war widow’s pension, she claims that her husband had once been “a loving outgoing type of person” but after his service “the close communicative relationship we enjoyed before his departure had changed considerably, he became quite withdrawn, he refused absolutely to speak of his term in Vietnam, and our everyday problems were left for me to resolve.”

He couldn’t sleep, took to smoking heavily and developed a persistent cough. Despite a doctor’s warning, he kept smoking. He had pains in his arms and was treated for rheumatism instead of the heart condition ticking away like a bomb. Elsie leaves it to her last paragraph to explain the reason for her request for help: “I still have two daughters dependent on me.”

She never got her pension. The repatriation board found no direct connection between John Rennex’s service and his death. He was overweight and smoked too much: end of story. Her pursuit of a pension is a biting illustration of the Kafkaesque maze she had to contend with, as her daughters did later.

Years down the track, after finally locating the relevant section of the veteran affairs department, Bronwyn requested a photocopy of her mother’s letter, eventually receiving one with the bottom chopped off. Asking about the missing lines, she was informed by a department office that the original was foolscap and they only had an A4 printer. She then asked why they couldn’t print the letter out on two pages. The second page would only have two lines on it, came the reply. Was she exasperated? Was she angry? Of course she was. My head spun just reading about it.

Yet Life with Birds is a beautiful poem of a book. I’ve given you the bones but little of its spirit, which is lyrical and quirky, if laced with piercing irony. Accompanying the text we have the author’s photographs, mostly underexposed and blurred, mimetic of Rennex’s defective memory of her early years and her long, slow awakening to her father’s story.

Like a Greek chorus, they offer a running commentary on the action. With few exceptions, only the reproduced documents are sharp enough to determine: the girlish diary pages, some army report sheets, a curious photo of a delayed christening with the tops of the heads missing (perhaps reiterating the missing lines in the departmental photocopy?).

So why the birds — creatures already so pregnant with symbolic import that they resist simplistic interpretation here? Birds crop up in songs and poems quoted, and they are resonant in the author’s own flying back and forth overseas. Home again after her mother’s death, she finds a myna bird trapped in the garage while hunting for her things stored there. The dehydrated bird is given water and released, but takes its time remembering how to fly. “Do birds have knees?” is the kind of question Rennex is prone to ask.

Life with Birds is both an idiosyncratic and a resolutely personal book. Its focus is on one family but the circle of its light spreads further.

As we 1970s feminists repeatedly insisted, the personal is political. These three explosive words became the movement’s central tenet as well as its most effective slogan. Nothing illustrates this more than Biff Ward’s The Third Chopstick, a book of great breadth and depth that answers many of Rennex’s questions yet is every bit as personal.

Here I must mention that Biff is a friend of mine, and that we met through Canberra Women’s Liberation. We both appear in Brazen Hussies, the award-winning documentary of the 1970s women’s movement released in 2020 and later screened on ABC TV.

All this is to say that we go well back, and one of the many things that struck me when reading Biff’s book alongside Life with Birds is that both of us are old enough now to be Bronwyn Rennex’s mother. Indeed we both have daughters around her age, neither of whom were left in the dark about Vietnam.

Though they had little choice in the matter, our girls were exposed to the radical movements of the day, for the war John Rennex went to was the one we vehemently protested. Our vocal, passionate opposition was the crucible in which grievances that had simmered through the fifties boiled to bursting point in the sixties.

The Third Chopstick’s first chapter vividly describes such a protest. It’s 1965. The woman who would come to write this book is walking past the Commonwealth Offices in Sydney’s Martin Place handing out leaflets and crying, “Get Out of Vietnam.” To begin with, only a gaggle of protesters had met there every Friday, but their numbers have steadily grown, and on this particular Friday, a group of 200 starts marching along Pitt Street until they meet a police blockade on the King Street intersection.

Prevented from going further, dozens of them sit down on the road, blocking the traffic. The police try to move them; the protesters resist. It is a rough confrontation; some are injured. Pushed against a jewellery store window, they have entered a dangerous new phase.

“I hadn’t seen this before,” Ward writes. “Australia had not seen this. My eyes raced from sitters to police to the onlookers collecting on the pavements. The tone of the surround sound had changed, the car horns now cut through with screams and voices barking on police walkie-talkies.” The next morning the papers were filled with reports of the incident. Forty-seven protesters had been arrested. A doctor, who’d gone to the jail to bail out his son, was arrested as well.

What I’ve left out in this summary is the extraordinary immediacy of Ward’s depiction, so skilfully sustained. For The Third Chopstick is a perfect blend of memoir, history and biography, beautifully and sensitively written. In its short introductory chapter we have the beginning, the veil of smug suburban complacency irreparably torn. What followed were the draft resisters, an easing of censorship, women’s liberation, the freedom rides and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the Whitlam government and its dismissal.

But the question to ask is why, after so many years have passed and events have erased the intensity of that day, Ward’s visceral connection with Vietnam remains. She has had a busy life teaching, running a practice for facilitating dialogue, attending other demonstrations and protests, and publishing poetry and two other books of non-fiction. But as soon as she could she visited Vietnam, and it wasn’t long before she was conducting tours through the country herself.

Occasionally I was tempted to sign up for one of those tours but circumstance and other priorities stopped me. I knew she was working on a book about Vietnam and was interviewing veterans for it, but I watched, intrigued, from the sidelines, never understanding the importance of what she was attempting.

In our time of niche politics, deepening polarisation and plummeting trust in governments, it’s easy to forget that we have been here before. We may find comfort in imagining that things were different back then, but The Third Chopstick reminds us that we’ve been divided, and angrily so, before.

It also shows us what it takes to walk across that divide, to establish genuine connections with people whose experiences and views on life are radically different from your own. You need imagination, compassion, commitment and, admittedly, the special skills Ward acquired in years of mediation work. As such, the book is as much about that process as it is about the veterans she meets, and her reactions to them and theirs to her.

Bit by bit, she stepped forward. She approached a speaker at a conference of former protesters, veterans and Vietnamese Australians. He introduced her to another man and so her involvement grew. She learned about Granville, where a federation of Vietnam veterans had its headquarters in a rundown community centre of the kind that resembled women’s refuges she had worked in.

Gradually this one-time Vietnam protester turned radical feminist turned professional mediator acquired the trust of many men who ended up allowing her to record their stories, and in the majority of cases welcomed the opportunity. Even now, I’ll be damned if I know how she did it. All I do know is that The Third Chopstick is a wonderful achievement, a book unlike any other, though I can understand why it took so long to bring to fruition. The stories the men told are painful. Not all of the connections went smoothly; one of the most important was arguably the most difficult.

Wars are hell for humans, whether they are the bombed civilians, those who are conscripted to fight or choose to enlist, or the families left behind to suffer long-lasting consequences. To acknowledge this in the face of war’s glorification and its industrial-scale infrastructure is essential. Australian governments have drafted no conscripts since Vietnam, conscription having proved too politically risky, yet they have eagerly signed up for so-called “coalitions of the willing,” and there’s a serious risk we’re heading for war on a scale much larger than those we’ve participated in so far, one with the potential for striking, literally, home.

Ironically, Ward’s deep involvement with Vietnam, the country itself and its people, has made her question whether she’s a pacifist after all. What were the odds that a small Asian country would bring the might of America and its allies to their knees? In their place, or a similar one, wouldn’t she have fought the invaders as the Vietnamese did?

That may be so for any of us. But I see it another way. These two books have convinced me, if I needed any convincing, that nothing is more important, or conducive to peace, than suspending judgements in our search for understanding. •

Life with Birds: A Suburban Lyric
By Bronwyn Rennex | Upswell | $29.99 | 204 pages

The Third Chopstick: Tracks through the Vietnam War
By Biff Ward | IndieMosh | $42.95 | 315 pages

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Jack would recall that the mothers of service personnel were issued with little brooch badges by the government: “On the badge was a star to show you had a son or daughter in the war. My mother wore one with three stars. She was very proud.”

Jack and Bob trained together with the 8th Division Signals, sailed together to Malaya, and fought and were captured together when Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942. Later that year, they were shipped to Nagasaki with “C Force,” the first of more than 3800 Australians sent to work as slave labourers on the Japanese mainland.

The Chapmans were initially deployed at the Kawasaki Shipyard in Kobe, before much of the city including the shipyard was destroyed in the US air force’s firebombing raids in 1944. They were then transferred to the infamous Yoshikuma coalmine in Fukuoka and forced to work in deadly tunnels miles underground.

The brothers would both credit each other’s support as the main reason they survived three years in captivity and made it home to Australia in 1945. Bob had a particularly vivid memory of one day at the shipyard in 1943: “Our job was fitting steel sheets to the side of the boat frame using big bolts and big spanners. If you stripped a bolt, it was easy to lose your balance… One time I was working high up on the side of the boat and Jack slipped. I reckon he was on his way down and would have gone if I hadn’t grabbed him and held him. If I hadn’t been there that day, he would never have made it.”

Bob Chapman died on 18 October, five years after Jack, at a nursing home in southern Queensland. He was 101. His death claimed the last of the signallers who had lived through the trials of Kobe and Fukuoka. And now the 8th Division Signals Association, which once had hundreds of active members, has just two veterans left.

When Alec Campbell, the last of the Anzacs who fought at Gallipoli, died in May 2002, it was a moment of national sadness and reflection. Campbell, who lied about his age to enlist at sixteen, had said of himself, “I don’t feel special. I am an ordinary man.” But prime minister John Howard attended his funeral, eulogised him and spoke of “the respect we feel and the debt we owe to this grand old man and those he came to represent.” Howard rightly observed that the child soldier who lived to be the oldest of his era had “shouldered the weight of history imposed upon him.”

Now, just two decades after the last Anzac departed, Australia is rapidly approaching the moment when the last veterans of the second world war will be gone.

Close to a million Australians served in that conflict. Now the youngest of those who enlisted before the war finally ended must be at least ninety-five years old. How many are still alive remains a mystery, even to those charged with their care and support.

Fewer than 3700 individuals who served during that war currently hold Department of Veterans’ Affairs healthcare cards — gold for those who went overseas and white for those who served at home. The number has plunged from about 23,000 in 2017 and 13,300 in 2019. The department estimates hundreds more surviving veterans may not have enlisted for the health support, although it is hard to imagine that many would have failed to apply for the substantial assistance.

Beyond the health card numbers, Veterans’ Affairs appears to be hopelessly uninformed about the men and women whose support in their final years should be its highest priority. It can’t give a breakdown of how many surviving veterans served in the army, navy and air force. And it refuses not only to identify the youngest and oldest surviving veterans but even to indicate their age, for “privacy” reasons.

The RSL also struggles with its roll call of those who ought to be the most venerated of their ranks. The NSW branch lists 694 surviving second world war vets among its members but says the statistics from its sub-branches are unreliable. The RSL in the ACT has twenty-one. RSL Tasmania thinks it has nineteen but is not sure. RSL Queensland counts 609 but says it may be unaware of a number of listed life subscribers who are no longer alive. Repeated requests drew a blank from other state branches.

The rapid thinning of the ranks of second world war veterans is being felt keenly across the hundreds of unit associations formed after the war, many of which have been forced to wind up over the past few years. Among those that have gone is the 467–463 RAAF Squadrons Association, which represented veterans of the two Australian Lancaster bomber squadrons that suffered among the highest casualty rates of the war in Europe and whose members took part in some of the most famous raids, including the sinking of the German battleship Tirpitz in late 1944.

Along with the Kokoda Track campaign in New Guinea, the siege of Tobruk in 1941 remains one of the most celebrated Australian achievements of the second world war after the Allies held off the German and Italian armies for 241 days in the Libyan port. When the Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-Haw derided them as “rats in a trap,” the 14,000 Australians who fought at Tobruk embraced the label as a badge of honour.

The Rats of Tobruk Association soon had a membership of about 3500 after its formation in 1945, including “water rats” — the Royal Australian Navy personnel whose ships gamely helped to keep Tobruk supplied during the siege. Now there are just four Rats still clinging to the sinking ship of our ranks of veterans — three in Victoria and one in New South Wales. All of them are centenarians, the oldest 106. Nine of their comrades died during the past year.

But while the numbers of veterans are rapidly dwindling, the Rats of Tobruk Association still has a national membership of about 600 consisting mainly of the family and friends of departed veterans. The association’s Victorian secretary, Lachlan Gaylard, says there is still a strong desire among the descendants of veterans and those who knew them to keep alive the memory of their deeds. “We also see signs that there is a hunger in the wider community, especially amonsg younger Australians, to learn more about this history,” Gaylard says. “It is a part of our history that schools don’t do enough to celebrate.”

Perhaps the most tangible legacy we have of those who have gone and those who remain is the priceless archive of service records and enlistment photographs of those Australians who served in the second world war. More than seventy-seven years after the war ended, though, hundreds of thousands of those records are still locked away in crumbling paper folders in a Canberra warehouse largely inaccessible to the general public.

While the digitising of all first world war personnel files was completed in 2010 — enabling them to be readily and freely viewed online — the task of digitising the files from the second world war has been excruciatingly slow.

The National Archives of Australia holds 1,169,199 personnel files documenting the service of Australian men and women in the army, air force and navy during the second world war. So far, less than two-thirds have been digitised. Those who wish to see any of the undigitised files must book a private viewing at the NAA’s Canberra offices or pay a $36 fee to have them copied — and even then wait up to ninety business days to see the results uploaded onto the NAA website. More than 14,460 people have so far paid rather than wait.

Two years ago, the NAA announced the signing of contracts worth $4.4 million for the bulk digitisation of remaining service files. The then NAA director-general, David Fricker, declared, “The World War II service records are among the most popular in our vast collection and this project will ensure Australians can access almost one million of those records digitally by 2023.”

Two years on, just half of the remaining records have been copied, and the NAA says it does not have enough funding to complete the job. It says the $10 million allocated by the federal government in 2019 for the work is not enough to cover the cost of digitising photos of personnel in the service files or to copy more than 100,000 outstanding files. “It’s a shame, it’s a real shame that this may not be done before the last of these veterans has died,” says Lachlan Gaylard.

While the NAA appeals for private donations to help meet the cost shortfall, $500 million is being lavished on the Disneyfication of the Australian War Memorial (after the scandalously wasteful decision to bulldoze the fabulous Anzac Hall — home of Lancaster bomber “G” for George — to make way for the structure).

Engraved in stone at the entrance to the War Memorial is a quotation from its founding father, the war correspondent and official historian Charles Bean: “Here is their spirit, in the heart of the land they loved; and here we guard the record which they themselves made.”

What Bean would make of the architectural extravaganza transforming the imposing yet modest shrine he helped build is anyone’s guess. But there can be little doubt what the man who was also foundation chairman of the 1940s war archives committee that would become the National Archives of Australia would think of the failure to complete the proper preservation of records of the men and women who fought in the second world war. •

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But if its perspective is accepted as the left’s view, it will be a disaster for progressive democrats and the idea of socialism. The call is profoundly misconceived, with respect to both Ukraine and Taiwan, especially Ukraine, and also in the general political analysis it offers.

I say this with regret. One of the main drafters is American law professor Richard Falk, a comrade from the struggle against the US war in Vietnam. His outstanding work helped lay the basis for the development of modern international law and human rights. I’ve worked with and admire two of the lead signatories.* So far there are thirty-eight of them, including Jeremy Corbyn.

“All Who Care” says wise things, including making a call for “a massive global awakening of human wisdom and energy.” The writers explain: “Important as governments and international institutions are, the initiative for a coherent response to the challenges we face lies largely with the people, with civil society.”

But it is primarily an intervention in conflicts of the moment, and it is in this respect that it needs to be judged.

On Ukraine, a call for peace that sets out to be principled should state that any threat to use nuclear weapons is an outrage. It does not. It must state that invading other countries is wrong. It does not. It was wrong for the United States in Iraq, it is wrong for Israel in Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza, and it must now be reversed in Ukraine.

“All Who Care” demands that Ukraine be “neutral.” If its neutrality were guaranteed by military commitments from outside to safeguard the country’s independence in a way that satisfied the government in Kyiv and did not deprive it of weapons for self-defence, then this would be reasonable. Given the risk of a world war, those outside Ukraine have a right to say that it cannot become a base that might be used to threaten Russia, or any other neighbouring country.

But in any such call, tone and attitude are of vital importance: it has to be said respectfully as a request to the Ukrainian people. It is arrogant, and even a touch imperial, to demand the country’s neutrality without also making clear that this does not take away Ukraine’s democratic right to decide what economic and social trajectory it aspires to. Neutrality should not prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union if it so chooses (something even Putin’s Russia seems to have accepted). This, too, needs to be said.

The approach to Ukraine taken by “All Who Care” demands the “phased withdrawal of Russian military forces” and “an end to the delivery of lethal military aid to Ukraine.” Why should the withdrawal be “phased” but not the end of military aid?

The document suggests that the underlying cause of the conflict is “the cynical use of the Ukraine war by great powers intent on pursuing their geopolitical ambitions.” But it was the uncynical resistance of Ukrainians themselves, much to the surprise of both Washington and the Kremlin, that shaped the war. “All Who Care” disregards Ukrainian agency and the commitment of a huge majority of Ukrainians to their country’s integrity and independence. Instead, it frames Ukraine as being manipulated by the United States. This echoes Vladimir Putin’s perspective.

What is the thinking that leads the authors and signatories to their conclusion? They sum it up in four short paragraphs which need to be quoted in full:

More troubling still is the toxic relationship between the United States on the one hand and China and Russia on the other. Here lies the key to both conflicts.

What we are seeing is the culmination of decades of gross mismanagement of global security. The United States has been unwilling to accept, let alone adapt to, the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. It remains unwilling to break with outdated notions of global dominance — a legacy of the Cold War and the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A global power shift is taking place. The West-centric world, in which first Europe and then the United States held sway, is giving way to a multi-centric, multi-civilisational world in which other centres of power and influence are demanding to be heard.

Failure to accept this new reality spells immense danger. A new Cold War is now in full swing, which can at any moment mutate into a hot war. In the words of UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

But it is the authors and signatories who are unwilling to face up to new realities of the nature of the regimes now challenging the United States, the autonomy of the demands for democracy, especially those led by women, and the way these are responses to the fact of America’s irreversibly diminished role, which Washington is certainly aware of.

Historically, they are right: we are caught in the legacy of decades of gross behaviour by the US governing elite. But its ambition failed more than a decade ago. This in turn gave birth to monsters even worse than US hegemony. The problem the world faces is not that the United States has failed to relinquish “outdated notions of global dominance,” it is the struggle over how and by whom its dominance will be replaced.

The United States is not innocent nor a mere bystander in this process. Under Joe Biden it is striving to re-establish global “leadership.” But it is doing it from a position of weakness. A recent example of how emaciated US power has become is the behaviour of what historically was its client state, Saudi Arabia. Despite being courted by a humiliating personal visit from the US president, who wanted their help against high energy prices, the Saudis have cut back production to ensure the opposite.

This is a direct help to Putin as it keeps the price of oil high, as well as being an intervention in the American midterm elections designed to aid Donald Trump and his family by making Biden unpopular.

How did we get to a situation where Washington is so weakened?

A NEW WORLD: MULTI-CENTRED AND MORE UNEQUAL

In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, president George H.W. Bush celebrated US “primacy” and boasted that no other country need “dread” its influence. In fact, the United States exercised its post–cold war supremacy with catastrophic stupidity and greed. Across the Global South, the wealth extraction of colonialism was replaced with the wealth extraction of the “Washington consensus.”

In the West itself, the working and middle classes saw their incomes flatline as the financial system transferred riches upwards, generating unparalleled inequality. Russia, in particular, was treated to the most brutal “shock therapy” and its oligarchs were encouraged to loot the country, with the West providing safe havens for their theft. Ordinary Russians suffered a deep, humiliating loss of income and livelihood.

The rise and nature of Putin are rooted in the rage this engendered. Only China had the sense and political means to ensure its economy was governed rather than handed over to the “freedom” of Wall Street. It grew exponentially, while its low wages were instrumentalised to break and impoverish the working classes in developed countries.

The rise of China and its admission into the World Trade Organization in December 2001 birthed a genuine economic rival to the United States. Meanwhile, the US used the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to occupy Afghanistan and later to invade Iraq, to supervise the world’s second-largest oil deposits and almost encircle Iran. In this way, the world would understand that the United States’ unprecedented economic hegemony would be underwritten by an unparalleled military supremacy.

That was then. Unrivalled hubris led to catastrophic humiliation. Five years after the “shock and awe” of its assault on Baghdad, as it faced strategic defeat in the deserts and mountains on the other side of the globe, the great financial crash of 2008 terminated US primacy. It also put an end to the justification of its “neoliberal” economics — the claim that markets know best. Which in turn undermined the claim that voters are powerless, and the political fatalism essential to its ideological success.

With Washington’s global dominance shattered, the world became irreversibly “multi-centred,” as well as even more unequal. Because the left had been so systematically marginalised, it was the right that tolled the bell. Trump gained the leadership of the Republican Party by denouncing the Iraq invasion as “a big fat mistake” that cost the US$2 trillion and benefited Iran, and excoriated the globalists who had sold out American business and workers. He specifically abjured the ideology, as well as the costs, of US global leadership. He praised Russia, refused to condemn Lukashenko’s crushing of democracy in Belarus and admired China’s Xi Jinping for his strength.

In his last speech to the United Nations (unless he is re-elected, that is) he advocated a gangster’s division of the world. He told his fellow leaders: “I have rejected the failed approaches of the past. I am proudly putting America first, just as you should be putting your countries first. That’s OK. That’s what you should be doing.”

In this way, the US “accepted and adapted” to the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. Only it did so by proclaiming a pluralist modern fascism, built on corruption and surveillance, and expressed in the language of The Godfather. The fact that the Biden administration seeks to reverse this while also terminating US efforts at “regime change” in Afghanistan is welcome.

Today, the most pressing danger that humanity faces is the return to the White House of Trump or a Trump clone, who would rig the US system permanently. This is of world importance because once joined by the economic and military weight of a far-right America, the global network of authoritarian regimes would enjoy irreversible domination for at least a generation. Xi, Putin and Trump, together with India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, Iran’s Ali Khamenei and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, would ensure that more nations joined them in Trump’s mobster international.

REJECTING THE RIGHT: UKRAINE ON THE FRONT LINE

The front line of resistance to such an outcome is, tragically, Ukraine. It did not ask for this role, but it is not just fighting for itself. Our democratic future, too, is at stake in its battle. To defeat Trumpism outside the United States as well as inside, we have to defy and frustrate Putin.

Of course, politically, this is not a clash between socialism and capitalism, but between capitalist democracies with some regard to the rule of law, freedom of speech and an open politics on the one hand, and lawless, oppressive capitalism on the other.

In this situation, the only way forward for the left, after decades of defeat, is through unconditional support for more rule-based democracy based on universal principles. Without this there is no hope for the democracy of feminism, of racial justice, of a sustainable environment, of a fair economy, of human rights, of participation, pluralism, deliberation and national self-determination. Or, to borrow from the inspiring slogan of the protests in Iran, “Women, life and freedom.”

This also means that the people of Crimea have the right to decide for themselves whether to be part of Ukraine or Russia, and the people of Taiwan must be free to decide for themselves if they want to be ruled from Beijing.

Some fear a Western victory in Ukraine would take us back thirty years to 1992, with Francis Fukuyama celebrating the triumph of liberalism over history all over again. But the younger generations are not going to be easily persuaded into passivity or believing that “the market knows best.” The United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan and can be prevented from ever again engaging in “regime change.” China is now its economic equal and this cannot be undone. The process in Ukraine is not one of collapse, as in eastern Europe, but the result of decades of effort to slough off the corruptions of Stalinism. Nor are Ukrainians alone. From Iran to Chile the genie of popular agency has shattered the bottle of neoliberal fatalism.

The authors and signatories of “All Who Care” are right to sound the alarm in one important respect. These are very dangerous times that demand wisdom, not glorification or the triumphalism that feeds arms industries.

Our larger aim should be to welcome the emergence of democracy in Russia — maybe the last thing that the Western security establishment actually desires.

The alternative is rule by a mobsters international, which would ensure that the world will fry. It is as important as that. •

* Of the thirty-eight initial signatories, Victoria Brittain, a pioneering editor of coverage of the Global South, is someone I was proud openDemocracy published. I worked with Yanis Varoufakis when I helped a little with the draft of the original DiEM 25 call for democracy in Europe (which we discussed together with the much-missed Rosemary Bechler).

This article first appeared in openDemocracy.

The post A betrayal of Ukraine and the left appeared first on Inside Story.

Stumm, who flew over Hiroshima with a group of correspondents, later wrote of the experience: “The usual journalists’ banter in the aircraft stopped as we neared the city, we were all so silent. I will never forget what it was like. I had expected rubble and the devastation, but nothing prepared me for the piles of bodies, clearly recognisable, and the bitter desolation of a once prosperous community. This [silence] continued even when we touched down. No one said a word.”

But it was Stumm’s interview with Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge as he lay in his hospital bed suffering from radiation poisoning that gave her readers the first real insight into what had taken place.

“Father Kleinsorge described walking barefoot through devastated Hiroshima for hours after the bombing,” Stumm filed. He had been reading at his presbytery, just 500 metres from ground zero, when he saw a flash. “I don’t remember hearing any explosion or how I came from the second floor to the ground floor, but when I did, I found that our house was the only one left standing as far as I could see,” Stumm quoted Kleinsorge as saying:

It was black as night. Six people, four brother priests, one student and one servant collected together, and we dug out the wife and daughter of the caretaker from under the wreckage. Fires had broken out all over Hiroshima. They raged at us from every direction. We had small splinter-like wounds all over our bodies. In the afternoon a whirlwind sprang up which made the sky pitch black and drove many people into the river, where they drowned. People were wandering about with their whole faces one large blister from the searing effect of the bomb. Only forty out of six hundred schoolgirls at the Methodist college survived; three hundred little girls at the government school were killed instantly. Thousands of young soldiers in training at barracks were slaughtered. I walked for two hours and only saw two hundred people alive.

“Two days after the bombing,” Stumm reported, “Japanese military forces entered Hiroshima and collected 200,000 bodies for cremation. In addition to those killed outright, many more died through lack of medical attention as every hospital had been destroyed.”

Ten years earlier, with a bachelor of arts, a diploma of journalism and some casual sports reporting experience at the Brisbane Telegraph under her belt, Stumm had followed her boyfriend, Harley, to London, where he was training to become an airforce pilot and she aimed to be a reporter.

But it was “harder to get into Fleet Street than to rob the bank of England,” as she would later write in her autobiography, I Saw Too Much. So, in 1936, she “crashed” into the night editor’s office at the Daily Mirror and plied him with a judicious mix of charm, truths and falsehoods.

“He asked me, can you do interviews? Never having done such a thing in my life, I promptly replied, yes.” To her amazement, he gave her a month’s trial, which would end up taking her across the world to cover the story of the century:

I was as green as grass for I’d never known what real work was like until I joined the Daily Mirror. However, it didn’t take long to realise that my job was one that demanded the qualifications of a Scotland Yard sleuth, combined with the acumen of an astute lawyer and the bright ideas of a crack advertising agency.

In the beginning I had no technical knowledge of how a newspaper operated. What I did have, I quickly discovered, was an instinctive news sense, something I believe you cannot learn: you either have it, or you don’t. In some instinctual way, I could scent, or feel my way into an important interview or recognise a good angle for a story.

And her angle was firmly tabloid. She covered crime, securing her first scoop by stalking a pathologist, charmed the leading tenor of the day into the bath to sing for a photo, interviewed movie stars like Robert Taylor and authors like George Bernard Shaw, and tailed Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret through the zoo at Regent’s Park.

When war broke out, Stumm followed Harley, now her husband, to Singapore and quickly found a job on the Malaya Tribune as a general reporter, bringing a “dash of Fleet Street” to Southeast Asia — so much so that her first story defamed the governor, almost getting her deported. Then, after the birth of her baby and the Japanese shelling of Singapore, she received a cable. It was her old editor at the Mirror. “Delighted to know you are safe. Can you become our accredited war correspondent and start filing stories immediately?”

Stumm became known as “that war correspondent with a baby.” Tiny Sheridan waited outside press conferences with her amah while her mother covered the refusal of authorities to believe that Singapore was vulnerable to Japanese attack. But Singapore did fall, and Stumm was forced back home to Brisbane, where she received another cable from the Daily Mirror: “All delighted you are safe. Can you represent us at General MacArthur’s HQ in Brisbane?”

The US general was the Supreme Allied Commander South-West Pacific Area, and Brisbane seethed with hundreds of thousands of serving US and Australian men and women. It was a city of sandbags, brown-outs and bomb shelters.

Stumm wore an Australian army officer’s uniform and the flat, broad brimmed Australian women’s army hat, all of which she felt was far from flattering. The American brass, complaining the hat made her look like a squashed tomato, gave her a US officers’ side cap, which she wore with flair. The quality of her reporting brought her to the notice of MacArthur, who included her in an otherwise all-male reporting pack sent to Port Moresby to cover the battle against Japanese forces.

“Here at this forward area, the atmosphere tinges with excitement and grim preparedness,” she filed. “Rugged Australian soldiers load trucks, dig roads, heave fence poles, their mahogany backs bent to the job, their Digger hats stained with the perspiration that pours off them in this humid land. Side by side with them work the Doughboys, more conventional in their fatigue suits with rolled-down sleeves, some even in khakis with ties neatly tucked in at the neck.”

She worked alongside George Johnston, who would cover the war in China and go on to become one of Australia’s most important novelists, and Ian Morrison, the war correspondent son of Australian George Morrison, who had covered the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China for the London Times. Like most of the men, she operated out of the local command post, covering stories that she couldn’t see first-hand, like the Battle of Kaiapit that saw Australian soldiers defeat a much larger force of Japanese with few losses and establish an airstrip to protect the northern coastal town of Lae.

“The country around Port Moresby was so bad it was a wonder to me that troops could fight in such difficult terrain,” she would write later:

The jeep track leading to the Kokoda Track was so rough it was a misery to ride along. But even here, Australian humour came to the fore. At the start of the Kokoda Track, a huge banner was stretched across the track which read: “Through these portals pass the best damn mosquito bait in the world.” On the other side to welcome the returning troops was written: “We told you so!”

Stumm covered the work of nurses, impressed with their courage and the hardships they faced. “Into Moresby by plane usually come the wounded from land and sea battles. Twenty-four hours a day the girls of Moresby, Australian and American, are on the job, taking care of them,” she filed. She would later interview a group of nurses freed from Japanese captivity, who, fearing pack rape, had kept vials of morphine, ready to kill themselves.

“Even though I’d been through air raids in Singapore, New Guinea was a shock,” she wrote later. “I remember walking down a dusty track, feeling dazed by the heat and the noise, when coming towards me was a war correspondent colleague, George Johnston. He asked me how it was all going. ‘It’s all a bit overwhelming, suddenly finding myself in the theatre of war.’ He nodded sympathetically. ‘I know. It’s a case of I saw too much.’”

As the war was ending, Stumm took a job on the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. But there was one last cable to come from the Daily Mirror, this time asking her to go to Tokyo to cover the Japanese surrender. In a story that would be repeated for women correspondents for decades to come, the editor of the Daily Telegraph only agreed to let her go if she made her own way there. With no civilian flights available, Stumm called on her air force connections, who helped her in memory of her husband, Wing Commander Harley Stumm, who had been killed in action.

After the war, MacArthur awarded Stumm the Asiatic Pacific Service Star for her services as a war correspondent in New Guinea. •

This is an edited extract from Through Her Eyes: Australia’s Women Correspondents from Hiroshima to Ukraine, edited by Melissa Roberts and Trevor Watson, published by Hardie Grant Books.

The post The correspondent who saw too much  appeared first on Inside Story.

The anniversary well-wishers included German foreign minister Heiko Maas, who said the convention “was drawn up in view of the immeasurable suffering that millions of people were forced to endure during and after the second world war. Its clear aim was to ensure that this could never happen again.” He also reminded us that more than eighty million people are currency displaced — a fact that made the convention “indispensable today.”

With these words, Maas conjured two sets of images. His “never again” was clearly a reference to the Holocaust, perhaps evoking the black-and-white photographs of emaciated survivors taken by the Allies immediately upon the liberation of the concentration camps. And his mention of today’s displaced people would have reminded his audience of televised footage showing thousands of predominantly Syrian refugees making their way through Hungary and Austria in the summer of 2015, or masses of people living in squalid conditions in refugee camps in Africa or Asia.

Neither of these sets of images has much to do with the origins of the Refugee Convention. Yes, two major refugee crises in the second half of the 1940s produced images akin to those that we might see today depicting refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Venezuela. But neither of those early postwar crises — the Nakba, which displaced some 700,000 Palestinians, and the Partition of India, when more than ten million people fled or were driven from their homes — were much discussed among those negotiating the Refugee Convention.

Instead, their attention was focused on what were known as “DPs,” or displaced persons. Millions of people had found themselves outside their country of origin at the end of the war. Most of them had been swiftly repatriated — some, against their will, to the Soviet Union. But by 1946, about a million DPs were still stuck, most of them in the French, British and American zones of occupied Germany.

Despite the war still being fresh in their minds, the drafters of the convention had set out to tackle the consequences rather than the causes of mass displacement. They wanted a convention that defined the status of displaced people rather than dealt with their “immeasurable suffering.” Resettlement wasn’t even designed solely for their benefit. When Eleanor Roosevelt warned the UN General Assembly in December 1946 that the DPs’ presence was delaying “the restoration of peace and order in the world,” her chief concern may well have been to prevent a potentially volatile situation in the DPs’ host societies, particularly in Germany and Austria.

Most of the DPs were from Poland, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states, the Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe. Most were stranded in Germany and Austria because that’s where they had been taken as prisoners of war or forced labourers during the war. Some were in Italy, the Middle East, East Africa, India and China, and some were Jewish survivors of the concentration camps.

In other words, today’s international refugee regime originated not in the refugee crises in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the 1940s, and not in the Holocaust (or in the earlier failure of nation-states to provide a refuge for European Jews). It lay in the anxiety provoked by DPs in the second half of the 1940s and the early 1950s, and in the effort to resettle the “last million” — initially to countries in Western Europe, but soon to Israel, Australia and the Americas.

The role of the “last million” in international discussions about the attributes and rights of refugees and in the making of international law is a key reason why studies of the DPs are so relevant to today’s debates. Much has already been written about the International Refugee Organization, or IRO, which was given the job of facilitating the resettlement of DPs, and much about the resettlement of DPs in Australia and other countries. Ruth Balint’s immensely readable and highly original book Destination Elsewhere adds to that scholarship. What makes her contribution particularly valuable is her concern not so much with the IRO or the reception of DPs in Australia and elsewhere, but with the DP experience.

Most importantly, Balint shows how the question of who ought to be counted as a refugee played out not just in the conferences where diplomats and international lawyers haggled over the definition used by the IRO and the terms of the draft Refugee Convention, but also in submissions by DPs, in interviews with DPs and, more generally, in the autobiographical narratives DPs fashioned to bolster their identity as refugees. The question, what were the grounds for a DP’s eligibility as a refugee?, runs like a thread through the book’s seven chapters.

Balint is less interested in the content of policies than in how they were implemented and how much wriggle room they provided. Drawing on dozens of cases, she explores not only how policies and practices affected the lives of individuals, but also how individuals negotiated their way around existing rules.

The cases featured in Destination Elsewhere are complex. Among them is that of Arthur W., a non-Jewish German married to a Jewish woman who had survived the Holocaust — not least, I imagine, because she was protected by his having resisted the pressure to divorce her. Arthur himself had been imprisoned in a concentration camp from 1944 until the end of the war, and was initially classified as a refugee, which would have allowed the couple to emigrate to join their son, who had left Germany ahead of them. But just as they were about to embark to the United States, the IRO realised it had made a mistake. Like other non-Jewish husbands of refugees, and unlike the wives of eligible refugees, Arthur was deemed ineligible for IRO assistance.

Also ineligible, but for very different reasons, was a couple whose son Gabor had a disability. Their application to settle in Australia was rejected, according to their emigration file, “because the child is a mongolian idiot.” The IRO advised the parents to leave Gabor behind. They separated over the issue, with the father emigrating after their divorce and the mother remaining with their son. A year later, the mother changed her mind and consented to separate from Gabor permanently.

Or consider the case of Gregor L., aka Michael Kolossov, a Red Army officer who defected in 1945 and was then advised by an official in the American zone to conceal his Russian identity. Changing his name, date of birth and nationality (and now claiming to be of Polish Ukrainian origin), he, his wife and their two children lived for four years as DPs in the city of Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, until they were accepted for resettlement in Australia. There, Gregor came clean, telling the authorities of his former identity, because, he said later, “I wanted to show that I was honest and loyal.”

A 1946 cartoon illustrating the obstacles impeding the emigration of displaced persons to the United States. The DP camp depicted in the background is identified as Wentdorf. Gedenkstaette Bergen-Belsen

The Australian authorities were “less interested in protecting Communist defectors than they were in sheltering Nazi ones,” as Balint dryly notes, and promptly declared him a security threat. His case received sympathetic attention in the Australian press, but he was deported back to Germany. Because the Australians told the IRO that they suspected him of having worked for Stalin’s secret police, the Americans kept him under close surveillance in Germany as a possible Soviet agent while inviting him to participate in the Harvard Project, an attempt to gather intelligence about the Soviet Union by interviewing refugees. The researchers much valued Kolossov’s assistance, with one of them later praising his “sincerity” and “objectivity.”

Concerning this last case, Balint tells us that the family may have lived in Germany until 1955 and then emigrated to Canada, but concedes that “even this is unclear.” In most other cases, we don’t learn what eventually happened to her protagonists. As a reader, I found the fragmentary nature of these accounts of DPs’ lives intensely frustrating. What became of Arthur W.’s family? Were they eventually resettled? If they weren’t, how did they fare in the country where they had been persecuted? Did their son return to Germany? And what about Gabor? Were his parents able to make a new start?

Arthur W.’s story also raises the question of whether he provided the IRO with a truthful account. Had he really been imprisoned in a concentration camp? If so, on what grounds? Such questions suggest themselves even more so in Gregor L.’s case. Was he also “sincere” and “objective” when it came to retelling his life? Was he identical with Michael Kolossov, or was L., as the Australians claimed, someone else altogether?

Of course this was not meant to be a book about the life histories of refugees. And the effort involved in comprehensively researching that many lives would have been considerable and, given the focus of the book, unreasonable. In fact — on second thoughts — I suspect that it may be the individual stories’ open-endedness that makes the text strangely intriguing and prompted me to read on. At the same time, the lack of closure focused my attention on the issues that the cases were meant to illustrate.

Historians trying to turn the past into a narrative tend to be influenced by at least three factors: their own present, the availability of sources, and what I would like to call the course of history. No historian is immune from these influences. But how they shape a historical narrative depends also on how much the historian is aware of, and able to respond to, them.

As Balint has demonstrated in her other books (most recently in Smuggled, which she co-wrote with Julie Kalman and which also came out this year), she is what the French call an écrivaine engagée, a writer who is perturbed and at the same time motivated by her own present, not least by its injustices. She is troubled by the categorical and seemingly unproblematic distinction between political refugees and economic migrants today, and aware of how much a person’s recognition as a legitimate refugee depends on their ability to offer a convincing narrative about their life. She knows that the more truthful the narrative the more convincing it is — but that here “truth” is in the eyes of the beholder, and depends on what seems credible to somebody else: for example, a person working for the UNHCR, an immigration officer or a judge.

Balint is appalled by the fact that the response of her own country, Australia, to people seeking its protection often doesn’t reflect the international treaties it has ratified, be it the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “Australia’s immigration laws still require all migrants to be screened for medical conditions, so as to prove they will not be an economic burden on the community,” she writes. “This affects children most of all.” In October, Australian Paralympic athlete Jaryd Clifford recalled the case of Pakistani refugee Shiraz Kiane, who twenty years ago set himself on fire outside Parliament House because the immigration department objected to his family’s joining him in Australia on the grounds that his daughter’s medical treatment would be too expensive.

“The book is a work of history concerned with the present,” Balint writes. Because she, like Clifford, is troubled by the present, she is particularly sensitive to instances in the past in which the present is prefigured. As she avoids any moralising, this honing in on historical issues to which she is particularly attuned adds a degree of passion to her text that contributes to its readability.

Balint is acutely aware of the second factor shaping her narrative, the limitations of her archive. Her book “began with a chance visit” to the International Tracing Services archives in Germany, which holds records relating to seventeen million people and had only recently been opened to researchers. This visit appears to have prompted her to consult the IRO’s records, which are held at the National Archives in Paris. And there she discovered the decisions of the IRO Review Board, which became a main source for her project.

Because of the richness of the review board’s files, the cases featured in her book tend to be complex and were contested at the time. But the majority of refugee status determinations involving DPs were presumably comparatively straightforward, which means that they didn’t leave an extensive paper trail. Balint’s reliance on the records of the review board partly explains why she was rarely able to say what eventually happened to people like Arthur W. and Gregor L.; for obvious reasons, the review board took no further interest in the fates of individuals once it had arrived at a decision.

The fact that archives are not merely repositories that can be mined to answer the historian’s questions is not peculiar to Balint’s project, but I wish she had taken her reflections about the peculiar archival further —that may be a suggestion for another text, however, one that engages with the peculiar challenges posed by archival research about refugees. In Destination Elsewhere, Balint seems to take shelter behind fellow historians Carolyn Steedman and Natalie Zemon Davis, who have both reflected on the historian’s reliance on and engagement with archival sources. “Nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there,” Steedman writes. “You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.”

Finally, the narratives produced by historians are informed by a presumed course of history. When looked at it with the benefit of hindsight, the so-called DP problem seems to have come about because many Eastern European DPs could not or did not want to be repatriated, and it was largely solved when a handful of countries of immigration — most prominent among them the United States, Australia and Israel — offered to resettle hundreds of thousands of people stuck in Central Europe. That outcome was in the interests of the Allies, who were responsible for looking after the DPs; of the IRO, naturally; of host countries Germany, Austria and Italy, much of whose infrastructure was in ruins and some of whose people were starving; of countries of resettlement, like Australia, that were experiencing a labour shortage; and of the DPs themselves, who often wanted to get away from Europe.

But it was by no means self-evident that resettlement would be the answer to displacement. I can think of only two other instances in which people who were displaced because they fled, or otherwise found themselves outside, their home, were swiftly resettled. One concerns refugees who fled Hungary to Austria or Yugoslavia after the failed 1956 uprising and ended up in pretty much the same countries that had accommodated DPs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The other relates to concerted international efforts to resettle Indochinese “boat people” stranded in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

But both before, during and after the second half of the 1940s, comprehensive resettlement schemes were the exception. Think of the Armenians in the early twentieth century, for example, or of the Palestinians in the late 1940s, or of Eritreans, Afghans and Syrians today, not to mention Jews desperate to leave Central Europe in the late 1930s. Resettlement was rarely an option for them. And when Polish or Latvian DPs first decided that they did not want to return home, they could not yet know that resettlement outside Europe would be the alternative to repatriation. Initially at least, they had to assume that they would have to remain in Europe, if not in Germany.

Only the course of history encourages us to think of the DPs’ lives in postwar Germany in the context of a trajectory that culminates in a country of resettlement. The course of history encourages us to focus on the DPs’ “quest to leave postwar Europe,” to quote the subtitle of Balint’s book. But not knowing that they might soon settle in the United States or Australia, DPs busily created social networks unrelated to their emigration.

Adam Seipp’s Strangers in the Wild Place, which I reviewed for Inside Story some years ago, illustrates the varied contacts of residents of the Wildflecken DP camp. Outside the camps, DPs interacted not only with members of the Allied occupation authorities but also with locals. In the camps, they carved out spaces where they could be in charge of their own affairs. In some camps, they elected representatives and staffed administrative bodies. They supported a vibrant cultural life. Most important, they created formal and informal networks of compatriots-in-exile and strengthened such networks and associated multiple identities through the publication of periodicals. In Germany’s American zone alone, twenty-nine newspapers and thirty-nine magazines published by and for DPs were counted in December 1947.

The course of history encourages us to think of resettlement as the norm for DPs. In places like Australia, history evidently continued. The arrival of a large number of DPs changed Australian society and helped to prepare it for a multicultural future. By contrast, the fact that a sizeable number of DPs could not be resettled and had to remain in Germany and Austria appears as a dead end. But these remaining DPs too made history. Categorised as heimatlose Ausländer (“homeless foreigners”) in West Germany and generally referred to as the “hard core” by the UNHCR and aid agencies, they acquired many of the rights usually reserved for German citizens but were nevertheless relegated to the margins of society.

From the perspective of 2021, the heimatlose Ausländer seem at least as representative of the modern refugee as Arthur Calwell’s “beautiful Balts.” And much like the experience of the “last million” tells us something about the origins of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the modern refugee regime, the lives and narratives of their “hard core” remnant, and their interactions within German society, ought to be indispensable reference points for a history of the Federal Republic.

Ruth Balint’s book is about the making of history by DPs in the sense that the period in the late 1940s and early 1950s that saw the resettlement of most of them “had a lasting impact on the definition of the refugee, the development of international law, and the creation of a modern, bureaucratic refugee regime.”

Her book is also about the crafting of histories by people who realised that the IRO and prospective resettlement countries were less interested in their wartime suffering, and more in a perceived Red menace, which led DPs to “[articulate] a narrative of persecution and [to valorise] their predicament in line with Western anti-communism.” That narrative established their credentials as refugees. Whether or not the histories that emerged in submissions and interviews were factually true is often impossible to establish. But that’s beside the point, at least as far as the argument in this excellent book is concerned. •

The post Becoming refugees appeared first on Inside Story.

I grew up in Hobart, but I had never been to this part of Tasmania before. Liffey is a very beautiful place, not a town but a cluster of small farms following the valley of the Liffey River. The cemetery is clearly marked on the map, but on the ground a cemetery without a church is an easy thing to miss. Suddenly, a glimpse of white showed above the tall yellow grass — white where there shouldn’t have been any white. We pulled over.

The cemetery’s double iron gates have crosses worked into them, signalling that this is consecrated ground. A lichen-encrusted sign tells us that the Mountain Vale Methodist Church occupied the site from 1867 until 1952. Behind us was Mountain Vale Hill, and across some green paddocks to the west, rearing up grimly on the other side of the Liffey River, were the densely forested Cluan Tiers.

We stomped through a patch of long grass and Scotch thistles, where the church must have stood, and past the remnants of a paling fence. The white headstone we’d seen from the road turned out to belong to Bertram Henry Saunders, who died in 1906 aged nineteen, and his sister Lily, who died in 1910 aged twenty-eight. Inscribed on their headstone is a pair of clasped hands surrounded by leaves and flowers. We could only see about twenty marked graves, none more recent than the 1930s. All were humbler than the tall marble headstone dedicated to young Bertram and Lily Saunders reaching out above the grass to beg passers-by that they not be forgotten.

Saunders. I knew the name. I’d been researching the impact of the first world war in this district and I knew that five men named Saunders had enlisted from around here, and that they feature on local war memorials. Bertram and Lily must have been from that family.

War memorials were why we had come. I had written an article about memorial tree-plantings in Tasmania’s northern midlands. Our visit to Liffey was to take some photographs of trees planted in 2015 at the old Liffey school to replace those planted in 1918 in honour of the men from Liffey who had volunteered for war. That done, we’d be on our way. We were snatching a few days’ holiday over Easter and would be spending that night in Longford.

But you can’t stand in an old cemetery, as we were doing, and not wonder about the entire history of the place and the people, and whether, after all, war was the defining event in their lives. I could see by the dates that these must have been some of the first white settler families in this district. Some had sent grandsons and sons to the war; others — whose names I did not recognise from local war memorials — had obviously not.

Anzac has narrowed our focus too much. It reduces our questions to those that treat the war as an inevitability. But it was not inevitable for Bertram and Lily, who died before 1914. These young people died quite innocent of one of the twentieth century’s great tragedies. The war, so soon to grind itself into Australia’s national psyche, never happened for them.

Glancing up and around, I had an uneasy sense that there were stories folded into those hills that it might not be my business to pry into. And yet I was so desperately curious about these people I would gladly have got down on my knees, right there and then, and scraped though thistles and bare earth if only that would reveal their lives to me. It wouldn’t, of course. I would have to wait until I got home to Canberra to dig into the traditional historical record.

But the experience of being in a place allows us to shift our gaze. What else happened here? How did the land and environment shape people’s ambitions, work and family life? Investigating this might produce histories that don’t sit comfortably with one another.

Victoria Falls, one of the four waterfalls on the Liffey River, c. 1940–50. State Library of Tasmania

The headwaters of the Liffey River gather in Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers and take a wild course through rainforest before plunging down four magnificent cascades known collectively as the Liffey Falls. The river is close to the boundaries of three nations of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, and several clans within these nations made seasonal journeys through the area. The Pallittorre clan of the North nation was based at Quamby Bluff, not far from Liffey Falls.

On 24 June 1827 a group of Pallittorre people camped between the Liffey Falls (then known as Laycock Falls) and Quamby Bluff, a prominent nearby mountain peak. They woke late in the evening to the barking of their dogs. Their fires had revealed their location to five white settlers — two soldiers, a police constable and two stockmen — intent upon reprisal for the murder the previous day of a white stockman, William Knight. The settlers fired on the Pallittorre people as they ran into the bush.

Depositions given the following week in Launceston by two of the settlers stated that only one round was fired on the Aboriginal people (many more on their dogs) and that one person had been wounded. But the Hobart Colonial Times reported — almost gleefully — that up to sixty Aboriginal people had been “killed and wounded.” Historians who have studied the incident accept that a massacre took place, with more killings on both sides in the ensuing days, part of what historian Lyndall Ryan has called an “eighteen-day killing spree” in June 1827.

The Pallittorre survivors may have been too frightened to return to the killing sites to observe funerary customs over the dead. Their normal practice was to cremate bodies, but fires would have given away their location. Without these rites, the spirits of the dead would never rest. In later years, stockmen and timber cutters passing through might have heard stories about the killing of the “Blacks,” might even have found a few bones here and there. Today, no memorials mark the sites near Liffey where the Pallittorre people died.

By the 1860s land outside Tasmania’s central midland corridor had been opened up for closer settlement. In Liffey, one of the first white arrivals was James Green, and it was he who donated a sliver of land for the building of the Methodist church in 1867, naming it Mountain Vale after his own property. Timber for the church was cut at his steam sawmill. The structure was so austere you might almost mistake it for a barn, not a church. A flourishing community grew up around it, and every year, for many years, Green gave his workers a day off so that they and their families could celebrate the founding of the church.

Mountain Vale Methodist Church, date unknown. Churches of Tasmania

Most of the blocks sold or leased in Liffey were just a few hundred acres each, and located in difficult country. Fertile certainly, but densely timbered, wet, very cold in winter, and remote from markets for the settlers’ produce. Clearing enough land to establish a viable farm could take a lifetime, but landholders were at least entitled to vote in local and colonial elections, which gave them some say in the sort of society they wanted to live in.

Until then much of the colony’s best land had been granted to free immigrants with plenty of capital who had used convict labour to establish vast pastoral estates. But now, new generations of settlers were pushing into “new” country and helping to level out old social inequalities.

The Saunders family were among that cohort. There were two couples: Caroline and John Saunders, and Maria and William Saunders. Caroline and Maria were sisters, and their husbands were probably cousins. Such couplings were not uncommon. Caroline and Maria’s parents, Jane and John Jones, had taken up land in Liffey in 1863. John was killed by a falling tree while he was building a house for his young family.

Caroline and John Saunders married in 1881 and had ten children. Eventually they did well enough to build a six-room farmhouse, quite fine for Liffey then, which they called Silverburn, but like many bush families they probably started out in a simple timber hut. With too many people living in unsanitary conditions, disease was common. Rose, their third-born, died of typhoid in 1884 at just ten months. She was probably buried in the Mountain Vale cemetery under a simple wooden cross, but if so, the grave marker is long gone.

Bertram and Lily at least survived to adulthood. I don’t know what carried them off, Bertram in 1906 and Lily in 1910. Tuberculosis perhaps. By then, the Saunders parents could afford an elaborately carved headstone for them. Unusually for a woman of twenty-eight, Lily was unmarried.

War came. Caroline and John still had four sons, and all enlisted. Leslie and Colin had moved to Queensland and were living in Gordonvale, a sugar-growing town near Cairns, when they signed up in August 1914, only weeks after war was declared. Both were at the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915. Colin went missing that day, but his death was only confirmed for his parents eighteen months later. Leslie survived Gallipoli but was killed in France in August 1916. Neither man’s remains were ever found; they are commemorated on memorials at Lone Pine, on Gallipoli, and at Villers-Bretonneux.

Their younger brother, Alan, enlisted from Tasmania in March 1915 and managed to have himself transferred to the same battalion as his brothers, presumably to be closer to them. After a few months on Gallipoli he joined the fighting in France. After Leslie’s death, Alan requested and was granted a compassionate discharge from the army on the grounds that his parents had lost two sons and were partly dependent on him as the only son left. He arrived home in Liffey in November 1916.

But here’s the twist. Alan had not told the truth. He was not in fact the last surviving brother in the family because all along, his oldest brother, Walter, had been living in Bracknell with his wife and four children. Walter did eventually enlist, in late 1917. He made it to France just before the armistice, when it was too late for him to see much action, and returned to Tasmania unscathed in October 1919. He took up a soldier-settlement block near Longford, and had four more children.

You can learn a lot from archival records and local newspapers. That’s how I put this story together. But there are limits. Often you can uncover “what happened” — or some of it — but not “why.” The emotional coherence that once held people’s decisions together is lost.

For instance, Leslie and Colin had left Tasmania before the war to strike out in Queensland. Why? Was there a family argument? Perhaps they were looking for work, which is why most young people leave Tasmania, but perhaps they just wanted to get out of this remote, tight-knit community where everyone seemed to be related to everyone else. But why go so far, to a place so different?

Young Alan seemed a troubled soul. He rushed to the war when, at age twenty, he still needed parental permission to enlist, but after his brothers died he lied his way out of the army to get back home again. Did his family connive at this? Given how long it took for letters to travel between continents, I would say not.

Clearly this was a family in acute emotional distress. How did Alan explain his return? What was said around the kitchen table at Silverburn in late 1916? None of us can suggest Alan was a coward. We weren’t there. But the fact that no one in authority checked his story (for instance, by requesting information from the local police) suggests that Alan may not have been an effective soldier, and that the army was willing to quietly let him go. Did his older brother Walter know of Alan’s duplicity? If so, it must have placed Walter in a most dreadful position. Perhaps — here’s a thought — the decision to volunteer for the war was more agonising for Walter than his actual experience.

The postwar years brought fresh worry for Caroline and John. In 1921 their oldest daughter, Beryl, died, leaving her own three children to Caroline and John to care for. Alan married and had a daughter but in the mid 1920s he and his family moved to Queensland, to Gordonvale, where his brothers had lived before the war. He died there in 1930, of war-related illness according to his family. He was thirty-five.

Caroline Saunders died in 1926 aged sixty-two. When John died in 1937, aged seventy-nine, he had been predeceased by seven of his ten children. The three who were left buried their parents next to their sister Beryl under a single, unadorned headstone at Mountain Vale, and added the names of their solider brothers — Leslie, Colin and Alan — who had died “For King and Country.” Thus were these adventurous, impetuous boys brought home to rest with their family.

Social historians of the first world war invariably point out that bereavement in war — the scale of it, the shock of it, and the fact that relatives could not be present at the death or bury their dead with traditional rites — was not the same as in peacetime. It isn’t natural that adult children should die before their parents. All true. And yet if we go back before 1914 we discover that many people were already in mourning when the war broke out. Each of my two Saunders couples in Liffey lost three children before 1914, and that can hardly have been a unique experience.

Maria and William Saunders married in 1886 and also established a farm in Liffey, and had eleven children. In 1901, diphtheria broke out among children in Liffey. This bacterial infection, transmitted by coughing and sneezing, was made worse in small houses where children shared cots and beds. It attacks the respiratory system; if unchecked, a toxin creates a thick grey film in the nose and throat. Many victims who die are unable to breathe.

In the space of a week, Maria and William watched three of their children die in this way: Stanley, aged nineteen months; Horace, thirteen years; and finally baby Grace, only a few months old. All three received separate funerals at Mountain Vale. Three times a procession set out from the Saunders’ house to travel a few kilometres on foot, surrounded by forest, behind a horse-drawn hearse to the little wooden church at Mountain Vale. Nothing marks their graves now.

Not surprisingly, Maria and William sold up and moved. They had more children, and were living in Hadspen, near Launceston, when war came. They had lost two sons who might have volunteered for the war, but still had three eligible sons, Harold (known as Errol) and twins Lawrence and Clarence. These young men would have had plenty of friends who rushed to the colours — including their own Saunders cousins — and yet they hesitated.

Many did. In Tasmania the enlistment rate among eligible men was 37.8 per cent. Pragmatically, men weighed up their various duties and obligations, calculated the pay and allowances made to soldiers and their families, and decided not to go. Others attempted to enlist but were rejected on medical and other grounds. But that left huge numbers who never went near a recruiting depot.

Tasmania voted twice in favour of conscription, in the plebiscites of 1916 and 1917, but the debate was bitterly divisive. For those who stayed home it must have taken a particular sort of courage to accept that their lot would be to plant potatoes, mend fences and get the harvest in; that they would be shooting rabbits and possums, not the beastly Hun.

Under the weight of all this, only Lawrence went. He enlisted in October 1916 and served on the Western Front until he was killed in action in Belgium in February 1918. He is buried in a cemetery near Ypres. Clarence, his twin brother, stayed home, married and had a family, and lived a long and outwardly uneventful life. There are tales aplenty of twins who enlisted, fought and died together, but these two didn’t. How did they decide who would stay and who would go? Could it possibly have come down to the toss of a coin?

The more we attempt to dwell inside the lives of people in the past, especially ordinary people who leave little trace of themselves in the historical record, the more questions we uncover that elude easy answers. So be it. My stories from Liffey are fragmented and unresolved. But small stories inspired by encounters with local places often ask us to reconsider broader national narratives: Anzac, or something else that we cherish. They nibble away at accepted versions of history and propose new relationships between apparently disparate experiences.

Who is a hero and who is a coward? Who is remembered and who is forgotten? How is the memory of the dead to be preserved? That man with a gun — that man with a spear — is he a patriot or is he a criminal? These binary questions are probably not useful. What is important is that we are attentive to whatever unquiet stories the land might reveal. •

The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of historian Dr Shayne Breen in the preparation of this article.

The post Unquiet stories from Liffey appeared first on Inside Story.

The many representations of the irascible, inspirational Winston Churchill on screens large and small have featured actors including Robert Hardy, Albert Finney, Gary Oldman, Brian Cox and Ian McNeice (Bert Large of Doc Martin fame) in the lead role, each of them finding his own way of coming to terms with possibly the most famous British politician of the past century.

But how many of us know much about Churchill’s involvement in the film industry? Fleet’s documentary goes some way to filling this lacuna.

Churchill and the Movie Mogul’s other protagonist is Alexander Korda, whose poverty-stricken Hungarian childhood didn’t stop him from becoming the most powerful producer in 1930s England, creating such international successes as The Private Life of Henry VIII. Churchill’s long association with Korda began in that decade, and Fleet’s film investigates how the two men came to see film as the best medium for promoting the British cause as the crisis in Europe deepened. This aim became more pressing, of course, as the threat of war became more ominous in the later thirties. And once the war was under way they saw films as even more crucial in making England matter more to the United States, which Churchill hoped to enlist on Britain’s side.

To do this, he felt it was crucial to send Korda across the Atlantic to make films that would create sympathy for Britain’s war aims. This resulted in what became Churchill’s favourite film, Lady Hamilton (1941) — more provocatively titled That Hamilton Woman in America, though neither title suggests that Lord Nelson, Lady Hamilton’s foil in the film, would get much of a look-in. Having often been a key adviser to Korda, Churchill saw parallels between England’s situation at the start of the war and its spectacular defeat of the Spanish Armada, celebrated in an earlier Korda film, Fire Over England (1937). Indeed, he increasingly came to see film as a “war weapon.”

Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor obviously played the key role in getting the Americans to the battlefront, but Fleet’s film suggests that we shouldn’t underestimate the effects of the Churchill–Korda offensive. One of the history-changing moments he recounts is a crucial meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt, recalled in the film by son Elliott Roosevelt.

Though documentary is an appropriate label for Churchill and the Movie Mogul, it’s not just a careful recital of facts. Fleet creates a sense of ongoing drama, drawing on a variety of sources and methods of presentation. Helping create that sense of drama are plenty of clips from the key films; for example, the moment from Fire Over England when Flora Robson as Elizabeth I makes her famous (and not terribly politically correct) remark, “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” We see audiences watching the films with rapt attention, and even cars lined up at an early drive-in, along with clips from the newsreels of the time. Commentators across an impressive range, including Stephen Fry, James Mason and Vivien Leigh, discuss Korda as producer, director and major figure in British film history, and politicians, academics and critics assess one or other of the two men.

The film is as much about Korda as it is about Churchill, and they get roughly equal screen time. Churchill and the Movie Mogul vividly evokes time, place and its protagonists.

I wouldn’t say that the Churchill we view in Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill is necessarily true to the life in every detail. Nor does the film, though an absorbing enough entertainment, always stick to the historical facts. I’m recommending it here as drama, not as documentary.

The film’s historical moment is that of the days leading up to the Normandy landing, Operation Overlord, or D-Day as it became known, on 6 June 1944. Its narrative impulse lies in Churchill’s approach to the operation and how it influences his dealings with the US supreme Allied commander, General Eisenhower, and with Field Marshal Montgomery and others. These others include his wife Clementine (Miranda Richardson) and King George VI (James Purefoy).

When we first see Churchill he is wandering, in a long shot, along a beach, presumably pondering the challenges of liberating France. This vista contrasts with our next view of him, as the camera prowls through his wildly untidy bedroom, littered with papers, cigar butts and whisky glasses.

Teplitzky is interested in evoking his dealings with staff, including a new secretary whose fiancé will have a moment in the landing — and here the film gives Churchill a touching if perhaps slightly soapy moment. There is clear conflict between Churchill, who is portrayed as opposing the D-Day landing, and Eisenhower and Montgomery. Clashes at this military level lead to a meeting with the King, who tells Churchill he “must stay at home and wait.”

However factually accurate, Teplitzky’s film weaves the public and the private to construct a persuasive entertainment that is also occasionally moving as it proceeds inexorably to the famous Churchill phrase, “We shall never surrender.”

I should mention that Teplitzky’s film led me to view two of the many other films based on the cantankerous character who ultimately led Britain to victory against the German military predator: Richard Loncraine’s 2002 TV movie, The Gathering Storm, and Joe Wright’s 2017 film, Darkest Hour. What all three movies have in common is their focus on Churchill’s dealings with a key moment in the second world war — and his relations with his wife Clemmie.

He somehow contrived, in Churchill, to make the D-Day landing redound to his credit despite his earlier opposition. In Darkest Hour, despite a snide reference to his role in promoting the Gallipoli landing during the first world war, Churchill (Gary Oldman) pushes parliament into evacuating from Dunkirk, following which he receives wildly enthusiastic support. In The Gathering Storm, we watch Churchill (Albert Finney) move from a career low point in 1934 to the triumph of taking over from Chamberlain to become the prime minister who would lead the nation to war — and repudiate the criticism of his “mindless optimism.”

In both Loncraine’s and Wright’s films, he is depicted in querulous dealings with various politicians — whether it is Stanley Baldwin (Derek Jacobi), whom he harasses in The Gathering Storm, or Neville Chamberlain, up till the latter’s announcement that “We are at war with Germany,” in Darkest Hour — and numerous others who cross his path. As well as these public manifestations of an imposing but somewhat despotic temperament, the films also offer entertaining insights into his married life with Clemmie, played respectively and superbly by Vanessa Redgrave and Kristin Scott Thomas. Each of them works hard at bearing with his outrages, and each makes credible an underlying devotion.

No doubt, all three feature films sometimes play fast and loose with the facts — a privilege not available to John Fleet — but their portraits of the charismatic and maddening central figure are of a high order, and in each film there is a pervasive sense of a nation at some of its most challenging times. •

The post Churchill on — and sometimes behind — the screen appeared first on Inside Story.

As international politics turned more murky, though, the emerging conflicts didn’t fit the 1945 template. An early example was the Korean war of 1950–53. There, Democrat president Harry Truman viewed the North’s invasion of the South as part of a systematic communist challenge to world order. He sent US troops to defend the South — but then ordered them not to achieve total victory.

Truman was fearful that a more decisive campaign would expand across the Chinese border, perhaps triggering a third world war with the Soviet Union. Instead, a restricted but protracted conventional conflict destroyed the Korean peninsula and claimed the lives of more than 30,000 American troops. South Korean independence was preserved, but the aggressors in the North remained in place, a stalemate unfamiliar and distasteful to American voters.

Strategy became a political hot potato. Accusing Democrats of being soft on communism, Dwight Eisenhower’s incoming Republican administration adopted a policy of “massive retaliation.” If communists tried another attack, they wouldn’t be permitted to set the terms of the fight. Communist encroachments, it was proclaimed, would be met by an all-out nuclear response.

By the 1960s, John F. Kennedy’s Democrats were arguing that using nuclear weapons to stop limited communist advances in the developing world would be suicidally reckless given the Soviet nuclear build-up. Kennedy offered a more flexible and innovative approach to combating leftist insurgencies in Southeast Asia: rather than the sledgehammer of nuclear bombs, the scalpel of special forces.

But the scalpel proved inadequate to defeat communists in South Vietnam. The next president, Lyndon Johnson, desperate to prove American credibility to friend and foe, gradually escalated the violence, eventually deploying hundreds of thousands of troops and dropping millions of tons of bombs. That approach also failed.

Eventually, in the early 1970s, president Richard Nixon extricated US ground forces from an increasingly unpopular conflict. To cover the withdrawal he upped the bombing and adopted a policy of “Vietnamisation,” bloating the South Vietnamese military with more equipment. That failed too, with the South’s large army unable or unwilling to defend the Saigon regime. Aside from the devastation of Vietnam, the costs included the lives of some 50,000 American soldiers.

Defeat fuelled public cynicism and increased isolationist sentiment. With America having supposedly become battle-shy — the Vietnam syndrome, as it was labelled — Washington had a credibility problem: who would now believe in its readiness to defend its allies and interests? The risk, it believed, was that the global chessboard would be abandoned to Moscow.

Partly to deal with that worry, the United States invaded small-fry Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989). These morale-boosters demonstrated how Washington could avoid the mistakes of Vietnam while keeping force as a politically viable policy instrument. Pentagon officials codified the criteria for prudent armed intervention: wide political support; clear objectives serving the national interest; readiness to use decisive force; avoidance of protracted engagement; and acceptable costs and risks.

Then, in 1991, along came Saddam Hussein, a villain from central casting, whose aggression fitted America’s post-1945 template of a good war. Hussein’s Iraq ticked all the above boxes, and more. Its invasion of Kuwait provided a just cause as recognised by the United Nations; there was a clear, limited objective (eviction of the Iraqi army); and American generals were granted unfettered use of overwhelming force. Moreover, the military’s success demonstrated Washington’s status as a superpower, with the White House declaring, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

But the real world kept presenting messy problems, like peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, that failed to match the preferred Pentagon model. They are too numerous to discuss all of them here, but some stand out. In 1992, after being criticised for inaction, president George H.W. Bush sent troops to protect the UN humanitarian effort in Somalia from local warlords. By intervening in the anarchy, US forces became a participant in a civil war; the mission creep led to the Black Hawk Down battle of 1993, in which eighteen American soldiers were killed. President Bill Clinton reacted by withdrawing, creating a perception that the United States had been thwarted by a rabble.

Americans had had enough. Sending troops to help apparently ungrateful foreigners in intractable squabbles became politically unsustainable. Washington would be damned if it did, and damned if it didn’t. It’s one reason why Clinton stood back as the 1994 Rwandan genocide unfolded.

Clinton later latched on to long-range precision munitions as a way of continuing to use force while minimising the domestic political costs. In 1998 he fired cruise missiles at Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq in half-hearted punitive strikes that didn’t seem to achieve anything. The strategy took a more serious turn in the 1999 humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. Contrary to expert predictions, the US air force (with NATO) managed to bomb the Serbian government into submission without “boots on the ground.”

Two years later, the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington reset strategy once again. For the first time since the 1940s, American troops were used to defend the homeland. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan hammered al Qaeda and overthrew the supporting Taliban government.

But president George W. Bush’s framing of the war on terror as all-encompassing and open-ended had been ill-conceived. He also accepted the neo-conservative fantasy that 9/11 presented an opportunity to remake the Middle East. The result was strategic incontinence and the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, and all that went with it. To borrow an expression from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “stuff happened.”

The Iraq folly exacerbated anti-American feeling in the Muslim world and diverted Washington’s attention from Afghanistan at a critical time. The Taliban regrouped, leaving Washington with a “now what?” moment. For years American officials switched between counterterrorism (killing remnant al Qaeda operatives), counterinsurgency (suppressing Taliban guerillas) and state-building. In practice, this meant American blood and treasure underwrote the corrupt Afghan regime. The signposts to failure became well known in Washington, but were only faced up to when Joe Biden won office and followed through on a promise to withdraw.

The post-Afghanistan chapter of US intervention doesn’t begin with a blank sheet. For example, the CIA and special forces continue to hunt Islamist terrorists in Africa. America remains key to NATO’s containment of Russia as well as the deterrence of North Korea. These opponents of the West, and others such as Iran and China, will be reaching their own conclusions about the implications of the shambolic collapse of the American position in Kabul. Some will be considering whether to test Biden’s resolve.

Allies who haven’t weaned themselves off American power will worry about either being abandoned if Washington loses interest or being dragged into unwanted conflict as it reasserts its superpower status. Canberra will fret about Washington either backing away from the South China Sea or trying too hard to prove itself.

Perhaps, after the dust settles, US credibility might not be as badly damaged as many suppose. After all, Biden didn’t back down on his Afghanistan policy; he persisted, despite considerable political heat. And, in theory, the move out of that country allows Washington to reinforce its position in the balance of power and frees it to more assertively police its revised version of world order. •

The post From Korea to Kabul, and beyond appeared first on Inside Story.

After president Joe Biden announced the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in April, the Morrison government quickly followed suit. But the stories they are telling about why the withdrawal is happening differ in important ways.

In the United States, Biden’s reasoning was straightforward: the war had already dragged on for too long, and there was no justification for its continuation. It had spanned four presidential administrations; he refused to allow it to continue into a fifth. When we’re so accustomed to hearing the United States described as a defender of freedom and democracy in the world, Biden’s reasoning seemed uncharacteristically resigned.

Biden speaks not of freedom or high-minded ideals but of his responsibility to bring American troops home. Even months ago, faced with the accusation that he was abandoning America’s commitment to the people of Afghanistan, he was unapologetic. Asked if the United States, and he personally, would bear responsibility should the Taliban regain control of the country, he was unequivocal. He felt, he said, “zero responsibility.” This would be a full, unconditional withdrawal.

In the end, that withdrawal happened very quickly. Fittingly, Biden’s deadline was 11 September this year, but American troops are mostly already gone. They left quickly and quietly, no doubt hoping to avoid the kind of iconic images of desperate evacuations that now characterise American withdrawal from its second-longest foreign war. As we now know, that effort has failed spectacularly.

The obvious comparisons to the war in Vietnam were not lost on Biden — he has already insisted, repeatedly, that this is “not Saigon.” He is at least partly right; while the comparison is apt, it relies on the vantage point of American power and a repeat of American mistakes. The “fall” of Saigon and Kabul were equally predictable, but the future is not — while the Communist Party of Vietnam is many things, it is not, and was not, the Taliban.

And in Biden’s case, the historical comparison lies not with the president who oversaw the end of America’s war in Vietnam but with the one who didn’t: fellow Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson’s catastrophic failures in Vietnam destroyed his presidency and dramatically constrained his domestic agenda. Biden seems intent on not making the same mistake, making the calculation that American fatigue with the “forever war” is stronger than any latent desire to be seen as the guardian of freedom and democracy in the world. He’s probably right.

The Australian government seems less cognisant of that history, and perhaps even more inclined to repeat it. When it came to the withdrawal, the Australian government was all too happy to outsource decision-making to the Americans, just as it was during the Vietnam war. But unlike Biden, Australia’s prime minister has continued a long tradition of justifying American military interventionism, and Australian support of it, in grandiose terms.

Echoing Richard Nixon’s invocation of “peace with honour” in Vietnam, Scott Morrison insisted in April that “freedom is always worth it” and “the world is safer” as a result of the war. That freedom and safety, as usual, is ours rather than that of the people of Afghanistan. It barely extends even to those Afghans who helped both the American and Australian campaigns directly.

Both the United States and Australia have, rightly, faced significant criticism for failing to do everything possible to protect even the local translators who worked with US and Australian forces and who were, by all accounts, integral to those operations. Those “locally engaged employees,” in the jargon of Western military interventionism, are now targets, along with their families, and many of them are desperate to get out.

The Biden administration is looking to spend US$1 billion on evacuations, and thousands have already been moved to either the mainland United States or military bases elsewhere. The Australian government has been much slower, and has faced significant criticism for it.

Visa processing, always deliberately unhurried and arduous, was slowed even further when the Australian government shuttered the Australian embassy in Kabul. Faced with an atmosphere of distrust, former local employees are forced to prove they did indeed work for the very Western forces that should know full well whether they did or not.

The Australian government’s shirking of its obligations was foreseeable months, if not years, in advance. It was bad enough to prompt intervention from the architect of Australia’s involvement in the war. Former prime minister John Howard weighed in in July, telling SBS News that granting asylum to former local employees “is a moral obligation we have. And it was a moral obligation that was shamefully discarded many years ago when we pulled out of Vietnam. I do not want to see a repetition of that failure in relation to Afghanistan.”

Unsurprisingly, Howard didn’t mention other historical failures repeated during the war and in its aftermath. That would mean examining the comparison between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam too closely, and asking too many questions about why those failures echo each other so clearly.

While the Australian and American approaches to withdrawal might vary by degree, they share much in common. The historical comparisons are ever-present, but any real “lessons” that history might offer are ignored. In neither country is there any real effort to understand and change the processes and structures that dragged us into both the longest and the second-longest foreign wars we’ve ever been involved in.

Even this year, the seventieth anniversary of the official security treaty between Australia and the United States, and the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, neither the US nor Australian government has shown any interest in understanding why it is that the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam mirror each other so closely.

In their refusal to engage with that history, both the Morrison government and the Biden administration shut down the possibility of any kind of learning that involves more than just mild regret. And so the risk that all of this will be repeated remains. •

An earlier version of this article appeared in Footyology.

The post Lost in translation appeared first on Inside Story.

Biden was right about one thing, at least. The abrupt collapse of another bankrupt regime — propped up for years beyond its deserved expiry only with the lives and largesse of the United States and its dutiful allies — didn’t end on an embassy rooftop. Instead, there was a terrified stampede across a nearby airfield.

This time the spectacle was more shocking as it unfolded in graphic live streaming around the world. The humiliation of the fall of Saigon was etched in the iconic black-and-white image, taken by United Press International photographer Hugh van Es, of a helicopter lifting desperate refugees from a rooftop near the American embassy. The capitulation in Kabul would be captured on scores of smartphones — defined with appalling images of desperate Afghans clinging to the fuselage of a departing US transport plane before plunging to their deaths.

Biden was also right to call out the unfair comparison between the defeat in Vietnam and that in Afghanistan, but not in the context he implied. The Taliban is certainly not the North Vietnamese army. In the Vietnam war, the United States was beaten by millions of North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong fighters backed by massive military and economic aid from the Soviet Union and China. In Afghanistan, it took just 80,000 Taliban fighters with rudimentary weapons and an unshakeable fundamentalist faith to exhaust the will of the most powerful armed forces in the world.

The waste, however, has indeed been comparable. As Biden confirmed on Monday, close to US$1 trillion has been squandered in Afghanistan over the past two decades — only to see the Taliban come full circle from a stunning victory in 1996 to a stunning return to power in 2021. And although the casualties are nothing like the 47,000 American military personnel who died in Vietnam, more than 4000 American troops and contractors have been killed in Afghanistan and another 20,000 wounded — along with the 50,000 Afghan civilians and a similar number of Taliban fighters estimated to have perished.

As Biden ruefully conceded, the speed with which the Taliban swept across the country recapturing cities and towns before reaching the capital in just ten days — and the correspondingly rapid disintegration of the 300,000-strong Afghan army — has been breathtaking. As recently as early last week, the Washington Post was reporting US military estimates that it would be at least another month before the city fell.

But the inevitability of this week’s events should have surprised no one, least of all the Republican rabble now baying for Biden’s blood. “What we have seen is an unmitigated disaster, a stain on the reputation of the United States of America,” intoned Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. “Every terrorist around the world, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, in Africa, are cheering the defeat of the United States military by a terrorist organisation in Afghanistan.”

In truth, Biden is little more than a late-shift janitor charged with clearing up the mess created by his predecessors, most recently the man for whom McConnell ran a shameless four-year protection racket, president Donald Trump. Trump’s decision to cut a deal with the Taliban in February last year made their return to power inevitable. Under the agreement, the United States and NATO promised to withdraw all their troops within fourteen months in return for the insurgents pledging not to allow al Qaeda or any other extremist group to operate again in the areas they control. Whether or not the Taliban kept their side of deal — many analysts believe their links with al Qaeda remain strong — the die was cast.

Of course, ultimate responsibility for the debacle rests with Trump’s Republican predecessors in the Bush administration, which drove the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001 in their fumbled pursuit of Osama bin Laden. As former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr said this week, “They’ll blame Biden, but Afghanistan, like Iraq, was the work of the neo-cons who fooled the Bush administration and seized 9/11 to prove American weaponry could dominate. Tribesmen with Kalashnikovs prevailed.”

The speed with which the Afghan government fell apart over recent weeks has laid bare how thin the veneer of its control was all along, and how utterly dependent it always was on US dollars and the Western military. As Biden rightly postulated, another year, five years or ten years on US life support would not have changed the prognosis for the corrupt and bitterly divided administration — and would have done nothing to blunt the stubborn resistance of the Taliban. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future,” said Biden of the fallen government. “We could not provide them with the will to fight for that future.”

Not surprisingly, the return of the Taliban has triggered alarm around the world. The images from Kabul over recent days seem like a flashback to 1996: a movement frozen in time, at least sartorially, as the same sullen men with beards and turbans brandished their weapons while posing with flags and banners in newly captured government offices, or roamed the largely deserted streets of the city.

It was almost inevitable that thousands of panicked residents remembering the brutal first coming of the Taliban would overrun the airport in a desperate and mostly vain bid to escape from the country. And it was grimly predictable that the women of Kabul — banished from their jobs and schools and ruthlessly suppressed last time around — would flee indoors and hunt for their mothballed burqas.

The decision by president Ashraf Ghani to flee last Sunday — reportedly aboard a plane overloaded with bags of cash — has been denounced by his former political partners and ridiculed by Joe Biden. While Ghani sought to clothe his escape with the virtue of seeking to avoid bloodshed, it is likely the blood he worried most about was his own. He would have been acutely aware that when the Taliban first came to Kabul, his predecessor, the Soviet-installed Mohammad Najibullah, was abducted from his refuge in the United Nations compound and tortured to death, his body dragged through the streets behind a truck before being suspended from a traffic light pole in front of the presidential palace.

While first appearances can certainly be deceptive, the return of the Taliban has so far been remarkably peaceful, a largely bloodless coup. While there were reported episodes of fighting and reprisals as the insurgents swept across the country in the face of token resistance from government forces, their arrival in Kabul this time came without violence or loss of life.

The Taliban leadership, so far at least, has been true to its word. “We want a peaceful transfer of power,” declared spokesperson Suhail Shaheen, as the Taliban forces paused at the entrances to the city, only proceeding as it became clear the regime’s soldiers and police had abandoned their posts. Shaheen told the BBC the Taliban wanted to form an “inclusive” government to run its new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: “There will be no retaliation and revenge.” There would also be an amnesty for those who had collaborated with the former regime and foreign governments: “We once again invite them all to come and serve the nation and the country.”

In a media conference on Tuesday, Taliban representative Zabihullah Mujahid indicated that the new regime would honour its undertakings not to allow the country to again become a sanctuary for terrorism: “We will not be allowing the soil of Afghanistan to be used against anybody.” And he promised that women’s rights would be protected: “All our sisters, all our women are secure… They can work. They can get education. They are needed in our society and they will be actively involved.”

Such pledges should rightly be viewed with great scepticism given the Taliban’s brutal track record, but there are reasons to believe their leadership will proceed more cautiously and perhaps more inclusively this time around. One of the movement’s highest priorities will be to win international legitimacy. Already Russia and China have effectively recognised the new order. Having engineered the negotiations that opened the way for the Taliban’s return, the United States can hardly now deny the reality of that return to power nor, more importantly, fail to acknowledge that for the first time in the modern history of Afghanistan a single political group controls the entire nation.

It was the US’s refusal to allow the Taliban to take Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations after their victory in 1996 that was widely credited with driving the isolated regime into the embrace of Osama bin Laden, who then plotted the devastation of 9/11 from within Afghanistan. Western governments and Afghanistan’s neighbours will be acutely vigilant watching for any signs of a renewed embrace of extremist allies now that the Taliban’s own revolution has been re-won. And the purportedly more pragmatic new leadership group will be mindful that it was the enabling of al Qaeda that visited the wrath of the West on their last government and saw them driven into the political wilderness for twenty years.

As Western governments consider the parameters of their relationships with the new Afghanistan, they would do well to contemplate anew the dangers and costs of adventures in foreign nation-building. Once more Afghanistan has taught a humiliating lesson to foreigners seeking to impose their will and way of life on its proud and ancient civilisation. First, it was the imperial British whose noses were bloodied in a series of presumptuous military campaigns in the nineteenth century. Then it was the Soviet Union, whose ten-year occupation in the 1980s saw 15,000 of its soldiers killed and more than one million Afghans perish before the Russians were driven out by the Mujahideen alliance. Now it is the turn of the United States to make its inglorious exit.

The failure of the latest Afghan misadventure is a failure shared by all of the American allies, including Australia.

Australia stumbled into Afghanistan on the coat-tails of our powerful ally — desperate as ever to ingratiate ourselves by delivering a marginal military contribution. In Vietnam, our war for the asking, as Michael Sexton revealed it to be, cost more than 500 Australian lives. In Afghanistan, we lost forty-one — each of them killed in a fight not of their making. And like their forefathers thrust onto the shores of Gallipoli a century before them, many must have wondered what exactly they were doing on such a strange battleground so far from home.

In the midst of the chaos and confusion of events in Kabul this week, prime minister Scott Morrison had the temerity to cast a military defeat as a success — and to swaggeringly place Australia in a starring role in that supposed success.

“Let me say this about our presence there,” said Morrison. “We went there to stop Osama bin Laden and to stop al Qaeda having a base of operations in Afghanistan. And that’s what was achieved. We were there in the cause of freedom. And every Australian who fell in that cause… is a national hero. And for that we are forever thankful and they’ve died in a great cause.”

A great cause? In fact, despite the bloody invasion of Afghanistan twenty years ago, Osama bin Laden brazenly evaded capture and remained at large for many more years before the Americans finally tracked him down in Pakistan. Al Qaeda was forced to relocate and regroup but would remain a dangerous and elusive terrorist network. In truth, our continued presence beyond these initial military objectives served only to help prolong the violence and instability in Afghanistan. The ambition of building a new and freer society is now exposed as the profligate fantasy that it always was. •

The post Mission unaccomplished appeared first on Inside Story.

One evening I glanced at the rug and couldn’t believe my eyes. I asked my son to corroborate. “Tanks, warships and helicopters,” he said, having already seen them, as an eleven-year-old would, but until then reluctant to say. We laughed at how I’d been diddled. Little did I realise that what lay at our feet was an item of genuine value.

I tell this story because my ignorance was emblematic of the Western attitudes towards Afghanistan that are the overall theme of Tim Bonyhady’s Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium. Bonyhady, a cultural historian, has fashioned a history through imagery, a refreshing approach to a highly complex and often elusive subject. His exploration of the Western boom in war rugs erupting out of Afghanistan’s conflicts is a prime example of his method.

Afghanistan’s history has been shaped by outsiders’ repeated attempts at conquest, in which their arrogance has combined with the fiercely independent spirit of Afghans to produce failure. First the British, then the Russians and later the Americans foundered there. After twenty years the United States has finally pulled out, dragging us Aussies with them, and the Taliban is poised to take over. The book couldn’t be more timely.

Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium spans from the early twentieth century to the September 2001 attack on New York’s twin towers and its aftermath. Apart from its use of various types of imagery as barometers of successive foreign influences and Afghan responses, one other thing distinguishes this book: Bonyhady’s exposure of how that imagery has been greatly misrepresented in foreign media, chiefly because much of it has been shaped by cameras capturing what we foreigners expect to see — a phenomenon that encapsulates for Afghanistan what Edward Said wrote about Orientalism in general.

Take women’s dress. You couldn’t find a more politically loaded symbol of Afghanistan’s vicissitudes, from periods of modernisation to those of fundamentalist backlash, complicated by regional and tribal differences, and all of it responding to foreign influence. Add to that the fact that Western perceptions are largely shaped by developments in Kabul, a city that has both welcomed and discouraged the interest of foreign media.

In the 1920s the country’s Queen Soraya made a show of throwing off traditional dress. A famous photograph has her face bared, her hair fashionably bobbed, and her neck and arms exposed in a sleeveless jewelled gown. As a sign of Afghan women’s new freedoms, it appeared in countless overseas outlets. Many upper- and middle-class Kabul women followed suit, throwing off veils and donning short skirts. Girls in the city were being educated, some were going on to employment, and a few ended up in prestigious careers. In 1929, however, their newfound liberties were cut short. A rebellion against Western influence had women back in chadaris (the Afghan burqa) and it wasn’t until 1959 that Western styles took hold again.

It was in that year that Afghanistan’s prime minister staged an “unveiling” at Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium, signalling the government’s return to women’s advancement. For two decades women enjoyed greater freedom in dress and opportunities, at least in the capital, but this was quashed by a new wave of religious fundamentalism triggered by the onset of mullah rule in neighbouring Iran. Then Soviet-backed communists seized power in Kabul, initiating a swing back to wider horizons for women and another relaxation of the dress code. Some women even became celebrated parachutists.

American and Saudi financial support for the mujahideen meanwhile escalated, “transforming Afghanistan,” Bonyhady writes, “into a prime site of the Cold War and of Islamic fundamentalism.” The Soviets hung on until 1989, then leaving a vacuum that enabled a host of tribal warlords to sweep through the country. Two years later the Soviet Union itself collapsed, and by 1994 the Taliban were in charge. Now, twenty-seven years on, history, in that hackneyed phrase, appears to be repeating itself.

This necessarily brief survey doesn’t begin to do justice to the tremendous detail and nuance Bonyhady brings to his subject. The second “afternoon” of the book’s title, for example, was the 1999 public execution in the Ghazi Stadium of a woman named Zarmeena, in striking contrast to women’s ceremonial “unveiling” on the site forty years before. Convicted of murdering her husband, she was clad in a flowing blue chadari when she was executed by Kalashnikov shots to the back of her head. Members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan filmed the execution with cameras hidden in their chadaris, and the video went viral after one of the RAWA women appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s program.

Zarmeena was most likely innocent, but in such frenzied times any reasonable doubt counted for little in Afghan courts. And Americans, post 9/11, would prove only too eager for evidence of Taliban rigidity. Yet Bonyhady’s portrayal is of an ever-spiralling chaos in which the Taliban themselves were caught. He notes their frequent retraction of edicts in response to popular resistance, and compares them to the warring mujahideens whose bloodlust was far greater. As for their executions, they were fewer than Iran’s or Saudi Arabia’s at the time, or even those by lethal injection in Texas.

While Bonyhady conclusively shows “the heft of the visual,” he also shows how susceptible images are to misrepresentation, not to mention manipulation. He recognises their importance in societies with high levels of illiteracy, yet points to the dangers they hold even in those with literacy rates like our own. Given their central place in his argument, it’s a pity so few images are reproduced in the book.

Still, for an exploration of Afghanistan and its fateful interaction with the West, you couldn’t do better than this book. The wealth and range of its material, combined with its extensive analyses of the status of Afghan women and the roles of posters, photography, television, cinema and pictorial carpets, can make it dense reading, but its map and timeline help with navigation, and I was grateful for the index. The chronological rather than thematic structure can be challenging: its discussion of a single image or artefact — a carpet, say — is set within the various histories of regional carpet weavers, the Western buyers of their carpets and the places they were sold, all in the context of unfolding political developments. A sign of Bonyhady’s breadth, it also means there’s a lot to digest in each chapter.

Finally, if you’re wondering whatever happened to my war rug, all I can say, as a measure of its worth, dear reader, is that it was stolen. •

The post The heft of the visual appeared first on Inside Story.

Those women were part of a movement that stretched back to 1965, when a group of Sydney women calling themselves Save Our Sons, or SOS, began protesting against conscription. They were swiftly dismissed as a bunch of eccentric housewives.

Every picture tells a story, but not necessarily the whole story. In the years since then, memories of Australia’s anti–Vietnam war movement have tended to focus on images of the huge moratorium marches, largely ignoring or downplaying the role of women. Coming across photos of the Sydney protesters almost fifty years later, I too thought I had them pegged, albeit more kindly, as a group of concerned middle-class mums.

As a mother of a teenage boy myself, it wasn’t hard to empathise with Joyce Golgerth, who formed the Sydney SOS after learning that her twenty-year-old son had been picked for conscription in the Menzies government’s conscription “lottery,” a crass spectacle involving an actual bingo barrel. And it was easy to understand why, after the organisation issued a “distress call — SOS — to mothers everywhere,” others were inspired to form their own groups in Townsville, Brisbane, Newcastle, Wollongong, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

But the more I delved into my research, sifting through archives, ASIO files, newspapers, letters and interviews, the more it became clear that SOS involved much more than maternal outrage. Indeed, as the stories started tumbling out it seemed the entire history of the twentieth century was converging on this one phenomenon.

Black-and-white photographs of women in sensible shoes and matching handbags don’t do SOS justice. In my book, Save Our Sons: Women, Dissent and Conscription during the Vietnam War, I wanted to look at the stories behind the images, to present a more nuanced picture of this grassroots movement and of those who joined it.

As I soon learned, there was no typical SOS supporter; many weren’t even mothers. They were young and old; rich and poor; working and non-working; of all political and religious creeds; and they lived on farms and in cities and country towns. Some were well known in peace circles; others had never joined a cause in their lives.

Individual stories stood out: the television celebrity with the radical past; the ambulance driver (now a mother of ten) who had patrolled London during the Blitz; the German migrant whose husband had been part of the SS and who was determined not to be a “fellow traveller” again. I read heartbreaking letters from women who were still living with the fallout from previous wars. One, who had lost all her close male relatives in the second world war, now had two sons of conscription age.

It became clear that history hadn’t given SOS its due: it was one thing to march with thousands of others in 1970, but a different matter altogether to picket an army barracks in 1966. Indeed, SOS was one of the first groups to protest against conscription, and one of the last to put its banners away.

For almost eight years, supporters worked tirelessly, often behind the scenes, assisting young men and their families, and fighting for civil liberties along the way. As the war dragged on, some became more radical: scandalising Melbourne Cup–goers in scanty anti-war fashions; hijacking an evangelical rally; holding parties to fill in false conscription papers; and setting up a series of safe houses to hide draft resisters.

The year following the Canberra protest, five SOS members were jailed after staging a sit-in at a Commonwealth office in Melbourne. Politician and moratorium leader Jim Cairns would later describe it as a turning point in the anti-war campaign (and apologise for not mentioning SOS in his memoirs).

Protesting came at a personal cost. SOS women were followed by ASIO and faced widespread hostility, sometimes within their own families. One woman’s workmates poured hot tea on her (she resigned at once). When ridicule didn’t work, SOS women were derided as communist dupes, bad mothers and neglectful wives.

More surprising was the bitterness of other women; one declared SOS “a disgrace to womanhood,” and members clashed publicly with “white mouse” Nancy Wake, the Australian war hero.

Pinpointing SOS’s legacy is difficult, but as well as their practical contributions, there can be no doubt that these “respectable” women helped widen the appeal of the anti-war movement and made public dissent more acceptable. After SOS, some adopted new causes, including the women’s movement; a few moved into politics. Others, like ballet teacher Edna Gudgeon, quietly resumed their former lives. Asked why she had joined the Canberra chain gang, she summed up the frustration of the times: “Because I cannot seem to reach this government in any other way.” •

The post Gloves off appeared first on Inside Story.

After some initial cold war amnesia, historians in the English-speaking world have, by and large, accepted that the war in Europe was won by the Red Army. Most also agree that, on balance, this was a good outcome. While Stalin’s totalitarianism would victimise millions, it was the lesser evil. And until the Western allies developed significant amphibious capability relatively late in the war, there simply was no alternative: only the Soviets could fight Hitler on the continent.

Recently, however, a new generation of English-language historians have returned to the tune that it was Private Ryan and his friends, or the valiant boys of Bomber Command, who won the war. Stalin and his soldiers, at best, were conduits for American military aid (via Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease scheme).

Now, Sean McMeekin has joined this new assault on the Soviet war record. Born in 1974, he has taken great delight in publishing books designed to increase the blood pressure of historians of an older generation. His biggest coups were a tome about the first world war that claimed, in the words of one reviewer, that Russia was “responsible for everything from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand to the Armenian genocide,” and a history of the Russian Revolution that argued Lenin’s victory showed what happens if you let liberals run a country. Hilariously, it also warned darkly of the new socialism of a Bernie Sanders or a Thomas Piketty.

Stalin’s War might well lead to heart attacks among historians of the second world war. In short, this fast-paced and well-written account argues that the historiography is too obsessed with Hitler, has underestimated the importance of Lend-Lease to the Soviet war effort, and has failed to see that the Soviet dictator was at least as bad as his German colleague. British and US support for the Soviet Union was caused by the leaders’ irrational “Stalinophilia,” not by a realistic assessment of the balance of forces. The Soviets only won because of Western military aid.

Such judgements are based on a caricatured picture of the literature on this war. Neither the authoritative three-volume Cambridge History of the Second World War (2015), nor Evan Mawdsley’s masterful short introduction (2009), for example, apologise for Stalin or concentrate on Hitler. The role of Lend-Lease has been discussed at length, and with significant nuance, including by scholars McMeekin quotes. And historians like Robert Gellately have written damning accounts of Stalin’s goals in war and cold war, which, predictably, are passed over by McMeekin. Don’t let bibliographical research get in the way of a good story.

If McMeekin is cavalier with historians who came before him, he’s often tendentious when it comes to using primary sources. To give one example: the speech of Stalin to the graduates of the Red Army military academies on 5 May 1941 that starts the book, which was published in 1998 in a collection famous among historians. This book is not “out of print today and difficult to find,” as McMeekin claims, but freely available on the internet. To cite the relevant section of the source in full:

Major-general of the tank forces is speaking. He proposes a toast to the peaceful Stalinist foreign policy.

Comrade Stalin: Allow me a correction. The peaceful policy ensured peace for our country. A peaceful policy is a good thing. For the time being, we pursued a line of defence — until we re-equipped our army, provided our army with modern means of fighting.

And now, when we have reconstructed our army, saturated it with equipment for modern combat, when we have become strong — now we need to move from defence to offence.

In order to defend our country, we are obliged to act in an offensive manner. From defence [we have to] transition to a military policy of offensive actions. We have to rebuild our education, our propaganda, our agitation, our press in an offensive spirit. The Red Army is a modern army, and a modern army is an offensive army.

Historians have puzzled over these words. Did Stalin tell his soldiers that he was planning offensive war? Did Stalin have one drink too many at the reception and make off-the cuff remarks he needed to walk back later? Or was this a pep talk to bring the troops into line with military doctrine: that any attack on the Soviet Union would be repulsed aggressively and finished quickly on the opponent’s territory? Each interpretation can be made plausible by citing other evidence, but none is provable beyond a reasonable doubt.

Historians are of course not obliged to tell their readers about every step they took from reading the sources to producing their interpretation. But McMeekin does something else altogether in order to advance his case against Stalin. Here is how he renders the leader’s remarks in his book:

What transpired next was so dramatic, so unexpected, that no one present ever forgot it… Stalin leapt to his feet, cut off the poor lieutenant general, and reproached him for pushing an “out of date policy.” Stalin then moderated his tone, reassuring the officers and party bosses present that the “Soviet peace policy”… had indeed bought the Red Army time to modernise and rearm, while also allowing the USSR to “push forward in the west and north, increasing its population by thirteen million in the process.” But the days of peaceful absorption of new territory, Stalin stated forthrightly, “had come to an end. Not another foot of ground can be gained with such peaceful sentiments.”

The Red Army, Stalin told its future commanders, “must get used to the idea that the era of the peace policy is at an end and that the era of widening the socialist front by force has begun.” Anyone “who failed to recognise the necessity of offensive action,” Stalin admonished, “was a bourgeois and a fool.” The defensive doctrine that had animated strategic planning and war-gaming for a European conflict prior to 1941, he explained, was appropriate only for a weak, unprepared Red Army.

This is not history in the normal sense of the word: a disciplined, if imaginative rendering of the past constrained by what the sources say. The archival account of this speech simply does not have Stalin leap to his feet; he says nothing about an “out of date policy,” a thirteen million population increase, or a push to the west and north. No bourgeois fools and widening fronts. Where does McMeekin get this from? I checked the online version of the source, its hard copy version in the collection he cites from, and the version in the Stalin archive (for which he gives a wrong file number in his footnote). Nowhere could I find words even close to these.

A close reading of the convoluted endnote to this episode and a trip to my university’s library eventually revealed the source: an account by a German diplomat who was not present at the occasion. Published in 1956 and cited in 1985 in a notorious German revisionist history (translated into English in 1987), this version relies on interrogations of captured Soviet soldiers later in the war. It has been dismissed by most historians for obvious reasons, but McMeekin claims that it conforms to other eyewitness accounts. I checked these, too: no such words. Instead, they confirm the more boring Soviet archival version.

The most telling quotations, then, the words that allow McMeekin to prosecute his case against Stalin the alleged warmonger, come from an account far removed from the actual speech and published well before the Soviet archives opened. They have been called “embellishment(s)” by the most in-depth investigation, which McMeekin cites as if it supports his reading (it does not). So much for the revelations from the Soviet archives on which this book is said to be based.

The misleading use of the 1941 speech is not the only technical concern historians might raise with McMeekin’s account. He misquotes a famous Stalin speech of 1931 as having taken place in 1928 (with a footnote leading nowhere); he misplaces Stalin’s deportation of the Soviet Korean population (which happened in 1937 in response to the outbreak of war in Asia) to 1938, allegedly some kind of perverse victory celebration after the Battle of Lake Khasan; he claims that Britain was “grasping for legal straws to avoid entanglement with Stalin” by interpreting the phrase “European power” in the 25 August 1939 Agreement of Mutual Assistance with Poland to mean Germany only (in fact this was explicitly stated in a secret protocol to the agreement); he asserts that the April 1941 neutrality pact with Japan allowed Stalin “to concentrate everything he had on the West,” stripping “his Far Eastern defenses” (in fact, Soviet troop strength in the east never fell below 1.1 million men, with significant military assets deployed throughout the war); etc. etc. His account of the role of US and British aid — central to his argument — is a beautiful polemic that unfortunately obscures the real constellation of forces and is not infrequently undermined by his own evidence.

Most egregiously, McMeekin cites a 1939 forgery of an alleged Stalin speech as authentic, claiming that it was recently “discovered in the Russian archives.” There is, indeed, a copy — in an archive holding foreign-origin documents — and it is a translation from a French original. Even the article McMeekin cites for proof of the authenticity of this document notes that “it seems to originate from an article published in the French La Revue universelle” in 1944. As the most accomplished political historian of Stalinism wrote in a work McMeekin cites himself: “Most historians have never assigned much significance to this forgery. Neither the Politburo archive nor Stalin’s own files contain even circumstantial evidence of such a speech.” But McMeekin cites it — because it fits his plot.

Such examples undermine confidence in McMeekin as a historian. His book makes a lot of arguable points: that Stalin always had one eye on his own Eastern Front, the front with Japan; that he was a Marxist who saw little difference between an English Tory and a German Nazi; that his foreign policy was cynical to an extreme degree, exploiting his allies as much as he could; that in the run-up to the notorious Molotov–Ribbentrop agreement of August 1939 he was far from a passive figure, actively shopping around for the best deal he could get for his country; that the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 was more than just a bloodless sideshow; that the Sovietisation of the newly acquired “western borderlands” in 1939–41 and then again from 1944 was an incredibly violent affair; that Britain and France could have stopped both the German war machine and Stalin’s expansion into eastern Europe had they bombed the Baku oilfields in 1940; that the April 1941 neutrality pact with Japan was a major “coup” with serious strategic consequences; that the Soviets were busily preparing for war with Germany in 1941; that Roosevelt was naive in his dealings with Stalin; and that both the US president and the British PM adopted “an attitude of wilful blindness toward Stalin’s crimes.” He is right, too, in pointing out that many aspects of Stalin’s war make it impossible to tell the story of the second world war as a simple fight of good against evil. But his zeal to completely discredit the Soviet (read: Russian) war effort has seduced him into suspending the critical method his métier demands.

McMeekin has thus done a great service to the history warrior in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin has long complained that Western historians downplay his country’s contribution to victory over Germany and Japan. The Russian president has also offered his own tendentious account of how to properly understand this history. McMeekin’s account is an equally misleading response in a new international history (cold) war. A gifted writer and a talented polemicist, he has lowered the historian’s craft to the level of propaganda. The result is a lamentable step back in our understanding of Stalin and his second world war. Those Russian historians who follow the line laid down in the Kremlin will have a field day with this book as an example of Western distortions of history. McMeekin has made their job rather too easy. •

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The son of an industrial chemist from northern England who brought his family to Australia in 1957, Barton was raised in the working-class Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth and gained degrees in microbiology and biochemistry from the University of Adelaide. But what to do with this classic STEM education?

A vaguely worded advertisement he spotted in the government gazette in 1972 sought a junior scientist for the Department of Defence. He applied, and the job turned out to be an analyst position with Australia’s intelligence assessment agency, the Joint Intelligence Organisation.

Hired by the JIO’s Defence Science and Technical Intelligence directorate, and shuffled into the arcane field of Middle Eastern nuclear chemical and biological weaponry, Barton went on to spend thirty-plus years as an Australian intelligence analyst and assessment officer. His scientific and technical skills, plus some training in spycraft, led him from Canberra to London, Somalia and, ultimately, Iraq, where he found himself in the vortex of the biggest intelligence controversy of our time: the search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, Barton was acting director of intelligence analysis at the Defence Intelligence Organisation. It was his job to brief prime minister Bob Hawke about the risks — chemical, nuclear and biological — facing Australia’s naval vessels supporting the US-led coalition in what we now call the first Gulf war.

“I told him that we knew what kind of chemical agents and weapons Iraq had, and what the [Australian ships] might expect to face in the Gulf region,” writes Barton. “As for nuclear weapons I assured him that Iraq was a decade away, and probably more, from developing a bomb. We had little intelligence on Iraqi biological weapons, and although I thought the threat was low, I believed it would be prudent for our forces to be prepared. He nodded and seemed satisfied with this. Perhaps if he had learned what I discovered later, he would have felt differently.”

These “later” discoveries came through Barton’s intensive work as a weapons inspector in Iraq, where he was a member of the UN inspection teams, UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, under Swedish diplomats Rolf Ekéus and, in the lead-up to the second Gulf war, Hans Blix. Separately, he was attached to GATEWAY, a CIA-run operation to gather intelligence alongside, and about, the UN inspectors. He later joined the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group as special adviser first to David Kay and then to Charles Duelfer.

As recounted by Barton, the life of a weapons inspector involves dangerous field assignments, frustrating interrogations of uncooperative Iraqi scientists and military leaders, jigsaw-like puzzling through caches of seized documents, detailed tracing of the movement of potentially lethal chemicals, and a delicate balancing of international political and intelligence interests. Barton entered smouldering warehouses and bunkers containing stockpiles of unknown chemicals and live munitions, seized documents that revealed sophisticated Iraqi weapons programs, and prepared reports for the UN Security Council.

It is exciting stuff. Barton writes in an easy conversational style with plenty of anecdotes, and he negotiates many of the more confidential passages with the use of false names, nicknames, first names or, sometimes, simply no names at all.

One seized document he studied demonstrated that as early as May 1990 — seven months before the first Gulf war — Iraqi scientists had put that country “on the brink” of making a nuclear bomb. Having briefed Hawke that an Iraqi bomb was at least a decade away, Barton has spent troubled nights wondering if this much more threatening knowledge would have changed Australia’s calculations about the merits of sending those ships to the Gulf in 1991.

The Hawke briefing aside, there is little in this account of what any of the revelations about Iraqi weaponry may have meant for Australian decision-making as part of US president George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” That story is better told in more analytical and comprehensive accounts elsewhere.

Instead, Barton’s target lies elsewhere. A consistent thread through the weave of his narrative is its severe indictment of the intelligence performance of our closest ally. He writes to make a point, to demonstrate how the CIA’s intelligence capacity was distorted by its excessive responsiveness to political pressure.

Barton’s first confidence-shaking experience of CIA intelligence occurred early in his career. In mid 1981 reports emerged from Laos and Cambodia of sickness caused by “yellow rain.” CIA analysis pointed to a chemical agent the Soviet Union was supplying to its Vietnamese allies, leading then US secretary of state Alexander Haig to accuse the Soviets of chemical warfare. For the Australian investigators, though, led by Barton, the data didn’t add up: sickness reports were inconsistent and didn’t tally with the fungal-borne mycotoxins the CIA had identified in the samples.

In their report at the time, Barton and a colleague “concluded that there had been no chemical warfare in Indochina. The CIA had gotten it dead wrong.” Barton explains: “Bees often defecate in swarms, and their faeces falls to the ground in sticky droplets like rain. Since a food source for bees is pollen, their droppings are yellow. What the CIA had actually collected was dried bee poo, some of which had become mouldy, perhaps in transit, and so was contaminated with tiny amounts of toxin.”

Barton attributes the intelligence error to political influence — in other words, the analysis was shaped to fit the political conclusions that had already been announced. He was also shocked by the CIA’s response to his report: a personal letter went to the head of JIO questioning Barton’s analysis and accusing him of “perverse and mischievous” behaviour. The insult clearly rankles with him to this day.

In Iraq, as the drums of war were beating ever more loudly, the CIA was under ever greater pressure to find what it had been told to look for. Indeed, George W. Bush and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, had declared not only that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction existed but also that they posed an existential threat. Barton, by contrast, had become convinced that the Iraqis had destroyed most of their weapons of mass destruction, and that whatever remained was likely to have passed its use-by date — in other words, that the Iraqi program posed no continuing threat.

Yet the United States and Britain accused Iraq of possessing capabilities that the UN inspectors under Blix — and, Barton suspected, the Iraqis themselves — had no knowledge of. Even more emphatically, at the Iraq Survey Group, “everything was premised on the belief that there were hidden weapons out there, and all they had to do was find them.”

This dilemma led the ISG’s first director, the highly regarded David Kay, to walk away. When his successor, Charles Duelfer, was introduced to staff in an excruciating scene witnessed by Barton, CIA director George Tenet bluntly asserted, “Iraq has hidden weapons out there, and it’s your job to find them!” Barton, remembering the saga of the bee poo, concluded: “Politics was once again taking precedence over intelligence findings.”

So it turned out. The intelligence was wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction — or none any longer. “It was the politicians who made the decision to go to war, but it was the massive failure of CIA intelligence that facilitated it,” writes Barton. “In my view the CIA was as culpable as their political masters.” This lesson alone is worth the price of the book.

Barton writes as probably the best-informed Australian on the subject of Iraqi weapons development. His only rival for the title would be diplomat Richard Butler, who followed Ekéus as head of UNSCOM; but though Barton’s involvement was at a lower level, it was for a longer period and arguably gave him more on-the-ground knowledge. Curiously, Barton doesn’t mention Butler at any point.

Even so, it is not entirely clear how an intelligence agent who held senior positions in the Australian system and operated in elite international networks is able to write any sort of memoir. To be fair, much of his account deals with his service with the United Nations, in Mogadishu as well as Iraq, when by definition his activities and reports were ultimately public. But he was employed by Australian intelligence for most of the time and he is still bound, as he acknowledges, by the Official Secrets Act.

Bob Hawke’s 1994 memoir, for example, is much more circumspect about the intelligence briefings he received at this time. Though Barton’s story doesn’t show Hawke in a negative light, I suspect the late prime minister would hardly have approved of discussion of his highly confidential briefings. And for what it’s worth, I doubt that a more accurate representation of the Iraqi nuclear threat would have deterred Hawke, who was determined not to appease an aggressor. •

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So he set out to investigate why the battles in Belgium have been marginalised in the Anzac narrative — despite the fact that the AIF spent more time on the front line in 1917, the worst year of the war for the Australians, than in any other year of the conflict.

The battles of 1917 were downplayed almost immediately within the Anzac tradition. The fighting at Gallipoli in 1915 was seen as the AIF’s first test, and the battles at Fromelles and Pozières the following year as confirmation that the Australians were formidable soldiers. But the limited scope and outcomes at Messines and the increasing criticism of Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig’s planning and execution of the Battle of Passchendaele, as the Third Battle of Ypres is often known, meant the war in Flanders in 1917 was a bitter memory. Moreover, it was overshadowed by the historic formation of the Australian Corps in 1918 and the AIF’s achievements in the final battles of the war, which fit much more easily into the Anzac legend.

Weaving together military and cultural history, Haultain-Gall explains how the very character of the fighting in 1917 influenced how it was remembered. Charles Bean, Australia’s official correspondent and war historian, had been promulgating a narrative of Australian martial masculinity that focused on the skill of the infantry, but “the dominance of the artillery, the pillbox fighting, the sense that victory was near before hopes stuck fast in the quagmire of the salient” sat uneasily within this story.

Bean devoted only one volume of his Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 to the battles of 1917, whereas the Gallipoli campaign and 1918 both earned two volumes. This marginalisation was largely mirrored in unofficial writings about the war, that saw the battles of 1917 become a coda to those of 1915 and 1916, where the Anzacs proved their mettle, or a prequel to their triumphs in 1918.

This is somewhat surprising given that images from 1917 — Frank Hurley’s photograph of Australians walking across duckboards in an otherworldly landscape of the devastated Chateau Wood, for example, and Will Longstaff’s canvas, Menin Gate at Midnight (1927) — are among the most iconic and frequently reproduced depictions of the war. But rather than consolidating a narrative of the AIF’s 1917 battles, such images were used to establish a broader narrative of a futile year for the British and their Allies. The trend continued in the interwar and post–second world war eras, and Australians failed to make a distinctive mark in a landscape where commemorative rituals and practices were imperial rather than national.

The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory is particularly strong in its examination of the role of individuals in shaping memory. Haultain-Gall observes, for instance, that Bean’s writing about 1917 was lacklustre because he was simply too busy — collecting for a future national museum — to cover the fighting of Messines and Ypres as deeply as he had the battles at Gallipoli and Pozières.

Significantly, the book also explores how the memory of the fighting in Flanders was shaped as much by official agents, like Bean, as it was by public demand for meaning and purpose to be wrested from the futility. A chapter on interwar histories, memoirs and novels details how Australian publishers and editors were initially attracted to the disillusionment literature of this period, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). As the war book boom grew, however, publications like Reveille and Smith’s Weekly began criticising works that cast the conflict as pointless. Haultain-Gall points out that the interwar public welcomed Australian soldier-writers’ ability to “salvage purpose from the wreckage of 1914–18” and to create “middlebrow” stories that found meaning in Australia’s war experience. Yet writers found detailing the experience of the Third Battle of Ypres challenging, falling back on grim descriptions that made the success of 1918 all the more dramatic.

Haultain-Gall also notes how opportunities to create a distinctive memorial for Passchendaele were lost. From Bean’s cursory attention in his Official History to prime minister Billy Hughes’s rejection of a national memorial at Broodseinde, he explores how Australia’s presence in Belgium was sidelined. This neglect in the interwar years meant there was little in Flanders to provide an anchor for the reinvented Anzac legend that, having shrugged off its imperial ties, emerged in the 1990s as part of the new nationalism. Instead, Villers-Bretonneux became an important site of national remembrance, and Messines and the Third Battle of Ypres remained on the periphery. The lasting effect on the campaign’s place in the Anzac legend was seen in the modest Polygon Wood centenary commemoration in 2017, which was outstripped tenfold the following year at the Villers-Bretonneux ceremony.

Memory-making is a process of contest, struggle and, sometimes, annihilation. Drawing on an impressive range of material, including the Official History, unit histories, magazines, art, photographs, literature, film, television, rituals and monuments, Haultain-Gall traces how this process played out during the evolution of the Anzac legend over a century.

This book is as much about how and why Australians forgot the war of 1917 as it is about remembering it. The battlefields of Messines, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde were, it turns out, perishable and held a precarious place in the emergence and reinvention of the Anzac legend. The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory reminds us of the fallibility and fragility of memory and provides a fresh and important addition to Australia’s military history. •

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The poem reminds me of country drives. You stop for a break, and on the way back to the car you glance across at the town’s war memorial and frown, wondering if you should pause. If someone had the decency to put a memorial there — no, if someone had the decency to volunteer for war in the first place — the least you can do is spend five minutes having a look.

You wander over to read the names inlaid, and marvel at the men, obviously from the same family, who all joined up, quite possibly breaking their parents’ hearts. You circle the memorial respectfully so as not to neglect names from later conflicts, or the names of the occasional Boer war man or army nurse. But the wind whips up and you go back to the car. Doors shut, you turn up the music and get on your way.

A curious traveller might pull out their phone. Many websites are now dedicated to Australian war memorials and monuments, putting biographical flesh on the names they list. A few taps will bring you the service record of every Australian enlistee in both world wars, kept in the National Archives of Australia.

Twenty-three years after Page’s poem came the pivotal academic work on war memorials, historian Ken Inglis’s masterly Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (written with Jan Brazier). Despite those earlier fears, interest in Anzac, and in the history of the first world war especially, has not withered. Quite the contrary: our last man might have long passed away, but his memory is kept alive by many, many commemorative shillings.

“Every town has one…” Yes, so it feels, as if small-town and suburban memorials have always dotted the Australian landscape. And yet there must have been a time during and after the first world war when no town had one, when no names were inlaid. What did families do when they began, painfully, to accept that the empty place at the dinner table would never be filled? How would the memory of their son or husband be kept alive not just for now, but for the future?

Historians have written extensively about mourning and commemorative practices in Australia during and after the first world war, and about whether and how they brought consolation to the bereaved. These are not new questions, and indeed they were not in the front of my mind when I came across a photograph of a woman named Fanny Cooper in the Australian War Memorial’s collection. This studio photo with her son Louis was taken in Launceston shortly after he enlisted in October 1916.

Fanny Cooper with her son, Private Louis Cooper, in late 1916. Australian War Memorial

It was the image of Fanny that gave me pause. I wondered instantly who this beautiful, sad-eyed woman could possibly be. She seemed old enough to be Louis’s grandmother rather than his mother. Patient resignation is written on her face, as if she has known tragedy and is steeling herself for more. And it came. Louis served on the Western Front with the 12th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, but in July 1918 he died of broncho-pneumonia in a military hospital in England. Such is the ready availability of records these days that it took very little effort to establish these facts. The lad in the photograph did not come home. What then of his mother?

The Coopers lived in Longford, a small town about a twenty-minute drive south of Launceston. The family made no special mark on history and apparently left no personal letters or diaries in public archives or libraries. But the National Archives holds Louis’s pay file and service records, and in these I found a few letters from Fanny to military authorities seeking information about this and that. Not much, and little to tell me about her life or character.

Now fully immersed in this story, I kept digging and turned, inevitably, to local newspapers. The Launceston papers, the Examiner and the Daily Telegraph, routinely covered events in this and other northern districts. For decades historians have been using local papers to recover myriad small but telling details of people’s lives, but digitised newspapers now make this astoundingly quick. They open new paths for searching across places and associations with church, school, sport, leisure and work. This is how I recovered the Cooper family’s war story.

Fanny was the daughter of Isaiah Briggs, a saddler by trade and stalwart of Longford’s Methodist church, and his wife, Maria. One of Fanny’s sisters married the brother of Walter Lee, a Longford man from a Methodist family that ran a business making agricultural implements. Lee rose to prominence as a Tasmanian parliamentarian and, as Sir Walter Lee, was three-time premier of the state. Fanny married William Cooper, a painter and decorator, in 1880. Large families were still common then; Fanny was one of ten children, and she and William had six sons and five daughters. All eleven survived infancy, but their daughter Elsie died of typhoid in 1904, aged seventeen, and in 1910 two of their grandsons died in a horrific fire, aged just six and four.

Louis was the only one of Fanny’s sons to enlist, but by the time he did, seven of her nephews had enlisted and three had died. It is no wonder that, by then, Fanny looked all of her fifty-seven years.

The Coopers were at their property at Liffey when the dreaded telegram arrived in July 1918 announcing Louis’s death. For some years the family had divided their time between Longford and Liffey. The Liffey River drains the cliffs of Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers and meets the Meander river near Carrick. It is an area of wild beauty, known today for its protected wilderness areas and especially for the famous Liffey Falls. In the Coopers’ time, families ran small  farms in the valley, grew vegetables and fruit, and trapped rabbits and marsupials for their fur.

The Cooper property appears to have been a mixture of farm and orchard, and provided extra income and employment for the Cooper sons beyond the family painting and decorating business in Longford. The Coopers sent Louis and perhaps some of their youngest children to the school at Liffey, but although there is a Baptist church there the Coopers worshipped at the Methodist church in nearby Bracknell, where William was a lay preacher.

A path towards acceptance? The former Liffey state school, site of an early honour board and tree-planting. Edward Condé

Among the first things William and Fanny did after hurrying back to Longford was place an “In Memoriam” notice for Louis in the Daily Telegraph headed “Duty nobly done.” A few weeks later, at Bracknell on 16 August 1918, a memorial tree-planting was held at the recreation ground. Premier Sir Walter Lee attended the event along with local councillors and clergy, and addressed the crowd. His wife, Margaret, planted the first tree in honour of Colin Saunders, killed at the landing on Gallipoli, who was the district’s first soldier to die. The relatives of twelve other soldiers then planted trees, the last one being for Louis Cooper. He had not been dead a month at that point. His parents must still have been reeling.

This was several years — many years, in some cases — before permanent war memorials were established in Australian towns and cities. Ken Inglis has noted that expenditure on lavish monuments was discouraged during the war because all fundraising was directed to the war effort. Afterwards, local communities took so long to raise the money and settle upon the form and the site for their memorials that it was too late, Inglis thought, for them to serve as sites of immediate healing or consolation for many bereaved relatives. Anzac and Remembrance Day observances were still only in a formative state.

In the meantime, families needed something, somewhere to go, something to do, beyond their private grieving. This is what a funeral is for, after all. The Coopers and 60,000 other families had no body to bury or funeral to arrange, and no one knew when or how permanent memorials would be established. In the meantime, tree-plantings must have been a response to a hunger for ritual.

In Tasmania in the spring of 1918, with the war still going on, public tree-plantings were occurring all over the state — in fifty towns, according to one estimate. The trees were usually planted along major roads as “soldiers’ avenues.” They drew on a longer-standing practice: community tree-plantings as civic beautification projects had been a feature of Empire Day celebrations each 24 May, possibly based on an American tradition known as Arbor Day. Australia’s nationwide tree-planting movement — both to encourage enlistment and to mark the sacrifice of men of the district who had volunteered and died — began in 1916, promoted by returned soldiers’ associations and state recruiting committees. A major memorial avenue of 520 trees was established on Hobart’s Queen’s Domain in 1918 and 1919. These were planted solely for the dead, but in some towns there were plantings for all known volunteers.

Not a huge amount of money or coordination was required to clear and prepare land to establish soldiers’ avenues, and councils or local committees raised the funds to cover the costs of trees, tree guards and name plates or boards. Although they were usually secular affairs, a local clergyman would typically make a speech, and there would be hymns. “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” was the most popular, and the assembled crowds would salute the flag and sing the national anthem.

Tree-plantings didn’t have to be gloomy. The town of Cressy, about ten kilometres south of Longford, was described as “en fête” for the planting of its sixty trees, and the ceremony at Exton featured games and races for the children. People were often encouraged to support the latest national war loan, and a word of thanks would be put in for the Red Cross. Families gathered for photographs. Children might help plant the trees, although surely no one in these rural towns minded getting a bit of dirt on their knees. Proceedings invariably concluded with an afternoon tea provided by a committee of local women.

About 150 trees were planted along several of Longford’s major streets on 24 August 1918, a few weeks after the event at Bracknell. Premier Lee was again in attendance. He paid tribute to the bereaved parents of the district and declared his belief that trees were a much better way of “keeping green” the memory of those who had enlisted than the “rearing of a marble monument,” because the trees “would grow and live for many years.” The names were too numerous to be noted by the local press, but it seems likely that Louis Cooper was among those memorialised. Anyone who had “a boy at the front” could plant a tree as long as they promised to look after it.

Less than a month later, in the grounds of the Liffey state school on 15 September 1918, the Coopers had another tree-planting to attend. Basil Archer — a member of the Longford Municipal Council, Methodist lay preacher, and scion of one of northern Tasmania’s wealthy landowning families — did the honours this time. Again, the first tree was dedicated to Colin Saunders. (Five Saunders men — four brothers and a cousin — had enlisted and three had died, a fact that was probably the stuff of legend in the district.) A tree was planted for Louis Cooper.

As years passed, though, most soldiers’ avenues, even the large one in Hobart, fell into disrepair. Relatives who had tended to “their boy’s” tree, who had gathered there to spend a moment remembering or even have a picnic, gradually moved away or died. Councils ceased to pay attention. Trees died or were cut down to make way for other developments. Guards and name boards were lost. Memories were not “kept green.” Rather than being “inlaid,” the names were usually painted, impermanently, on timber.

At some point Longford’s council removed the name boards for refurbishment, after which they were forgotten and finally disposed of, apparently with no record kept. Were it not for newspaper reports, the existence of many soldiers’ avenues would be almost impossible to trace. In 2015 the little community in Liffey replanted their commemorative trees on the site of the old ones, and marked each with a new metal plate. Likewise, volunteers in Hobart have restored the soldiers’ avenue and launched a website explaining the history of this and other Tasmanian avenues. It keeps the memory digital.

Tree-plantings were one form of community response to the loss of sons and husbands. Honour boards were another, and here again we benefit from the efforts of volunteers in recent times to locate and digitally document artefacts scattered across sometimes obscure places.

Honour boards were unveiled in churches, schools, workplaces and community halls: hundreds in Tasmania, thousands across the country. Most consisted of lists of names painted onto a timber plaque, or “tablet” as they were sometimes called, perhaps embellished with elaborate carvings. Some were merely painted or printed on paper and framed. As with soldiers’ avenues, the same names would be repeated in different places, or sometimes omitted entirely for reasons impossible to recover now. No official coordination was undertaken, and few precedents or traditions existed. People just did what they felt was right.

Louis Cooper is named on a large, printed honour board dedicated to hundreds of men of the Longford district, which includes enlistments as well as deaths. It looks like a commercial effort by a publishing company, and evidently someone who was not local has gathered the names because all five of the Saunders men are erroneously called Sanders.

The same mistake was not made on the honour board for fifteen men from Liffey state school (now a community hall), which includes the Saunders men as well as Louis Cooper. A more elaborate board dedicated to “the mothers in sympathy and in memory of those sons from Longford who fell during the Great War” was unveiled in Longford in 1920. Twenty-six men are named, including Louis and two cousins, Guy Briggs and Charles Lee. Curiously, Louis was not included on the Bracknell town honour board even though his parents planted a tree for him there.

He is named on the honour board unveiled at the Mountain Vale Methodist church, however. A settlement principally based on sawmilling grew up in this area south of Liffey towards Blackwood Creek in the 1860s. The church served as a school building as well. Although the village was in decline by the early twentieth century, fifteen volunteers, including Louis Cooper, are recorded on the honour board. Six had died. The church has been dismantled and the honour roll is now kept at the Liffey Baptist Church.

Back in Longford, in May 1922, a memorial window was unveiled at the Methodist church, commemorating the loss of Louis Cooper and six other men from the parish. After the hymns and addresses, the assembled stood in silent prayer as Basil Archer drew aside the Union Jack to reveal the window. Its central feature is a crusader in armour with sword and crown, surrounded by the words “Faithful unto Death” and “I Have Fought the Good Fight.”

Longford’s permanent memorial was finally unveiled in Victoria Park, in the centre of town, in August 1922. It is a black granite obelisk with fifty-three names inlaid, including Louis Cooper’s. By then his name had been honoured with three tree-plantings, three honour boards and a church window, meaning that the Coopers had put his name forward for commemorative projects no fewer than eight times in four years. I have no doubt they and their family attended every single planting and unveiling.

We can read accounts of all these events, but we can only imagine the social interactions: the greetings among neighbours and extended kin, the consoling hand on a shoulder, the stories told in odd moments between formalities. Ageing parents listen eagerly to men who had been to the war and come back, keen for anything that could help them understand how their son had died. Over cups of tea, they might grumble about how slow military authorities were to pass on information but also share some of their son’s letters and mementos, perhaps even a pocket diary sent home with his last effects. Clergymen murmur words of consolation. Young men who had not volunteered stand apart talking among themselves. Children dodge about, gobbling cake while trying to look solemn.

Community events like this gave the bereaved a space within which to renew social connections and compose a story of the war that they could live with. They would see roughly the same people and hear the same speeches from the same local worthies at events held sometimes only weeks apart. The very repetition might have been comforting. Everyone had heard all the rhetoric before, of course, but that didn’t matter. Seeing their boy’s name listed in public among the others was what mattered. If that helped to define and externalise their loss, a path towards acceptance might just have been possible.

Fanny Cooper would have known that Louis might not come back. Other women in her community, including her own sisters, had already been bereaved by the time mother and son posed for their photograph in a studio in Launceston in late 1916, he in his newly issued uniform and she in her best dress. How could any parent live with that awful uncertainty? That is the mystery preserved in the photograph; that is what draws our eyes to hers. •

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The Argylls had been in the thick of some of the heaviest fighting down the peninsula over the preceding weeks, and their number had been reduced to just ninety men. But they departed the mainland in style early on the morning of 1 February, watched by the Scottish journalist and novelist Eric Linklater: “Their pipers played their own regiment out of Malaya. The morning sun was already hot when the still air was broken by ‘A Hundred Pipers’ and ‘Heilan’ Laddie.’” Then, with “steady bearing and their heads high” the Highlanders marched “from a lost campaign into a doomed island.”

The last to make the crossing over the causeway linking the island and the mainland was the Argylls’ commanding officer, Colonel Ian Stewart, with his batman Drummer Hardy and a pet dog on a leash. Accompanying them were Lieutenant Doug Lush and the men from his J Section, who had formed the last Australian Signals Corps unit deployed on the mainland. In the final moments, a wave of twenty-seven Japanese planes swept over the area, dropping about fifty bombs on the retreating troops.

When Colonel Stewart and Lieutenant Lush reached the island side of the causeway, the Japanese shelling intensified and most of the troops dived for cover in slit trenches. To Lush’s astonishment, Stewart stepped forward, ignoring the danger, to be greeted by Brigadier Harold Taylor, commanding officer of the Australian 22nd Brigade. “Colonel Stewart saluted and simply said, ‘Good morning, Brigadier,’” recalled Lush. “The Brigadier returned the salute, both of them standing to attention in the midst of the shelling.”

After the last of the men had crossed, depth charges laid along a twenty-five-metre section of the causeway were detonated. The ferocious explosion sent a column of debris flying into the air and water coursing through the gap. With the severing of the last physical link to the mainland, “Fortress Singapore” was now alone to face its fate. In less than two months the Japanese army had swept aside almost a century and a half of British hegemony in Malaya, driving the combined British, Indian and Australian defending force 800 kilometres down the Malayan peninsula and into a state of siege on Singapore island.

Having installed himself in the sultan’s palace in Johore Bahru, the triumphant General Tomoyuki Yamashita surveyed his trapped quarry from a glass-domed observation tower while plotting their final defeat. The great British naval base “lay beneath one’s eyes,” his intelligence officer, Colonel Tsuji, observed, and Tengah airfield “appeared as if it could be grasped in the hand.”

The fighting had exacted a terrible toll. The Allies had suffered more than 19,000 casualties — killed, wounded or missing in action. The Japanese casualties, at 1793 dead and 2772 wounded, were less than a quarter of that. Many more were to perish on both sides in the days ahead, but Yamashita chose to pause for a week to regroup and refine his plans for the Battle of Singapore. Inexplicably, and to the disgust of many of the Australian troops, no attempt was made to shell him in his palatial redoubt.

During a visit to Singapore on 20 January 1942, General Sir Archibald Wavell, the commander-in-chief of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific, had been convinced that the Japanese would launch their invasion along the northwest coast of the island. The Johore Strait was narrowest in this sector, and a number of river mouths on the mainland side provided potential cover for launching amphibious landing craft.

Wavell believed this would be the place to deploy the freshest and strongest troops, the British 18th Division, most of whom arrived on 29 January. Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, the British commander in Malaya, strongly disagreed. He thought the attack was most likely to come down the Johore River and on the eastern side of the island. In the end, despite Wavell’s growing concern that Percival was not the “really vigorous, ruthless personality” needed to organise the defence of Singapore, Percival prevailed. It would be a fateful decision for the island, and for the men of the Australian 8th Division.

Percival ordered the Australian 22nd and 27th Brigades to deploy along the northwest coast and sent the 18th Division and the best of the remaining Indian troops to the northeast. In the northwestern sector, Brigadier Harold Taylor and his 22nd Brigade troops faced a massive challenge with severely limited resources. Their task was to defend an eight-mile front with just three battalions — half the number of men deployed along an eight-mile section of coastline near Changi on the island’s northeast coast.

The terrain — largely mangrove swamp and mud flats — was an operational nightmare. One officer with the 2/19 Battalion would complain that he and his men had been “dumped in a scraggy waste of stunted rubber and tangled undergrowth, apparently miles from anywhere, our vision limited to the next rise in the undulating ground and our means of movement confined to a few native foot tracks winding through the wilderness.” Lieutenant Frank Gaven of the 2/20th Battalion was appalled at the sight: “I have never felt such a feeling of desperation in all my life. I then realised that forward defence in this situation was an impossible task.”

As Wavell had predicted, the onslaught came from the west. At dawn on 8 February, the Japanese launched a severe bombardment of Singapore and heavy artillery attacks on the areas held by the Australian brigades. At first, the shelling of the western sector was considered to be either a feint or merely part of a general “softening up” operation. But as the attack intensified through the day, the Japanese plan became clear.

It was the Australians’ first experience of heavy shellfire and many were shocked and even traumatised by the ordeal. The 2/18 Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Varley, who had endured the German shelling of Pozières in 1916, said he had never experienced “such concentrated shellfire over such a period” in the four years of the first world war. Major General Gordon Bennett, whose 8th Division headquarters had been targeted during the morning, visited Taylor and found him “somewhat shaken.” Taylor had good reason to be agitated. His desperate efforts to call in artillery support had been rebuffed and his superiors had not assembled reserves behind his men or prepared a reserve line.

The Japanese struck just after 10.30pm. The first men from a force of sixteen battalions boarded a flotilla of motorboats, many of them towing rafts, and raced towards the positions held by the 2/18th and 2/20th battalions. The Australians responded with intense fire from their Vickers machine guns and a barrage of grenades but were soon overwhelmed. The 2/20th alone would lose more than 400 men as the waves of landing Japanese surged over and around them. Throughout the night and through the following day Taylor’s brigade was pushed back as the Japanese captured their initial objective, Tengah airfield.

Around 9am on 9 February a second Japanese force came ashore in the area between the causeway and the Kranji River held by Brigadier Duncan Maxwell’s 27th Brigade. The Japanese fell back after huge oil storage tanks near the causeway were blown up, sending more than nine million litres of burning oil flooding across the strait. But by the morning of 10 February they were comfortably ashore and had most of northwest Singapore under their control.

Throughout the first days of the fighting on the island, Lieutenant Doug Lush had been detached to work as 22nd Brigade Signals Officer, working alongside Brigadier Taylor. Lush was responsible for keeping Taylor in touch with the various units under his brigade command. It was a challenging task. The preliminary bombardment by the Japanese had severed most of the telephone lines running to the companies on the front lines. And the brigade’s wireless sets had only returned from servicing the morning of the Japanese landings, while the smaller and less powerful battalion sets proved to be of little use.

Despite these setbacks, the signallers worked feverishly to maintain communications. As Lieutenant Colonel Roland Oakes would later write, “From the shelter of a slit trench in which I was crouching, I saw a regimental signaller lying in the open nearby, in the middle of a severe shelling bout, transmitting messages on a line phone he had connected up. And this was typical of the whole tribe throughout the campaign.”

On the afternoon of 9 February, the decision was made to relocate Taylor’s headquarters from Bukit Timah to a villa on Holland Road, several miles closer to the centre of the city. A night of hectic activity followed as the signals team packed up the large quantities of stores and equipment. In the early hours of the morning, the Japanese began shelling and bombing the area, and several quartermaster staff who were among the last to leave narrowly escaped being hit. The teams immediately began work laying cable from their new Holland Road office, led by Doug Lush.

The signallers were increasingly being called on to fight as well as to maintain the brigade’s precarious communications. Just before the move to Holland Road, several signallers from Lush’s cable party had been wounded in a desperate effort to silence a menacing Japanese machine gun located nearby. Leading the brigade, Major Rex Beale had ordered several of the signallers to arm themselves with grenades and join him in an attack on the machine gun position. As they made their way forward, one of the signallers, Lance Sergeant Geoff Bingham — who would be awarded the Military Medal for his bravery during the Singapore fighting — was hit in the hip and had to be carried away by Signaller Todd Morgan.

“Major Beale was also hit in the hip,” Lush would recount, “because there was a bit of a contour between our men and this Japanese position, and once they got up over this contour the Jap machine gunners began firing low and, of course, this was hitting our fellows at about waist height, although Bobby Hook, another of the attackers, was only a little chap and this gun got him in the chest. Morgan also picked up Bobby Hook and carried him back to our position.” Hook and Major Beale were later taken to the Alexandria Hospital, and were killed by the Japanese when they captured the hospital. “Bingham had been far luckier,” added Lush, “instead being conveyed to the St Andrew’s Cathedral, which was now being used as a main medical post. He would later recover from his wounds.”

By 12 February the situation was rapidly deteriorating. The 22nd Brigade could muster just 800 men from the three infantry battalions and the machine gun battalion that had started the battle with roughly 3400 men. Two days later, the 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Anketell, was mortally wounded. After Harold Taylor collapsed from exhaustion and was hospitalised, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Varley was promoted to command the 22nd Brigade.

The Allied troops faced an impossible situation after the Japanese captured the MacRitchie Reservoir and water became desperately scarce for both the civilian population and the many wounded being cared for in various hospitals. Percival was left with no choice. He sent his last telegram to Wavell on 15 February: “Owing to losses from enemy action, water, petrol, food and ammunition practically finished. Unable therefore to continue the fight any longer. All ranks have done their best and are grateful for your help.”

Late that afternoon, Percival drove with a sombre posse of senior officers to the shell-damaged Ford Motor Factory near Bukit Timah village where, after a brief and terse meeting with General Yamashita, he signed the document of surrender at 7.50pm. As historian Mark Clisby would write, “With the signing of these terms of surrender, 100,000 Allied soldiers, including nearly 15,000 Australians, would be led into captivity. After only eight weeks of fighting, the Japanese were the undisputed masters of Singapore and the entire Malayan Peninsula.” •

This is an edited extract from The Emperor’s Grace: Untold Stories of the Australians Enslaved in Japan During World War II (Monash University Publishing).

The post The fall of Singapore appeared first on Inside Story.

Kaufmann had turned ninety-seven in January. Virtually anybody who reaches such a ripe old age has led a life worth making into a film — or writing about, for that matter. Kaufmann’s story, that of a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an Australian writer and then moved to the old East Germany, was particularly rich.

Any biography is shaped by the letters, diaries and other sources available to the biographer. In Kaufmann’s case, much could be made of the thick files created by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in the 1950s, and those of ASIO’s East German equivalent, the Stasi, between the 1950s and the 1980s.

Even more might be made of Kaufmann’s own writings, including at least a dozen books that could be classified as either autobiographical fiction or memoir. But the life depicted by oneself is not necessarily any more accurate than the life that can be winnowed from the observations of outsiders, who in Kaufmann’s case included spies and informers. And in a life spanning nearly ten decades, many aspects won’t have been recorded by other people or deemed worth remembering by the subject himself.

The omissions start with Kaufmann’s early life. He was born Jizchak Schmeidler (or perhaps Sally Jizchak Schmeidler) on 19 January 1924 in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, a neighbourhood dominated by Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. His mother Rachela, originally from Poland, was among them. Aged seventeen when Jizchak was born, she was working as a shop assistant at a department store. That’s all we know about her; when Jizchak was three, she gave him up for adoption. We can only guess why.

His new parents were a couple from far-flung Duisburg, a city in the Ruhr Valley in the west of Germany. His adoptive father, Sally Kaufmann, had fought and been decorated in the first world war and afterwards practised as a lawyer and notary. Sally’s wife Johanna had been to art school, but her dreams of becoming an artist remained unfulfilled. Jizchak had no siblings, but later in life speculated that he may have been adopted not because his adoptive parents were childless but because Sally was also his biological father. But we simply don’t know why and how young Jizchak and his mother entered the Kaufmanns’ lives.

Jizchak, who became Walter upon his adoption, grew up in a well-to-do bourgeois household. Like his biological mother, his adoptive parents were Jewish. The family observed the high holidays, young Walter was required to take Hebrew classes, and Sally for many years chaired Duisburg’s Jewish congregation. Like many German Jews, though, the Kaufmanns were not overly religious.

The anti-Semitism of the Nazis, which would have such an impact on Walter’s life, didn’t come out of nowhere. A pogrom had occurred in the Scheunenviertel only a couple of months before Walter was born there, with Jews assaulted (and one of them killed) and their businesses looted. But the systematic discrimination against Jews, and their exclusion from public life in Nazi Germany would have come as a shock to the Kaufmanns. In early November 1938, during the so-called Reichskristallnacht pogroms, Sally Kaufmann was taken for a time to the Dachau concentration camp and the Kaufmanns’ house was ransacked while Walter and his mother hid in the basement.

The violence convinced the Kaufmanns that Walter, at least, needed to be sent to safety, and in January 1939, on his fifteenth birthday, he left on a Kindertransport to England. There he attended the New Herrlingen boarding school in Faversham, Kent. In June 1940, when the Battle of Dunkirk forced the British government to prepare the country for a German invasion, sixteen-year-old Walter was among the many recently arrived “enemy aliens” to be arrested. Then, together with more than 2000 other German and Austrian refugees, he was sent to Australia on the infamous Dunera and interned in a camp in the western NSW town of Hay. Under “reason for internment,” the dossier created by the Australian military authorities stated incongruously: “Enemy Alien — Refugee from Nazi oppression.”

Released from Hay in March 1942, Kaufmann joined the Australian army — or rather, the 8th Employment Company, which provided an opportunity for “refugee aliens” to contribute to the war effort. Still with the army, he applied for an Australian entry permit for his parents; by then, however, they had been deported, first to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and then to Auschwitz, where they were killed. They shared the fate of the hundreds of Jews from Duisburg who became the victims of Nazi persecution. (The letters Johanna and Sally Kaufmann wrote to their son in England and in Australia are about to be published as a book.)

In 1944 Kaufmann married Tasmanian-born Barbara Dyer, who was eleven years older than him. They had met while she was working as an officer for army intelligence — a job she lost because of the relationship. (Kaufmann may have been in the army, but he was still an alien from Germany.) He was naturalised after the war was over, in 1946.

Kaufmann had begun to write fiction, in English, while he was still with the army, and by the end of the war was already a published author. In 1944, his short story “The Simple Things” won him the first of many literary prizes. He joined the Melbourne Realist Writers Group, a group of left-wing authors, and became friends with Frank Hardy and David Martin, the latter himself a Jewish refugee who had fled Germany in 1934. Martin in particular encouraged him to write about his experiences in Nazi Germany.

Kaufmann’s first novel, Voices in the Storm, an account of anti-fascist resistance and the coming of age of a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, was published in 1953 by the Australasian Book Company, which had been set up by a group of like-minded authors. He later recalled that he himself sold 2000 copies of the book by hawking it at wharfs, mines and other workplaces during fifteen-minute stop-work meetings.

While he continued to write, Kaufmann worked in a wide range of jobs, including as a wedding photographer and a seaman. In 1955, the Seamen’s Union sent him to the Fifth World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw. There he met an East German publisher who convinced him that his writings, including Voices in the Storm, would find a receptive audience in communist East Germany — the German Democratic Republic, to give it its formal name, or GDR. Travelling from Warsaw to Berlin, he not only met fellow writers at a GDR writers’ congress, but also searched unsuccessfully for his biological mother.

Walter Kaufmann (third from left, standing) with other members of the Australian delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw in 1955. National Archives of Australia

Kaufmann found himself attracted to the prospect of becoming a writer in a country where people tried to live according to the philosophy he and his Australian comrades were preaching. For the first time since 1939, a return to Germany presented itself as an option. But first he went back to Australia as an attaché with the German team that attended the Melbourne Olympic Games.

After a lecture tour in which Kaufmann talked about his European travels (which had also led him to the Soviet Union), he and his wife moved to East Germany — or, in his words, he “returned home to foreign parts.” Unlike another Australian who migrated to East Germany at around the same time, the anthropologist Fred Rose, Kaufmann didn’t leave Australia because he felt victimised for his political convictions. (All he shared with Rose was a tendency to philander.)

The secretary of the GDR writers’ association had told him that he could be more useful in the West than in the East, but a short visit to his home town on his first trip back to Europe had convinced him that he wasn’t welcome there. His parents’ house was now occupied by strangers who did not even ask him inside.

By the time he arrived in East Berlin, however, the deal that had initially attracted him to East Germany had fallen through. The East German authorities deemed parts of the plot of Voices in the Storm to be against the party line and demanded that he rewrite the book. Kaufmann refused. But he used some of the autobiographical material that informed his first novel to write another book, which was allowed to be published. And despite this early setback, he could be a professional writer in the GDR, something that would not have been possible in Australia.

Back in Australia, Kaufmann had been a member of the Communist Party, but he later recalled neither wanting nor being able to join East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party. One prerequisite would have been taking out GDR citizenship, which he declined to do. Retaining his Australian citizenship meant he could travel the world.

And he did: to Western Europe, Asia and the Americas, including several times to the United States. As a roving reporter, he covered the Cuban revolution and the court case against the American civil rights activist Angela Davis in the early 1970s. His journeying provided him with the material that helped him become arguably East Germany’s most widely read travel writer.

Much of his writing about foreign places is reportage in the tradition of the “racing reporter” of the 1920s and 1930s, Egon Erwin Kisch. Although probably not as accomplished a writer as Kisch, Kaufmann too married social critique with travelogues. And his occupation as a travel writer and foreign correspondent at large was also an opportunity to escape, albeit only temporarily, the confines of East Germany’s insularity. He let his readers share in these escapes, and they loved him for it.

He also wrote short stories, novels and books for children. By the time the Berlin Wall came down, Kaufmann had published twenty-six books in German and was part of the country’s literary establishment. His standing is evident in the fact that in 1984 he was able to publish Flucht, a book about a medical doctor who left the GDR for West Germany.

When all his publishers went out of business after reunification, the sixty-six-year-old Kaufmann began a new career, as a German, rather than an East German, writer. He must also have realised that he had to move on from the travel writing that had made him a household name; with air travel now possible and affordable, his readers no longer needed the window on the world that he had been able to provide.

Much of Kaufmann’s post-1990 writing is autobiographical. There was a market for that too, but he didn’t enjoy the same success that had marked his career in the GDR. And although he began to publish books with West German publishers, he also contributed regularly to two daily newspapers that have acted as reminders of a bygone era, and of a state that ceased to exist in 1990: the Neues Deutschland, formerly the paper of the Socialist Unity Party, and the Junge Welt, which used to be published by the Free German Youth, the GDR’s official youth organisation. Kaufmann’s last Junge Welt article, a review of a book of poems by another nonagenarian, the East German writer Gisela Steineckert, appeared about a month before his death.

Kaufmann had felt less at home in the GDR than in Australia. But, he told an interviewer, the GDR “became my home when it had gone.” He reasoned that this was because he felt he had been taken care of there, both as a person and as a writer.

A Jew in Nazi Germany, an enemy alien in wartime England, a communist in Robert Menzies’s Australia, an Australian in East Germany, and somebody with a GDR identity in the reunified Germany: throughout his life, Kaufmann didn’t quite belong. Sometimes that was because he had been excluded; at other times, it was because he cultivated the sense of detachment that also characterises some of his writing.

For most of his life in East Germany, he wasn’t a foreigner just because of his Australian passport. Initially, he even spoke German with an Australian accent. And he continued to write in English. All the books he published in his first twenty years in Germany had to be translated. The way he tells the story, he eventually taught himself to write in German after a Melbourne publisher reissued Voices in the Storm in the early 1970s. When he took the opportunity to submit the book again for publication in the GDR, the text was approved without changes — with the proviso that it be translated by the author himself. Stimmen im Sturm, published in 1977, thus became the first book he wrote in German. He recalled that it was hard work to turn his English prose into German, but by the end of it, he had graduated from a German writer of English to a writer of German.

His German writing retained an Australian touch, though. He privileged unadorned and succinct prose, and an uncomplicated syntax. “My German has become like English,” he told an interviewer.

Three of his books were published in English by an East German publisher, but Voices in the Storm remained the only one of his books to be published in Australia. He may have identified as an Australian writer for much of his life, but the Australian reading public didn’t warm to him, despite his writing frequently about Australian topics, such as the Maralinga atomic tests, and despite much of his autobiographical fiction being set in Australia. I hope that Australians will one day discover one of their own — although in order to do so, they might have to rely on translations, as he wrote some of his more interesting autobiographical prose in German.

Biographies are not only shaped by the material on which a biographer can draw; they are also informed by broader narratives. The website advertising the forthcoming film about Kaufmann, for example, says, “For us filmmakers, this is the main content of Walter Kaufmann’s life: the catastrophic consequences of National Socialism; the legendary trial of Angela Davis; the revolution in Cuba; the discussion about Stalinism; the impact of the atomic bomb in Japan; the never-ending history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; the collapse of the GDR; the return of nationalist, anti-Semitic tendencies in Germany.” It’s not hard to anticipate the film’s drift.

Often biographies try to fit the life of an individual into a national story, or relate it to the life of a more famous person. That’s what happened to Kaufmann; in Germany he will also be remembered as the man who — albeit unwittingly and indirectly — ruined the reputation of East Germany’s most famous writer, and arguably its best, Christa Wolf.

Like Fred Rose, Kaufmann was a communist and therefore a person of interest to ASIO. Unlike Rose, Kaufmann did not become a spy himself when he moved to East Germany. On the contrary, the East German Stasi was as interested in Kaufmann as ASIO had been. Although he had chosen life in the communist East over life in the capitalist West, Kaufmann was not trusted. For good reason: while he remained faithful to socialism, including the perverted variety practised in the GDR, blind conformism was not his thing.

In the 1990s, Kaufmann’s Stasi file became the subject of a German literary controversy when it was revealed that Wolf had been among those reporting to the Stasi about Kaufmann (and, to a lesser extent, others). She was pilloried in much of the German media, including in a damning piece in the magazine Spiegel, even though Kaufmann, to whom she apologised, took her side. He did that not only because her transgressions were comparatively minor, but also because he was not somebody to hold grudges. When asked eight years ago to sum up his life, he said, “Life has been good to me. I’m not a victim. And I don’t feel like a victim.”

In Australia, Kaufmann may be remembered in the context of the uplifting and decidedly patriotic Dunera story, not least because he didn’t identify as a victim there either. Like many of those who later became known as the Dunera Boys, Kaufmann was appalled by the treatment meted out to the internees aboard the British ship but remembered fondly his first encounters with Australian soldiers, who escorted him and his fellow inmates to an internment camp in Hay. (He recalled his first impressions of Australia and Australians in a piece of autobiographical fiction published in Meanjin in 1954.)

When he interviewed Kaufmann on Late Night Live in 2014, Phillip Adams marvelled at the Dunera Boys as “the most extraordinary refugees we received” and described their contribution to Australia as “beyond parallel.” Kaufmann happily played along, referring to his stint in Hay as the “formative time of my life.” •

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But despite their differences in politics, personality and style, they enlisted in US president George W. Bush’s modern march of folly that led inexorably to the invasion of Iraq and the multiple calamities that followed.

Why and how they joined Bush’s crusade to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is the subject of Judith Betts and Mark Phythian’s new book, The Iraq War and Democratic Governance. The two academics show how democratic structures and processes — parties, parliaments, cabinets and bureaucracies — can be co-opted, sidelined or neutered when prime ministers, driven by sentiment and perceived national interests, are determined on a course of action — in this case, to follow a powerful ally on the road to disaster.

Betts and Phythian tell the tale well, methodically comparing the factors and processes that led Howard and Blair to send armed forces to support the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The two men’s shared belief in the importance of their countries’ relationship with the United States was the primary reason they went to war, though they downplayed its importance when justifying their decisions.

Britain has seen its much-vaunted “special relationship” with the United States as a way of retaining global influence after its empire disintegrated and America supplanted its physical power in the wake of the second world war. Australia’s alliance with the United States, expressed in the ANZUS treaty, was based on the fear of abandonment made real when Imperial Japan gave the country the fright of its life in 1942.

Both countries adorn this relationship with sentimental references to common ties of democratic values, cultural affinity and shared wartime service. (US officials go along with Australia’s mawkish marketing of the alliance as “one hundred years of mateship,” politely overlooking the fact that Australia’s contribution to US military adventures is sometimes tokenistic and always carefully circumscribed — as was the case with Iraq.) Implicit in the relationship, particularly for Australia, is the view that military contributions are insurance premiums, periodically paid to maintain the alliance.

For Blair in particular, a strategic assessment of the relationship’s benefits was overlaid by an emotional belief in America’s fundamental goodness. Howard was determined to strengthen the alliance, which also had the political benefit of wedging the Labor opposition. Already mentally and politically attuned to the importance of the United States, both leaders were galvanised by the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Blair’s reaction was evangelical in its tone: standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush against al-Qaeda was an opportunity to reorder the world, or at least the Middle East, by influencing US policy.

While Howard’s outlook was narrower, his response was heightened by the fact he was visiting Washington at the time of the attacks. He knew then that the Americans would respond militarily. He, too, promised to stand by the United States. Britain and Australia both sent forces to support the US action in Afghanistan in late 2001 to overthrow the Taliban government that had sheltered al-Qaeda. Both knew Bush and his crusading advisers already had their sights set on Saddam Hussein in Iraq, despite the fact he was not involved in 9/11, as part of a bigger project to rearrange the Middle East and rid it of despotism.

By mid 2002 they knew Bush was planning an attack on Iraq, and both had given clear indications of support, which they kept from the public. Howard carefully crafted his response to allow him to insist that he had made no commitment until the very eve of the invasion. Yet, as Howard writes in his memoir, after he met Bush in June 2002 the American president was entitled to assume that if the United States took military action “in all likelihood Australia would join.”

Getting troops into position meant months of managing and manipulating parties, parliaments, cabinets, bureaucracies and the media, in an environment where public opinion in both countries opposed military action. On the evidence forensically mustered by Betts and Phythian, Blair and Howard managed this task with considerable skill.

Blair believed modern decision-making meant that traditional ways of doing things — bureaucratic advisers drafting policy papers to be subjected to cabinet debate leading to consensus decisions — were slow and dated. Having risen to power through an obsessive control of media messaging, he made sure his government was on a perpetual election footing. Old ways of governing created the risk of dissent and media leaks. In this controlled environment, as former British Labour leader Neil Kinnock observed, “disagreement was only characterised as rebellion, not as a divergence that was based on rational consideration and open to persuasion.”

To manage dissent and minimise debate, the detail of Iraq policy was kept to a small circle of insiders, with potential leadership challengers — principally Gordon Brown — excluded. Although Iraq was mentioned in twenty-six meetings of Blair’s cabinet in the twelve months before the invasion, only five substantial discussions took place. Blair limited the information that went to cabinet and ensured there was never a frank and open consideration of risks, options and alternatives. Robin Cook, who was to resign as leader of the House of Commons in protest at the invasion, wrote in his diary: “Tony does not regard the cabinet as a place for decisions.”

Howard’s challenges were different and somewhat easier. His cabinet and MPs were united behind his election-winning leadership and were, in any case, controlled by strict party discipline. Unlike Blair, he faced an opposition that was against the war but had cracks in its unity that Howard could wedge. While he increasingly confined discussion on Iraq policy to cabinet’s national security committee, Howard ensured wavering MPs were soothed by an informal process of consultation, sometimes lubricated with a calming cup of tea.

If Blair shut dissenters out, Howard sought to lock them in while leaving the traditional sources of strategic advice — senior public servants in key government departments — on the sidelines. The heads of the foreign affairs and defence departments later recounted how their advice was neither sought nor offered because the government had already made up its mind. The only advice the government sought was on the nuts and bolts of logistics and capabilities — how Australia could contribute to the war — rather than on the merits, risks and consequences of doing so.

Betts and Phythian offer two explanations for the silence of top bureaucrats who are paid to provide frank and fearless advice. One is that they were cowed into compliance by Howard who, in his first days in office, had sacked six department heads. The second possible explanation is that they agreed with Howard that joining the war was the price that had to be paid to maintain the alliance. This, of course, was not the main reason Howard gave for joining Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” Mention of the alliance was subsidiary to discussion of the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, his potential nuclear capabilities, and his links with terrorism.

Claims about WMD dominated prime ministerial messaging in the months leading up to March 2003 — most notoriously in the dossier produced by Blair’s government a month before the invasion, which, in the words of Betts and Phythian, “did not so much report on a threat as create one.” The dossier, including the headline-grabbing assertion that Saddam could deploy biological weapons in forty-five minutes, led to claims the government had “sexed up” inconclusive intelligence assessments.

The failure to find WMD prompted a series of post-invasion inquiries in Britain and Australia. The most exhaustive of these, chaired by Sir John Chilcot in Britain, was initiated by Gordon Brown after he succeeded Blair as prime minister in 2009. Chilcot confirmed that the US alliance was the determining factor in Britain’s decision to join the war, found that claims about the threat posed by WMD were “presented with a certainty that was not justified,” and concluded that, despite clear warnings, the consequences of invasion were underestimated.

Chilcot also revealed that the pressure on intelligence agencies to provide unequivocal evidence of WMD verged on the farcical. At one stage, British intelligence was citing an Iraqi source who falsely claimed first-hand knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs. It turned out the source was passing on information from a “sub-source” who had been coached by the source to fabricate reports.

Parallels exist between Chilcot and the two post-invasion Australian inquires, the most significant of which was conducted by the joint parliamentary committee on intelligence, chaired by Liberal MP David Jull. It found the government had exaggerated the “moderate and cautious” assessments of Iraq’s weapons made by the Office of National Assessments and the Defence Intelligence Organisation. It found the DIO to have been the most accurate and sceptical, and that the two organisations diverged in their assessments from September 2002, when ONA was influenced by US intelligence reports, some of which were based on the untested claims of Iraqi defectors.

Despite this divergence, the agencies both found that any Iraqi threat was limited and in decline; its nuclear program was unlikely to be advanced; its long-range missiles were in poor condition; there was no known chemical weapons production; and no links existed between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

Jull totally discredited Howard’s stated reasons for going to war. Howard, however, deftly dodged any subsequent storm. In February 2004, selected portions of the Jull report were leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald, the only major metropolitan newspaper that had opposed the war. The leak was a master stroke of media manipulation, as the Herald’s report, based as it was on carefully culled excerpts, largely focused on the finding that the government had not doctored the intelligence it received.

This reporting effectively absolved the government and framed subsequent news coverage when the entire Jull report was released two weeks later. With just a few exceptions — notably Patrick Walters in the Australian — most of the media declared the government had been cleared of “sexing up” the intelligence, while missing Jull’s key conclusion that, on the basis of the intelligence the government did have, no compelling case existed for war. Betts and Phythian rightly judge this to be a massive failure by the media, “which by and large had either not read the [Jull] report or failed to grasp its significance.”

Despite the inquiries’ findings, and well after the war, Blair and Howard continued to insist they acted in good faith while being let down by poor intelligence.

The consequences of the invasion differed for the two prime ministers. Politically, Blair never recovered, the revelations of Chilcot and other inquiries leading to disillusionment and a loss of trust in the Labour Party and among the general public. A total of 179 British personnel died in Iraq, most of them after Bush declared in May 2003 that major combat had ended and that the United States and its allies had prevailed.

Howard had a better war. Unlike Blair, he didn’t face internal party dissent. He had carefully crafted his words in the run-up to the invasion by maintaining he had not made a commitment until the eve of the war, thereby keeping the opposition off balance. Crucially, he ensured Australian forces remained in Iraq only for the invasion phase and in carefully limited roles to avoid casualties. No Australian troops were killed. By June 2003, when the troops were back in Australia for welcome home marches and medals, the insurgencies triggered by the invasion, which would rip Iraq apart, were only beginning.

Betts and Phythian set out to examine how democratic institutions operated in a decision to go to war. They tell this story systematically, comprehensively and with clarity, drawing on a wide range of sources and interviews with key players. On any reading, our democratic institutions failed. This book is all the more powerful because of its sober style. It deserves an audience much wider than international relations specialists. Members of parliament and press gallery journalists should be first in line.

Thirteen years on from the invasion, Howard said that “the hardest decision I ever took as prime minister, along with my cabinet colleagues, was to commit the men and women of the Australian Defence Force to military conflict.” In the wrong circumstances, based on the evidence in this book, crafty prime ministers can quite easily lead their countries into wars. •

The Iraq War and Democratic Governance: Britain and Australia Go to War
By Judith Betts and Mark Phythian | Palgrave Macmillan | €79.99 | 236 pages

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The Taliban are already moving openly around the fringes of Kabul and in the countryside of Uruzgan province, where the Australian taskforce operated up to 2013. The veterans, along with many others, will no doubt be asking whether Australia’s longest military campaign, which saw forty-one soldiers killed and hundreds injured physically and mentally, was doomed from the beginning.

Brereton’s report is an opportunity to extract honour out of this sorry failure. Even in the redacted form released on 19 November, it offers a devastating inventory of killings and mistreatment of civilians and captives by Australia’s special forces, mostly from the Special Air Service Regiment, or SAS. It finds plausible evidence of thirty-nine unlawful killings by twenty-five soldiers, and recommends war crimes investigations of nineteen of them.

Six weeks after Anzac Day, a federal court will start hearing the defamation case brought against Nine Entertainment by the highest-profile of the former SAS troopers, Ben Roberts-Smith, over allegations he participated in war crimes in Afghanistan. Those stories have been given new life by Sunday’s fresh revelations on Nine’s 60 Minutes.

The Morrison government moved quickly to implement Brereton’s recommendation for war crimes trials by setting up a new Office of the Special Investigator within the home affairs department. Led by Victorian judge Mark Weinberg, its director-general is former attorney-general’s department secretary Chris Moraitis, with one-time Queensland Police deputy commissioner Ross Barnett as director of investigations. Weinberg was the sole dissenting judge on the Victorian appeals panel that upheld the conviction of Cardinal George Pell (later quashed unanimously by the High Court); his appointment suggests the government wanted someone unlikely to let emotion override reasonable doubt.

Brereton didn’t expect quick results, and nor did anyone else. The new office is still assembling the team of investigators who will go through the evidence collected by Brereton and separate Australian Defence Force inquiries and winnow out what is admissible, what is protected by promises of immunity, and what needs to be re-sworn.

If this process involves taking fresh statements from Afghan witnesses, an article by Kabul-based journalist Andrew Quilty in the current Monthly suggests it will be fraught. As Quilty found in Uruzgan in January, most potential witnesses live under Taliban control, some even joining the Taliban in reaction to the killing of relatives. Many claim Brereton missed numerous other cases.

In the Roberts-Smith defamation case, Justice Anthony Besanko has ruled that four Afghans who claim to have witnessed unlawful killings will be allowed to testify by video link — a process Justice Weinberg might also employ. Even so, it will take years for cases to be forwarded to the director of public prosecutions and for trials to be held.

Brereton also made recommendations that needn’t wait anywhere near as long, and here the Morrison government, the defence department and the ADF are showing little sign of progress. Among these is the question of compensation for Afghan civilians harmed by Australian actions.

“In cases where it has found that there is credible information that an identified or identifiable Afghan national has been unlawfully killed, Australia should now compensate the family of that person,” Brereton argued. “Doing so will contribute to the maintenance of goodwill between the nations, and do something to restore Australia’s standing, both with the villagers concerned, and at the national level. But quite aside from that, it is simply the morally right thing to do.” This process need not wait on convictions, he added.

Prime minister Scott Morrison’s initial response, last November, wasn’t encouraging: “That is not a matter that’s currently being considered by the government at this stage.” This appears to remain the government’s position.

Perhaps work is proceeding behind the scenes? When I put this question to the defence department I was told that it is still developing “a comprehensive implementation plan” for Brereton’s recommendations. “This includes working with relevant agencies to provide advice to government on issues such as compensation,” said the department. “Final decisions related to compensation (including relevant processes and procedures) will be a matter for the Australian government.”

One possible complication involves the interaction of compensation payments and war crimes trials. Could compensation payments, which assume specific killings and injuries were unlawful, undermine the presumption of innocence for soldiers charged over the incidents? Clive Williams, an ANU security expert and former intelligence official, says this is a real risk. He points to the precedent created by the International Criminal Court, which ordered a convicted person to pay compensation to victims after being convicted.

Ben Saul, professor of international law at Sydney University, doesn’t share that view. Recognising Australia’s responsibility by paying compensation “does not prejudge the criminal liability of individuals,” he tells me. He sees an analogy with Australian state government schemes that make payments to victims of crime “regardless of whether an offender has even been identified, let alone criminally convicted; the former does not prejudge the latter in any way.”

But defence lawyers in any war crimes trials will undoubtedly question whether alleged victims of Australian actions are in fact civilians. “It’s common for local villagers to support Taliban insurgents in some way — whether they want to or not,” says Williams. “This could involve spotting for them to let them know when to detonate an IED [improvised explosive device], for example, while seemingly engaged in innocent farming activity.” They wouldn’t qualify as armed insurgents, he says, but it “does make them party to an attack on our soldiers. This has led in the past to items being planted on spotters by frustrated International Security Assistance Force soldiers to justify shooting them.”

The money itself isn’t the issue: the compensation is unlikely to break the Australian treasury. From 2009, while operating in Uruzgan, the military ran a scheme that made “expeditious non-liability payments” for property damage, injury or death resulting from military actions by deployed forces. The 2836 payments made before the troops’ withdrawal in 2013 totalled $206,937.

An existing compensation scheme heavily funded by international donors but run by the Afghan government is supposed to pay about US$1300 for every civilian killed in action by Afghan, American or other forces, and US$650 per wounded civilian, says Williams. In reality, he adds, the victims’ families seldom receive any money. “Afghanistan is such a corrupt society that any money paid by Australia for victims’ families is likely to be considerably diluted, with corrupt middlemen, distant relatives and the local hierarchy all taking their cut.”

A better option, he says, might be to determine what the victims’ village needs — a well, electricity, access road, mosque or school — and find a way of providing it. “Another option might involve funding a scholarship for a victim’s younger family member. It should be noted that the Afghan government has limited control below the district level, which would probably mean having the Taliban manage the payment process, which could also present difficulties.”

But Williams doubts compensation will change Afghan attitudes towards Australia. “As far as most Afghans are concerned, we are just lackeys of the Americans. I agree that paying compensation is the moral thing to do, but it’s going to be very difficult to deliver a satisfactory monetary outcome for the alleged victims’ families.”

Among Brereton’s other challenging recommendations is his call for soldiers who helped his inquiry to be spared any penalty. Those who witnessed and then disclosed summary executions, but didn’t participate themselves, should be promoted, he recommended. Those who admitted participation on the understanding that it wouldn’t be used against them should not receive “adverse administrative action.” This “will be an important signal,” Brereton wrote, “that they have not been disadvantaged for having ultimately assisted to uncover misconduct, even though implicating themselves.”

It’s not clear whether the armed forces are following that recommendation. On 24 March, army chief Lieutenant-General Rick Burr told the Senate’s defence and foreign affairs committee that seventeen defence personnel had so far faced “administrative action” on the basis of Brereton’s findings, with eight sacked. Some officers were among those facing dismissal, he said, though he refused to go into detail on privacy grounds.

Questioning by senators did not clarify whether the seventeen included whistleblowers. Some newspaper reports have said that soldiers potentially facing war crimes charges have been allowed to take a medical discharge, allowing them to retain certain veteran benefits.

When I asked the defence department about whistleblowers, I was told that the army had “initiated administrative action for termination of service against a number of individuals where failure to comply with Australian Defence Force expectations and values was identified.”

Need for change: the chief of the Australian Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, after delivering the Brereton inquiry’s findings in Canberra on 10 November 2020. Mick Tsikas/AAP Image

The department and the ADF are also looking at other Brereton recommendations about the culture of the military, command responsibility, and internal reforms. Not surprisingly, the most fraught issue has been the question of ultimate responsibility for war crimes. Brereton attributed blame to a clique of non-commissioned officers in charge of operational patrols, in the SAS’s case with their junior officers out of sight in overwatch positions. A cult-like “warrior” image put these NCOs beyond challenge, with complaints by Afghan civilians tending to be dismissed as Taliban-inspired.

Brereton’s finding that the abuses escaped the attention of lieutenants, captains and their superiors is something many find hard to believe. Indeed, army legal officer Major David McBride heard many soldiers expressing concern about unlawful killings and tried to convey them up the chain of command. Frustrated by Defence and Foreign Affairs stone-walling, he gave the information to the ABC. For that, he is now awaiting trial on several serious charges.

The inquiry into command responsibility is being overseen by a generation of senior officers who served with the Australian task force in Uruzgan, in the SAS or in other positions connected to Afghanistan. The current defence force chief, General Angus Campbell, was commander of Australian forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan for part of the period, though based in the Gulf. Andrew Hastie, who became assistant defence minister in December, was an SAS troop commander in Afghanistan in 2013.

In the Senate hearing last month, Greens senator Jordon Steele-John bluntly told Campbell he should resign. “I think you’ve joined a distinguished list,” Campbell replied. At the same hearing, independent senator Jacqui Lambie, an army corporal in earlier life, seemed to suggest soldiers had been misled into cooperating with the inquiry by ANU sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, whose preliminary findings led to the commissioning of Brereton.

Lambie’s comments fit with the view that NCOs were left to do the dirty work while officers kept their reputations. One of Campbell’s first actions in response to the Brereton report was to remove the unit citation — shown in a bronze bar worn on the uniform — from some 2000 special forces soldiers who served in Afghanistan. After a campaign by the Sydney tabloid Daily Telegraph, radio shock jock Alan Jones and SAS veterans arguing that this was collective punishment, Scott Morrison overruled Campbell and restored the citation.

Campbell was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his command in the Middle East and Afghanistan in 2011, when some of the alleged crimes happened. Of the eighteen commanders of the task force in Uruzgan, twelve got the DSC, or a bar to it, for their service there. So far, all have retained these honours.

But two of the eighteen, Brigadier Ian Langford and Lieutenant Colonel Jon Hawkins, tried to hand back their medals after Brereton’s report was released. Campbell told the Senate committee he had urged them not to act “emotionally” but wait for “a sensible reform plan to be developed, and give opportunity for me and others to be more systematic in the approach we take.”

This is part of a broader study of cultural change and organisational reform taking place internally, supervised by an “independent oversight panel” made up of former inspector-general of intelligence and security Vivienne Thom, former attorney-general’s department secretary Robert Cornall and University of Tasmania vice-chancellor Rufus Black. No detail has been released about the scope and timetable for this study, or who will be invited to contribute.

One small bombshell was dropped on 13 April when the Australian reported that a colonel working on these reforms had himself been photographed, as an SAS major, taking part in a puerile drinking session in the unauthorised bar known as The Fat Lady’s Arms inside the Tarin Kowt base. In their Senate committee testimony, generals Campbell and Burr indicated any soldier involved in this breach of discipline should be sacked.

Not only are there many problems within the forces to review, but their causes also run deep. Military historian Peter Stanley, a former Australian War Memorial staffer, believes they can be traced back to the creation of a standing regular army, replacing Australia’s citizen military force, after the second world war. “One consequence of that profound change,” he says, “has been — it is now sadly all too clear — the creation of an army which is unduly insular and distant from broader Australian society.”

Before then, part-time soldiers lived in every community; now they are mostly regulars based in places like Townsville and Darwin, away from where most Australians live. “That has had several lamentable consequences,” says Stanley. “First, it’s made soldiers separate from the nation, and it’s allowed an insular military culture to develop. Even worse, the decision to create an exclusive SAS and to allow it to develop in isolation not just from Australian civil society but also from the regular army has now been shown to be disastrous.” The undue reliance on special forces, he says, has proved a folly.

“Second, it’s now clear that while Australian society as a whole has become more liberal, tolerant, inclusive and generally ‘softer’ over several decades, the culture of the ADF, and especially the SAS, appears to have become increasingly at variance,” says Stanley. “While several chiefs have addressed this — notably David Morrison in his celebrated and justified video address — and the ADF has embraced diversity, the SAS culture both in Australia and on operations has remained so doggedly entrenched and insular as to be unquestionable — until now.”

Stanley wonders whether the Breaker Morant legend also conditioned many Australians. “Largely as a result of the 1981 film there was a change towards regarding Morant as either a victim of imperial injustice or at least a man traumatised in war whose crimes were understandable.” Although the movement to secure him a pardon failed, Stanley wonders whether sympathy for Morant means that many people regard crimes like those documented by Brereton as a natural part of war. “They aren’t, of course — war crimes are a product of both the specific conditions of a war but also the society that goes to war and sends its citizens to war.”

Stanley says that “armies embody values,” and that the reaction to the Brereton report made it clear that “many Australians consider that members of our army have transgressed values we hold… It can never be acceptable for Australian soldiers to deliberately kill civilians, and that seems to be an essential starting point for considering the implications of the Brereton report.”

Australia’s armed forces need to go through the “painful” cultural reform that armies in countries like Germany and South Africa needed to undertake. “I’m greatly heartened by the way senior officers, and especially Angus Campbell, have spoken about the need for change,” says Stanley. “Though how far up the chain of command and how far back restitution needs to be imposed is a moot point. But they seem to understand that the culture Australian soldiers have operated within needs to be challenged.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Becker knew she owed a debt to three remarkable women who had paved the way for her, and she tells their stories in this sensitively written and utterly absorbing new book. That it’s taken her this long is testimony not only to the hardships they endured, their singular achievements and their shattered lives, but also to the time she needed to fully absorb the meaning of their experiences and her own.

Some things change quickly, others take longer. After recent revelations about precarious employment among ministerial staffers in Canberra, few would say there’s been much progress on that front. Yet in ways dimly grasped at the time, the conflict the Vietnamese call the American war, which had spread to Laos and Cambodia by the time Becker turned up in Phnom Penh in 1973, did mark a turning point — for women, for the United States, and for us in Australia.

Two of the women profiled in You Don’t Belong Here arrived in Saigon in 1966, the year the United States became more deeply mired in a war it could never win. Back home the sexual revolution was under way, powered by the advent of the oral contraceptive. But it wasn’t yet a feminist revolution, which would take far longer, as we’ve so disturbingly seen.

The reception French photojournalist Catherine Leroy got from the military, her male superiors and her colleagues is a telling case in point. A petite blonde, she marched unannounced into the Associated Press office in Saigon angling for an assignment. Initially Horst Faas, head of photography, was taken aback. “She was a timid, skinny and very fragile young girl who certainly didn’t look like a press photographer,” Becker quotes him saying.

After a series of tame assignments, Leroy went to Da Nang on her own initiative to photograph the Buddhist demonstrations there. Faas bought two of her photos — striking images of Vietnamese civilians taking cover from sniper fire behind gravestones in a stonemason’s yard — and they were sold around the world. She was determined to do more.

French and strong-willed, Leroy was blithely unaware that she’d crossed a significant line. The US military had a longstanding prohibition against women reporting from the battlefield — though, as Becker explains, since America hadn’t declared war on North Vietnam, technically speaking the ban wasn’t in force. A press card opened all doors, and Faas saw that Leroy got one. She elbowed her way onto helicopters ferrying the press to operations, and took haunting, beautifully composed pictures of what she saw.

Eventually Leroy was taken on a secret operation to photograph America’s first air offensive of the war. She jumped with the paratroopers and on the descent grabbed her camera from around her neck and shot the parachutes as they opened “above and below and sideways.”

For all that, it was catch-22 for Cathy, as she became known. Had she been appropriately “feminine” she would never have taken the photographs she did. She smoked and drank and her language was blistering. In short, she acted, when she had to, like a man. And eventually some of her male colleagues did their damnedest to get rid of her because of it.

Like Leroy, Frances FitzGerald came from the middle class, in her case its highest reaches, and like the others was chary of openly identifying as a feminist and being slated as a “women’s libber.” Her mother was the socialite Marietta Tree, lover of Adlai Stevenson, twice the Democratic presidential candidate and later president Lyndon Johnson’s UN ambassador. Her father, Desmond FitzGerald, had been head of the CIA.

With her connections, there was no need for her to play dirty like Leroy did. The brass were familiar with her father, and she hooked up with Ward Just, one of the most respected of the male correspondents.

FitzGerald was charming yet studious. She quickly understood that the war was unwinnable for the simple reason that American policymakers knew next to nothing about Vietnam, its history, its culture or its people. Cold war imperatives had blinded not only them but also many in the press corps. She learned what she could through serious research, contacts and forays into the countryside, and started sending pieces on the fabric of Vietnamese life as it was endured in this latest of foreign interventions. After she left Vietnam she wrote Fire in the Lake, judged by many to be a classic account of the war. Of the three, she’s the only one still alive, and has carved out an impressive career as a writer and historian.

For Australians, the story of the third woman, Kate Webb, is of special interest. The daughter of Leicester and Caroline Webb, she spent most of her early life in Canberra, where her father headed the political science department in the newly established Australian National University.

As an intelligent, sensitive teenager, her life was blighted by a tragic accident that killed her best friend, and for which she was held — and held herself — responsible. Then, when she had rallied enough to enrol in a course at Melbourne University, came the news of her parents’ death in a car accident. She left university and moved to Sydney, where she became a journalist. Intrigued by the passionate protests against the Vietnam war during President Johnson’s controversial visit to the city, she elected to go there herself in 1968.

Everything about Webb’s story is enthralling. The war absorbed her, as brave a heroine as anyone could be who must have felt she had nothing more to lose. She was thoroughly professional but took one risk too many, and was captured in Cambodia, to where she’d moved, by the North Vietnamese. Though taken for dead, she survived and was eventually released.

Reading Becker’s account, I wondered why no one has written a novel or a television series about Webb. But maybe that’s the point. The crucible that was Vietnam has faded in our collective memory, overtaken by subsequent wars and different enemies. This magnificent book reminds us, though, of how pivotal it was.

It was the first war America lost, a shock to a society stuck in triumphalism, and the start of its slide. For Australia, the irony is that the war we entered to hold back the “yellow peril” created the refugees who would forever change our demographic composition. And the women who went there set a new standard for reporting, developing a deeper, more humane way of writing about war and its terrible, needless suffering. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Crossing the war-reporting lines appeared first on Inside Story.

Not that they were failures for which blame could always be attributed. The limits of human vision and agency must be confronted in any disaster, and Black Summer, the first episode of the year, presented the confrontation as a very immediate ordeal, terrifying to witness even in its aftermath. The program was introduced by Hamish Macdonald, who was himself caught up in the unfolding catastrophe in Cobargo on the NSW south coast, and footage was provided by people struggling to get their bearings in the midst of the inferno. With sparks flying from all directions as the fire front approached in the opening scene, a voice-over at least provided reassurance that we were in the presence of a survivor: “The sky was changing colour… It just got darker and darker and darker.”

“There are known unknowns,” as Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “and there are also unknown unknowns.” The fires were a known unknown. Rural fire brigades knew that conditions were stacking up for a worst-case scenario; fire chiefs issued dire warnings to the government. But no one could know how, when or where the emergency would present itself. When outbreaks began to multiply, news commentators spoke of “uncharted territory.” As for dealing with the human aspects of the tragedy, Shane Fitzsimmons, head of the NSW Rural Fire Service, put it best: “there’s no rule book, no script, no guide.”

The fire itself was a demon of unpredictability, changing course, creating its own weather, eliminating so many features of the natural world that people trying to flee couldn’t see or hear anything else. Vehicles were driven in conditions of near-zero visibility; a fallen tree across the road could prove fatal.

Twenty-twenty vision is a luxury we don’t always have, and having to do without anything resembling it was one of the lessons of the bushfires. “It’s going to be a turning point for everyone in Australia and a lot of people worldwide as well,” said a Kangaroo Island survivor in the closing moments of the program.

If that’s the case, we have yet to reckon with it. Hard Winter, a follow-up on bushfire recovery screened in June, showed the communities of Cobargo, one of the worst-affected areas, struggling on their own. A couple are seen pulling a tarpaulin over a makeshift shelter on a property surrounded by blackened trees. With no running water, they must drive to the village to take showers. Fuel is a scarce commodity. Five months on, basic needs were still not being met.

The government bodies, charities and services supposed to be helping were simply not equipped to respond adequately, and had failed to factor in the psychological gap. Presenting application forms to traumatised people who have lost everything is crassly inappropriate; a $50,000 rebuild grant for an uninsured farmer living amid the burnt-out ruins of a lifetime’s work is cruelly inadequate. Post-traumatic stress may kick in several months after the event, once the mental health counsellors have packed up and left.

But the turning point seemed not to have registered in the national psyche. Only those at the centre of the disaster were facing up to a changed reality. “We’ve lost our innocence, our ‘she’ll be okay mate,’” said a local business owner. “Because it’s not. And it won’t ever be.” “Be with us. Work with us. Stay with us,” another resident pleaded. Some have stuck around, like the volunteer backpackers who helped a farmer replace kilometres of fencing, but elsewhere other concerns were coming to the fore.

By late February, the pandemic was taking over from the bushfires as the crisis of the year. In Coronavirus (24 February), Sean Nicholls reported from Wuhan with footage of a deserted metropolis that presaged what was to come in cities around the world, though at the time it seemed an extreme symptom of some alien regime of power. The virus was another known unknown, with comparisons to be made with SARS, HIV/AIDS, Ebola and the Spanish flu.

If there were any unknown unknowns, they were in its place of origin — this great oriental city under the control of a government increasingly perceived as hostile and secretive. What was really going on in those sinister scenes of white-suited men hauling citizens out of their houses and bundling them into official vehicles? Terrified residents found themselves locked in their apartment buildings; people were said to be dropping dead in the streets; doctors were being threatened for sharing information about cases they were seeing.

Xi Jinping had lost control of the narrative, said the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor. And as for the infection rate and mortality numbers, who knew for sure? According to Neil Ferguson, professor of epidemiology at Imperial College in London, up to an estimated 50,000 people were being infected each day in China. Official figures were reckoned to reveal less than 10 per cent of the actual rates. If the Chinese government was underestimating at that stage, Ferguson’s numbers were wildly overestimated.

In hindsight, the program had some troubling elements of xenophobia. How different does all this look when we take the Orientalism out of the picture — when it is the deserted streets of Paris and Rome on our screens; when the US administration has lost control of the narrative; when an apartment block in Melbourne is suddenly cordoned off and Sky News stirs up alarm about Dictator Dan?

Pandemic (30 March), was the first attempt to report on the virus from an Australian perspective. Sean Nicholls, again the principal reporter, opened by announcing that Australia, like much of the world, was “on a war footing.” Norman Swan, reporting from the frontline, was measured and genuinely informative, as he has been throughout the pandemic, but the spectre of disaster on an unpredictable scale loomed.

Every infected person would infect two others, said Sharon Lewin, director of the Doherty Institute. That is theoretically possible, though not a standard expectation by any means. As the program went to air, the Ruby Princess debacle was unfolding and the prime minister had been forced to do a swift reversal on pronouncements made two weeks earlier about freedom to go to the footy. On social media, “2020 vision” was becoming a bad joke.

As might be expected, the pandemic dominated the Four Corners agenda for the rest of the year. Episodes focused on the financial implications, on the Ruby Princess, on vaccine research, on the second wave, on infection spread in aged care facilities, and on the impact of school closures on Year 12 students. As the year progressed, reporting became less speculative, less foreboding and more focused on the specific ways in which the pandemic’s impact was being experienced.

Students interviewed for The Class of 2020 (2 November) talked of how the lockdown had brought them to reflect on their futures in sterner ways. A confrontation with the unexpected can create a steep learning curve. “This year targeted everything I took for granted,” said Joseph Hathaway-Wilson. Like the woman in Cobargo who spoke of a lost innocence, these students were coming to terms with the limits of human foresight.

Those limits can be a challenge for even the most hard-bitten investigative reporters. A Careful War, a two-part series on the war in Afghanistan originally broadcast in 2010, was promoted again on the Four Corners site earlier this year. It was a remarkable piece of reporting by Chris Masters, embedded with Australian Special Forces troops, who provided live documentation of engagements with the Taliban, including an incident in which two Australian soldiers were killed by an improvised explosive device.

This was the blackest day for Mentoring Team Alpha, which was on a mission to provide security and reconstruction to communities in the remote Mirabad Valley. At the start of the enterprise, morale was high. “Shifting schisms and alliances” was the name of the game and, as commanding officer major general John Cantwell put it, it was not one for sledgehammer tactics: “It requires understanding, nuance, and a sense of affiliation.”

It also requires stepping carefully across every metre of ground. What the troops could not determine, often because the locals wouldn’t tell them, was where the explosive devices were buried. Always, there are known unknowns. And for Masters himself, there was a residual awareness of another side to the military story, which he has subsequently taken a lead role in exposing. The darker picture emerged with devastating impact in Killing Field (16 March), based on footage captured by soldiers in Afghanistan. Mark Willacy obtained extensive interviews, most notably with Braden Chapman, an operative deployed with the elite Special Forces in 2012.

From the opening frames, with a soldier’s voice shouting “Get the fuck out!” while frightened civilians were herded from their homes, it was clear we were in a very different environment from the one Masters had documented. Everything was reversed. Here, it was the Australians who were the danger to local communities, and the soldiers themselves had little to fear. “You definitely feel confident with these guys,” said Chapman, “I never felt like we weren’t gonna get through it.”

Chapman is an impressive witness, determined to say what needs to be said despite not knowing how he will get through whatever may be in store for a whistleblower. He had distressing stories to tell, in detail, and the program-makers illustrated them with expertly edited footage that gave a sense of events unfolding in real time.

By the time the episode went to air, allegations of war crimes committed by Australian Special Forces were the subject of an inquiry by NSW Supreme Court judge Paul Brereton. Four Corners reporting, and the work of Masters and Willacy in particular, has a prominent place in the log of evidence.

Amid the global crises and the mounting chaos in the United States, domestic politics registered less strongly than usual on the current affairs radar. With little to be reported from a deserted Parliament House, Louise Milligan’s attempt to portray the building as a scene of scandalous affairs in Inside the Canberra Bubble (9 November) was ill-timed. Why at this moment, when the fallout from the US presidential election was dominating the news, the second wave of the pandemic was building across the globe, and fears of an economic depression were being rehearsed in the press?

It’s not that the issues lacked importance. But the program was made up of a jumble of concerns about personal behaviour, the professional culture of Parliament House (or lack of it), the proportion of women on the frontbench, sexual discrimination and workplace management. The behaviour of senior ministers raises one set of concerns; how workplace conditions are managed and regulated raises another. Why was there no interview with the Clerk of the Senate, who has oversight of human resources?

The program was poorly structured, strung together with a mish-mash of visual footage that might have been assembled from discarded offcuts. Ominous music accompanied panoramic shots of night-time Canberra. The camera peered up the hill towards Parliament House at dusk. Headlights swerved in the darkness. A full moon loomed. All this created a portentous mood, as if to suggest that Canberra is a sinister place and Parliament House — “a bubble within a bubble,” as Malcolm Turnbull put it — a secretive bastion where all manner of things go on.

As for what was actually happening inside the building, the answer was not much, at least at the time. Close-up shots of feet walking down corridors became a kind of leitmotif. They were anonymous and out of focus, and there were high heels in the mix, evoking a stereotyped female corporate look. A few days after the program went to air, it was a relief to see Penny Wong being presented by her colleagues with a birthday present of Converse sneakers of the kind worn by Kamala Harris.

Four Corners doesn’t often fall short in its endeavours. The program continues to make an essential contribution to national affairs. Time and again it has broken stories that spark major public enquiries and legislative changes, and this year was no exception. It’s in periods of turmoil and crisis that its role is most valuable. No government should be allowed to put such work at risk. •

The post Known unknowns appeared first on Inside Story.

We know — or think we know — what happened next because everything that happened during these engagements was carefully recorded at the time, pored through by analysts back in Tarin Khot and Kabul, and then noted down in an extensive series of after-action reports. Military historian Rhys Crawley is ploughing through these at the moment, conscientiously compiling the official history of Australia’s engagement. That’s what we know — the facts repeated and the successes trumpeted by Defence’s public relations department at Russell Hill in Canberra.

The truth, of course, is a different thing altogether.

As a journalist I’ve spent time embedded with the Special Forces Task Group and also “outside the wire.” The narratives that I heard during this period were dramatically different from each other; it all depended on whom you spoke to. The sad reality was that reporters couldn’t risk travelling independently in the Australian area of operations — it was just too dangerous. So there was no verifiable evidence of what was really happening, especially in those remote areas where the Taliban were operating.

We knew the policy was to strike hard at the Taliban, interdicting the supply lines stretching from the wilds of the Pakistan border to Kabul itself. Special Forces were used repeatedly to eliminate enemy commanders and small insurgent forces and dominate the terrain. In this way, the Special Forces evolved from its original role, as a strategic force providing vital intelligence and engaging only in absolutely critical actions, into a “kinetic” unit, used constantly to “take out” people who were supposedly enemy commanders. No longer a strategic reserve, it became the tactical force of choice.

These aggressive patrols, together with body counts never openly discussed, offered the illusion of progress and even the possibility of victory. No one wanted, or felt the necessity, to look too deeply into the brief period after those instants of chaos in which the battle was fought. Nobody worried too deeply about what happened when the area was being secured: after all, these were critical missions. The SAS was cutting off the head of the growing insurgency, killing enemy commanders and leaving peasant farmers alone.

What’s important to realise is that these are the moments that Justice Paul Brereton investigated during his probing of alleged war crimes. Not what happened during the action, when soldiers were making split-second decisions under fire, but what occurred afterwards. This is what is so shocking about his revelations.

These are not instances that can be shrugged off with the casual comment, “Oh well, that’s what happens in war.” Brereton investigated killings — murders — committed after the fighting had finished.

If you wonder, even for a moment, about the care and precision with which he completed his task, then read his report (or at least those parts of it that are not expunged, which include the entire six volumes of part two, almost certainly many hundreds of pages). Then, if you still doubt the possibility that Australian diggers killed potentially innocent Afghan civilians, watch the videos and read the published accounts in the media.

With no preconceived agenda, no axe to grind, and an extensive experience of the military (Brereton trained as an infantry officer in Sydney University Regiment and has served, part-time, for most of his life), the lawyer went about his task carefully and meticulously. He interviewed people, interviewed them again, then travelled to Afghanistan. He immersed himself in gathering evidence and exploring the totality of what passed in the moments following the battle. This is where our focus will be drawn over the next few years: to questions of detail.

Civilian juries will be deciding not just if events occurred the way they are described in the report on the balance of probability, but if they happened this way beyond reasonable doubt. What is on trial is rapidly emerging as much more than the guilt or innocence of individual soldiers. Legal teams and, perhaps more worryingly, public relations and other consultants have already been briefed and are entering the arena to debate the prosecution before any charges have been laid.

These will not simply be trials about the soldiers’ actions. The ramifications will be far more significant. The decision to intervene, coupled with the subsequent decisions of governments of both persuasions, is on trial because it will be impossible to separate them from broader policy issues and questions. When they are delivered, the verdicts will not only deal with what happened in Afghanistan: they will be a judgement on the Anzac myth of the exceptional digger and, because of this, the very value of using military force in places like Afghanistan.

In the meantime, many soldiers will suffer in ways big and small as a result of the actions of the few. On the morning that General Angus Campbell released the report he also announced that the meritorious unit citation — a small federation star on a golden background — will be stripped from members who had served with Special Forces. Because this special badge was awarded to the entire unit, it makes eminent sense to withdraw it. But that’s not the way it appears to many of the soldiers, who will now have a gap where it was once pinned on their uniform.

There’s no point, now, in attempting to tease out what actually happened on the fifty-seven occasions where Brereton finds a war crime was committed. The courts will do that. The 1000-plus pages of the unredacted report focus on twenty-three instances where he believes that twenty-five Australian soldiers (mostly, but not all, members of the Special Forces) made conscious decisions, completely removed from the heat and confusion of battle, to illegally kill thirty-nine Afghan civilians (and severely mistreat two others).

Brereton has outlined a clear path forward, but it’s littered with jeopardy on either side. How can evidence initially given under compulsion be used? Why are some junior soldiers apparently being given indemnities from prosecution in return for evidence that may convict more senior soldiers? Can such evidence really bear the burden of proof — “beyond reasonable doubt” — that such cases require?

Each crime has been individually and carefully detailed, ready for the prosecutions brief to be compiled. It’s this precision that furnishes the inquiry with incredible strength. But it also leaves a vacuum at its centre, because these aren’t the only issues that need to be fixed.

The investigation has exposed a great deal more that needs to be tackled. First, there are the problems within the structure of the army itself, particularly evident in the separate martial culture that has been allowed to develop within the Special Forces. The units have become isolated from the mainstream and have acquired a hallowed, almost untouchable reputation. As its one-time members have been promoted up the chain of command, it’s acquired the gloss that has made even a brief period of service appear a prerequisite for higher positions.

It’s vital to keep in mind that instead of ending the insurgency, the violent tactics adopted by the units appear to have exacerbated the violence and created new enemies. All those raids were, in the end, utter failures. Instead of strategically successful strikes at critical, irreplaceable Taliban assets, it’s now clear that the Special Forces mainly achieved short-term or tactical successes. And when they began killing civilians, they began working actively against the entire mission.

In some parts of the military a clear rectification plan has been outlined and already begun. In others, however, no way forward seems to have been charted. The reluctance to tackle the full dimensions of the problem is understandable, but will do nothing to solve it.

The second issue is the effectiveness of the Special Forces. This is, after all, the entire reason the investigation began. Sociologist Samantha Crompvoets was called in because the (then) Special Forces commander was aware of this problem and needed her technical assistance to take it further. If her report helped prompt the subsequent investigation, it was only because the ground had already been tilled and prepared for exactly that outcome.

The commanders were well aware that something had gone wrong, particularly in the SAS. It wasn’t the unit it had been before successive commitments in the Middle East. In particular, senior non-commissioned officers were effectively running the regiment. It was focusing on “kinetic” action, almost to the exclusion of its other tasks. This situation needed to change, and quickly.

Against that background, another way of looking at the Brereton inquiry is through a management prism. Last Thursday the inquiry provided a reason for removing ten further members of the SAS. It has proved an extremely effective way of bringing the unit back under control by shaking out the bad apples. The SAS today is a very different beast from the one that deployed, time and time again, into Oruzgan.

Finally, these accusations have opened deep fissures, not just in the military but across the country. The Anzac myth, with its image of the larrikin digger, looms large; but now we’ve found it has a very dark shadow. Many Australians will be challenged by this revelation and feel it represents a direct assault on their own identity. It’s amazing how many individuals, including those who have never joined up to serve, hold such definitive views about Anzac. Some people I’ve spoken with, most of whom have no idea what the soldiers have been accused of, have attempted to dismiss the charges as simply applying to “what happens in war.”

Others, of course — people already suspicious of the warrior ethos that holds such a dominant place in our society — have already swung instinctively the other way. For them nothing good was done in Afghanistan and prejudice against the military has merely grown.

What was once an icon, a binding figure that could be used by politicians to hold the country together (as well as a political prop) no longer possesses unquestioned authority. People are looking at the army and, if not actually finding it wanting, certainly keen to examine it.

The biggest questions are strategic. How could it be that this country sent soldiers to patch up Afghanistan only to have a significant number go rogue, turn themselves into gods, and arrogate to themselves the right to decide who would live and who would die? What was the point of all that money, all those lives lost?

No matter the care with which you read the narrative, you won’t find the answer to either of these critical questions in Brereton’s pages. Instead of closing the cover on a dark chapter of our history, it ensures that these issues will continue reverberating for a long time to come.

No matter how the individual war crimes allegations are resolved, Brereton’s report challenges something far more significant — our way of understanding what it means to be Australian. Society works through stories. We knit together narratives and use these to tell ourselves about who we are, to justify our behaviour and to explain why we’re acting the way we do. That’s why stories are critical. They are the frames of reference inside which we make meaning for our lives.

The Anzac myth has become one of the country’s most powerful ideologies. It’s been used, quite deliberately, to shape modern Australia. Both sides of politics have borrowed these stories to help elevate the shallow mechanics of government into something transcendental. In the nineties, prime minister Paul Keating bent down on the Kokoda Track to kiss the ground defended by young men during the second world war; in 2015, the narrative switched to Gallipoli when prime minister Tony Abbott insisted that the diggers had played a critical role in “the founding of modern Australia.”

The revered Anzac has become much, much more than an unquestionable truth. The image of the selfless digger has come to play a special role in the way we perceive our society and its actions. Brereton’s investigation means the country will need to find a new way of understanding itself without looking for a martial glue to hold things together. Politicians will need to find a new way of justifying their actions without wrapping themselves in the flag and slouch hat.

One of the great foundational myths of the country has suddenly come unstuck. Perhaps there really is nothing so unique about the Anzacs after all. And how can we trust all those other things we’ve been told? •

The post After the battle appeared first on Inside Story.

Born Salama bint Said in 1844 in Zanzibar, she was the daughter of Said bin Sultan Al-Said, the Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman, and Jilfidan, a Circassian woman who had been abducted by slave traders as a child and bought by the sultan to join his harem. Although her mother was not the sultan’s principal wife, Salama benefited from being part of the island’s ruling family. As one of her father’s thirty-six children, she inherited a plantation and residence upon his death, and a further three plantations when her mother died.

In her early twenties, Sayyida Salme (Princess Salama), as she was later known, was living in the Zanzibar capital, Stone Town. A love affair with her neighbour, the German merchant Rudolph Heinrich Ruete, resulted in her falling pregnant. Conscious that her relatives wouldn’t countenance marriage to an infidel, she fled to Aden aboard HMS Highflyer with the help of the wife of a British consular official. There she converted, took the name Emily and married Ruete, who had followed her under less dramatic circumstances. The couple moved to Rudolf Heinrich’s native Hamburg, where they had three more children (her first child had died in Aden). The marriage was short-lived, however; in 1870, aged thirty-one, Rudolph Heinrich was killed in a tram accident.

Although Hamburg law prevented Emily Ruete from claiming her late husband’s estate, she and her children initially remained in Germany — not least because her return to Zanzibar was vetoed by her half-brother, the then sultan. Occasionally she taught Arabic to make ends meet. In 1886 she published a part memoir, part ethnography of Zanzibar, Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin, that would be reprinted numerous times and translated into English (under the title Memoirs of an Arabian Princess), French, Arabic and other languages. In 1889 she left Germany and settled in Beirut. When the first world war broke out, she returned to Germany to live with one of her daughters in Jena, where she died in 1924.

“Model immigrant”: Emily Ruete (Sayyida Salme), Princess of Zanzibar. Undated photo by unknown photographer/Alamy

Emily Ruete was buried in her husband’s family plot in Ohlsdorf, Hamburg’s main cemetery. The grave is considered historically significant and has been preserved. In 2007, during the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All, her life was commemorated with a memorial in the cemetery’s Garden of Women. Two years later, her story featured in an exhibition at Hamburg’s town hall. Over the past twelve years, her life has also been the subject of three works of fiction: the rather conventional biographical novels Sterne über Sansibar (2011) by Nicole Vosseler and Abschied von Sansibar (2013) by Lukas Hartmann, and Sansibar Blues (2008), a piece of postcolonial metafiction by acclaimed writer Hans Christoph Buch.

Given this background, it’s not surprising that a local resident suggested naming a park in Hamburg-Nord, one of Hamburg’s seven districts, after Emily Ruete. In a submission to the district assembly five years ago, he argued that the park, adjacent to a waterway and not far from a mosque and the Ruetes’ former residence, was reminiscent of Zanzibar. The idea was again on the assembly’s agenda in 2017, this time supported by the argument that present-day refugee movements made it appropriate to honour “Emily Ruete aka Princess Salme” as a “model immigrant of her time.” On neither occasion did the idea attract sufficient backing.

Events started to move more quickly in February last year. A newly created square needed a name, and this time the Social Democrats and the Greens, who together hold the majority of seats in the assembly, proposed memorialising Ruete, with the Greens arguing that she was a “strong and intriguing” historical figure. Local residents attending the meeting at which the plan was considered commented that the name didn’t matter to them; they were more concerned that street furniture be installed to make the square more inviting. When the motion was put to a vote, the Christian Democrats opposed it — not because they objected to memorialising Ruete, but because they believed the process of naming the square lacked transparency.

Later last year, Hamburg-Nord Council advised the district assembly that the square’s name had been gazetted and street signs delivered. The council suggested that an information panel about Ruete’s life be erected and her descendants invited to attend its unveiling, and in February 2020 €4400 (A$7200) was allocated to commissioning a local history workshop to create the panel.

Here, the story took its controversial turn. The workshop’s research found that Ruete had not only defended slavery during her lifetime but also made racist remarks in her 1886 memoir. The workshop’s findings drew on an intervention by a member of Hamburg Postkolonial, a network of individuals interested in Hamburg’s colonial legacy, who may well have been the first person to take an interest in the naming of the square and read Ruete’s 1886 book closely.

In September this year the Greens and the Social Democrats moved successfully to reverse the assembly’s earlier decision. “In 2020, to name a square after Emily Ruete is not an option,” the minutes of the meeting record a Greens representative saying. “It would be inconsistent with the [two parties’] stance against exclusion and inhumanity.” Rather than naming the square after someone else, the district assembly decided to leave it nameless for the time being, presumably to avoid having Ruete’s name remain in place during the search for a substitute. Immediately after the assembly’s decision, council workers removed the offending street signs.

Matthias Iken and others who criticised the change of heart bemoaned the fact that a nineteenth-century woman was being judged against the standards of the twenty-first century. A representative of the Free Democratic Party, who voted against the unnaming of the square, argued that Ruete’s book was “an authentic non-European source” about the history of East Africa, which had otherwise been told from a “colonial point of view.” Ruete had commented on the Germany of the time from a non-European perspective, he pointed out, and had exposed the hypocrisy of her European contemporaries in Zanzibar, who decried the institution of slavery but were themselves slave owners.

By the time Ruete’s book was published, slavery had long been formally abolished in Europe and North America: in Britain, for instance, in 1834; in France in 1848; and in the United States in 1865. But Emily Ruete, herself the daughter of a former slave, had known Zanzibar only as a place where slavery was largely uncontested. In the mid nineteenth century, the island had been a hub of the Arab slave trade, with possibly as many as 50,000 slaves passing through its port annually. The political clout of Emily Ruete’s father, the sultan, was based not least on his prominent involvement in that trade. Slavery was formally abolished in Zanzibar in the 1870s but continued until the early twentieth century, despite the island’s becoming a British protectorate in 1890.

The September 2020 backflip was not the first time Hamburg politicians have had second thoughts about streets named after people whose views or deeds are now considered repugnant. In recent years, Hamburg’s state government has become particularly concerned by the possibility that some streets and public buildings might be named after people who were Nazis, supported the Nazis or advocated anti-Semitic or racist ideas.

In several instances, streets have been renamed; on two occasions their names were retained but the reference changed. Weygandt Street, for example, was originally named after the Hamburg psychiatrist Wilhelm Weygandt (1870–1939), who was interested in eugenics and sympathised with the Nazis. Now it is named after somebody with no connection to Hamburg: Friedrich Weygandt, a public official in Mainz who was executed because he had been a vocal critic of the local archbishop during the peasants’ war of 1525. New proposals for street names are now routinely vetted by the Hamburg State Archives.

In 2017, the archives commissioned historian David Templin to investigate fifty-eight historical figures whose names featured on street signs, or were likely to do so sometime soon, and develop criteria for deciding whether to rename particular streets. One person on the list was Gustav Gründgens, a famous actor and director whose life is explored in Klaus Mann’s controversial novel Mephisto and the acclaimed István Szabó film of the same name, winner of the 1981 Oscar for the best foreign-language film. So far Gründgens, who was the protégé of Nazi strongman Hermann Göring and played a prominent role in Nazi Germany’s cultural life, has not been deemed sufficiently compromised to warrant a renaming of the street carrying his name.

Compromised? Gustav Gründgens as Hamlet in January 1936. Wikimedia

While until very recently the archives’ vetting process focused on links to the Nazi regime or ideology, Nazism is but one of at least two dark chapters in Germany’s past whose legacies endure. Another is colonialism. Because Hamburg has long been Germany’s most important port, many of the city’s businesses and individuals played a significant role in colonial endeavours, including during the short period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Germany had colonies in Africa and the Pacific.

Demands to engage critically with Hamburg’s colonial past go back a long way. In 1967, and again in 1968, student protesters toppled a bronze statue of Hermann von Wissmann, a former commander of German colonial troops and governor of German East Africa, resulting in that memorial’s permanent removal. But it was only in 2014, after sustained pressure from civil society groups, that the state government agreed to tackle the city’s colonial legacy.

Compared with efforts to draw attention to the Nazi past and remove references to Nazi perpetrators and their accomplices from public view, official moves to expose Hamburg’s colonial links have been slow. (This was partly because, as Thomas Laqueur noted when recently comparing German Vergangenheitsbewältigung and American attempts to come to terms with slavery, the Nazi past was “brief and circumscribed.”) In fact, when the state archives looked into the naming of Emily Ruete Square last year in the course of its routine vetting procedure, the proposal didn’t raise any concerns. Yes, a memorial for prominent merchant — and notorious slave trader — Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann (1724–82) was removed in 2008, but demands to rename three Hamburg streets that carry his name — Schimmelmannstraße, Schimmelmannallee and Schimmelmannstieg — have so far been unsuccessful.

Besides, the government’s decision in 2014 focused on how the city’s colonial past was being represented publicly, and how Hamburg could distance itself symbolically from that past. The decision made no reference to demands for reparations to tackle historic injustices. In the past twenty years, such demands have focused on Germany’s genocidal 1904–08 war against the Herero and Nama in what was then German South West Africa (today’s Namibia); most recently, Namibia rejected Germany’s offer of a one-off €10 million compensation payment and an unreserved apology as inadequate. But the issue of symbolic and material reparations is not limited to Namibia, and given the extent to which Hamburg has been a beneficiary of colonialism, this issue should not only be a matter for the federal government.

Also absent from the state government’s decision were references to present-day injustices. German colonialism did not end when Germany lost its colonies after the first world war, nor when German attempts to colonise Eastern Europe came to a crushing halt in the course of the second world war. Hamburg businesses and Hamburg consumers continue to be implicated in colonial practices — something that is easily forgotten when the focus is on a past that is seemingly over and done with.

Hamburg-Nord’s decision to rescind the honouring of Emily Ruete didn’t, however, reflect a gradually growing awareness of wider historical injustices. It came about suddenly — in fact, it’s possible to pinpoint a specific day on which the wheels were set in motion: 25 May 2020, the day a white police officer killed George Floyd, an African-American man, in Minneapolis.

The death, and the consequent surge in the Black Lives Matter movement, provoked a rethink of the memorialisation of individuals implicated in slavery, or in colonialism more generally. In the United States, numerous monuments commemorating the Confederacy, for example, were toppled or, having been targeted by protesters, removed by the authorities. In the British city of Bristol, protesters toppled the bronze statue of English slave trader and Tory member of parliament Edward Colston (1636–1721) and dumped it into the harbour. Having recovered the statue, the authorities took it to a “secure location.”

In this context, the dispute over Emily Ruete Square was a small skirmish. Public interest died down quickly. Ruete was, after all, a minor historical figure — and there have been more obvious and prominent targets in Hamburg.

None has been more prominent than Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), the preeminent political leader of nineteenth-century Germany. As prime minister of the militarily and politically dominant German state of Prussia, he engineered the unification of Germany in 1871 and served as its first chancellor. An ardent defender of the monarchy, he had the support of Prussia’s landed gentry; in turn he ensured that their privileges remained untouched.

Bismarck’s time as chancellor was marked by two momentous conflicts. They pitted Bismarck first against the Catholic Church and then against the socialist labour movement, both of which he believed posed threats to the status quo. Having largely lost the Kulturkampf (culture war) against the Catholic Church, he formed an alliance with the party representing Catholics in parliament to take on the socialists. He had more success on that front, not least by introducing compulsory sickness, disability, accident and retirement insurance schemes, making imperial Germany something of a pioneer of welfare capitalism and at the same time reminding the socialists’ prospective supporters that their interests were well served by the government.

Unlike Ruete, Bismarck was no slave owner. Nor did he defend the institution of slavery. That he nevertheless became a target was because, as German chancellor, he hosted the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 that eventually led to the divvying up of most of Africa among the European colonial powers. He also oversaw Germany’s acquisition of colonies in west, southwest and east Africa and in the Pacific, including New Guinea, Samoa and Micronesia. Although he initially opposed Germany’s becoming a colonial power, he later took a hands-on approach to furthering its interests in Africa and the Pacific. He even enlisted Emily Ruete in diplomatic manoeuvres to secure Germany’s influence over Zanzibar (which Germany later traded with Britain for Helgoland, a small island off the German coast).

Making the case for German colonial rule in Africa, Bismarck’s government drew on arguments provided by Christian abolitionists. Germany’s late nineteenth-century colonial ventures thus became precursors of the Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq in 1991, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and other modern-day humanitarian interventions. But although Bismarck’s government tried to justify German colonialism on humanitarian grounds, it condoned slavery and forced labour in its African colonies.

After his resignation in 1890, Bismarck was venerated as unified Germany’s founding father, not only during the remaining twenty-eight years of the monarchy but also, albeit less emphatically, in the Weimar Republic, in Nazi Germany and in the Federal Republic. Throughout Germany, numerous Bismarck statues are testament to the admiration. Hamburg has three. His memorialisation even went beyond Germany; the capital of the US state of North Dakota, for example, is named after him.

Contested: another of Hamburg’s Bismarck memorials, after cleaning. Klaus Neumann

By far the largest of Hamburg’s Bismarck statues, and the best known nationally, sits on the edge of the red light district of St Pauli and overlooks the river Elbe. Made of one hundred blocks of granite, it is more than thirty-four metres high and weighs more than 600 tonnes. Unveiled in 1906 after three years’ construction, it depicts Bismarck as a medieval knight holding a sword. It was listed on the cultural heritage register in 1960.

The monument has long been the focus of protests. It attracted controversy even during the planning phase. Sculptor Hugo Lederer and architect Johann Emil Schaudt’s design was criticised for portraying a seemingly unapproachable leader, prompting art historian Aby Warburg to deride its critics as anti-modernists. In the latter years of the Weimar Republic, German nationalists who celebrated Bismarck’s birthday at the memorial regularly clashed with left-wing demonstrators. In 1990, on the day of German reunification, unknown climbers covered Bismarck’s head with a Helmut Kohl mask, which inspired Stephanie Bart’s 2009 novel Goodbye Bismarck. In 2015, the monument was repurposed for another ephemeral work of art, “Capricorn Two,” when an ibex was mounted on Bismarck’s head.

When the Black Lives Matter movement took hold in Germany, Bismarck memorials were among its first targets. On 14 June, a week after Colston’s statue was dumped in Bristol Harbour, activists daubed one of the smaller Bismarck statues in Hamburg with red paint. The larger statue was spared the same fate only because it was concealed behind fences and scaffolding. In 2014, the federal government budgeted €6.5 million to restore the crumbling memorial, with the proviso that the state government match that amount to rebuild the surrounding park. Later, the overall amount budgeted for memorial and park was increased to €15.4 million. It was ironic that work on the monument began shortly before the repercussions of George Floyd’s killing reached Germany.

The decision to spend so much on restoring the Bismarck monument attracted criticism well before May 2020. Since January, a group that calls itself Intervention Bismarck-Denkmal has demanded via Twitter that the renovation work stop immediately. But the criticism was amplified following Floyd’s death, with new groups, such as Bismarck’s Critical Neighbours, adding their voice. When demonstrators demanded a halt to the project on 28 June, the Social Democrats and Greens, who have been in power in Hamburg since 2015, found themselves in a quandary. They were committed to restoring the monument but didn’t want to be seen defending what it was increasingly associated with: colonialism and racism. The state government therefore proposed to hold consultations to determine how the site could be repurposed without removing the monument. (They will kick off this Thursday, 19 November, with an online panel discussion, “Recontextualising Bismarck.”)

Proposals advanced thus far include a memorial museum inside the base of the monument to document Hamburg’s colonial past, and a counter-memorial adjacent to the statue. A Hamburg precedent exists for the latter: in 1982, rather than removing a controversial war memorial in the centre of the city, the state government commissioned the Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka to create a counter-memorial right next to it. Ideas less likely to be adopted include turning Bismarck on his head or replacing his granite sword with an illuminated Star Wars–type lightsabre.

Are the unnaming of Emily Ruete Square and demands for the removal of Bismarck statues evidence that Germany is heading towards an Orwellian dystopia where anything not deemed politically correct will be suppressed? No — if only because the “cancel culture” has been accompanied by loud protests (such as Iken’s) and authorities haven’t rushed to get rid of street names honouring the slave trader Schimmelmann or the opportunist Gründgens.

Prominent in the debate about what to do with the hundreds of Bismarck memorials in Germany is opposition to any form of Black Lives Matter–inspired iconoclasm. More often than not, the defenders of the monuments have spoken out against iconoclasm as such, rather than in defence of Bismarck as a historical figure. But that is likely to reflect strategic choices rather than any kind of censorship.

Iken and others nevertheless have a point. During the district assembly committee’s debate, Free Democrat Lars Jessen said he was “astonished” by the proposal to unname Emily Ruete Square because it was “incomprehensible” that Ruete’s views had only now become known. But the issue is not so much that the Greens and Social Democrats belatedly discovered Ruete’s racism; it’s that they didn’t care to engage with her life before suggesting a square be named after her.

Ruete’s 1886 memoir was reissued in 1989, accompanied by an editorial essay that contextualises her text, and republished by different publishers in 1998, 2007 and 2013. It is still in print and is available in several Hamburg libraries. I suspect the fact that Ruete was a woman of colour in nineteenth-century Germany was considered sufficient grounds for honouring her — in the same way that, a year later, her comments about slavery were sufficient grounds to withdraw the honour.

The complexity that makes Ruete such an intriguing historical figure has been in plain view, but was recognised only briefly during the discussions about the square. This complexity has not yet received the attention it warrants. Once the history workshop had produced evidence of her views about slavery and Black Africans, other aspects of her persona no longer mattered. Yes, she was an apologist for slavery. But she was also an astute observer of the hypocritical stance of European humanitarians in Zanzibar. She had only contempt for the British anti-slavery campaigners who took no interest in the welfare of people who had been freed: at best, she commented sarcastically in her memoir, European humanitarians were knitting woollen socks for the former slaves.

Complications: the Monument to Slaves in Stone Town, Zanzibar. Wikimedia

That it is possible to engage with Ruete while criticising her views on slavery and her role as a slave owner was demonstrated in 2009, when the Hamburg-based artist HM Jokinen created the performance “An Maria Ernestina,” an artistic intervention designed to disrupt the exhibition about Ruete at the Hamburg town hall. “I welcome the exhibition about Sayyida Salme, daughter of a slave,” the artist wrote at the time. “But I reject the honouring of a princess who accepted as normal the services of slaves and who profited from them.”

Ruete was also a perceptive observer of racism in Germany and the colonial gaze to which she herself was subjected: “At social events, in the theatre and at concerts, I had the feeling that I was constantly being looked at — something that I found most annoying,” she recalled in her second book, Briefe nach der Heimat. “One day, as my husband and I were out for a stroll, a couple of ladies in an equipage went by. Not only did they stare at us when they went past; but, when I accidentally turned around, I noticed the two ladies kneeling on the back seat in order to be able to observe us more closely.”

It is telling that the first German edition of Briefe nach der Heimat, in which Ruete writes about the first years of her life in Germany, was published only in 1999, six years after its English translation, and has never been reissued. Doesn’t the unnaming of Emily Ruete Square also perpetuate the silencing of Ruete’s critical views about Hamburg society?

I too have misgivings about the readiness with which Emily Ruete Square was unnamed, but mine are different from those articulated by Matthias Iken and aren’t specific to memorials tainted by Hamburg’s colonial past. Germany is still a country of perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders and their direct descendants. Memorialising the lives of the victims of Nazi Germany (or of German colonialism, for that matter) while removing from public view any references to the lives of perpetrators, accomplices and bystanders risks obscuring that fact.

Over the past twenty-eight years, the artist Gunter Demnig has laid more than 75,000 Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”): concrete cubes with brass plates inscribed with the name of a victim of Nazi persecution. The overwhelming majority of Stolpersteine are in Germany. This is undoubtedly an effective means of helping Germans to remember the Holocaust and honour the many ordinary people who became its victims, but shouldn’t Germans also be compelled to stumble across the names of perpetrators and accomplices, lest the complicity of ordinary Germans is forgotten?

Or, as I proposed some twenty years ago, might it not be appropriate for Hamburg residents to perform a public reading not only of the names of the thousands of Hamburg Jews who were killed in the Holocaust but also of the names in the 1943 Adressbuch, the last directory of all the heads of all households registered in Hamburg, which was published during the second world war?

Bismarck is in good company. Other historical figures — Immanuel Kant among them — have been exposed as apologists for colonialism or as racists. Postcolonial and anti-racist iconoclasts would be very busy indeed if we decided to no longer commemorate the lives of individuals who used the “n” word, denigrated people of colour or were implicated in German colonial ventures. Which is not to say that Kant’s writings about “races,” for example, don’t deserve more critical attention than they have received thus far.

Nor are the demands to raze controversial memorials unprecedented. After 1989, East Germans were often only too ready to expunge all traces of the German Democratic Republic by renaming streets and schools and removing memorials. Sometimes the desire to draw a line under the past even led to the targeting of people like Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who happened to be communists but who could not be held responsible for Stalinist repression. With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that attempts to expunge all references to East Germany’s communist regime have been counterproductive and ill-conceived.

But when it comes to German debates about memorials today, I don’t see a cancel culture at work. Rather, I detect attempts to neutralise, if not sanitise, the past. Complementing a restored and cleaned-up Bismarck monument with an exhibition about Hamburg’s colonial past and with a counter-memorial, however worthy that may be in itself, could encourage Hamburg residents to wash their hands of the legacies of colonialism. Rather than letting the past intrude into the present, a counter-memorial on its own might put the past to rest. But the thirty-four-metre high Bismarck monument would stand in the way of such memorial hygiene.

Sure, it could be regarded as an eyesore. But because it is so monumental and ugly, it can’t be easily ignored. It could therefore serve as an awkward reminder of Germany’s dark pasts, and their legacies and continuation into the present. Something like that happened in 2004–05 when the Wissmann statue, which had been put into storage in 1968, was re-erected for fourteen months in the context of HM Jokinen’s afrika-hamburg.de art project.

Like the Hamburg war memorial, whose message was meant to be neutralised by Hrdlicka’s counter-memorial, the granite Bismarck should remain a beacon for protests and a canvas for graffiti and other ephemeral art, notwithstanding any adjacent counter-memorial. Let’s hope that the authorities don’t take the view that a counter-memorial is a substitute for anti-memorial graffiti and that the statue therefore needs to be kept spotlessly clean.

The Hrdlicka memorial is not enough to counter Hamburg’s most obnoxious war memorial: traces of red paint, and of countless attempts to remove that paint, have done at least as much to call the war memorial’s raison d’être into question. The head of the district of Hamburg-Altona, which is responsible for one of the smaller Bismarck statues, had a good point when she announced after it was defaced that council workers were not expected to clean it up immediately.

Bismarck has been a controversial historical figure not only because of his role in German colonialism but also because he was an anti-democrat, because he tried to repress the organised labour movement and because of his anti-Semitism. He was also the founder of Germany as a political entity. Critically engaging with his memory could prompt a reassessment not just of the kind of aggressive nineteenth-century nationalism that informed the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian war, which led to the unification of Germany, but also of the idea of the nation that suffuses today’s understanding of what it means to be German.

I hope the Bismarck colossus overlooking the river Elbe will stick around to catalyse discussions that go beyond a distancing from recognisably dark pasts and instead engage with seemingly unproblematic presents. I also hope that closer attention to the experiences of Emily Ruete will facilitate a public conversation about everyday racism and the lives of people of colour in Hamburg, be it in the late nineteenth or in the early twenty-first century.

Some weeks ago, the state archives created a new position to investigate the colonial dimensions of street names in Hamburg. Obviously the authorities are hoping to avoid in future the kind of embarrassment that was caused by the naming of Emily Ruete Square. But what might actually be needed to get people in Hamburg to engage with the complexity that made Ruete such an intriguing historical figure is a (non-official) effort to rename that square in Hamburg-Nord. •

The post Cancelling Bismarck appeared first on Inside Story.

The Brereton inquiry was conducted in such secrecy that even its terms of reference aren’t public. But a recent Parliamentary Research Service report spells out how events unfolded after media outlets began publishing allegations of serious misconduct in Afghanistan more than a decade ago. The key date is 2015, when special operations commander Jeff Sengelman responded to rumours and internal accounts of misconduct by commissioning Canberra-based sociologist Samantha Crompvoets to examine “special operations command culture interactions.” It became clear that “a culture of impunity… may have normalised allegedly disturbing behaviour” (in the words of the Sydney Morning Herald) and that serious governance and behavioural lapses had occurred.

Sengelman forwarded those findings to the chief of army, Angus Campbell, in early 2016, and Campbell asked the inspector-general of the Australian Defence Force to ascertain whether the allegations had any substance. Sometime after that, the inspector-general appointed Brereton, a justice of the NSW Court of Appeal, to inquire into the matter.

Given that this all looks somewhat like the ADF investigating itself — and doing it in great (if understandable) secrecy — it is reasonable to ask how independent this inquiry really is. The answer: very independent. The inspector-general is a statutory position established outside the chain of command to monitor the health of the military justice system and, where necessary, conduct inquiries into matters concerning the defence force. The inspector-general may in turn appoint an assistant inspector-general, who is a judicial officer. Such appointees (of whom Justice Brereton is one) are not bound by the rules that apply to other inquiries by the inspector-general; they are required to conduct their inquiry in a manner they consider appropriate “having regard to the subject matter of the inquiry.”

In plain English, Justice Brereton, operating as part of a system that sits outside the normal chain of command, is not only free to investigate as he thinks fit but also required to do so. No one may give him directions.

Justice Brereton’s findings are disturbing, to say the least. Earlier this year, the inspector-general revealed that fifty-five separate potential breaches of the laws of armed conflict had been identified as having been committed by Australia’s Special Operations Task Group in the period 2005–16. The inspector-general noted that the inquiry had focused not on decisions made during the “heat of battle” but on the treatment of individuals who were clearly non-combatants or were no longer combatants.

We can take some comfort from the fact that this appalling behaviour came to light as a result of appropriate action both at the front line and at the highest level of command. Fellow members of the Special Operations Task Group brought the incidents to light, the commander of special operations commissioned the Crompvoets report and handed it to the chief of army, and the chief of army referred it to the inspector-general, who appointed Justice Brereton to investigate.

It is important to note that the Brereton inquiry is an administrative process rather than a criminal investigation. It is intended not only to ascertain whether misconduct has occurred but also to exonerate those who may be affected by unsubstantiated rumours and allegations. It will be for the newly created Office of the Special Investigator, operating within the home affairs department and leveraging the powers of the Australian Federal Police, to decide how and when to deal with the recommended criminal prosecutions, and perhaps the military justice system will play a role in considering military sanctions.

No doubt the defence department and the military hierarchy will also need to determine why the issue came to Sengelman’s notice only via rumours and media reports rather than up the chain of command. Who, between the frontline soldier and Sengelman, knew what about this behaviour, when did they know it, and what did they do about it? What leadership failures occurred at those intermediate levels?

There are suggestions that some frontline soldiers became almost untouchable because of the “old hand” status they had acquired from repeated deployments — and perhaps too many deployments is itself part of the problem. Perhaps, also, decades of concealing special operations members from public view may have been misconstrued by some insiders as an indication that they were immune to scrutiny. We know that Justice Brereton’s inquiry examined the organisational, operational and cultural environment that may have enabled the alleged breaches, and it will be surprising if he does not have a lot to say about them.

What will probably get less attention, because it will be beyond the scope of the inquiry, is the light that these dreadful incidents, and others revealed in the ABC’s 2017 series The Afghan Files, sheds on the nightmare that military conflict of this kind visits on the civilian population we are supposedly trying to help. Innocent people in the contested zones come under threat both from the indigenous insurgents — the Taliban — and heavily armed special forces able to descend on them from the sky at any moment. No matter how diligently the invading forces concentrate on individuals assessed as high-value targets, innocent civilians will be killed, either because they are unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or because a highly trained soldier had to make a split-second decision in the heat of battle — a decision on which his own life may depend — about whether a person in his field of fire represented a risk. We now know that some who are killed are either non-combatants or are no longer combatants.

According to the ABC report on next week’s release, senior army figures estimate that Australian personnel killed more than 5000 individuals during the Afghanistan deployment. Most were suspected Taliban fighters, but numerous of them were innocent civilians. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reports that 1282 civilians, including 340 children, were killed during the fighting in Afghanistan in the first half of 2020. While anti-government elements were responsible for more than half of those deaths, pro-government forces killed more children, mainly with airstrikes and indirect fire during ground engagements. Children and women continue to be disproportionately affected by the violence.

The humanitarian cost of these military engagements is one factor that should be explicitly weighed up when we contemplate participating in foreign military conflicts. So too is the damage to our own military personnel. It is not good enough to go along with US-initiated military action simply to show that we are “a good ally,” and nor should we hang around year after year, long after the endeavour has become a lost cause, simply because our ally would prefer to sustain operations at some level rather than admit defeat. Apart from the continuing impact on the civilian population, how can morale and a sense of purpose hold up in the absence of a plausible strategy for winning? Does killing supposed adversaries become an end in itself?

The place to consider and debate these costs before committing to military action, and to take account of the financial and opportunity costs of tying up defence forces far from our shores, is our national parliament. It is to be hoped that we will make no future commitments to military action — apart from emergency decisions for the direct defence of Australia — without a parliamentary resolution emerging from a fully informed debate.

Finally, knowing what we know now, it would be a good time for the government to consider dropping the charges against David McBride, the man at the heart of the leak that prompted the ABC’s The Afghan Files and led to the AFP raids on the ABC offices. McBride faces charges of theft of Commonwealth property, breaching the Defence Act and unauthorised disclosure of information. He says he tried to push the story internally before going to the federal police and the media; surely it is time to lay off the messenger and concentrate on the message. •

The post Weighing the costs of war appeared first on Inside Story.

The telegram had been sent on 9 October 1917 to the Reverend George Cranston, the minister at the Presbyterian church in Campbell Street, Balmain. It was his job to break the news of Eric’s death to the Garriock family. He probably delayed his call until the late afternoon when Thomas would be home from work and his wife Ann, Eric’s mother, would not be alone. So: a house, a doorstep, a nervous clergyman with a duty to perform.

As he stood there he might have smelled dinner cooking and heard the Garriock daughters chatting as they helped their mother. The oldest girl Ora had married in 1917, but Agnes, Annie and Robina were still at home. Their father was perhaps sitting in the corner with the evening paper. People often dreaded the sight of a clergyman in their street, and Reverend Cranston might already have been seen walking up Duke Place. Whose turn was it this time?

While life had carried on as usual at Duke Place, Eric had been dead for three weeks. He had given “Presby” as his religion when he enlisted, so it was up to Cranston to offer any comfort the family would accept. Breaking the news to nonbelievers, a clergyman could find himself back on the street in no time. But George Cranston and Thomas Garriock were fellow Scots, and perhaps this was enough to give Cranston entry to the household even if the Garriocks were not regular churchgoers.

It might also have helped that Cranston was a former army chaplain who had served sixteen months overseas in Egypt and France. Faced with the Garriocks’ pleading eyes he wouldn’t have needed to rely on empty platitudes: he would have ministered to many dying men, buried them, and written letters home to their families.

What most people wanted was the truth, however brutal. How did my son die? Where is he buried? Who was with him at the end? Cranston had no more information for the Garriocks that day than was in the telegram, but he would at least have been able to respond with something authentic from his own experience. Then, after leaving the telegram with the family, he would have walked back to the manse and to his wife, Marion. “Don’t hold dinner,” he’d probably said on the way out. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

What happened next? At this distance it is near impossible to know how grief played out in the lives of the Garriocks, and how long was the shadow it cast. This was not a well-off family with the leisure to preserve their feelings in letters and diaries. So, let’s come at it from another angle.

What happened to the telegram? Such a flimsy piece of paper for the weight of news it carried. Was it abandoned on the kitchen table? Did it flutter to the floor? Or did the family pore over it, searching for answers? Tens of thousands of similar messages were delivered all over the country between 1915 and 1918. What did people do with them? Is it something you would throw out, like a gas bill? How could you, with the words “killed in action” next to your son’s name?

In 1987, seventy years after this telegram was received, it was donated to the Australian War Memorial. If you order it up to the reading room today you are presented with a carefully preserved piece of paper in an acid-free cardboard folder. In researching this essay I found about ten official first world war telegrams like this at the AWM, and all came as part of small collections donated by families. Typically these collections might include some letters and cards home from the soldier, condolence letters after his death, commemorative memorabilia, information about his burial, a notebook or pocket diary, photographs and newspaper clippings. What families donate varies according to time and circumstances, and as a researcher in the reading room you never know quite what you will get.

A weight of news: the telegram that brought word of Eric Garriock’s death. Australian War Memorial

Still, I was taken aback when I opened the folder to find just this solitary piece of paper. I was tempted to shake the folder in case something else dropped out. But is this record any less weighted with meaning than those more elaborate collections? I took a second look. The telegram has been folded and looks as if it was carried around for a long time, resulting in tears along the creases and one of the folded surfaces becoming more rubbed than the others. Perhaps someone carried it in a wallet; Thomas probably, not Ann, because women carried purses in those days. Was that a strange thing to do? Who can say?

In pencil on the back of the telegram these words have been written in a small neat hand:

Dock Rs 1^st 2 of storey house past Bay St

Directions to some waterfront location? Not the Garriocks’ own house, for there is no Bay Street in the area. Perhaps Thomas made the jotting himself when he needed to note something down and the telegram was all he had.

I wanted more context. I pulled up Eric’s war service record, which is held by the National Archives of Australia and viewable online. He died in one of the battles of 1917 known collectively as the Third Battle of Ypres. I was interested in any evidence of how his family dealt with news of his death and noticed that, unusually, no personal items were returned to them. A deceased soldier’s kit was always examined and anything not issued by the AIF was sent to his family, who were always anxious to receive anything, however trivial, as mementos. Soldiers couldn’t carry or store much stuff, but most had something: a wallet, a Bible, a few photographs, perhaps a pocket diary. But Eric’s service record notes that when he died he had no personal effects at all.

Still, as next of kin Thomas Garriock was issued with Eric’s service medals and the commemorative bronze plaque and scroll sent to all families of the British Empire war dead. Also standard was a photograph of the soldier’s grave, if there was one (some soldiers’ remains were never found). These photographs showed the temporary grave, usually marked by a simple wooden cross, preceding a soldier’s final interment, and were mounted in cardboard folders with the precise location of the grave given. Relatives could draw comfort from this information even though few could ever expect to visit the grave.

A photo was sent to Thomas by defence authorities in May 1920 and he replied to say how pleased he was, but he apologised that he could not afford to “improve” the grave. By that he probably meant that he would not be able to pay for an inscription when his son’s remains were permanently marked under a headstone. All headstones included the soldier’s name, military unit and date of death, but anything else had to be paid for by the family. The cost was thruppence ha’penny per letter for a maximum of sixty-six letters including spaces. Historian Colin Bale has estimated that the cost of a full inscription would be about a quarter of a basic adult weekly wage. At least a third of Australian identified graves have no personal inscription.

Thomas was so troubled about his inability to pay for an inscription that he wrote in 1922, unprompted, to apologise again. He had been invalided after an accident in 1917, he explained, and when his wife Ann died in 1921 the twelve-shilling weekly pension paid to her as a dependent of Eric’s was stopped. Thomas was living near Gloucester in northern New South Wales by then and relied on “the daughters” for everything he received. “I hope the country won’t forget the Boys who gave their lives for their King and Country,” he wrote. Maybe that was the inscription he’d have chosen: “For King and Country.”

Eric’s final resting place is in the Birr Cross Roads Cemetery, three kilometres east of Ypres, Belgium. Thomas Garriock died in 1946.

With archives, abundance is always regarded as a virtue. Breadth, depth, richness, variety: that’s what we want, and get, in the great deposits of personal records. The papers of John Monash, probably Australia’s most famous soldier, occupy sixty metres of shelving at the National Library of Australia and another six metres at the Australian War Memorial. Four major biographies have been written from them. In fact biographers’ careers can be built on access to rich deposits like these: subject, biographer and the holding institution can bask in a mutual glow of prestige and influence.

But fat biographies lull us into false expectations. What is actually held in archives and museums represents the merest fraction of the material evidence created in a society at any given time. Novelist Hilary Mantel expresses it best. History, she says, is “what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it — a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth.”

How then do we grapple with scarcity, not abundance? We must begin with an awareness that many processes and circumstances are at play in the creation of records and their preservation as archives. Our man Eric Garriock probably did write at least a few letters or cards home to his family and it’s obvious from his enlistment papers that he could write — but these have not come to light, and nor has the photograph of his grave that we know existed. If he had a studio photograph taken in uniform before he left Australia, as many excited young enlistees did, it has not been donated to a public collection and nor have his service medals and the memorial plaque and scroll issued to his next of kin in the 1920s.

And the telegram? It has little obvious evidential value. By the time it was donated to the memorial in 1987, the memorial had long since collected the details of all the Australian first world war dead for its Roll of Honour in Canberra, so the telegram added nothing to the existing public record.

The file documenting the Garriock acquisition by the memorial is slender. It shows that the donor was a Mrs W. Bentley of Punchbowl, New South Wales. The only other item in the deposit is a piece of souvenir embroidery from Egypt with “From Eric to Agnes” inscribed in stitches. Such souvenirs were cheap to personalise and Eric obviously sent one home to his sister while he trained with his unit at a camp near Cairo in early 1916.

“Souvenir of Egypt 1916”: the embroidered greeting Eric sent to his sister Agnes in 1916. Australian War Memorial

The file contains no correspondence from Mrs Bentley to tell us about the Garriock family. Who was she? Electoral records show that Agnes Garriock, Eric’s sister, remained unmarried and lived in Punchbowl for many years, so Mrs Bentley may have been a younger friend who, on Agnes’s death in 1970, received some of her possessions. But while she cared enough to offer the telegram and the embroidery to the AWM, she may have known very little about them. No story — no anecdotes about Agnes or her long-dead brother — came with the donation when it was transferred to the memorial. Too many years had passed. There was nothing left to say. The emotion of that frightful moment in 1917 on the doorstep at the little house in Duke Place had all been spent.

The embroidery does yield a story of its own, though. It has been mounted on a stiff brown backing, and over many years light has faded the dyes in the base fabric, turning red into pink and blue to pale grey. You can see the original colours around the edges where the mount has crumbled and flaked away. This deterioration would have been arrested once the object was placed in museum storage. So? Agnes Garriock had it on the wall in her house for so many years it almost fell apart in front of her eyes.

They that are left grow old, and so does the material evidence of their loves and sorrows.

For Reverend Cranston, the Garriock telegram would have been one of dozens he had to deliver after his return from his own overseas service in March 1917. It was part of any parish priest or clergyman’s duties. Policy on this appears to have been formulated around the time the nation began to brace itself for the first casualties from the Dardanelles (Gallipoli). On 29 April 1915, defence minister George Pearce told the Senate that relatives of soldiers reported missing or killed would receive the news via a telegram delivered by a clergyman of the soldier’s denomination. (In the 1911 census less than 1 per cent of the Australian population had declared themselves non-Christian.) The names of the dead would then appear in the official casualty lists published in newspapers. Pearce’s announcement was reported in the press the next day.

In Britain and Germany, by contrast, messenger boys delivered the telegram, a terrible burden to place on the shoulders of boys aged not even eighteen. Many of them probably handed over the piece of paper and rode off on their bicycles as fast as they could.

The system in Australia was more humane, but there were still flaws. Sometimes the clergyman couldn’t break the news because the family was not living at the given address. In 1916 this was reportedly happening in about one in ten cases, which is why Base Records, the office set up in Melbourne by the defence department to handle soldiers’ records and coordinate casualty notifications, constantly pleaded with people to keep their addresses up to date. The ultimate horror was that families would read about a death in the newspaper, which did sometimes happen. Clergymen were required to notify authorities when they had delivered the message to each family so that the names could then go forward for publication, but there were a few who replied immediately only to discover that the telegram was undeliverable.

Behind all the procedures for keeping relatives informed was a continuous flow of information between Melbourne and locations overseas: Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt, Rouen in France, and of course London, where the AIF had its administrative headquarters. Nevertheless, information on the fate of a soldier could often be slow and vague, especially early in the war. Months often passed before the deaths of soldiers previously reported missing could be confirmed, and the Red Cross set up its own private enquiry service to assist relatives despairing at the lack of information from official channels.

In deciding to use clergymen to deliver the worst news to relatives, the government relied on the cooperation of churches, and for the most part got it. But people’s new dread of noticing a clergyman in their street impeded clergymen’s normal parish visiting. Before long, many began to regard the whole business as a terrible ordeal. Michael McKernan, one of the few Australian historians to have studied this aspect of home front history, corresponded with the son of a wartime clergyman who told him that his father had found the work “extremely distressing” and “never forgot how it hurt.”

The personal service records for all members of the AIF are held by the National Archives of Australia.  On them are copies of telegrams to families notifying them that their soldier had been reported wounded or sick, but rarely do we find telegrams for the missing or dead. For years I wondered how the system had worked. Clergymen broke the news, yes, but how did they know who had died, and where to call?

In 2019 I found the procedure described in an obscure defence department report published in 1917. A telegram was sent by Base Records in Melbourne to the military district in which the soldier had enlisted (the 2nd, in Eric’s case, which was New South Wales), and the commandant then authorised a telegram to the relevant clergyman. Back at Base Records, a small note was made on the soldier’s file that the necessary action had been taken. So, on Eric’s file we read: “Oct 8 1917 MC2 advised killed in action 15/9/17.” But you must be very sharp-eyed to notice it.

All of the military districts were state-based and they must have liaised with all archdioceses (and equivalents) to keep a record of the names and locations of priests and clergymen in all Christian denominations in their state, backed up by a substantial recordkeeping sub-structure of ledgers, indexes and correspondence. I have found no trace of any of it, at least not at the National Archives. Relevant records might still exist in church archives, or evidence in clergymen’s private papers or in local histories, but they would be scattered across the country. But even fragmentary records might expand our knowledge of how priests and clergymen became home front foot soldiers for the state during the first world war.

The urge to make a story out of these slivers and fragments is irresistible. I keep probing the Garriock story from different angles, searching, as novelists and biographers do, for hints and different perspectives to fill gaps and absences. I want to give Eric Garriock’s life some meaning apart from the fact of his early death. When it was founded in the 1920s and 1930s the Australian War Memorial was a national repudiation of meaninglessness: what parent can accept that their child has died without a reason? That is why it built its collections with such relentless determination in those early years, and why the quiet simplicity of the building in Canberra was so important. There had to be solace somewhere, surely?

But no mountain of paper or pile of stones will bring back the dead. The Garriock telegram confronts us with the terrible mystery of death. He breathed, and then he didn’t. He is not coming home. •

The post The telegram appeared first on Inside Story.

Mitter is fundamentally interested in the Chinese government’s efforts to integrate the history of China’s war with Japan into the world history of the second world war. As he indicates, success in these efforts would mean a China-centred history in which China replaced the Pacific as the significant theatre in the east and the Chinese rivalled the Americans in importance in combatting the Japanese.

The book is overtly aimed at showing (to quote the subtitle) “how World War II is shaping a new nationalism,” though the nationalist character of China’s project is mainly left implicit. Statist aims seem more obvious. In chapters on formal historical scholarship, TV drama, film and other forms of popular history, sites of historical memory, and historical debates, Mitter shows that remembering the war, and reminding the rest of the world about it, is helping China to burnish its “claim to ownership” of the post-1945 world, “deny Japan any significant role in the region” and “add moral weight to China’s presence in the region and the world.”

China had a long war with Japan: just over eight years counting from the attack on Beijing in July 1937 to the Japanese surrender in September 1945. These days, as Mitter tells us, children in China are taught about a fourteen-year war that begins with the Manchurian crisis of 1931 and the Japanese occupation of northeast China. The September 18th Historical Museum in Shenyang, built to commemorate this starting point, was formally opened in 1999, but Mitter dates the new orthodoxy to a 2015 statement by Xi Jinping. In 2017, the education ministry decreed that the iconic “eight-year war” was henceforth to be called the “fourteen-year war” in all textbooks. Historians in China have greeted this new development with a mixture of irritation and resignation.

Early sign: the September 18th Historical Museum in Shenyang. Antonia Finnane

Mitter’s own view is that China did not regard itself as being at war with Japan during the six years before 1937 (which were admittedly marked by extreme tensions and even outbreaks of armed conflict between China and Japan). His introductory chapter provides an outline history of the war, and it is for the most part the eight-year war. As he goes on to show, research and publishing on war history in recent years have also mainly been concerned with events that took place in those years.

Prior to the 1980s, Chinese research on the war years was largely directed at party history rather than war history. The result, not surprisingly, was a body of work that contrasted a positive interpretation of the Communists with a “very hostile analysis of the record of the Nationalists.” (Even Western historians held a negative view of the wartime Nationalist government.) When China entered a period of relative openness in 1980, discussion about the war widened. In this newly established field of research, moves were made to rehabilitate the Nationalists’ role in the war. As it turned out, they had done most of the fighting.

The treatment of the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 epitomises historiographical change in the 1980s. A much-studied topic in Japanese and English as well as Chinese-language works, the massacre doesn’t dominate Mitter’s book but he frequently returns to it. Research on the massacre carried out at Nanjing University in the 1960s had been suppressed during the Mao years but was finally allowed to see the light of day in the eighties. A museum commemorating the massacre was built in 1985 and redeveloped in stages in subsequent decades.  Partly inspired by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, it is a standing reminder of Japanese wartime atrocities in China. Later, in the early 2000s, a number of documentary and feature films about the massacre were released, some to international acclaim.

In a historical landscape dominated by Beijing, attention to the massacre signified a new acknowledgement of local history, significant not least because Nanjing had been the Nationalist capital and also the capital of a collaborationist regime during the war. A comparable process of recovering local history has been undertaken for the wartime capital of Chongqing, another topic explored by Mitter.

The recovery of these local histories has been accompanied by a fever of interest in the Republican era, causing some concerns in Beijing. An effort to “own” the histories is the obvious strategic response. On 13 December 2014 (although Mitter doesn’t mention this) Xi Jinping presided over a ceremony at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum on the occasion of the first National Day of Mourning. The nation came to a standstill as air sirens sounded. In retrospect (since 2014 is a fairly random year in commemorative terms), that event seems to have laid the groundwork for the great victory parade of 2015, which marked the seventieth anniversary of the Japanese surrender.

Mitter was in Beijing for that parade — an event designed, he writes, “both for domestic political purposes and also to send signals to the outside world about China’s international role.” He uses it to highlight the significance of the second world war in the Chinese government’s repackaging of itself in a changing world order. If the war was remembered primarily as an anti-Japanese war in the 1980s, by 2018 it had become “the main Eastern battlefield for the global war against fascism.” In other words — in history, as at the present time — China was to be perceived as a world player, not merely a regional one.

An important point of reference in the new war history is the 1943 Cairo Conference, at which president Chiang Kai-shek joined Churchill and Roosevelt to discuss postwar arrangements in Asia. In an absorbing discussion of the conference, Mitter shows that the point of the Chinese Communist Party’s present-day (re)writing of war history is to show not only that China fought the “good war” too. Even more importantly, it also participated in postwar planning.  In other words, China was “present at the re-creation” of the postwar world.

The pace of change in Chinese historiography has been rapid, and the politics of the changes rather transparent. Mitter is far from the only observer interested in the relationship between the two. As a call for a greater awareness of history as ideology in China, his book is part of a growing chorus: Zheng Wang’s Never Forget Humiliation (2012), Huaiyin Li’s Reinventing Modern China (2013) and Bill Hayton’s The Invention of China (2020) all riff on similar themes. In similar vein, James Millward, historian of Xinjiang, has called on historians of modern China to be less lazily compliant with the revised standard version that passes muster as history in China.

All of this prompts consideration of what, if anything, students in Australia are learning about Chinese history. Sure enough, guidelines for the Chinese Revolution unit for the Year 12 Victorian Certificate of Education reveal a series of sub-topics that might well be taught from a critical perspective but nonetheless follow a path that could have been laid by the Chinese education ministry.

If teachers are asked any time soon to bone up on the 1943 Cairo Declaration, they could do worse than read Mitter on the subject. He writes a plain, uncluttered history that informs and explains in equal parts. In China’s Good War, he shows that the history of wartime China has been largely shaped by just one of its outcomes: the ascendancy of the Chinese Communist Party and the creation of a state that depends heavily on a certain sort of history for its legitimacy. •

The post Good war, long war, whose war? appeared first on Inside Story.

Inglis achieved both national and international eminence, and acknowledged that he had lived a privileged professional life. But when the choice was between defending the weak or barracking for the strong, he never had to spend any time pondering which side to take. One of his early books, The Stuart Case, along with his journalism on the same subject, probably helped save the life of an Aboriginal man accused of raping and murdering a child in a society that did not, and could not, give him a fair trial. Inglis thought it more likely than not that the accused man had done it, but that did not hinder his desire for justice to be dispensed fairly.

Rather than passing the middle years of his career enjoying the pleasant life of a professor of history in the nation’s increasingly comfortable capital city — a life to which his talents and achievements had given him entree at a still-young age — he went to Port Moresby to help make a university and a nation. He would eventually serve as vice-chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea, before returning to the Australian National University as a research professor in the mid 1970s.

Inglis’s own scholarship was formidable, ranging over the history of the media — he wrote two major histories of the ABC — religion, national days and celebrations, colonial social life, and the social and cultural history of Australians at war. He was the originator and leader of the massive, multi-volume bicentennial history project, Australians: A Historical Library.

His major interests were less fashionable in their day than they have become, a marker of both his foresight and his influence. It was in the field of war history, especially through his groundbreaking work on memorials, that Inglis acquired an international reputation and perhaps also exercised his most enduring influence on Australian public culture. He was a key figure in Australia’s rediscovery and reinvention of Anzac.

This was all delivered in elegant but unpretentious and accessible prose that served as a constant reminder that Inglis had early aspirations to become a journalist. He was a cautious, modest scholar despite his great gifts, or perhaps because of them. He knew that there was always much more to learn. I may be permitted, I think, to use language that would have been familiar enough to Inglis who, as I did forty years later, grew up in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. He didn’t have tickets on himself.

And so why did he turn to the history of the 2800 men, women and children who came to Australia in September 1940 on the Dunera, from England, and the Queen Mary, from Singapore, as the final historical project of his life?

As his collaborators explain in Dunera Lives: Profiles, Inglis offered several explanations for his decision. This volume and its predecessor reveal how the lives of some of the men of the Dunera intersected with his own at various points in his life. Franz Philipp, the art historian, tutored the young Inglis at the University of Melbourne and, after recognising his ability in an essay on Machiavelli, asked him, “Why not consider following an academic career?” Later, Inglis inevitably had much to do with Henry Mayer, the Sydney University politics professor, not least through their common academic interest in the media. He shared a Canberra suburb with the retired diplomat and academic Klaus Loewald.

A seventeen-year-old Fritz Lowenstein (second from the right in front row) on a school trip to Bucknow, east of Berlin. Courtesy of Monica Lee Lowen and Jocelyn Lowen

Inglis’s collaborators on this project came round to the view that Inglis turned to the Dunera as a subject out of “the desire of a modest man to tell the story of a chapter of his early life without writing about himself.” This looks right, and certainly in character. The stories of the Dunera and Queen Mary also gave Inglis the chance to research and write history of a kind with which he was most comfortable. Both volumes — this one and its lavishly illustrated companion, published in 2018 — are essentially biographical, and Dunera Lives: Profiles uses the stories of eighteen of the internees (as well as of two other remarkable men, Captain Edward Broughton and Julian Layton, closely connected with the episode) to tell the larger story of the Dunera.

In doing so, Inglis tells a story of the twentieth century, the era that he himself lived through and that formed the subject of most of his writing. The history of this century, his collaborators explain, seemed to Inglis “more disturbing and bleaker than it was ennobling or enlightening.” While no doubt a fair summation of Inglis’s views, this book is also about the lives that the remarkable Dunera affair would subsequently make possible. It is no tale of woe.

Inglis was keen to avoid the hagiography to which the Dunera story has sometimes seemed prone, but there is much that is ultimately uplifting about the stories told here. The internees have come down to us in collective memory as “The Dunera Boys” — all somewhat Peter Pan-ish — thanks largely to the power of television and of one of that vast number of historical miniseries that graced our screens in the 1980s. Much mythology clings to them. They were Jewish. They were intellectuals and artists. They transformed Australian life.

There is some truth in each of these impressions. Many of those interned by the British authorities and sent to Australia on the Dunera in the wake of the fall of France and the Low Countries in mid 1940 were indeed Jews, although not all; and many of the Jews did not practise their religion or observe Jewish customs. Some conformed to the model of what Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher called a “non-Jewish Jew.” Few were devout. For a good many, their “Jewishness” was a function of Hitler’s racist lawmaking rather than an identity that was meaningful to them.

Quite a few were intellectuals, but there were about 2000 Dunera internees all up, and most clearly were not. A few internees — such as Leonhard Adam, author of Primitive Art (1940), and the Bauhaus artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack — were already significant figures in their fields when they were arrested and interned. Others would soon achieve eminence: by the late 1940s Hans Buchdahl, the theoretical physicist, was attracting the praise of Albert Einstein for his work in Hobart on general relativity.

The Australian camps in which they spent the early part of the war hosted a vibrant intellectual and artistic life behind the wire. The Collegium Taturense — at Tatura internment camp — offered lectures in a wide array of subjects, an average of 113 per week at one stage, given by twenty-three lecturers to 700 students. There was sufficient expertise within the camps to prepare internees for matriculation to the University of Melbourne.

Did the Dunera internees transform Australian life? Even to ask the question embodies the misconception that they made their life here. Most, in fact, did not: about 1300, or two-thirds, left Australia. But for some who went to live elsewhere, the threads were not entirely severed. Klaus Loewald, a US diplomat posted to Vietnam, became disillusioned with his adopted country and later took up an academic post in the history department at the University of New England in Armidale.

In retrospect, these men look like an advance guard for the massive postwar emigration from Europe, even if, like the convicts who founded white Australia, they were “unwilling emigrants.” They brought European sophistication and style to a country that was still meat, bread and three veg. No doubt that was part of their appeal to young Ken Inglis, the product of an Anglo-Australian lower-middle-class upbringing in Melbourne.

Dunera Lives does not aspire to be representative; indeed, it is clear that the biographies are not. “You hear all about the professors and doctors,” complained Roy Thalheimer, “but not about the taxi drivers.” Thalheimer wasn’t a taxi driver, but he was a forest worker and public servant. All the same, his story was remarkable enough: as the son of a leading communist activist and theorist, he had once sat on the knee of Lenin’s widow — “The only thing in my life worth mentioning,” he said. The concentration on the clever and creative worried Inglis, conscientious historian that he was. Was he selecting internees whose lives were closest to the kind of life he had led as a writer and academic? Yes, surely, and in choosing the stories that most interested him, his collaborators have ensured that this remains, as they wanted it to be, “Ken’s book.”

Taken together, the stories reveal much of the Dunera experience, not least because there were so many common elements. There was the shock of arrest and internment in Britain, given that so many of them — although not all — had fled from the Nazis. Then came the unpleasantness of the journey — the British guards behaved brutally, stealing from them and generally being obnoxious and threatening. The relief of arrival in Australia followed — a place they had neither chosen nor understood to be their destination, “the arse of the globe.” The pleasures of the first decent feed on Australian soil made an impression. Several seem to have recalled that first sandwich, along with the fruit that came with it: luxuries compared with shipboard fare. There were the insensitivities and the kindnesses of those they encountered in Australia. At Hay, one internee was surprised when an Australian soldier wished him “Shabbat shalom.” The soldier had served in Palestine, and would later take a message from the internee to his sister in Melbourne to tell her that he was safe.

There was the longing for freedom as they made the best of their incarceration in Hay, Orange and Tatura; the difficulties of deciding whether to stay in Australia — which often meant joining a labour battalion, the 8th Employment Company — or return to Britain; and the lives they made following internment and war. Many realised they had been lucky on the whole, despite their discomforts. So many of their relatives had perished in Nazi concentration camps, and some in similar circumstances to their own had drowned at sea following an encounter with a German torpedo. Life in Australia, dreary as it might have been, was safer than enduring the bombs and, later, rockets landing on British cities.

The professional lives of the internees who figure here would take in art, science, history, anthropology, economics, business, journalism and psychiatry. Some, if not quite household names among Australians of their day, nevertheless led lives as public figures: economist Fred Gruen, political scientist Henry Mayer, furniture maker Fred Lowen, and the flamboyant, exasperating composer Felix Werder. Others were well known in their particular communities and somewhat beyond them: for instance, Erwin Lamm, businessman, conservative Zionist and Jewish community leader.

Henry Mayer in his study at home, c. 1985. Courtesy of Media International Australia © Elaine Mayer

As Glyn Davis, political scientist, former University of Melbourne vice-chancellor and an Inglis PhD student, said at the online launch of this book, it is an act of love. There is Inglis’s love for the Dunera men, and for telling stories — the passion of his professional life. But there is also the love of his friends and collaborators, Bill Gammage, Seumas Spark, Jay Winter and Carol Bunyan, who have seen his project through to completion. Rae Frances, then dean of arts at Monash University, provided the financial support for this remarkable collaboration.

While Inglis’s research notes were substantial, and he had done some drafting, much of the book remained to be written at the time of his death. These accomplished historians have done a splendid job of seeing the project through in a manner that seems, so authentically, to realise Inglis’s vision. Winter, probably the world’s most eminent historian of the first world war, is a Yale University professor now based in Paris. Gammage, a friend of Inglis for more than fifty years and colleague at the University of Papua New Guinea, is one Australia’s leading social historians; with Inglis, he was a major contributor to the modern reappraisal of Australia’s involvement in the first world war, in his case through his book The Broken Years and role as an adviser on Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli. Spark, a younger historian whose work has been mainly on the second world war, began as Inglis’s research assistant but became a full co-author and close friend. And the Canberra-based Bunyan has built up a formidable knowledge of the Dunera affair over many years of painstaking research, work that continues.

Few of us are capable of inspiring the kind of devotion and loyalty that could bring such a team together. The two volumes of Dunera Lives are a remarkable conclusion to a career and a life. Even this second volume is generously illustrated, following its older sibling of 2018, which interpreted the Dunera experience through the visual record. Both are superbly produced by the excellent Monash University Publishing.

At the heart of the book lies Australia: what we were in 1940, and the very different country we would become in the decades that followed. While some of the men, women and children whose stories are told here did leave the country, the book is slanted towards the lives of those who stayed, or at least returned. Not all of those wanted to recall their connection to the Dunera. Henry Mayer did not, whereas Jules Stocky, the scion of a wealthy and well-connected German Catholic businessman, contemplated calling his daughter Dunera when she was born in 1944.

And there are those such as Heinz Schloesser — he would change his surname to Castles — who left Australia but for whom the ties were never quite cut. He returned to England with his wife and children to resume his job as the warden of a youth hostel. Their two sons, Frank and Stephen, Australian-born, would watch the sun set on their winter walks, saying, “It’s going to Australia” — and blow it a kiss before its departure.

Both sons returned to Australia as adults, to build distinguished careers as academic sociologists — one in welfare policy and the other in immigration studies. Frank’s daughter, the author Belinda Castles, has published a novel based on the experiences of her grandparents and their families. Dunera is a tale that continues to unfold, and there are many stories still to be told.

Ken Inglis would like it that way. •

The post A story of the twentieth century appeared first on Inside Story.

Five weeks earlier, Australia had sent its first diplomat to the Pacific islands seeking information about the level of support for Charles de Gaulle. The London-based Free French leader had called on France’s overseas possessions to rise up against the collaborationist regime led by Marshal Philippe Pétain.

It was a crucial time in the relationship between Australia and one of its closest Pacific neighbours, and this history of mobilising defence and diplomacy against a rising Asian power has echoes today.

The path to war during the 1930s had already transformed colonial relations in the Pacific. Facing US embargoes, Japanese militarists looked south to the oil resources of Southeast Asia and to strategic mineral deposits throughout the Pacific islands. New Caledonia’s massive reserves of nickel were also coveted by Germany, and the Japanese had increased their investment and trade with the French colony. From 1933, the fascist powers even began to manufacture solid nickel coins as a way of stockpiling this crucial resource for arms manufacture.

But Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria and the 1937 Sino-Japanese war raised fears of a wider regional conflict. With war raging in China, anti-fascist trade unionists in Australia blocked shipments of slag metal to Japan in late 1938, to the anger of attorney-general Robert Menzies, known forever after as Pig Iron Bob.

Long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, some French officials in New Caledonia had tried to limit the sale of nickel to Tokyo, fearing it would be onsold to Nazi Germany. By 1940, Australian officials were negotiating with New Caledonia’s largest producer, Société Le Nickel, to purchase nickel as a way of encouraging the French colony to cease exports to Japan.

Australian politicians had been promoting a policy of “strategic denial” in the Pacific since long before Federation. At the start of the second world war, with Britain and France entangled in the European conflict, the Royal Australian Navy needed more information about political developments in strategically important New Caledonia.

Naval historian Ian Pfennigwerth has documented RAN intelligence operations at the time. “Director of Naval Intelligence Rupert Long had organised some human intelligence sources in Noumea,” he writes. “He had arranged to have William Johnston appointed as Admiralty Reporting Officer Noumea on 15 April 1940. He had also organised through Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Denis, the French military commander in Noumea, that a French naval officer would provide the Naval Intelligence Division with intelligence.”

Anxious to get more of its own information independent of the British, the Australian government decided in mid July 1940 to send a French-speaking lawyer, Bertram Ballard, to Noumea to observe and report back.

Eighty years on, Ballard’s successor as Australia’s representative in New Caledonia is consul-general Alison Carrington. Last month she organised a ceremony in Noumea to commemorate the arrival of Australia’s first diplomatic representative in the Pacific islands.

“This year, we’re celebrating eighty years of an official Australian presence here in New Caledonia,” she tells me. “The nomination of Ballard was quite an important moment: it represents our fourth diplomatic mission overseas. Before Noumea, there was only London, Washington and Ottawa.”

Bertram Ballard had previously served as Australian government solicitor in neighbouring New Hebrides (today, the Republic of Vanuatu). The government’s decision to send him to New Caledonia followed Charles de Gaulle’s famous 18 June call for French overseas colonies to rally to a Free France. “New Caledonia hadn’t actually done that,” says Carrington, “so Ballard’s mission was to come to Noumea, report on political and economic matters and basically take the temperature of the place during this time of global upheaval.”

With the Germans having occupied Paris, New Caledonia’s governor, Georges Pélicier, an ageing colonial civil servant, was wavering between supporting the exiled Free French forces or Marshall Pétain’s regime, headquartered in the French spa town of Vichy. The governor angered Gaullist supporters in Noumea when he published Vichy’s new constitutional laws on 29 July.

Pélicier had asked the Vichy regime to send a warship to Noumea, and it deployed the vessel Dumont d’Urville from French Polynesia in late August, commanded by Toussaint de Quièvrecourt. The French aristocrat, a fervent colonialist, reported to Paris that Australia was subsidising local Free French agitators with the objective of annexing New Caledonia.

A month after he arrived in Noumea, Ballard wrote to Canberra reporting that most New Caledonians would “welcome and follow” a governor appointed by de Gaulle. As Alison Carrington explains, until Australia had someone on the ground in Noumea “we weren’t aware of quite the level of support for Free France here. I like to think that having an official representative on the ground at the time contributed in some small way to assisting the decision to send HMAS Adelaide to escort Henri Sautot into New Caledonia, which ultimately led to New Caledonia rallying to Free France.”

Sautot was French resident commissioner in the neighbouring Condominium of the New Hebrides, which had been jointly colonised by France and Britain. With British support, Sautot had rallied French colonists in Port Vila to support the Gaullist cause. After extensive debate, the Australian government decided to transport Sautot to Noumea, deploying HMAS Adelaide as protection.

John Lawrey’s classic study, The Cross of Lorraine in the South Pacific, documents this successful episode of gunboat diplomacy. The Australian warship, under the command of Captain Harry Showers, escorted the Norwegian ship Norden from Port Vila to New Caledonia, with Sautot aboard. Arriving in Noumea early on 19 September, Showers was under orders not to fire unless fired on by the Dumont d’Urville or French army shore batteries. Facing off against the French ship, Sautot was transferred from the Norden onto the Australian warship. A popular uprising was under way onshore.

An uneasy days-long stand-off ended with the Free French forces prevailing under the watchful eye of the RAN warship. Following an unsuccessful revolt by pro-Vichy officers on 23 September, Ballard and Showers convinced Governor Sautot to arrest the remaining pro-Vichy leadership. To forestall any further trouble, Showers drafted a letter for Sautot to send, inviting Dumont d’Urville to depart. The French ship soon left port, carrying pro-Vichy officials to Saigon in French Indo-China.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, an Australian commando company was deployed to New Caledonia to train “native scouts” for a guerilla campaign against an invading Japanese force. From 1942, Noumea was transformed by the influx of tens of thousands of American troops, preparing to fight their way across the Pacific islands towards Japan.

These tumultuous events inspired a young Australian to write his first book. Hailing from the small town of Poowong in the Victorian farming district of Gippsland, Wilfred Burchett visited New Caledonia in 1939 and 1941. He travelled throughout the islands, gathering stories from a range of ordinary people — nickel prospectors and Javanese mine workers, Kanak villagers and French farmers.

Published in 1941 as Pacific Treasure Island, Burchett’s words from eight decades ago still resonate today, as New Caledonia strengthens ties with Australia and the Pacific region. “Whatever the fate of the French empire,” he wrote, “it is certain that relations between New Caledonia and its Pacific neighbours will become ever closer, and it is high time that all we Pacific neighbours began to know each other a little better.”

This perception of Australia and New Caledonia as neighbours was uncommon in the 1940s. Since then, community contacts between the two neighbours have ebbed and flowed through periods of cooperation, exploration and mutual suspicion.

From the mid 1970s, as Papua New Guinea gained independence and ni-Vanuatu battled Britain and France in the New Hebrides, some Australians engaged with Kanak cultural and political activists. Links expanded through unions and ecumenical church networks, regional sporting competitions, cultural exchanges and the thousands of young Australians who travelled to study the French language.

Even before the founding in 1984 of the independence movement Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, Kanak leaders such as Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Yann Céléné Uregei visited Australia to lobby for government support. Between 1984 and 1988, trade unions, churches and community groups supported the Kanak independence struggle through the period of violent clashes known as les évènements.

As New Caledonia descended into armed conflict, friendly relations between Canberra and Paris disintegrated. France’s ties with the Pacific Islands Forum were already strained because of regional opposition to French nuclear testing. The 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior by French intelligence agents and the deployment of thousands of troops to New Caledonia in 1986 won France few friends, in the region or internationally.

Australia reluctantly followed Island Forum countries to support New Caledonia’s return to the UN list of non-self-governing territories in December 1986. In retaliation, France suspended ministerial visits and expelled Australian consul-general John Dauth from Noumea in early 1987.

Those diplomatic dramas are long past. French nuclear testing ended in 1996; two years later, the Noumea Accord mapped a path to possible New Caledonian independence via political devolution. This transformed France’s profile in the region and ties to Australia.

“Today, we have a very good relationship with Australia,” New Caledonia’s president, Thierry Santa, tells me. “We’re developing many commercial activities because we have a good bilateral relationship. As a government, we’ve undertaken a number of visits to Australia, but the economic discussion is happening more at the level of the states. On the health front, Australia remains the primary location for medical evacuations from New Caledonia. In education, we have a number of agreements for students to move in both directions. So relations are really great.”

Over the past decade, even as independence movements in New Caledonia and French Polynesia continue to call for an end to French colonial rule, Paris has improved its diplomatic relations in the islands region. The government of New Caledonia is also basing delegates in French embassies in Canberra, Wellington, Port Vila, Port Moresby and Suva.

A key turning point, according to Australia’s Alison Carrington, was the decision by regional leaders to include the two French dependencies as full members of the Pacific Islands Forum in 2016.

“This decision really marked an evolution of the relationship for these two Pacific territories more broadly in the region,” she says. “This is something that both France and Australia strongly encourage and endorse: the increasing participation of the French Pacific territories in the Pacific region, the neighbourhood we all share.”

The consul-general says she is seeking to expand cooperation with Australia in agriculture, mining services and especially education.

“More and more Australians are aware that New Caledonia is just a stone’s throw from our east coast,” she says. “Because of that geographic proximity, for a long time there’s been a lot of back and forth between Australia and New Caledonia, for holidays, for work or study. New Caledonians young and old have been travelling to Australia to study English, some to do their primary and secondary schooling, many to study at universities in Australia. In the other direction, New Caledonia represents the closest and easily accessible place for Australians to come and enhance their French-language skills.”

Where wealthy New Caledonians once travelled primarily to France for holidays, by 2010 Australia had become their top destination. “There is a strong flow of tourists headed in the direction of Australia,” Carrington acknowledges. “The number of tourists who come from Australia by plane to stay in hotels is a bit smaller, and that is something that New Caledonian authorities seek to grow. But before Covid, we were welcoming around 300,000 Australian tourists a year on cruise ships.”

Trade between Australia and New Caledonia amounted to $721 million in 2018–19. But that year, China was the number one export destination for New Caledonia, with 31.7 per cent of trade, followed by Korea and Japan — rankings that reflect exports of nickel ore and ferronickel metal. Australia had been a primary export market for nickel ore until rogue politician and entrepreneur Clive Palmer closed the Yabulu nickel smelter in Townsville in 2016. By 2018, Australia only ranked number eleven as an export destination, receiving just 1 per cent of New Caledonian exports.

Alison Carrington sees room for more cooperation in mining services: “The technology and services part of the mining sector is an important part of our relationship. We in Australia are world leaders in this sector and have a lot to offer to New Caledonia.”

Despite this, Australia’s overall trade with the Pacific has stagnated, even as China’s has more than doubled over the past decade. In August last year, just weeks after his election as president, Thierry Santa travelled to his first Forum leaders meeting in Funafuti. “When I met prime minister Scott Morrison in Tuvalu,” says Santa, “he was very enthusiastic about us being part of PACER-Plus, the regional trade agreement between Australia, New Zealand and the independent countries of the Pacific. But we’re not really within that framework — we’d rather improve the bilateral relationship.”

At a time of geopolitical tension between China and the United States, regional interventions by Australia and France are increasingly framed by the concept of the “Indo-Pacific.”

“France is a great Indo-Pacific power,” said French president Emmanuel Macron when he visited Australia and New Caledonia in May 2018, “and it has great power in the Indo-Pacific region through its territories New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna and French Polynesia, as well as Mayotte and Reunion.” The 8000 or more French military personnel in the two oceans “project our national defence, our interests, our strategy; the region has more than three quarters of the vast maritime zone that makes us the second-largest maritime power in the world.”

Macron highlighted the strategic importance of both India and Australia, two countries where the French government is actively promoting arms sales. “Our shared priority is to build this strong Indo-Pacific axis to guarantee both our economic and security interests,” he said. “The trilateral dialogue between Australia, India and France has the possibility to play a central role in this.”

At the time, officials argued that continuing French colonial control in New Caledonia was crucial to France’s Indo-Pacific strategy. “In terms of geo-politics,” the Australian Financial Review reported, “losing control over New Caledonia’s foreign affairs and defence would undermine Macron’s strategy, of which Australia is a stated ally, to strengthen or protect France’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region — presumably as a hedge against China.”

During the visit, Macron and then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull signed a new Vision Statement on the Australia–France Relationship, extending two previous intergovernmental agreements on strategic partnership. This relationship is dominated by Australia’s $80 billion submarine technology deal with France’s Naval Group, and other ADF purchases from the arms manufacturer Thales.

After a decade of negotiation, Australia and France also signed a Mutual Logistics Support Agreement in 2018, a deal promoted as “symbolic of the strategic depth and maturity of relations between France and Australia in the field of defence.” The agreement increases intelligence sharing and allows French and Australian naval and air units to use each other’s ports, fuel and logistics in the Pacific.

Alison Carrington sees cooperation between the Australian Defence Force and the Forces Armées de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, or FANC, as a key part of the burgeoning relationship with Paris and Noumea. “Sitting here in Noumea, where the French armed forces are headquartered, this part of the relationship is a really crucial one,” she says. “For a long time, there’s been a good level of cooperation between Australian and French defence forces, preparing for and responding to humanitarian disasters in the region. But I’d say we’ve gone up from a good level to a very good level now.”

Carrington points out that Australia’s chief of the defence force made his first visit to Noumea, with his New Zealand counterpart, in January this year. She also welcomes a new ADF liaison officer, to be based in Noumea later this year. “That person will share their time between the consulate-general and the French armed forces headquarters. That will only further enhance our interoperability.”

“There’s an alignment between Australia’s ‘step-up’ engagement with the Pacific and France’s Indo-Pacific axis strategy,” says Carrington. “Both of us see ourselves committed to security in the region and meeting the security needs of the region. In that sense, France is a very important partner for Australia.”

The closeness of this relationship will be tested, however, in coming years. New Caledonia will hold a referendum on its political future on 4 October. Fearful of upsetting the global security relationship with France, Australian ministers are loath to publicly champion the “right to self-determination” for colonised peoples. But the Kanak independence movement sees status quo definitions of “security” as reinforcing France’s colonial control. The ebb and flow of neighbourly relations will continue to be affected by their call for sovereignty and independence. •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post “Before Noumea, there was only London, Washington and Ottawa” appeared first on Inside Story.

It was three days later, when the second atomic bomb was dropped, that the now-familiar photo of the mushroom cloud rising nearly fourteen kilometres into the air above Nagasaki was released to the media. Taken by Lieutenant Charles Levy from an observation plane accompanying the bomber, it epitomised American military might.

But not the effects of that might. Photographer Yoshito Matsushige’s images of the destruction in Hiroshima were confiscated by the American military and only published once the peacetime occupation ended in 1952. Until then, few people outside the city had seen evidence of what happened to the people inside it.

Having used great resourcefulness to get into Hiroshima, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett provided the first eyewitness account of what he called “the atomic plague” in the London Daily Express on 5 September 1945. Blume perhaps underplays Burchett’s worldwide scoop, but her focus in Fallout is to illuminate the importance of John Hersey’s article, simply titled “Hiroshima,” published a year later in the 31 August 1946 issue of the New Yorker.

At that time, and indeed right up to 1992, the New Yorker didn’t publish photographs. Hersey’s 31,000-word article occupied an entire issue of the magazine, a first in its twenty-six-year history. That is a lot of words, and Blume argues that they, more than photographs extolling military power or showing shattered buildings, have informed views about atomic bombs because they told the stories of six survivors from the moment of the bomb’s impact to several months afterward.

Since the publication of “Hiroshima” it has been hard for anyone to pretend that the impact of nuclear weapons on people, instantaneously and in lingering radiation sickness, is anything but horrific. Blume uses a quote from Hersey as her book’s epigraph: “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has been the memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”

Here’s a paragraph from “Hiroshima” that, once read, is hard to forget. It concerns the efforts of one of the survivors, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, to save others:

Mr Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly.

By now the tide has risen, making it harder for him to get across the water. Hersey continues:

On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, “These are human beings.” It took him three trips to get them all across the river.

By bringing readers down from the aerial view of the city to people on the ground, Hersey opened space for them to imagine themselves in the shoes of a people whose military just a few years before had bombed Pearl Harbor, killing 2400 people and bringing the United States into the second world war.

Hersey’s decision to strip out any discussion of the debate about whether the two atomic bombings were necessary to win the war exposed him to criticism, particularly from Mary McCarthy (best known as author of the novel The Group), that he had reduced the uniqueness of the atomic bomb attack to the kind of “human interest” story that follows every natural disaster.

There is something to McCarthy’s criticism, but it’s not a big something. The fact that “Hiroshima” has little to say about the bomb’s necessity or otherwise flows from Hersey’s choice, encouraged and then patrolled in the drafting by New Yorker editor Harold Ross, to focus on “what happened not to buildings but to human beings,” as Hersey later put it. To portray the reality of their experience he needed to convey that perspective and that perspective only. It is this, though, that enables a mass audience to sympathise, even empathise, with the Japanese — something few had been able, or willing, to encourage.

No newspaper human-interest story has ever been as artfully composed as “Hiroshima,” either. Hersey drew on the structure of Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which he fortuitously came across while travelling to Japan. Wilder portrayed the interconnected lives of five people who were destined to die when a suspension bridge over a canyon in Peru broke with all of them on it.

Hersey uses a similar sequential narration device to tell the stories of six survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. The opening paragraph captures what each of the six was doing at the exact moment, 8.15am, when the bomb was dropped.

Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk, was “turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.” Dr Masakazu Fujii was “settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital.” Hatsuyo Nakamura “stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house.” Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge “reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house.” Dr Terufumi Sasaki “walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen.” And the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto “paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer.”

In cutting from one person to the next, Hersey uses a cinematic effect completely familiar today but novel, in both senses of the word, in 1946.

His achievement was journalistic as well as literary. Blume lays out in detail just how much news “Hiroshima” contained. The number of deaths was 100,000, significantly higher than the US military’s official figure. Contrary to the official reason for choosing Hiroshima — that it was a military base — the overwhelming majority of the city’s population was civilian.

General Groves had consistently denied or downplayed the level of radiation sickness in the bombed cities, and told a Senate committee on atomic energy in late 1945 that doctors assured him radiation poisoning was “a very pleasant way to die.” But Hersey showed that levels of radiation poisoning were still alarmingly high in 1946 and that it wreaked terrible suffering on victims.

“Hiroshima” had an enormous impact. According to media historian Kathy Roberts Forde, all newsstand copies — priced at 15c — sold out within an hour. Within weeks, writes Blume, the magazine was selling for US$6 at secondhand bookshops. Albert Einstein, the Nobel prize–winning scientist and pacifist, requested 1000 reprints which he sent to leading scientists. The full article was read on the American Broadcasting Company radio network over four consecutive evenings.

As many as eighty newspapers and magazines around the world clamoured for rights to reprint the story, which Hersey granted with two conditions: that the proceeds go to the Red Cross and that the article run in full. It was published in book form in November 1946 and, according to Jeremy Treglown’s 2019 biography of Hersey, Mr Straight Arrow, sold more than 600,000 copies within a year.

Despite Hersey’s steering clear of the issue, or perhaps because of it, “Hiroshima” provoked the first full public debate about whether the United States was right to drop the bomb. “As I read, I had to constantly remind myself that we perpetrated this monstrous tragedy. We Americans,” one reader wrote in a letter to the New Yorker. An internal New Yorker report said Hersey’s article provoked a stronger response than any other in the magazine’s history, according to Forde. The great majority of the 400 letters were favourable, including a good number from readers who had noticed and praised Hersey’s “masterful storytelling.” A small number were critical: “Wonderful. Now write up the massacre of Nanking,” of Chinese people by Japanese soldiers in 1937, wrote one.

The response of commentators across the media was overwhelmingly positive. The New York Times editorialised:

The disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were our handiwork. They were defended then, and are defended now, by the argument that they saved more lives than they took — more lives of Japanese as well as more lives of Americans. The argument may be sound or it may be unsound. One may think it sound when he recalls Tarawa, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa. One may think it unsound when he reads Mr Hersey.

What is remarkable about this editorial, writes Blume, is how at odds it is with the newspaper’s earlier, fervent support for the dropping of the atomic bomb. Not to mention the fact that one of its journalists, William Laurence, had been seconded in April 1945 from the newspaper to the Manhattan Project, where he wrote most of the press releases the media relied on in the days following the bombing.

After Burchett reported “the atomic plague” in September 1945, Laurence was among the journalists given a guided tour of the site of the original atomic bomb tests in New Mexico. His story, headlined “US Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales,” reported that Geiger counters revealed “a minute quantity” of radiation in the ground, showing that Japanese claims of people dying from radiation sickness in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a fiction.

When Hersey’s article was published, Laurence was about to release his own book, Dawn Over Zero, in which he extols the virtues of the nuclear power he had seen in July 1945, when the first bomb was exploded at New Mexico, and on board one of the planes in the bombing run for Nagasaki:

It was as if the earth had spoken and the suddenly iridescent clouds and sky had joined in one affirmative answer. Atomic energy — yes. It was like the grand finale of a mighty symphony of the elements, fascinating and terrifying, uplifting and crushing, ominous, devastating, full of great promise and great forebodings.

Blume lays bare the deeply entwined relationship between the most respected newspaper in the United States and the top-secret Manhattan Project. That relationship might have been covered by earlier writers such as Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell in Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, but what hasn’t previously been covered — and what is one of the most extraordinary parts of this carefully researched, crisply written book — is the extent to which the New Yorker cooperated with the US military before publishing “Hiroshima” — for better and for worse.

Like the rest of the American media, the New Yorker sent stories to the War Department for clearance. The level of censorship of the magazine’s war coverage, though, had been light, according to Blume. The Office of Censorship closed down in late September 1945, but in early August the following year, just as Hersey and his editors at the New Yorker were feverishly editing “Hiroshima,” President Truman signed into law the Atomic Energy Act. The act restricted publication about “all data concerning the manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons.” Use of any such data that might harm the United States could “be punished by death or imprisonment for life.”

The magazine’s editor, Harold Ross, and his deputy, William Shawn, were worried this new restriction could kill their article. On advice from their lawyer, they felt they needed to get official clearance. They decided to send it not just to any government public relations officer but to General Groves himself.

Why? It isn’t clear. The records of the New Yorker, held at the New York Public Library, and General Groves’s papers have intriguing gaps, but Blume has pieced together the available information. She offers informed speculation about exactly what transpired in the negotiations between Groves and the magazine.

Blume points to speeches Groves had made defending the dropping of the atomic bomb. If anyone didn’t like the way the United States ended the war, his argument went, then they should “remember who started it.” She also shows that the United States’ own scientists had been to Hiroshima and discovered for themselves the extent of the damage and its lingering effects.

Groves had been the architect of the postwar information suppression campaign, but he was also concerned to protect the United States’ upper hand in the nuclear arms race, especially against the Soviet Union. Atomic bombs were now part of the world, he wrote in a memo in early 1946, and “We must have the best, the biggest and the most.”

Blume suggests that, perversely, the eyewitness accounts in “Hiroshima” could even have been “seen as an advertisement for the effectiveness of the weapon whose creation General Groves had spearheaded — and he had become increasingly concerned with receiving credit for his role in creating the war-winning weapon.” In other words, “Hiroshima” could be good PR for the general and the United States. Blume rightly describes this stance as “cynical,” and could also have described it as chillingly hypocritical.

After receiving the draft article, Groves called Shawn on 7 August 1946 and said he would approve the story. But he wanted to discuss “changing the article a little” in ways that “would not hurt the article” — words guaranteed to make any journalist’s blood run cold. But the negotiations were successful, and the article was run.

Blume shows what was lost, and what was left in or overlooked by General Groves. In the former category was a categorical statement by Hersey about Americans being wilfully kept in the dark about the exact height of the bomb’s detonation and the weight of uranium used. Gone was Hersey’s indignant line that “Trying to keep security on atomic fission is as fruitless as trying to keep a blanket of secrecy on the law of gravity.” Gone, too, was the fact that some parts of a comprehensive government report about the bomb’s effects were being kept secret.

What Groves let stand, though, was Hersey’s most disturbing revelation: in Blume’s words, that “the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”

That the atomic bomb was not simply a more powerful bomb than any other but a qualitatively different kind of bomb was Hersey’s point — and Groves’s too. For Hersey, enabling people to see the bomb’s exact impact should prompt them to believe it should never be used again. For Groves, that should prompt readers to fear what their nation’s enemies might do and trust what their military leaders could, and would, do if necessary.

No atomic bomb has been dropped in a war since 1945. This might speak to the enduring power of “Hiroshima,” but nine countries have nuclear weapons, including North Korea and, of course, the United States, both of which have dangerously unstable and capricious leaders today. The Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is set at one hundred seconds to midnight, the closest since the nuclear watchdog was set up in 1947.

As Albert Einstein reflected in 1949, “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks.” With that in mind as we commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, read — or reread — “Hiroshima.” •

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The second half of 1943 brought chaos to Italy, with the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist regime and then, in September, surrender to the Allies. Allied forces landed on the Italian mainland and began their slow advance northward, opposed by German soldiers sent to defend the peninsula. With the collapse of the Italian war effort and the state’s bureaucracy, the prison system that held Allied POWs faltered.

Some Allied prisoners simply walked away, unchecked by the Italians who once had guarded them. That was the easy part; the hard part was finding a way to freedom, which often involved picking a way past Italian fascists, aggrieved by developments in the war and looking for violence, and through the German forces that had flooded northern and central Italy to defend the Gustav Line. Many escapers made for the Alps and tried to cross into neutral Switzerland; others went south in the hope of locating Allied lines and finding sanctuary behind them.

As the book’s subtitle indicates, Kittel has a particular focus. She follows the prisoners of Campo 106 and their bids for freedom in the weeks and months after Italy’s surrender. Her father, Col Booth, was one of those who “shot through” from Campo 106, and her impulse to learn about her father’s war led her to more stories of Italian captivity and escape, and to significant civilian histories. Woven through the book are interesting portraits of Italian men and women who helped, and sometimes hindered, escaped POWs. Kittel has done well to find these stories, which illuminate aspects of Italian life under fascism and occupation. Careful and determined research informs the narrative.

The image of bumbling, comical Italian soldiers has dominated Australian perceptions of the war against Mussolini and life in Italian captivity. Early in the book Kittel writes of Australian soldiers who duped their Italian captors into believing they didn’t know how to use a shovel, prompting the credulous Italians to offer digging instruction. Surely this is a story that grew in the telling, a tale conforming to the stereotype of the larrikin Aussie soldier and the dopey, pliable “Ities” who served Mussolini. I mention the passage not because it’s typical, but because it sticks out from the narrative as wholly atypical. One of the best things about this book is that Kittel deftly avoids tired caricatures of Aussie diggers and incompetent Italian soldiers.

Given a choice, POWs would have chosen Italy over Changi or the Thai–Burma Railway or the Sandakan death marches, but it doesn’t follow that captivity in Italy was benign, as perception and written histories often have it. Colonel Vittorio Calcaterra, commandant of Campo 57 at Gruppignano and a committed fascist, was infamous among Australian prisoners for his brutality. He and his thugs inflicted cruel and degrading punishments on POWs, forcing sick men to stand on parade in sub-zero temperatures, and stripping, chaining, starving and beating other prisoners.

For all the physical suffering of POWs, captivity made deeper wounds on the mind. Kittel shows that the circumstances of imprisonment matter less than what prison represents: the theft of an individual’s freedom. The book thus prompts readers to consider a radical and important thought: did prisoners of Italy suffer the same level of mental torment as prisoners of Germany or even of Japan, the gold standard for measuring POW misery?

The question is implicit, for Kittel wisely avoids linking her story to the experiences of Australian POWs in the Asia-Pacific theatre. Much of the limited literature on Australian POWs in Italy is shaped by an unhelpful tendency to examine the Italian experience relative to events in Asia. Details of beatings at Changi reveal nothing about what men endured at Campo 57 or 106 or elsewhere in Italian POW camps.

Nor was the pursuit of freedom some sort of boys’ own adventure in bucolic Italy. Kittel’s subject matter came with risks, for it is the stuff of schoolyard daydreams, feats of derring-do hard to comprehend. But she succeeds in telling these stories without injecting a false note of romance, never trivialising escapes as exciting jaunts. Fear and death stalked the men all the way to Switzerland or Allied lines, and they often went without food and shelter. If they reached the Alps they then had to cross them, challenge enough in peacetime. In civilian clothes behind enemy lines they forfeited the protection of the Geneva Conventions; capture could mean being declared a spy and executed. Some Australian escapers in Italy were murdered by Italian fascist soldiers. The physical and mental burdens incurred in “shooting through” were as heavy and damaging as those imposed by captivity.

In the final two chapters, the best in the book, Kittel considers how the experience of captivity shaped the postwar lives of these POWs. She writes movingly about the pleasures and difficulties of returning home to families and communities who offered warm welcomes and love, but rarely understanding. I hope that in these two brief chapters is the kernel of a new book, a companion volume to Shooting Through.

In places Shooting Through is overwritten, the metaphors clunky. Some sentences seem to have been written around certain words and phrases, with language chosen for effect rather than to make sense of the story. Kittel’s habit of avoiding good, simple words for sexier alternatives can rankle: “diarised” or “scribed” instead of “wrote,” “trundled” instead of “drove,” “spearheaded” instead of “headed,” “toddled” instead of “walked.” Does anyone in a war zone “toddle”? Rather than lifting the story, this language intrudes, especially given the power of the raw material: these histories don’t need embellishment. There is a sprinkling of typos and misplaced apostrophes through the book, most in the last third of the manuscript. A sterner, more careful edit was needed.

But these are quibbles. Shooting Through helps us better understand the experiences of Australian soldiers imprisoned by Italy in the second world war, a significant but little discussed chapter in Australian military history. Kittel has done Col Booth and his mates proud. •

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After an initial assault by soldiers from the 2nd Commando Regiment on 10 June, reinforcements from the Special Air Service Regiment were called the next day to the hamlet of Tizak as the Taliban prepared to counterattack. The fighting was intense, with the SAS troopers under heavy fire from the moment they alighted from their helicopters.

At the height of the thirteen-hour battle, an SAS corporal led an assault against an enemy fortification. When members of his patrol were pinned down by Taliban fire, he exposed his own position to draw the fire away from his comrades then, fighting at close range, stormed two enemy machine-gun posts and silenced both of them.

The following January, back in his home town of Perth, Ben Roberts-Smith was presented with the Commonwealth’s highest and most revered award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross. According to the citation for the award, “his selfless actions in circumstances of great peril served to enable his patrol to break into the enemy’s defences and regain the initiative… resulting in a tactical victory.”

The award would transform Ben Roberts-Smith from an anonymous soldier into a national celebrity. After leaving the army in 2013, he was named Australian Father of the Year, appointed chair of the National Australia Day Council and honoured as number-one ticketholder of the Fremantle Dockers. On completing an MBA at the University of Queensland, he became a senior executive with Kerry Stokes’s Seven television network and a star performer on the lucrative corporate speakers’ circuit. Lauded wherever he travelled as a hero and an exemplary role model, he was much sought after as a business consultant and an adviser to governments.

Now that celebrity has been engulfed by allegations that may yet end in infamy for Ben Roberts-Smith. In 2017, investigative journalists Chris Masters and Nick McKenzie revealed the first details of allegations implicating the former SAS soldier in a series of war crimes in Afghanistan. Last month the two journalists reported that the Australian Federal Police had referred Roberts-Smith to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to face possible charges. The Sydney Morning Herald subsequently reported that the DPP had appointed Sydney barrister David McClure SC to examine the case for proceeding to prosecution.

According to Masters and McKenzie, the AFP’s brief of evidence outlined allegations that Roberts-Smith had kicked a defenceless prisoner off a cliff during a special forces operation in Afghanistan in 2012, and covered up his subsequent murder, and that fellow SAS soldiers had witnessed the future VC recipient’s involvement in the murder of other defenceless Afghans. In addition to the AFP investigations, an extensive internal military inquiry led by NSW Supreme Court of Appeal judge Paul Brereton is soon to hand down a report into these and other alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Roberts-Smith has vehemently protested his innocence, claiming that the reporting has branded him a murderer and deriding the allegations as “recklessly untrue.” He told the Australian in December, “I have put my family name and medals on the line to sue Nine [publisher of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald] and restore my reputation.” But his decision to sue the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald for defamation may have compounded his problems.

While the start of the trial has been delayed because of the pandemic, fresh witness statements submitted in the Federal Court in early June claimed Roberts-Smith was involved in seven unlawful killings in Afghanistan. Counsel for the newspapers, Sandy Dawson SC, told the court Roberts-Smith and another unnamed soldier had kicked a handcuffed man, Ali Jan, off a cliff in the village of Darwan in September 2012 and that either he or another soldier had subsequently shot and killed the prisoner.

The implications of the case run far deeper than the reputation of one man, the jealously guarded pride of the elite Special Air Service Regiment and the honour of all Australian military forces. It could have consequences around the world for holders of a hallowed band of crimson ribbon like the one that sat above the breast pocket on Ben Roberts-Smith’s army tunic — and Australia’s long and storied association with the Victoria Cross.

It was at the end of the Crimean war, in 1856, that Queen Victoria decided a new honour was needed to recognise the remarkable acts of heroism that had been reported during the great victory by Britain and its allies over the Russians. The medal she authorised would become the highest award in the imperial honours system. In the order of precedence it outranks even the Most Noble Order of the Garter — the highest order of knighthood — which is confined to the reigning sovereign, the Prince of Wales and no more than twenty-five others. Yet from the outset, the Victoria Cross was intended to be both exceptional and egalitarian.

Victoria insisted that it stand out for its humble simplicity: a plain bronze cross struck from captured cannon metal (not from the Crimea as folklore has it, but from the colonial wars in China) suspended on a plain crimson ribbon. And at her direction, it was to be blind to class and seniority. Its awarding would be influenced by “neither rank, nor long service, nor wounds, nor any other circumstance or condition whatsoever save the merit of conspicuous bravery.”

But the criteria for its awarding were far from modest. The VC was to recognise only “the most conspicuous bravery, or some preeminent act of valour or self-sacrifice in the presence of the enemy.” In modern times, the perception in military circles is that the VC can be earned only by a member of the armed forces who lays his or her life on the line in a situation of clear and present danger in combat. It often has been awarded posthumously.

Since its inception, the medal has been won 1358 times. Each of those awards is revered in the military (a general will salute a private displaying the ribbon) and exulted in popular perception. And those medals not locked away in museums and private collections can fetch staggering prices at auction. In 2006 Kerry Stokes paid a world record price of $1.2 million for the medals of Captain Alfred Shout — who was posthumously awarded the VC for his bravery during the Battle of Lone Pine at Gallipoli — and then donated them to the Australian War Memorial.

But the prestige of the VC and the instant celebrity it confers on those who win it are, so to speak, a double-edged sword. Those who so distinguish themselves in battle invariably are expected to lead exemplary lives in peacetime. And it can be a dizzying height from which to fall for any of them who fail to live up to that onerous standard. Here lies the potential challenge for the Australian government in the event that Ben Roberts-Smith is unable to clear his name.

During its 164-year history, the VC has been forfeited just eight times for serious misconduct: twice for desertion, five times for theft and assault and once for bigamy. But while many more recipients have publicly fallen from grace after coming home from battle, none have had their honour revoked since 1920, when King George V declared his displeasure at the practice.

As George’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, would write, “The King feels so strongly that, no matter the crime committed by anyone on whom the VC has been conferred, the decoration should not be forfeited. Even were a VC to be sentenced to be hanged for murder, he should be allowed to wear the VC on the scaffold.” Winston Churchill, then Britain’s secretary of state for war, disagreed but approved an amendment to the regulations stipulating that henceforth only “treason, cowardice, felony or any infamous crime” should lead to forfeiture.

In the annals of crime, few are more infamous than murder, and while VC winners so convicted would no longer face the option of wearing their medal to the gallows it would be untenable for them not to be stripped of the honour. Sitting at the top of the honours system, the Victoria Cross can hardly be exempt from the practice that has seen hundreds of disgraced honours recipients stripped of their gongs — from Kaiser Wilhelm, who forfeited his Order of the Garter (for starting a world war), to artist and royal favourite Rolf Harris, who ceased to be a Commander of the Order of the British Empire after he was jailed for sexually assaulting underage girls.

Since Australia severed ties with the British honours system in 1975 and instituted its own awards under the Order of Australia, the conferring of the Victoria Cross to Australian military personnel has been made by the governor-general on the advice of the defence minister. The Victoria Cross for Australia — which has identical status to the British award — has been presented to four Australians, including Ben Roberts-Smith, all of them for valour in Afghanistan.

There are dozens of precedents for Australians to be defrocked under our honours system. Disgraced former WA premier Brian Burke lost his award as a Companion of the Order of Australia, billionaire businessman Richard Pratt pre-empted the same fate by surrendering his AC after being fined $36 million for price-fixing, and the Order of Australia medal of criminologist Paul Wilson was rescinded after his conviction for the indecent treatment of a child.

In 2015 Australia’s Defence Honours and Awards Appeal Tribunal recommended the discretionary forfeiture of gallantry medals if the recipient were convicted “of an offence which is considered so disgraceful or serious that it would be improper for the offender to retain the award.” But while subsequently stipulating a range of grounds for mandatory forfeiture — including treason, mutiny and cowardice in the face of the enemy — the defence department added what smelt like an escape clause: “However, the circumstances under which gallantry and distinguished service decorations are awarded dictates that entitlements should not be forfeited except under extreme conditions.”

If the Australian government were confronted with a winner of the highest award for gallantry being convicted of a serious crime and it showed cowardice in the face of military or public opinion, it would risk far more than domestic opprobrium. A person allowed to continuing wearing the medal in such circumstances — and the authorities that permitted him to — would diminish not only the deeds of other Australian VC winners but also the hundreds of others throughout the Commonwealth who came before them. •

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