Finished Reading: Stalingrad – The Fateful Siege 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor

20 September 2019 by particularkev

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

Not My Review: Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore

18 September 2019 by particularkev

Not My Review: The Institute by Stephen King

16 September 2019 by particularkev

Not My Review: Flames by Robbie Arnott

16 September 2019 by particularkev

The link below is to a book review of ‘Flames,’ by Robbie Arnott.

For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2019/aug/19/not-the-booker-flames-by-robbie-arnott-review-magic-works-in-a-wild-tasmania

BOOK REVIEW: Brian Toohey’s Secret warns against Australia being ‘joined at the hip’ with US

15 September 2019 by particularkev

Toohey writes, among other things, about laws hustled through parliament in recent years that hamper journalistic inquiry.
Shutterstock

Tony Walker, La Trobe University

When journalist Brian Toohey began researching his book Secret: The Makings of Australia’s Security State, he could not have foreseen publication would coincide with real-time overreach by government agencies of their security responsibilities.

Contemporary examples of such overreach include: a raid on a Canberra journalist’s apartment in search of evidence of who might have leaked top-secret information about the government’s surveillance plans; pursuit of a former intelligence officer and his lawyer over revelations Australian agents had bugged presidential offices of Australia’s weakest neighbour; and intrusions into ABC offices to gather evidence of sources of information about alleged Special Air Service war crimes in Afghanistan.

Laws that are antagonistic to journalist inquiry in pursuit of wrongdoing have been hustled through the Australian parliament in the past several years. Toohey writes:

No major party seems bothered by the use of new surveillance technology that allows governments to detect contact between journalists and their sources, effectively denying whistle-blowers the opportunity to reveal abuses of power and criminal behaviour.

If this was simply a matter of constraining journalists’ attempts to expose government secrets, it would be one thing. But it has become an assault more broadly on the public’s right to know about the seamier aspects of government behaviour.

Governments have taken advantage of the war on terror to strengthen their ability to suppress unwelcome disclosure. In the process, they have raised the stakes for whistle-blowers whose conscience dictates that activities that skirt – or break – the law should be exposed.

The Labor opposition has baulked at its responsibilities to push back against some of the more expansive powers accorded under the security legislation.

Labor’s weakness is not least a consequence of its worries about being wedged on national security issues. In this regard, governments of the day have taken advantage of legitimate concerns about multiple security threats.

All this is well described in Toohey’s sprawling account of the history of the Australian security state. It stretches from the early fumbling days of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), whose activities would not have been out of place in the Keystone Cops.

Based on a lifetime of reporting for various publications, including The Australian Financial Review and the National Times, Toohey provides behind-the-scenes snapshots of the Central Intelligence Agency’s anxieties about threats posed by the Whitlam government to American spy stations on Australian soil. He also examines the role of senior public servants in manipulating governments of the day and intelligence blunders that led to the Iraq war.

The list is long, and reflects poorly on the individuals and agencies involved.

Media organisations have realised too late the threats the new security legislation poses to journalistic inquiry. Proprietors and the industry itself, for that matter, have underestimated the determination of government to pursue journalists and whistleblowers under both existing statutes and the new legislation.

In the absence of explicit freedom of speech protections in the Constitution, Australian journalists find themselves at the mercy of a vastly expanded security state.

No government, Labor or conservative, is likely to reverse course.

The June 2018 Espionage Act is one case of Orwellian overreach. It makes it an offence to receive

information of any kind, whether true or false and whether in a material form or not, and includes (a) an opinion; and (b) a report of a conversation.

How this provision made its way through a democratically-elected legislature is confounding.

Apart from a description about threats posed to reasonable disclosure of information about government activities in the public interest, the rub of Toohey’s book lies in its telling of the sort of relationship that has evolved between Australia and its security guarantor.

This will be regarded by readers and critics as the most controversial element of Secret. Not everyone will agree with the author’s observations about risks to Australian sovereignty posed by its security relationship with the United States allied with a potentially damaging antagonism towards China in the national security establishment.

But his arguments are well made and deserve attention. This is especially so in view of our involvement in Iraq 2003, where the principal justification post facto has been that Australia needed to continue making regular down-payments on its security arrangements with the United States.

This is what Toohey describes as Australia being “chained to the chariot wheels of the Pentagon”. He writes:

The British monarchy has no say in Australian government decisions. It’s a different story with the head of the American Republic. A US president presides over a military-industrial complex with a huge say in whether the Australian government goes to war, buy particular weapons, host US-run military intelligence bases and ban trade with certain countries. The upshot is that Australia has now surrendered much of its sovereignty to the US.

In this context, Toohey quotes an off-key contribution to the debate about the power of a military-industrial complex. In 2016, former Australian ambassador in Washington, Kim Beazley, in his capacity as a board member in Australia of Lockheed Martin, gave a speech in which he described himself as a member of a “benign deep state” where the real power is “a military/intelligence phalanx”.

It is not clear whether he was joking, but the fact is he has long associated himself with an uncompromising pro-American viewpoint.

Beazley, now governor of Western Australia, remains influential in Labor security policy-making.

Toohey’s concluding chapters offer some fairly pungent criticism of Australia’s national security establishment. It refuses, he says, to welcome China’s rise. Instead, it agitates for an increased US military presence in the region, it advocates a confrontational approach to Beijing and a strategy aimed at damaging the Chinese economy, never mind that this will have negative consequences for Australia itself.

At the same time, it lobbies for an ever-closer security relationship with the US summed up by Malcolm Turnbull in 2017 in which he said Australia is militarily “joined at the hip to the US”.

Toohey argues that rather than being “joined the hip”, Australia has more scope for individual initiative, and, in extreme circumstances, the capacity to deter and defend itself.

This book is the work of a contrarian. It should be read.

Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Review: The Testaments – Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale

14 September 2019 by particularkev

Janine, a Handmaid, in series three of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Sophie Giraud/Channel 4

Susan Watkins, Leeds Beckett University

SPOILER ALERT: This review contains plotlines and details from Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Testaments

When Margaret Atwood was writing The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984, she felt that the main premise seemed “fairly outrageous”. She wondered: “Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship?”

How times have changed. The connection the novel makes between totalitarianism, reproduction and control of women is now legible to most of us. The image of the red-and-white-clad handmaid has become a symbol in the wider culture of resistance to the restriction of women’s reproductive rights and to their sexual exploitation.

Partly this is a consequence of the immensely successful TV series, the third series of which has just concluded. Series one was directly based on Atwood’s novel and subsequent episodes over two years have continued the story of Offred beyond the ambivalent ending Atwood imagined for her, in which her fate is uncertain. Now, in her eagerly awaited sequel, The Testaments, Atwood makes a series of dizzying creative decisions which move away from, but also develop out of, both novel and TV series.

Next generation

The action of The Testaments takes place 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. The claustrophobic first-person narration of Offred is widened out to incorporate the stories of three narrators. These narrators are Aunt Lydia – the most senior of the Aunts in the first novel, who trains and manages the handmaids on behalf of the Gilead regime – and two young women.

It is in the identity of these young women that Atwood incorporates elements of the TV series. We discover that both are Offred’s daughters. One, Agnes, is the daughter she was forced to give up when she became a handmaid. The other, Nicole, is the baby she is pregnant with at the end of the novel and gives birth to in the second series of the TV programme.

Agnes has been brought up as a privileged daughter of the Gilead regime; Nicole – and the name choice here, as well as aspects of the story, draw on the TV series – has been smuggled out of Gilead by the May Day organisation and raised in Canada.

The inventiveness of this choice of narrators, plus the time shift, allows Atwood to do all sorts of exciting things. She explores what it actually means to be a mother. The Gilead regime has to keep records of bloodlines to avoid the genetic conditions attendant on incestuous couplings. Genealogical information is kept by the Aunts in folders organised by the male head of the family, but paternity will always be more uncertain than maternity. We never find out for sure who Nicole’s father is, although there are hints.

More broadly, though, can the same uncertainty be attached to the mother figure too? As one of the Marthas (the domestic servant class in Gilead) says to Agnes when she finds out that the person she believed to be her mother was not her birth mother: “It depends what you mean by a mother … Is your mother the one who gives birth to you or the one who loves you the most?” How do we define a mother when conventional family structures have been upended?

Making a difference

The interplay between the three women’s stories also allows us to compare how individuals make decisions about what constitutes ethical behaviour in a totalitarian regime. In the world of The Testaments, unlike in The Handmaid’s Tale, later period Gilead is on its uppers. It struggles to control its leaky borders and there is internecine in-fighting and betrayal within the upper echelons of the Commanders.

Change of heart: Aunt Lydia is now working for the downfall of Gilead.
Sophie Giraud/Channel 4

Unbabies – defective births – continue to be born and the resistance is growing. Lydia begins to plot Gilead’s downfall, but in retrospect we also get her account of her earlier collaboration as the regime was established. Do her attempts to destroy Gilead cancel out her previous decision to collaborate? If she had not survived, she would not have been alive to work to bring down the regime, but can the master’s tools ever dismantle the master’s house?

Casualties of the resistance efforts abound. Becka – a friend of Agnes and a survivor of child sexual abuse – sacrifices herself for the greater good of what she believes to be the purification and renewal (rather than the destruction) of Gilead. Nicole (who engages in an undercover operation in Gilead vital to the resistance) remarks that she “somehow agreed to go to Gilead without ever definitely agreeing”. The novel asks readers to think about the extent to which exploitation of idealism and naivety are appropriate as means that justify the end of Gilead’s potential destruction.

Judgement of history

The Testaments ends with the Thirteenth Symposium of Gilead Studies – an academic conference taking place many years after the regime’s destruction. This is the same framing that concludes The Handmaid’s Tale, although the emphasis here is different. In her book, In Other Worlds, Atwood claims that the afterword to the first novel was intended to provide “a little utopia concealed in the dystopic Handmaid’s Tale”.

But, for most readers of the original novel, the effect of encountering the afterword is the opposite of optimistic. Reading it diminishes and undermines our emotional investment in Offred’s narrative, as historians debate whether or not her story is “authentic” and a professor warns us that “we must be cautious about passing moral judgement on the Gileadeans”.

Dystopian vision of everyday oppression of women.
Jasper Savage/Channel 4

The same historians make similar comments in the Thirteenth Symposium that ends The Testaments, but here they are fundamentally convinced of the witness transcripts’ authenticity. The postmodern uncertainty about the status of Offred’s narrative in The Handmaid’s Tale could be seen as characteristic of the mid-1980s (with its suspicion of narrative authenticity and reliability), as characterised by Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “incredulity towards metanarratives”.

Now, in 2019, Atwood replaces that incredulity with a much clearer sense of the validity of women’s stories. I believe we can relate this change of emphasis to the different times we find ourselves in – where the notion of the equal status of all versions of the past and indeed the present has been abused explicitly by Trump and others who make accusations of “fake news”.

In Gilead, women are not allowed to read or write – unless they are Aunts. Agnes therefore struggles to become literate as a young woman. The description of her slow and painful acquisition of literacy reminds us of the vital connection between words and power and how important it is to validate women’s words in particular. A testament is a witness after all.

Susan Watkins, Professor in the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities and Director of the Centre for Culture and the Arts., Leeds Beckett University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.