The link below is to a book review of ‘God’s Love For Muslims – Communicating Bible Grace and New Life,’ by Ibrahim Ag Mohamed.
For more visit:
http://www.andrewfullercenter.org/blog/2015/11/book-review-gods-love-for-muslims-communicating-bible-grace-and-new-life/
The link below is to a book review of ‘Sermons on Ephesians,’ by John Calvin.
For more visit:
https://banneroftruth.org/us/resources/book-review-resources/2015/sermons-on-ephesians-a-review-by-brian-garrard/
The link below is to a book review of ‘Transforming Homosexuality,’ by Denny Burk and Heath Lambert.
For more visit:
http://thecripplegate.com/book-review-transforming-homosexuality/
The link below is to a book review of ‘How Church Can Change Your Life,’ by Josh Moody.
For more visit:
http://9marks.org/review/book-review-how-the-church-should-change-your-life-by-josh-moody/
The link below is to a book review of ‘Pray for the Flock,’ by Brian Croft and Ryan Fullerton.
For more visit:
http://9marks.org/review/book-review-pray-for-the-flock-by-brian-croft-and-ryan-fullerton/
Natalie Mast, University of Western Australia
In September 2005, Melbourne University Press (MUP) published former Labor opposition leader Mark Latham’s personal diaries, covering the 11-year period he served in parliament. The book turned Latham, who resigned as leader and from parliament in January that year, into a pariah in the ALP’s eyes.
In the book, Latham does not hold back on his opinions of caucus colleagues, factional leaders, union heavyweights, business elites and journalists. The book caused a sensation. It not only included Latham’s own views, but recounted comments from other Labor caucus members and party figures, many of which were scathing.
Sales-wise, The Latham Diaries was a huge success. MUP ordered a second print run before the book had even been released.
I first read the book in 2005. The book does contain vitriolic insults about political figures of the day. But what struck me then and has remained with me was that The Latham Diaries provided an excellent discussion of the parliamentary Labor Party in the wilderness years post-Paul Keating.
Given that the book was released so soon after Latham quit parliament, I decided a re-reading was warranted in order to determine how well the book had aged and if there were larger lessons that could be taken from it a decade on.
From the time he was a backbencher in the Keating government through to his stint as leader, entries in the book often end with Latham declaring himself the outsider. Latham views himself as a lone operator who often finds only Keating and Gough Whitlam agreeing with his position and encouraging him to keep up “the good fight”.
Within the book Latham is a “true believer”, battling against the ALP’s machine men. But his view of Labor and what it stands for is a romanticised one.
Latham looks back with rose-coloured glasses to mythical glory days, when a purer ALP was committed to improving the lives of working-class Australians. He forgets the splits and factionalism that are just as much a part of ALP history as the campaigns for a minimum wage and universal health care.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Latham despairs at Labor’s rejection of the legacy of the Hawke-Keating economic reforms. He claims that the ALP under Kim Beazley’s leadership was so eager to distance itself from the Hawke-Keating era that no-one – including Beazley – seemed to know what the party stood for.
For Latham, the wilderness years of opposition were unbearable. He is utterly contemptuous of Beazley’s attempts to gain government:
After six years of Beazley’s small-target strategy, we face an identity crisis. The True Believers don’t know what we stand for and the swinging voters have stopped trying to find out.
Latham’s view was that the ALP should gain government because of the appeal of its policies, rather than strategic targeting and poll-driven responses to issues of the day.
One of the most interesting things about Latham is that his passion for economic reform – including reduction of tariffs, fiscal accountability, winding up generational reliance on welfare – and his belief in social capital was at the forefront of social democratic thinking in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
While the ALP was busy distancing itself from the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating era, many social democrats in Europe and the US were using the reforms as a successful example of “Third Way” thinking. Latham was one of the leading advocates of Third Way politics in Australia during this period and published on the topic.
The Latham Diaries provides an insight into Latham’s views on where the ALP should be heading. While interested in the stories and lessons told by Keating and Whitlam, for Latham the real excitement is always in the future:
That’s the difference between us. I see a problem in the public arena and think: how do I solve it and explain the solution to people? Beazley sees a problem and thinks: how do I analyse it and exploit it?
Latham’s other area of concern focuses on his view that there is a social capital deficit in Australia which not only has a negative impact on political engagement, but also on the way in which we all live our lives. Latham regrets the lack of community that seems to pervade the sprawling Australian suburbs.
Throughout the book, it is clear that Latham understands how the factional system of the ALP works:
My belief in adventurism means that I will always have an uneasy relationship with the NSW Right … I joined the Right in the mid-1980s for pragmatic reasons: in a two-faction state you had to join one of them to have any hope of preselection.
The faction, however, is based on a culture of anti-intellectualism. Policy is made through a series of deals rather than the public interest.
Latham’s own behaviour is at times partly driven as a response to the factional system:
Simon Crean’s leadership came under pressure from the factional and union interests opposed to organisational reform … I resolved to remain loyal to his leadership, mainly on principle but also out of self-interest, as this assisted my rehabilitation in caucus after three years on the backbench.
Like many former members of caucus, upon leaving parliament Latham reveals a hatred of the factional system and the rise of machine men controlling the party. His disdain for the “three roosters” – Stephen Smith, Wayne Swan and Stephen Conroy – is evident in many of the entries:
These roosters have not learned anything from the leadership debacle. They are small-minded troublemakers and white-anters who would love to see me fall over to hurt Crean – two for the price of one.
AAP/Alan Porritt
The contempt Latham has for the press gains momentum throughout the book. In particular, Latham targets:
… the three gallery journalists who have run a ten-year critique on me are Oakes (Jabba), Grattan and Milne (the Dwarf).
Latham despises the culture of leaking among his colleagues. He quotes a June 2003 speech he gave supporting Simon Crean’s leadership:
If the push against our leader were to succeed, it would set a shocking precedent. This long campaign of leaking, backgrounding and sabotage would be legitimised within the ALP.
Following Crean’s departure as opposition leader, Latham assumes the role and tries to deal with the leaking within caucus:
I’ve had my suspicions for some time now that Rudd has been feeding material to Oakes. Decided to set him up, telling Kevvie about our focus groups on Iraq. No such research exists … Today right on cue Jabba has written in The Bulletin.
Latham’s angst at the sacrifice of time with his family for his political career is genuine. He and his second wife, Janine, discussed whether or not he should continue in the role:
What can I do now? Three more years in this rotten job, three more years staring across the chamber at a Tory government … It’s tempting to pull the pin.
Having decided to remain as opposition leader, at the end of 2004 Latham suffered a second attack of pancreatitis, which he thinks was most likely a result of radiotherapy treatment he received for his cancer:
It’s all turned to seed: pancreatitis, time away from home, loss of privacy, impact on family, so many ficklers in politics, disdain for the media and the whingeing, gossiping, sickening caucus … that thing they call the Labor Party.
The relief Latham feels at his escape from the rigours of political life is evident.
While the book ends with Latham happy at being able to spend time with his family and regain his privacy, the reader is left with one over-arching question: how do we fix this problem?
Latham described an Australia where the country’s main reform party rejected its economic credentials, played small-target politics and refused to engage in the major debate on political philosophy of the late 20th century.
Ten years on, many of the complaints Latham made about the workings of Australia’s parliamentary system have moved from the secret inner sanctum of Canberra to everyday news events:
In-depth policy debate appears to be a thing of the past as politicians from both sides simply repeat the slogan of the day at whatever event they happen to be at.
Leadership issues quickly come to dominate the news cycle.
Leaking dominates the political environment. A mixture of disgruntled MPs seeking retribution and the ambitious looking to make friends in the press gallery provides the daily fodder that now dominates political coverage.
The flaws in our political system that Latham highlighted continue to affect us. Australia remains a poorer nation as a result. Ultimately, The Latham Diaries remains a seminal piece – not only having revealed the ALP’s inner workings, but having highlighted policy issues and structural problems that continue to be of concern a decade on.
Natalie Mast, Associate Director, Research Data & Strategy, University of Western Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The link below is to a book review of ‘Cool Shades – The History and Meaning of Sunglasses,’ by Vanessa Brown.
For more visit:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2015/11/20/book-review-cool-shades-the-history-and-meaning-of-sunglasses-by-vanessa-brown/
Peter Vale, University of Johannesburg
In the face of mounting of international disapprobation, how did white rule in South Africa sustain itself?
Ron Nixon tries to answer this question in Selling Apartheid – South Africa’s Global Propaganda War. He is a Washington correspondent of the New York Times and an associate of the department of Media and Journalism Studies at Wits University. Unfortunately, his book disappoints.
As the title suggests, Nixon believes that apartheid South Africa “sold” – rather than “told” – its story to the world. His narrative draws from three sources: published work, several interviews, and a peek into (mainly) American archives. His technique is the case study.
So he uses the exemplar case of apartheid’s “unorthodox diplomacy” – the well-documented Muldergate scandal of the 1970s. Its infamy was heightened by the fierce interdepartmental rivalry it generated. It also ended the careers of the then-prime minister, John Vorster, and Connie Mulder, the influential information minister. Mulder was considered to be next in line for the top job.
The conspiracy aimed to buy newspapers in the US with taxpayers’ money. Through these, apartheid’s cause would be promoted in an America in which the issue of human rights was increasingly drawn towards the foreign policy debate. South Africa aimed to tap into a counter-narrative that eventually led to the Reagan presidency, the rise of free market economics, and the “second” Cold War.
As Nixon points out several times, the events that culminated in Muldergate were spearheaded by a 30-something former journalist and sometime government information officer. His name was Eschel Rhoodie, a controversial character in any book.
The Paper Curtain, a polemic Eschel Rhoodie wrote, seemingly was the text that enabled South Africa’s traditional diplomacy, modelled on formal state-to-state practice, to change into a policy of buying influence in high places in Washington and other Western capitals.
When the Muldergate ruse was exposed, Rhoodie fled and purported sightings of him came to overshadow the scandal itself. Intrepid South African pressmen finally tracked him down in Ecuador. The occasion was marked by a photograph of him feeding a llama, on the front page of the then-Rand Daily Mail.
Nixon has used the seminal account of Muldergate, written by journalists Mervyn Rees and Chris Day, as the basis for his version of the story. So, on the Muldergate case, there’s very little new in the book.
In presenting another case, Nixon turns to another contentious character – Max Yergan, a Black American activist who arrived in South Africa in 1922 to pursue a career in the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA).
Posted to Alice, in the Eastern Cape, Yergan became close to many who would play a role in South Africa’s liberation – John Tengo Jabavu, John Langalilele Dube, Alfred Xuma, ZK Matthews and Govan Mbeki.
Ostensibly monitored by the state’s security apparatus, Yergan gradually lost his faith in Christianity (and in the work of the YMCA) as a force for liberation. During a visit the Soviet Union in 1934, he embraced Marxism. Unsurprisingly, his South African friends found him a “changed” man when he returned to this country.
Three years later, and back in the US, he set up (and served) on various bodies that were the precursor to the worldwide anti-apartheid movement. In these spaces, Yergan rubbed shoulders with legends of Black American culture and politics: actor Paul Robeson, Nobel Laureate Ralph J.Bunche, and pan-African intellectual W.E.B du Bois.
But Yergan’s political star was to crash, as the Cold War took hold, in a brutal argument with Robeson. This conflict drove Yergan back towards South Africa in the form of a newly found anti-communism. This was the official Cold War position of the government in Pretoria that he had once so strongly opposed.
In the 1940s Yergan made several visits to South Africa that were cleared by the FBI and sanctioned by the white government. During the course of these, Yergan and his fierce anti-communist views were spurned by the African National Congress, South Africa’s liberation movement, and by the South African Communist Party.
The Star
If efforts by white power to directly buy influence in the world – as in the Rhoodie instance – is one case in Nixon’s book, another – represented by the Yergan example – was the failure of Black Americans to understand that they too could be tricked by the persuasive power of the white purse.
But – and this is a failure of the book intellectually – the comparative value of these two cases, and others of similar ilk in the book, is of limited value. They are not thought through.
Nixon is strongest, empirically, when he is working the Washington patch: his access to individuals and to archival sources has brought several fresh issues to the fore. That said, he is weak on American policy towards apartheid South Africa and how this issue was linked to decolonisation in the subcontinent.
So, the important role of Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, in the making of America’s African policy is poorly considered. When he was US national security advisor, Kissinger was responsible for what was famously called the “Tar Baby” option – America’s policy tilt to governments in Africa’s “white South” and intentionally away from the majority-ruled countries.
This move, more than any other factor, opened the way for Vorster’s government to “sell” its wares to the US and – as Nixon also claims – to its European Cold War allies. Unfortunately, as the focus moves towards these places, the empirical evidence weakens, and speculation drives the story.
Let’s be clear: there is no doubt that successive apartheid governments spent millions (and much energy) cosying up to political parties (and the great-and-good that support them) in the UK, and in Europe. But the deep evidence for this, as presented in these pages, is a thin, thin reed.
There is an important and interesting book to be written on the apartheid’s efforts to peddle its story through unorthodox diplomacy, but this is not it.
Peter Vale, Director, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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