edited by Catherine Lutz, Pluto Press, London, 2009

“Island of Shame”

by David Vine, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009

In August 1971, on a quiet coral island in the Indian Ocean, a man was sent by the US government to kill the local inhabitants’ dogs. There were about a thousand of them, roaming free. He tried to shoot them, but some were merely wounded and howled. So he went off to get a poison and strewed strychnine. But still dogs survived. So the remaining ones were rounded up, put in a compound and gassed, while the island’s children cried. The next day all the children and their families were herded onto a boat and shipped away from their home. The island was thereby emptied of people and pets, and two hundred years of human culture was abolished. The people have still not been allowed to return. The expulsion is one of the moral watersheds of the last 50 years. These books explain why it happened, why it’s so little known, and why it matters.

During the 1950s’ Eisenhower era, when the Cold War between the US and the USSR had become the defining feature of global politics, America was exuberantly powerful. The Russians might have a bomb, but the Stars and Stripes flew over the oceans. It was a period when America could “project” its influence with few impediments, so officials pressed for it to take its chances while the going was good. Some farsighted staffers within the Government recognised that the colonies of Africa and Asia might soon attain independence and the locals might get stroppy.

It occurred to a certain Stu Barber, from the Long Range Objectives Group of the US Navy, that the oceans of the world contained scores of small islands that were going to waste. “Our military criteria were location, airfield potential, anchorage potential. Our political criteria were minimal population, isolation, present status, historical and ethnic factors”. As a US Navy historian has explained, the idea was that the US “should acquire base rights in certain strategically located islands, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, and stockpile them for future use”. The race to check out the world’s islands was on, especially those that were “sparsely populated”. These would be “the easiest to acquire and would entail the least [sic] political headaches”.

Depopulating Diego Garcia

The Indian Ocean, handy to Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, was ideal. In no time, 60 likely sites had been found there. Best of all was Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Archipelago about 1,000 miles south of India. Too small to show up on normal maps, the island was still long enough for runways, and its almost enclosed lagoon could shelter as many aircraft carriers as might one day be needed. There was one problem: people lived there. Diego Garcia had once been uninhabited, a perfect example of the sort of palm-treed, coral-reefed atoll that features in magazine cartoons. That lasted until 1783, when the island’s French “owner” brought in 22 African slaves to grow coconuts. In 1814, with Napoleon defeated, Diego Garcia became a British colony. Because slavery was abolished in 1835, Indians were imported to replace the slaves as cheap labour. That’s how Diego Garcia remained for the next century or so, a pinprick on the map of empire, and less than a pinprick on the conscience of the Colonial Office.  

The post-war American surge coincided with a tired Britain trying to cut costs. The UK felt it could no longer hang on to all its pink empire, deciding to give up on all its conquests between Suez and Singapore. This didn’t mean they didn’t worry about “the vacuum in the Indian Ocean” that might have resulted - had it not been for kind Uncle Sam. Successive British governments had become attuned to abasing themselves before the Americans and were quick to agree that the US deserved to have “exclusive control” over Diego Garcia. Parenthetically, spelling out the obvious rider, the UK added, “(without local inhabitants)”.  

Whatever Yankee wanted, Yankee got. So as not to inconvenience Washington, it was accepted that Her Majesty’s Government “should be responsible for acquiring land, resettlement of population at HMG’s expense”. The people of Diego Garcia would be shuttled off to Mauritius, the nearest available island, a thousand miles away to the south-west. The Chagossians wouldn’t get off the boat in Mauritius, despite the promise of $1 each as a resettlement bonus and a slum shack. In the meantime, the worst worries of both imperial governments had been justified. The Third World, as the self-styled First World was pleased to name the colonies, was indeed becoming independent - in formal if not real terms - and the UK Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, warned US officials that he might have to “pay a price” at the UN for having ejected a whole culture from its birthright. A British official pleaded with the Americans. He needed a “bribe”. It’s an ambiguous plea. Did the Right Honourable gentleman mean the islanders needed a sweetener or did he have his hand out? Ostensibly the former, but the Brits have always favoured the nod and the wink.

In those more upfront days US officials might have felt neither Wilson’s nor the Chagossians’ pain. Wilson was to offer the new Prime Minister of Mauritius three million pounds to cover the costs of transferring an entire culture to his island, to which the Chagos Archipelago was formally attached. This arrangement gives a further clue as to the hapless bargaining position of the islanders. In so many colonial territories, the post-independence boundaries were haphazard, reflecting imperial convenience rather than the needs of the colonised. In this case, the locals didn’t count at all because the day after the dogs of Diego Garcia were exterminated, the human locals too no longer existed.

Dumped Into The Slums Of Mauritius

In 1964 Chagos had been politically separated from Mauritius, allowing the co-opted local elite to wash their hands of the whole squalid affair. Fearing dominance by Indians, the conservative Opposition, which was largely Kreol (ethnically African) and Coloured, had come out against independence. Never mind that the people of Diego Garcia were themselves mostly African. With almost no resettlement money and the demise of the copra industry, the people who had been forced into a monoculture of coconuts had no place in the economy and no means to gain a toehold in a future economy. A vague plan to invent a culture for them as pig farmers was aborted and they were dumped into the slums of Port Louis, Mauritius, where they were derided as the bottom of the heap by those one tiny notch above on the ladder. Deprivation does that to people. Like pigs in crates, they turn on themselves and on each other. 

Vine paints Diego Garcia as very much a tropical paradise, and the few other impartial observers who have been able to visit concur. The Americans based there seem to have delighted in the place - as individuals. As cogs in a machine they have dredged its pristine coral to make concrete. Throughout, the islanders have been refused even service jobs at the base on their own land. That’s because any sort of occupation could one day allow a legal challenge to stay. The imperial masters reckon it’s safer to deny any hope, however faint.  Eventually, shamed at last into a gesture of guilt, the UK gave some Chagossians citizenship. A small group bound by a common and intensely narrow experience, with no cultural ties to other sub-cultures from deprived backgrounds, the emigrants will find the going tough. At present they live mostly near one of London’s airports (neither of the books discusses this present tense, the epilogue to their stories).

Vine, an anthropologist, is very good at putting their plight into context. Most accounts of this nature are written from an exclusively political or economic bias. Vine’s understanding of culture, of the effects of dislocation, and of generational impoverishment, allows him to engage imaginatively with his topic. The injustice under scrutiny is so blatant that his book could easily have become a spluttering polemic. It’s much more than that, at once sympathetic, scholarly and witheringly angry.

Amid stark contrast, irony abounds. Mauritius is one of the richer places in the region, its wealth deriving from tourism. Tourist venues in the “ Third World”, typically on islands, are like that, with the whims of rich First Worlders being met by some of the world’s poorest workers. The central Indian Ocean thus has two big new airports, one for bombers and one for tourists, and many of the people expelled from their home to make room for the military now find work catering to the tourists who might, in a less neurotic world, otherwise have been enjoying an unspoiled Diego Garcia.  

Legal Victories; Political Defeats

Supported by international solidarity, the Chagossians sued the British government in the British courts. Everyone was surprised when they won, with the UK Supreme Court declaring the expulsion to have been illegal. The problem was that the verdict had no coercive power. The law be damned, the Government lawyers fumed. The return can’t happen. So it was that in 2004, an Order in Council, a decree from the Cabinet, banned it. Then, a further surprise, the High Court judges overturned the ban, with some staunch comment: “The suggestion that a Minister can, through the means of an Order in Council, exile a whole population from a British Overseas Territory and claim he is doing so ... for the ‘peace, order and good governance’ of the territory is, to us, repugnant”.

The judges can’t be faulted, but there’s an absurdist look to proceedings. The law, it seems, is unimpeachable - until the State discerns a serious threat, when all bets are off. According to John Pilger at the time, the British authorities brazened a blank denial of the truth. “There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation”, declared the UK Department of Defence (antiwar.com: “Diego Garcia: Paradise Cleansed” 4/10/04). In the US, in 1975, Ted Kennedy, then as now a Senator representing Massachusetts, put in an unwelcome but successful amendment to a Congressional bill, asking for a report on the expulsion. In their reply, the two complicit bureaucracies, State and Defense, were less abrupt then the Brits but more misleading. A simple lie can be challenged, but the US denial was couched in the evasive terms of public relations spin: “In the absence of more complete data”, Washington prattled, “it is impossible to establish the status of these persons and to what extent, if any, they formed a distinct community”. With the whole government machine determined to hide it, the “data” would remain “incomplete” for decades.

Washington suggested that the removal of Chagossian people from their homeland was doing all concerned a favour as it was a way “to avoid social problems”. Vine translates. This was “a polite way of referring to trumped up racist fears about prostitution” at the base. To the State and Defense Departments, there was no problem as the Chagossians (“these people”) “all went willingly”. Always happy to look on the bright side of life, US military Websites can now enthuse about the good living on the island, with its great golf and snorkelling. After the “sweep” that had “sanitised” the base from messy human beings, Diego Garcia could be branded as pristine and perfect. Official amnesia allowed an impression that it had lain unspoiled and receptive for millennia, awaiting only the sympathetic power of the US Navy for it to achieve its destiny as a home away from home for the guardians of global peace. 

In 2001, as domestic US opinion recovered a repressed memory, a class action suit was launched in Washington. The defendants included Robert McNamara, President Kennedy’s whiz-kid technocrat, and those more familiar and recent villains, Donald Rumsfeld and the Halliburton corporation. The Chagossians had difficulties beyond the obvious imbalance in power and influence, most obviously in Mauritius. Opinion in the Archipelago was divided between one island and the next, and between Indian and African. While some opposed the base, others welcomed it as a potential job provider. While some Chagossians decried interference with their traditional lifestyle, others hoped for new opportunities arising from the new link to the world. 

Most languished in local slums; a few got to England. Are you keeping count? The menial workers clustered around Gatwick Airport south of London represent a third diaspora. Diaspora 1: from Africa or India to Chagos; Diaspora 2: from Chagos to Mauritius; Diaspora 3: from Mauritius to England. And only now has the possibility of a normal freedom, in the sense of their being able to choose a way of life, arisen. It has for the younger generations growing up in England, triply displaced as they have been, with no cultural memory. You could say that they’re on their own. It’s an ambivalent legacy.

Base Central To All America’s Wars

Since the base was built, Diego Garcia has been involved in all America’s regional wars. In Gulf War 1 B-52’s flew to Iraq. From there Afghanistan has been bombed. And after 9/11, it hosted a new “ Camp Justice”, a secret detention centre. Vine shows that the base serves as a model for any future “Diego Garcia” that could be set up in Africa. As one military planner notes: “It’s the single most important military facility we’ve got. It’s the base from which we control half of Africa and the southern side of Asia, the southern side of Eurasia [and]...the Persian Gulf region. If it didn’t exist, it would have to be invented.... We’ll be able to run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015”. 

The base’s motto is “Footprint of Freedom”. The US State doesn’t do irony, so they won’t be concerned that people who really do care about the environment enjoin us not to leave a “footprint” on the earth. A greener consciousness than the US Navy might baulk at the ethnic cleansing of a people so that their land could be paved for bombers. If you look at a map you’ll see why Guam, which became vital to the military during World War 11, is seen as a natural partner for Diego Garcia as the future eyes and ears of Freedom. Its position east of Indonesia, the Philippines and China is comparable to Diego Garcia’s position vis-a-vis north-east Africa and south Asia. In any strategic planning, the western Pacific and the northern Indian oceans will likely dominate into the foreseeable future. 

While Vine treats his topic of Diego Garcia with thoughtful respect and depth, he provides context with sketches of other islands. “Bases Of Empire” has the opposite emphasis, with chapters on each, including one on Diego Garcia by Vine. The latter book is mostly set elsewhere. The Pacific, big and empty, has been bounty galore for military planners. The first big American push followed its take over of the Philippines in 1898; the second followed the defeat of Japan in 1945. Since then the US has enjoyed a free run. The tropical seas were either unpopulated or, like Diego Garcia, peopled by a few dispensable locals. It’s been a half century when no restraining rivals could check US impulses.

Prostrate Japan offered Iwo Jima and Okinawa, whose people are regarded by mainland Japanese as a lesser culture, and whose economy still lags the rest of the country. Tensions with the occupying Americans persist. Perhaps the closest parallel to Diego Garcia is the Bikini Atoll, whose population was removed to free it up for testing atomic bombs. Apart from giving its name to the skimpy two-piece bathing suits of the Fifties, a joke of sorts, Bikini has, like Diego Garcia, had no voice.     

Polluting Puerto Rico

Some of the islands of empire are within the US itself. Puerto Rico, an island colony in the Caribbean and constitutionally American, serves as a sort of landfill site for the 48 continental states. To show that they’re boss, the Navy routinely complains of “civilian encroachment” caused by the existence of neighbourhood Puerto Ricans looking for a place to live. The Pentagon has always opposed initiatives to clean the island’s air, soil, water and hazardous waste, which has been fouled by decades of unrestricted military swagger.* Even in the mainland US urban sprawl near its many bases has compromised the health of civilians.  *A domestic NZ version of this is the propensity of State-Owned Enterprises like ports and airports to try to exempt themselves from responsibility for their local environments by claiming that the existence of nearby residents creates “reverse sensitivity” issues which interfere with their efficient operation.   

Eventually Puerto Rican opposition to gross pollution could not be resisted, and the Navy left. As in Diego Garcia it trumpeted its environmental credentials, in this case by agreeing that the land it had occupied be declared a national park. In practice this meant that they didn’t bother to clean up the contaminants when they left. This chapter comments on the battle for public opinion in terms which will resonate with NZ readers. Co-opted journalists told Puerto Ricans opposing Iraq War 2 that the pro-Bush position was the expression of a “rational, inevitable and realistic policy”. Democratic supporters of an independent and responsible foreign policy (two can play at the language game) were patronised as “idealists” and “romantics”. Well meaning they might be, but that’s the road to ruin. If they won, the peaceniks would bring about “chaos, political and economic crisis, coups and civil war”. All debates over principles and values tend to echo with variations on this demagogic panic mongering. What else can you do when you control the government, the military and the press but your argument makes no sense? That’s the problem posed by democracy and an educated population, the Diego Garcia problem for which Stu Barber devised a final solution.  

The Philippines is at once a biggish country and a collection of smallish islands and its entanglement with the demands of empire has been as long and as complete as anywhere. So it is not surprising that the fightback in the Philippines has been strong. Filipino pressure freed the country from Clark Air Force Base, one of the world’s largest and most intrusive. Long experience has created alliances between activists. The various campaigns - against foreign military bases, against social and environmental pollution - have been increasingly linked. Huge injustices remain, but each victory increases the chance of future successes.    

But it is in Diego Garcia that the ravages of empire are most obvious in that the injustices committed have been without any mitigating excuse. The history of the island is the story of how a perfect storm of exploitation was created, and we can attach whatever label we wish to explain it, whether that be to do with imperialism or colonialism or militarism or racism or patriarchy. However, one explanation offered by a contributor, that the islanders were the victim of so-called “bureaucratic neglect”, is harder to sustain. The neglect was not the result of careless negligence.

Another writer reminds us that the abuse was dealt out when Henry Kissinger ran US foreign policy. This man believed in “realpolitik”, a fancy word for bullying. Eurocentric Kissinger used to boast that “southern” concerns were of no interest to him and that the African bureau of his department was a “bunch of missionaries”. That’s because officials at the embassy in Mauritius were appalled by the expulsion. Vine is particularly lucid in analysing the social dynamics of small, homogenous situations. For whites on the island the culture of the base was all they had as a reference for daily life. It’s not realistic to have expected resistance from within the local power structure.

There is one misreading on Vine’s moral compass. It’s OK that he openly sympathises with the Kreols, but problematic when he ignores Indian experience and blames the Indian leadership for selling out the Africans. As he has himself demonstrated, there was a hierarchy of misery, and blaming one of the victims doesn’t help. Chagos’s ethnic history was a colonial construct, designed by the imperial power precisely to be divisive. It’s a pattern along the lines of Trinidad, Guyana or Fiji. In all these instances, there has been an unfortunate habit among liberal white academics to chastise Indian politicians, when in all four colonies progressive, non-sectarian resistance has been largely led by Indians.      

In 2004 the US announced its Global Defense Posture Review, which was all about how to “project” their power. That entails an indefinite “posture”, squatting all over Diego Garcia. Just why did the Bushes attack Iraq and Afghanistan? All the likely critiques make the bases integral, whether the wars were just about the oil or Kuwait, or whether they’ve been “demonstration” wars (“pour encourager les autres”) or whether they’ve been excuses to re-legitimise other Middle East bases. Whatever the emphasis or immediate motivation, the need for island bases is assumed.

US Washes Its Hands Of Chagossians

When at the Congressional hearing the Embassy in Mauritius asked home base to think about the US’s “moral responsibility”, the responding flunky suggested the Government bore no “legal responsibility. Moral responsibility is a term, sir, that I find difficult to assess”. That might be bureaucratic, but it’s not the voice of “neglect” or civil service caution. It’s the voice of a bully who won’t answer to anyone. To a State Department flunky would New Zealand be an “island”? Probably it was - until the nuclear row. That’s one good news item for us locals. Another comes from an overview of US policy:

“ Equally courageous are the banished people of Diego Garcia who are struggling to return home and to end their years of suffering and marginalisation as foreign outcasts. With activist allies in New Zealand and the help of leading journalists, human right organisations, and jurists in Britain, they have risen from oblivion and won case after case in the British courts”  (“US Foreign Military Bases And Military Colonialism”, Joseph Gerson, a US Quaker, “Bases of Empire”, p67). As he was finishing his book, curious about the man who first proposed the expulsion, Vine tracked down Barber’s son. Barber was dead, but, said his son, he had come to bitterly regret his part in the tragedy. Yet all his efforts to influence the system came to nothing. As an individual man with a conscience Stu Barber didn’t count. 

“KIWI COMPAÑEROS: New Zealand And The Spanish Civil War”

edited by Mark Derby, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2009

1939 newsreels showing German tanks plunging into Poland can make it seem that World War 2 had a sudden and surprising start. This impression goes along with a supposed knowledge that Hitler’s generals had devised a “lightning war” strategy, for which neither Britain nor France was prepared. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, is remembered for “appeasement”, a policy based on the hunch that the whinging Herr Hitler had a point. His country had been hard done by and, treated with respect, the Chancellor would settle down.

In fact, the war had already begun. It could be dated to 1937, when Japan invaded China, or to 1935, when the Italian Army marched into Ethiopia. And of course Hitler’s propensity to violence had already gone unchecked within Germany. Rather than accept that Chamberlain was a stunned mullet, it would be more accurate to say that the governing elites in the UK and France didn’t mind what was happening. Their miscalculation was in gambling that the strategic interests they felt they shared with the Nazis would be appreciated in Berlin. They never thought the Wehrmacht would march west.

Spain Was The Cause Celebre Of the 1930s

These days, outside Spain at least, the Spanish Civil War is largely forgotten, but not long ago it provoked passion. Fought between 1936 and 1939, the war was historically significant as it served as a prelude to World War 2, which broke out the year it ended. In the Thirties, the drift towards catastrophe was there for all to see, and nowhere more clearly than in Spain. It began as a run of the mill military coup against an elected government in a country that normally didn’t matter much to the big powers. But the times were anything but normal. In his Introduction, Mark Derby sets the context:

“‘In a highly volatile Europe already fractured along faultlines of politics and class, this desperate localised uprising swiftly became an international conflict....Over the next three years the names of at least 15 New Zealanders would appear among the bewildering cosmopolitan forces in this very globalised ‘civil’ war... [T]hey were drawn into the war’s centre of gravity by their conviction that Spain’s war would be a decisive bridgehead in the struggle against fascism, the ideology that already held sway in Germany and Italy and threatened much of the rest of Europe. By late 1936 it was apparent, even in secluded New Zealand, that if fascism were not defeated in Spain, a world war would eventuate”.

In ones and twos the Kiwi compañeros made their way to Spain, where they fought in defence of the Spanish Republicans - the Government - alongside Britons, Americans, Canadians and assorted Europeans in what came to be called the International Brigades. Against them were ranged the regular Spanish Army - or at least those parts of it on which the military leader, General Franco, could rely - and guns, bombs and planes supplied by Hitler and Mussolini. It was a unique historical moment, one that could not have occurred either earlier or later than it did.      

Derby has collected chapters on each of the New Zealanders, from a variety of researchers. We’re given the reminiscences of relatives and friends. It’s a fascinating look at a past which might seem impossibly distant. It isn’t though, not chronologically. A note at the end of one chapter reads, “Sir Geoffrey Cox died in April 2008 as this book was in preparation”. Besides being the longest-lived of the compañeros, Cox was the only one whose name is widely known (but probably more so in Britain than in Invercargill or Timaru, where his young life was spent). Cox was sent to Spain as a cub reporter for a London newspaper. His dispatches and books on the experience and subsequently on hot spots for the rest of the 20 th Century became classics of the genre. In the Thirties Cox, who went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, a contemporary of those other expat university men, Paddy Costello, John Mulgan and Dan Davin, held classic “old Left” views. Interviewed near the end of his life by James McNeish, Cox was happy to pronounce himself an admirer of Margaret Thatcher. Like his journalistic forays to the world’s crises, Cox’s ideological journey defined and reflected an epoch.

Doug Jolly, from Otago, a medical student active in the Student Christian Movement, became another expat in the UK with a background of classic New Zealand idealism. Jolly pioneered surgical techniques that were to be used by Allied surgeons in World War 2. Quotes from an articulate Jolly illustrate this chapter. Not all the volunteers were motivated by a love of democracy. Some were excited by the prospect of an adventurous OE. They’re a lively lot. One at least seems to have been escaping a dodgy life at home. There were even a couple who fought for Franco, but their motives seem to have been apolitical.  

Labour Government Offered Only Tepid Support To Spanish Struggle

The contributors elucidate the interplay between New Zealand’s domestic politics and Spain. Although the fascists were backed by Germany and Italy, France and Britain did not help the Republic, claiming that any intervention of theirs would provoke Hitler and Mussolini to even grosser aggression. The Soviet Union did chip in, but not on a scale that began to match what Franco got. Were the Russians acting out of socialist solidarity or did they fear they’d be the next target? At the time the Communist connection was a big deal, a reason for the tepid support for Spain offered by the Savage government, and for the heated opposition from the Roman Catholic hierarchy in New Zealand. The Spanish fascists paraded as defenders of God and landlords, guarding family values against the Russian bear, who wanted only to invade Spain (and then NZ) and burn down the churches. 

Did Rightwing intellectuals believe their own propaganda? Nicholas Reid, a historian of the Church, quotes a letter from Archbishop O’Shea to the Editor of the New Zealand Tablet: “I know the Prime Minister and most of the members of his Cabinet well enough to be convinced that they have not the slightest intention of legislating on communistic lines nor in favour of anything forbidden to Catholics... Unless our Government did what they are doing, the Left Wing of the party, which such legislation holds in check, might easily prevail with Labour”.

O’Shea was taking issue with the Editor for having printed a letter denouncing Labour’s “socialism”. This suggests that the Archbishop was concerned primarily to hold back progressive ideals. He assumed that censorship of opinion in the Church’s paper was a justifiable tactic, and that support for social democratic legislation was needed in order to finesse the call for more radical measures. The Archbishop was an opportunist, a manipulator, looking at the end game. Editorials on the evils of democratic Spain dominated official Catholic writing throughout the late Thirties and it seems likely that the obsessive hostility of the church to the Republican cause was a way of discrediting Leftist ideals so that the Savage government would remain only mildly reformist, a safety valve. O’Shea was relying on the prevailing ignorance about foreign affairs among the population, using Spain as a scapegoat.  The hierarchy had to take into account the strong Catholic influence within the Government. It knew that Catholics, in general, were more likely to vote Labour than were the members of any other religious grouping.  

Malcolm McKinnon, a historian specialising in foreign policy, debunks the popular notion that the Savage government was a principled critic of appeasement. He reminds us that an independent foreign affairs department with dedicated policy specialists scarcely existed. Labour was sympathetic to the Republican cause, but its focus was always on domestic policy and it saw no reason to stir opinion about matters which would have seemed diversions and traps. There are chapters on the Communist Party and the trade union movement, the two main organisers of support for Spain. In the circumstances it’s remarkable that the Republicans held out for as long as they did. And, given the lack of information about far off Spain within 1930’s NZ, the initiative of the volunteers is admirable. They were all tall poppies indeed 

“THE TAKE ”,

A DVD by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein

How did this excellent DVD slip by so largely unnoticed in NZ? “The Take” tells the story of an Argentinian factory, which, six years ago, lay rotting, abandoned by its owner, its machinery gutted. A deregulated, neo-liberal economy had gone bust, the victim of the inevitably bad advice of the International Monetary Fund having induced global speculation, a collapsed currency, the privatisation of public assets, and mass unemployment. The Argentine crisis was one of the more severe local tremors that preceded the global quake that we’re now living through. 

If we recognise the big picture, it might be because of “The Take’s” writer. Naomi Klein’s book* expounding the inherent instability of world capitalism is as sharp an analysis as any, so viewers can be confident that there is an intelligence and commitment behind the camera. But this film is not a lecture. It tells a specific and unique story and it always lets its characters speak for themselves (*I reviewed “The Shock Doctrine” in Watchdog 117, April 2008, online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/17/06.htm. Klein also wrote “No Logo”, a brilliant putdown of brand culture. See my review of that in Watchdog 98, December 2001, online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/98/12.htm). The director, Avi Lewis, partnered with Klein both in film and in life, is the son and grandson of leaders of the New Democratic Party, a Canadian equivalent of Labour. 

New Zealanders probably don’t often think about Argentina, but we have not a little in common. Older readers might recall the days, about 50 years ago, when New Zealanders were told we were one of the richest countries in the world, usually being ranked as Number 2 or 3. Even further back, Argentinians used to hear the same thing. In NZ, we were warmed by the wool on the back of sheep. Argentina was fattened by beef. Other agricultural exporters like Australia and Canada fared well too - and didn’t slip as Argentina has.  

In this film (and in most accounts of public life in Argentina) there are repeated references to Peron. Juan Peron, Argentina’s highly charismatic leader in the 1940s and 50s, has no obvious equivalent in NZ, where the heroic gesture is distrusted, but Peron invested heavily in public works. The rival politicians we see here pose as his successors, the name of Peron still providing legitimacy - but little guidance. Juan Peron was elected President three times, between 1946 and 1973. He died in office in 1974. Ed.

Carlos Menem (President from 1989-99. Ed.) campaigned with a slogan that claimed he was engineering “the model”. This phrase is revealing. It suggests that Menem was proud of his role as stooge for the international bankers. Like NZ’s Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson, he explicitly thought that There Was No Alternative to the neo-liberal wrecking ball. And as with Roger’s 1984 modelling experiment, it all started with a balance of payments shock and a currency crisis. The IMF patted Menem on the head, deeming Argentina to have been on a “very, very solid base”. Solid as?

Neo-liberalism’s model demanded the right to slosh money around the globe with every care for bank profits and no care for local economies. The certain result of this is that smaller currencies will be less than solid. When the speculation flu hit Argentina the peso collapsed. Big players with prior knowledge shifted their money out. For private citizens leading normal lives there was no such escape. Argentina was bankrupt. As millions demonstrated in the streets outside, banks froze accounts and businesses closed. In three chaotic weeks in 2001, five presidents looked on hopelessly. Lewis remarks that this was in the same week that Enron went bust.

We see an interview with Lewis on an influential CNN programme in which he is asked for alternatives. As CNN and Big Media were in the business of drumming in the nostrum that there was none, Lewis is not allowed to offer one. The interviewer keeps interrupting. If you don’t watch a lot of channels like CNN and CNBC - if you’re like most normal people - you might think that Lewis is editing to make the media look bad. That’s not likely. Big Media never allow contrary views airtime, not even token seconds.

Workers Take Control Of Factories

In fact alternatives are what this film is mostly about, and not just the challenge it offers to the neo-liberal model. In a discussion in Melbourne which follows the main film, Lewis emphasises the novelty of what happened in Argentina and what it suggests to advocates for workers and social justice. Traditionally the way to protest outsourcing was to go on strike. The Argentinians insisted on working. A court allowed the workers to go into the abandoned factory to see whether they had been right to claim that equipment had been taken away. The workers voted to occupy and clean up the factory. The bulk of the film looks at how they managed. From this - and other - accounts it’s been inspirationally successful. The factory staff agreed that they’d govern themselves with one person having one vote and with equal pay. Cooperation and equality works, they say. With a boss system, there’s no identification with the product and no incentive other than fear. Workers take unnecessary toilet breaks or leave lights on in empty rooms.

The plants we see have done well. At a ceramics factory, where most of the shoot was done, the tiles are cheaper than when the company was owned by the boss, and production has increased. What’s more, the wages are spent in town. It might have become an efficiently boring factory, but just a few years ago, as the Canadian unit observed, the workers had armed themselves with slingshots and marbles to defend their occupation. The slogan was Occupy, Resist, Produce. It worked - as a sober and effective tactic in a contemporary, advanced society. This might strike New Zealanders as an astonishing achievement. It’s thought that in all Argentina 15,000 people have restored abandoned plant in this way. 

Amid the successes there were of course setbacks and defeats. One of the film’s many virtues is that we’re left the space to consider them. As Lewis has since remarked, one reason the occupations mostly succeeded is probably because blocked bank accounts affected the middle and professional classes. It’s also likely that the factory occupants had wide support for having converted broken buildings into productive use. The owners waited for the system to bail them out, but there were few reasons for public opinion to rally to the cause of fat cats who had hung onto their profits by deserting their country. According to Wikipedia, the owner of the ceramics factory had built on public land which he never paid for, so his complaints about having lost the fruit of his labour might well have rung as hollow as his self-looted factory. 

During the occupation, in 2003, Nestor Kirchner, from a rival, leftist faction within Menem’s Peronist party, challenged for the Presidency, running against Menem, who tried out a line in repentance, saying that, yes, the meltdown was his fault, but he was back. The humble gimmick was soon tossed. Banners read: “Menem, the third Presidency... The historical one”. He was the man of destiny, offering a third coming. In a strongly Christian culture, Menem campaigned as the Messiah. Both he and Jesus, he proposed, had “provoked great hatred, great love, and ended up crucified”.

Neither man got more than a quarter of the vote. Menem was fractionally ahead, but withdrew before a scheduled run-off. It seems that both Peronistas offered a sort of nostalgia, Menem for the roaring 90’s, and Kirchner for the real deal, an interventionist State (because of Menem’s withdrawal, Kirchner became President by default. He was in office from 2003-07 and was succeeded by the current President, his wife, Christina Kirchner. Ed.). You can’t picture a NZ Prime Minister claiming to be the son of God, and neither Jenny Shipley nor Helen Clark are easily cast as Juan Peron’s widow, Evita, warbling “Don’t cry for me, New Zealand” to a million Westies. We merely experienced Muldoonism, our own, milder version of big State populism.

In one effective scene, we see a worker explaining why he was going to vote for Menem, the one man who (besides the absent boss) was most closely responsible for his own immiseration. To the obvious, but unexpressed, frustration of his mates, the poor guy talks of how Menem will bring about “change” and “stability”. It’s a scene that’s been replayed in every workplace in NZ. We might expect such self-abuse, but find it hard to imagine a director of a transnational trying to convince his colleagues to vote for a workers’ cooperative. 

There’s a happy ending to this sub-plot. The misguided man we see later in full and understanding support of his own interests. Experience and confidence are the best teachers. “Maybe we can run the whole country this way”, one woman observes. The producers have explained their title, which has multiple resonances. You can take ... on the system, over the machines, out the boss, and back the country. These marvellous Argentinians took all four options. I take my hat off to them.