This survey based on revelations from Wikileaks weighs in at a solid 624 pages, but it could have been much longer, Julian Assange having intercepted 2,325,961 State Department cables. What’s on offer is basically a general summary of recent history, as seen from policy makers in the United States, with essays on lots of countries by different authors. As such, the sweep of narrative won’t surprise specialist experts or researchers.

Some of the comments on-line complain of uneven quality, an obvious hazard in anthologies, but for my money the perspective is presented in a consistently liberal and accessible academic style which has avoided overlap. Don’t expect shock and awe, as most of the big stuff has already been publicised. The ideal reader might be one who wants a reference book on world affairs, to dip into from time to time as the globe lurches from one mad mess to another.

One pattern that emerges is a frequent contradiction between US tactical considerations and overall strategy. The cables are usually to do with immediate needs, and these can be at variance with long-term policy. In the chaos of places like Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, it seems that Washington elites have never been united on precisely what they want or why. The rhetoric of George Bush and – if in a more nuanced tone – Barack Obama hinted at a wish to embrace both countries as democracies, by which they meant neo-liberal investment zones. Yet in the Afghanistan of 30 years ago the US was empowering Osama bin Laden’s medievalist mates to topple a secular-minded Government because it was being propped up by the former USSR. Largely because of this, half the world is still in turmoil.

In the bad old days of the Cold War, big power politics was simple, there being two sides said to be opposites, and various small fry in between, for whose favour the blacks and the whites competed. It was crude, but it was simple. Wikileaks is post-Cold War, a world with 50 shades of grey.

The devil, we’re constantly being told, is in the detail. When politicians mouth this tired refrain their usual purpose is to hedge their bets, to avoid commitment, but Wikileaks reminds us that details can be revealing. It is in their asides, their jokes, their gossip and unscripted comments that people reveal motivations that their carefully spun webs of misinformation are designed to hide.

Wikileaks titbits show us an obsequious UK sucking up to the Americans, shedding all dignity in its rush to please big brother. David Cameron and other UK leaders keep letting it being known that the US role in everything that matters is “essential” because they’re the “world leader”. In one message William Hague, then Cameron’s Foreign Secretary, panting puppyishly, added “my sister is a US citizen”. That’s the background to the relationship of the warriors Dubya Bush and his good mate Blairy.

Another detail: New Zealand is not in the index but it is in the text. Apparently we were part of a small privileged group of special best friends of the US, part of The Club no less, that gathered to worry about Iran and its rumoured nuclear ambitions. Was anyone besides #JohnKey and Murray McCully in the know? Is anyone aware of this privileged NZ expertise in Iranian nuclear policy?

The Wikileaks files on New Zealand, all 613 pages of them, can be read online at http://liberation.typepad.com/files/wellington-us-embassy-cables---bryce-edwards.pdf. There is some fascinating stuff in them. Ed.

WHITE COLLAR RADICAL

by Mark Derby, Craig Potton Publishing, Nelson, 2013

The white collar radical was Dan Long, the influential leader of the Public Service Association (PSA). Mark Derby’s subtitle, “Dan Long And The Rise Of The White Collar Unions” goes some way to explaining why Long was seen as “radical”. He wasn’t especially, but in the context of our recent past the notion that chaps (it was an overwhelmingly male ethos) who wear a shirt and tie to work would want to be in a union was seen as wild.

As of course it is seen now, in our Rogernomic world of “contractors”, where union membership is again unusual. In bringing our attention to the post-war New Zealand – really the Wellington – of the men we used to call civil servants, Derby has filled a gap which might otherwise have remained.

In popular mythology, as fostered by neo-liberal prejudice, civil servants are gatekeepers, timeservers who glide on in their cardigans and walk shorts doing nothing much. This pastiche persists despite the evidence being clear that in the era in which the Dan Longs of NZ worked the economy grew more steadily than in the periods either before or after. That’s largely why the three decades from around 1950 to 1980 are so often said to have been boring. They were. There were no financial meltdowns, no depressions, no leaky roofs, no killer mines. It wasn’t really radical at all. The early post-war period was when workers and bosses, labour and capital, compromised, and though there were few big gains for working people, the economy at least provided jobs. Long’s contribution, modest but essential, was to create the conditions for potential future improvements.

Our celebrity-obsessed society would not see Long as a rock star. He graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor of Arts, and at the age of 27 became a clerk for the Ministry of Works. In 1958 he was elected PSA national President and in 1960 he became General Secretary, a position he held until his early death in 1976. This reads like the life of an ordinary Joe from our recent past, and in Derby’s telling, Long’s life was indeed very much the life of middle New Zealand. If in England they refer to a notional average citizen as the man on the Clapham omnibus, Long was the man on the train to Upper Hutt. 

Long’s parents emigrated from Ireland to Wairarapa, where his father worked at first as a guard on trains labouring over the Rimutakas, before moving over the hill to Upper Hutt.  It was a tough and apparently tedious life, which Tim Long relieved by drinking. Dan’s mother was a devout Catholic and prohibitionist. When Dan married his fellow PSA civil servant, the daughter of strictly Presbyterian Scottish migrants, there was unease from both sides about their child marrying into the wrong religion.

Jailed As CO For Duration Of WW2

Again, this is a standard background for New Zealanders from a few generations back. Where Dan Long was exceptional, however, might well have stemmed from his mother’s pacifism. Christianity, she thought, held that killing was wrong, a simple and principled stand which was not appreciated in the Hutt Valley. Dan inherited this moral courage, refusing to serve in the Second World War. Derby’s account of Long’s imprisonment as a “military defaulter” in primitive conditions is compelling and disturbing. Officialdom was plain nasty. Long’s appeal against military service, when he would have been hoping to open a discussion about values, was dismissed on the day he made it. New Zealand’s treatment of dissenters was harsher than in comparable countries, including the UK, where the feared German enemy was not on the other side of the globe.

Long was not released till 1946, the year after the war ended, and, despite NZ now being at peace, with returned servicemen buying suburban lots and producing the first wave of baby boomers, he was ordered to work for two years as a labourer for the Hutt Valley Municipal Gas Board. This was not justice. It was unrelated to security needs. It subverted democratic morality. Why was the NZ State so vengeful?

In such cases the assumption is usually that the crudity is political in the style of the Red scares that swept America in the years after 1945. But in NZ at least something other than raw power was in play. In discussing the seminal influence of Bill Sutch, perhaps the most influential civil servant in the 1950s and 60s, Derby shows that he was disliked by the political and economic elites for more than his progressive views. He was known to be a danger to the country’s peace and prosperity because he drank coffee and read UK and US newspapers. Earlier, Long and his fellow “conchies” were hated because they held strong religious and philosophical views that marked them as alien to the spirit of true-blue NZ (for a close recent parallel, think of officialdom’s reaction to the Waihopai Domebusters – and then add more hysteria and resentment). For a detailed account of NZ’s punitive treatment of WW2 conscientious objectors (COs, “conchies”), see Murray Horton’s obituary of Will Foote, specifically the section titled “Four Years Behind The Wire”, in Watchdog 137, December 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/14.html. Ed.

But if political division can play out in these sorts of culture wars, the basic splits are economic. A strong public sector threatens the hegemony of big money and its defenders in Parliament, and in NZ the PSA was seen as radical because it represented core democratic aspirations. In 1912 a Public Service Act had aimed at settling the relationship between the Government and its employees by formally placing employment conditions under State control, with public workers being denied bargaining rights. The following year (when industrial strikes were being ruthlessly put down) the PSA was formed.

Its leadership was keen to prove to its masters that they were sensible fellows, and with an overwhelmingly conservative membership, it is not surprising that public sector wages lagged well below private sector rates. During the 1935-49 Labour government only slight gains were achieved (during the six years of Long’s confinement Peter Fraser, once a pacifist, was Prime Minister).

Hated By Truth & SIS

So by the time Long was in the saddle no credible claim could be made that the men in cardigans and walk shorts were a threat to national security, but that didn’t stop successive Governments, both Labour and National, from saying just that. From behind the scene, the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) whispered in the ears of Parliament, and at centre stage Truth, the weekly scandal sheet, shouted the dangers. Jeremy’s review of “Truth: The Rise And Fall Of The People’s Newspaper”, by Redmer Yska, is in Watchdog 126, May 2011, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/26/10.htm Ed.

The SIS was run by a retired Army man, Brigadier Gilbert*, who, as an observer noted at the time, was apt to “equate radical political activity with Communism… He must waste a large amount of time investigating people who are utterly reliable and trustworthy”. No, it was worse than that. It’s more accurate to say that Gilbert equated an interest in politics, any interest, as subversive. At Victoria University an SIS spy was revealed through his practice of ignoring the lecturer and taking notes in seminars only when students spoke.  *Murray Horton’s obituary of Gilbert is in Watchdog 58, January 1988, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-january-1988_11.html. Ed.

Truth liked to claim that PSA members were “seething with discontent” at Long’s “ruling Leftwing junta”, which was associated with “Vietniks”, who were like beatniks, hippies, all of them traitors because they regarded US activities in Vietnam as ill-advised. As a result, “prominent Communists, otherwise known as Marxists or Leftists… were closer to their ultimate goal of total control of the PSA… [and] whoever controls the PSA can also control the Government and we forget this at our peril”

Looking back, this sort of rabble rousing might seem comical, but in 1966 it was potent enough, as evidenced by the lack of any concerted – or “credible” – pushback, and although no evidence, however trivial, ever emerged that there were Reds under the bed, the PSA – and others – felt compelled to show that they were indeed goody-two-shoes lads and lasses.

By any rational assessment Long was a moderate, as typical of his generation as his parents were of theirs. He succeeded because of his qualities as a leader and organiser, and his victories - equal pay for women, bargaining rights, and the use of the strike as legitimate - shaped modern NZ. Yes, NZ gave women the vote way back in 1893 and of course you can strike if you’re a bus driver in Auckland, but the equality that all now assume was in fact only recently won. 

Long’s other big achievement was in nudging his union into declaring solidarity with social movements. On his watch the PSA came out as being against the Vietnam War and the apartheid system in South Africa.

All along he was on the right side of history, and sooner than the vast majority of his peers. Throughout, his wife and colleague Margaret, Editor of the PSA Journal, was similarly prescient. In 1959 she reported that Treasury was “considering a giant electronic computer” weighing five tons that was able to make 138,000 calculations a minute. Just two years later, when computers were still unknown to the world at large, she wrote that while the technology was “a long way yet from displacing the human element entirely”, it posed a risk to older workers and the unskilled. Now, fully 50 years on, these are central issues for white collar workers.

EYES OF FIRE:

The Last Voyage Of The Rainbow Warrior

by David Robie, Little Island Press, Auckland, 2015

This is an updated version of the account of the 1985 sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, first published in 1986. No New Zealander old enough to have been around then will be unaware of the incident, but this is a timely reminder for a newer generation of the day when terrorism reached Waitemata Harbour.

Terrorism is supposed to be the last resort of alienated young men from places we know nothing of, but the bomb which blew up the Rainbow Warrior in downtown Auckland was detonated by men and women employed by the Government of France. If you didn’t know otherwise, you might suppose that some time before the attack France had suffered a traumatic event, because how else might such an odd barbarism be explained? France surely is a modern and agreeable place which merits our sympathy as the target of terrorism, not its perpetrator.

Not really. France is the same place with the same public institutions as it had in 1985, its current President being from the same party, the Socialists for Heaven’s sake, as the President back then. Neither, in essence, has its global circumstances changed.

France Regarded Greenpeace As “Terrorists”

Pollution of land and sea and the degradation of habitats are even more of a problem now than they were last century and you don’t find advanced Western democracies openly calling for the globe to get ever dirtier. And when the Rainbow Warrior docked in Auckland in July 1985, it was in the middle of voyages to draw attention to all sorts of environmental issues. Greenpeace had protested nuclear tests, acid rain, whaling, attacks on dolphins and the dumping of toxic waste. It was doing great work.

Not in the eyes of the French State. Their problem was that the Rainbow Warrior was due to sail towards Tahiti and the French islands in the south-east Pacific, where they were testing nukes. If, for the rest of us, it was bad enough that the Russians and Americans were in a perpetual nuclear confrontation which had the potential to wipe us all away, that tension was at least understandable, given the circumstances at the time. But France had as much reason to want to join the nuclear club as it would have if it started to do so now. That is, zero. It was pure folly.

Being primarily focused on environmental issues Greenpeace was protesting the very real and obvious threat to marine life. The French of course said that their tests were clean. Which prompted the obvious response that they should, therefore, test their bombs in mainland France. Rainbow Warrior had just arrived from the Marshall Islands, where the US had long polluted (and where areas are still uninhabitable).

By 1985 France had conducted 193 tests in the Pacific and it wasn’t done yet. France (still) pretends to believe that its overseas colonies are no different politically from Paris or Marseilles, so it felt able to treat the New Zealand government, then beginning to respond to Greenpeace’s campaign for a nuclear-free Pacific, as an ally of its activities, which France labelled terrorism. 

So it was that one winter’s night on Tamaki Drive boat club members, who had been the target of thieves, were staked out on watch when a speedboat landed. Two people got out, dumped the boat’s engine in the water, and were then picked by a car driven by someone in a frogman suit. The yachties noted the car’s plate number. A later search of the water came up with water bottles made in France. NZ’s petty criminals had enabled the Police to arrest France’s State terrorists.

A Frenchwoman who joined the open activities of Greenpeace in Auckland apparently expressed hostility to the idea of independence for New Caledonia and support for France’s bombs, both opinions being the last things you’d expect to hear around Greenpeace. She advanced the rationale that nukes were needed as otherwise “we risk becoming like Finland, which is so influenced by Russia”. Hearing this ingénue, an experienced observer who knew European history would have intuited that she had been indoctrinated by an older and nostalgic extremist as no-one else had worried about Finnish sovereignty since about 1940. She turned out later to have been a spy. While it might not be surprising that no local NZ activist would have suspected her, it is surprising that an agent of the French secret police was so gauche.

It seems that the French didn’t know enough of their own history to have created a convincing persona for their agent, who would have been detected had she operated in a more experienced milieu. Operationally, too, French tactics were clumsy. Twice before they had sunk ships, and both times they achieved nothing beyond discrediting the activities they were hoping to defend.

And just as its secret police have been amateurishly incompetent, so has its political class. Robie tells us that theories from the political elites in France included the assertion that low-tech Greenpeace was about to advance on French Polynesia with an armada so loaded with the latest gadgets to thwart the tests that the nuke programme would have to be abandoned. It was said that Greenpeace was financed by BP to maintain its oil interests, that the UK’s MI6, the South African secret police and the Soviet’s KGB had infiltrated Greenpeace.  The latter, an old favourite, was picked up a naive NZ media and across the Tasman in the Australian. This detail is significant in that, as a “quality” Tory broadsheet with sophisticated journalists, the paper must have known the claim was suspect. Ideology trumps truth every time.

The rhetoric did not often reach eloquence. One letter to the Greenpeace office after the bombing warned of the traitors ready to deliver the country to the commies. They included “pacifists, hooligans, hippies, trade unions, PLO, Khomeinists, Labour terrorists – all the same riff-raff, all KGB agents.’ No wonder the correspondent concluded with: “Revenge. Better dead than Red. No more Vietnams”. For years serious and educated people had been debating this dilemma of whether they would prefer to be crimson or expired.

Exact Opposite Of Intended Result

You’d think that the combined resources of the French elites would have come up with something better than these childish conspiracy theories, but perhaps the greatest of the many asinine calculations of the French State was its assumption that blowing up a Greenie ship in an allied country on the other side of the world would help it to carry on poisoning the South Pacific. Instead, inevitably, international outrage raised Greenpeace’s profile enormously. It is no coincidence that the peace and environmental movements around the world became increasingly popular from the mid-1980s.

Only one man was killed, a Portuguese photographer, Fernando Pereira, but there could easily have been a high death toll. The frogmen who placed the bomb timed it to detonate just before midnight when normally there would have been many others in their cabins, but most happened to be on shore that night. Robie himself had been on board when the ship docked in Auckland, having sailed from the Marshall Islands.

Even after the event, after the terrorists were caught, President Mitterand’s France knew no shame, and the dirty tricks continued. Now perhaps there’s some resolution, some (in the irritating vernacular of the day) closure. In 1987 – after Robie’s original account came out - the Rainbow Warrior was sunk off Matauri Bay in Northland as a likely future marine habitat for divers to explore. And in 1996 France signed the nuclear test ban treaty.

Robie’s professional life has been devoted to the peoples of the Pacific. A journalist and university teacher, he’s written a series of investigative accounts of the struggles of the island nations against big power politics. ‘”Eyes Of Fire” is an excellent production, thorough and informed with a restrained passion, with interesting photographs. French politicians, by and large, might now be behaving in a more acceptable fashion, but the global issues that Robie has analysed – of pollution and violence and the stupidity and corruption of power – still demand our witness.

2015 Rainbow Warrior Microsite – Eyes Of Fire 30 Years On (Little Island Press): http://eyes-of-fire.littleisland.co.nz/ More than 40 video interviews, a lead background article and photo gallery by the author David Robie and contributions by Pierre Gleizes, Bene Hoffman, Hilari Anderson and John Parulis.

THE BIG SHORT

A Film By Adam McKay

Adapted from the Michael Lewis book of the same title, this entertaining flick deservedly won the 2015 Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. As well as being a devastating critique of the fast money gambling that landed us in the 2008 money meltdown, it’s as funny as it is angry. 

When the gamblers short the market, they’re hoping that the instrument will fall in price. A short is a bet on failure, and when it pays off, it does so handsomely. The movie follows a fund manager who sees that the numbers don’t add up and, while stated values are soaring, bets all on a collapse. Along the way we meet a cross-section of Wall Street types, who range morally from the greedy and devious to the almost honest. They’re both real life characters and fictional blends.

The unforgiveable aspect of all the criminality was that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) had to happen. The world’s economy was being forced into a Ponzi scheme, in which fictional values were sustained on the suckers’ money that chased quick profits. The big players hope to get out just before the fall takes down those Mum and Dad investors and the jobs of millions of uninvolved working people.

In one scene our hero asks Standard and Poor’s how they can justify their participation in the sleaze. Everyone’s doing it, is the answer. This is the company that has recently told the Christchurch City Council that its debt rating will be cut if it doesn’t flog off its assets. Before such blackmail senior managers habitually cringe.

In some yet elusive future people will look back and wonder how it was that after the crash the same system and the same companies got back in the trough getting rich again and how it came about that they still advised credulous Governments and Councils how to manage their resources.

Unfortunately that time has not arrived.