The University of Canterbury’s Bronwyn Hayward is a member of the international panel which, in October 2018, confirmed what we knew: if we are to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5°C from existing levels, we need to lift our game, because if we don’t, we are all in big trouble. The scientists have long known that human activity has been altering climate, but, in the face of polluters with the ability to obstruct and distort reliable information, they have often softened their message. Now they’re saying that this appeasement cannot go on. It’s already almost too late for present compromises to continue, so the planet demands real and immediate measures to radically reduce carbon emissions.

Having global cred as an experienced expert, Hayward is an excellent source for this brisk survey of climate change. As a social scientist she discusses how we laypeople might view the issue and outlines the scientific consensus without too much elaboration. This is a wise approach, as trying to convince the various deniers is a waste of time. People cannot be reasoned out of illusions they were not reasoned into – and they will not be among her readers in any case.

Record Of “Clean, Green NZ” Has Been Woeful

Between 1990 and 2015 our greenhouse gas emissions increased by 64% as authorities did as little as possible to perform responsibly. Hayward resists calling out individuals – in our tiny country that might well be a necessary omission – but she does suggest that, of the political parties, only the Greens (somewhat) have done much to help.

New Zealand’s pollution rate, per person, is the fifth worst in the world. In comparison, the UK, where the Industrial Revolution began around 1760, where dark satanic mills once blackened the sky, emissions in the same 25 years were cut by 38% (Radio NZ, 26/5/17, reported NZ as 7th worst and put the increased rate in the period at 24%. Some lists omit various contributors, measuring for instance only carbon and under reporting, e.g., agriculture. Hayward’s numbers are likely to be as reliable as any).

Since around 1850, when few other countries had begun to industrialise, global temperatures have gone up 1°C. That might not sound much, but Hayward points out that an era called the Little Ice Age was the result of a fall of just 2°C. 20,000 years ago, an average temperature 5°C lower than now meant that North America lay under a “towering mass of ice”.

Without mitigation, as “undeveloped” countries industrialise, the rate at which the atmosphere heats up would only increase. Hayward says that - at present rates of climate change - by 2050 the world would be 2°C hotter than it is now. And by 2080, when today’s baby would (assuming she is still around) be 60 years old, it would be 4 to 5°C hotter. Is she alarmist? On the contrary: look at the last sentence of the preceding paragraph. That’s the same number. And she makes these two points in separate places. A less honest reporter would have screamed alarm.

As a generalisation, it’s safe to say that younger generations appreciate the true state of affairs more than older ones, so is there hope that present responses are surprisingly recent and that the rate of change in public attitudes might speed up? Hayward says she first heard the view that we needed to “keep the coal in the ground” only in 2011 when she introduced former Green Co-Leader, Jeanette Fitzsimons, and the highly influential American scientist, James Hansen*, at a meeting in Christchurch (which of the two said it first she does not say). * Jeremy’s review of James Hansen’s “Storms Of My Grandchildren” is in Watchdog 124, August 2010, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/24/10.htm. Ed.

Fitzsimons elsewhere in this account is credited with calling out the elephant in the room when she had remarked that polluting interests are so influential that polite company listens respectfully to Big Coal and Big Cow and averts its gaze from their often reckless advocacy (as a typical example: at a conference I heard the Mayor of a major NZ city talk seriously of “clean coal”). Hayward cites Guy Salmon, from Alister Barry and Abi King-Jones’ film, “Hot Air”. NZ, Salmon opined, was a “company town”. Jeremy’s review of “Hot Air” is in Watchdog 137, December 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/37/13.html. Ed.

“Political power”, Hayward notes, “is often most potent when it keeps issues off the agenda”. So much is this the case that she herself succumbs. In a passage on the influence of corporate lobbies she feels obliged to mitigate the facts by resorting to italics, softening the critique by saying that “some” of agriculture and “some” of mining wield undue and harmful influence.

We Need To Get Stuck In & Green Up

A major emphasis in Hayward’s contribution to alerting opinion to the importance of combatting climate change in her work and in these pages is in her way of seeing “citizenship as a state of being, belonging and participating in communities”. New Zealanders, she observes, “have traditionally been great joiners but reluctant protesters”. We need to get stuck in. Change comes not from the top but from actions of small groups of participating citizens. As she says, this has been true of all the major progressive victories.

But it’s getting harder. Working people’s power has been eroding, largely due to the permanent attack on trade unions, and “[i]n an increasingly individualised, fragmented and unequal society it also becomes harder to encounter and hear the views of others who live different lives”. Compounding the difficulty is that, unsurprisingly, the places in NZ that are the most threatened by shifty weather and rising sea levels are poorer places with little influence, just as NZ’s Pacific territories are among the most threatened and least powerful on a global level.

In 2017 the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – an orthodox capitalist outfit and therefore allergic to too much equality and democracy - stated that New Zealand was starting to reach its sustainable limits. If they say so, then the present Government, with two of its three Parties saying they’re committed to a cleaner and more just society, needs to get a move on.

Hayward does not offer any big systemic changes in this survey, which is perhaps disappointing. Instead we are given the usual suggestions of lifestyle habits that individuals could adopt. Yes, of course there are many ways in which many of us could live cleaner, healthier lives. But, at the same time, we need - as active communities – to force governments and economies to green up.

HOPES DASHED?
The Economics Of Gender Inequality
by Prue Hyman, BWB Texts, Wellington, 2017

The idea that economic and social health cannot properly be captured in a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) number is becoming part of the conventional wisdom these days. Finance Minister Grant Robertson, for example, has indicated that the present Government will instead be using a term like “wellness” or “wellbeing”, because GDP is indeed a gross indicator.

In this look at the real economy, the one that interests itself in how the numbers are constituted and how people live their lives, Prue Hyman pays her respects to two women whose thinking has long foreshadowed present attitudes. It was 125 years ago that Kate Sheppard’s campaign for women to be allowed to vote achieved success.

Sheppard had been explaining to a lot of confused and often angry men that, though the fair sex was popularly seen as a merely domestic species, women’s work, in fact, was an important enabler of the economic numbers. The other mentor has been Marilyn Waring. Elected as a young MP in Rob Muldoon’s 1975 National government, Waring would have bewildered her very traditionally male leader with a series of proposals which look contemporary even now, nearly 50 years later. Waring of course is still at it, with Muldoonism’s often blatantly sexist style long seen as obsolete.

Paid & Unpaid Work Is The Same

A basic premise of Hyman, Sheppard and Waring is that paid and unpaid work is the same. If an activity is needed as part of what produces targeted outcomes then it needs to be respected, even if (in the recently popular phrase) it cannot be monetised. We’re talking women, yes, but also the old. Hyman gives some statistics which might surprise the uninitiated. Annually in New Zealand one million people give 270,000,000 hours of unpaid labour to formal non-profit institutions. It is a huge number, one quarter of the population.

Combined with the conventionally measured jobs undertaken both by the one million and by their various partners, relatives and mates, the number is saying that almost all of us are part of the wellbeing economy. Measuring the value of this can scarcely be precise – especially in the context of an analysis that warns against false precisions – but, if we are to come to any sort of convincing conclusions, if only to satisfy the “number crunchers” - it has to be tried. Hyman reckons that non-profits add an unacknowledged 2.6% to GDP. When the value of volunteer labour is included, the number becomes 4.9%.

As a help to satisfying the needs of objectivity, Hyman introduces us to the concept of a “replacement cost”. If the activity was not being undertaken by volunteers, how much would an employee need to be paid? A number suggested by the best available research is that – in 2004 when the minimum hourly wage was $8.50 - the replacement cost of the average volunteer “wage” worked out at $12.15.

In the review above Bronwyn Hayward discussed the importance of volunteer culture in New Zealand. Hyman agrees. It’s “huge”’. In 1998/99 Statistics NZ, to whom number crunching GDP compilers have to defer, calculated that were all this volunteered and unpaid stuff given a number it would add 40% to GDP or $40 billion.

This estimate is endorsed by the findings from Finland that the goods and services produced by households constitute a real 39% of GDP. Volunteer work has usually been associated with female work, a reason that women still lag behind men in the paid work force. Women are often to be found in what are called the “caring professions”, the phrase implying that the work is nice and kind but of little importance to the GDP compilers.

The overall gender gap is between 13 and 15%. It closed after 1972 with enactment of the Equal Pay Act, but – surprisingly perhaps - there has been little change since. In three of the four job categories which are predominantly female - community services, personal services, sales and professionals – the gender gap is 20%. Conversely, within the four male-dominated areas - labourers, managers, operators and drivers – the gap is narrower.

In many professions requiring higher education there are, these days, more women than men, a trend that becomes more pronounced at universities. Hyman notes that the acquisition of human capital – education and experience - by males and females is ever more equal. This has offset the permanent chipping away of pay and working conditions since the 1991 Employment Contracts Act began the assault on trade unionism.

This suggests that the trend in pay might be more between skilled and unskilled than between male and female. It also helps to explain rising inequality. There are other reasons beyond the crudely political for the widening gap between well rewarded jobs and unskilled jobs - automation, technology and immigration policies among them.

So, it remains true that men, who dominate managerial roles, continue to get paid more than women in their traditionally lower paid professions, just as in the working classes, men (builders) get paid more than women (aged care). Hyman might have given more attention to information technology (IT)-associated and financial jobs, the lucrative part of the economy that Bill Clinton’s economics adviser, Robert Reich, calls “symbolic analysts”. The trend toward rewarding these people is likely to keep increasing – and they are overwhelmingly male jobs.

But do they need to be? We know all about those evil old white men who climb their ladders and then install glass ceilings so others can’t join them. And Hyman is to be thanked for not boring us with yet another trudge over worn ground. She suggests, tentatively, that implicit biases and cultural beliefs are an inescapable aspect of our crooked timber of humanity. While it remains true (in some age groups and demographics) that women are still more likely to be judged on the basis of appearance and dress, it is not only rich old white men who prejudge. Among some of the historically disadvantaged, proudly upheld cultural habits and ethnic traditions also keep women’s horizons short.

Or take the example of Japan, significant in its being a rich world country (with the third largest GDP) enjoying a comparatively healthy record of resisting imposing inequality, but one with an exception. It has a wider gap between the genders than other liberal democracies. Fareed Zakaria, an excellent contributor on CNN (22/10/18), cites figures comparing Japan to another rich country, but one with a more level playing field between men and women. Were Japan Sweden when it came to hiring women, its GDP would be $US579 billion more than it is.

Class Is The Original Cause

The one factor on which – surely – all are agreed is education. In the US, during the tawdry Kavanaugh controversies, 60% of educated women believed the abused woman, but only 30% of uneducated women did. Were a similar issue to emerge in NZ there is no reason to think opinion would vary much from this sort of ratio.

Knowledge and confidence are why this discrepancy exists, but this brings us to the original cause: class, the spawning ground of sexism and prejudice (despite a nearly ubiquitous chorus claiming otherwise, racism is seldom a factor in these attitudinal matters). Hyman argues for a universal basic income. With the fragmenting of the economy, the trend towards ever greater inequality can only increase. Outsourcing and neo-liberalism disproportionately affect women and minorities - though she might well have included other influences, like managerial, engineering and IT roles, which play to the inherited advantages of (mostly) men.

In the end we come back to the decline of trade unionism. In Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in the 1990s labour took in 66% of all income. By the 2000s, they got 62% of it. All employees are losing out, if to varying extents, as the neo-liberal economy caters to its clients. Hyman’s stat: if earnings since 1989 – the year when the Rogernomic coup was completed - had matched productivity growth, private sector wages would have averaged $31.85 in 2011. But they were only $23.43. Public sector workers have generally fared worse.

Labour’s share of total income in 1981 – just before the neo-libs ruled our roost - was 65.9%. It should not be assumed that ours was a lazy and spoilt culture, content – as the received analysis always is assuming - to glide on in mediocrity. On the contrary: even then NZ’s wages lagged others in the OECD. But by 2002, at its historic low point, as Ruthanasia joined the Rogernomes, this proportion had been slashed to 53.9%. By 2010 the number had eked back up to 56.1%.

CATASTROPHISM:
The Apocalyptic Politics Of Collapse And Rebirth
by Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen and James Davis, PM Press, Oakland, 2012

Catastrophism is a neologism to describe the belief that the sky is falling. Catastrophism foresees a social collapse, brought on by political, environmental, military, moral or financial crisis. It is not necessarily a pessimistic notion. Indeed, some catastrophists are hoping for an end to the way we presently live our lives. The topic is timely; the consequences of the ideology are more various and serious than a casual observation might suggest.

A Staple Of Rightist Elite Boltholers

Catastrophism is a staple within the Rightist elites in the USA. It seems to have been a requirement for senior Republicans to have an escape hatch from disaster. George Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, and his Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, both had retreats in the Rockies, where a business of high-end disaster survival shelters also thrives. The refuge needs to be high and as far as possible from the teeming lowlands. Since then it has been realised that to be anywhere within the US might not be safe. New Zealand? Sounds good. It’s way down at the end of the world, so remote that maps often forget to include it. And you never hear that terrorists and Mexicans have found it either.

Early British films would often include NZ when they needed to provide a location for an eccentric or solitary relative to have retreated from life. And during the early days of the Cold War, when people like Ned Flanders, the evangelical neighbour of Marge and Homer Simpson, were building bomb shelters so that they, the righteous few, could repopulate America after Armageddon, others – often of a more liberal bent - saw distant and innocent NZ as the best option for survival (they did not take into account our high rainfall, which would be leaking radioactivity).

These days catastrophism is the burgeoning ideology of the successors of Cheney and Rumsfeld, Trump’s mate, Peter Thiel, and fellow mega-richer Matt Lauer, who have boltholes above the lakes and rivers of Central Otago. For them, NZ is as safe as the world is likely to offer: it is more than remote; it is Anglo-Saxon, a host for Five Eyes.

Sometimes, as with Thiel, the boltholers are motivated by the extreme neo-liberal need to vacate the sordid Earth in favour of a paradise with no laws or regulations that would allow any government to extort taxes or seek to have any influence over how their business interests might operate. Boltholeism is the expression of an anarchic and narcissistic individualism.

But beyond the anti-social neuroticism, does it matter? We’ve always known those guys are nutters. It does, in that it tells us that the men at the centre of Western power either do not care if the world is to do well or do not think it is possible for it to do well. For them any improvement in the lot of ordinary people, any change in the balance of power, is a potential threat. Privilege demands repression. Their ideology is the antithesis of hope.

Combine this mindset with the millennial aspect of boltholeism and it is not necessary to buy chunks of the Southern Alps. The Rapture, popular with the likes of The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders and red state evangelicals, means that when God decides that he won’t put up with human folly any more, that it is time for his boy Jesus to come back, then the Good will be whisked to Heaven – where they will mingle with jihadists and their virgin brides.

Once the world can be divided into the heavenly pure and the hellishly impure, then it becomes possible to wish for disaster. Catastrophism becomes the theology of the righteous. Bring it on (the 1978 mass suicide of Jim Jones’s disciples in Guyana is an example of another variant of the phenomenon that did not seem to have a coherent political inspiration beyond a generalised certainty that everything was screwed up).

Left Not Immune Either

Leftist catastrophism often mirrors the Rightist version. You might remember Paul Watson, from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, as the captain of the boats protesting the whalers in the Southern Ocean. It’s good that the whales have a friend, but maybe it’s not so good that Watson is not so benign about his own species: “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion…. Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore cutting the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach” (cited by Steven Pinker, “Enlightenment Now”, p.122).

When a person whose public persona is that of a purist conservationist wants to kill off six billion human beings, something has gone badly wrong. Note that Watson does so using disease metaphors. These have always been a staple of the extreme Right. He talks about us all in the same way that Hitler spoke about Jews and the way Trumpian mass murderers describe worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and mail bombers describe former Presidents and CNN.

Disease metaphors rightly belong only to fascistic fantasy, For the ideology which posits “purity” as the ideal, In Western societies at least, the enemy to be purged was typically “godless Communism”, but now that God has won, we hear that phrase no longer. There are many replacements to stoke righteous indignation, among them multi-culturalism, and in the present context, in Trumpland, Mexicans, Muslims, women, blacks, Democrats - and the dangerously eggheaded media. A textbook example of this neofascism was the man in Norway who killed all those young people as they had been “infecting” the land with social democracy.

Apologists might well suggest that Watson had had a bad day at the wheel, because the notion that the world is dangerously overpopulated belongs to the intolerant and the advantaged. It is an essential ingredient of Rightist catastrophism. The classic formulation came 200 years ago from Thomas Malthus, a British cleric, who argued that food production could never keep pace with an increasing human population, and mass starvation would result – unless the poor could be stopped from breeding. Donald Trump, with his vicious lies about immigrants and refugees, is a Malthusian.

A rational post-Malthus Left points to inequality and exploitation as the reason for violence and hunger. Lilley writes that “mainstream Western conceptions of Nature swing between cornucopian triumphalism about the power of science to master Nature, and doom-laden pessimism over natural limits. Catastrophism inhabits the latter half of the binary, steeped in Malthusianism”. The “cornucopian triumphalism” is wont to take the form of extrovert billionaires like Richard Branson and Elon Musk promising superb technological breakthroughs which will see the danger of, for example, climate change, forever averted.

These posturings are as irresponsible as their antithesis, the view that we are doomed, because both excuse the lack of current action on the grounds that they have the answer. The motive for this is part egoism, part self-interest, and part evasion. Like the polluters, and like the boltholers, they do not really want to do anything. Just as Rightist catastrophism has its optimists (the Rapturers and the cornucopian triumphalists) so too does the Leftist strain. In the Preface Doug Henwood considers the Leftist version of the malaise: 

“I can certainly understand the temptation of catastrophism. Faced with a population largely numb to environmental and economic disaster, one longs for some dramatic external intervention to do the work that conventional political agitation can’t. So: the banking system will collapse utterly and people will finally wake up to the fact that the whole money and credit system is a sham and has been for at least 100 year”.

“Or we’re going to run out of cheap oil, and the whole carbon-based energy system will collapse, and we’ll all have to resort to growing food in our backyards (if you have a backyard, that is - and if you don’t, that’s probably your fault for living in an overpopulated, inauthentic city when you should really be scratching tubers out of the soil)”.

Green Rapturism

The system is corrupt, man. It has to go. Then we will be free. Without the banks and the nukes and the cows – the candidates are many, depending on time and place - we can start again. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) said: “Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains”. Ok, he should have changed that first noun, but you get the point. A few years ago, where I live, a group claiming to be the greenest of environmentalists were circulating a book proclaiming global extinction as their one best hope.

The pure would survive, born into a clean and perfect paradise. Call it green rapturism. The catastrophist mind often targets human beings. Recent examples are US anti-abortionists – Rightists all - who periodically murder doctors in the name of giving life, and, as “Leftists”, animal rights activists who bomb buildings with the same justification.

Cults proclaiming doom or salvation have always been with us and might fulfil some psychological need, but in a secular. liberal society it might have been thought that there were more obvious belief systems available. A forerunner of the present age – to include earlier memories of older readers – was the tendency in the 1970s for young, educated professional couples to announce that they would have no children as it would be irresponsible to bring new humans into a world that was on the brink of disaster.

This was despite the reality that educated post-war Baby Boomers were the richest, healthiest generation, with the most positive choices available, in human history. The idea soon drifted into the unfashionable. “The apocalyptic scenario, in which a complete collapse of social organisation ushers in a tumultuous upheaval, is ultimately a mystical rather than a political one”, notes McNally. In this he is more than fair to the catastrophists, who have, at best, a tenuous relationship with political analysis.

The Y2K mania is an instructive example of what happens in moments of mass hysteria. McNally remarks that “the frenzy of 1999 took on a life of its own and brought together an unlikely assemblage of Rightwing survivalists, white separatists, and goldbugs with anti-civilisational Luddites and primitivists, rusticating hippies, and anti-authoritarian Leftists” all wallowing in the excitement. 

The seven categories McNally includes would all consider themselves to be politically either extreme Rightists or extreme Leftists – or (and here the confusion deepens) they would say they were not at all political, not recognising that they were in fact very much so. The one common factor in which they self-identify is in their hostility to rationality, a malaise which necessarily boosts Rightwing interests. As is so often the case when we look at toxic societies, Donald Trump provides the obvious example. 

Lilley has an excellent passage in which she explains how social collapse will always enable the already powerful (Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”, which I reviewed in Watchdog 117, April 2008, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/17/06.htm has dubbed the deliberate exploitation of crisis as “disaster capitalism”, a conscious tactic). The hippy notion that an idyllic existence would emerge from chaos has never and will never be vindicated in the real world. Lilley cites Karl Marx:

“History does nothing,” Marx and Engels emphasised in “The Holy Family” (1844), “it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles’. It is Man, real, living Man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using Man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of Man pursuing his aims”.

Falsehood Of “No Gain Without Pain”

A common strain within Leftist catastrophism wants to promote poverty as it thinks that if people are desperate, they will finally revolt. No, they won’t. Trumpists will emerge. The tactic is irresponsible as it advocates that nothing be done to improve the condition of working people. “Great Chaos Under Heaven”, is Lilley’s chapter title. She continues the quotation in her text: “… the situation is excellent”. This, she tells us, was Mao’s contribution to catastrophism (though some dispute the attribution to Mao). Progressive impulses are more accurately associated with rising fortunes, especially if they have been brought about by political action.

Both wings of catastrophism believe that social, political or economic collapse will usher in their future. The book provides a vivid example of the Left variety, namely the Weathermen’s 1969 Days of Rage in Chicago. They were American anarchists who “described their belief that by bringing repression down upon themselves, they would expose a fascistic system:”

“‘We weren’t just a bunch of super-violent kids out to destroy Chicago because we enjoyed vandalism … Mr and Mrs America would … see our bodies being blasted by shotguns, our terrified faces as we marched trembling but proud, to attack the armed might of the Nazi state of ours. Running blood, young, white human blood spilling and splattering all over the streets of Chicago for NBC and CBS to pick up in gory Technicolor”’.

We are then brought back to our senses by reading of a Chicago Black Panther who “denounced them as ‘opportunistic, adventuristic, and Custeristic’” (i.e. reckless leadership with total disregard for human safety; leading people into a massacre. Named after US General George Custer, of Custer’s Last Stand fame, at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn).

Adventuristic? More like demented, spoilt middle class kids. The revolutionaries elaborated: “We will be throwing the stinking dead bodies of our families into pits and kneeling in garbage coughing up blood. But we may also get to break the pavement off the streets with sledgehammers and plant gardens. It’s what’s really going to happen: this civilisation will fall, humans will survive, the Earth will survive, and we will have an opening to try something new.

Within that range of imagined futures, even the bad extreme is not so bad, and at the good extreme we see the Earth quickly healing to its former fecundity, and people living peacefully with other life, and never sliding out of balance again”. A “rapid collapse is ultimately good for humans - even if there is a partial die-off - because at least some people survive”. No worries then (in the 1960s, we are reminded, there was a Leftist faction hoping for nuclear war as a prelude to Nirvana).

Rightist catastrophism, the authors suggest, has greeted any progressive advance since 1789 (the French Revolution) with rhetoric to do with “Armageddon, civil war, or in its purest form, biblical Apocalypse”, typically cleansing floods, and the Rapture. “They believe that Apocalypse can be overcome and survived and that a purer form of existence and society is possible”. As human progress is a permanent threat to vested interests, catastrophism is a necessary aspect of fascist and other extreme Rightist ideologies. Its Leftist variant is an aberration.

World Is Actually Getting Better

Catastrophists are not just wrong in their emphasis; they’re galloping off in the wrong direction. In every statistic measuring health, wealth and welfare, the world is getting healthier, wealthier, safer, and more peaceful. It might not seem that way when we view what’s going on in Syria and Yemen, but spikes in any bad stuff always tend to lead to our exaggerating the bad news and boosting our ability to believe what is emotionally satisfying to believe.

It’s called confirmation bias. One key number, from which much else follows, indicates that global real income was up by 13,637% between 1700 (just before the opening shots of the Industrial Revolution) and 2008. Diseases and famines are being eradicated and poverty is being reduced. There are fewer wars. Superstition is diminishing. This is especially true of the poorer parts of the world, and the rate of improvement is increasing. Even the billions of people that some want to kill off will begin to stabilise their numbers and even reduce themselves naturally as global wealth increases.

The many problems we do indeed face can thus be seen as risks we can solve. Catastrophists of both the Right and the Left do not want to believe this, preferring to wallow in despair or hope - and in passive acceptance of the status quo. They’ll skip these paragraphs as the opinion of just one writer. They are not opinions though. They are facts (a thorough account of this trend is derived from “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker).

HOW TO READ DONALD DUCK
by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattlelart, OR Books, London and New York, 2018

The idea of a full-length book discussing what Donald Duck is all about is intriguing, as is the history of the book itself. “How To Read Donald Duck” is the work of a Belgian and a Chilean, first published in 1971. This, the fourth edition, is its first full publication in the United States, which is where the authors’ eyes are firmly fixed. The first edition of 10,000 was dumped into the sea at Valparaiso, Chile’s main port. Any remaining copies were burned. Chile’s new dictator, General Pinochet, did not like Dorfman and he did like Donald Duck. “Viva el Pato Donald”, a Pinochet motorist shouted to Dorfman in the street.

A butchering fascist, Pinochet had just seized power in a coup by murdering the elected president, Salvador Allende, on September 11, 1973, a date that has been called “the first 9/11”. He had every reason to ban the book. Besides their interest in Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Mickey Mouse and all the gang, the authors have in common a Marxist outlook. Their work could have been titled “How A Marxist Reads Donald Duck”.

In the intervening years Dorfman and Mattelart lived safely in Paris, from where they sent a message: “Mr Disney, we are returning your duck, feathers plucked and well roasted”. 2018’s US publication followed a ruling by the authorities in Washington that no corporate or censorship issues had been provoked. Disneyworld is free to stock the book.

Walt Disney An Archetypal Rightwinger

They won’t. In a Foreword a like-minded colleague discusses Walt Disney, a background from which the culture war, pitting corporate USA against a couple of foreign Marxists, is stark. Disney was an archetypal Rightwinger with a hatred for the sort of values that the authors – and Allende - personified. The distaste is mutual. Disney is charged with being authoritarian, cold, repressive and repressed. It’s not the first time that journalists have thus characterised Donald Duck’s creator, but this book must be the first time – certainly at such length – that Disney’s stories have been critiqued as sharing Walt’s shortcomings.  

Walt Disney’s family life was bleak, as are the families of his animals. Disney, we read, “had nothing to do with either of his parents, or, indeed, any of his family except Roy. His brother Roy, eight years older than himself and throughout his career his financial manager, was from the very beginning a kind of parent substitute, an uncle father figure. The elimination of true parents, especially the mother, from the comics, and the incidence in the films of mothers dead at the start, or dying in the course of events, or cast as wicked step-mothers (“Bambi”, “Snow White”, and especially “Dumbo”).

“There is one basic product which is never stocked in the Disney store: parents. Disney’s is a universe of uncles and grand-uncles, nephews and cousins; the male-female relationship is that of eternal fiancés. Scrooge McDuck is Donald’s uncle, Grandma Duck is Donald’s aunt (but not Scrooge’s wife), and Donald is the uncle of Huey, Dewey, and Louie”.

“Cousin Gladstone Gander is a ‘distant nephew’ of Scrooge; he has a nephew of his own called Shamrock, who has two female cousins. Then there are the more distant ancestors like grand-uncle Swashbuckle Duck, and Asa Duck, the great-great-great uncle of Grandma Duck; and (most distant of all) Don de Pato, who was associated with the Spanish Armada. The various cousins include Gus Goose, Grandma Duck’s idle farmhand”.

The Two Donalds: Duck & Trump

Our authors ascribe this pattern not just to Disney’s cool personal life, but to a puritanical distaste for sex or anything that implies intimacy. And “since they are not engendered by any biological act, Disney characters may aspire to immortality”. The main gripe, though, is systemic. In their Introduction the authors update matters with mention of that other latter-day Donald. Walt Disney and his ducks and geese embody the same pathologies that are running rampant in today’s America:

“Undoubtedly, the values that we impaled in our book so they would not overwhelm and derange the Chilean revolution—greed, ultra-competitiveness, over-arching individualism, subjection of people with darker skins, suspicion and derision of foreigners (Mexicans, Arabs, Asians), all of it edulcorated by a false credo of unattainable happiness - are what animate many of Trump’s enthusiasts and certainly the bullying billionaire himself. But perhaps these targets are too obvious”.

Disney’s cardinal sin is of projecting a false “innocence, the inability of the America he was exporting (and selling to his own people) to recognise its own history” of violent exploitation, a history in which “the pure and immaculate Disney worldview crumbles. Only an America that bathes over and over in this false innocence, this myth of exceptionalism and natural God-given goodness destined to rule the Earth, could have produced a Trump victory”.

Disney agreed with his father that “after boys reached a certain age they are best removed from the corruptive influences of the big city and subjected to the wholesome atmosphere of the country”. The Disney myth is based on an innocent countryside pitted against an ever-dirty city. It is simplicity pitted against complexity. The authors don’t mind telling us that they are the not-Disney; they are urban sophisticates.

This critique hints at a traditional strain in US society of an intolerance and paranoia that lies behind the rural idyll. To return to Trumpery: both the Donalds hold “fly over state”* values. They are both mad about money. The authors would be emblems of the “media elites” that lurk in the fevered imagination of the deplorables. They would be happy to accept such a demonology.

* "A 'flyover state' is one that most Americans see only from the window of an airplane as they fly back and forth between the country's major east and west coast cities, like New York and Los Angeles. These states find themselves like this mainly because they're landlocked and have rather small populations, and lack many interesting attractions”.

“The term is generally used perjoratively by the aforementioned coastal-dwellers, with the implication that the residents of those states are somehow less cultured and educated. Nevertheless, the people who do live there often wear the designation as a badge of pride, especially since they often see themselves as more honest and hardworking than their snobbish critics. Political divisions also play a part, due to the fact that most of the states generally considered to be in ‘flyover country’ are more conservative than the others, and hold significant sway in national elections”, Urban Dictionary.

In a section that demands some familiarity with Marxist concepts there is a detailed discussion suggesting that Disney’s world reproduces capitalist relationships. It is provocative and, while some might skip it, those with some background in such matters will find it entertaining. Maybe Pinochet suspected something along these lines. Certainly, he knew that Disney was the embodiment of what he admired as American values. He was not the first to appreciate Donald Duck’s influence. In 1935 the League of Nations recognised Mickey Mouse as an “International Symbol of Goodwill.”

Later, Nelson Rockefeller, the descendant of America’s first billionaire, when Coordinator of Latin American Affairs, arranged for Disney to go as a “goodwill ambassador” to the Western Hemisphere, and make a film in order to win over hearts and minds vulnerable to Nazi propaganda. During the Depression of the 1930s, “Disney favorites such as Mickey Mouse and the Three Little Pigs were gratefully received by critics as fitting symbols of courageous optimism in the face of great difficulties”.

Disneyfication & Brand America

Disney, of course, is a major contributor to Brand America, the cultural power that Donald Duck and Disneyworld projects internationally, but the authors think that “Disneyfication is Dollarfication: all objects … are transformed into gold”. What was sauce for Pinochet and Rockefeller was not so tasty for Chilean people. Foreigners never come off well in Disney’s world. Let’s take an example that has current echoes:

“Aztecland”, a Disney comic location, “is Mexico, embracing, as it does, all the prototypes of the picture-postcard Mexico: mules, siestas, volcanoes, cactuses, huge sombreros, ponchos, serenades, machismo, and Indians from ancient civilisations. The country is defined primarily in terms of this grotesque folklorism. Petrified in an archetypical embryo, exploited for all the superficial and stereotyped prejudices which surround it”.

Another obvious similarity between Disneyfication and Trumpification is their power to dominate and manipulate publicity and thereby create their own imagery. Written nearly 50 years ago is the observation that “the prerequisite to all this is to have become a news item, broadcast by the mass media, and recognised by ‘public opinion’. To the Disney hero, the adventure in and of itself is not sufficient reward”.

“Without an audience it makes no sense, for the hero must play to the gallery. The importance of the exploit is measured by the degree to which others know that he has surpassed them. Thus, from the television, radio, and newspaper he is able to impress other people of his importance and dominate them. A powerful figure may be able to help them become famous themselves”.

Both Donalds know the value of constant self-promotion. Here’s the duck Donald: “Success did not come easily, but it came”, he says to the ducklings, “with this start, you can become a movie star or a Senator ... or even President!” The duck Donald knows the value of fake news: “It is not truth, but appearance, that matters. The hero’s reputation rests entirely upon the gossip column. When his party is a flop Donald says “I can only hope that no reporter gets to hear about this. An article on that party would finish me for good”. In Trump’s America, though, the article would be dismissed as yet more fake news from the enemy of the people. Since Disney’s day the culture wars have become more violent.

IN THE SHADOWS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
The Rise And Decline Of US Global Power
by Alfred W McCoy, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2017

Murray Horton

I first became aware of Alfred W McCoy’s impressive scholarship and riveting writing (based on life-threatening fieldwork) when I read his 1972 masterpiece “The Politics Of Heroin In Southeast Asia”, which clearly documented the role of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the opium/heroin trade in the context of the Vietnam War. The book created a global sensation.

Not that it shamed the CIA into stopping its partnership with transnational organised crime – the Agency had had a working relationship with the Mafia going back to World War 2, one which came to full bloom with regards to Cuba, where they shared common goals (namely to get rid of Fidel Castro by any means, including numerous unsuccessful murder attempts).

I hadn’t read anything else by McCoy in the 46 years since that book. But it made such an impression on me that I was glad of the chance to read this latest one (the first book I’ve ever read electronically). I wasn’t disappointed. McCoy is one of the few American writers to not be squeamish about using the word “empire” in relation to his own country (although I note that it doesn’t feature in the subtitle, which substitutes “global power”).

McCoy’s 1972 book was a forensic expose of the links between US intelligence and organised crime, specifically drugs, as a key component of building and maintaining the American Empire. His 2017 book continues and updates that theme. There is a fascinating chapter entitled “Covert Netherworld”, which looks at several case studies in recent decades, starting with the 1980s’ Iran/contra scandal, whereby the Reagan Administration sold missiles to Iran (then, as now, Uncle Sam’s bogeyman) in order to get the money to arm the counter-revolutionary guerrillas (the contras) fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, on behalf of the CIA.

That, in turn, required the active (and very profitable) involvement of the various cocaine barons of Central America and the Caribbean. I’d never heard of Alan Hyde, who was a drugs kingpin in that part of the world. He became a key CIA ally. That chapter also examines, in great detail, the role of the politically well-connected opium/heroin barons in America’s seemingly endless war in Afghanistan (which is still going today, including the involvement of minor US satellites such as New Zealand).

Surveillance

Two other fascinating chapters are titled “A Global Surveillance State” and “Torture And The Eclipse Of Empires”. McCoy has long specialised in the Philippines (a country which is also of great interest to me). He did extensive fieldwork for his 1972 book in the Philippines of Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship. That country was an American colony for the first half of the 20th Century, being “pacified” only after horrendous slaughter, and is still in thrall to the US today.

McCoy makes a cogent case that the US treated the Philippines as a “colonial laboratory”, which resulted in the world’s first surveillance State. This was then further honed in the Vietnam War and also against the American people themselves. It has now grown into the monstrous global surveillance regime that we see manifested in things such as the Five Eyes electronic intelligence spying network, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (which is about the only mention that NZ gets in the book. Our Governments and their media mouthpieces like to trumpet that NZ is a key ally of the US. Let’s not kid ourselves. We’re useful, in the same way that a doormat is useful).

Torture

The chapter on torture follows the same trail, from the Philippines at the start of the 20th Century to George W Bush’s “War on Terror”, with the horrors of Guantanamo, rendition, waterboarding, etc., etc. Torture has always been a feature of empires, any empires, and the Americans are no exception. There are plenty of other examples which could have been cited in this book.

For example, I very recently met my first person of Uruguayan descent. I had studied inter-American relations at university in the 70s and this guy told me I was the first person he’d met in NZ who’d ever heard of Dan Mitrione. Who? He was an American assigned by his Government to work in several South American countries, to teach "advanced counterinsurgency techniques". He was accused of helping to train the torturers – which led to his being kidnapped and murdered by a Uruguayan guerrilla group in 1970.

“In The Shadows Of the American Century” was published in 2017, so this is not yet another book about Donald Trump (he’s in it but basically as an endnote, which seems appropriate). Barack Obama is the most recent President to be examined by McCoy, who makes clear that this supposedly “liberal” President was up there with the worst of them, using torture and surveillance and whatever else it took to maintain the supremacy of the American Empire.

Indeed, in some respects, Obama was worse than his predecessor George W Bush – Obama authorised more State-sanctioned murders by drone (with all their attendant “collateral damage” i.e. dead and maimed civilians) than any other President. All of this is the result of an institutionalised culture of impunity.

Murder With Impunity

Imperialism and impunity go hand in hand in hand. This is not confined to the US. Let’s just take the practice of killing your opponents or critics in other people’s countries. Countries that have been guilty of that range from France (the Rainbow Warrior bombing in Auckland in the 80s) to Russia, with the attempted murder by nerve agent of a former Russian double agent in the UK in 2018. Both France and Russia are former major imperial Powers that obviously still harbour delusions of grandeur.

You don’t even have to be a major Power to undertake these extra-territorial murders – being a strategic ally of one is sufficient. Israel has murdered people offshore for years (when Mossad agents were arrested and imprisoned for trying to fraudulently obtain New Zealand passports last decade, they wanted them to assist their international travel. Fake passports from “respectable” countries are a standard tool of Mossad death squads).

The current 2018 example is the revolting torture and murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist, inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, by a death squad that was flown in to do the job (then flown out very quickly). Of course, both Israel and Saudi Arabia are strategic allies of the US. Likewise, North Korea is a strategic ally of China – so, with impunity, carried out the 2017 murder of Kim Jong-un’s half-sibling at Kuala Lumpur Airport (also using a nerve agent, obviously still favoured as the State murder weapon of choice in what used to be called, in the Cold War days, the Second World or the Communist Bloc).

But the US, as still the dominant Empire (albeit on the way down) takes impunity to a whole new level, with its systematic dealing out of death worldwide, both via “surgically precise” (yeah, right) drone strikes or good old-fashioned carpet bombing. Ask the residents of Mosul in Iraq how they enjoyed being “liberated” from ISIS by US air power. A lot of them didn’t survive to express their gratitude to Uncle Sam.

McCoy’s book contains fascinating details about modern (and future) warfare, in a chapter entitled “Beyond Bayonets And Battleships: The Pentagon’s Wonder Weapons”. The vitally important role of cyber-warfare in crippling your enemy’s military ability (not to mention his whole society) is emphasised. Of course, protecting little old New Zealand from hacks and cyber-attacks is given as the prime reason for the existence of the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), which operates the Waihopai spy base.

The counter-argument is that there is no good reason why a separate, dedicated, cyber-defence agency couldn’t handle that and that alone – leaving the GCSB exposed for what it is, a junior satellite of the US National Security Agency (NSA), spying on the people of NZ and the world on behalf of the US covert State. The US has enthusiastically adopted cyber-warfare as a weapon, targeting the likes of the Iranian nuclear programme (working in tandem with Israeli intelligence, whose agents did the “wet work” of systematically murdering Iranian nuclear scientists).

The book’s subtitle is “The Rise And Decline Of US Global Power”. The titles of the final two chapters are self-explanatory: “Dynamics Of US Decline” and “Five Scenarios For The End Of the American Century”. The latter looks at scenarios by which China (in partnership with others) can supplant the US, both economically and militarily within the next few decades. Trump responded to the former threat by launching an ever-expanding trade war with China.

Militarily, the US is still the dominant global power but China is developing the capacity to nullify that. One of McCoy’s scenarios is World War 111. Another one is the runaway train that is climate change. “Whether by slow erosion or violent eruption, this ongoing shift in the balance of power bears watching. From everything I have learned over the past 50 years, we can count on one thing: this transition will be transformative, even traumatically so, impacting the lives of almost every American”.

Book Has Some Omissions

I must say there is something depressing about seeing the world in terms of a new empire (China) replacing the old one (US). To me, the central omission from this book is any questioning of why does the world need empires at all? As McCoy graphically illustrates, imperialism throws up a system of governance seemingly inspired by binge watching Game Of Thrones.

There are other omissions – McCoy concentrates on the American State, overt and covert. Outside of the gigantic arms manufacturers, there is little to no examination of the American private sector – the huge transnational corporations (TNCs) that dominate the global economy and increasingly set the global economic and political agenda. The likes of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon (the quartet known as GAFA) are key players in the American Empire.

Anyone doubting the clout of American Big Business in a small satellite country like NZ need only consider two very recent examples: firstly, the role of Warner Brothers in getting the NZ government to change labour laws to suit the American entertainment giant when making movies here (the “Hobbit Law”). Secondly, and most dramatically, the ability of the US entertainment transnationals to influence the US government to lean on the NZ government to bust Kim Dotcom via an over the top American-style Police raid. His alleged crime (for which he is still resisting extradition)? Copyright violations! Both of those events occurred during the “liberal” Obama Presidency.

On the solely military front, an omission is an examination of the role of mercenaries and transnational private armies to which the US can outsource its wars (to coin a Nixonian phrase familiar to those of mine and McCoy’s vintage, they provide “plausible deniability” to the American Empire/State). There is no mention of Blackwater, whose “military contractors” wrought such havoc during the American and ludicrously titled “Coalition of the Willing’s” occupation of Iraq.

Blackwater has gone now (well, it no longer operates under that name) but its founder has been suggesting to Trump that the American war in Afghanistan should be privatised and turned over to mercenaries. Indeed, mercenaries of a variety of nationalities have been quite the fashion in the last couple of decades, cropping up in countries ranging from Papua New Guinea to Equatorial Guinea, from Syria to the Central African Republic.

Personal Cost Of War & Empire

For me, the chapter with the most impact is the first one, entitled “US Global Power And Me”. These are the book’s first few paragraphs: “Throughout my long life in this country, America has always been at war. Short wars, long wars, world war, Cold War, secret war, surrogate war, war on drugs, war on terror, but always some sort of war. While these wars were usually fought in far-off countries or continents, sparing us the unimaginable terrors of bombing, shelling, and mass evacuation, their reality invariably lurked just beneath the surface of American life”.

“For me, they were there in the heavy drinking and dark moods of my father and his friends, combat veterans of World War II; in the defence industries that employed him and most of the men I knew growing up; in the State surveillance that seemed to follow my family; in the bitter anti-war protests that divided the country during my college years; and in the endless war on terror that has stumbled ever onward since 2001”.

“I was born in 1945 at the start of an ‘American Century’ of untrammelled global dominion. For nearly 80 years, the wars fought to defend and extend that vision of world power have shaped the American character - our politics, the priorities of our Government, and the mentality of our people. If Americans aspired to govern the world like ancient Athenians, inspiring citizens and allies alike with lofty ideals, we acted more like Spartans, steeling our sons for war from childhood and relegating their suffering to oblivion as adults”.

“Yet it was that Athenian aspiration to dominion that led this country into one war after another. It was that unbending ambition for a global Pax Americana that has allowed war to shape this country’s character. At great personal cost for those who fought such wars, this country has won not only a kind of security but unprecedented power and prosperity...”.

McCoy’s father was a veteran of both WW2 and the Korean War. The family paid a heavy price for the personal legacy of war. “Prosperity’s glow turned out to have a darker side. My father had suffered more in two wars than we knew. During our first years in Los Angeles (in the 1950s), he drank, gambled, caroused, and racked up debts that nearly bankrupted us. Little more than a year after asking my mother for a divorce and walking out, he died in an alcohol-fuelled accident at the age of 45…”.

A Must Read

This book is a must read for those who want to understand the central global fact of the last nearly eight decades, namely the domination (actual or attempted) of the world by the American Empire. War has always been a central feature of that imperial process. As the above quotes show, war has cast a long shadow over Alfred W McCoy’s entire life, both academically and personally. This is a book by someone who has devoted his life to examining the American Empire, in all its unlovely glory. Highly recommended