Reviewed: 5 May 2012

A Short History of Western Thought is blurbed as “an entertaining crash course in Western philosophy”, but also offers help to “the reader who has lain awake fretting over his tenuous grasp of the Aristotelian syllogism”. Lest any feel discouraged, let me suggest that anyone who peruses book reviews can comfortably absorb this summary, in comparatively few pages, of a vast intellectual scope.

When I was young, most family bookshelves carried a few hardback volumes from the Everyman imprint of the British publishers J. M Dent. The prefaced intent of the series was to bring knowledge and the experience of literary classics within the reach of “the common man”. They were favourites of those seeking to broaden their minds beyond formal education.

In this generation, the earnest Everyman approach gave way to louder self-improvement title claims like Get Rich Now without Risk or Quantum Theory for Dummies. With its hardback heft and retro cover design, this volume feels and looks like a return to the Everyman bookshelf.

For this reader, with no formal training in philosophy, Trombley succeeds in mapping out who said what and when along the 2500-year timeline that has led to what the title identifies as Western Thought. Philosophy works by argument, so I hope others will disagree with me as to whether Trombley succeeds. The essence of philosophy is not the parade of names and -isms, but the questions that are raised and the answers explored.

So let’s deconstruct the title. “Short” is a relative term, so we can let it lie. “History” is a term itself violently contested by philosophers of the modern period. Marxists posited History as an inexorable determinative force beyond human control, whereas continental deconstructionists hold history to exist only as a retrospective construct invented by the present. To avoid mental chaos, let’s assume that “A History” here denotes the attempt to identify relationships between a range of connected ideas developed over a period of time.

“Western” used to be applied with more confidence than today, now that Euro-American dominance of the global agenda is challenged, and cultural change can be rapid. Trombley seems to mean those societies defined by European traditions of Christianity, based upon the ancient Greek and Judaic origins of that religious philosophy. He recognizes the significant contributions of Islamic scholarship during centuries of enlightenment, but seems reluctant to look beyond the Peoples of the Book. He offers the bald assertion that “Judaism was the first monotheistic belief system”, when it is thoroughly documented that the Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten promoted monotheism centuries before the Hebrews, asserting claims to the land of Canaan, constructed a history to explain that they were the chosen people of the only valid God.

Trembley also barely mentions the influence of Indian philosophy on the West via Persia, Egypt and the Buddhist missions sent by Asoka (3rd century BC ) to Syria, Egypt and Greece. There is good evidence for the influence of Buddhism on Plato and, indeed, on the teachings of Jesus.

Now what is “Thought”? In this book, thought means philosophy, which in turn implies something systematic or at least deliberate. Most of my thoughts are not like that. For the purposes of this book, I like best what was proposed first, by Aristotle: that philosophy (literally “love of wisdom”) begins with wonder.

Trombley’s philosophical canon is limited to those who sought to discover system in the apparent chaos of human consciousness. Socrates is the original benchmark, not because he was the first, but because despite his avowed mistrust of the written word ( he thought writing corrupted the memory) Socrates’ own words were systematically recorded by his pupil Plato. Trembley says the first philosophers, centuries before Socrates, “were called pre-Socratics”, presumably not by their contemporaries unless they were all remarkable prophets.

The short history concludes with a few still-living philosophers, apparently divided by irreconcilable differences between “analyticals” trying to discern logic and system in human thought and, on the other hand, “continentals” deconstructing all verbal expression of thought as ephemeral and unreliable. I think they are both correct, but I’m not a modern philosopher.

The closer we come to the present, the more diverse and complex is the range of philosophical positions to be summarized. The earlier philosophers sought to explain all human experience, from perception of the material world to ethics and political science. What was considered by Aristotle to be the business of “philosophy” has now fragmented into many different disciplines with their own vocabularies and genealogies: political science, ethics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, theology, and even the natural sciences.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, mainstream philosophy was concerned with the relation between the individual and society. Issues of responsibility, ethics and morals underpinned social change and fed into the structures and values we now call “Western”. When Henry David Thoreau, dawdling safely by Walden Pond in New England, wrote “That government is best that governs not at all”, he would not have forseen today’s Republican Tea Party types, funded by laissez-faire billionaires to oppose social welfare.

Trombley, keeping it short, has no space to put political philosophy in its economic context, except when noting that the most ancient Greek centres of philosophy were also centres of international trade.

Are “how we behave” and “how we think” closely connected? Many philosophers have thought so, and some still do. How do we know what is real? A glance at any news page reminds us that belief is as remote from reason as ever, and no less powerful for the accumulated knowledge and philosophy of the centuries.

Even if contemporary philosophy, hemmed in by competing disciplines, confines itself to studying the process of thought and the nature of reason, it now must account for the findings of the neurosciences as well as to the accumulated history of abstract reasoning.

Getting back to basics – if you have a love of wisdom, you will probably find this canter through centuries of hard thinking a pleasure and, at times, a challenge.

Richard Thwaites acknowledges clear thinking as an elusive concept, rewarding to pursue.

Reviewed: 31 March 2012

If intelligence is the trump card of modern warfare, the United States ought to prevail in every conflict. This book describes the disconnect between America’s vast and pervasive intelligence resources and its failure to translate that investment into effective strategic decision-making.

The Intel Wars is not just about the mobilisation of intelligence for counter-terrorism programs. It’s also about the wars among the sixteen major US government intelligence agencies and hundreds of smaller specialized units, who employ well over 200,000 military, civilians and contractors and cost American taxpayers $75billion per year.

Matthew Aid is a Washington-based writer and commentator on the US intelligence establishment, with many first-hand sources ready to inform him on the weaknesses of their present or former employers, but especially on the weaknesses of agencies that are rivals to their own. The kiss-and-tell sources are heavily reinforced by published reports and by classified material exposed through Wikileaks.

The author is no lefty – he does not question America’s right to engineer regime change in uncongenial foreign countries, but he is highly critical of its inefficiency in pursuing those objectives. He is most critical of the political messes made and bequeathed by the Bush administration, but is also disappointed that the Obama administration has fallen into similar bad habits of suppressing unwelcome intelligence that does not suit the public management of short-term politics.

“War on Terror” rhetoric is blessedly absent from this account, but the folly of that absurd political narrative is implicit on almost every page. Foreign regimes in Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan and elsewhere invoke the word terrorism to call in massive American resources for local political purposes. Within the USA, a national counter-terrorism program included the funding of dozens of state and city-level “intelligence fusion centres” to coordinate information on potential terrorist threats. Most are manned by local police with no analytical training, and a definition of “terrorism” to suit their local flavour of law and order. One such centre issued a bulletin noting the death (from old age) of Dodi the performing elephant, on the basis that a possible demonstration by animal rights activists could threaten state security. Many divert their funds to tracking illegal immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security, supposed to provide national coordination of all intelligence bodies, had an inauspicious start under the Bush administration. It was led by unqualified political appointees, and the FBI openly refused to acknowledge its authority while other agencies just dug in their heels and declined to cooperate. It funds campaigns against Mexican drug cartels, and takes action to enforce the copyright interests of Hollywood film studios, while the FBI carries on with more than 10,000 staff full time monitoring Muslim citizens of the USA.

Unlike several other nations subject to terrorist threats, the USA has taken no steps to control the sale of ammonium nitrate – the main component of car bombs including the bomb discovered by a traffic policeman after it failed to detonate in New York’s Times Square in 2009. Information that could have alerted the FBI to that genuine bomb plot had simply not been collated because the bomber, a previously blameless Pakistani-American, was not one of the tens of thousands of dozens of un-connected watch-list databases held by numerous agencies. After all these years and $500billion of counter-terrorism funding, Aim says nothing can guarantee protection against the actions of a lone “cleanskin”.

In the popular imagination, all covert action for American interests is “CIA”. In fact, the agencies with secret intelligence and executive functions are too many to list here. Aim has previously written on the National Security Agency (NSA) that is increasingly central to US intelligence. Its role is to monitor global electronic communications, from cellular phones to email to military satellite signals, and its resources are vast. NSA at 35,000 employs more people than the FBI (34,000) and far more than the CIA (25,000), with hundreds of stations and operations across the globe, including the Pine Gap station at Alice Springs.

NSA also epitomizes the main problem faced by US intelligence services – how to sip useful information from a firehose of raw data collected in hundreds of languages, encryptions, and modes of transmission. Thousands of computer hackers work for NSA on both defensive and aggressive “cyberwarfare”, and thousands in other countries, notably China, work against them. But once the harvested information is assembled in some degree of organization, who is to analyze its significance in remote and unfamiliar contexts and pass the important fraction up the chain of command? Then, how do you persuade a political staffer or military commander to believe anything they don’t want or expect to hear?

Global challenges to US political interests are diverse, but radical Islam remains the principal source of potential terrorist action. The failure of the American-led project to remake Afghan culture is daily more evident. This book describes how intelligence effort is shaped to immediate combat goals rather than to strategic understanding of the enemy and his motivations. The military tradition is to dehumanize the person you may need to kill, but that has proven to be the Achilles’ heel of western military might in a theatre such as Afghanistan. Mostly, those directing the action have no idea of the real effect of what they are doing.

Aim writes that deep research into the forces that generate guerilla resistance abroad and terrorist sympathies at home has been repeatedly devalued and defunded, while vast resources go to projects that promise victory by overwhelming force. Military and political elites seem unwilling to learn from defeats in Vietnam, Soviet Afghanistan, and numerous smaller theatres within living memory.

The text was finalized several months ago, but Aid mentions, almost as an aside, that US agencies have been funding dissident groups in Syria to oppose the Assad regime. Are you surprised?

This book should interest not only intelligence and strategy buffs, but anyone hoping to understand a bit more about why global affairs do not turn out as we had been led to expect.

Richard Thwaites, a former journalist and communications policy adviser, is still pondering those unknown unknowns.

Recently I’ve noticed more Australians voicing their disgust at the verbal violence and personal nastiness that pervade our public politics. Some blame whichever party or interest group they don’t support, and many blame our news media for fostering political violence (real or synthetic) for the sake of cheap ratings points or journalistic one-upmanship.

Much of our mainstream popular culture apes the loudest (not best) of America, and likewise American media and political role-models most influence our own “Washminster”political culture: structured after Westminster, but behaving quasi-Washington.

There are stark parallels between Republican oppositional strategy to the Obama presidency and the Abbott-led Coalition opposition strategy against our Labor minority government. The cry is “accountability”, but the apparent objective is to deny the government any chance of seeming effective, and to inflame public doubt as to the legitimacy of the government itself.

Arthur Goldwag’s The New Hate looks at a wide range of current Obama-haters, from Tea Party to rabid broadcasters to Islamophobes and bizarre conspiracy-cult websites. He places them in a context of hate-farming that traces right back to the earliest Puritan colonists. It seems there never was a time when American politics was not infected with conspiracy theories about unseen, powerful groups bent on subverting the Bible, the Constitution, or the apotheosis of the white race in American Exceptionalism.

Religious identity has often been the target, echoing the politico-religious purges that drove Puritans and many other waves of immigrants to America from their European homes. Freemasons, Roman Catholics, Jews, freethinkers, Communists, homosexuals, witches and innumerable real or imagined secret societies have been the object of hate campaigns embraced by high-level politicians as well as rabble-rousers and opportunists. Goldwag is a declared liberal Democrat, but provides admirably balanced accounts of many hate-merchants and their innocent or questionable targets.

One of the earliest American conspiracy theories starred the Illuminati, recently revived in a Dan Brown novel as an elite cult within the Church of Rome. In reality, the Illuminati were a rationalist secret society in 18th Century Bavaria, whose core ideas were progressive, anti-clerical and anti-monarchy – hence the need for secrecy in the Catholic monarchy of Bavaria. They went the way of most extremist cults and fell apart within a generation, but still gain attention in the conspiracy-hungry USA.

On his last page Goldwag admits what a reader might conclude on page one – he is talking about “not-so-New Hate”. Fear and hate motivate political action throughout the animal kingdom, let alone all human history. Goldwag collects a rich miscellany of anecdote and history that illustrates the range and variety of haters and the hated through the American centuries. In the years leading up to World War II, there were more than a hundred pro-fascist and white supremacist organizations in the USA, most of them openly sympathetic to Hitler and with total membership in the hundreds of thousands.

So why do nominally civilised humans, individually and collectively, keep returning to destructive behaviours based on falsehood, prejudice, and paranoid fantasy? Goldwag suggests that the common visceral element is a human yearning for a secure identity. Any perceived threat to that identity, whether religious, cultural, race, or economic, induces a natural fear that is easily fanned into rage and hate. The more that a relatively successful society has fostered a sense of entitlement and “rights” among its citizens, the easier it is to promote outrage and hatred whenever such entitlements may seem challenged.

It’s easy to construe some of Australia’s ugliest recent political events in those terms, but less easy to see how individual entitlement is balanced against social responsibility. Hence politics.

Goldwag can point out that present-day US media demagogues like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have made themselves multi-millionaires through whipping up fear and loathing among the jealous, the credulous and the insecure. They follow in the profitable footsteps of sensationalist publishers and pamphleteers of previous generations. Again, Australian imitators among radio shock-jocks may come to mind.

What is missing from this book is much analysis on how hate and fear are deliberately mobilized by special interest groups for political or commercial purposes. The most contentious political debates of our era are characterized by demagoguery – whether climate change, taxation, education, industrial relations or refugee issues.

Charitably, Goldwag accepts that some hate-peddlers at least believe what they are saying. The current wave of anti-Obama “New Hate” in America expresses a desire to turn back the clock to a mythical golden age free of troublesome women, minorities and foreigners raining on America’s God-given parade, but it also embodies a cynical ploy to get more confused and apathetic Americans out to vote Republican. He concludes that the majority of those who claim to believe Obama is a foreign Muslim are less concerned about Obama’s identity than about America’s identity not being what it used to be, at home or abroad.

The Australian experience of politics steered by poll-driven marketing gurus may incline some of us to be more ready than Goldwag to see hate-movements as blatantly manipulated by vested interests. Cynicism may be, on average, a healthier mental state than credence in fantastical conspiracy theories. After all, it was Plato who warned that the fatal weakness of democracy is its susceptibility to manipulation by demagogues.

Richard Thwaites, when a broadcast current affairs producer and editorial executive, has struggled to balance coverage of punch-ups with coverage of policy.

Reviewed: 18 February 2012

From one man’s navigation through six decades of Chinese politics, we can learn much about the choices we humans make about how our societies are to be governed. Blow away the fog of ideology, and Deng Xiaoping’s choices, loyalties and betrayals could as well take place in ancient Rome or modern Washington as in Beijing. Deng’s personal saga of the acquisition, application and retention of power might attract a future Shakespeare, but we contemporary readers are here offered primary sources and extensive documentation on a man who, more than any other, delivered 20th Century China into the form we see today.

All the evidence suggests that Deng, since his days as a 16-year old Communist student in France in the 1920s, sought power for an altruistic purpose – the advancement of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation. His greatest personal contribution may have been to value pragmatism above ideology. But the one principle on which he would not budge was that all power in China must be centralized through the Communist Party. Communist ideology provided some core principles objectives, but its main function was to define discipline and solidarity within the Party.

In 1979, in response to growing national agitation for greater democracy, Deng promulgated his “Four Cardinal Principals” that were simply four different ways of saying “Obey the Party, no matter what”. Deng fought bitter battles within the Communist Party leadership to promote economic liberalization, but did not hesitate to crack down hard, whether on life-long Communist colleagues or on Western-influenced student dissidents, whenever he sensed any serious threat to the power and authority of the Party.

One of these principles enshrined “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought” as national ideology. In reality, Deng himself was barely a conventional Marxist, and he is most remembered for his work to undo the national economic and cultural catastrophes of myopic Maoism. But his Leninist conviction on the central role of the Communist Party never wavered even when nepotism and corruption among the Party elite caused deep resentment among the population. A few junior crooks could be shot, and senior ones humiliated, but the Party’s hold on power must not be challenged.

Deng’s survival through savage intra-Party struggles and ultimate rise to the top is an epic in itself. He had been an aggressive but astute military leader in the civil war that brought the Communists to power in 1949, and 1957 Chairman Mao put him in charge of implementing the “Anti-Rightist” purges against intellectuals and doubters, which intimidated a generation of China’s educated classes and paved the way for Mao’s most destructive campaigns, the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”.

Deng himself was purged three times under Mao, but managed to survive by grovelling just as much as required, without losing his life or, apparently, his self-respect. This was a feat akin to surviving at the court of King Henry VIII. Deng’s reputation for effectiveness and Party loyalty meant he always had protectors when he needed them, whereas many equally loyal but less judicious Communists were destroyed utterly by Mao, or in his name.

Any organization that sets itself above the law, as the Chinese Communist Party has always done, may fall to subversion by dominant individuals. By the late 1960s Mao Zedong had established a virtual monarchy (as have many “socialist” dictatorships). The Constitution of the Peoples’ Republic can be changed by any National Peoples Congress, so provides no reliable institutional constraint on personal dictatorship, as demonstrated by China’s national shame of the Mao era. After Mao, power had to be reconstructed on foundations that had been deeply fractured, and by individuals who in many cases had been induced to betray each other.

Deng Xiaoping emerged by 1978 as the one figure with the deep personal support base and the tactical skill to bring many factions together into a viable, common program that bypassed the leftist conservatives. Step by careful step, he and his allies began introducing essential economic reforms such as the de-collectivisation of agriculture, restoration of education, permission of private enterprise, and opening to foreign trade and investment.

Deng in later years enjoyed recognition as “paramount leader” or “supreme leader”, but he never held or claimed Mao’s absolute authority, and he largely avoided the dangers of a personality cult. Deng would cautiously place chosen people in key positions and wait for an alignment of events that favoured his next challenge to opponents within the Party.

The internal debate between liberalizers and conservatives never ended. Deng would rarely jeopardize Party unity for a short-term goal, but never gave up on his long-term strategy for China’s economic development. Even when officially retired in the mid 1990s, he used a well-publicised “family holiday” to the southern provinces to bring pressure to bear on his successor, Jiang Zemin, to push on with economic reforms against the resistance of conservatives such as the veteran advocate of central planning, Chen Yun.

Internationally, Deng was often preoccupied with perceived threats from the Soviet Union. On Mao’s behalf, he had participated in bitter negotiations of the early 1960s when China rejected the notion of a Soviet-led Communist Bloc.

His first crackdown on democratic activists in 1979 took place over the same days that he was insisting China launch an attack on Vietnam as punishment for its invasion of Cambodia, which Deng saw as a ploy for Soviet encirclement of China. China’s leadership was divided on that point, so a gesture to the conservatives was needed and the noisiest dissidents were locked up. His second crackdown, at Tien An Men Square in 1989, took place as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Berlin Wall was about to fall, and Communist Parties were being bundled out of power across Eastern Europe. Conservatives in Beijing were able to convince Deng, by then in his mid-80s, that the Chinese Communist Party was also under threat, and he took it as a direct challenge to Party rule.

There’s no evidence that Deng Xiaoping had any interest in broadening democracy for China, although there were times when he acted and spoke to mobilize liberal intellectuals, at home and abroad, so as to put heat on more conservative Communist colleagues. He was not immune to insult. His crackdowns on democratic movements came after some public criticisms of Deng himself. Deng had promoted the capable and popular liberal Party leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang for their reforming vigour and openness, but when Hu and then Zhao provoked strong reactions from conservatives whose support Deng needed at the time, he ended both their careers with very public humiliations – sacrifices on the altar of Party unity.

This is a massive tome. Vogel is a veteran sinologist who has accessed a wide range of Chinese and foreign sources, including some personal interviews with surviving key players or those close to them. He assembles insights never available to those of us who were trying to cover these events as they occurred.

Because of the Party’s vigilance, sinologists are often reluctant to jeopardize future access to their privileged sources. Vogel abstains from challenging the Communist Party’s central claim that China can have only Leninist one-party rule, or chaos. He notes, however, that memoirs of key figures, including former liberal Premier Zhao Ziyang and conservative politician Deng Liqun, could not be published in China, but were published in Hong Kong.

I found a few factual errors in matters that I was familiar with, and some editing errors, but this is a handsome hardback production at a price half one might pay for some ephemeral paperback textbook. Both as a serious contribution to the history of contemporary China, and as an often dramatic universal political narrative, this deserves a place on many bookshelves.

Richard Thwaites was ABC correspondent in Beijing in the years Deng Xiaoping achieved pre-eminence in China’s leadership, 1978-83.

Reviewed: 19 November 2011

If you are the sort of person who reads book reviews, you will probably find this omnibus tour of (mostly) human language entertaining and gently informative. If your interests in language are more technical or academic, you may find yourself picking arguments with the absent author.

The author, John Davidson, is an anthropologist and long-time BBC documentary producer of travel and exploration programs hosted by personalities like Michael Palin and Stephen Fry. In fact, this book is advertised as the “companion” to accompany a BBC series, presented by Stephen Fry, that has just begun airing in Britain. As ‘the book of the series’, it can draw on the generous research and travel budgets of a major television production.

The result is a book that reflects the episodic, anecdotal, fast-paced style of a television treatment. It is at once easy to read in short bursts, endlessly diverting, and lacking a coherent thesis or narrative drive. Rather like a Stephen Fry television program.

As a book, this takes us back to the days before television or radio offered passive consumption of such edutainment. Individuals and families used to read encyclopaedias and non-fiction miscellanies for entertainment and self-improvement. As a child I browsed Coles Funny Picture Book or an old Pear’s Encylcopedia, puzzling with their Edwardian understandings of the world. Now I can get lost in a maze of hyperlinks on Wikipedia, launched from any conceivable Internet query. Fry and Davidson seem to share what psychologists have called “divergent” thinking, and I enjoy the rambling that results.

They have given themselves a vast terrain across which to fossick, like gentlemen explorers on a world tour. They begin with the most primitive indications of language in animals, and the extent to which the human body and brain are shaped for language. More than half the large human brain is involved with language one way or another, yet much is still unknown about how verbal and non-verbal communication interact with memory or with control of our physical bodies.

At the next level, we review the place of language in identity. This ranges from micro-dialects within individual families to the grand political projects of nationalism, such as the forced extinction of regional dialects in Republican France. Mediaeval Emperor Charlemagne had said, approvingly, that “to have a second language is to have a second soul”, but the Academie Francaise consider this unpatriotic. Hebrew was re-invented as a Zionist program to provide a national language in Israel for people who had shared a religion, but not a language, for two thousand years. Irish Gaelic is practically extinct in once-Gaelic villages, but is revived and renovated as a cultural project by urban Irish nationalists.

The primary audience being British, it’s no surprise to find examination of English dialect as a social class marker. Did you know that the Queen’s accent is less “posh” than it used to be? This has been tracked by Australian researchers from recordings of her annual Christmas broadcasts. The range of Australian accents is scanned, but American English is barely mentioned.

Beyond the reach of royal role-models, English vocabulary and usage is continually enriched and extended by slang, cant and jargon rising up from the unwashed and the uninhibited. New dictionaries include words or usages invented by our own Barry Humphries, and by the creators of Homer Simpson, following the innovative tradition of Shakespeare as the most prolific individual source of new language (over 400 citations) in the Oxford Dictionary.

We owe our written culture to the innovation of the alphabet, attributed here to the Phoenicians. Originally Canaanites of the Levant, they were driven out of Canaa by their cousins the Hebrews, and in diaspora created the first trading network to unify the Mediterranean, founding many cities including Carthage and Barcelona. They needed a flexible, easily learned writing system to facilitate their trade, and built one from symbols including elements of cuneiform and of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Greek and Roman alphabets developed from the Phoenician, and the rest is (written) history.

Alphabets also made mechanical printing economical, leading to exponential expansion in the sharing of knowledge. Our modern information-based societies are defined by education, shared science, propaganda, literature and even advertising. The development of each is given generous anecdotal examination with examples of the word in action.

Though the spin-off an ephemeral television show, this book is a solid object you can hold in your hand and admire on a shelf. Most books published today are cheap-as-chips content wrappers, but this one is nicely designed and built to last, as a classy hardback on good quality paper, generously illustrated and with an attractive slip-cover. It’s about the right size, price and task-level to make a decent Christmas present to someone you like, or even yourself.

Disappointing, then, that after all their investment the publishers have skimped on proof-reading. My first graduate job in publishing enforced proof-reading as part of the apprenticeship, but perhaps current publishing recruits hold too many degrees to stoop to it. In any case, this entertaining and handsome book about words is the last place you would expect to find the name of the printer Gutenberg misspelt Gutenburg, among quite a few oversights.

Richard Thwaites has loved words since his earliest memories and misconceptions.

Reviewed: 22 October 2011

You might think that the last century and a half of Chinese history has already been probed from every conceivable angle, but Peter Thompson has come up with an angle that may both prove useful and entertaining to the general Australian reader.

Let’s first get past the annoying title. For one thing, “fury” of one kind or another is nothing rare in the history of Shanghai. For another, Thompson knows well enough that Shanghai is not China, and this book is about China. And it’s not a war history, like Thompson’s other two books Anzac Fury and Pacific Fury.

As to “Australian Heroes of Revolutionary China”, Thompson has certainly gathered together an intriguing account of many Australians who had some part determining the destiny of China from the 19th Century Opium Wars through to the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. Many were courageous adventurers and a good number were genuinely hoping to help China improve the lives of its suffering people. Many others were simple opportunists and some were scandalous criminals. Which of them were “heroes” may depend on the reader’s point of view.

Australians, or British with Australian colonial experience, were among the earliest opium traders and gunboat “free trade” opportunists of Canton, Shanghai and the Yangtze valley. The two Saunders sisters from Melbourne, missionaries in South China, were among several massacred by Taiping rebels in 1895, their widowed mother in Melbourne then declaring “Hallelujah … the Christianising of this people will be expedited”.

The Rev Robert Mathews, also from Melbourne, was invited to Christianise the entire army of northern warlord Feng Yuxiang in the 1920s, but is best remembered for compiling the monumental Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary that set the international standard for at least fifty years.

Geelong-born George Ernest “Chinese” Morrison was for decades Peking correspondent of the London Times and sometime adviser to warlord Yuan Shikai, helping Yuan to hijack the floundering, shambolic republican revolution of 1911, of which the centenary is celebrated this month. Morrison was undoubtedly heroic in many ways, including the physical. His exploits walking across continents and rescuing damsels from the Boxer Rebellion siege of the British Embassy in Peking in 1900 have attracted several biographies already.

Like many journalists of the period, Morrison saw nothing wrong with getting deeply involved in the politics he was reporting upon. He was of the generation and class of Australian colonials who saw the British Empire as the standard-bearer for human progress, and therefore saw China’s long-term interests as naturally linked to Britain’s imperial interests. Despite this, the British establishment, including the Times, ultimately underpaid him, sidelined him patronizingly as a rough but effective colonial, and declined to offer him the honours or rewards his efforts might have deserved.

William (W.H.) Donald is lesser known to current generations but in reality a much more influential figure in the life of Republican China. A journalist, born in Lithgow, he spent over forty years in China, more than twenty in various capacities advising the Republican government leadership, particularly Chiang Kai-shek and his potent wife Soong Meiling. Over four decades at the heart of Chinese politics, Donald never learned the language and refused to eat Chinese food. His often critical role, as un-corrupted adviser and catalyst to action, was later written down by the Chiangs where it threatened to detract from their own heroic narratives.

At the other end of the hero scale were a group of Australian expats in Shanghai under Japanese wartime occupation, who collaborated actively with the Japanese and broadcast to Australia urging a “separate peace” with Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Other Australians died as victims of the Japanese or in resisting them. After the War, despite hundreds of witnesses to what the Australian collaborators had done and their own admissions, Australia’s solicitor-general (Gough Whitlam’s father, Fred) declined to prosecute, citing “lack of evidence” of treason. Australia also provided our share of Shanghai’s touts, black-marketeers, drug traders and party girls.

This book is anecdotal rather than analytical, drawing on hundreds of memoirs and other published histories. The published sources are supplemented with a few interviews with survivors (including Canberrans). But while sinologists might find few new facts in it, the overall picture offers a distinct perspective that would only have been written by an Australian.

One is reminded that Australian governments over this period generally clung to the skirts of Empire, and were ignored or reprimanded when they didn’t. Britain consistently acquiesced to Japanese expansionism in China and elsewhere in our region, reluctant even to protest against abuse of its own citizens by Japanese troops in China. By the time Pearl Harbor forced a change, it was too late.

It is also salutary to revisit the venomous racism that prevailed in popular Australian attitudes of previous generations, particularly around the time of Federation. Several Australians were among perpetrators of extreme vilification of the Chinese race in newspapers published in the colonial treaty ports of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Even many who professed to love China could be extraordinarily patronizing, though there were also the minority, generally with deeper knowledge, who had no such prejudice.

On the other side of the race line, there were many Australian-Chinese who took aspects of their Australian experience home to try to build a modern China. The biggest Shanghai (and later Hong Kong) department stores, Sincere and Wing On, were founded by Australian-Chinese on Australian models, as were numerous progressive newspapers, trading houses and fledgling democratic movements. These significant Australian links are ignored by American or European writers of Chinese histories, so we can thank Peter Thomson for his monumental work of journalistic research.

To the non-specialist with an interest in modern China, or for the jaded specialist interested in a fresh overview, I commend this as a good read.

Richard Thwaites reported from China for five non-revolutionary years, 1978-83.

Reviewed: 1 October 2011

In tracing the politics of Australia’s military involvement in Afghanistan, this book says more about Australia than about Afghanistan. From John Howard’s emotional and instant commitment to George Bush’s “War on Terror”, through to the current government’s inability to articulate any coherent plan for extrication, Australia seems humiliatingly dependent on the whims and favours of dominant allies.

We are in Afghanistan in 2011 for the same reasons that Australians were in South Africa for the Boer Wars around 1900 – as minor contributors to the defence of a challenged empire that seems to offer us security in our isolated corner of the world.

Karen Middleton, senior Press Gallery correspondent for Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service, was with John Howard in Washington on September 11th 2001, and actually in a press conference with him at the moment an airliner flew into the Pentagon within view of their hotel. The assembled journalists could have seen that hijacked plane from the windows, but for a curtain drawn so that the news cameras could record Howard discussing his chat with George W Bush.

Without reference to Cabinet or Parliament, Howard publicly committed Australia to supporting the USA in whatever response it might choose to make. He had been a smart kid in short pants during World War II, his father and grandfather had fought in both World Wars, and Howard seems to felt 9/11 to be the nearest he would come to a Churchillian moment for epic and righteous heroism. It was also an agenda-changing godsend for the imminent Federal Election in Australia.

From the Canberra Press Gallery, Middleton has watched how that initial impulse for retaliation against an act of terrorism became inflated and diverted. The urge to punish Al Qaeda and its supporters grew in a steady “mission creep” to embrace objectives not only of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also of culture change, with the idea that western-style politics (a.k.a “Freedom” or “Democracy”) was the only long-term answer to anti-Western terrorism.

This was how the war became unwinnable. The political objectives have been proven, yet again, not to be achievable by military means, regardless how superior may be the destructive power at one’s disposal. The Romans ruled Britain for four centuries, but our Anglo-Celtic ancestors reverted to near-barbarism when Rome withdrew its legions.

Whatever levels of resentment large sections of Afghan society may feel toward Taliban extremists, it is sheer conceit to pretend that suppressing the Taliban will result in a flowering of liberal democracy, so long as 25 million Afghans still lack basic education and economic security. Our own systems remain ridden with faults and imperfections, after a thousand years of often bloody struggle.

This Western campaign in Afghanistan has been going on so long that it is easy to forget how many twists and turns brought Australia to the present impasse. Middleton does an excellent job in reviewing the step-by-step politics of Australia’s expanding commitment to the US-led campaign. She interviews dozens of key players from all sides of the argument, including politicians, senior military figures, advisers and academic specialists. Many now express the doubts that politics previously constrained them from airing.

It’s useful to be reminded that Joe Biden, now Obama’s Vice-President, argued that the USA should not attempt any kind of nation-building role in Afghanistan, but should limit its engagement to pin-point targeting of proven terrorists. US Military (and some, but not all, of their Australian counterparts) have routinely argued for more hardware, more troops and more “victories” on the ground.

I had forgotten how firmly the Australian Labor Party, then led in Opposition by Simon Crean, had argued against Australian participation in the hugely costly invasion of Iraq, at a time when Howard and the media were eagerly swallowing every piece of tainted “intelligence” about Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction tossed their way by a US Defence establishment under the tendentious direction of Rumsfeld and Cheney.

The bleak landscape is not devoid of humour. In preparing for their Afghan assignment, our muscular SAS heroes knocked back proposals from Defence scientists that the ideal base colour for camouflage uniforms in the Afghan landscape would be pink or mauve. Once there, they found that their secret observation dugouts were being sniffed out by curious goats. An goat-deterrent perfume was distilled from tiger excrement, but th experiment failed when shepherds came to investigate what was stampeding their herds. Further blending produced an ideal “tiger mild” cologne that left nearby goats alert, but not alarmed, and the shepherds apparently unaware.

War is ultimately a human meat-grinder, and every Australian combat soldier is a courageous volunteer. Justifying the toll in deaths, wounds and minds broken by mortal conflict is a problem for any war-making politician. Karen Middleton has been studiously professional in balancing the views she presents throughout this sad chronicle of a conflict that, in retrospect, is unlikely to be seen as worth the human cost. Yet the book is punctuated by a complete account of each Australian fatality as it occurs, with names and circumstances, like the tolling of the knell. The numbers are thankfully few compared to US, British or Canadian casualties, yet our Prime Minister and our Leader of the Opposition seem to feel they have to appear at each individual funeral. Is this for the families, or for the news cameras?

The last word goes to Ric Smith, former senior diplomat, Secretary of Defence, and Rudd’s Special Envoy to international talks on Afghanistan, who acknowledges that staying in Afghanistan is necessary to maintain the status of our alliance with the United States. He notes that the importance of that alliance can not be publicly debated during a major operation (such as Afghanistan), but in less critical times the debate is forgotten.

Karen Middleton suggests it may be time for Australia to have that debate.

Richard Thwaites is a former foreign correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Money is the way we measure exchange of goods and services. Finance is the tactics and technologies for directing the circulation of money, for any purpose. Economics is the study of production, exchange and consumption of goods and services. This book delivers a horrifying picture of how Extreme Money (under-regulated, manipulative finance) has corrupted both the world of money and the world of academic and government economics.

Masters of the Universe is the label proudly worn by a large class of financial operators in Wall Street, London and their equivalents, including Australians. They build, operate and protect a financial system based upon fake valuation of assets, fake transactions, and fake profits, which may turn other people’s real savings into real losses, while the Masters pocket stupendous fees and “performance” bonuses for themselves.

The Cult of Risk is a little more arcane. The principle of risk lies at the heart of investment capitalism. In normal use, risk means the chance of profit or loss that is undertaken by anybody lending to, or investing in, another person or business. The higher the risk of loss to the investor, the higher should be the rate of return or of interest due to that investor. Calculation of risk is rarely perfect, but the formula is expected to benefit of both parties, so long as they share similar understanding and information about the risk that is being traded.

Ordinary consumers make risk decisions each time we decide on the level of insurance we want to purchase, or whether to put our savings in cash, bonds, equities or real estate. Rarely do we understand the extent to which our personal risks can be manipulated by the financial Masters of the Universe, essentially to their own private benefit. Risk is abstracted, repackaged and traded by the financiers, using derivatives and hedging techniques, to the point that neither buyer nor seller really knows the risk (and therefore the value) of the instruments being transacted. Ultimately, buyers exchange cash for false expectations of security. The smarter financiers take their bonuses in cash.

Satyajit Das has decades of professional experience as a risk analyst, first with a major Australian bank, then as an independent risk consultant. He has participated in the wheeling and dealing, bluff and counter-bluff, puffery and debacle of the financiers’ world of risk trading. The Cult of Risk is the separation of debt and risk-trading from the real world of the economy.

Das exposes the shambles of a system characterized by bogus and failed economic market theory, a shamelessly rapacious finance industry, and a broad failure by governments to protect either their citizens or their productive industries from a finance industry driven by the most perverse incentives.

He traces the many steps downwards toward the Global Financial Crisis and its continuing aftershocks. Financial institutions can effectively multiply their operating cash by issuing credit – essentially, printing their own money. Credit has brought many benefits to economies, but also multiplied the amount of financial risk that circulates and proliferates with no ultimate backing in real assets.

Real money comes from customers’ deposits and from shareholders’ funds, but the amount of credit extended by banks to their customers is eight times the amount of real money in circulation. With the label of “securitization”, bundles of risk-laden debt (such as sub-prime mortgages and credit-card debts) are repackaged and sold on as if they were secure assets, with no way for the buyer to understand the risk they are buying.

Banking deregulation has allowed banks to speculate with their depositors’ and shareholders’ funds, often disastrously. Financiers have been allowed to award themselves bonuses for speculative contracts at the time they are written, rather than when they are completed. They speculate in the financial risks born by real people and businesses, but for the most part can avoid any risk to their own gross remuneration. This is a clear example of moral hazard.

The Chicago School of Economics was espoused and funded enthusiastically from Wall Street, and has garnered several Nobel Prizes for economic theories that, when put into practice by financial institutions, have proved shallow and disastrous. The fundamental flawed has been failure to account for the greed, fear and ignorance that drive human behaviour in the real world.

Alan Greenspan, long-time Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, is castigated at length for his ideological commitment to Ayn Rand individualism, which blinded him to all evidence of failure in deregulationist neo-liberal finance policy. A whole generation of politically-favoured economists were essentially fundamentalists, who dismissed both contrary interpretations and inconvenient facts that did not suit their ideology.

The Masters of the Universe exploited these flawed policies to make personal billions from useless or destructive market manipulations, and the global economy is still paying for that. Behind the financiers’ marble façade is a flimsy wooden shack riddled with termites.

The book is packed with facts, case studies and incidents to support its basic polemic. Das writes colorfully, in short punchy sections, and countless memorable aphorisms – though I sometimes wondered whether less might have been more. If you don’t follow all the technicalities, you will still find a highly readable, though appalling, narrative.

The GFC has focussed short-term political attention on these issues, but that attention was too often lacking during the bull-markets and decades of growth. When house prices and the stockmarket appear to be rising, who dares to be a spoilsport? Even now we see finance journalists describing house-price inflation as “performance”.

New technologies, from the pocket calculator to the Internet and computerised split-second trading, accelerated the scale and velocity of financial circulation ultimately far beyond the capacity of human reaction. They have thus removed the customer or private investor ever further from the ability to know the true value of the risks they are undertaking. Das quotes widely from ancient historians, industry insiders and even post-modern cultural critics to show that underlying issues of trust, governance and human market behaviour are as old as history and as present as the sun. Don’t believe anyone who says, “It’s different this time”.

On the principle of Buyer Beware, do we suckers deserve sympathy? Das describes a world of finance in which the sellers play with loaded dice and the buyers, however wary, may never understand the product they are being sold. That is what economists call “market failure”, and the trigger for regulatory intervention.

Ultimately, the challenge is not to the buyers and sellers in the market, but to the credibility of governments. Today, Australian banks are fiercely resisting the introduction of strengthened prudential requirements that have been adopted by the global Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. While financiers in Wall Street, London and Sydney resume their well-resourced rent-seeking campaigns, governments in all the capitalist democracies face a significant crisis of public confidence in their ability to manage their economies.

Politicians, please read this book.

Richard Thwaites lives mainly on superannuation and modest investments, hoping to escape the attentions of financial predators.

Today is always a good time to review the function and practice of journalism – the word itself implies daily update and review. Swamped with information in so many modes and media, we might reconsider the boundaries of what we call “news” and how it converges with propaganda, education, and play.

Ian Bogost, an MIT alumnus, academic and partner in a videogame company, attacks this topic with the support of two of his graduate students in the Literature, Communication and Culture Department at Georgia Institute of Technology. He aims to suggest how the modes of engagement offered by videogame technology can be harnessed to support the mission of journalism, namely to inform and to stimulate critical thinking.

The book’s title implies that news and journalism are the same thing. We soon find there is a need to distinguish between services that aim to deliver reliable facts (the conventional concept of “news”) and those other branches of journalism whose function is to explore, explain, comment and provoke debate. This distinction is frequently under challenge, not only in the land of Fox News but also in our Australian media, when facts are selected or distorted for attention-grabbing or political purposes.

Reading this book, it transpires that the opportunity for game or videogame techniques to extend the scope of journalism is mainly limited to those extensions of journalism into comment and exploration. However, Bogost and his team extend their review to a few media technologies that, while not really “games”, allow a consumer to engage interactively with information sources.

These are the interactive descendants of the “infographics” that began developing about a century ago to give printed newspapers a graphical means to display correlated information. The history of the pie chart and the bar graph is surprisingly interesting. Bogost particularly commends efforts by the New York Times online edition in the field of “playable infographics”, whereby readers can choose various inputs to website graphical systems that alter fact-based displays of financial, political or social data.

Bogost’s point is that interactive infographics give a reader more ways to digest useable information from raw facts – surely a core function of journalism in all its forms.

The journalistic ambition to spread understanding (not just information) provides the link to journalism-related games. These seem to occupy a space somewhere between educational programs and factual reportage. In this territory, objectivity may be less important than emotive communication in keeping the participant engaged. This raises the problem that one person’s journalism may be another peron’s propaganda. Opinionated journalism is as old as the information trade itself, but overt opinion should be distinguishable from biased reportage masquerading as fact.

How can bias not be present in a “game” environment that presents a structured version of reality with no visible author? One answer might be that anyone playing such a game will know that they are experiencing an artificial world, and that the relation to reality is no more than allusive. But then, the same might be said of all forms of journalism, from newspapers to scripted “reality” television.

Many of the examples offered are, to my mind, educational rather than journalistic. These include interactive re-creations of historic scenarios such as the assassination of JFK and even Henry Thoreau’s wistful sojourn at Walden Pond, where the player chooses between options for action that are limited by historical facts. Any such immersion in a simulation of past events must affect the participant in some way – although I wonder how far any simulated experience that is free of consequences can really be compared to the physical experience that it aims to model. Even death is just a passing irritation, soon corrected.

Simulations that stop short of fictional role-playing might be more easily measured for effect. Budget Hero, from the American Public Media foundation, gives the player the option to set US national budget objectives, then play around with fiscal allocations for various taxes and expenditures to see how the whole situation will work out over time. Other fact-based simulations model scientific or economic processes behind such issues as oil supplies, a hailstorm, global warming, and other adjustable human interactions with the physical world.

A number of the games explored are from Bogost’s own company, tellingly named Persuasive Games. His agenda is clearly an idealistic and liberal one. Persuasive Games created a series of short games for the New York Times online edition that embodied commentary on current issues such as airport security, food pollution and Christmas consumerism. The model is something like an interactive version of satirical video mash-ups that are so popular on internet social media.

Bogost ruefully notes that, after the New York Times ceased publishing his firm’s games, comments on his site suggested people prefer “vanilla entertainment” to socially-relevant comment. This exposes the perennial journalist’s dilemma of balancing entertainment with instruction. The motivation of the fickle consumer can not be ignored.

A further category of games is about journalism itself rather than about the news. Some games have players respond to real-time updates of actual news events piped, via internet, into scenarios developing in the players’ simulated world.

Bogost concludes finally that newsgames are a way to encourage popular scrutiny of the economic, social and technical systems behind the news, of which the daily news items are only the passing symptoms.

The search for more effective ways to pursue journalism in contemporary society is admirable, but this book left me with several unanswered questions. If interactive games can be socially beneficial by providing models for understanding and acting in the real world, then what are we to conclude about the dominant interactive game culture that models violence, racism, theft and rape? When is a game a rehearsal for life, and when is it not?

Richard Thwaites was at one time head of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s national radio current affairs department.

Why are Australians fighting, killing and dying in Afghanistan?  Surveys of Australian opinion suggest a confusion that crosses party lines, just as the official explanations from politicians of both major parties sound increasingly ritualistic.

Are we there to “defeat” an enemy that is barely distinguishable from the majority of the Afghan population, or to force a predominantly feudal, illiterate and isolated population to accept Western social and political values that took us centuries of bloodshed to hammer out?  Or are we there to prove that the Western political/economic hegemony can still defeat any challenge from an upstart, politicized Islam?  Or just to prove, to the USA, that we are a loyal ally?

It would be hard to beat the qualifications of the contributors to a conference on this topic at the Australian National University’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (also covering Central Asia) in October 2009.  Sadly, their contributions are, if anything, more urgently relevant today than two years ago. The critiques of Australia’s involvement are today more evidently true, the rationales for current policy more challenged, and our politicians apparently further out of step with their international peers within the general Western alliance.

It’s not clear how the live symposium was structured, in this book the official government and military positions are presented well after their claims and rationales have already been shredded in earlier chapters. This makes it tough going for Colonel Mike Kelly (PhD), former Army Legal officer now Parliamentary Secretary, and Lt-General Mark Evans, then Chief of Joint Operations and formerly responsible for Australia’s Iraq and Afghanistan engagements.  Whatever Kelly’s personal views, his presentation appears heavily vetted by the political and military PR machinery that is itself scathingly attacked by other contributors.

General Evans’ contribution shows signs of similar political discretion except for a couple of significant lines of strategic reserve. Noting other demands on Australia’s defence forces, Evans states that Australia must “balance its commitment [in Afghanistan] against the correct and prospective tasks the ADF may be called upon to perform in Australia’s nearer region”.  Even if this is a typesetting error for “current and prospective tasks” (there are quite a few uncorrected typos in this book), we register the query over Afghanistan’s military priority for Australia, from a most responsible officer.

Ten years ago, the Western alliance invaded Afghanistan on a specific mission to catch bin Laden, destroy al Qaeda, and punish the Taliban regime for hosting them. With the Taliban chased from Kabul by superior firepower, the US and its allies found themselves landed with every social, economic and political problem that Afghanistan had thrown up over the centuries, with few of these problems usefully soluble with either guns or money.

Prof Amin Saikal, head of the centre and chair of the conference, opens the book with his survey of Afghanistan as a country that has no real sense of nationhood, but a mosaic of ethnic, historical and religious polities left by centuries of empires, personal fiefdoms, and tribal migrations. Islam, while a common point of identity for most Afghans, does not itself foster national identity, though it reinforces resistance to intervention by non-Muslims. The Bush regime’s ham-fisted attempts to impose democracy in America’s image, by military means, have produced an Afghan  government that has no legitimacy or respect among most Afghans, and is infested with nepotistic kleptocrats feasting on the inflow of misdirected Western money.

Saikal suggests the only practical way forward involves abandoning the US-style presidential centralized government for something that is more recognizably an “Islamic democracy”, even if this disappoints those impatient for the full range of liberal social change. It also involves rigorously curbing Pakistan’s fostering of Pashtun actors for its own strategic objectives.

Prof Nazif Sharrani chairs America’s pre-eminent Central Asian study centre at the University of Indiana. He is even more trenchant in identifying Afghanistan’s woes as the inheritance of meddling by imperial and colonial powers, past and present. He sees a radically decentralized Afghanistan as the necessary first step to building any effective longer-term sense of nationality above tribe.

Hugh White’s dissects the failure of Western strategy at every level from conception to execution. Centrally, he disputes that Western (and Australian) military involvement can be effective in any “hearts and minds” campaign or civil reconstruction, because every civil initiative becomes tainted by the organized violence that is the overt purpose of any military presence. He also warns of the trap, so often exploited by politicians, of claiming that a retreat or admission of strategic failure would “dishonour” those soldiers who have already made personal sacrifices on the ground.  Similarly, he notes how US (and Australian) policy and was too often manipulated by military claims that “victory” could be assured with more guns and men.  He believes the Obama administration has already rejected that mirage of military victory, bringing some hope for more practicable and humane policy over time.

Prof William Maley’s contribution on civil reconstruction applies similar principles, noting the chaotic and uncoordinated efforts of multiple international, national and non-government agencies pushing projects that, whilst worthy in motivation, stand little chance of long-term viability so long as there is no stable Afghan state to support them, no legal framework, no sustainable economy, and no social consensus on national objectives or priorities.

In that context the Karzai government’s plans, presented by Mahmoud Saikal, for rebuilding the infrastructure of Kabul with $500million of foreign money, look worthy, but with what chance of surviving Western military withdrawal?  Could a modern Kabul, foreign-funded but beset by literally millions of rural refugees, float long above a sea of schismatic and feudal provinces?

Virginia Hausegger’s account of women’s rights activism again identifies worthy efforts and objectives that appear doomed, in the medium term, for lack of secure legal and political foundations upon which to graft aspirational social change.

Beth Eggleston, of Oxfam, makes the telling point that the engagement of military forces in civil and social reconstruction efforts (of which the Australian military are so proud) has the unintended consequence of tainting all reconstruction efforts by association with the invaders, and hence exposing even NGOs to hostile labeling as accessories to those military invaders.

Contributions by Tom Hyland (The Age) and Kevin Foster (Monash University) are both highly critical of the extent of information control and manipulation practised by the Defence and political PR machines with regard to Australia’s engagement.  They claim this far exceeds the degree of control imposed even by Australia’s allies in the field, and blame it for reducing debate in Australia down to the level of supporting the home team.

So if our sacrifices are misplaced, our international allies are planning or implementing their exits, and even our own experts doubt the “strategy” of being there, what keeps us in Afghanistan?  Do both major parties fear being called chicken if they withdraw or refocus on civilian assistance?  Perhaps we need to question the quality of our own democracy before insisting that others copy us.

This is a valuable collection of authoritative and provocative views, easily readable, and should be read by anyone interested in Australia’s role in the world.

Richard Thwaites has been a foreign correspondent and a bureaucrat engaged with international affairs, and has family links to Central Asia.