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.

This book offers unparalleled insight into the policy morass of current Western engagement with Afghanistan, where vast expenditure of lives, billions of dollars, and years of rhetoric have failed to reveal any credible strategy for a long-term sustainable outcome.

From an authoritative insider’s viewpoint, it also exposes the ultimate charade of a nominal “coalition” in which the dominant player, the United States, for all its commitment of resources, seems least able to implement a strategy informed by the experience of others, or even by its own recent history.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles had a stellar career in the British diplomatic service, rising through postings in Cairo, Israel, Washington, Paris and Saudi Arabia before being dispatched as Ambassador to Kabul in 2007. In 2009-2010 he was Foreign Secretary David Milliband’s Special Representative on Afghanistan, and resigned from the Foreign Office soon after the change of UK government, in late 2010. We can be grateful that the resignation made this book possible.

The author’s great-grandfather, a captain in the Royal Navy, is credited with inventing the swivelling naval gun-turret. Cowper-Coles, freed from diplomatic restraints, lobs shells in all directions, hoisting friend or foe. As he chronicles his years in Kabul and the machinations of international politics, he exercises a peculiarly British capacity to combine praise (and even claimed devotion) with devastating personal critique.

The book is dedicated to the late American diplomatic star Richard Holbrooke, “who gave his life for peace”. But the portrait of Holbrooke, during his 2010 role convening a process of Special Representative meetings to coordinate a strategy for Afghanistan, is of a vain and crass egomaniac incapable of accepting, or acknowledging, the contributions of others. Many a minister, military officer, or civil servant (some anonymously) get similarly brisk treatment – especially those who trot out the platitude “much has been achieved, but challenges remain”.

With the confidence to be self-deprecating, Cowper-Coles admits shame for occasions on which he too, in the line of duty, allowed lies and obfuscations to go unchallenged, or on some occasions challenged, too brusquely, the naïve good intentions of less jaded Westerners on mission in Kabul.

Most of his critical ordnance lands on Americans, and on those British who seemed to be pushing personal agendas that often involved not saying boo to the American goose. Cowper-Coles himself manifests as a bright, urbane English toff – public school, classics at Oxford, pony clubs, country houses, brother in the Guards, the august Brooks’ gentlemen’s club in London. One might not be surprised that Americans, or Australians, could find him bumptious, especially when what he had to say was both politically inconvenient and correct.

He met in Kabul with Senator Joe Biden, then Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee but not yet US Vice-President. Having treated Biden to a lecture on the flaws in US Afghanistan policy, Sir Sherard was needled by an apparently patronizing Biden trotting out Winston Churchill’s reference to democracy being “the worst form of government – except all the others”. He volleyed back “..Churchill also said that you could rely on America to do the right thing – once it had exhausted all the alternatives”.

This may have been a career-defining moment, though the author remains proud of it.

A writer who begins a book quoting Thucydides Peloponnesian Wars and ends it with a Latin tag (untranslated) is likely to exhibit a political “responsiveness” that is hampered by a knowledge of history, like a Greek chorus howling in his ear. Cowper-Coles sees the Western coalition floundering around Afghanistan, ignoring all the lessons of Empires, ancient and modern, and especially the local lessons of the British Empire. He grows increasingly frustrated by the success of militarists, British and American, in convincing politicians that the key to Afghanistan’s political future is a foreign-imposed and foreign-funded military “victory”. Russian diplomats gloat that the West is repeating the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, having learned nothing from it.

By early 2011, when he has left the Foreign Office, he has regained some hope that the Obama administration “gets it”, and understands that negotiation with the Taliban is the only and inevitable way forward. But the negotiating position grows weaker each month that negotiations are delayed. He quotes the wisdom of Sun Tzu (550 BC) that “tactics without strategy are merely the noise before defeat”.

Other requirements for an Afghan solution are that serious action be taken to cut off Taliban support from Pakistan, and that the self-serving military demand for more “victories” be firmly rejected by political leaders. No wonder that he appears to have been eased out of the Foreign Office.

Australia is never mentioned as carrying the slightest weight in coalition strategy talks, nor as participating in serious coalition strategy meetings. Former diplomat and Secretary of Defence Rick Smith is noted as an honourable participant in Holbrooke’s 2010 Special Representatives process, but that process is written off as an ineffective “circus”.

Australian military in Afghanistan are briefly cited, not for good works in their patch of Oruzgan, but for breaking the hearts of female staff and gate-crashing the Ambassador’s Charity Ball at the British Embassy in Kabul. So much for the vaunted importance of Australia “staying the course”.

Paul McGeough’s Infernal Triangle is a complementary perspective, collating dispatches from his coverage of the Afghanistan and Middle East conflicts over the decade since Al Qaeda attacked New York’s World Trade Centre. His first-class journalism sits outside the stream of diplomatic noblesse that filters (and decorates) Sir Sherard’s insider account. McGeough draws instead on street-level observation and interviews with active and passive stakeholders on all sides of the action.

McGeough was reporting for an Australian (Fairfax press) audience, but the Australian perspective rarely colours his sense of global interconnection. The dispatches are presented in three sections respectively on Afghanistan, Iraq and “The Levant”, then chronologically within each section. I’m not sure the sectioning was a good idea, because one of the rewards of reading dated reportage is to observe the reporter’s changing viewpoint as his experience grows and events unfold. To some extent, the sections break this chronology.

Infernal Triangle begins with McGeough’s sympathetic account of the 9/11 attack itself, which he witnessed on the streets of Manhattan, and with hopes for social justice in a future democratic Afghanistan. It ends with the bitter conclusion that, despite the failure of Al Qaeda to win the “Arab Street”, the West has squandered vast resources, and killed thousands of its own and others, in hopeless politically-driven military campaigns to “impose democracy at gunpoint”.

The West can never eliminate the motives for terrorism, nor expect lasting trust from Islamic nations, so long as the West sanctions Israel’s unconscionable colonization of more and more Arab lands. McGeough’s chapter “Controlling the Narrative in Israel and Palestine” is particularly mordant on this aspect.

Australia’s presence in Oruzgan offers a microcosm of the general failure, in a chapter McGeough calls “Doing the Bidding of Organised Crime”. Cowper-Coles favours pragmatic negotiation with the local powers that be, however distasteful. McGeough’s observations in Oruzgan lead him to believe that the Karzai regime, and perhaps the whole American-style centralized government structure imposed by the US and its allies, has no hope of taking root with the dispossessed and marginalized who make up most of Afghanistan’s population. These wary, tribal people assume government officials to act criminally, and they respond only to tangible bribes (from the West) or the most credible threats that come from the Taliban, local drug lords, or both simultaneously.

The USA alone expends over US$125billion on Afghanistan, which amounts to about one hundred times Afghanistan’s domestic revenue. Everyone knows this is unsustainable and that there is no credible strategy for a withdrawal that might avoid almost immediate collapse of the regime. Politicians who tell you otherwise are merely playing for time with their own electorates, while poor Afghans scramble in the dirt for dollars that fall from the sky.

Richard Thwaites has been a foreign correspondent and a bureaucrat engaged with international affairs.

In an era of public communication in Western democracies dominated by news-cycle stunts and media demagogcracy, has radical protest lost its moral and political force? Sean Scalmer casts a historian’s eye over Western protest movements of the 20th Century, from when Gandhi’s techniques first attracted Western attention, to the high point of Western political protest movements against the Vietnam War.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has attracted many biographical and political studies, but this is not one of them. Scalmer’s topic is the way that Western societies responded to Gandhi’s words, actions and image, and how those responses influenced political action in Western democracies.

His primary sources are the words of the activists, officials, journalists and commentators who fed their various impressions of Gandhi, or “Gandhism”, into the making of Western public and political opinion.

Scalmer lectures in history at Melbourne University and acknowledges Australian Research Council funding support for this study. So it was a little disappointing, for this local baby-boomer, to find that the protests, sit-ins and love-ins on Australian campuses and downtown streets of the late 60s and early 70s are not mentioned. In fact, there is not a single reference to Australian experience. Primary sources are exclusively British and American. I have always thought “Western” to include at least Western Europe, as well as we hangers-on in the Pacific.

The study chronologically and falls into two phases: Gandhi’s lifetime until his assassination in 1948, and the echoes of Gandhian influence through three major protest movements thereafter. During his life, Western attitudes to Gandhi reflected people’s support for, or resistance to, Indian independence from the British Empire. There was also spillover into general pacifism, whose legion of supporters in the West 1920-1939 largely abandoned it when faced with the aggression of the Axis powers.

Significant later Western movements that owed some technical credits to Gandhian modes of protest were the nuclear disarmament campaigns beginning in UK in the late 1940s, the US Civil Rights movements in the 1950s and 60s, and finally the protests against Vietnam War.

Gandhi himself objected to the notion of “Gandhism” as any form of ideology or canonical philosophy, but a label of some sort has to be applied to his collected thoughts and the lessons derived from his actions. As with most isms, Gandhism had both a moral component (setting out how and why the individual should act in particular situations) and also a pragmatic component, setting out how people could act together to achieve political objectives in the real world.

Scalmer’s study suggest the moral and spiritual components of Gandhi’s teachings to have been a mixed blessing. A syncretic blend of Jain, Hindu, Christian, Sufi and other moral systems, they gained him a certain mystic authority to mobilize mass protest action in India, and attracted a useful subculture of Western devotees who awarded him the status of spiritual guru. But the personal side of Gandhi’s moral philosophy ultimately was too eccentric for him to be accepted, by Indian elites or by average Westerners, as a political leader for all Indians.

It was the pragmatic effectiveness of his protest techniques that most influenced Western emulators. There had been “passive resistance” protests before (suffragettes, for example), but Gandhi coined the phrase satyagraha from the Sanskrit terms for truth (satyam) and for firmness (agraha). He sometimes translated this as “soul force”. He and his followers believed that mass non-violent resistance against oppression would, eventually, morally convert the oppressors.

This undoubtedly occurred, at some level and to some oppressors, but more realist analysts attribute Gandhi’s political successes to publicity – what today’s skeptical observers recognize as stunt politics.

If conditions are right, then the sympathy generated by public images of demonstrators being treated violently can be potent in mobilizing support for political change. But first, the ruling powers must be accountable, at least to some degree, to those whose sympathies are converted. Second, the balance of other factors has to be in alignment if the moral sympathy factor is to tip that balance.

Scalmer traces how successive Western protest movements gradually watered down the Gandhian moral element of satyagraha, reducing it to lip-service, then to a pragmatic political method, until eventually American protest movements dropped all reference to Gandhi and claimed that passive resistance methods were their own invention.

By the end of the 1960s, Martin Luther King’s non-violent protest movement, based on Gandhian as well as Christian values, had been replaced in the public eye by the conflict-model Black Power movement of Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, and by the anti-establishment stunt politics of the psychedelic era. The Anti-Vietnam War protests, it must be said, were about Save Our Sons and Save Our Skins at least as much as they were about saving Indo-Chinese villagers from high-level bombing.

The media wanted then, and want even more in the video era, the gratification of retailing conflict, not resolution. Scalmer’s survey, in the end, is about us in the West, not about Gandhi. Almost every page is weighted with extensive footnotes that will delight a scholar but might put off the general reader. Scalmer writes clearly and concisely, and offers insights that are well worth the read.

Richard Thwaites passively resists taking part in organized protest movements.

Katharine Gelber has been pursuing Free Speech, and its evil twin, Hate Speech, through the academic world of political science for well over a decade. Now an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, she offers this survey of the complex status of freedom of speech in Australia. She points to flaws and inconsistencies in the way governments impose limits on various freedoms that Australians generally think they possess. She also identifies a wide disparity of opinions among Australians as to where Free Speech can, or should, be overridden by other political, social, cultural or moral values.

The book title proposes that we can “get it right”. I turned to the final chapter on How to Get It Right. Sadly, after so much study and explication, the author can only exhort us to try harder with “a more robust commitment to this fundamental freedom” that needs liberating from the strictures that our complacent political culture has allowed to impinge upon it.

Part of the problem is the extension of the concept of “speech” to include other kinds of political expression such as demonstrations, public assemblies and art exhibitions. As a political scientist, she considers “speech” to include all forms of expression that contribute to political discourse. This broadened sense of the word embraces the freedoms of expression considered intrinsic to a functioning democracy, but it does muddy the waters somewhat, compared to a narrower view of speech as limited to verbal expression. It also increases the range of circumstances in which one person’s freedom of expression runs up against another person’s sensibilities, or their exercise of other personal rights or social authorities.

Prof Gelber notes that the right to freedom of speech in Australia has been limited in various ways by federal, state and local governments. But the right itself has never been confirmed or defined by our High Court, nor does it appear in our Constitution. By contrast, the United States First Amendment to its Constitution expressly forbids any level of government from making any law that will curb freedom of speech, and successive US Supreme Courts have not only upheld this general right against government limitations, but have extended its ambit to cover many non-speech and non-political forms of expression.

Australia’s record is not all bad. Gelber devotes a whole chapter to the repeated refusals of Australian parliaments to make it an offence to insult the Australian flag, despite the calls of nationalists to restrict that particular form of political expression. She also commends the ACT Government for its unique legislation to prevent corporations employing SLAPP writs (“Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation”) to stifle public protest against their commercial activities.

Generally though, her case is that Australian political culture has been too ready to accept creeping erosion of the right to free speech in over-reaction to political exigencies. She gives particular attention to the many infringements upon personal liberties, including freedoms of expression, rushed through Australian parliaments in the name of the War on Terror, and never moderated since then. For example, it remains illegal for an academic to collect, for research purposes, any publication that might inspire a mentally impaired person to consider committing an act of terrorism.

The Australian Research Council grant that resulted in this book funded a modest attitudinal survey project consisting of broad interviews with a pool of sixteen respondents, selected to be broadly representative. One could not claim such a small sample to be statistically authoritative, but it at least provides a systematic source of diverse opinion that is better than daily vox populi media polls.

These survey responses, and others quoted from published sources, did not surprise me. They indicate that Australians support free speech in principle, but rarely give it priority over other values such as security and social cohesion. Perhaps this is because few Australians have ever experienced the absence of free public expression, and we have sufficient trust in our democratic institutions to believe that if something becomes intolerable, we can change it. Gelber suggests we are too complacent on that score.

The Free Speech issue is one aspect of the broader contradiction between two democratic values – freedom and equality. Gelber finds herself in this cleft stick when she discusses the need to control “Hate Speech” and vilification. She defines both of these as being attacks by the empowered against the “weak and marginalized” in society, and therefore requiring social and legal restriction. At one point she equates vilification with violence, a view that may seem contradictory to general free speech principles.

Few would quarrel with the principles that a civilized society will protect the weak against the strong, and that institutionalized values should discourage abuse of power through speech as much as any other form of abuse. But the record on vilification laws and the politicised notion of “Hate Speech” seems to show that legal avenues of redress are of most value to the most organized, not to the genuinely weakest targets of abusive speech. Without careful calibration and adjudication, anti-vilification laws can themselves be abused to the same effect as SLAPP writs.

This book is written in academic style, each chapter topped and tailed with “I will show..” and “I have shown..” sections. It will be a worthy addition to political science reading lists, but should also find a readership among those who are interested in how we manage our ideals through our institutions of government.

Richard Thwaites values his democratic right to vilify the powerful on an almost daily basis.