Dirty Politics

Nicky Hager: Dirty Politics (2014)

Well, I've read the book. Finally. It only came out last week, but it had already sold out from the local bookshop, so I was forced to make my way to the heart of the mall in Albany, where there were still quite a few copies left in the local Whitcoulls.

I'm no stranger to Hager's writing. I read The Hollow Men (2006) back when it first appeared (and was struck by how few of my colleagues who professed an interest in politics bothered to do as much - as if they somehow thought a few reviews from our wonderfully objective New Zealand media could give them the nub of the matter ...) I also read his genuinely shocking book about New Zealand's (so-called) "humanitarian" involvement in Afghanistan: Other People's Wars (2011).

At first I was a little disappointed to see how comparatively thin this one was: the others were thick, meaty tomes, with hundreds of pages of text and almost equally fascinating footnotes. In this case, though, I think one would have to say that size really doesn't matter. And I could also see the point that there's really no excuse for not reading less than 200 pages of material which could vitally affect your view of New Zealand's democracy.

I could recite a few of the shocking things in there: John Key's "sympathy" call to Cameron Slater of the Whale Oil blog (I won't provide a link) when the latter was being criticised for gloating over the death in a car crash of a youth from the West Coast ("One More Feral Down"); Judith Collin's fawning text messages and systematic leaking of material to Slater (for which she's now received a "final final warning" from our Prime Minister - preliminary to a final final final warning, no doubt); the gullible way in which our News Media have permitted Slater and his loathsome buddies to dictate the terms of each new political "scandal" ... It's all in there - all clearly documented, with chapter and verse.

But that isn't really the story, for me. At the time of Watergate, the real shock for Americans was not that their President had authorised a systematic campaign of dirty tricks against his opponents (including burglary, theft and a range of other foolish and counterproductive crimes), but the way he spoke to his White House intimates day to day.

Those endless, heavily edited transcripts of the tapes he released, with all their thousands of "expletive deleted"s, were the thing which really sealed his doom in the eyes of the American public. He'd always been sold to them as a Sunday School teacher, a bit of an old-fashioned, aw-shucks, fuddy-duddy puritan. To discover, now, that Nixon was in the habit of joking about sch loveable topics as how much he hated sitting next to Japanese dignitaries (because they stank of fish), the sheer number of curse words he used in every single sentence, made him sound more like a racist taxi driver than a responsible statesman.

The same is true of this book. Simply being allowed to overhear the kinds of filthy, sexist, abusive, mindless drivel Slater and his intimates - including, it seems, Cabinet Ministers and senior advisers to the Prime Minister (if not actually Gentleman John himself) - trade on a daily basis on their facebook and twitter accounts is like crawling through a tunnel of ordure.

Don't get me wrong. I was never a subscriber to the John Key myth. The mask, after all, is pretty thin whenever the slightest hint of opposition or dissent is heard. But I honestly had no idea that he and his minions actually enjoyed dealing with the likes of Slater. That his rants really and truly represent their view of the world. That came as a genuine surprise, I must say.

The final icing on the cake is the discovery of how much of this activity is motivated by a taste for easy money rather than genuine ideological involvement. It turns out that Slater prints posts from Big Tobacco and various other "responsible" lobby groups under his own name as if they were sincere expressions of opinion - for a substantial monthly sum. Hence, according to Hager, the constant shifts and contradictions on his famous blog. What is it being paid to print this month is more the question than what does it actually stand for?

Read the book. There's far more in there than you've been told. Make up your own mind. Don't be "spun" on this one - it matters too much. If the Slaters of this world continue to flourish, then there really is no hope for our electoral system. If that's of no interest to you, then perhaps the likes of Paul Henry and Cameron Slater really do speak for you. Congratulations!

I don't really believe that, though. Nixon may have his apologists still, but when it came down to it, the citizens of his country were simply not prepared to endorse his doctrine that he never broke the law because "it can't be illegal, if the president did it." Politicians must be subject to the law of the land, and it's about time that we all started to hold them accountable again. Thanks, Nicky Hager.

The Daily Blog

In Flanders Fields

[Passchendaele (1917)]

It seems like ages since I last posted anything on this blog. What can I say? Summer intervened.

I feel like I spent most of it moling through stacks of books and typing up long lists of them for my bibliography blog (still, alas, a long way from completion - though sometimes I delude myself that the end might be in sight).

Bronwyn and I did have a nice little break by the banks of Lake Rotorua, though, during which I managed to read the whole of Anthony Beevor's horrifying account of the Battle of Stalingrad. I found it in the shelves of the friend's house we were staying in.

Which brings me to the subject of history books - more specifically books of military history. I seem to have read an awful lot of them lately. First there were the First World War books:

• Liddell-Hart, Basil H. History of The First World War. 1930. Rev. ed. 1934. London: Pan Books, 1972.
• Middlebrook, Martin. The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
• Middlebrook, Martin. The Kaiser’s Battle. 21 March 1918: The First Day of the German Spring Offensive. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
• Prior, Robin, & Trevor Wilson. The Somme. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005.
• Taylor, A. J. P. The First World War: An Illustrated History. 1963. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
• Tuchman, Barbara W. The Guns of August. 1962. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1963.
• Wolff, Ian. In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign. 1958. London: Pan Books, 1961.

Some of them I found in my own shelves, others I borrowed from the library. After that I found myself moving on to the Second World War:

• Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
• Lord, Walter. The Miracle of Dunkirk. New York : Viking Press, 1982.
• Shirer, William L. The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940. 1969. London: Pan Books, Ltd., 1972

Now, however, it's back to the Napoleonic wars, and even further back in time - all the way to antiquity:

• Burrow, John. A History of Histories: Epics, chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. London: Allen Lane, 2007.
• Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Trans. Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007.
• Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian War. Trans. Richard Crawley. 1874. Introduction by Victor Davis Hanson. 1996. New York: Free Press, 2008.
• Zamyoski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.
• Zamyoski, Adam. Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon & The Congress of Vienna. HarperPress. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.

Why? You may well ask. I've always been a bit of a fan of such books, but I hope I'm not just one of those war junkies who spend their time prying into the more gruesome details of ancient battles because it gives them some kind of perverted thrill.

I do remember the sheer shock of seeing the Menin Gate and those immense fields of immaculately tended white crosses on the former Western Front when I went there with my parents as a teenager.

I guess my excuse, then, has to be relevance. The more of these books I read, the more applicable they seem to everyday life - my own, where I get to watch bureaucratic decision-making processes on a daily basis - but everyone else's, too, as we all experience the dreary parochial soap-opera of New Zealand politics.

[The Honourable John Key
Prime Minister of NZ]

It was interesting the other day, in fact, listening to John Key's response to the news that unemployment was far, far higher than anyone had feared, giving the lie to all his optimistic statements around New Year. His comment was that the recession was very bad, the worst since the 1930s, so there was really nothing anyone could do. "It could be worse," he added with a toothy smile.

I guess an outsider might find it a bit odd to find the man in charge of the overall direction of the nation's finances saying, in effect, that there was nothing to be done and it was all in the lap of the gods. But it's not so surprising if you've recently had the experience of reading William Shirer's appalling, terrifying account of the breakdown of France in 1940 - the pusillanimous refusal to take responsibility for anything on the part of the generals; the active, gleeful desire on the part of so many politicians to grovel before a Dictator (preferably a senile one - like Petain - who would allow them to pull the strings); the instinctive preference of the middle classes for Hitler and his Germans over the opposition at home. It made perfect sense to them at the time, but the harvest was a bitter one.

Watching the way decisions actually get made in a big organisation inspired the following poem, in fact. How else it it really possible to understand why people sign up to a solution they know to be unworkable and wrong? It isn't cowardice, exactly - or even complacency. It's just that things tend to develop a momentum of their own, and it's very difficult for novel and creative ideas to be heard, even, in an atmosphere where wiseacre "realism" rules.

Luckily the consequences seldom entail the violent deaths of half a million men. Seeing Key's complacent, vacant face proclaiming his inability to think of anything to do to reduce unemployment in the slightest, though, made me it far easier for me to imagine him or his kind signing up to yet another pointless, bone-headed war. We've seen his sort before. They used to be called Chamberlain or Herbert Hoover (or G. W. Bush and his toady Blair, for that matter):

Last Conference before Passchendaele

(5th-7th January, 1917)


Everyone knew it wouldn’t work, but nobody
could think of a way not to go through
with it. Lloyd George knew
Douglas Haig was self-deluded,
believing every ‘intelligence report’
from crystal-gazing Colonel Charteris
– God (after all) was on his side.
Sir William Robertson (Chief
of the Imperial General Staff) knew
Haig was next door to an imbecile
but backed him – lacking better –
against any alternative. Haig knew
the Fifth Army Staff, Gough’s boys,
were capable of stuffing up
the most elegant and foolproof
plan. Everyone knew
it always rains in Flanders
in the Autumn. The result was
the ‘most indiscriminate slaughter
in the history of warfare.’
No-one could find
a good way to avoid it.

Without losing face, that is.

All in all, it's hard to feel that I've been entirely wasting my time with these books.