COLD WAR AUSTRALIA - ARGUING THE COLD WAR - REVIEW |
Menzies’ Cold War, a reinterpretation One Man’s Fight Against ASIO Arguing the Cold War By 1938, the
émigré German novelist Thomas Mann had perceived that Nazism and
fascism were “expedients against the threat of social revolution
everywhere … for which the respectable world everywhere … has a
secret weakness”. The appeasers knew which side they were on in that
global class war. The armed conflicts that had begun in Spain and China
did not surrender their character as imperialist rivalries upon the Nazi
invasion of the Soviet Union. The USA continued to wage economic war
against both its Japanese competitor and its British ally, as it had
done during and after the Great War. The tussle for dominance within the
United Nations erupted as soon as the Axis powers surrendered. The
conflict between the Soviet bloc and the US-dominated force was another
part of this grab for markets. Les Louis has
shifted the ground beneath Cold War scholarship by linking
military-espionage matters to the struggle between wage-labour and
capital. From this perspective, the attacks on Communist-led unions
appear as economic necessity more than red-baiting. The class struggle
would have proceeded inside Australia even if the Cold War had not
occurred. When Labor and then the Coalition used the military in the
mines and on the docks they were involved in the class struggle as a
battle for productivity against the technological backwardness of both
sectors. In the late 1940s, much of the Australian economy was still being managed
under the wartime extension of central power. The big exception was the
direction of labour, although New Australians were supposed to work
wherever they were told for two years. When the Menzies government
lifted price controls and ran into the Korean War boom, the gap widened
between the need to invest in capital goods and the demand for consumer
items. On top of this scissors crisis, came pressure to increase
military outlays. With inflation moving towards 18 percent in the April-June quarter of
1951, Menzies declared that Australia “did not have a day more than
three years in which to get ready” for a new world conflict. Having
just had his Communist Party Dissolution Bill declared unconstitutional,
Menzies was staking out the grounds for arguments before the High Court
to extend the powers of the Commonwealth to preparations for war, and
not just for its conduct or aftermath. The Menzies Government needed a US umbrella (ANZUS) if it were to win an election after signing the Peace
Treaty with Japan and committing troops to the Middle East. Louis’
Australian case makes sense in the context of the triangular strategy of
reviving Europe and Japan by giving them access to their old colonies.
The British needed Malaya for tin and rubber to provide dollar
exchanges. Louis underlines the nuclear option as the new priority that allowed
total defence outlays to stagnate around £200m. through the 1950s,
after the death of Stalin and cease-fires in Korea and Indo-China had
lowered the temperature. Now that Louis has pointed the way, it behoves diplomatic historians to
bone up on political economy in the manner of the Kolkos, but with even
more attention to the labour process. The
working day of Leftheris Eleftheratos (Lefty Freeman) at the GM-H
Pagewood plant in the 1950s deserved more space in his memoir. Freeman,
came to Sydney in the late 1940s but was not allowed to return when he
went back to Greece in the mid-1950s. He complains that he was treated
as a Communist when he wasn’t one. Typical of Hellenic revanchists,
Freeman spends much of his book proving that Cyprus has always been
Greek. The national question takes precedence over the class question,
even though, as he notes, the armed rebels in Cyprus under Grivas were
in cohoots with the homeland Greeks who had collaborated with the
British in 1945-48 and with the Colonels who overthrew a creaky
democracy in 1967. Less than a quarter of Freeman’s book adds to the
Cold War story in Australia. Yet it is worth being reminded that Cyprus
was one of the foci of the Cold War for control of the Mediterranean,
another strand of decolonisation. The retreat of Britain left room for
the US to swivel between Athens and Ankara, according to which was the
more fascist at the time. Henry Kissinger connived in the Junta’s
toppling of the democratically elected President Makarios in 1974, which
further diminishes the Greek claims to be the fount of democracy. Conference
papers gauge the ideological winds. The Love and Strangio collection
presents somewhat more than the conventional left-wing wisdom about the
Cold War years in Australia, but nonetheless reveals how far most
writers have to go to catch up with Louis. Peter Love opens with as succinct an overview as it is possible to
construct. Errors of detail and emphasis are worth correcting to sharpen
our understanding of the class factors at play. The Coalition was not
the “only unequivocal victor in Australia’s Cold War” since the US
military and corporations did far better out of it. Moreover, it is sad
to see someone on the left accepting US propaganda about the Marshall
Plan as a charitable act, and one which Stalin rejected. In fact, the
Plan had been framed so that the Soviets could not accept it, its aim
being to revive the US economy. Love is also amiss to claim that von Hayek’s allegation that welfarism
must lead to totalitarianism was not widely discussed here by 1946.
Dymocks had published an edition of The
Road to Serfdom in 1945, with a reprint the next year. By October
1945, local trade journals were quoting praise for Hayek from the Reader’s Digest. More significantly, Australia had its home-grown
von Hayeks in Professor F. A. Bland’s
outpourings, John
Anderson’s 1943 essay on “The Servile State”, and the Institute of
Public Affairs, founded late in 1942. The ideological front of the class
war was well underway in Australia before Churchill’s Iron Curtain
speech. The pre-emptive strike against planning was part of the war for
position on the ideological front, protecting capital from domestic
constraints, not threats from abroad. At the start of the Cold War, the
struggle was to restore capitalism to favour after it had delivered two
world wars, a depression and fascism. The Communist Party Dissolution Bill and subsequent referendum have none
of the aura that Petrov Commission still attracts yet it generates as
many errors. Contrary to Love, Evatt’s arguments to the High Court
over the Act “persuaded” none of its members who had to put aside
their animus towards their erstwhile brother in order to uphold their
legal principles. A majority of electors voted “No” at the
subsequent referendum because of the economic anger that Evatt and
Victorian Liberal premier Tom Holloway inflamed. Jenny Hocking’s piece
on the 1951 Referendum misses both these points and fails to grasp that,
as much as Dixon J. wanted to ban the Communist Party, he was not
prepared to abolish Federalism, or the High Court, which he believed the
government was asking the Bench to do. To dismiss such objections as
“technicalities” fails to grasp the nature of judicial logic. Those
technicalities may prove useful against the latest state terrorism. Hocking also needs to read Audrey Johnston’s 1986 life of Tasmanian
Senator Bill Morrow, Fly a Rebel
Flag, if she thinks that Menzies was being other than factual when
he remarked how easy it would be easy to “declare” at least one
Labor senator. Menzies’ mention that a member of the House of
Representatives would escape by the skin of his teeth was a
parliamentary riposte at Eddie Ward who had just interjected. Evatt’s
role in the court case or referendum did not ensure “his and the
Australian Labor Party’s electoral defeat for years to come”. On the
contrary, Evatt went from strength to strength until he won a majority
of the votes, but not of the seats in 1954. The ex-Coms, Amirah Inglis and Bernie Taft, rake over ploughed
fields whereas the Groupers, John Cotter and Rick Brown, open up the
story. A volume of their colleagues’ memoirs would be more welcome
than another moan from the Left. The splits in Santamaria’s
organisations matched those in their Communist adversary. What would
have happened had the Movement been led by Stan Keon and not by Bob
Santamaria? Was Keon was the greatest Labor prime minister Australia
never had? Bruce Duncan seeks to crack the Santamaria Conundrum but does
not see that he was a Falangist more than a fascist, whose enemies were
the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Modernism, of which Communism was
but a late manifestation. His attacks on global finance in the 1990s
were part of that mentality. Overland editor Ian
Syson ends the collection with the wish that the Cold War become a
popular topic, observing that it is important to keep the Quadrant crew, from Peter Coleman to Robert Manne, in their
ideological place. Surely it would be better to go back to Les Louis’s
concern for the class war in every decade as a basis for waging it
today? In preparing for those battles, it is worth noting that none of
these leftist authors accepts the Marxist-Leninist stance that the state
is the instrument of class repression. Rather, they seem upset that the
government did not act as umpire. From this condition, two conclusions
follow. First, many of the most radical Australians have absorbed a
bourgeois liberal view of the state. Secondly, if this acceptance is
indicative of the outlook of the Australian working class, then any
notion of the state as class violence raised to an obligatory norm is
enshrined as a truism with scant relevance to political activism. To
analyse why this pluralist view has triumphed means exploring the
effects of industrial arbitration, parliamentary cretinism and welfare
systems in giving the workers’ representatives a bureaucratic rent. Similarly, the Left’s acceptance of the Venona transcripts –
despite Phillip Deery’s warnings - has installed a line between those
bad communists who spied for the Soviet Union and the good ones who
worked for social reforms. Again, this division rejects Marxist-Leninist
principles where loyalty is owed to the international working class, not
to the capitalist state under which one happens to be born. To rephrase
a familiar remark, if asked to betray either one’s country or one’s
class, the revolutionaries of the 1920s had hoped for the courage to
subvert the rulers of their nation-market-state. That this morality
later served ignoble ends does not make it any less honourable. Above
all, the great betrayal was not of bourgeois patriotism in the 1930s and
1940s, but of proletarian solidarity when Labor leaders sabotaged the
Second International’s pledge for a general strike to prevent war in
1914. |