Robots are taking over

It is currently fashionable to be concerned about robots taking over jobs, putting people out of work. There was an article about this in a recent NZ Listener, there was a BBC programme about it. I imagine the discussion is not that different from that during the early years of the industrial revolution, Spinning Jenny making skilled weavers unemployed. People losing their jobs, being unemployed, losing their livelihood and their self esteem is nothing new. But we may be better able to cope with this now than we were in the early nineteenth century, or even during the 1920s and 1930s, when automation replaced skilled tradesmen. There is a discussion going on, a recent article in the New Yorker, about Universal Basic Income. The nature of capitalism is evolving. The concept of the capitalist owning the means of production and the worker hiring out his labour is no longer a simple relationship. Capitalism is increasingly about monopoly and not about owning the means of production, monopolies undermine efficiency, access to capital and credit increases profits rather than production, or for that matter, in novation. With the gradual advent of capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the feudal relationships of mutual responsibility broke down. The labourer who hired out his labour had to work or starve. He was probably driven off the land, his link to the land was severed,  and he, she, the children had to find employment to survive. The worth of his labour could be negotiated. The idea of the undeserving poor, the ones who dropped off the poverty ladder was born. Wealth was the reward of hard work and virtuous life. Yet in this day and age, where wealth is often the outcome of monopolistic strategies and a measure of good luck the equation between wealth and virtue, or for that matter, poverty and idleness no longer holds. Fortunately the world is becoming a better place and old certainties about capital and labour, hard work and idleness, employment and redundancy are breaking down. There are currents of thought abroad that might tide the present generation through to new concepts of social relationship and self worth.

Sir Julius Vogel at 180

The United Synagogues (London) is commemorating on Monday, 27 June, the 180th anniversary of the birth of Sir Julius Vogel, and the 140th year of the end of his Premiership as New Zealand's eighths Prime Minister. Vogel is remembered for his policy of borrowing for railway construction and public works. The policy brought the colony out of its economic stagnation and was very popular at the time, although later it was blamed for a period of subsequent recession. Vogel was a man of ideas, and although he is now mainly remembered as a politician, he was also the founder of the Otago Daily Times, the only remaining independent metropolitan newspaper in New Zealand. He was also a writer with imagination way ahead of his time. I wrote the following about him as a novelist in Jewish lives in New Zealand : a history / Leonard Bell and Diana Morrow, editors. Auckland, N.Z. : Godwit, 2012.

Julius Vogel (1835 – 99)

Julius Vogel, playwright and novelist, is much better known as a big spending, think big Prime Minister, ¹ He might have been a shrewd, at times divisive, politician, but at heart he was a writer and by profession a journalist. He founded the Otago Daily Times with W. H. Cutten, and hired Benjamin Farjeon, another Jew from London, whom he might have known from the Australian goldfields, as his manager.

Vogel always nurtured his ambition as a writer. Before entering politics, soon after his arrival in New Zealand, he tried his hand as a playwright, dramatizing, Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon,² one of the most popular English novels of its day. The plot includes madness, bigamy, attempted murder, and seduction. The play was widely performed.

After his defeat in politics, Vogel retired and moved back to London. Severely handicapped by gout and deafness, he spent the final 11 years of his life in a wheelchair. In his retirement he wrote Anno Domini 2000: or Woman's Destiny, (1889)³, usually regarded as New Zealand's first science fiction novel. There was an international vogue for futuristic stories, and Vogel had hoped to make money from his book⁴. In this he was disappointed, he earned a mere £50, but he found an outlet in his writing for his political ideas and his vivid imagination. In the world of the future, poverty would disappear.

‘The writer has a strong conviction that every human being is entitled to a sufficiency of food and clothing and to decent lodging whether or not he or she is willing to or capable of work.’ … ‘An incalculable increase of wealth, position, and authority would accompany an ameliorated condition of the proletariat, so that the scope of ambition would be proportionately enlarged’⁵.

And he posed the question:

‘Should human knowledge, human wants, and human skill continue to advance to an extent to which no limit could be put, or should the survival of the fittest and strongest be fought out in a period of anarchy?’⁶

‘The British dominions had been consolidated into the empire of United Britain’⁷ and women took over the prominent leadership roles.

‘It has, in fact, come to be accepted that the bodily power is greater in man, and the mental power larger in woman. So to speak, woman has become the guiding, man the executive, force of the world. Progress has necessarily become greater because it is found that women bring to the aid of more subtle intellectual capabilities faculties of imagination that are the necessary adjuncts of improvement.’⁸

In the story, a young woman, Hilda Fitzherbert, the Member of Parliament for Dunedin in the Imperial government becomes one of the most influential politicians, an advisor of the Emperor. An eminent Australian soldier, Lord Reginald Paramatta, is in love with her, but his love is not reciprocated, and to have her in his power he plots to overthrow the Empire. The plot is foiled by the Emperor’s spymaster, ‘a very remarkable man. He was on his mother's side of an ancient Jewish family, possessing innumerable branches all over the world’⁹ With Semitic features, he was ‘a tall, slender man, apparently of about thirty-five years of age. His complexion was very dark; and his silky, curly hair was almost of raven blackness. His features were small and regular, and of that sad but intellectual type common to some of the pure-bred Asiatic races.’¹⁰ Mockingly, this saviour of the Empire describes himself as coming ‘of a race of money-lenders’¹¹

Vogel had a visionary imagination. He wrote about air cruisers, driven by engines much like jet engines, the inventor of which was a young Jewish woman, niece of the spymaster. He envisages large irrigation schemes in the South Island, electricity as the prime source of domestic light and heat, hydro-electricity as a major source of power. In political developments, he foresaw a global federation of financial interests that maintained world peace, taxation as the great divisive issue threatening to break up the empire¹², and foresaw the resolution of the issue of Irish Home Rule. There is no limit to Vogel’s seemingly far-fetched ideas.

The Southland Times, reviewing Vogel’s book said:

‘In " Anno Domini 2000," it is easy to detect the hand of a beginner. The plot, if plot it can be called, is not very ingenious, the dialogue is not very brilliant and the characterisation is decidedly poor. The whole story is moreover ridiculously improbable.¹³’

What is interesting is that Vogel, who was reminded of his Jewish identity throughout his life, whom his political opponents described as the “wandering Jew”¹⁴, whose newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, was referred to as ‘that despicable literary dish clout’, “the jews Harp”, created a positive image of Jewishness in one of the leading characters of his work of fantasy.

1 'VOGEL, Sir Julius, K.C.M.G.', from An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, edited by A. H. McLintock, originally published in 1966.

2 Raewyn Dalziel, Julius Vogel: Business Politician, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1986, p.39

3 Julius Vogel (1889) Anno Domini 2000 - A Woman's Destiny or Woman’s Destiny, London, Hutchinson & Co.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini_2000_-_A_Woman%27s_Destiny

4 Roger Robinson, Introduction to Vogel, J. (2000). Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman’s destiny. Auckland, Exisle.

5 Vogel, Anno Domini, p. 329-330

6 ibid p. 19

7 ibid p. 32

8 ibid p. 29

9 ibid p. 126

10 ibid p. 130

11 ibif p. 210

12 ibid p. 153 ‘maintaining the Empire as a whole entailed the sacrifice of regulating the taxation so as to suit the least wealthy portions’.

13 Southland Times , Issue 10164, 23 May 1889.

14 Dalziel, Vogel p.47

Labyrinth of lies - the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963

Went to see the German film, Labyrinth of lies last night, and despite what various critics said I found it a very powerful and thought provoking film. Critics who expected this to be a deep film about Auschwitz, or a courtroom drama, Le Carre thriller or action movie, profound exploration of characters to engage with are bound to be disappointed. This is about facing the past. A young prosecutor, Johann Radman (Alexander Fehling) is appointed by the Chief prosecutor, Fritz Bauer,  to the job to bring those who committed atrocities in Auschwitz to justice because he was young enough, born in 1930, not to have been compromised. It is Fritz Bauer, only a minor character in the story, but in real life the instigator of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, who is the key to what the film is about. The fictitious young investigator puts his efforts into capturing Mengele and bringing him to trial, because he thinks that Mengele encapsulates the horrors of Auschwitz, but Bauer instructs him to forget about Mengele, Mengele was known to live in Argentina, and to visit his family in Germany regularly, but has powerful friends to protect him. Instead the prosecutor should go after the 8000 other Nazis involved in running the camp and committing atrocities. The point Bauer argued, and kept stressing for all his professional lives, was that the atrocities were not committed by monsters, but by ordinary unremarkable people, teachers, bakers, foresters, civil servants, and all who supported the regime and condoned its actions were guilty. Radmann, the young prosecutor and the other characters in the film are fictitou, except for Fritz Bauer, who was himself incarcerated in a concentration camp, escaped to Denmark then to Sweden. After the war he returned to what was by then the Federal Republic of Germany, and entered the justice system, becoming District Attorney in Essen, based in Frankfurt, and there, controversially, he initiated the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. There were many who believed that it was best to let bygones be bygones, let sleeping dogs lie, but Bauer, a friend of Willi Brandt, considered it important to face the past, no matter how dark, and was greatly disappointed that the way the Frankfurt trials were presented, those found guilty were depicted as monsters, out of the ordinary, not typical average German citizens.

Understanding poverty

Katherine Boo is an American writer, an investigative journalist, who wrote about the disadvantaged. She is married to an Indian academic and this is how she ended up visiting India and spending long stretches of time there. She described here experiences in her book, Behind the beautiful forevers. A small, blond American woman, she stood out in the Annawadi slum adjacent to the Mumbai airport. Making use of translators, she got to know the people there, the boy who was a successful dealer in trash until he was falsely accused of instigating a murder, the younger boy who made a very precarious living by scavenging, the woman whose ambition was to become a local politician and slum landlord, the girl with no prospects except to get married to the man her parents chose for her, She writes about children, orphans who somehow survive by their wits. She also writes about corrupt policemen, who demand bribes for doing their job, corrupt politicians who divert money given by international charities for education into their won pockets, the public prosecutor who tries to extort payment for mitigating the prosecution for a crime that was never committed. It is all powerful stuff. We get to know people who somehow survive in conditions and circumstances that to us, living a comfortable middle class life in a Western society seem unimaginable. The children play games, families quarrel, neighbours fight. They live from day to day for a glimmer of hope, the hope that the slum will not be bulldozed just yeat, or their part of the slum will be the last to me removed, that somewhere, out in the country, if they made a little money by collecting rubbish they might have a better life. It is grim reading, but Katherine Boo never makes judgements. She describes people and their circumstances as they are, with understanding and compassion. A wonderful book.

Hungary 2 - Austria 0

I got up today at 4.00 am to watch the Hungary v. Austria game in the the Euro Cup competition. I wake up in the middle of the night any way, so it was no special hardship, but I watched the game to share it with my late father. One of my childhood memories is listening to the commentary on the Hungary v. Austria game with my father approx 1947 or 1948. There was, of course, no television, we listened to the commentary on the radio. This was the biggest annual sporting fixture. The commentator was Pluhar whose distinctive voice was so well known that people imitated him. He covered sporting events for generations. Football played an important part in my father's life. He witnessed the ticker parade when the Ferencvaros football team was carried on people's shoulders through the Ninth District, the Ferencvaros, after their European tour in 1911 - 1912 when they beat  teams in Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, and the biggest scalp, the English Premier side, Woking in London. My father was 10 years old. Celebrated players, Imre Schlosser, whose playing career spanned over twenty years, Gyuri Sarosi, who played for Ferencvaros for eighteen years and his younger brother, Bela, not to mention more recent players, Puskas, Bozsik, Hidegkuti,  were part of the family lore. Ferencvaros was a sports club with a number of amateur and youth teams and my father played for one of these teams. He was a skilled footballer even in middle age. I myself kicked a football around on the waste ground in Budapest with friends, on the tiny enclosed courtyard of my school, the Jewish Gimnazium, and when we moved to New Zealand I played soccer, (in New Zealand football is rugby and soccer is football) and my great ambition was to get into the first, or at least the second eleven of my school. Those were the days when the Hungarian national team, lead by Puskas, was the best in the world. It was perhaps a great disappointment to the football coach of our school that I was not made of the same mettle. I worked hard to get fit, pounded the pavement every evening, and though I was a puny teenager with a slightly dickie heart, I made one of the school teams. Once I was even mentioned in the Manawatu Evening Standard, commended for my enthusiastic defence. School sport was big news in Palmerston North. I  played football when I came to Wellington to university. My footballing career came to an end when on one occasion I couldn't find the ground we were meant to be playing at. Who knew where Macalister Park was and how to get there by tram? So when I turned on the TV today to watch the Hungarian team play Austria in Bordeaux there was more to it than watching just any ordinary sporting encounter. I relived part of my life and shared it with my father. That Hungary won against great odds was a bonus.

Inequality and its consequences

It is always a pleasure to read in the NZ Listener the column by Rachel Morris, a New Zealander who is executive editor of Huffington Post Highline. Being an expat, she can see things that are not obvious to those of us living inside the national cocoon. We, that is, the New Zealand media, talk about rising house prices, people sleeping in garages or in their cars, child poverty and deprivation on a scale that New Zealanders have not experienced perhaps since the depression of the 1930s. We all, including politicians, agreed that this is terrible, unacceptable, and then file the problem as too big to tackle. Yet it is not the size of the problem but the political will to solve it that is the issue. The consequence of rising house prices is that wealth is shifted from those working for wages to those who have capital which they can invest in property. The inequality that this leads to changes the way people live, both individually and collectively. There are the "haves" and the "have nots" and their lives diverge further and further, with empathy shrinking across the divide. In the US both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump tapped into this sense of disengagement, and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn and some of his less savoury allies also give political voice to this discontent. In New Zealand, however, there is no appetite for radical responses to the obvious social problems besetting New Zealand society. The housing crisis is eminently soluble. The first Labour government faced an acute housing shortage after the war and they set about building thousands of  state houses, borrowed money, worked with the builder, James Fletcher, and created whole new suburbs that seemed like workingman's paradises. The houses were well designed, strongly built, didn't leak, and were developed around attractive public spaces and communal facilities. If the government would build a few thousand houses, making use of cheap credit available to it, the housing shortage would be solved and the escalating housing prices would come to a halt. Some investors would get burned, the value of their investments would decline and in some cases they would lose their equity. The banks would panic about bad loans. But people, "hard-working New Zealanders", people working for wages, would have roofs over their heads. If there would be a Labour Party in New Zealand that values its heritage, the heritage of Michael Joseph Savage, it would advocate such a radical measure which would do much to alleviate poverty and narrow the gap between the rich and the poor. But this would mean trampling on libertarian sacred cows. It would look to solutions to social problems to the government, not to private enterprise and the market. It would accept that the government and bureaucracy can deliver needed social outcomes more efficiently than private enterprise. The NZ Labour Party lacks the gumption of a Bernie Sanders and risk turning against the prevailing libertarian political canon. 

Salinger and Catcher in the Rye

Last week I watched a documentary about J. D. Salinger. He was one of the generation of young American  writers who went to war and returned traumatised to a greater or lesser degree. Some wrote straight war stories, largely based on their own experiences, Irwin Shaw's Young Lions, Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny, Norman Mailer's Naked and the dead. Some wrote books reflecting their disenchantment with the war as a great patriotic effort, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, Joseph Heller's Catch 22, but Salinger expressed his disenchantment differently. in Catcher in the Rye he got inside the head of a rich, spoiled seventeen year old student, a dropout from a prestigous school, who saw the world as one inhabited by phonies. Ambition, success were meaningless for him. He did not want to emulate his brother, a successful writer, who sold out to Hollywood, or his father, a successful lawyer. He could only relate to his younger sister, the embodiment of childish innocence. Generations of teenagers identifies with Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye. Mark Chapman shot John Lennon, then proceeded to read Catcher in the Rye. John Hickley, who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan had this book with him. Holden Caulfield and I were about the same age when the book was published in 1951 and I must have read the book in my time. I certainly read Franny and Zooey in the New Yorker some years later and I was interested in Salinger as a writer. I appreciated a kind of perfection in his writing. The characters come alive. It is not the story, not the action that matters but the people who inhabit the book. Catcher in the Rye takes place over two days, and nothing much happens, but the narrative is so complete, it would not be possible to add anything to it. Yet I, as a seventeen year old, or perhaps a few years older when I read the book, could not identify with Holden Caulfield. To me he was a spoiled rich brat who had nothing to complain about, he should have got his act together. The world was threatened by nuclear war, the poor of the world ware oppressed by the rich, wars were waged in parts of the world for the aggrandisement of the capitalist  or the communist system and my contemporaries were slaughtered in Malaya, Korea, later in Vietnam. Leaders chosen by their people were assassinated in the Congo, in Iran, in Chile.The challenge for me and my generation was to make the world a better, juster place, Protesting about wars, protesting about injustice was OK, but sulking, withdrawing from the world, killing John Lennon, did not help to make the world and its future any better.

Polish orphans of Pahiatua

There was an article in today's newspaper, taken from The Times about the Brexit debate. It was written by the eminent journalist and political activist Daniel Finkelstein, Baron Finkelstein. He argues that Europe's battle scars should bring Europeans together, an argument to keep Britain in Europe. His grandparents came from Lviv, now Ukraine, then Poland. His grandfather fought in Anders' Army, the Polish army recruited from the Polish exiles in the Soviet Union, which fought by the side of the Russians. The family was transported, from their place of exile in Siberia to Iran together with 77,000 soldiers, and 43,000 civilians, which included 20,000 children [Story of the Polish Children of Pahiatua]. Some of these children left behind in Iran needed a place to go to. The Polish Government in London appealed to the League of Nations for help in finding temporary refuge for the Polish civilians and children. Mrs. Fraser, wife of the New Zealand Prime Minister, Peter Fraser, met socially someone from the Polish Government and was told of the plight of these children and persuaded her husband to bend New Zealand's immigration policy and accept, in the end 733 children and 102 caregivers, which included a priest. The children were Catholic. Although there were many Jewish civilians, including children, like Daniel Finkelstein's grandparents among the Polish refugees in Iran, they didn't make it to New Zealand. The New Zealand government's policy was that no Jews were allowed to come. Jews were perceived as hard to assimilate, even though Jews had lived here since before colonization, before 1840 and had a record of assimilation better than most, many became exemplary citizens and leading public figure. The government was also concerned that by allowing more Jews to enter the country more Jews would bring with them more anti-Semitism. When after the war New Zealand accepted refugees from the Baltic states and other parts of Eastern Europe, many of whom harboured, no doubt, anti-Semitic sentiments, no such concern was evident. Polish Jewish children, stranded in Iran were not allowed to come to New Zealand. They were diverted to Palestine. Three years later New Zealand was one of the first counties in the UN to vote for the establishment of Israel in 1947. It suited the New Zealand Government to wash its hands of the world wide Jewish refugee problem.  They wished it on the Arabs.