Assessing Paul Foot
In his Observer encomium to Paul Foot, Nick Cohen states:
[M]ost of the best investigative journalism doesn't come wrapped in a big shiny package which can be opened in a rush on Christmas morning. Foot's campaign to free the four men falsely convicted of the murder of Carl Bridgewater was the result of a relentless exposure of the flaws in the prosecution case. Year in, year out, he refused to accept that he was becoming a bit of a bore on the subject. He banged on until four broken men finally received a belated sliver of justice.
This is true. Foot's obsessiveness on this and other miscarriages of justice did an appreciable amount of good - obviously for those who had been wrongly convicted, but also for our culture in exposing the fallibility of a nominally disinterested system of criminal justice. (It has furnished an overwhelming argument against capital punishment.) But it's not only the system of criminal justice that's fallible. The Guardian's account of Foot's death included this extraordinary statement:
Among his later exposes were the miscarriages of justice including the Carl Bridgewater murder case and the execution for murder of James Hanratty.
Those cases are not the same. The case of James Hanratty and the A6 murder was not a miscarriage of justice: Hanratty was guilty as charged. We know this because the science of DNA testing has progressed to the point where what was once an intractable case can now be resolved. As the Telegraph reported two years ago:
SCIENTIFIC evidence establishes "beyond doubt" that James Hanratty was the man who committed the notorious A6 murder more than 40 years ago, the Court of Appeal ruled yesterday. Dismissing Hanratty's posthumous appeal, three judges headed by Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, said there was "overwhelming proof of the safety of the conviction". Ironically, it was Hanratty's family who sought DNA tests on two items of evidence that had been preserved since the trial.During the appeal, Hanratty's counsel conceded that, provided the possibility of contamination could be excluded, analysis of these items pointed conclusively to Hanratty having been the man who murdered Michael Gregsten, 36, a civil servant, and raped Mr Gregsten's lover, Valerie Storie, then 23.
The Hanratty campaigners now rest their case on the argument that contamination cannot be excluded, yet as a witness from the Forensic Science Service told the BBC in a Horizon documentary examining this evidence:
NARRATOR: [Scientists'] confidence stems from a simple act of logic. If James Hanratty is not the killer then where is the killer's DNA? For scientists can only find one male profile on the exhibits.ROGER MANN: We only have one profile. That profile matches James Hanratty. If that was a contaminant, if that was due to contamination we would expect two profiles, one from James Hanratty due to the contamination and one from the original killer.
Commenting on this evidence, Paul Foot told the same programme:
I'm a complete illiterate in relation to the science of DNA, physics and so on. I know nothing about it at all. My doubts stem solely from my, a very, very clear belief that this man did not commit this murder, so if the science is saying he did commit the murder I say well that clashes with my belief that he didn't commit the murder and there must be something wrong with the science.
That is the credo of the biblical creationist confronted with geological evidence for the age of the Earth. Foot's campaign for Hanratty wasn't a passion for justice against a pitiless state machine: it was an idee fixe, impervious to evidence, that has itself devastated the lives of innocent victims. According to the Telegraph, in an accompanying report on the Court of Appeal ruling in 2002:
At the age of two, Anthony Gregsten's father had gone for ever and the boy's life would never be the same again. By the age of eight, he learned that Michael Gregsten, a 34-year-old physicist, had been shot dead, in 1961, after he and a woman friend were ambushed in their car by a gunman. Mr Gregsten knew, too, at primary school, that a man called James Hanratty had been convicted and hanged for the murder, and the shooting of his father's lover, Valerie Storie.It was a difficult burden for any child. He was shaken to the core, however, by the publication of a book, in the early 1970s, by the journalist Paul Foot. It was entitled Who Killed Hanratty? and raised the suggestion that his mother, Janet Gregsten - who had been aware of her husband's affair with Miss Storie - had been involved in some way in setting up the attack.
Mr Gregsten, a 42-year-old furniture designer, said: "Many people lose a parent, sometimes in the most tragic circumstances. You get over it. In this case they [campaigners] dragged it out for 40 years . . . 40 years to clear the name of a man who was found guilty by a jury.
Anyone, in a long career and with a voluminous output, can make a mistake. The fact that the British justice system did wrong to those falsely accused of the Birmingham pub bombings doesn't overturn the notion of the rule of law; the fact that Foot's campaign on the Hanratty case was misconceived doesn't invalidate his other campaigns. But you would have thought Foot could at least have acknowledged his error and apologised to those harmed by it; instead he continued insisting he was right regardless of the evidence. That was not merely "becoming a bit of a bore".
At the same time as the Hanratty appeal, my friend John Sweeney, formerly of The Observer and now of the BBC, was investigating the horrifying case of Sally Clarke, wrongfully convicted for the murder of her two baby sons who had in fact both died of natural causes. Sweeney's patient inquiry and lucid argument was an important contribution to the successful campaign for Mrs Clarke's freedom. But one of the reasons I implicitly trust Sweeney's judgement on this type of issue is that in addition he knows that his inquiries have limits: he will go only so far as the evidence permits. When journalists and campaigner pursue not the evidence but their deeply-held convictions, people can get hurt.
Politics is not irrelevant to this methodological question. Foot was a longstanding public advocate for a party that in the Iraq war called for military victory for Baathist tyranny. Sweeney, on the other hand, over many years exposed the cruelties of that same regime, and showed courage, strength and indefatigability in confronting its apologists. His brilliant BBC expose of Saddam's propaganda campaign over sanctions earned him a round-robin campaign of character assassination, falsehood and abuse. I know whom I regard as the better campaigning journalist: it's the one who doesn't defend the indefensible in any circumstances, even where - especially where - his prior convictions are at stake.
Ironically for one who professed the politics of solidarity, Foot's campaigning worked better on a smaller scale - miscarriages of justice, rather than great campaigns. That's true in politics as well as the legal system. When he aimed at specific targets - Archer, Poulson - he deployed formidable research and could draw blood. At book-length it could work too. His 1969 book The Rise of Enoch Powell was powerful and original. Its particular value lay in its portrayal of Powell as the opposite of the austere and consistent statesman. Powell's demagoguery on race, Foot argued, was tailored to the chances of his own political advancement. I consider Foot's judgement was vindicated by almost everything Powell did after that, notably his call for a Labour vote in 1974 and his bizarre anti-nuclear speeches in the 1980s. The consistent thread was not free-thinking heterodoxy but a vain attempt to be seen to influence electoral outcomes once his ministerial career had imploded.
Foot's attempt to dissect not the tergiversations of a maverick but The Politics of Harold Wilson (1968) was much less successful. Two-thirds of the book consider Wilson as Prime Minister. Taking aim at the Government's abandonment of socialist principle, Foot succeeded in demonstrating his own unfamiliarity with the policy issues that the Government foundered upon, notably the run on sterling:
Perhaps the saddest personal aspect of [a speech by Wilson in July 1968] was its complete abandonment of the cheeky language with which Wilson had, on occasions, mocked the received doctrines of the Bank of England, and sterling speculators.
Foot's concern was to present Wilson as the creature of the scheming Lord Cromer, Governor of the Bank of England and guardian of financial rectitude. The reality was somewhat different. There was a perfectly sensible option available to Wilson in his discussions with Lord Cromer (and which according to Edmund Dell's The Chancellors he actually threatened), which was to float sterling, whereupon the Government's policy mix would have become internally consistent and thereby invulnerable to pressure from the currency markets. The policy that Wilson in fact adopted was inconsistent, because he was then unable to target the exchange rate while at the same time having his other policy goals (too many policy goals for the instruments available to target them). Foot's is a poor book because it scarcely begins to consider the policy debates that exercised his subject - economically the best-qualified Prime Minister ever to hold office, who produced an almost incomparably bad record in economic management (exceeded only by Heath and Barber).
The 1970s were the period of Foot's greatest activity as a propagandist for Socialist Worker. The deadening of his prose and the crudeness of his analysis are exemplified in his booklet written for the launch of the Socialist Workers' Party (a grandiose scheme of the party founder Tony Cliff, heedless of the minuscule size of the membership) from its origins in the International Socialists, Why You Should be a Socialist (1977). Here he is depicting 'Capitalism - Class and Crisis':
Go down to a Tory Party conference or listen in to a BBC current affairs programme any week and you will hear the argument for the profit system. It is that there are only a few people in our society with initiative and enterprise.... Unless we allow these people to have the maximum 'incentive', they won't use their initiative and enterprise.
Well, no, that isn't the argument - or at least, it's only a minor argument - for 'the profit system'. The argument more properly has to do with knowledge and co-ordination, not incentives, and is well known not only to economic liberals such as Friedrich von Hayek but to socialist economists as well. As one of the best of those socialist economists, Alec Nove, wrote in The Economics of Feasible Socialism (1983), concerning the Soviet experience:
If millions of prices are to be fixed, whoever determines or approves them must collect information (on costs and demand) , information which needs cross-checking, in view of the possible interest of the information-providers in higher prices.... Furthermore, even if it were decided that prices should be flexibly adjusted to changes in supply-demand relationships, it would be quite impracticable to do this administratively, that is, through price control by the government and/or the planners. There would simply be far too many prices to control.
The problem that the 'profit system' (more accurately, the system of shifting relative prices) addresses is, in short, not a fabrication of Tory Party conferences. Of that problem, you will read not a word in Paul Foot's writings, and that's a fundamental omission. But at least you can attribute that to nothing more serious than the author's unwillingness to read the case of those he dismisses. It's a different matter when Foot claims:
Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, is usually painted as a tyrant. In fact he was the opposite.
By the time of a new edition of this booklet, The Case for Socialism (1990), this preposterous - and for Foot's reputation, humiliating - remark had become:
The thousands of intellectuals then and since who abused Lenin as a 'tyrant' and a 'dictator' cannot have read The State and Revolution, which again and again repeats that socialism and democracy are indivisible.
That's like saying, "Those who describe Stalin as a dictator can't have read the Soviet constitution of 1936." It is of course true that The State and Revolution envisages a post-revolutionary order without compulsion, still less repression (save for a brief period of "the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of wage slaves of yesterday"). That was not, however, the post-revolutionary order that Lenin created. It never could have been, because it envisaged a social unity in which "all take part in the administration of the state". In this vision, there was no concept of opposition; when massive opposition in fact arose, Lenin imposed a police state to crush it. I wish I could say that the means of doing so are well-known, but they aren't. Former Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev has made it the work of what remains of his life to document the cruelty of the system this produced, and he has published his findings in A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Among innumerable horrifying statistics and anecdotes contained in the book, this one stands out for me:
Documents show that even after the campaign for "thinning out" [yes, that's some euphemism - OK] the concentration camps in July 1921, the camps in Tambov province still held more than 450 hostages aged one to ten.
One of the reasons this stuff is still not widely known among the general public is that wise and good men in the East, such as Yakovlev, still have to contend with the durable romantic illusions of frivolous men in the West, such as Foot. If admiration for the creator of this abominable system had been a mere idiosyncrasy on Foot's part, then some allowance might be made for it. But again and again in Foot's writings one comes across sentiments that are callous as well as shallow. In his 1989 booklet Ireland: Why Britain Must Get Out (in the short-lived Chatto CounterBlast series), he dismissed fears of a "bloodbath" in Northern Ireland after the withdrawal of British troops:
In the past, British governments, after deciding to withdraw from colonies, have not been overly squeamish about bloodbaths. When Britain left India there was a bloodbath. When Britain left the Central African Federation there was a bloodbath. Yet no one but the most oddball reactionaries argued then (or argue now) that Britain should not have left those places.
Let us, for sake of argument, accept Foot's ahistorical designation of Northern Ireland as a British colony. Let us also overlook his failure to mention that in India there was of course not only bloodshed but partition - exactly what Foot erroneously believed his proposal for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland would avoid. Even then, is it not striking how easily he accepts the prospect of loss of life to accord with his own political proposals? Does that not say something about the quality of the proposal, even if it is just that human values are incommensurable?
In his Guardian columns after 9/11 Foot kept on displaying a reactionary casuistry rather than an appreciation of the import of political violence. Exactly a week after the attacks he wrote this about suicide terrorism:
I much prefer the advice of Leon Trotsky who became a socialist largely out of hostile reaction to the individual terrorism and assassinations practised by so many rebels against Russian tsarism in his youth ... "In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish their mission."
And that, for Foot, was sufficient judgement on the issue. The notion that suicide terrorism is a moral abomination because it targets civilian life doesn't enter into it; the salient characteristic about the act of slamming aeroplanes into office blocks and killing thousands of civilians is that it imbues the masses with false consciousness.
In March 2002 Foot amplified his views on suicide terrorism:
The violence of the Israeli army and police in [the West Bank] is the violence of the oppressor, and the consequent violence of the Palestinians is the resistance of the oppressed. Anyone who favours the Israeli occupation of the areas, or the settlements, or who denies the right of violent resistance to the Palestinians is siding unequivocally with the oppressor against the oppressed.
This is a statement not of support for terrorism, but of ideological apology for it. It insidiously invokes a vapid slogan - "resistance of the oppressed" - to obfuscate a specific type of act: suicide-bombing of buses, shopping malls, discotheques and restaurants. If there is to be a territorial settlement comprising sovereign and independent states of Israel and Palestine living peacefully alongside each other, then it most certainly requires "denying the right of violent resistance" to those who target civilian life. It requires an assertion of the necessity of politics, and of politics alone.
Foot's position was not only ethically flawed but also intellectually idle. In October 2001, as Parliament voted in favour of military action in Afghanistan, Foot asserted:
Appeasement of Israel has been the lynchpin of US and British policy in the Middle East, and is obviously connected, at whatever distance, to the terrorist attacks on September 11.
At whatever distance. I must remember that formulation the next time I'm challenged on links between Saddam and al-Qaeda. It's impervious to being falsified: whatever distance you travel, you can always travel further and thereby maintain that the connection exists even if it's not been uncovered yet. For good measure, I could always claim that evidence is unnecessary because the phenomena I'm trying to establish links between are "obviously connected".
Of course there is in some sense a connection between Western policy on Israel and al-Qaeda's murderous ideology. That's because Israel is a Jewish state and al-Qaeda urges holy war on Jews. There is nothing, literally nothing, that Israel can do to meet al-Qaeda's minimal requirements, because the minimal requirement is death. But that's the point: al-Qaeda's programme is not a set of negotiable grievances but an apocalyptic pursuit of the annihilation of western civilisation. That isn't merely what al-Qaeda is accused of: it's what al-Qaeda says. As Peter Bergen explains in the first and best book to have been published about Osama bin Laden after 9/11, Holy War Inc:
Bin Laden articulates an all-encompassing world view with a much wider appeal than simple hatred of Israel. Of course, he is opposed to Israel, but he also calls for the end of US military actions against Iraq; demands the creation of a 'Muslim' nuclear weapon; claims it is a religious obligation to attack American military and civilian targets worldwide because of the continued presence of US troops in the Gulf; criticises the governments of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia for not instituting what he sees as true Islamic law; and supports a multitude of holy wars around the globe.
The unintended irony of Foot's piece is his assertion, after listing half a dozen of his own complaints about the international order:
That doesn't excuse the fanatical and suicidal terrorism of September 11. But it helps to explain it.
No, it doesn't. Foot's catechism doesn't even begin to explain Islamist terrorism, because it doesn't attempt to examine critically what the Islamists actually stand for. It's a conceptual as well as a moral evasion.
Nick Cohen concludes his commendation of Foot for beatification with a tribute to his late friend's enthusiasm for Romantic poetry:
Red Shelley, published in 1980, remains one of the finest interventions in literary criticism of our time. Shelley, another revolutionary who came from the establishment, was a comrade. Foot rescued his reputation from the critics and syllabus setters who sought to portray him as a love poet and showed him to be what he was, a poet of rebellion.
Red Shelley may rank as the worst book published on a literary subject since the war. There is a tradition of the man of letters illuminating our understanding of literature through exposition of his own insights (think of Chesterton on Browning and Dickens). Foot's work belongs instead to the tradition of the dilettante determined to wrench his literary enthusiasms to his own image. It emulates the misplaced ingenuity of Churchill's minister Duff Cooper in writing Sergeant Shakespeare, an attempt to prove from internal evidence that Shakespeare must have had extensive military experience. Foot's Shelley is "a man with revolutionary ideas" that by a remarkable coincidence turn out to be Paul Foot's ideas:
Shelley wanted the truth about repression and exploitation to go ringing through each heart and brain, so that each heart and brain would unite in action to end that repression and exploitation. So, particulanly in his later poems, he concentrated all his mastery of language, all his genius with rhyme and rhythm into translating the ideas of the revolution to the masses.After 160 years he survives for us not as a lyric poet but as one of the most eloquent agitators of all time. That is why we must read him, learn him, teach him to our children. He will help us to communicate our contempt for the corporate despotism under which we live and our faith in the revolutionary potential of the multitude.
To say this is a misreading of Shelley is to understate the case. Foot's wider incomprehension is of poetry itself. In his political prose, Shelley explicitly rejected Foot's "ideas of the revolution". He believed in social reform by peaceful means. In his Declaration of Rights he wrote:
No man has a right to disturb the public peace by personally resisting the execution of a law, however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason to promote its repeal.
If we're going to play at snatching a poet's reputation to bolster modern political views, I think I'll appropriate Shelley for David Blunkett's stress on social improvement through a building of moral character. Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam both stress a moral revolution in concert with a change in the temporal order. Prometheus Unbound expresses a liberal politics of forgiveness, not revolution, and an awareness of the destructiveness of revolt. With these words Prometheus repents of the curse that he had called down on Jupiter:
It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;/ Grief for a while is blind, and so was mine./ I wish no living thing to suffer pain.
Foot's exposition of Shelley's poetical worth is as philistine in its way as the right-wing populism that decries experimental art. The value of poetry lies not in "translating ideas to the masses" but in creating worlds of imaginative experience for the reader and allowing him to explore them. Certainly poetry and other forms of literature have the power to shape our external world and influence our ideas of how that world should be ordered. But literature makes us at home in the world by explicating how things feel - the life of the mind and the emotions - as well as by explaining how the world is.
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Clive James, then television critic of The Observer, watched an edition of the BBC programme Question Time and wrote about the contrast between two members of the panel:
Paul Foot sat relaxed under his re-entry vehicle hairstyle and pithily made points. The admiral [Lord Hill-Norton], burdening himself with that upper-class drawl by which near inarticulacy presumes to disguise itself as a stiff upper lip, could not convey even the simplest opinion in under five minutes and looked outraged when Robin [Day] cut him short. Yet forced to choose between the admiral's view of life and Paul Foot's most people would probably choose the admiral's, if only because it shows fewer signs of having been hatched in a cosy upper-middle-class incubator. Paul is absolutely certain that outmoded institutions must be swept away. You have to be brought up in sheltered circumstances to have that absolute certainty.
Press coverage over the past week has underlined that Paul Foot was held in high regard and affection by very many people. If he had ever managed to escape his absolute certainty borne of sheltered circumstances, presumably there would be fewer of them.
UPDATE: A correspondent quite correctly upbraids me for my hyperbolic description of the ranking of Foot's book Red Shelley. There are, of course, many bad books on literary subjects, and I was meaning to exclude the obvious crank theories such as those on the authorship of Shakespeare (on which subject my favourite of all web sites does a valiant job of refuting the literary equivalents of the UFO conspiracy theorists). Let us say merely that Red Shelley is a bad book that perpetrates anachronisms, unwarranted inferences and misinterpretations. I'll try and post a longer explanation for that judgement later in the week, as I am an enthusiast for Shelley, but note here merely that by imposing a retrospective taxonomy of Shelley's political beliefs (e.g. a misconceived attempt to explicate the poet's wavering attitude to means of social change), Foot ends up looking at the wrong bits entirely. The essence of Prometheus Unbound, for example, is not the overthrow of Jupiter by Demogorgon (and Demogorgon is not the masses), but the hymns of transcendental humanism that make up the fourth act.
A couple of suggestions for illuminating future pieces you could write:
1. Something on the frequency with which the press and (even senior members of) the legal professions misunderstand or display ignorance of Bayes' theorem in cases involving DNA evidence.
2. Something about the political use of violence against civilians. (For instance, you frequently and rightly condemn the use of suicide bombing of civilian targets by terrorists in Israel. I haven't seen you condemn killings of civilians by the IDF during its anti-terrorist operations but presumably we can take it as given that you silently condemn these also. Similarly and equally reasonably the other day you condemned the suggestion of Eric Hobsbawm that, "the loss [i.e. murder] of 15, 20 million people might have been justified" to build "the radiant tomorrow" in the Soviet Union. But, equally, you frequently mention your support for Britain's nuclear deterrent -- and above you excoriate Enoch Powell for his opposition to it -- and therefore advocate a policy by British governments of, should circumstances require it, killing millions of civilians using the weapons which make up that deterrent. Some readers might identify hypocrisy here; it would be useful for you to explain why they are mistaken.)
Posted by: Chris Lightfoot | July 27, 2004 at 10:23 AM
I'm sure the Telegraph reported that evidence confirmed 'beyond doubt' the guilt of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. I've seen no explanation yet as to why DNA evidence cannot be planted.
Posted by: John Green | July 27, 2004 at 11:02 AM
Thank you for your helpful and interesting suggestions, which I'll certainly consider carefully. I'd like to correct you, though, on one important point and one trivial one. My sentiments on the killing of civilians by the IDF in anti-terrorist campaigns are explicit. I wrote last month:
I don't recall having posted specifically on Britain's nuclear deterrent, as I don't think independent British weapons add much to the effect of the extended deterrence of the US nuclear guarantee under Nato. But I do support Nato's nuclear deterrent posture, and as you rightly note, I don't consider there is any hypocrisy in my holding that position simultaneously with my views on terrorist violence against civilians.
Posted by: Oliver Kamm | July 27, 2004 at 11:08 AM
I've seen no explanation yet as to why DNA evidence cannot be planted.
There wouldn't have been any point in planting such evidence back in 1962, as the relevant technology was still decades away from introduction.
And while it might have been possible to interfere with the Hanratty evidence in (much) more recent years, it's hard to see what would have been gained by it, given that the man was long dead and the relevant officers in the case either dead or retired.
Surely it would make far more sense (if only in wild conspiracy theory terms, which I agree stretches the term somewhat) if the evidence had been tampered with in such a way as to suggest Hanratty was actually innocent?
Posted by: Michael | July 27, 2004 at 11:23 AM
"I've seen no explanation yet as to why DNA evidence cannot be planted."
What they planted the evidence on the off chance that DNA testing would be invented a few decades later?
"Something on the ....the legal professions misunderstand or display ignorance of Bayes' theorem in cases involving DNA evidence."
It has been a while since I did Bayes theorem at university, but I was under the impression that it is only important in DNA evidence at trial if the probabilty of a defendant's guilt without the DNA evidence is very low. Given that Hanratty was convicted without DNA evidence that isn't the case here. It has been a while since I did Statistics so I could be wrong.
Posted by: Ross | July 27, 2004 at 11:27 AM
I hadn't seen Michael's post before I put mine up, so apologies for repeating his point.
Posted by: Ross | July 27, 2004 at 11:30 AM
Apologies to those who assumed I was referring to the planting of DNA evidence specifically in the Hanratty case. My point was related to the use of the term 'beyond doubt' by the Telegraph and the suggestion that cases are necessarily more watertight on the basis of DNA evidence.
Posted by: John Green | July 27, 2004 at 11:38 AM
I've met Tony Gregston, he's an SPGB member, and very upset about Foot's campaign. That said, Foot based his position of rejecting the DNA result on the basis of some evidence, that Hanratty had an alibi that put him somewhere else at the time. On that basis, where you have a contradiction in the evidence, you have to try and resolve this. I'm not saying Foot resolved it correctly, but his position *did*, pace Kamm, have some basis in fact beyond faith.
Posted by: Red Deathy | July 27, 2004 at 12:29 PM
Oliver -- apologies; I had forgotten your 21st June piece. (Plainly I had read it, since I commented on it. Oops.)
On the question of deterrence I had interpreted your description (e.g. on 2nd April this year) of the 1980s Labour policy of unilateral disarmament as "disgraceful" as indicating your support for maintaining the independent deterrent. (I'll also say that, while "nuclear deterrent posture" is a useful shorthand for those who are already familiar with the area, it is a fairly uninformative euphemism for everyone else....)
Ross's point about Bayes' theorem and the Hanratty case is sound, which is why my suggestion above didn't refer to Hanratty specifically. It was, however, motivated by the use of language in the two extracts Oliver quoted.
Posted by: Chris Lightfoot | July 27, 2004 at 01:39 PM
"Foot's Shelley is "a man with revolutionary ideas" that by a remarkable coincidence turn out to be Paul Foot's ideas"
Hmmmmmmm, you haven't actually read Red Shelley have you?
Posted by: Stan | July 27, 2004 at 07:45 PM
The Islamic terrorists intend by the very nature of their acts to kill civilians. Are you (Chris Lightfoot) claiming that the intention of the IDF is to kill civilians as an end in itself ? That is a very broad slur.
And, are you aware that there is very good evidence that there were armed persons in the group of civilians that I presume you are referring to, in Gaza, and that they were in fact sheltering behind children, who they had specifically placed or at the very least encouraged to be in front of them. Can you truly compare such situations and say they are morally equivalent ? Frankly, you use civilians in general, and children specifically, in such a way, then you are specifically responsible for any harm that befalls them.
Posted by: Ed Snack | July 27, 2004 at 11:22 PM
"Hmmmmmmm, you haven't actually read Red Shelley have you?"
That book, and many others....
Posted by: Oliver Kamm | July 27, 2004 at 11:22 PM
Had I wished to make such a claim, I would have done so. NEXT!
Posted by: Chris Lightfoot | July 28, 2004 at 12:11 AM
Chris: I think the more interesting question is, why does Israel have to brought into this discussion - and just about every other discussion that I look at? Whatever the subject, eventually, Israel/Palestine is going to put in appearance, otherwise it fizzles out. Why? Is this really the biggest issue in the world today?
And why does a condemnation of terrorism aimed deliberately at civilians - something which I would have thought any decent person would agree with - have to be "balanced" by a condemnation of IDF killings of civilians, which are generally the regrettable side effect of dealing with terrorism? Are Israelis the only soldiers killing civilians in the course of combatting terrorism or defending their country?
Posted by: ilana | July 28, 2004 at 12:33 PM
I gave that as an example because it is a topic which Oliver often covers.
When such deaths are regrettable and avoidable they should be condemned. Often -- as when the IDF uses guided missiles, anti-tank rockets, remote-controlled bulldozers or tanks in built-up areas -- they are avoidable.
Posted by: Chris Lightfoot | July 28, 2004 at 01:38 PM
Psst. They would have been avoided altogether had not Arafat & Co. launched and continued their terror war against Israel almost four years ago.
(Yes, yes, I know. Irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant....)
Posted by: Barry Meislin | July 28, 2004 at 01:42 PM
Oliver, a few points:
Foot was not necessarily being irrational in rejecting the Hanratty DNA data. If you have several pieces of evidence pointing to conclusion A and you discover another piece of evidence (x) pointing to B, then the tendency is to regard (x) as an anomaly until further research has been carried out. You will perhaps say that in this case (x) constituted irrefutable proof. The problem with that is that Foot had no knowledge of DNA testing and to accept the DNA evidence would have meant submitting to an argument from (scientific) authority. Of course, Foot should doubtless have tried to familiarise himself with DNA testing but his initial position is not as unreasonable as you suggest. .
‘Foot was a longstanding public advocate for a party that in the Iraq war called for military victory for Baathist tyranny.’ This is a rather skewed proposition. Compare: ‘Michael Foot is a longstanding advocate of a party that placed restrictions on union recognition in 1998.’
‘The 1970s were the period of Foot's greatest activity as a propagandist for Socialist Worker. The deadening of his prose and the crudeness of his analysis are exemplified in his booklet written for the launch of the Socialist Workers' Party.’ Well yes, of course; he’s agreed to lend his name and his writing to party objectives – such works are scarcely ‘his’ at all, i.e., they throw little light on the individuality of Paul Foot, other than underlining his willingness to submit himself and his intellect to the discipline of a collectivity. Such writings are barely part of his ‘oeuvre’.
Works such as ‘Why You Should Be A Socialist’ are not of course why people are now writing ‘encomia’ to Paul Foot. This is not an irrelevant point. Imagine, on Pinter’s death, if I were to write an obituary/ ‘assessment’ talking mainly about his screenplays, poems, and attacks on American foreign policy. It would be partly disingenuous in so far as the very reason for writing the obituary is being contradicted by its chosen content. Had Paul Foot been only a prominent SWP member his death would have registered on the public Richter scale a few notches below Tony Cliff’s.
You’ve already retracted your comment about Red Shelley being ‘the worst book published on a literary subject since the war’ (sadly it isn’t), so I won’t comment on that other than to say that it isn’t of course a scholarly work, it’s fundamentally Paul Foot singling out a precursor and also trying to wrest Shelley away from the some of the very a-political readings which were current at the time.
I disagree with some of what you say on Shelley and on poetry in general, but that's another subject!
Posted by: mark.b | July 28, 2004 at 02:44 PM
On the subject of DNA tests:
The tests claim to be accurate to about 1 in a billion. I take that to mean about 6 people worldwide would produce positive results for any test.
Bayes therom deals with false positives. The FBI tried an experiment some time ago, sending 2 completely different samples ( one from a supposed suspect, one sample from blood on an imagined victim ) to a few hundred different labs a few years ago, to "verify" their findings that the sample matched, which they did not.
2% of labs reported that the samples matched. This clearly blows away the accuracy of DNA tests, if Baye's therom holds. In short, if you could test 100 million people in the immediate vacinty of the murder ( or say, we had them on file), you would expect 2 million and 1 positives results from the sample, 2 million of them false positives. Which narrows nothing down.
Of course this 2% figure may represent a very high end - lazy lab technicians probably did not even do the tests and agreed with the FBI without trying; or when they saw different results, distrusted their own equipment. However, a clever laywer could work it in as a defence.
Posted by: eoin | July 28, 2004 at 04:54 PM
"When such deaths are regrettable and avoidable they should be condemned"
Though I condemn the Nazis for their brutality, I also condemn the RAF for their mass-murder of innnocent German civilians in Dresden.
Though I condemn the occasional brutality of the Stern Gang, I also condemn Britain for her quite calculated anti-Semitic immigration policy which directly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Holocaust.
Though I condemn the occasional brutality of Irgun, I also condemn the vicious anti-Semitic policies adopted by the post-war British Labour government in Palestine.
Though I condemn Milosevic, I also condemn the mass-murder carried out by the RAF against the innocent civilian population of Serbia.
Though I condemn Saddam Hussein, I also condemn the UN for imposing sanctions against Iraq which directly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
Though I condemn Ariel Sharon for his negligence at Sabra and Shatila in not properly overseeing Israel's Christian allies, I also condemn the negligence and rank cowardice of the EU in turning its back as one million innocent civilians were hacked to death in a few short weeks in Rwanda.
I condemn China for the many thousands of Tibetans she has murdered.
I condemn Russia for the genocide she has committed in Chechnya.
The measured and humane methods adopted by Israel to counter a most ruthless enemy have in fact proved remarkably effective. Had Israel adopted the barbarism of a Britain or a Russia, there would now be a hundred thousand Palestinian dead. Had Israel, at great cost to her herself, not gone into Jenin on foot, and employed British tactics instead, the Palestinian death toll would have been in the many thousands and not around sixty (most of whom were "militants").
Posted by: Heidi | July 28, 2004 at 05:58 PM
A spellbinding rhetorical display, Heidi. Erm, just out of interest, do you have an opinion on Paul Foot?
Posted by: e.a. | July 28, 2004 at 07:28 PM
Wow interesting list...wtf relevance does it have to this post? Or did you just want to slam the British for shits & giggles?
Posted by: Andrew Ian Dodge | July 29, 2004 at 04:14 PM
To cut to the chase:
Charming eccentricities, misplaced idealisms, or quaint perversities aside,
1. Why might a brilliant thinker, a talented writer, a sensitive humanist have thrown his support behind a system that slaughtered tens of millions and imprisoned hundreds of millions more?
2. And might a socially progressive individual have decided to believe and to support murderous tyrants, liars, and terrorists?
And the answers are (answer is?):....
Posted by: Barry Meislin | July 29, 2004 at 04:43 PM
Should be:
2. And why might...
Posted by: Barry Meislin | July 29, 2004 at 04:44 PM
And the answer is...
well, for one thing, "brilliant thinkers" often hold greater store by the reality of their own thoughts than unpalatable realities. When reality disproves theory, deny reality. (copyright - Marxists against Praxis)
Posted by: John Green | July 29, 2004 at 05:13 PM
sorry. Too much reality, man. But you know what I mean.
Posted by: John Green | July 29, 2004 at 05:15 PM