Oliver Kamm

Palestine Solidarity and antisemitism

Who said this?

[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously. It is beyond doubt that Zionists, the most radical, racist and nationalistic Jews around, have already managed to turn America into an Israeli mission force. The world's number one super power is there to support the Jewish state's wealth and security matters. The one-sided pro-Zionist take on the Israeli­ Palestinian conflict, the American veto against every 'anti-Israeli' UN resolution, the war against Iraq and now the militant intentions against Syria, all prove beyond doubt that it is Zionist interests that America is serving. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least. Whether the Americans enjoy the deterioration of their state's affairs will no doubt be revealed soon.

The former Klansman David Duke? The Holocaust denier David Irving? Ernst Zundel, author of The Hitler We Loved and Why?

No, none of these. In fact I've already quoted the passage and identified its author in an earlier post. This tireless propagandist for Jewish conspiracy theory - a man who believes that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately depicts the state of modern America - is a former Israeli reservist now resident in the UK, the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon.

Atzmon is quite the poster-boy for far-Left and anti-Israel events and causes. He was an invited speaker at the Socialist Workers' Party jamboree Marxism 2004 last month, having been commended by Socialist Worker for his "fearless tirades against Zionism". Next month he turns up in Leicester promoting the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who proudly state:

Jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon (www.gilad.co.uk) is a committed anti-Zionist and supporter of the Palestinians. Leicester PSC is immensely pleased that he and his superb band, The Orient House Ensemble, have agreed to do this benefit as the first date in their tour promoting their new album, musiK.

I argued in the previous post (and I'm afraid I'm about to return to the subject, for there is much to say on it) that the far-Right has in recent years refined its campaigning away from know-nothing nativism to stress instead virulent antisemitism and hostility to democracy. It is a particularly dangerous phenomenon, because the casual indulgence and even overt espousal of antisemitism is increasingly a feature of parts of the Left that I have been discussing. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign wishes to be taken seriously as "a source of accurate and reliable information on the Palestine-Israel conflict and the social and political conditions within Palestine". It clearly needs to start gathering accurate and reliable information on the state of modern antisemitism.

"Fascism and the Left": Nick Cohen responds

The Observer columnist Nick Cohen has written to me about my post on Fascism and the Left, which stemmed from his article in the New Statesman last week on the supersession of the principled Left. He says:

Many thanks for your kind words and mild criticism.... I accept everything you say, but still think you're wrong. What is novel is that no one from the Marxist tradition has ever embraced theocracy before. I'm sorry to quote myself - but then if I don't, who will? - but as I say in my latest book: 'Marx abominated religion. For the crime of preferring feudal bureaucracy to bourgeois democracy he would have tied copies of Das Kapital around the necks of the SWP leaders and thrown them into the Thames.' Marx saw himself as a part of the Enlightenment tradition. What's left of the far left is embracing the Counter Enlightenment. This is new.

You are right about the 1930s and the similarities between Lenin and Mussolini. But you're missing the wilful determination of many on the left to abandon what was for better or for worse their basic world view and go through a shameful and laughable inversion of their principles. As I also discuss in my book, there are good reasons for this, not least the absolute failure of Marxist Leninism. You might reply that what went on in the 1930s was worse, and it was. Or that if there had been religious totalitarian regimes around at the time they would have been supported. Maybe that's true too. But there weren't, and not just Marxists but many others on the left prided themselves on their rejection of superstition and rule by priests. That's the principle which has gone and in the process of losing it lots of people are making a nonsense of everything they profess to believe.

In other words, by maintaining there's nothing new under the sun, you're actually letting your opponents off the hook. (Bet no one's accused you of that before.)

I have written back:

Many thanks for your message, which I'm very pleased to have.... You're right about the novelty of Marxist support for theocracy. I said it was unusual, but I ought to have said instead that it was unprecedented. The nearest equivalent I can think of is the sympathy extended to Iran's revolution by Richard Falk - but we can charitably assume he had no idea what he was talking about.

But I don't agree that embrace of the Counter-Enlightenment is the essence of the SWP's rejection of the principles of the traditional Left. You believe I'm letting them off the hook by downplaying that element of their apostasy. But imagine if the party's position were one of 'critical support' for Saddam Hussein as a secular moderniser against Wahhabism and Shi'ah fundamentalism. They would attack Saddam for his compromises with political Islam, while acknowledging that these were expedients forced upon him by the obduracy of US foreign policy and the rapacious character of US oil interests. Their argument would be that theocracy at home and abroad could be defeated only by an appeal to international workers' solidarity, of which Saddam, as a Third World populist and economic nationalist, was an imperfect instrument but the most progressive force available (like Chavez). This would be a secular case reminiscent of many other Trotskyite campaigns (c.f. the Spartacists' support for the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan). The civilised Left would not in these circumstances say that the SWP's position had been sanitised of its worst elements and allies; the party would be supporting as a matter of ideology (and not merely realpolitik, as the US did in the 1980s - grotesque and myopic as that stance was) a tyrant whose regime was, as you point out, modelled on Nazi Germany and which received strong support from Joerg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen. The SWP's support for fascism (notably including its wish for Saddam's regime to be militarily victorious), and not its deference to superstition, is its defining characteristic.

You overlook the fact that, whereas the SWP's position is indeed unprecedented for a Marxist party, contemporary fascism is also staking out previously-uncharted territory. So far from believing that there's nothing new under the sun, I consider that both sides have changed radically in the last 20 years. You're concentrating on the 'left' side of that symbiotic relationship to the exclusion of other ideological currents that serve as political Islam's apologists or supporters. The far-Right is much more of a global and insurrectionist movement than it was 20 years ago. The racism and malevolence are constants, but the strident nativism has become less significant relative to violent antisemitism and hostility to democracy. The far-Right is becoming much closer to the "pure" academic model of fascism as (in Roger Eatwell's words) "a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national radical Third Way" than it was when led by buffoons such as George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party or John Tyndall of the National Front. The spark for the creation of an "International Third Position" is, of all things, support for political Islam. Partly this is opportunistic - Libya has dried up as a source for funds for extremist groups, but Iran hasn't - and partly it's because Islamism is seen as a potent force to counter Jewish financial power. On those grounds, Horst Mahler of the German NPD supported the destruction of the Twin Towers, just as he'd supported the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics when he was a leader of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Unlike Mahler, the SWP is not a supporter of Islamist terrorism; it is an apologist for Islamist terrorism. I cited its position on 9/11, which has its counterpart in the language used by far-Right ideologues. The late William Pierce, leader of the US National Alliance (and author of the survivalist novel that served as the inspiration for the Soho pub-bomber David Copeland), blamed the attacks on the alienation and hatred generated by the United States. The French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson described the US as the real terrorist. David Irving compared the deaths in NY ("by 19 intelligent and virile young Muslims") with the bombing of Dresden and drew predictable conclusions about who were the real war criminals.

Unlike the NPD or the Front National, the SWP is not a party of the far-Right - but it has taken the route common to other Leninist organisations I've cited, of support for fascism. I can see why you want to stress the party's distinctiveness apart from that position. Its stance on political Islam is indeed unlike anything else on the Left. But that's because it's the only organisation on the Left to replicate the ideology of the contemporary far-Right. Yes, that's new, because not even the most reactionary among other totalitarian-Left organisations is stupid enough to be that consistent.

Blogging commentary II

I should have added one thing when explaining that I was adopting a new policy on Comments (i.e. not to have them). I should be glad to receive comments directly, and I shall assume that I may post them on the site, unless I am specifically requested not to.

I ought perhaps to explain as well, in case it affects some readers' decisions on whether to write to me, that I do receive a lot of messages - daily, and usually in volume - that conform to an almost invariable type. These observe animatedly and discursively that I am a banker (true) and a journalist for the capitalist press (untrue), that "banker" is rhyming slang for what I in fact am (you don't say), that I am being less than honest in describing this blog's position as left-wing (as it most certainly is), and - a less frequent but still regular line - that I must come from a long line of Nazis (apparently on the doubtfully consistent grounds that, first, I have a German name and go to Germany often, and, secondly, I am pro-Israel).

Please be aware, if you are planning to write to me along similar lines, that your sentiments are not novel and are thus already known to me. Moreover, whereas I used to take inordinate pleasure in replying to messages of this type, my wife has lately forbidden me to enter into any similar correspondence with anyone, ever. I can't even promise to read them. I'm sorry, but there it is.

Fascism and the Left

I've only just caught up with Nick Cohen's fine article in The New Statesman last week inferring from the recent contortions of the traditional Left that "the principled left was a 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon". The article echoes the philosopher Michael Walzer's remarkable essay Can there be a decent Left?, written shortly after the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban. If the Left comprised mainly people such as Cohen and Walzer, then the answer to Walzer's rhetorical question would be straightfoward. But the evidence Cohen presents is dispiriting: indifference to the liberation struggle against Saddam Hussein's regime, and alliance with clerical reaction. From it, he argues:

The obvious conclusion to draw at the moment is that we are living in a rerun of the 1930s, and the liberal left is once again sucking up to tyranny. It is easy to think that way. Look at how the democratic left in Britain proved its futility and played into Tony Blair's hands when it allowed the Marxist-Leninist Socialist Workers Party to lead the anti-war movement. Look at the Independent, which has abandoned its founding principle of separating news from comment, so its front pages can imitate the manners of the Mail and scream at readers that the troubles of the world are the fault of democratic governments.

Yet the idea that history is repeating itself fails to take account of the weirdness of the times. If the fact that the anti-war movement was as much under the control of the religious fundamentalists of the Muslim Association of Britain as the political totalitarians of the SWP doesn't convince you, look again at the three examples I gave. They are all symptoms of a left that has swerved to the right.

I agree with these strictures on the conduct of the Left, but I disagree with Cohen's judgement that that conduct is unprecedented - that "nothing like this has happened before". There is certainly a division on the Left, between its better traditions of internationalism and democracy on the one hand and the reactionary trends identified by Cohen; but the division, though it has lately taken an unusual form, is a longstanding one.

The novelty of today's anti-democratic Left lies in its alliance with clerical fascism. Cohen performs a public service in denouncing it. I have written about this phenomenon myself once or twice, while the invaluable Harry's blog has analysed it at length (to the distraction of some of its readers, judging by the comments box). It's worth recapping the issue.

The Muslim Association of Britain, co-sponsor of the huge Hyde Park anti-war demonstration last year with the Stop the War Coalition (a front organisation for the Socialist Workers' Party) and CND, is a frank advocate of views that range from the authoritarian to the malevolent. So is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who recently visited Britain and whom I cited here. I don't regard a moral objection to abortion as an inherently immoral position (though I do regard it as a mistaken and illiberal one); but the Sheikh's propositions that homosexuality is an "evil and unnatural practice", that wife-beating is permissible in some circumstances, that suicide terrorism against Israeli civilians is unexceptionable, are despicable. The MAB is moreover a leading theocratic voice of antisemitism, as I explained here. A civilised Left would campaign against these forces. The totalitarian Left allies with them.

Cohen is right to refer to this trend in campaigning of the "political totalitarians of the SWP". I've commented before on the irony that the SWP has concluded that whereas Jewish nationalism is oppressive and racist, Muslim particularism is progressive. One of the most remarkable articles I can recall in an ostensibly secular Left-wing journal appeared last autumn in International Socialism Journal, organ of the Socialist Workers' Party. (I should explain, for those unfamiliar with the practice of Leninist parties, that International Socialism Journal is not a magazine like, say, The New Statesman or Prospect, where writers of different points of view are represented. A party that operates on principles of democratic centralism sets a line, which its publications then adhere to.) The article, entitled Global and local echoes of the anti-war movement: a British Muslim perspective and written by a Birmingham anti-war activist called Salma Yaqoob, maintained:

The challenge for many non-Muslims, especially in the West, is to admit the possibility that there are values as universally valid as their own, and that it does not have a monopoly over the production of modernity. For example, the breadth and complexity of the Islamic movement and the Muslim presence, with its contribution to Western culture historically and its current role in extending modernity in the Middle East, needs to be acknowledged.

Here, by contrast, is my position as a liberal, secular, European leftist. I proclaim the "universal validity" of the western Enlightenment values of liberal political rights, free expression, scientific inquiry, religious liberty, the rule of law, limited (not 'minimal') government, female emancipation, and separation of civil and religious authority. Anyone who subscribes to those broad principles - whatever his view on second-order issues such as the right balance between private enterprise and the public sector in the economy - is my ally. Anyone who doesn't, isn't.

For a progressive, there can be no compromise on these principles. Their abandonment by many was obvious 15 years ago when British Muslims campaigned vigorously for the banning of a novel by Salman Rushdie that they regarded as deeply offensive to their faith. Some Labour MPs, such as the egregious Keith Vaz in Leicester and Max Madden in Bradford, spoke at demonstrations where the book was burned. Vaz even referred to Muslims' "right" to have the book banned - a right that doesn't exist in a free society. (I ought to add that conservatives here and abroad were at least as feeble. President Bush Snr described the Ayatollah's fatwa as 'deeply offensive', which was hardly adequate to the gravity of the issue. At least he didn't go as far as the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, who declared with callous stupidity, "Both Mr Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom of speech.")

Now, here we have a far-Left political party (which could itself be said to represent a particular Enlightenment tradition - the totalitarianism of Rousseau's General Will) that attributes the "production of modernity" to political Islam. Salma Yaqoob cites as an analogy the campaigns of Martin Luther King. That is a grotesque elision. King's religious faith was his personal inspiration for a great moral campaign of social reform; more than that, the religious tradition he exemplified is a valuable civic resource for American democracy. But there is a fundamental difference between the call to America's collective conscience represented by King's religious imagery, and the notion that a religion may legislatively dictate its own conscience. The latter notion is evident in Yaqoob's extraordinary insistence on Islam's "current role in extending modernity in the Middle East". That "role" is not remotely analogous to the religiously-inspired campaigning of, say, Protestant Churches in a polity that explicitly rejects religious tests for public office. As Gilles Kepel notes in his excellent book Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, there is no counterpart in political Islam to the separation of church and state, even in the obvious exceptional case:

Under Turkish secularism, which was unique in the Muslim world, the state did not remain neutral in religious matters, as it does in Western democracies, or aloof from religious activities. On the contrary, Turkey placed strict limits on those activities and exercised very careful control.... The secular character of the republic founded by Ataturk was the legacy of Comtean positivism, but it also owed a lot to the institutionalising of Islam by the Ottoman empire. One of the duties of the sheikh of Islam, chosen by the sultan-caliph, had been to make sure that the state's authority was not undermined by overzealous clerics.

All of this is an unusual departure on the Left. I know of only one obvious contemporary equivalent, the Trotskyite Parti des Travailleurs in Algeria, which likewise is in alliance with political Islam and serves as ideological apologist for Islamist terrorism. If you think that's an unreasonable description of the SWP, recall that the party recoiled from condemning the act of slamming aeroplanes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. At a meeting of the Socialist Alliance executive on 20 September 2001, the SWP stated its position unambiguously:

We do not believe that the use of the word ‘condemn’ is appropriate in relation to the tragic events in the US. Clearly we do not support the attacks on working class people and it should go without saying that we oppose the strategy of individual terrorism. This would be our preferred way of stating our case. But the language of ‘condemnation’ is that which is always required of socialists and national liberation movements by the media and the ruling class. It would have been better to avoid it for this reason.

The most important task of socialists is to patiently explain why the US government is hated so much and why there are people who are prepared to kill themselves and many others in opposing the US. The answer is US imperialist foreign policy.

At the moment we are in the eye of a media storm directed at mobilising international and popular domestic support for a bloody and destructive imperial intervention. We should not allow either the really terrible events of September 11 in New York or the media campaign that has followed to drive us to use language that we may regret when the real balance of terror is revealed by the war the major powers are now planning.

(Note in particular the disgusting euphemism in the first sentence of that passage. The calculated murder of thousands of civilians is a "tragic event", and thus presumably comparable to a natural disaster such as a flood or earthquake. Who could lack the elementary decency to exculpate barbarism in this way? Well, now you know.)

But while political Islam is an unusual ally for the totalitarian Left, fascism is not - and the type of political Islam that is represented in the forces of the SWP-dominated Respect "coalition" is aptly described (even allowing for the Catholic derivation of the term) as clerical fascism. As Walter Laqueur notes in his succinct survey of Fascism: Past, Present, Future:

The affinities between the Muslim Brotherhood [of which the Muslim Association of Britain is an offshoot] and fascism were observed in the 1930s, as was the fact that the extreme Muslim organisations supported the Axis powers in World War II. In a remarkable book published in 1937, a German Catholic writer [Edgar Alexander, Der Mythus Hitler] labelled Nazism a new political Islam and Hitler-Mohammed its prophet. Why this "new German" (neudeutsch) Islam? According to Hitler from Mein Kampf onward, the sword has always been the carrier, prophet and propagator of a new religion: "Hatred was always the main moving force of all revolutionary change, pervasive fanaticism and even hysteria were impelling the masses rather than any scientific perception."

There is a substantial academic literature - associated principally with the Israeli historian Ze'ev Sternhell, the late French historian (and ex-communist) Francois Furet, and the very unreliable German historian Ernst Nolte - on how far Marxism (especially in its Leninist variant) and fascism share ideological origins. In his great work The Passing of An Illusion Furet goes furthest in identifying the important influence of Lenin on Mussolini and Hitler. That debate is a subject for a separate post, but I note here merely the unacademic and entirely commonsensical view of the perennial US Socialist Party candidate for President, Norman Thomas, in 1948, that Marxism of the Leninist variety was "Red fascism". The evidence lies in the brutal character of every single regime modelled on Leninist principles, and in the conduct of Leninist parties. I mentioned some aspects of this record in a post a few weeks, and as it caused outrage among a lot of my correspondents I'll return to the subject now.

There are numerous cases of Leninist and pre-Leninist organisations and theorists extending support to fascism, and in some cases biological racism and antisemitism. It is for this reason that I disagree with Nick Cohen's judgement: we aren't in a new political era; history is indeed repeating itself. Today's alliance between the totalitarian Left and fascism is the heir to an identifiable, ignoble tradition. This tendency dates at least to Ludwig Woltmann, a theorist of the German Social Democratic Party and author in 1890 of what was then regarded (not least by Lenin in his own exposition of Marx) as an outstanding treatment of Marxist theory, Der historische Materialismus. Woltmann then increasingly concentrated on Marx's references in Das Kapital to the constraints on labour productivity - which was, according to Marx, "fettered by physical conditions ... all referable to the constitution of man himself (race, etc.)". Marx, argued Woltmann, had acknowledged the role of racial characteristics in the development of society, but had stopped short of pursuing this insight. By the time of his death in 1907, Woltmann had succumbed altogether to the notion of race as the agent of social change. (I owe this historical example to A. James Gregor in his study of Marxism and fascism in the 20th century, The Faces of Janus.)

The analogy with the 1930s is not, as Nick Cohen suggests, that "the liberal left is once again sucking up to tyranny" (though as anyone familiar with the positions of The New Republic and the New Statesman at the time of the Moscow Trials will know, that is exactly what the liberal Left did). Rather, it is with Leninist organisations, within the Comintern and outside it, which allied with fascism. Several years before Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact, German communists anticipated that relationship by co-operating with the Nazis in the Prussian referendum of 1931 and the transport strike of 1932. Even communists who opposed the Comintern's refusal to support a popular front with the Social Democrats against Nazism later found that fascism was their natural political home: Jacques Doriot broke with the French Communists on this very issue before founding an explicitly fascist and antisemitic party, the Parti Populaire Francais. Japanese Marxism, both in the Communist Party and outside it, transformed itself wholesale between 1929 and 1933 into an ideology of economic nationalism, military aggrandisement and racial purity. These were not ideologically heterodox acts: they were conscious and faithful applications of Bolshevik strategy. As Richard Pipes notes in the final volume of his trilogy on Tsarist and revolutionary Russia, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924:

At their June 1923 Plenum, Radek and Zinoviev insisted that to break out of their isolation, the German Communists had to link up with the nationalistically minded elements. This was to be justified on the grounds that the nationalist ideology of "oppressed" nations, of which Germany was one, bore a revolutionary character. "In Germany," Radek said on this occasion, "the heavy stress on the nation is a revolutionary act."

Nick Cohen is thus in the interesting position of being a distinctive voice of a decent and perspicacious Left, whose stance is founded in part on an overestimate of the decency of the very tradition he distinguishes himself from:

Historians may see the similarities between the slave empires of Nazi Germany, communist Russia and Maoist China as more important than the differences, but the differences meant an enormous amount to millions of people at the time.

True, but not the whole story: to a particular tradition on the Left, the similarities between the first and second of those slave empires were more salient than the differences. Moreover, that part of the Left was being consistent, if abhorrent. As Richard Pipes observes:

[P]erhaps the most fundamental affinity among the three totalitarian movements [that came to power between 1917 and 1933] lay in the realm of psychology: Communism, Fascism and National Socialism exacerbated and exploited popular resentments - class, racial and ethnic - to win mass support and to reinforce the claim that they, not the democratically elected governments, expressed the true will of the people. All three appealed to the emotion of hate.

The totalitarian Left is not being false to its traditions in having campaigned explicitly (as the Socialist Workers' Party did) for military victory for the fascist tyranny of Saddam Hussein. It is being true to them. That part of the Left supports fascism, not out of idiosyncrasy but out of ideological consistency. Consequently, while being on the Left myself, I don't regard the wing of politics on which I stand as an essential unity. To me, the most important distinction in politics is that stated by the American Marxist philosopher Sidney Hook, in an address entitled 'A Critique of Conservatism' to a conference of Social Democrats USA in 1976. Hook concluded his critique with this prophetic observation:

The differences between conservatives and liberals [in the American sense], when the terms are reasonably construed, are family differences among adherents of a free society, defined as one whose institutions ultimately rest on the consent of those affected by their operations. When the security of a free society is threatened by aggressive totalitarianism, these differences must be temporarily subordinated to the common interest in its survival. There is always the danger that in the ever-present and sometimes heated struggles between liberals and conservatives, each group may come to fear the other more than their common enemy. If and when that happens, the darkness of what Marx called 'Asiatic despotism', in modern dress to be sure, will descend upon the world.

The Left is not dead. The totalitarian and pro-fascist wing of it is durable. The civilised Left, on whose behalf Sidney Hook was (so to speak) indefatigable and for which this blog stands, has the continuing obligation of confronting it with all the militancy we expend against its Right-wing equivalents.

Big Brother isn't watching us — but don't relax

The following article appears in The Times tomorrow.

CZESLAW MILOSZ, one of the noblest minds in the politics and literature of the past century, died on Saturday. In a long life he was both participant and sage in the conflict between the constitutional democracies of the West and communist totalitarianism. Having served as a cultural attaché in the Polish embassies in Paris and Washington, Milosz defected in 1951. The reasons he expounded were memorable. He declared that in communist societies writers had to “renounce the truth completely” even while daily observing “human tragedies in comparison with which the tragedies of antiquity pale into insignificance”.

It is unlikely that these words were in the mind of the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, when in an interview in yesterday’s Times he claimed that Britain risked emulating the type of society that Milosz escaped. The commissioner holds a useful but limited post — that of observing constraints in the State’s collection of information. But he appears to have set out to discredit it through trivial observation couched in extravagant rhetoric.

“I don’t want to start talking paranoia language,” said Mr Thomas, his indifference between noun and adjective serving as a cipher for his wider confusions, “but data protection has a strong continental European flavour. Some of my counterparts in Eastern Europe, in Spain, have experienced in the last century what can happen when government gets too powerful and has too much information on citizens.”

It turned out that the outrages the commissioner had in mind were government proposals for identity cards, a population register and a national database of juveniles.

How much information a democracy should amass on its citizens is plainly important. When we know that some British citizens support terrorist groups, then the balance between personal liberty and national security may need to be reassessed. There is a plausible case that better information would reduce the State’s intrusiveness for the peaceable, while circumscribing the activities of the malevolent. More widely, as governments have duties beyond public order and national security, welfare, for example, they require accurate records of earnings and employment.

None of the main parties shows much seriousness in this discussion. New Labour, while commendably concerned with the advancement of sexual freedom, has shown itself consistently obtuse in observing the bounds of legitimate authority in other matters of personal choice. The Conservatives disingenuously proclaim libertarian ends while promoting intervention on behalf of sectional interests, such as motorists. The Liberal Democrats rival the Information Commissioner for the enervating evasions of unthinking populism: commenting on Mr Thomas’s warnings, the party’s home affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, cocked his tin ear and helpfully lamented “the danger . . . that we are slipping into a Big Brother society by stealth”.

Yet ironically it is the pedestrian quality of mainstream politicians’ interventions that provides reassurance that the issue is marginal, a discussion about where the boundaries properly lie between privacy and civic obligation. Lacking sharply-defined ideological differences, Westminster politics has little sense of the malign, let alone totalitarian, as opposed to illiberal or merely incompetent, exercise of power.

The Information Commissioner offers a peculiarly British lament: it’s impossible to believe that he has thought much about the character of totalitarian societies, and in invoking their example he illustrates the parochial character of his concerns.

Exactly 20 years ago a writer who genuinely understood the character of totalitarianism, the Sovietologist Leopold Labedz wrote an apprehensive essay on the reputation of George Orwell. Throughout the year 1984 Orwell was the stuff of newspaper cliché about the characteristics of modern societies that his most celebrated novel had supposedly anticipated. Labedz counterposed Orwell’s metaphor for the character of totalitarian rule — “a boot stamping on a human face — forever” — with the observations of political and media commentators about . . . nothing in particular.

Among the culprits Labedz cited was the ever-superficial television anchorman Walter Cronkite, who in a two-hour documentary to mark Orwell’s achievement, apparently managed to avoid even a single mention of communism. To Cronkite, 1984 was just a jeremiad against technology. Unsurprisingly, given the advances in computing power, the spread of television, the use of polygraphs and so on, Cronkite found disquieting parallels with modern industrial societies.

Of this type of reasoning Labedz was scornful: “For Orwell the problem was the technology of power rather than the power of technology.” Orwell’s book’s aim was not to depict a science-fiction dystopia, but an actually existing state whose ideological millenarianism posed a threat to the values Orwell exemplified.

Historical parallels are always inexact and frequently a device for avoiding critical inquiry. But it is beyond serious argument that the Western democracies today contend with a totalitarian idea that is literally and not only metaphorically apocalyptic. The forces of theocratic totalitarianism aim at the destruction of Western civilisation and its replacement by a restored Caliphate. Armed with technologies that they must never secure, they could in principle inflict grievous harm on us and our way of life. The more our public servants talk of totalitarianism without really meaning it, the less serious will that threat be taken. That really would be, as the Information Commissioner put it, “a danger, yes”.

Foot again

At Harry's blog, Johann Hari kindly commends my long piece on Paul Foot of a couple of weeks ago (and, I note with complacency, immediately attracts the indignant attentions of two of his longstanding virtual stalkers - whom I am gratified to find that I have come to share with him). Johann's comment is so generous that I'm slightly embarrassed to be in the midst of writing a critical post on his recent Independent column attacking the 'totalitarian strains' in the Vatican. I ought at least to return the compliment by observing that he is one of few Independent writers who maintain what I took to be the critical spirit of that newspaper at its founding nearly two decades ago. The Independent has a genuinely excellent record of commentary by such writers as the late Peter Jenkins, Andrew Marr and the former economics editor Diane Coyle. The newspaper has in the past few years, however, abandoned that inquiring and heterodox approach in favour of exhortation for a predictable - by which I mean you can predict with complete certainty what the paper's view will be on any given subject, and find that view intruding into or even replacing altogether the news copy - set of political predilections. Not only in his support for the Iraq war, on which he was out of line with his colleagues and probably with most of his readers, but in his individual interpretations of a range of liberal causes (for example, making a well-judged intervention against the populist prejudices of the UK Independence Party, and observing the government's commendable approach to the eradication of anti-homosexual prejudice and discrimination), Johann is a distinctive and cogent commentator who is consistent with his newspaper's best traditions.

Since I wrote the piece, three further points have occurred to me to substantiate its main criticism - which is that Foot was effective when campaigning on smaller-scale cases of injustice or analysing individual politicians, but crippled by the crudity of his totalitarian ideology when dealing with larger themes.

First, I criticised Foot's tract Ireland: Why Britain Must Get Out (in the Chatto CounterBlasts series, 1989) for its heedlessness of the political consequences of the course he advocated. Foot maintained that an abrogation of the Union, so far from leading to civil war and the redrawing of the partition boundary in another place, would cause Ulster Protestants to "demand - and create - a carnival of peace, prosperity and progress, North and South". The awfulness of the cliches are testament to the vapidity of the thinking behind them, but what is more disturbing is the uninterest that Foot revealed in even the possibility that he might be wrong. He declared blithely: "The 'something worse' [than Direct Rule], therefore, is probably not so much a possible bloodbath as the fear of a 'defeat'." And that was it: having identified to his own satisfaction the ideological shiftiness of the British state, the hard physical reality of what would happen to the same Catholic civilians who had urged the introduction of troops in 1969 no longer interested him.

Secondly, in the same booklet, Foot showed himself remarkably trusting of official reports when they suited him. He asserted: "The Cameron Report [the Cameron Commission was set up by Terence O'Neill, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, in 1968] uncovered the vast network of discrimination and bigotry which the Northern state had become." There were many deplorable instances of discrimination under Stormont, but whether these were systematic (i.e. built into the structure of the state rather than remediable by reform) is an issue that you would have thought an investigative journalist would wish to pursue. There is no mention by Foot of independent studies such as that of Richard Rose of Strathclyde University in 1968 (and published in 1971) casting doubt on Cameron's conclusions (which were founded on a survey of just seven of the 68 local authories then extant).

Thirdly, I have to record my agreement - for the first time on this blog, so far as I recall - with John Pilger. Pilger lamented in The New Statesman a couple of weeks ago that the widespread affection and commendation of Foot's writings had failed to reflect how central how Foot's politics were to his entire output. The point is well-taken. Foot's writings are easy to become entranced with, to the detriment of assessing them politically. Yet the unexamined assumptions and the leaps of logic continually betray an indifference to the checks and balances, and the intractable character of conflicts of values, that are the stuff of democratic politics. In his polemic Red Shelley, Foot gushed, of Shelley's 'vision of poesy' (emphasis added):

Shelley was a master of words, of ryhme and rhythm. And he used his mastery to paint his pictures and his metaphors - from landscape, from the world of animals, from the deepest recesses of the imagination - to conjure up the ideas which he was expressing. He was not just an agitator. He was perhaps the most eloquent agitator of our time. Our world, like his world, need agitators. People's aspirations need to be lifted and guided into action....

Note that last sentence, which characterises the philosophy of the vanguard party that Foot devoted his campaigning energies to and which nicely echoes the totalitarian notion of a General Will waiting to be discovered. What is most interesting about its appearance in this weak and florid book is that it is exactly the authoritarian and reactionary aspects of Shelley's thinking that Foot is interested in. Shelley's famous essay A Defence of Poetry not only articulates a social vision, but places that social vision above the wishes and desires of the people the poet claims to be acting on behalf of. According to Shelley, the poet "not only beholds intensely the present as it is" but "discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered" (emphasis added). The critic Simon Haines writes of this passage from the Defence (in his excellent though hostile study Shelley: The Divided Self):

On this account of society ordinary people would have to accept that the poet-as-legislator was really discovering the 'laws' ordering it and not just making them.... [This] is precisely the difference between implicit teaching and unacknowledged legislating, between 'ought to be' and 'ought to be ordered'. The extra step is a dangerous one....

I entirely agree. As I wrote in my earlier discussion of Foot's treatment of Shelley, whereas Foot maintained that Shelley had been shorn of his political ideas by literary critics, in fact literary critics have generally done Shelley the justice of acknowedging the importance of those political ideas and noted their debilitating effect on the poetry. Those ideas were frequently confused; but Red Shelley tells us a lot more about the politics of Paul Foot than it does about the poetry and thought of his subject. So it is with much of the output of Paul Foot, a talented writer and an energetic campaigner who dissipated his skills and bequeathed a destructive legacy.

Blogging commentary

While I was away I temporarily (as I thought) suspended the 'comments' facility on this site. But after consulting one or two other bloggers about their own policies, and problems they have experienced in common with me, I've resolved to try the experiment of inviting readers to email me directly if they take issue (or indeed agree) with me, rather than reinstate the comments box at the moment. There are a number of reasons for this new tack, but none of them is that I wish to deter comments.

The paranoid style

Gerard Baker, writing in The Times, makes an important observation about the migration of a hoary political tradition:

This widely propagated conspiracist approach to politics is now largely the preserve of the Left. In the immediate post-Cold War period, conspiracy theorists used to be in the main nutty rightwingers, convinced that the federal government was after them in black helicopters. Now, intriguingly, conspiracy has become the basis for left-of-centre analysis. It was, after all, the basic proposition of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

I would recast this judgement slightly. Conspiracy theories do still have currency on the American Right, but only on its far fringes. The most mainstream figure (a strictly comparative term) among these elements is the Rev. Pat Robertson, a no-hope contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1988, whose absurd book The New World Order explains world events with reference to an international conspiracy of Freemasons and bankers. Robertson's theories became better-known as a result of a thoroughly muddled critique in the New York Review of Books by Michael Lind. Lind, unaware that the 'Secret Society' version of conspiracism is not the same as the 'Jews control the World' version, identified an antisemitism in Robertson's work that is not there. (I owe this useful distinction between parallel but discrete types of conspiracy theory to Daniel Pipes' sober and illuminating study Conspiracy. Pipes notes that not only Robertson has been misunderstood in this way: Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam is well-known for inflammatory statements about Jews, but in fact places more emphasis in its curious mix of theology and conspiracy theory on the role of Freemasons.)

Yet the nominally Left-wing variants of conspiracy theory enjoy, if not quite mainstream status, then certainly vogue, as the popularity of Michael Moore's film demonstrates. A hostile reviewer of Moore's most recent book (I think it was Alan Wolfe in The New Republic) described it as 'Chomsky for children', and the analogy is exact. Fifteen years ago Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman co-authored a book entitled Manufacturing Consent that has become a standard source in courses in media studies. While ostensibly a work of social science, the book is - contrary to its admirers' protestations - a conspiracy theory lightly disguised. The authors make much of five 'filters' that they apply to selected news stories, but their technique shorn of jargon and truisms (e.g. commercial news organisations aim to be profitable) reduces to pre-specifying what constitutes the 'progressive' side of the debate and then claiming that this voice is systematically excluded from the media.

There is a trivial sense in which their claim is right: many viewpoints (eugenics, for example) are not represented in the mainstream media. Yet the proper test is not whether a view is excluded, but whether it is excluded while being a credible alternative account of the news. In this respect, Chomsky and Herman do an excellent job of unintentionally undermining their own case by the volume of hair-raisingly heroic assumptions they incorporate into their own alternative account. They describe anti-Communism as a 'national religion', as if there were no important difference between the views of, say, Richard Nixon and the perennial Socialist Party candidate for President, Norman Thomas. They castigate the 'neo-Fascist national-security states of Latin America' but don't include in their stricture the police-state of Cuba. Most revealing of all, they observe indignantly that in the Cold War (this was in 1988) "rooting for 'our side' [is] considered an entirely legitimate news practice". Try transposing this complaint to, say, the propaganda of the German-American Bund in 1938 to see what's wrong with it. Honest journalism is characterised not by a studied neutrality between whatever protagonists are being described, but by a determination to describe the world accurately despite a reporter's inevitable subjectivity and partial information. A journalism that fails to remark on the substantive political distinction between the imperfect but free societies of the west and the tyrannies of the former eastern bloc is itself a political choice - one that explains nothing and obfuscates much. (Compare with the BBC's eschewal of the noun 'terrorist' - even resorting to the absurd description of Osama bin Laden as a 'Saudi-born militant', as if his distinguishing characteristic was the immoderation of his opinions.)

What I find perplexing about the liberal wing of American politics - my natural ideological allies, for I am a Labour voter in the UK and would be a registered Democrat if I were American - is the ease with which it now invokes populist language that is scarcely distinguishable from the Moore-Chomsky account of the way the world works. The notion that the war in Iraq was fought for US oil interests, the denunciation by Senator John Kerry of 'Benedict Arnold' corporations for outsourcing clerical or data-processing jobs overseas, the superstition that Rupert Murdoch's media outlets schemed for and secured an illegitimate win for Bush in the 2000 election, are all commonplace rhetorical tropes that go beyond policy argument to a more diffuse embitterment. This type of thing ought to be consigned to the fringes, and a mainstream party that adopts such notions deserves to end up there too.

UPDATE: Chris Lightfoot writes:

You go on and on about the fact that (e.g.) the BBC use the term `militant' to describe various kinds of terrorists. But you're presumably aware of the argument that, in order to be palatable to an audience outside the West -- and particularly in the Arab world -- the BBC avoids using terms like `terrorist'.

Do you advocate that the BBC alienate that audience by using the terms you prefer? If so, which media organisations do you think would replace it?

I advocate that the BBC describe the world as it is rather than regard the corporation's remit as avoiding damage to the sensibilities of certain audiences. That's one of the functions of public-service broadcasting.

UPDATE II: Matthew Turner writes:

Just to note that militant, according to my dictionary, means 'engaged in fighting or warfare'. Thus given this is a war we're fighting, surely it seems a very apt term. Also in terms of conspiracies you state, "notion that the war in Iraq was fought for US oil interests" is ludicrous. I don't know whether you're being clever with words here -- I agree the notion that Exxon made the US fight the war is ludicrous -- but in general I think the opposing view, that the war had nothing to do with US oil interests, is ludicrous. Most people with any role in British government I've spoken to believes it what the happy coincidence of UN resolutions, the perceived threat of WMD and the opportunity to control Iraq's oil reserves that led to the attack.

My objection to the BBC's use of 'militant' is that it's deliberately choosing a term that is not wrong but is ambiguous. It can refer to either actions or opinions. As Walter Laqueur comments in his his recent book No End to War: Terrorism in the 21st Century: "To call a terrorist an 'activist' or a 'militant' is to blot out the dividing line between a suicide bomber and the active member of a trade union or a political party or a club. It is bound to lead to constant misunderstanding." It's precisely that misunderstanding that the BBC relies upon in order not to upset parts of its audience, as Chris Lightfoot suggests above. I think that's a reprehensible practice.

I agree with the rest of Matthew's comments, though I would alter his phrase 'opportunity to control Iraq's oil reserves' to 'opportunity to remove control of Iraq's oil reserves from Saddam Hussein'.

Bernard Levin: an honest journalist

I'm very sorry to read of the death of the former columnist and critic Bernard Levin. Levin's columns in The Times were, with Clive James's television criticism in The Observer, models of literate, witty and erudite commentary for which my parents were enthusiastic and that I thus read too when I was growing up. I shall post a proper appreciation of Levin on my return home, when I can refer to his books, but three aspects of his writings stand out in my memory.

First, on the most important political issue of his generation - the struggle between the western democracies and Communist totalitarianism - he got it more right than anyone else. He was dogged in his support for heterogeneous dissident voices in the Soviet Union, and contemptuous of moral evasion in the prosecution of the Cold War. But he also understood that Communism was fragile. He knew that the human spirit would supersede Communism if the western democracies held their nerve, and said so explicitly. He also campaigned - and used his columns for the purpose when it came even to such prosaic matters as internal elections in the National Union of Journalists - against the know-nothing totalitarian Left that disfigured British politics and especially parts of the Labour Party from the mid-1970s.

Secondly, he also understood that the anti-Communist cause was essentially a liberal one, and he advocated liberal values across diverse issues. He was a trenchant opponent of apartheid, and frequently deployed his biting wit to mock the inanities of constitutionally-mandated racial discrimination. On domestic issues, he regularly criticised anti-homosexual prejudice in society and the communications media (Paul Johnson was one target of his scorn).

Thirdly, unlike one or two journalists I could name whose half-baked cultural enthusiasms served merely as a cipher for their own political prejudices, Levin had a great knowledge and appreciation of art, music and literature, and was able to communicate those enthusiasms lucidly and expertly. He did so not as a hobby, but as a duty. One of the columns I most prize of his output - it's in one of his collections, and I'll quote from it when I get home - referred to the philistinism of the Greater London Council under the (unelected) leadership of Ken Livingstone in the early 1980s. The GLC Labour group of that time took it into its collective tiny mind to divert public support for the arts away from the supposedly elitist Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank and towards a 'People's Festival' in Hyde Park. Levin was quick to mock the stupidity of this affectation, which reflected more an obscurantist refusal to acknowledge the concept of aesthetic excellence than any genuine left-wing tradition. The socialist convictions of William Morris, Robert Blatchford or, in our own day, Arnold Wesker, inspired their advocates not to decry high art but to attempt to spread appreciation of it more widely. Levin's denunication of the cultural vandalism of an intellectually disreputable part of the Left - the real snobs, for they implicitly assume that Beethoven or Janacek is not for the likes of their own constituents - was always a joy. But more than that, it was an education. His enthusiasms were diverse, and some were perplexingly idiosyncratic - but it was difficult not to get drawn into them as he advanced them in his impeccable prose. He will be much missed.

The voice of reaction

The Independent columnist Johann Hari asks rhetorically, concerning one of his longstanding antagonists:

Doesn't it worry [Noam] Chomsky that as he was trying desperately to prevent the invasion, he was acting against the clear wishes of most Iraqi people? Is it really reasonable to denounce as "Stalinist" (the tag he applied to me a year ago) anybody who tries sincerely to support the Iraqi people? I believe in siding with the Iraqi people on both counts: for overthrowing Saddam, and against a protracted occupation. Chomsky, it seems, does not. Why?

I don't know definitively the answers to these questions (other than the second), but I can draw an inference from Chomsky's writings on earlier conflicts. Chomsky, lauded as the voice of dissent by his admirers, is more properly regarded as a representative of the forces of reaction and conservative pessimism in foreign affairs. In his 1994 collection of interviews, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, he was asked by his indefatigable Boswell, a radio producer called David Barsamian, quite a pertinent, if non-threatening, question about the greatest moral failure of European policymakers since the war:

Would you comment on the events in the former Yugoslavia, which constitute the greatest outburst of violence in Europe in fifty years -- tens of thousands killed, hundreds of thousands of refugees. This isn't some remote place like East Timor we're talking about -- this is Europe -- and it's on the news every night.

Chomsky's answer began, irrelevantly enough, with the preposterous accusation that western conservatives (for him, a blanket term) "defend much of what's happening". To that end he cited a letter to The Economist from an obscure former Observer journalist and pro-Serb crank called Nora Beloff, and ignored historically somewhat more significant figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Jeane Kirkpatrick, both advocates of western intervention on behalf of Bosnian Muslims. But, perhaps unintentionally, Barsamian asked not a bad follow-up question:

Some say that, just as the Allies should have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz to prevent the deaths of many people in concentration camps, so we should now bomb the Serbian gun positions surrounding Sarajevo that have kept that city under siege. Would you advocate the use of force?

Here is Chomsky's answer in full:

First of all, there's a good deal of debate about how much effect bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz would have had. Putting that aside, it seems to me that a judicious threat and use of force, not by the Western powers but by some international or multinational group, might, at an earlier stage, have suppressed a good deal of the violence and maybe blocked it. I don't know if it would help now.

If it were possible to stop the bombardment of Sarajevo by threatening to bomb some emplacements (and perhaps even carrying the threat out), I think you could give an argument for it. But that's a very big if. It's not only a moral issue -- you have to ask about the consequences, and they could be quite complex.

What if a Balkan war were set off? One consequence is that conservative military forces within Russia could move in. They're already there, in fact, to support their Slavic brothers in Serbia. They might move in en masse. (That's traditional, incidentally. Go back to Tolstoy's novels and read about how Russians were going to the south to save their Slavic brothers from attacks. It's now being reenacted.)

At that point you're getting fingers on nuclear weapons involved. It's also entirely possible that an attack on the Serbs, who feel that they're the aggrieved party, could inspire them to move more aggressively in Kosovo, the Albanian area. That could set off a large-scale war, with Greece and Turkey involved. So it's not so simple.

Or what if the Bosnian Serbs, with the backing of both the Serbian and maybe even other Slavic regions, started a guerrilla war? Western military "experts" have suggested it could take a hundred thousand troops just to more or less hold the area. Maybe so.

So one has to ask a lot of questions about consequences. Bombing Serbian gun emplacements sounds simple, but you have to ask how many people are going to end up being killed. That's not so simple.

And here is my translation of Chomsky's answer into plain English:

No.

What I find extraordinary in retrospect, as I did at the time, about Chomsky's sentiments on the subject of aggression and genocide is not just the policy proposal he expounded but the terms in which he couched it. His is a statement not of internationalist solidarity with the victims of aggression, but of traditional 'realism' in the discredited sense of urging on the West an abdication of moral responsibility: the issue, after all, was "not so simple".

Yet the issue did turn out to be pretty simple in one crucial respect a year after the book was published. In August 1995 the Croats began a ground offensive against the Serbs, while Nato launched air attacks against Serb positions after the shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace. The resulting rapid and decisive shift in territorial advantage against the Serbs enabled the negotiation of the Dayton Accords. Chomsky's warnings proved groundless. Had Nato followed the advice of this paragon of radical conscience and dissent, much needless suffering would have ensued.