Oliver Kamm

What is... Pajamahadeen?

This column appears in The Times today.

LAST WEEK the veteran American news anchorman Dan Rather stepped down from his post at CBS. Though the demotion was sweetened by his resuming a reporting role, few doubted the sequence of events. During the election campaign, CBS had reported allegations about President Bush’s military service that turned out to be based on fraudulent documents, easily identified as such. Rather had defended the veracity of the report with an indignation touched by hubris.

The denouement was hastened by a varied group of conservative bloggers. A blog (a contraction of weblog) is a running commentary posted on the internet about whatever takes the author’s interest. It is a valuable medium for those with a cause to ventilate, and who fancy that the print and broadcast media are biased against them.

An uncomfortable Rather had denounced his blogging nemeses as “partisan political operatives”, but it was left to another television executive, Jonathan Klein, to inspire a resonant image appropriate to this series on buzzwords. Surveying the bloggers, he declared: “You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances (in television news) and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.”

Given a sense of history, Klein might have realised that a considered and satisfying sneer is infuriatingly liable to be appropriated with pride by its target. Methodism and neoconservatism both started life as terms of abuse. The guys in pajamas likewise speedily adopted for themselves the felicitous collective term “Pajamahadeen”.

Conventional journalists criticise bloggers for being parasitic rather than investigative, and Pajamahadeen, with its metaphorical connotations of guerrilla warfare, scarcely dispels that suspicion. But — though I declare an interest, as a (non-conservative) blogger myself — I am an unabashed fan of the medium. It is admittedly a ready vehicle for dilettantes bearing grudges, and at its worst it attracts political obscurantists. But at its best it offers additional checks and balances on the flow of information.

Had there been an equivalent force in this country — a Pyjamahadeen to match the Pajamahadeen — the Hutton inquiry might not have been necessary. Concerted scrutiny on the internet of that notorious broadcast might have spared the BBC later embarrassment — and the rest of us Greg Dyke’s self-regarding memoir.

The traditional vehicle of political activism is the organised campaign or interest group. Rendering political decision-making more sensitive to these groups is almost bound to produce unrepresentative outcomes, for the biggest interest group in a liberal democracy always comprises those who, politically speaking, are not particularly interested. Advancing from cornflakes to commentary in a single generation, the pyjama-clad are their champion.

Intermission

I shall be taking a break from blogging for the rest of the year, and will resume in the first week of January. I extend good wishes to all who celebrate either Chanukah or Christmas, and a happy new year to all without discrimination.

Chomsky and the True Believer

From the popular Skeptic’s Dictionary:

Communal reinforcement is the process by which a claim becomes a strong belief through repeated assertion by members of a community. The process is independent of whether the claim has been properly researched or is supported by empirical data significant enough to warrant belief by reasonable people…. Communal reinforcement explains how entire nations can pass on ineffable gibberish from generation to generation.

I turn ineluctably to the subject of the admirers of Professor Noam Chomsky. Members of that community spend much time and expend much effort in reassuring each other that when, a quarter-century ago, their hero intervened in support of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson he was disinterestedly and even heroically defending the principle of free expression. Readers who have followed the story from my earlier posts will know that that is nonsense. Chomsky defended the political legitimacy of Faurisson’s beliefs, and not merely the right to express those beliefs. He did this - inexcusably speculating that Faurisson was “a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort” – despite being fully aware that he was speaking of an antisemite and an apologist for Nazi Germany.

In the course of this discussion, I commented on a source of a type I would not normally discuss at all, viz. the weblog of a member of the community of Chomsky’s admirers. I made an exception in this case first because the blog in question was illustrative of a point I wished to make about the character of Chomsky's following (see below), and secondly because, to my perplexity, it cited me in Chomsky’s defence, by the seasoned expedient of quoting me out of context. Writers quite as obscure as I am have found themselves unwittingly transmuted into exhibits in the self-reinforcing mythology that Chomsky’s admirers construct for each other, and I was disinclined to acquiesce in a similar hoax through the excess of taciturnity for which my friends know me.

Because I described this blogger as a soft and hapless target, I feel it is only fair to refer my readers to his rejoinder, which I reproduce in full and as it is written:

Oliver Kamm has replied to my earlier post on Chomsky/Faurisson (which was in turn a reply to one of his posts). I am now convinced that Kamm is not an honourable debater.

He accuses me of "rank dishonesty". I want to just respond to that, and then point out Kamm's own dishonesty, and leave the rest aside. This post will therefore be relatively short.

Kamm says that the original piece contradicts my claim that Chomsky might have skipped over, read hastily or misremembered the claims about Faurisson's views. I say it doesn't. This is perfectly normal and expectable human behaviour isn't it - misreading or misremembering something? Everyone does it once in a while.

Indeed, none of the evidence Kamm provides disproves my claim - although it does cast some doubt on it, I'll freely admit. Readers can judge for themselves. (The letters - I don't know what in detail was in them, and Kamm doesn't tell us, so they could have contained circumstantial yet unconvincing evidence, for all I know.) Chomsky was and is a busy man, and he was not particularly interested in Faurisson's views, as he regarded Faurisson's Holocaust denial conspiracy theories as (obviously) disgusting and false, and therefore not worth discussing directly. My claim is perfectly (as I said) "logically possible" - and I happen to think that that's the most likely explanation for Chomsky's apparent mistake - the mistake of describing Faurisson as a "relatively apolitical liberal".

Let's now just take a quick look at Kamm's dishonesty.

He says "I have already shown that Chomsky’s defence of Faurisson is, precisely, an attempt 'to normalise and justify' Faurisson’s views, by disregarding the pro-Nazi character that Chomsky knew they possessed."

We can safely assume that he is not here talking about the 90% of the Chomsky piece on free expression that does not deal directly with Faurisson's views. So he must be talking about the final few sentences of the piece:

"Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read -- largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him -- I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort. In support of the charge of anti-Semitism, I have been informed that Faurisson is remembered by some schoolmates as having expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in the 1940s, and as having written a letter that some interpret as having anti-Semitic implications at the time of the Algerian war. I am a little surprised that serious people should put such charges forth -- even in private -- as a sufficient basis for castigating someone as a long-time and well-known anti-Semitic. I am aware of nothing in the public record to support such charges. I will not pursue the exercise, but suppose we were to apply similar standards to others, asking, for example, what their attitude was towards the French war in Indochina, or to Stalinism, decades ago. Perhaps no more need be said."

Normalising is one thing, and it's what's under debate. But just because Chomsky said Faurisson was a "relatively apolitical liberal", this doesn't mean that he was trying to justify any of Faurisson's views in any shape or form. If Kamm really thinks that, then I am curious to know precisely which views of Faurisson's Chomsky was trying to justify, according to Kamm - and from where he adduces this conclusion on Chomsky's state of mind. If he doesn't really think that, then he is being deliberately deceptive.

With this, I think we may safely determine that the issue is definitively resolved.

I don't wish to sound ungracious, but I would rather that than be misunderstood. My interlocutor is mistaken in assuming my remarks were either a reply to him or a contribution to a debate with him. They were, rather, a citation of the reductio ad absurdum that he serendipitously exemplified of the irrationalism that characterises Chomsky’s following. I do not know how to refute an argument of the form "I can't believe it, therefore it didn't happen", and would not presume to try. (Admirers of the zoologist Richard Dawkins's book The Blind Watchmaker will recall his citation of arguments of a similar form - which he terms The Argument from Personal Incredulity - where the "it" refers to such propositions as that the human eye cannot possibly have evolved independently of divine fiat.)

I am glad, however, to record, as I am requested to do, precisely which of Faurisson's beliefs Chomsky set about justifying (i.e. defending as reasonable or proper - OED): Faurisson's belief that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by international Jewry for nefarious purposes, i.e. his entire philosophy on the subject. My interlocutor is at liberty to attribute any views he finds congenial to Chomsky, but he should be prepared for some brutal remarks about his competence in the field if he persists in making such claims without first consulting Chomsky's own writings on the matter. The claim that Chomsky "regarded Faurisson's Holocaust denial conspiracy theories as (obviously) disgusting" is plain ignorant. Of Faurisson's theories, Chomsky says nothing of the kind. On the contrary, in a letter to the historian Professor William D. Rubinstein in 1981, he wrote:

I see no antisemitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust. Nor would there be antisemitic implications, per se, in the claim that the Holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see no hint of antisemitic implications in Faurisson's work.

In short, while he doesn't endorse the factual accuracy of Faurisson's opinions, Chomsky does defend their propriety. Those opinions are, as we have seen, pro-Nazi and antisemitic, and - again, as we have seen - Chomsky was aware of this at the time he wrote in Faurisson's defence.

Rubinstein quoted these stupid and repulsive remarks in an article "Chomsky and the Neo-Nazis" in the Australian magazine Quadrant, October 1981. They are quoted in turn in Alan Dershowitz, Chutzpah, 1991, p. 176, which is my source. After Rubinstein made public the contents of the letter, Chomsky complained about the supposed impropriety in doing so (I think Rubinstein did the right thing) but he has never disputed that the words were quoted accurately. He's hardly in a position to do so, given that he conveyed these preposterous views liberally. In her posthumous book What is the Use of Jewish History? (1992, p. 95), the historian of the Holocaust Lucy Dawidowicz writes:

In a letter to me, September 18, 1980, Chomsky expressed complete agnosticism on the subject of whether or not Faurisson's views were "horrendous", saying that he was not sufficiently involved in the issue to pursue or evaluate it.

Nor has Chomsky changed his mind on the matter. In Chronicles of Dissent, 1992, p. 352, the following exchange from 1991 between him and his interviewer, David Barsamian, is recorded:

Barsamian: You told Bill Moyers in an interview that given a chance you would do some things differently. I was wondering if you were thinking about the Faurisson affair?

Chomsky: No.

I began this line of thought by quoting, earlier this week, the judgement of the Berkeley economist Brad DeLong on the cult-like qualities of Chomsky's following. I have laboured over the worked example in this post because I am concerned to demonstrate that DeLong's assessment, while not flattering, is accurate and sociologically important. Chomsky's admirers include - and I believe predominantly comprise, but this is merely an impression rather than an authenticated statistic - many college students, whose observations of the domestic and international political order are inchoate. Listen for any length of time to Chomsky's followers, and you gain an unmistakable impression of a quasi-religious movement using the language of personal rebirth and salvation. For example:

In 1993, as a 19-year-old UF student, I didn't know who Noam Chomsky was, and while I was interested in politics, I didn't know much I hadn't learned from the mainstream news. However, I saw a flyer for Chomsky's speech at the Reitz Ballroom and, for some reason (maybe I was bored that night), I decided to go. When I saw the overflow crowd-it must have been hundreds-crammed into the hallways outside the ballroom, it was clear something special was happening. I was one of the lucky ones who got a seat, and what I heard was truly life-changing.

And:

For me, hearing Chomsky speak for the first time was a life-changing experience. His ability to take preconceptions and destroy them—to completely remodel one’s understanding of reality with cold, hard facts—blew me away. When I left what was then the ARCO Forum last fall, I felt as though I had been through the Matrix and back. Chomsky really has this effect because he bombards you with evidence and logic, not empty rhetoric. It is nearly impossible to hear him or read him—once you’ve actually checked his facts yourself (he even cites page numbers in public addresses)—and deny what he’s saying.

It's difficult to find much redeeming levity in this sort of bathos, but the last sentence of the second quoted passage does it for me. Those readers who have followed this series on Chomsky's writings will know why. Those who go further, and elect to discuss with Chomsky's admirers the matters I have laid out, will gain an insight into the thinking of an incomparably greater observer than Chomsky of the human condition, the late Eric Hoffer (Reflections on the Human Condition, 1974, p. 54):

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.

Chomsky's outlets

Dedicated readers of Noam Chomsky, of whom I am one, have a valuable resource with which to keep track of the master’s opinions. The far-left Z magazine is a shrine to Chomsky. It is the host for his weblog (launched with much puffery but since apparently superseded by this less ambitious effort), publisher of many of his articles, and provider of an extensive online archive of his books and other writings.

Z magazine itself can always be counted on to review Chomsky's books with deference. One such review, published in the December 2000 edition, is of The New Military Humanism (2000), Chomsky's polemic against Nato’s intervention in Kosovo. I have observed before that Chomsky’s stance on an earlier Balkan conflict coincided with the reactionary and amoral stance propounded by the then Conservative government in the UK. His writings on Kosovo were no better, and the fulsome review in Z magazine inadvertently illustrated why.

The reviewer, Michael Hardesty, attacks in extravagant terms those of us on the Left who supported military intervention:

Unlike the mainstream media, Chomsky uniformly condemns atrocities, whether perpetrated by our official enemies or theirs. This is in refreshing contrast not only to the standard media/government line, but also much of what passes for the Left. Two distinct trends emerged on the left, there were the soft left social democrats such as Ian Williams and Christopher Hitchens who would accept at face value the most enormous tales of Serbian “genocide” and there were the old-line CP-COC types who labored to present Milosevic as a genuine socialist. Some of the pro-Serbian sentiment had a factual basis in the partisan warfare conducted by Marshall Tito and the Communist partisans against the Nazi occupiers of Yugoslavia (who were aided by large sectors of the Croatian population plus many Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Albanians). Even though most historians estimate that anywhere from 500,000 to 1,000,000 Serbs, 30,000 to 60,000 Jews, and others were killed by the Nazi occupiers during WWII, some lefties have engaged in their own particular form of Holocaust denial on this matter. Once an entire people is demonized all the little nuances, truths, and complications of history go out the window. It wouldn’t do to see the Serbs as having been victims, even in the past, for that might give rise to historical perspective (such as who was the dominant group in Kosovo in 1940) and cramp the morale of our daily hate the enemy sessions. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times declared that we were at war with the entire Serbian nation and that we could pulverize them back to 1389. As Chomsky points out this sort of ethnic cleansing is an old American tradition.

It’s a drearily familiar argument, but no less repugnant and slanderous for that. Hardesty first scorns the reports of Serb atrocities, and then explicitly accuses left-wing interventionists of “Holocaust denial” themselves. He thereby exemplifies a theme that I have referred to many times with regard to this type of writing, and which was well-described by one of my regular correspondents (it was Eve Garrard, a philosopher at Keele University) whom I quoted in another post about Chomsky:

Don't you think that [Chomsky's] a particularly outrageous example of a more general inflation (and hence debasement) of the currency of moral condemnation (e.g. the Israelis are as bad as the Nazis, etc etc)? This often goes hand in hand with a deflationary line about other groups - militants instead of terrorists, and so forth. In fact the pattern of inflation and deflation can be very revealing about deep and often unacknowledged political sympathies.

The pattern is perhaps even more revealing than Eve realised. As it happens, Michael Hardesty wrote to me last week in response to my most recent post on Chomsky's intervention in the case of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. Here is Hardesty's message in full (and as it is written):

I've known and corresponded with Chomsky for almost two decades and recently parted ways with him over his god complex, refusal to acknowledge any errors at all, his recent contortions on the nonexistent silent genocide in Afghanistan and the preposterous lie that thousands or millions may have died as a result of Clinton's bombing of the Sudan pharmaceutical factory in error. And many more issues where I have butted heads with him.

But your description of the Faurisson controversy is as intellectually dishonest as anything Chomsky has done.. From the beginning Faurissson's civil rights were the issue, why else was being PROSECUTED BY THE STATE FOR HIS DISSENTING VIEWS ON THE NAZI HOLOCAUST ?????????????????????????????? The very fact of the existence of these laws in many countries is evidence that the conventional story of the holocaust is a fraud. Why would you seek to legally proscribe "falsehoods" that are allegedly easily refuted ? In fact, Faurisson himself has refuted the very sources that you claim have refuted him. Many times over. His articles have been published for years in the Journal of Historical Review and have been devastating in his cogent, witty and merciless rebuttal of the conventional line. That the Nazis were evil criminals is not in doubt, even by many of the revisionists by the work by people like Berman, Lipstadt, et al, is laughable, a total joke. I think Chomsky's been able to coast because so many of his critics are either crackpot Zionists racists of Likudnik dimensions or goofy Holocaust hysterians of the Edwin Black [author of a book on IBM and the Holocaust] variety. There's much more I could say on this subject but you need to clean up your act, you just give the Chomsky cult ammo by such stupid rantings.

Whenever receiving a message of this type, as happens from time to time, I reason that it’s best to offer the most gracious possible speculative hypothesis; I thus replied:

I think you should be aware that a discharged lunatic has managed to gain access to your email account and is using it to send out absurd messages in your name in an attempt to discredit you. I am forwarding an example.

I should look into this if I were you.

I have since received a further message from Mr Hardesty, which reads in full:

Your [sic] an establishment buffoon incapable of thought or reason, thanks for more evidence of the intellectual bankruptcy and utter third-rate mindedeness of the neocons and their holohoax mythologists.

And there the matter rests.

In no circumstances would I dignify Hardesty’s deranged opinions with a rebuttal. The lies of pseudo-historians such as David Irving and cranks who are not historians at all such as Robert Faurisson have been well-covered in, among other sources, Denying History (2002) by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman and Lying About Hitler (2001) by Richard Evans (on the David Irving libel action). My only factual point about Hardesty’s remarks, for those readers who may not be familiar with this organised campaign of fraud and bigotry, is that the publication Hardesty cites – the Journal of Historical Review – is not at all the scholarly journal its name suggests. It is the publication of the equally tendentiously-named Institute for Historical Review (IHR), of which the Anti-Defamation League observes:

One typical example of the rhetoric encouraged by [IHR] gatherings occurred at the 1983 conference, one of the best-attended in the organization's history; concluding his address, Keith Thompson, one of IHR's early stalwarts, urged supporters to "stand by the Third Reich" because, "if, in the end, the Holocaust did take place, then so much the better!" Thunderous applause greeted these remarks. In keeping with its duplicitous efforts to conjure an innocuous impression before the outside world, this statement was deleted from recordings of the speech sold through the IHR catalog.

Hardesty’s name, while deservedly obscure, was not totally unknown to me when he wrote, both because I read Z magazine and because I have read a certain amount of Holocaust denial literature (on the grounds that I wish to be aware when its adherents try to infiltrate such notions into conventional political debate). Among those writings are the prolific output of the movement’s founding father, Paul Rassinier. Rassinier – perversely a French former socialist and Resistance fighter who was actually interned in Buchenwald for a time – became after the war a fierce antisemite. His books are sustained diatribes against the Jews for supposedly starting WWII, and provide inspiration for Robert Faurisson’s own propaganda. Rassinier's collected writings were published in English in the 1970s by a neo-Nazi publishing house; the volume contained a foreword by Michael Hardesty.

Hardesty is not always open about being a Holocaust denier, but he is always openly an antisemite. In a letter to The Washington Post on 26 April 1973, he called for this ‘long-run’ solution to the Middle East conflict (evidently after deciding against his preferred adjective on grounds of diplomacy):

Until the only possible long-run solution is undertaken: full repossession by the Palestinians of their property, and a total ejection of the Zionist colonialists, there will be no permanent peace in the Middle East.

One disturbing theme that I have written about on this site is the increasing adoption of traditional antisemitic notions by those parts of the Left that have previously contented themselves with propagating more euphemistic modern counterparts, such as that Zionism is a form of racism. Examples include the Socialist Workers’ Party’s commendation of the “fearless tirades against Zionism” of a man who maintains that the notorious forgery the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately portrays the state of modern America, and Counterpunch magazine’s belief that accusations of dual loyalty against Jews are a part of progressive politics.

In the circumstances, I ought not to be surprised that Z magazine welcomes the contributions of a man who for 30 years has hardly been reticent about his own Jew-hatred, but I thought it was worth remarking upon anyway.

Department of Unfortunate Verbs

The Times reports:

The Home Secretary saw Mrs Quinn’s son frequently during their relationship and is said to have become closely attached to him.

"A kind of cult..."

I have written at some length over several posts on Noam Chomsky. To summarise: I judge Chomsky’s political writings to be discreditable, dishonest and on occasion scandalous. His comments on Holocaust denial illustrate those qualities, but the response of his admirers to the episode is at least as perplexing. That is the subject of this post.

Andrew Sullivan kindly linked to my most recent post on this subject, and I have received many messages from those of his readers who are more sympathetic to Chomsky than Andrew and I are. I have to say that those messages generally correspond with the observation of the economist Brad DeLong on his weblog a couple of years ago:

The Chomsky defenders--and there seem to be a surprisingly large number of them--seem to form a kind of cult. Arguing with them seems to be a lot like trying to teach Plato's Republic to a pig: it wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.

This is an apt analogy. DeLong notes, in the context of Chomsky’s version of the origins of the Cold War (a subject I shall discuss shortly in a separate post), the obligation of any serious writer:

… not to try to suppress big chunks of the story because they are inconvenient in the context of your current political goals. You can't show only half (or less than half) the picture. That's a major intellectual foul. And in a world in which there are lots of people who try hard to tell it as it really happened, I see no reason why I should waste time reading someone who tries to tell it as it isn't.

It isn’t just that Chomsky gives a false account of the issues he writes about: he actively manipulates the evidence in order to mislead. Chomsky’s admirers, many college students among them, frequently lack the background to be able to spot his techniques, and Chomsky takes advantage of this in order to make short-cuts, elisions, false interpolations and outright fabrications. He is to politics, economics and modern history what the Creation Science movement is to geology, palaeontology and biology. When reading him, you have to bear in mind that every reference and quotation he gives needs to be checked independently; on making those checks, you find a pattern of abuse of source materials that is impossible to explain as mere accident.

Chomsky’s malpractice is consistently on one side, moreover. It serves to bolster an all-embracing mythology of the malevolence of the United States, which Chomsky depicts as the moral equal or inferior of Nazi Germany. Absurd and offensive as this notion is, its very heterodoxy in political debate encourages Chomsky’s adherents to think of themselves as the elect. From him, they learn a roster of historical myths, heroic assumptions and dubious analogies, and repeat them in answer to any counterexample or criticism. Indeed, only rarely from my experience – and, I infer, from DeLong’s too – do they have anything apart from Chomsky’s writings to contribute to a discussion, and even then their reading of Chomsky is slight, comprising perhaps two or three of the pamphlets and a book of interviews. They are a tabula rasa on which Chomsky has latitude to expound.

I say this by way of explanation for the behaviour of Chomsky’s admirers when faced with his defence of the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. Collectively they are convinced that Chomsky’s critics have maligned their hero as himself a Holocaust denier. Almost all of the posts I have received on this subject take it for granted that that is a charge I make against Chomsky. Yet Chomsky’s principal critics make no such accusation. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, for example, states in his essay On Faurisson and Chomsky:

To be sure, it is not the case that Chomsky's theses in any way approximate those of the neo-Nazis.

Alan Dershowitz makes it clear by counterexample what his objection is, and at no point does it include the charge that Chomsky is a Holocaust denier (Chutzpah, 1991, p. 173):

If I were asked to defend the right of a Holocaust denier to express his perverse views, I would agree to defend his right, but I would insist on exercising my own right to call his views antisemitic and false. Nor would I encourage anyone to read or listen to such garbage. To the contrary, I would urge everyone to reject it outright in the marketplace of ideas, to refuse to patronize that disease-infested part of the market. I mention how I, as an opponent of censorship, would handle the issue of Holocaust denial, in order to contrast this with the disgraceful manner in which Professor Noam Chomsky took up the cause of a notorious neo-Nazi Holocaust named denier Robert Faurisson.

The strongest version of the critique against Chomsky over the Faurisson affair that I am aware of is by the sociologist Werner Cohn, in The Anti-Chomsky Reader (2004, p. 150), but he is scrupulous in stating:

Chomsky’s propaganda, taken by itself, is obnoxious and certainly hostile to Jews, but still doesn’t have quite the same character as that of his associates. Where they are frankly neo-Nazi and antisemitic, he fudges and covers himself with self-exculpatory formulas. Were it not for his associates, we would certainly wish to acknowledge a line between him and organized antisemitism.

In the first of my own posts setting out the facts of the Faurisson case, I stated the case this way:

Chomsky is not himself a Holocaust denier, and no responsible critic has ever claimed he is. He is, rather, an “antisemitism denier”. His disaffection from genuinely progressive values – the values that the United States at its best effectively promotes, as we have lately seen in Afghanistan – is so extreme that it leads him to see not only “no enemies on the Left” but also “no enemies amongst the enemies of my enemies” – even if it puts him alongside men who whitewash Nazi genocide.

The views of us critics are surely not difficult to interpret. Chomsky is not a Holocaust denier; he is an associate of Holocaust deniers. He does not defend the historicity of Robert Faurisson’s claims about the Holocaust; he does defend the political legitimacy of those claims. He does so, moreover, while being fully aware of the pro-Nazi and antisemitic character of those beliefs. This is, as Dershowitz rightly states, a disgraceful record.

Evidently aware that the facts are against him, Chomsky’s editors and annotators rewrite the charge-sheet to a form they prefer. In a recent long book of Chomsky pieces, Understanding Power (2003, p.206), the editors put in the following explanatory note on the Faurisson affair:

Chomsky made public statements in 1979 and ’80 that a French professor who denied the Holocaust should not be jailed for his writings by the French government, and was denounced as a defender of the man’s views.

That passage is notably dishonest. Leave aside the incidental errors of fact: Faurisson was not a professor, and the French government was not his antagonist (he was sued for falsifying history by two anti-racist organisations in a civil case – a charge that ought not to have been heard in a court of law, but was strictly accurate). The plain implication is that the critics slandered Chomsky as a Holocaust denier because Chomsky defended free speech. In fact Chomsky has been criticised because – I repeat the point, but it clearly bears repeating - by active misrepresentation and the omission of relevant information he sanitised the views of a man he knew to be a pro-Nazi apologist and antisemite. In that sense – and not the ‘straw man’ that Chomsky was a Holocaust denier – it is correct to say that Chomsky defended Faurisson’s views.

As could be predicted, the misrepresentation perpetrated by Chomsky and his circle has its effect on those who don’t have the background to investigate (or, it has to be said, the inclination to question) the matter. Almost all the messages I have received in the past couple of days have been complaints of greater or lesser animation about a charge that I, Dershowitz, Cohn and others have not made, with an accompanying eerie silence about the charge we do make. I choose one example among my (in fact, Andrew Sullivan's) correspondents that makes disturbingly clear the characteristics that DeLong refers to. The correspondent's name is Patrick Boyle, and I alerted him in reply that I reserved the right to reproduce his remarks. He writes to Andrew, copying it to me:

Today you provide a link to the "invaluable" Kamm whose essay claims to establish that Chomsky is a Holocaust denier. Do you actually read the essays that you provide links to? No where does Kamm provide any quote from Chomsky regarding a denial of the reality of the Holocaust….

I don’t know whether Andrew reads the essays he links to, but Patrick Boyle clearly doesn’t. For good measure, Boyle complains that:

Ironically, one of the more prominent (so that both of you cannot be unaware of it) debunking of the claim that Chomsky is a Holocaust denier was made by Christopher Hitchens -- an apparent darling of both you and Kann [sic]. Kann has an active link on the same page that he attacks Chomsky to an essay by Hitchens. Talk about intellectual dishonesty. Again you would think the most basic notion of fairness would require that you provide your readers with a link to Hitchens' defense of Chomsky.

Except that I did link to precisely the Hitchens essay that Boyle is referring to, in my original post, as was clearly referenced. I do not use the term for hyperbolic effect: Chomsky's followers do have the appearance of a cult. They maintain the authority of Chomsky by not reading him, and the malevolent fallibility of his critics by not reading them.

If anyone else is thinking of writing to me along the lines of Mr Boyle – and many have already - I should appreciate it if you would take note of the reply I have sent to him:

Thank you for writing. I receive, if not quite hundreds, then certainly scores of messages from people who, like you, press Chomsky's case without having first read either him or his critics. Be assured, however, that your own message is distinctive, in that few of my correspondents manage to scale comparable heights of idleness and incompetence, or at least not in the opening sentence.

You assert there that my "essay claims to establish that Chomsky is a Holocaust denier", when it explicitly denies that Chomsky is a Holocaust denier. What my essay says is that Chomsky defends the content of Faurisson's assertions not by agreeing with Faurisson's views on the historicity of the Holocaust but by asserting the political legitimacy of those views. In the circumstances I am unsurprised at your expedient in framing the argument as you wish I had made it rather than as I actually made it, but if you persist in these manoeuvres then you will need to get used to wide-eyed expressions of admiration on the scale of your effrontery in lecturing Andrew, me or anyone else on standards of intellectual honesty.

Had you read my posts before wasting your own time and, more importantly, Andrew’s and mine with your vexations, you would have seen that not only do I do what you demand of Chomsky's critics, viz. link to that 1985 essay by Christopher Hitchens, but I also point out what's wrong with Hitchens's argument. Hitchens offers the mildest of friendly criticisms - that Chomsky misdescribed Faurisson's political character when he ought not to have speculated on the matter - in order to absolve Chomsky of more serious misdemeanours. I point out in my post that that criticism is in fact also made by critics of Chomsky; Brad DeLong asserts that Chomsky had a duty to inform himself of Faurisson's political views yet failed to do so.

But Hitchens and DeLong are both wrong on this point. Chomsky made his comments about seeing no antisemitic implications in Faurisson's work, and about Faurisson's appearing to be a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort, when he (Chomsky) was fully aware that Faurisson was in fact a vehement antisemite and pro-Nazi apologist. As you have not read my posts, I have the good fortune of not needing to repeat the details of the case but can refer you instead to what I have already written. Were you to do so, and to read also what Chomsky has written on the subject, you would see that Chomsky himself gives us the information that he was aware of the character of Faurisson's toxic political views. Chomsky chose to whitewash those views, which is why I describe him as an apologist for bigotry and a defender of the content of Faurisson's opinions (i.e. just to get this straight, as you appear to have difficulty with the concept, a defender of Faurisson's political legitimacy regardless of the historical veracity of Faurisson's claims about the Holocaust)....

There is at least one more of my correspondents on Chomsky I wish to present, and I shall do so later in the week.

What is...'Popera'?

This column appears in The Times today.

ONE OF today’s top-selling music albums is by a group called Il Divo. Its output comprises operatic versions of popular songs, and its target audience appears to have been carefully researched. As The Sun puts it: “They’re good-looking, have oodles of charm and a debut album that’s flying off the shelves but there’s one more thing pop opera quartet Il Divo are hoping for — female fans falling at their feet.”

Il Divo is the latest confection in a line that encompasses such tripping names as Andrea Bocelli and Opera Babes. The collective term for these performers is “popera”.

An irresistible target for this series on buzzwords, popera denotes the output of classically trained performers who, having made a commercial virtue of what would otherwise be a problematically inverse relationship between personal decorativeness and technical proficiency, apply a melodic gloss to popular music and a magniloquent treatment to light arias.

Critical comment on the genre has been, on the whole, unburdened by solicitude. Faced with popera, it would be easy and tempting to join in the derision, draw slighting inferences about popular artistic appreciation, and issue jeremiads about the state of musical education. So I shall do all those things.

The managing director of EMI Classics UK justifies popera, and its close relation “crossover”, as “trying to get great melody to as large an audience as possible”. But melody is not music. It is one of the vehicles of music. The Western musical tradition is about the development of shifting relations between melody, harmony and musical form.

Popular music, by contrast, is almost entirely about repeated melody, without musical development. It depends for its potency on an immediate sensory impact on the listener. Classical music that does the same thing is no longer classical music. Opera with the excision of the drama of which the aria is an integral part is doubly diminished. Getting popera to as large an audience as possible is an aim of startlingly attenuated ambition. Being, in all essentials, pop music, it has already got there.

There are critics who, in affectedly decrying popular taste and confusing aesthetic judgments with antediluvian political prejudices, only make it more difficult to defend the claims of art. The task is important nonetheless. Entertainment confirms us in our immediate emotional states. Art takes us beyond those states, by forcing us to consider how we are affected by its formal properties.

If popera has any rationale, it is that this is a false and stuffy distinction, and that classical music needs to be stripped of its forbidding complexity to be more widely appreciated.

In practice, a music business intent on feeding us the same nourishment will produce only the same old manure.

Chomsky and Holocaust denial - again

Not long after I started this blog 18 months ago, I got involved in a spat with another blogger who had posted sympathetic and grossly ill-informed remarks about the now-defunct German terrorist group the Red Army Fraction. Spelling out to a determinedly uncomprehending interlocutor the appalling nature of that organisation remains the most dispiritingly pointless blogging experience I have had. On its conclusion, I resolved in future to avoid targets that were as ephemeral and obscure as a political naïf’s weblog, and I have generally held to that rule. In this post I make an exception, for I am going to comment on a very soft target indeed: a weblog written from a 'socialist, vegan, transhumanist' standpoint, for which I suspect (though do not know) the audience is extremely limited. The reason is that the target, while intrinsically trivial, is both representative and illustrative of a position of which I am contemptuous, yet on behalf of which it appears that I am now dishonestly being cited.

The subject is, once more, the nature of the association between the linguist Noam Chomsky and that most perplexing adaptation of modern antisemitism, Holocaust denial. Let me recap.

In 1979-80 Chomsky intervened in the case of a French Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson. Chomsky’s admirers habitually and indignantly insist that the support extended to Faurisson was nothing more exceptionable than a defence of free speech, which they claim Faurisson was being denied. The unboundedly credulous among those admirers – such as Neil Smith, Professor of Linguistics at London University, in his book Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals – even present Chomsky’s actions as heroic. The reality is different. I set out the facts of the case in this post last month. I summarise them again now, but please see the earlier post for sources.

First, the Faurisson affair had nothing to do with freedom of speech, but was a university’s response to a faculty member’s demonstrable fraud in presenting his arguments. By fraud, I don't mean just that Faurisson's claims about the Holocaust were false (though of course they were); I mean he was caught out by a genuine historian (Faurisson is no historian at all, contrary to Professor Neil Smith's invincibly ignorant account of the case) in doctoring his source material in order to suppress those parts of it that clearly stated the existence of the gas chambers. With offensive sophistry, Chomsky (Chronicles of Dissent, 1992, p. 349) describes the charge of 'falsifying history' that was brought against Faurisson as 'a case where a fascist law was applied' and as 'standard Stalinist, fascist doctrine'. The truth is that 'falsifying history' is a literal and exact description of what Faurisson was proved to have done. Faurisson is a charlatan and a crook whose methods disqualify him from teaching in a university.

Secondly, Chomsky’s intervention was a defence of the content of Faurisson’s beliefs and not merely of Faurisson’s right to express those beliefs. In his essay misleadingly entitled Some Elementary Comments on The Rights of Freedom of Expression, Chomsky declared, “As far as I can determine, [Faurisson] is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort” – and did so in the full knowledge that Faurisson was an antisemite and pro-Nazi apologist. This is not a guess on my part to the effect that Faurisson's antisemitism is something Chomsky must have known: it is something Chomsky actually did know. I have demonstrated this beyond argument by paying close attention – as Chomsky’s admirers invariably fail to do – to what Chomsky wrote at the time. Chomsky may not have read Faurisson, but he had certainly read – for he tells us so – an article by the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet that accurately summarised the pro-Nazi and anti-Jew tirades that Faurisson had published. (Vidal-Naquet's article is reproduced as Chapter 1 of his book translated into English as The Assassins of Memory, 1987. For an account of this piece - which unfortunately is not available on-line, so far as I know - please again refer to my earlier post.) Knowing that Faurisson was an antisemite and a pro-Nazi apologist, Chomsky chose to whitewash the man’s politics. Why he did this is a matter for interpretation, and I offered mine at the end of my post; that he did it is not open to dispute.

Surveying Chomsky's incomparable record of dishonesty and perversity, the Berkeley economist Brad DeLong wrote on his own weblog a couple of years ago:

What I object to is that Chomsky is an intellectual totalitarian. What I object to is that Chomsky tears up all the trail markers that might lead to conclusions different from his, and makes it next to impossible for people unversed in the issues to even understand what the live and much-debated points of contention are. What I object to is that Chomsky writes not to teach, but to brainwash: to create badly-informed believers in his point of view who won't know enough about the history or the background to think the issues through for themselves.

Not everything DeLong said in his Chomsky posts was strictly correct: ironically, in concluding (justifiably) that Chomsky's political writings were not worth considering at any length, DeLong overlooked some of the most damning evidence against Chomsky. But the passage I have just quoted is a temperate and accurate judgement, as I shall now demonstrate.

I had no serious expectation that my own exegesis of Chomsky's writings would shake the certainties of those 'badly-informed believers in his point of view', and so it has proved. The author of the socialist, vegan, transhumanist blog I mentioned above, and that I – presumably in common with my readers - had never stumbled across before, responded to the facts I presented by reciting the catechism with a fervour unmarked by a consideration of those facts:

In the context of [Chomsky's] essay and especially in the context of Chomsky's strong views on Holocaust denial, this was clearly not any kind of attempt to normalise or justify Faurisson[']s malignant views on the Holocaust - indeed, the whole point of the essay was that free speech is for people we find disgusting, not only for people we like or tolerate.

I hold no objection to the author's voluntarily-chosen veganism, while some of those I most admire in politics were or are socialists (George Orwell, Ernest Bevin, Sidney Hook and Michael Walzer). If I knew what transhumanism is, I'm sure I should be sympathetic to it. But rank dishonesty is another matter altogether; if this blogger persists in it, then I shall persist in pointing it out. I have already shown that Chomsky’s defence of Faurisson is, precisely, an attempt 'to normalise and justify' Faurisson’s views, by disregarding the pro-Nazi character that Chomsky knew they possessed. Dealing with the evidence by pretending it doesn't exist is a fashionable approach among Chomsky's followers, but this particular one of their number will not find it in his interests to continue with it.

How does our pro-Chomsky blogger deal with the uncomfortable fact of Chomsky's knowledge of Faurisson's antisemitism and Nazi apologetics? Well, I had thought myself inured to the full extent of human gullibility once I had read Professor Neil Smith’s hagiography of Chomsky, but it turns out Smith was a novice in the field. Here is our blogger's rationalisation; read it carefully, for it is a pearl of great price (emphasis added):

I must first make the obvious point which Kamm seems to have missed: (a) even though we know Chomsky noticed the part of an article which criticised him personally, because he (Chomsky) said so, it is logically possible that he might not have read carefully the bits making clear Faurrison's [sic] own views; (b) even had he read it all, he might have forgotten it (though, given Chomsky's impressive powers of recall, this latter explanation seems implausible).

What I have just quoted may seem incredible, but remember what Brad DeLong said. Chomsky’s admirers are badly-informed. Few have read much in the way of politics, economics and history, which makes them vulnerable to Chomsky’s characteristic techniques of stripping out relevant context, making false interpolations, and twisting source material. What is more surprising is that few of them have read much by Chomsky either, or at least not beyond the pamphlets and books of interviews. The blogger I have quoted, who insists on the 'logical possibility' that Chomsky might have forgotten that inconvenient detail that Faurisson was an apologist for Nazi Germany, hasn’t even read the article he claims to be summarising. In that piece Chomsky not only states explicitly that he had read the article by Vidal-Naquet summarising Faurisson’s political writings, but also remarks:

Let me add a final remark about Faurisson's alleged "anti-Semitism." Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi -- such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here -- this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights.

Disregard the characteristic non sequitur about Faurisson’s civil rights, which were never at stake in this case. Note merely that here Chomsky acknowledges that he has read the evidence of Faurisson’s antisemitic and pro-Nazi views, in the form of correspondence to him. Indeed his dismissive reference to that correspondence is also characteristic: he falsely dresses up as fastidiousness what is in fact a straightforward and shameless cover-up. Chomsky doesn't say so, but that correspondence was from Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who was determined that Chomsky should not be in a position to claim ignorance of Faurisson's positions. Here is what Vidal-Naquet has to say on the matter, in Chapter 2 of The Assassins of Memory:

[Chomsky] has also read his critics, specifically my article in Esprit (September 1980), and even the personal letters I sent to him on the subject, "a private correspondence which it would be inappropriate to cite in detail here." A fine case of scruples, and a fine example as well of double language, since Chomsky did not realize that the book he was prefacing contained unauthorized reproductions of a series of personal letters, and he himself does arrogate the right of summarizing (while falsifying) my own letters. I shall simply say to him: "Kindly publish-- I give you my authorisation-- the entirety of that correspondence. It will then be possible to judge whether you are qualified to give me lessons in intellectual honesty."

Chomsky does not appear ever to have taken up that challenge. I assume, however, that, given that Vidal-Naquet tells us that his letters to Chomsky were on the same subject as his article in Esprit - viz. Faurisson's pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bigotry, which the article demonstrated at length - not even our vegan blogger is going to claim that it is 'logically possible' they instead dealt exclusively with the weather, Chomsky's health, or recipes for blanquette de veau au pamplemousse.

As I intimated at the start, I have in this post discussed at far greater length than it merits a target of zero intrinsic value: an ill-read blogger's hapless defence of Chomsky. I have done so first because this blogger's refusal to acquaint himself with what Chomsky has said and written - a counterpart to those who manage to maintain the inerrancy of the Bible by the expedient of not reading it - is replicated across countless university campuses and supposedly progressive publications, and when I see it I am unwilling to let it pass. But secondly, I decided to discuss his attempt to defend the indefensible because he has the effrontery to cite me in his support (emphasis added):

I also note in passing that even Kamm (who seems to have studied this [Faurisson] episode at length) says that "Chomsky is not himself a Holocaust denier, and no responsible critic has ever claimed he is."

Let me say this as undemonstratively and cordially as I can to any Chomsky admirers who may be reading this (and judging by the messages I receive daily on this subject, in varying shades of politeness, there are liable to be quite a number). If you wish to quote me on this or any other subject, I expect and require you to do so with the relevant context included, rather than in the way this blogger has done. So you should be in no doubt about what that involves, I am doing you the favour of appending a paragraph I have knocked together that will provide you with both the judgement that you apparently wish to reproduce and the context in which it is made. Here goes:

Kamm has studied the Faurisson episode at length and is consequently in a position to refute Chomsky's self-serving and dishonest claim that he is the victim of a campaign to depict him as a Holocaust denier. Chomsky's most prominent critics on this subject - among them Alan Dershowitz, Steven Lukes, and the late Lucy Dawidowicz - have made no such accusation. Chomsky's claim to the contrary is deliberate misdirection designed to impress a personal following that evidences scant familiarity with the issues involved. Kamm has also demonstrated the falsehood of the constant refrain of Chomsky's admirers that, in defending Faurisson, Chomsky was doing no more than defending freedom of speech. Chomsky in fact defended the character of Faurisson's beliefs and not just Faurisson's right to express those beliefs (which was in any event never at issue). Chomsky did this not by endorsing Faurisson's obviously false claim that the Holocaust never happened, but by defending Faurisson against the charges of antisemitism and pro-Nazism despite the fact that Chomsky knew those charges were true. Kamm has thereby demonstrated that Chomsky, contrary to his followers' belief that he represents some sort of progressive and principled strain of politics, is in fact a dissembling apologist for bigotry.

If you want to quote me, comrades, then quote that.

White-poppy wearers, then and now

My regular Respect-watching correspondent draws my attention to the views of Lindsey German, convenor of the Stop the War Coalition, on the 'White Poppies' campaign of the Peace Pledge Union. In The Independent last week, Mrs German stated:

The poppy is the symbol of the millions of people who died in the First World War. People wear them because they don't want such wars to happen again. Politicians such as Tony Blair, who will lay wreaths at the Cenotaph on Sunday, are taking us into new and dangerous and illegal wars and the poppy is being used by them for their own ends.

For this reason I would not wear a red poppy. I will be wearing a white poppy because it is the symbol of peace.

More accurately, the white poppy is the symbol of an organisation that comprehensively failed to innoculate itself against pro-Nazi elements in British public life the late 1930s, and whose views even as the full extent of Nazi barbarity became known were strikingly devoid of self-criticism. I recommend on this subject the standard historical work Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945, by Martin Ceadel (2000), from which I have taken the three quotations that follow.

John Middleton Murry, editor of the pacifist journal Peace News during WWII, wrote in that magazine on 9 August 1940:

Personally I don't believe that a Hitlerian Europe would be quite so terrible as most people believe it would be.

The best that can be said of Murry is that, unforgivably foolish as this judgement was (did he imagine Kristallnacht was mere youthful high spirits that would be toned down with the responsibilities of the occupation of Europe?), at least he had the belated sense after the war to acknowledge the truth about the moral failings of pacifism. (He is now best-remembered as a literary critic and editor of the brilliant short stories of his late wife, Katherine Mansfield.) The pacifist Peace Pledge Union overall cannot be acquitted so lightly. Right up till 1943, the Marquess of Tavistock, founder of the pro-Nazi and antisemitic British People's Party, was winning election to the national council of the PPU. He was nominated for the council also in 1944, but declined to serve. In Peace News, 30 October 1942, he invoked the following rationalisation for Nazi aggression in Europe:

... the very serious provocation which many Jews have given by their avarice and arrogance when exploiting Germany's financial difficulties, by their associations with commercialized vice, and by their monopolization of certain professions.

To honest pacifists, the gas chambers - and the consequent certain knowledge that every Jew in Europe would have been killed had the allied powers not taken up arms - were a cause of personal shame as well as horror. Not, however, to the most famous of all British peace campaigners, Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth (and, incidentally, mother of the current Liberal Democrat leader in the House of Lords, Baroness Williams of Crosby - who would certainly not share her mother's view of WWII). In one of her regular letters to her fellow-campaigners, on 3 May 1945, Vera Brittain maintained that the gas chambers were being publicised by the allies:

... partly, at least, in order to divert attention from the havoc produced in German cities by allied obliteration bombing.

Thus an ethical objection to war - grossly misguided, but not inherently ignoble - became a position indifferent to tyranny and genocide, uncomprehending of the moral imperative of combating evil, and even complicit in support of that evil. Lindsey German, London mayoral candidate for Respect and convenor of the Stop the War Coalition, wears the symbol of that campaign with pride - and, I must say, a certain historical appropriateness.

Politics and remembrance II

Nigel Farndale goes on to remark of another peace organisation:

At least the families against the war weren't wearing white poppies. These are being distributed this year by the Peace Pledge Union. The PPU's members feel that red poppies symbolise, well, I don't know what they think they symbolise but not, presumably, the sacrifice of life in the name of freedom and peace. They do, though, know what the white poppy stands for: "The belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers." Not enemy strangers, note. Not enemy strangers who are trying to kill you. In the Disney world of the Peace Pledge Union, there is nothing that can't be solved by joining hands to form a healing circle and singing a couple of verses of Blowin' in the Wind.

This is understating the case. I’m glad to fill in the historical gaps.

The Peace Pledge Union is a pacifist organisation that stemmed from a letter to The Manchester Guardian almost exactly 70 years ago – in October 1934 – from an Anglican clergyman, Canon Dick Sheppard, denouncing war. Sheppard received huge public support for his views. A mass movement speedily arose. As with the temperance movement, whose ethos the PPU resembled, members signed a pledge – in this case reading: “I renounce war, and I will never support or sanction another.”

Predictably, the movement never regained such levels of support after it became clear to all but the most fervent of Canon Sheppard’s flock that a pledge against war was ineffective against aggressive tyrannies that unaccountably declined to be held to the same standard. (Sheppard died in 1937, and thus didn’t live to appreciate the absurdity of his views. There is a portrait of him on the west wall of the incomparably beautiful Church of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, where he was vicar from 1914 to 1927; he looks like a cherub.)

The PPU’s ‘White Poppies’ campaign dates from the 1930s, but was revived in earnest in 1980. It received a burst of publicity in 1986 when the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, was goaded into expressing in answer to a parliamentary question her distaste for the campaign. It was probably a counterproductive intervention, but it was certainly justified. The PPU claims the white poppies commemorate those who have fallen in war, but in fact they do something substantially different: they bear testament to the belief that those who fell in war were wrong to take up arms. I think that’s an immoral as well as mistaken belief, but I take particular exception to its being advanced as a parody of the act of Remembrance.

All that, however, is way of background. The main interest of the PPU in the history of the peace movement is that its political stance – while primarily religious and ethical in inspiration – closely parallels that of today’s anti-war movement, in one important respect. George Orwell referred to it in his essay Notes on Nationalism (May 1945):

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts [the colloquial name for Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists]. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransferred.

This passage has become quite well-known since 9/11. Vaingloriously, I believe I’m indirectly responsible for this; incredulous at the anti-war campaigners after 9/11, Andrew Sullivan mentioned in his blog that he was reading Orwell, so I sent him this quotation, which he used to great effect and which was picked up by others. It has always been a passage that Orwell’s detractors – Raymond Williams, and more recently Scott Lucas – find offensive. Christopher Hitchens also cites the passage in his excellent book on Orwell and elsewhere, but uncharacteristically makes a transcription error: Orwell referred to the pacifists’ “unadmitted motive”, which Hitchens renders as “unacknowledged motive”. “Unadmitted”, with its implication of concealment, is the better word. (There is also a particularly ignorant Internet hoax doing the rounds by those who claim – on the basis of a Chomsky-like running together of two separate passages from different essays in order to give a false impression – that Orwell renounced his strictures against pacifists. I was accosted on this very subject in the letters page of The Guardian a while back by a lady who had read the hoax but not Orwell himself; I’ll explain her fallacy in a separate post, though - as with refuting Chomsky - it requires a bit of space to supply the missing context.)

Despite his harsh words about pacifists, and despite peace campaigners’ outrage then and now against him, Orwell was still being generous in his judgements. It is true that the overlap between membership of the PPU and the Blackshirts was numerically small. The personalities involved in pro-Nazi activity by British pacifists were, however, the peace movement’s leadership, and the activity itself took place in organisations other than Mosley’s BUF.

I recommend in this context a new book by Sir Ian Kershaw (the renowned biographer of Hitler) called Making Friends with Hitler. It is a study of a minor Conservative politician, Lord Londonderry, who became convinced in the 1930s of the necessity of improving relations with Germany in order to avoid war. This superb book is a fair-minded portrait of an aristocratic sentiment that was not in itself ignoble but was stupendously, culpably and catastrophically misguided. One of the many valuable insights is Kershaw’s distinction between this type of unimaginative and myopic appeasement, and the outright expressions of pro-Nazism and antisemitism that could be found among other appeasers, including those in Londonderry’s own party.

The link was an organisation called, appropriately, The Link. Kershaw notes (p. 247) that this group, while ostensibly calling for better international relations, was also “heavily laced with antisemitism and fervent support for Nazism”. Londonderry – more stupid than malign, but truly very, very stupid – decided that, though The Link was indeed pro-Nazi, he shared its judgement that Munich represented a reasonable resolution of justified German complaints. He thus added his name to a letter to The Times (12 October 1938) to that effect along with half a dozen council members of The Link and various other Nazi sympathizers. His reputation deservedly never recovered.

One person who, unlike Londonderry, did hold membership of The Link, however, was the Chairman of the Peace Pledge Union, Canon Stuart Morris, who had succeeded Dick Sheppard. Another leading member of the PPU, the Marquess of Tavistock (later the Duke of Bedford) founded an explicitly pro-Nazi and antisemitic party in April 1939, the British People’s Party (BPP). The party’s Treasurer, Ben Greene, a former Labour Party candidate, was also a member of the PPU, which helped him to establish a periodical that freely lifted material from pro-Nazi sources. The PPU executive eventually expressed some diffidence at – though scarcely opposition to - the slant Greene was adopting, but leading PPU members continued to support the Nazi cause. The BPP fought a by-election in Hythe shortly after its formation; a prominent speaker in support of its candidate was yet another leading pacifist campaigner Dr Maude Royden. (In a neat historical irony, the candidate was the explorer St John Philby, father of Kim Philby; admiration for totalitarianism was clearly a family trait.) Dr Royden continued to support the BPP before and after the outbreak of war.

(This account is drawn primarily from a fascinating and historically important account of these pro-Nazi groups, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and Antisemitism 1939-40, by Richard Griffiths, 1998. Ramsay was a fiercely antisemitic Tory MP who was interned for his pro-Nazi sympathies. His Right Club was an organisation that we may assume would have furnished a Vichy-type regime had the Nazis conquered Britain. For many years the membership book of the Club was believed lost, but it resurfaced in a solicitor’s office in 1990, and Griffiths’s account is a definitive exposition of the subject.)

During and after a war that proved as nothing else could the fallacy of pacifism when faced with a regime of absolute terror, the PPU retreated to a position that was scarcely more reputable: an evasive and mendacious doctrine of ‘moral equivalence’ between the allies and the Axis powers. This has remained the pacifist position ever since, and periodically resurfaces in public debate. It is worth rehearsing this history because, while historical parallels are rarely exact, there is a discernible consistency here. The peace movement of today is analogous to the peace movement of 65 years ago in an important respect: it contains many genuine though misguided idealists, while its leadership is unmistakably supportive of fascism.