Oliver Kamm

Politics and remembrance I

The Telegraph columnist Nigel Farndale says what needs to be said about a campaign that – as distinct from the bereavements suffered by its nominal spokesmen – merits no sympathy whatever.

November 14, 1944 Today the tearful families of soldiers killed in the assault on Arnhem laid the blame where they say it belongs - at 10 Downing Street. They placed a wreath of poppies on Winston Churchill's doorstep during a symbolic minute's silence. The relatives, who have formed a campaign group, Military Families Against Soldiers Being Killed in Action, delivered an emotional letter to the Prime Minister charging him with "morally unacceptable conduct" and of entering a "contrived war". Afterwards they launched a savage attack on the Government and demanded that British troops be brought home.

No, of course they didn't. My point is not to compare Tony Blair to Churchill, which would be a provocation too far, or to compare the Second World War to what is going on Iraq, but just to illustrate why the sight of those families laying their wreath at Number 10 on Thursday made me want to throw up. In the past, military families have been like a seam of granite running through the country, immovable, inspiring, meeting adversity with a steady eye. Perhaps they always felt this way, even in 1944, but the media did them the kindness of not exposing their vulnerability to the cameras.

I use the adjective “nominal” because I suspect that the service families associated with the anti-war campaign have not looked closely at its political message. For example, Rose and Maxine Gentle – respectively the mother and sister of a British serviceman killed in Iraq – addressed a rally of the Stop the War Coalition last month in Trafalgar Square.

In turn, the Coalition put out a press release a few days ago transparently soliciting further support from other service families:

Tonight Lindsey German, the convenor of Stop the War Coalition, expressed her condolences to the families and friends of those Black Watch service personnel who died or were injured in Iraq. She said, “This is a dreadful night for the families and loved ones of all British troops in Iraq. The only way that they will have piece of mind is if Tony Blair sets a date for the immediate withdrawal of troops.”

I and others (notably Harry’s blog and Nick Cohen of The Observer) have spent some documenting the political affiliations of the Stop the War Coalition. In summary the ‘Coalition’ is misnamed, because it is in fact a front organisation for the Socialist Workers’ Party. Lindsey German, named as the Coalition’s ‘convenor’, was till recently the editor of the SWP’s monthly magazine. What Nigel Farndale possibly wasn’t aware of, and I have done my best to publicise, is that the SWP called for military victory for Saddam Hussein. In Socialist Worker, 22 March 2003, party ideologue Paul McGarr, stated:

The best response to war would be protests across the globe which make it impossible for Bush and Blair to continue. But while war lasts by far the lesser evil would be reverses, or defeat, for the US and British forces. That may be unlikely, given the overwhelming military superiority they enjoy. But it would be the best outcome in military terms.

This position was no aberration. Last month, the Stop the War Coalition issued this statement:

The StWC reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary, to secure such ends.

The political scandal of according legitimacy to any and all tactics considered ‘necessary’ by the Islamist head-loppers and suicide-terrorists in Iraq caused the Coalition momentary discomfort. Yet that judgement accorded strictly with the position of its controlling organisation, the SWP, in supporting military victory for the forces of Baathist tyranny.

In short, the families of British servicemen killed in Iraq are conducting their protests under the auspices of an organisation that supports those who are doing the killing. It is for that reason that I doubt the Coalition is being open in its position with those families, and consider Lindsey German’s remarks dishonest and hypocritical. Supporting military victory for genocidal tyranny and fascism is a position that is difficult to outdo in disrepute; emotionally exploiting the victims of the cause thus favoured does the trick, however.

What is ... reactionary fetishism?

This comment appears in The Times today.

A COLUMN DEVOTED to explaining a buzz phrase of the moment will find rich seams of material in political commentary. At its best, political writing offers arresting metaphor and acute diagnosis. More commonly, political columnists, mindful that few people share their interest in the subject, obscure the ephemeral character of their output with extravagant exclamations about its significance.
The Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley provided an example this week when she complained: “It looks as if conservative Americans have made a fetish of a few isolated issues while ignoring far harder and more painful questions.” Heroically overlooking the double entendre that was sure to occur to more frivolous readers, the newspaper headlined the piece: “We must reclaim morality from reactionary fetishists.”

The reactionary fetishists identified by Ms Ashley are those absorbed, appropriately enough, with sexual ethics. The enlightened are those who subscribe instead to the catechism of foreign-policy and environmental views to be found in — to take a random example of enlightened opinion — the comment pages of The Guardian. Ms Ashley dislikes the first group, while exhorting the second to congratulate themselves on their broadmindedness and seek an explanation for their unpopularity in their opponents’ underhandedness.

She complains: “Nothing has been more damaging to the Left than the smear that everyone who supports, say redistribution of wealth, is also by definition keen on compulsory adultery, the decriminalisation of all drugs and free access for armed burglars to pensioners’ homes. (If you think [this] exaggerates, think again: that is a reasonable précis of what they say about us.)”

As it happens, I am with Ms Ashley on the fetishes, and on redistribution too. No Guardian columnist’s heart bleeds more freely than mine in sympathy with liberal views on abortion, capital punishment and gay rights. But these are political opinions, not axioms. Ms Ashley’s depiction of her opponents does not even reach the level of caricature — which would at least contain a core of truth embellished by hyperbole. If there is somewhere a fully developed version of the argument she claims to have reliably summarised, she does not reveal its source. It is enough to propound it as a Manichaean counterweight to her own professions of — no, really — “a sense of proportion, fairness and civic-mindedness”.

The fact that religious observance is far higher in the US than in Europe does not make America intolerant. Incomprehension of American opinion — for which “reactionary fetishism” may now serve as a useful shorthand — is a failing that liberals ought to try dispelling rather than exemplifying.

Hitchens and secularism

Christopher Hitchens’s latest column in Slate appears to have annoyed a lot of people with an assertion of good sense on secularism:

George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the U.S. armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary—that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow can't hear Robert Ingersoll or Clarence Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within and without.

I admire what Hitchens has said and done in support of the revolutionary cause of regime-change in Afghanistan and Iraq. The negative side of his achievement – though no less important for that – is his documenting the descent into irrationalism of those parts of the Left that see President Bush as an equivalently malign force to Islamist totalitarianism. In spite of all that is public knowledge about the regimes we have overthrown, the furious sophistry of the reactionary Left goes on. We used to be assured that Saddam had no links with international terrorism - despite his documented subventions for suicide-bombers against Israel. The script then changed to Saddam’s having no links with international terrorism outside Palestine – conveniently overlooking the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which repaid Saddam’s support for its terrorism in Iran by assisting in the bloody repression of the Kurds in Northern Iraq.

But no myth of the reactionary Left has been more persistent than that Saddam’s regime was a beacon of secularism in a region plagued by obscurantism. In the words – which in every particular could scarcely be less accurate - of John Pilger:

No one disputes the grim, totalitarian nature of the regime; but Saddam Hussein was careful to use the oil wealth to create a modern secular society and a large and prosperous middle class.

Whether Saddam is personally devout I do not know. That he adopted the language of Islamism to bolster his regime and sought alliances with the most brutal theocratic elements is a plain fact. The day after Islamist terrorists murdered 3000 civilians on American soil, Saddam made a gleeful broadcast on Iraqi television clearly associating himself with the forces of Islamism (reproduced in Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East: A Documentary Reader, eds. Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, 2002, pp. 283-4):

[W]e hope that the people of the United States will remember that the souls that were killed with US weapons and US machinations and plots [in Vietnam, Iraq and – a crazed pitiable claim – the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk] can rise to God, lord of heavens and earth, to complain about the injustice of the United States. In fact, God, the omnipotent and great, can see. When God strikes, no one can stand in the way of his power.

Even supporters of the war against Islamist totalitarianism don’t necessarily grasp the point that this struggle is sui generis. Johann Hari of The Independent wrote a column decrying what he considered to be a Catholic equivalent. (I criticised it here, on the grounds that there is no proper analogy.)

The erosion – real or imagined - of the Jeffersonian principle of the separation of civil and religious authority is an issue of lesser moral import than the holy war that Osama bin Laden has declared against ‘the Jews and Crusaders’. One can perfectly consistently be against both, and I am. But – to use the analogy that Hitchens himself used on resigning from The Nation – the notion that John Ashcroft, now no longer in government, and Islamist totalitarianism are equivalent enemies of progressive values is worse than immoral. It’s frivolous.

Arafat's passing

It’s usually as well to observe a period of silence on the death of a public figure for whom one has little or no respect. But political leaders are different: we judge them more especially for what they have wrought. What Arafat wrought was ignoble.

The demand for an independent Palestinian state is just. No one – literally no one - has done more to prevent its realisation and detract from its legitimacy than Arafat. One need not subscribe to the notion that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” – an abdication of the responsibility to exercise moral discrimination – to acknowledge that a movement practising political violence can in principle metamorphose into a legitimate constitutional cause. (The old Official IRA, now sublimated in a small Marxist organisation called the Workers’ Party, is an example.) Arafat never made that transition. The terrorism with which he pursued his cause was distinctively brutal. When he planned and ordered the torture and murder in Khartoum in 1973 of the US Ambassador Cleo Noel and another American diplomat, it was impossible afterwards to determine from inspecting the victims' corpses which of the men had been black and which white.

I believe it is always a mistake for free societies to make political concessions in the hope of achieving a solution to terrorist grievances. The best means of transforming a conflict so that terrorists abandon violence and adhere strictly to constitutional politics is to make it clear to them that the costs of pursuing terrorism will be very high indeed.

This ought to have been the stance that democratic governments adopted with the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s. That it was not had a disastrous effect on the character of post-Oslo diplomacy. Never having been tested by international interlocutors, Arafat saw no reason to pursue a diplomatic resolution. Oslo was the right principle: but it failed because Arafat was unwilling to meet his treaty obligation of cracking down on terrorist groups. It wasn't that he was unable to do this - he dealt effectively enough with Hamas in 1996 and in the first year of Ehud Barak's government, when it was in his interests to be seen to comply with his obligations. But more typically he just didn’t want to. When Barak agreed to the Clinton administration’s proposals that would have created an independent, territorially-contiguous Palestinian state on all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem, Arafat responded not with a counter-offer but with a campaign of violence.

Those who have criticised President Bush’s disengagement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generally overlook the reasoning behind that stance. Arafat was duplicitous and untrustworthy. Instead of abjuring violence he fomented it. Instead of governing wisely and well in preparation for statehood, he exercised arbitrary power and exhibited relentless cupidity. No agreement signed by Arafat could have been made to stick. His people were greatly the poorer for having been misrepresented and misruled by him; they urgently require better leadership on his passing.

This just in...

On the letters page of The Independent a New York correspondent recounts her "horrifying realisation as the election returns came in on Tuesday ... that Bush was winning because too many Americans were complacent and satisfied with fantasy". Fortunately she is immune to fantasy; John Kerry won the election, but no one has realised this:

As an American, perhaps foolishly, I have difficulty accepting that much of the electorate is so misguided and intolerant. The reliance on electronic voting machines lacking a paper confirmation, and the lack of public outcry over this, is what has scared me the most. Someone can steal an election, claim a mandate, and then wreak havoc on the world for years to come.

Nothing like a sense of proportion...

Freud stayed in Vienna until Hitler had completely taken over the country, but I don't want to be wrong about when it's time to leave. My fear is that I won't know when to get out.

Peggy Bowen, a lawyer from Santa Fe, New Mexico, outlines her plans for fleeing the tyranny of President Bush, BBC News, 8 November

Yet more on Clark County

I wrote the post immediately below before I'd seen that Slate magazine has a further discussion, by Andy Bowers, of The Guardian's campaign to establish pen-friendships with US voters. It is nicely understated - a charge that could hardly be levelled at Professor Richard Dawkins, whom Bowers quotes. Here is the article's conclusion:

The most significant stat here is how Clark County compares to the other 15 Ohio counties won by Gore in 2000. Kerry won every Gore county in Ohio except Clark. He even increased Gore's winning margin in 12 of the 16. Nowhere among the Gore counties did more votes move from the blue to the red column than in Clark. The Guardian's Katz was quoted as saying it would be "self-aggrandizing" to claim Operation Clark County affected the election. Don't be so modest, Ian.

During and since the Iraq war I have periodically heard and read comments from Guardian readers declaring that they are ashamed to be British. I'm not so much ashamed, but certainly embarrassed, that a British newspaper of liberal outlook and with a distinguished history should have attempted so patronising and contemptuous an intervention.

The unipolar moment

This article appears in The Times today.

LADY ANTONIA FRASER, Professor Richard Dawkins and other participants in The Guardian’s ill-fated venture in establishing pen-friendships with US voters should prepare for their second shock of the week. (The first was the revelation that not everyone welcomes unsolicited e-mails from hectoring foreigners proffering advice on how to vote.)

Now they are about to find out that they are wrong to think of the US Administration as a monolithic force.

Like ducks paddling furiously below the surface, there is ferment beneath the serene countenance of US conservatism. Indeed it is proving no less fissiparous than its British counterpart, though with vastly better election results.The ructions are summed up in the phrase “unipolar moment”.

In the Cold War, the international order was “bipolar”, with power divided between competing superpowers. Then communism collapsed.

A popular thesis of the time held that this heralded the decline of an economically stretched United States too. It didn’t turn out that way. The US is dominant, economically and militarily. Its prime foreign policy concern is not with other major powers but with smaller aggressive states and terrorist groups. Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, anticipated this. In 1990 he wrote of a “unipolar moment” in international affairs. He urged the US not to dissipate its dominance by placing reliance on treaties and international institutions.

This year, Krauthammer revisited his argument. He maintained that in a unipolar order, “America should neither defer nor contract out decision-making”. It was perfectly pitched for Guardian letter writers. The unipolar moment was an “Aha! moment”: it meant unapologetic advocacy of US unilateralism.

But then the script ran out. Another neoconservative theorist, Francis Fukuyama, charged Krauthammer with being “strangely disconnected from reality”. Krauthammer, Fukuyama maintained, did not take account of the limits to US power. Fukuyama proposed a new foreign policy that emphasised coalition-building.

Krauthammer was dismissive. Fukuyama had failed to grasp the difference between a grandiose democratic universalism and Krauthammer’s position of democratic realism. Democratic realism seeks regime change, but only in regions strategically vital to the US: Afghanistan but not Haiti; Iraq but not North Korea. Coalition-building is desirable; but nation-building — to combat aggressive tyranny and theocratic terrorism — is essential.

Disagreements over nation-building and coalition-building will recur in the second Bush Administration. Perhaps alone among European liberals, I hope Krauthammer’s view prevails. America’s historic tolerance of autocracy in the Arab world merely fomented Islamist extremism. Regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq offers the chance of addressing this, the genuine “root cause” of terrorism.

And I don’t expect Lady Antonia to become my pen-friend for saying so.

Nothing like a sense of proportion... II

From today's Guardian, recording responses to the news of the President's re-election:

"Ach," says Oliver James, the clinical psychologist. "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?'"

In fact, I recommend the whole article, particularly to American readers. Like Oscar Wilde considering the death of Little Nell, one would need a heart of stone to read it without falling about laughing. Its sub-heading claims impertinently:

We went to bed daring to hope and awoke to the crushing news. And ever since we've been swapping emails and texts about how miserable we feel. Emma Brockes on how George Bush's victory catapaulted [sic] liberal Britain into collective depression

I can only say that the small corner of liberal Britain that is the Kamm household is as unflappable and cheery as ever.

Nothing like a sense of proportion...

Here's someone else pleading for derision: a professional philosopher (what else?) who believes the ghost of Harriet Tubman has been defeated by George W. Bush.