Oliver Kamm

The things they say II

Unexpectedly, I found that there are a number of Jews who dare to expose the truth about Zionism and Jewish supremacism. A much-persecuted and slandered group, they are just as appalled as I was about the intolerant and hateful strains of Judaism that had arisen in the Jewish community and the Zionist State. They have included Americans such as Alfred Lilienthal, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and a courageous Jew in Israel, the late Dr. Israel Shahak. These scholars have dared to stand up against Jewish intolerance.

David Duke, white supremacist and founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, in his book My Awakening, 1998. [Warning: the link takes you to Duke's own site.]

The things they say

I am known as a generous, forgiving, and Christian man, but in my own private world order I have worked out a kind of hierarchy, which ranks washing-machines above dishwashers, and beneath the latter a crumbling soggy heap of flaking lineoleum, dampness, crud, and mould, which is roughly where I would place the average journalist; and beneath that foul stratum, down in that darkness, the home of the cockroaches, termites, woodworms, and other infestations, and -- lurking even beneath their unremoved excrement -- the world of enemy lawyers, solicitors, and other bottom-crawling scumsuckers; and somewhere beneath all of them, until now, I had imagined Ken Livingstone and his "anti-fascist" ilk.

No longer. He has restored himself in my estimation.

David Irving, racist, antisemite and Holocaust denier, commends the Mayor of London on comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard. [Warning: the link takes you to Irving's own site.]

Chesterton: use and abuse

Writing in The Guardian earlier this week about the once-fashionable pseudoscience of eugenics, David Aaronovitch commented:

[The effect of public debate] was in good measure that Catholic intellectuals such as G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, together with Labour MPs, blocked the attempt to bring in such appalling legislation.

This is right. Chesterton – no liberal but an economic populist, agrarian reactionary and muscular Christian apologist – wrote a powerful essay called “The Fallacy of Eugenics” in one of his last books, Avowals and Desires, in 1934, as well as an earlier book called Eugenics and Other Evils. From his religious premises, Chesterton protested that eugenics was a device of social control that would oppress the poor – as indeed it was.

Writing in The Sunday Times on Easter Sunday, Brian Appleyard lamented the secularisation of our culture with an appropriate quotation:

“When people stop believing in God,” said GK Chesterton, “they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.”

Except it wasn't an appropriate quotation, but a spurious one. Chesterton no more wrote it than Edmund Burke made his famous supposed remark about the conditions for the triumph of evil. It was definitively traced a few years ago by the American Chesterton Society to a secondary source on the author by Emile Cammaerts, The Laughing Prophet, 1937. The 'quotation' is a paraphrase of Cammaert's own paraphrase of what he took to be an idea within Chesterton's Father Brown stories. You’re likely to come across this fake Chesterton quotation with monotonous regularity in the work of jobbing journalists who don’t check their sources and in religious apologetic, so I'm doing my bit to try to get it banished from public debate.

UPDATE: A correspondent rightly faults me for not giving the direct quotation. Chesterton has Father Brown say, in the story "The Oracle of the Dog":

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

It is this story that Cammaerts is discussing when his paraphrase occurs:

"It's drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition." The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything: "And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery."

Note the position of the quotation marks. The remarks inside them are Father Brown's. The remark not so enclosed is Cammaerts's own. The full, and to my mind incontrovertible, evidence is set out here on the web site of the American Chesterton Society, to which I am indebted. I have read about 50 of Chesterton's books since my teens, and a signed (and I believe unpublished) photograph of the man hangs in my study; I had become convinced that this most celebrated of his quotations must be apocryphal, but mistakenly assumed that it dated only from the 1960s or so, when he began to be rediscovered.

Atzmon watch

Al-Jazeerah has just published an op-ed entitled To Sit in the Dark by the jazz musician and former Israeli reservist Gilad Atzmon. It conforms to the man’s previous record, for he maintains that Jews bang on about the Holocaust because they want to maintain their power, privilege and dominion:

The victim strategy is the latest and most sophisticated form of Jewish supremacist segregation.... You can take from the Jew his religion, you can take away the chicken soup you can even put ‘sea fruit’ on his plate but once you take away the victim tendency, the Jew isn’t a Jew anymore. Once you lift the colossal threat of Hitler then the Jew becomes an ordinary boring being. Let me tell you, this is not going to happen.

It’s foul, foul stuff. But as regular readers will know, it fits with Atzmon’s insistence that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately depicts the Jewish conspiracy that seeks world domination:

[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.

Who could possibly take this fevered antisemitic crank seriously? Again as regular readers will know, the answer is the Socialist Workers’ Party, the controlling organisation behind the Stop the War Coalition and the Respect ‘Coalition’ – and it does no harm to remind ourselves of the fact every time Atzmon opens his mouth. Atzmon was an invited speaker at the SWP’s ‘Marxism 2004’ jamboree last summer, and was the recipient of this puff piece by Socialist Worker in advance. According to the paper, Atzmon’s unabashed anti-Jewish bigotry is best described as:

... Gilad’s fearless tirades against Zionism.

Unsurprisingly, the regard is shared on the other side. Atzmon declared in an earlier interview with the paper:

I love Socialist Worker. It is the only newspaper in Britain which campaigns against Israel.

Taken literally, the second sentence in this quotation is patently absurd, but it needs to be considered in the context of the first sentence. Evidently what Atzmon means is that Socialist Worker is the only newspaper in Britain that campaigns against Israel in terms that he would recognise as ideologically congenial. Count me unsurprised.

James Callaghan

The passage of time since Jim Callaghan’s departure from Downing Street predictably encouraged obituarists to exploit the man’s memory in order to advance by insinuation their current political preoccupations. Thus The Guardian’s leader column maintained:

His term as prime minister was brief and transitional, but some of its values - the belief in collegiate leadership, the candour - are ones we could do with more of now.

The not-so-subtle dig at Tony Blair is history of the inept and the inapt variety. There was no “collegiate leadership” under Callaghan: while the Cabinet gave every show of debate, the really important decisions were taken by Callaghan alone. Denis Healey’s raising employers’ national insurance contributions in the summer of 1976, in order to bolster foreign confidence in the Government’s fiscal policy, escaped Cabinet scrutiny. In the Cabinet debates over the terms for the IMF loan later that year, Callaghan had already made up his mind that his Chancellor would prevail in making public expenditure cuts. He was never going to accept the alternative proposals of Tony Crosland (who advocated an off-the-cuff scheme of import deposits, which would undoubtedly have harmed developing countries’ exports) or, much less seriously, Tony Benn (who presented the Left’s ‘Alternative Economic Strategy’ of reflation, high public spending, compulsory planning ‘agreements’ with industry, nationalisation and protectionism).

In his memoir Inside the Treasury (1982, p. 154), Joel Barnett, Chief Secretary to the Treasury throughout the 1974-79 Labour governments, records that at the Cabinet meeting of 7 September 1978, Callaghan peremptorily stated that, contrary to all expectation, there would not after all be a general election till the next year:

The Prime Minister had no objection to our discussing his decision but he said: “I told the Queen of my decision last night.” In those circumstances, and as he had the right to make the decision anyway, there was not much to discuss.

Still, The Guardian was trying to be kind, unlike the professional philosopher who offered his instant thoughts under the sensitive headline “Callaghan dead”:

Thanks to him and his ilk we suffered 18 years of Tory misrule.

I do indeed recall that throughout the 1980s and early 1990s voters returned Conservative governments in protest at James Callaghan, evidently fearing that trade union militancy, Trotskyite entrism and unilateral nuclear disarmament were not given sufficient expression in the Labour Party. (There again, I shouldn’t make an admittedly feeble joke about this. A large proportion of the Labour Party in the 1980s really did take the view I’ve just stated.)

Some time ago I posted my ranking of British Prime Ministers since the war. I would put Callaghan in the top half. Whereas in his previous ministerial posts he had been undistinguished – failing to devalue sterling early enough; the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968, which violated this country’s obligations to British citizens in East Africa; and his role in the defeat of industrial relations reform in 1969 – Callaghan was a good and effective Prime Minister. His greatest single achievement was to destroy Socialism as a serious proposition in British politics. The principal turning point in British politics and economic management in the past 60 years was not 1979, when Mrs Thatcher took office, but 1976, when Callaghan told the Labour Party conference:

We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting Government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the system.

This remarkable speech (drafted by his son-in-law, Peter Jay) was an implicit indictment of Conservative profligacy under Reginald Maudling (whose expansionary policies Callaghan had tamed as Chancellor) and Anthony Barber (still the most incompetent Chancellor since the war), but also of traditional Labour policies. It represented a repudiation of the disastrous first 18 months of the 1974-79 Labour Government, when public expenditure and inflation ran unchecked. Tied with the acceptance of IMF terms – a one-off, necessary and rational course to avoid accelerating inflation, a collapsing pound and mass unemployment – it was the beginning of a fundamental change in economic management that successive governments capitalised on.

Whether the necessary reforms that took place under Mrs Thatcher – defeating the abuses of trade union power and bringing the unions under the rule of law, maintaining the control of inflation in preference to full employment as the prime objective of economic policy, abandoning the ineffective and damaging pursuit of incomes policies – would have come about had Labour won the 1979 election is a matter of historical debate. I think they probably would have done, if not necessarily at the time and in the order in which they were achieved.

Against that scenario, however, and even assuming a reelected Labour Government would have wished to do these things, there would have been a serious risk of Callaghan’s being succeeded as Prime Minister by Michael Foot. Foot came top of the first ballot in the leadership election of 1976, and of course did win the leadership in 1980, when Labour was in fractious opposition. Had he been elected leader when Labour was in government he would automatically have become Prime Minister. A less competent or knowledgeable political leader, or one more instinctively parochial, would have been hard to find. That prospect in itself would have justified a Conservative vote in the 1979 election (though I canvassed for Labour in that election – I was not yet of voting age – and my left-wing views have scarcely altered at all since then). Despite that caveat, I consider James Callaghan and Denis Healey deserve credit in the historical scheme.

The other main area of policy in which Callaghan merits praise is defence policy. It was always a prominent part of the prosecution case against Callaghan during Labour’s internal warfare of the 1980s that he had secretly continued with the modernisation of Britain’s Polaris fleet and prepared for its eventual replacement by a new generation of nuclear weapons, the American submarine-launched Trident system, in defiance of the views of the Labour Party conference. These charges were absolutely correct, and reflect much credit on Callaghan and his inner Cabinet.

Callaghan also did his best to cope with a feckless and vacillating US President with minimal experience in international affairs, Jimmy Carter. The fiasco of Carter’s first securing the agreement of Callaghan and the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to the deployment of the neutron bomb to counter Soviet intermediate-range missiles, and then deciding against the deployment, damaged the cohesion of Nato. It took resolution and character on the part of Europe’s two most prominent left-wing leaders both to face down their own parties on the issue and then to continue working effectively with the White House when their positions had been undermined.

A point that I did not see raised in the obituaries was that Callaghan, while being a model of loyalty to his party successors compared with the comparable relationships in the Conservative Party, was prepared to voice his opposition to Labour’s unilateralist disarmament policies in the 1980s. In the 1983 general election campaign he gave a terrific speech, which he made sure was televised, stating calmly but forcefully that Labour’s new defence policies were out of line with the party’s traditional stance and that he did not support them. At least one Labour MP – John Gilbert, who eventually returned to government as a defence minister after Tony Blair’s first election victory – was convinced that he had held his marginal seat only because Callaghan had spoken out. Predictably, Callaghan was castigated by more frenetic members of the Labour Party (‘Guilty Men’ ran the headline in the post-election issue of Tribune) but he was talking sense. At that year’s party conference, to a chorus of boos from constituency delegates, he stated the issue matter-of-factly:

What the movement has failed to understand is that it reversed the traditional policy of the Labour Party on which we had fought 11 successive elections without any real attempt to convince the British people that what we were doing was right. I happen to believe it is wrong. But you make a fundamental mistake by believing that by going on marches and passing resolutions without any attempt to try to tell the British people what the consequences were, you could carry their vote. And you lost millions of votes.

On that last sentence, Callaghan was drowned out by opposing cries of “you did” – which merely showed the unreality of Labour activists. I recall an incident when I was canvassing for Labour in that general election campaign. In an industrial constituency (Oxford East) we could find few people willing to admit they were voting Labour. (My own canvassing pitch was to advise existing Labour voters to stay with us because there was not the remotest possibility that our disgraceful manifesto would ever be implemented. I did not try to persuade anyone else to vote Labour, which I counted an impossible and probably undesirable brief.) One elderly man who did say he would vote Labour added very politely and amicably that he believed Labour would lose heavily and the reason was the party’s defence policies. To my incredulity, my fellow-canvasser (since 1997 a Labour MP, whose name will be unknown to you) turned to me and said he didn’t think this was right: Labour was merely not convincing enough people that we would be effective in reducing unemployment.

But Jim Callaghan knew, and said so.

Tariq Ali is right

… in his analysis, if not his conclusions. I wrote in October:

Though I shall be voting at the next election for the return of a Labour government, I regard it as a legitimate position for consistent liberals to vote tactically to defeat the Liberal Democrats – and have indeed advocated this course since I started this site 18 months ago. In the 1980s, when the Labour Party adopted extreme positions and poor leadership, the old Social Democratic Party could be held to serve a valuable purpose in British politics (though I never supported it or voted for it). The Liberal Democrats, who absorbed the SDP, have made recent advances – from a very low base – in the quality of their economic thinking, but overall represent reactionary and sometimes ugly sentiments.

Tariq Ali wrote in The Guardian on Saturday:

In the warmonger constituencies we should vote tactically. In my north London constituency, the MP is Barbara Roche: pro-war and pro everything else this wretched government has done. I don't simply want to vote against her. I want her to be defeated. That is why I will vote Liberal Democrat.

Though I have revised my views on tactical voting since the Tories started appealing for the anti-war vote, I still think Ali’s analysis of the conjunction of forces has merit. He and the Liberal Democrats deserve each other.

(It is only fair to add, reading back my comments from a few months ago, that the “ugly sentiments” that immediately come to mind when I consider the Liberal Democrats are from politicians who are not standing again at the election – specifically Jenny Tonge and Paul Marsden. I wrote about the party's wider stance on the war here.)

Chomsky snippets

My thanks to three highly distinguished scholars – one in history and two in linguistics – who’ve written to me in the past few days about Chomsky-related material.

I noted that Chomsky’s Gifford Lecture at Edinburgh University last week, under the title “Illegal but Legitimate: a Dubious Doctrine for the Times”, is one he’s given before. My first correspondent points out that I was understating, and provides a a link to prove it. Though it is scarcely the greatest of Chomsky's sins, he always gives this lecture. After Edinburgh, he went to Berlin to lecture on – you’ve guessed it - “Illegal but Legitimate: a Dubious Doctrine for the Times”. Der Spiegel reports on the event here (in German only), beginning with the observation, which I shall not trouble to translate:

Noam Chomsky ist der Michael Moore für Intellektuelle.

You can say that again. The rest of the report demonstrates the point. There is Chomsky’s habitual analogy between the United States and Nazi Germany – this time the parallel inheres in JFK’s policies in Central America. There is also an indirect example of a tendency I have previously identified in Chomsky. Rather as 'Creation Scientists’ cite genuine geologists, biologists etc. in their support, having first taken the expedient of removing the relevant context that would make sense of the reference, Chomsky seems to be basing his argument on an extended allusion to the work of the historian John Lewis Gaddis.

Last year Gaddis wrote a concise and highly illuminating book, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, in which he argued that preemption, unilateralism and the pursuit of hegemony were enduring features of US strategic thinking. Gaddis cites the invasion of Spanish Florida by Andrew Jackson in 1817, which was precipitated by a perceived problem of weakly-governed states and a resulting power vacuum threatening American security. This has obvious modern implications.

Sure enough, in his Berlin speech, Chomsky comes up with the precedent of Andrew Jackson’s “Indian wars in Florida in the 19th century” in order to advance his claims of the historic bellicosity of the US. He doesn’t, however, cite Gaddis’s judgement that President Bush stands among three progenitors of great US strategic doctrines, the others being John Quincy Adams and F.D. Roosevelt. (Gaddis is far from being a partisan writer, and in his book is sceptical regarding the implementation of the Bush administration’s doctrines; that is my point. He is a scrupulous historian and not a polemicist.)

The second of my correspondents draws my attention to a new book, The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky. Four of the book's 14 chapters cover Chomsky’s politics, and I shall post a review of these in due course. I note that one of these chapters is written by Milan Rai, a former research assistant to Chomsky and the author of an earlier volume on Chomsky’s Politics. Rai’s book is undistinguished in all respects bar its dishonesty in presenting Chomsky’s intervention in the case of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson as “Chomsky's most famous defence of academic freedom”. For a balanced history of this case (i.e. one written by me) see here instead.

My third correspondent tells me that “Chomsky has made a variety of important contributions to linguistics but some of his followers seem to attribute magical powers to him and he seems to do nothing to discourage this.” He has referred me to an article from an academic journal (Lappin, S., R.D. Levine, and D.E Johnson (2000), 'The structure of unscientific revolutions', Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18, 665-671) which discusses the phenomenon. Of one line of inquiry in theoretical linguistics, these authors comment:

It is entirely reasonable for Chomsky to pursue his own research program on the basis of his intuition that it provides an interesting and potentially fruitful line of inquiry. Clearly, the burden of evidence and persuasion is on him to show us that this program is worth taking up. What is not readily comprehensible is that large numbers of researchers should substitute one theory for another simply on the basis of Chomsky’s personal authority, without subjecting his assumptions to the sort of critical evaluation that they would normally apply to theoretical innovations proposed under different authorship.

I hasten to add that this is a field in which I have no specialist knowledge and that I am not competent to discuss. I merely recognise in Chomsky’s political writings the phenomenon of statements that are accepted uncritically by a certain constituency on the presumption of their author’s authority (one that in the political sphere is not justified). I shall write in the next day or two of an example that I have not written about before and that I believe encapsulates what is wrong with Chomsky’s entire methodology in his political output.

Chomsky in Edinburgh

Noam Chomsky speaks today at Edinburgh University in the Gifford Lecture series. The Gifford Lectures are intended to “contribute to the advancement of theological and philosophical thought”, but Chomsky is instead using the occasion to advance his political opinions under the title “Illegal but Legitimate: a Dubious Doctrine for the Times”. I assume it is not literally the same speech that he has previously given under that title, but all will be given the opportunity to check this as it is being broadcast live on the Internet at 17.15 GMT.

Some distinctly uncritical journalism has accompanied Chomsky’s visit. Indeed, while I don’t wish to expend superlatives without cause, this profile in Scotland’s Sunday Herald at the weekend, by associate editor Alan Taylor, strikes me as possibly the most ill-informed article for a general readership I have read on the contentious subject of Chomsky’s political advocacy. All the standard elements from Chomsky are there. He is instinctively suspicious and graceless even in a determinedly soft interview:

I remind Chomsky of his 1990 visit to Scotland, when he spoke on “self-determination and power” at the Pearce Institute in Govan, Glasgow. “You’ve got to remind me what this is about,” says Chomsky. This does not seem a promising start. I remind him that he is coming to Edinburgh to deliver a Gifford Lecture. “I know that,” he says, rather testily. “But who are you?”

Taylor identifies in this type of reception “a seam of laconic humour beneath the serious, restrained manner”, which is just as well in the circumstances. There is also the habitual invocation by Chomsky of the precedent of Nazi Germany when discussing Western liberal democracies, though on this occasion, mindful of the newspaper’s readership, he selects a British target. In “rubbishing” Tony Blair, he observes:

I suppose Hitler believed what he was saying too.

There is the hagiographer’s benediction:

“Unlike many leftists of his generation,” says [Robert] Barsky, “Chomsky never flirted with movements or organisations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, anti-revolutionary, and elitist … He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century.”

And there is this truly extraordinary unsubstantiated assertion by Taylor:

Nobody can deny Chomsky’s commitment to the cause of truth.

If I were the editor of the Sunday Herald, I should have expected my associate editor to consult at least some of the relevant history of Chomsky’s polemical exchanges before writing a sentence like that. I have in any event referred Taylor to the judgement of the political scientist Samuel Huntington as far back as 1970, in a letter to the New York Review of Books, concerning an early instance of the distorted quotations and false interpolations that characterise Chomsky’s political output:

The three paragraphs of Mr. Chomsky to which I have referred constitute less than five percent of his article. I do not know if the level of veracity which he achieves in them is typical of the entire piece. If these paragraphs are representative, however, the article as a whole should contain, by conservative extrapolation, approximately 94 other serious distortions and misstatements of fact.

Taylor has, in short, done his subject a signal service by failing to investigate the historical record.

Theological novels

Sorry for the unannounced absence for the past ten days - I'll be catching up with posts and replying to emails.

I have posted (immediately below) the one thing I wrote last week, on theological novels. The D.H. Lawrence novella is also known by the later and less satisfactory title of 'The Man Who Died'; the Penguin Classics edition of Lawrence's short novels has restored the original title. George Moore's The Brook Kerith is less well-known and has never gained real popularity. George Bernard Shaw brusquely dismissed the book (quoted in Tony Gray, A Peculiar Man: A Life of George Moore, 1996, p. 296):

I read about thirty pages of The Brook Kerith. It then began to dawn on me that there was no mortal reason why Moore should not keep going on like that for fifty thousand pages, or fifty million for that matter.

This is a little unfair. The characterisation is good, and the dialogue (in an imaginative vernacular) sharp.

Frank Harris's short story, a deft work written in cadences that echo the King James Bible, is now almost unknown, but is included in his collection Unpath'd Waters. I came across it only from a reference in a more recent, but still little-known, theological novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973) by Martin Gardner (who also refers to the Lawrence and Moore literature). Gardner used to write the Mathematical Games column of Scientific American; unfortunately his range of interests is not matched by literary skill. The novel traces the philosophical searching of a young divinity student, ranging from evangelical Christianity through Communism to what Gardner terms philosophical theism (a non-Christian fideism). It is highly didactic, and the reader speedily loses interest in whatever the eponymous hero happens to believe at any time.

One novelist who deals successfully with matters of Christian theology is John Updike. In his memoir Self-Consciousness Updike devotes a chapter to the evolution of his religious beliefs. He follows the uncompromising orthodox theology of Karl Barth, who believed that all we know of God is by direct revelation, i.e. the Incarnation. There are many allusions to this in Updike's novels, alongside the better-known sexual content. One example is Roger's Version (1988); a sub-plot, anticipating the more recent 'Intelligent Design' argument (an ostensibly more sophisticated variant of biblical Creationism), has an earnest student trying to prove the existence of God by building a computer model of the origins of the Universe (he fails in this, of course, as he does also in an affair with the professor's wife). Updike has also expressed his Barthianism in an excellent poem about the Resurrection, Seven Stanzas at Easter; the first stanza is:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

I am not a Christian or a theist, but I find Updike's argument refreshingly direct in comparison with much modern religious apologetic - whether the unpleasantly sanctimonious certainties of C.S. Lewis or the pallid rationalism (agnostic on the Resurrection but fervent on the immorality of the Iraq War) of liberal Protestantism. If there is no Incarnation - God made flesh - and no physical Resurrection, then the entire foundation of Christian belief is undermined, and there is no point adducing arguments from Natural Theology to make up for it.

Mad, bad but not dangerous

This column appeared in The Times on Friday.

NOT SINCE Erich von Däniken maintained that extraterrestrials built Stonehenge has there been a more preposterous bestseller than The Da Vinci Code. In pedestrian prose and wooden characterisation, the book depicts a conspiracy that has suppressed the true history and doctrines of the early Church. In reality, Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who bore him a child and whose descendants dwell among us. Though a novel, The Da Vinci Code is claimed by its author, Dan Brown, to be based on historical fact.

The book has caused predictable outrage, including an outright ban in Lebanon lest it “worsen sectarian prejudices or offend religions”. This week the Cardinal Archbishop of Genoa attributed the book’s success to “great anti-Catholic prejudice”, and urged that it not be bought or read.

Such responses are more absurd than anything written by Dan Brown. Anti-Catholic prejudice does exist in our secular culture, and Brown has written a work of outstanding theological ignorance. But ignorance is not bigotry. The Da Vinci Code is not a work of systematic historical falsification for sinister purposes, like Holocaust denial. It is an imaginative reconstruction written for no more nefarious reason than enormous personal enrichment.

The Da Vinci Code stands in an established genre of fictional accounts of Christian origins. D. H. Lawrence’s The Escaped Cock (1929) depicts the risen Jesus being seduced by a priestess of Isis. In George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916), Jesus is not dead but comatose when taken down from the Cross. He lives for 20 years among the Essenes, till he meets Paul, who denounces him as a madman.

In his short story The Miracle of the Stigmata (1913), Frank Harris portrays Jesus marrying and living under the name Joshua while rejecting the new doctrines of Paul. On Joshua’s death, the Crucifixion scars are uncovered and Paul declares a miracle: “the Stigmata . . . had been wrought on the body of the last unbeliever in Caesarea.”

These are far greater literary works than The Da Vinci Code, but the ideas they express are no less heterodox, even blasphemous. We do not casually ascribe prejudice to those who read Lawrence or Moore, or regard these authors’ offensiveness to religious sensibilities as of the slightest public interest. That is as it should be, and Dan Brown and his readers merit the same minimal courtesies.