Oliver Kamm

Blame the big man himself

This article appears in The Times tomorrow.

NO COUNTRY better exemplifies civilised values than post-war Germany. Out of the ruins of barbarism, German statesmen fashioned a liberal political culture purged of xenophobia and willing to defend itself against domestic extremism. Chancellors Adenauer, Schmidt and Kohl often provided better leadership and wiser counsel for the Western Alliance than their counterparts in the US or UK.

This record makes the country’s recent political trajectory all the more dispiriting. Gerhard Schröder has proved the most feckless and unprincipled Chancellor in the history of democratic Germany.

Schröder’s attempts to reform Germany’s labour markets and welfare state have brought him domestic unpopularity despite their limited extent. What has irrevocably sullied his reputation, however, is not these faltering efforts to counter structural unemployment but his expedients to bolster his domestic position by the search for scapegoats.

When his economic proposals ran into difficulty, Schröder countered by blaming the Brussels bureaucracy (just as, more recently, he has blamed foreign investors). The strategy did not work, but the precedent was set.

Schröder’s opposition to the Iraq war went beyond strategic arguments to something more atavistic. He appealed to nationalist sentiments that are alien to the Republic’s ethos. His insistence on “a German way”, as opposed to the multilateral alliances that had characterised Germany’s postwar diplomacy, was a term consciously chosen for its historical resonance. One of his ministers, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, got the message, crowning a cynical 2002 general election campaign by comparing President Bush to Hitler.

Germany has had differences with the US before, but these have always been managed within the context of a commitment to collective security. There has been no previous case of a postwar Chancellor who has, in effect, campaigned not against his domestic opponents but against the American President.

The Social Democrats’ humiliating electoral rebuff this week in their former stronghold of North Rhine-Westphalia has persuaded Schröder to call for an early election to stave off his coalition’s implosion. In the interests of Germany’s diplomatic reputation, his ejection from office cannot come too soon.

Hords of zenophobes

My correspondent has written again. I quote his letter in full and unedited:

I see that you highlight my spelling mistake; yes I did spell the word hord wrongly, however, that was the only thing you could highlight that I got wrong. You could not argue with anything I said about the nasty bunch of rightwing ideologs who now infest the body politic both in this country and the United States. These idealogs claim to be democratic and Christian -this in itself is standing ideology on its head. The Christian coalition in the US is attempting to enforce its strident views on the rest of the population -if this is successful then the teaching of evolutionary sciences in schools and colleges will be forbidden, abortion will be illegal and stem cell research will be outlawed, despite the fact that in the future it could help cure thousands of people who now suffer from crippling diseases. These good people would force social democracy off the political map and send us back to feudal economic slavery. This is why Tony Benn was attacked in the 1980s and this is why you now attack George Galloway now. Anyone who is prepared to oppose illegal wars perpertrated by so-called christian big business is fair game to be villified by these political thugs. Those who stand up for economic redistribution not only on a national but also on an international basis will always be vilified by the Kahns of this world. These people are the advocates of a type of authoritarian selfish-individualism which would make the rich and irresponsible even richer. There have been individuals such as Mussolini who claimed to be on the left and yet who at the same time were intolerant of their colleages and extremely zenophobic in attitude. Mussolini, supported the First World War and that was the end of his leftism. I have even heard from some of these rightists that even Hitler was at one stage a member of the German left in 1919, this despite the complete lack of evidence for this thesis. I have, however, heard that both he and Stalin drank in the same pub in Liverpool. The thesis you put forward equating leftist parties has the same credability as the joke about Hitler and Stalin. The oldest and dirtiest rightwing ploy is to slander those to whom you have lost the argument. You keep good political company Goebells and the Sun toilet roll.

I have never, incidentally, claimed that Hitler came from the Left: he plainly didn't. I certainly claim that parts of the Marxist Left actively aided or supported Hitler long before the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The Communist Party co-operated with the Nazis in the 1931 Prussian referendum and the 1932 transport strike, while even some Marxists initially opposed to the Comintern's scuppering of a Popular Front against fascism later found their natural political home alongside Nazi Germany. The revolutionary socialist Jacques Doriot broke with the French Communist Party on precisely the issue of a Popular Front with the Social Democrats (he supported it; the Party, taking its orders from Stalin, opposed it), before founding his own explicitly antisemitic and pro-fascist Parti Populaire Français in 1936.

Respect and fascism

A comment on the complaint of my correspondent cited in the post immediately below. Of course at no time has it been my purpose to "attack the progressive left"; the progressive Left is where I stand. It is assuredly not, however, to "stand political ideology on its head" to associate some parties nominally of the Left with the cause of fascism.

It is not only that many intellectual forebears and political leaders of fascism have come from the Left (notably Georges Sorel and Benito Mussolini, respectively), or that unambiguously pro-fascist parties have sprung from the Left and considered themselves part of the Left. (Most prominent among those parties was probably the Parti Populaire Français establised by the Communist leader Jacques Doriot in 1936. The British traitor John Amery, hanged after the war, was a follower of Doriot, and the short-lived British People's Party - which I cited in an earlier post as a precedent for today's Respect 'Coalition' - was clearly modelled on Doriot's organisation.) In addition, ideas from certain parts of the nominal Left were assimilated into fascist ideology and made a significant impact upon it. The most interesting historical figure in this respect is the Belgian Marxist Henri de Man, whose ideas were a powerful influence on Mussolini, and also on a generation of French Socialists led by Marcel Déat. Déat founded successive pro-fascist parties in the 1930s and under Vichy - which he strongly opposed on the grounds that it was insufficiently accommodating to the Nazi occupiers.

This part of the European Left has been brilliantly analysed by Zeev Sternhell in Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, 1986, especially chapters 4 and 5. There is also a good summary of Sternhell's thesis in Richard Griffiths, Fascism, 2005, chapter 8. Griffiths notes (p. 129):

As Sternhell has pointed out, even under the Occupation, Déat still saw himself as a revolutionary socialist. Indeed, like de Man, he saw the German New Order for Europe as the best vehicle for the anti-capitalist renewal which had eluded him and others like him under the democratic system.

No historical parallel is exact, and as the Observer columnist Nick Cohen has pointed out, there is something novel in an alliance between the totalitarian Left and theocratic reaction. But Cohen is also on to something important in his comparison of two former Labour MPs and "moustachioed loudmouths" active in the same part of London but separated by 70 years. The point caused outrage among Respect's supporters, of whom this correspondent to The Observer is probably typical:

In the 1930s, Jewish people [note, incidentally, this bizarre genteelism, which crops up quite often among declared progressives: it's as if the word "Jews" is thought impolite] in east London were being pilloried and persecuted. The left came to their defence. Today, another ethnic and religious group is being pilloried and persecuted - the Muslims. Respect takes exactly the same attitude as the left in the 1930s. Muslims must be protected and Respect is doing exactly what the anti-fascists did in the 1930s.

Apparently George Galloway made a similar claim in his speech to his party's rally in London last week (though I cannot for the moment track down the press article where I read it), distinguishing between the campaign of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, which attacked immigrants, and that of Respect, which defends them. His distinction is bogus and ahistorical. Mosley's campaign was directed not at immigrants, but at Jews - the "big Jews", who he alleged controlled the nation's economy and finances, and the "little Jews", who supposedly threatened the livelihoods and cultural identity of British workers in particular areas. (The distinction was made in Mosley's speech to his party's Albert Hall rally in October 1934.)

Nick Cohen (who quotes Mosley's speech) slightly overstates the degree of cynicism involved in Mosley's antisemitism. Mosley certainly did believe that the Jews controlled Britain, having been convinced of this notion by a report he had commissioned from one of his party workers, A.K. Chesterton (nephew of the author G.K. Chesterton, and later chairman of the National Front). But it would be true to say that Mosley latched on to a strain of bigotry and made it central to his campaign, rather than that his political movement was itself founded on antisemitism from the outset.

Mosley later subtly rewrote the history of his pre-war political campaigning, as in his article entitled Antisemitism - take great care with the link; it takes you to a fascist site dedicated to Mosley - which is excerpted from his 1968 memoirs. He claims that:

While anti-Semites are busy pursuing the little Jews, the big villains of all races who run international finance are sitting back and laughing at them in the City, or Wall Street, or in kindred haunts of the usury species.

Mosley's insistence in his memoirs and elsewhere that he never espoused antisemitism is disgustingly, dishonestly self-serving. In fact the "big villains" in his scheme were the Jews; but his distinction between the big villains and the little Jews is, in that respect alone, an accurate recollection of what he was saying in the 1930s. The BUF unquestionably pushed antisemitism as a populist campaigning issue in the East End (where around a third of Jews in the UK lived in the 1930s, many of whom had fled persecution in the Europe in the previous half-century), but the anti-immigrant stance was less central to the party's purpose than its preposterous conspiracy theories about the control of Britain. Those exercising such control had been initially designated the "Old Gang" by Mosley, but it rapidly became clear whom - or rather what ethnic group - that gang consisted in.

I have written much about the position of the Respect 'Coalition' on comparable matters, and will not rehearse the argument in this post. It is enough to say that Respect is a front organisation for the Socialist Workers' Party, whose adoption of traditional antisemitism in my judgement parallels the history of the British Union of Fascists. Antisemitism is not central to the SWP's founding (or rather that of its predecessor organisation, the International Socialists), and the SWP's adoption of it is partly cynical; but having adopted antisemitism, the SWP is campaigning hard on it, and has made the issue fundamental to the party's current political identity. The SWP is not alone on the far Left in its resort to standard anti-Jewish themes, and I have written of other instances. But it is the most influential antisemitic organisation active in Britain today. It is properly regarded as the ideological heir of a particular strain of pre-war fascism, and the Respect 'Coalition' is aptly compared to the Mosleyite tradition.

Hoards of facists

I received a larger volume of blog-related email than usual over the weekend (apparently on account of being linked to by the weblog of The Nation magazine). Most of it makes observations about my personality and ideological location that are less original than its authors suppose, but one message does stand out, and I reproduce it in full and as it is written:

I see that you use the same kind of gutter language as the crazy christian right of the United States when you attack the progressive left. You stand political ideology on its head when you try and associate parties of the left with facism. I am 64 and I have been fighting facism all my life, my Uncle Tom was injured fighting Francos facist hoards in Spain-he was a much braver man than you ever will be, I see you are a big friend of the biggest war criminal on the face of the planet, Sharon. It is not facist to attack Zionism and the Likud; the Likud was a terrorist organisation which murdered British troops in the late 1940s. I admired many Jewish people and I had many Jewish friends in the Labour movement. What I am opposed to is the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and the murder of Palestinian civilians in Sharons policy of genocide. Perhaps, though, you do not consider that to be murder as you regard them to be sub-human

Why, incidentally, do people say they have expounded or opposed such-and-such a thing "all their lives"? This cannot possibly be true.

Hitchens on Galloway

Christopher Hitchens gets the measure of George Galloway in today's Independent (link requires fee):

[H]e looks so much like what he is: a thug and a demagogue, the type of working-class-wideboy-and-proud-of-it who is too used to the expenses account, the cars and the hotels - all cigars and back-slapping. He is a very cheap character and a short-arse like a lot of them are, puffed up like a turkey. He has managed to fuse being a Baathist with being a Muslim sectarian and a carpet bagger in the East End - as well as a front for a creepy sub-Leninist sect, the Socialist Workers' Party. He's got the venomous riff-raff at one end and your one-God fanatics on the other. Wonderful. Just what we need.

Uncanny. This was exactly what I was thinking, and in exactly the same words.

Once more again

Where would you go to hear a speaker commend the rationality of arson against synagogues? Or declare that we must take very seriously the accusation that the Jews are trying to control the world? Or explicitly identify today's Palestinians as the new Christ (and we know - oh yes - who was responsible for the Crucifixion)? Or denounce the outraged response to Ken Livingstone's crass comparison of a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard as a 'Jewish clannish demand' for an apology? Or observe that 'the J's [i.e. Jews] are the ultimate chameleons, they can be whatever they like as long as it serves as some expedient'?

Let's see now. The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors the activities of racist organisations in the United States and elsewhere, keeps a schedule of extremist events such as a 'Klan Jam' in Alabama next month, organised by the North Georgia White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and a 'White Unity BBQ' in Michigan in July, organised by the National Socialist Movement. But if you want to be certain of hearing exactly the sentiments I have cited, the most likely venue would be one where their author himself is speaking. That author is Gilad Atzmon. a jazz musician and former Israeli reservist, whose extreme antisemitic bigotry is set out extensively on his web site.

And where might such a discreditable and discredited figure be found? Regular readers, whose patience on this issue I realise I am testing, will know the answer instantly. Atzmon will, of course and appropriately, be speaking at the 'Marxism 2005' jamboree of the Socialist Workers' Party, to be held in London in July, just as he spoke at last year's event. The SWP is the controlling organisation for which the Respect 'Coalition' is the electoral front. A few weeks ago, John Rees, the national secretary of Respect and a member of the Politbureau of the SWP, insisted indignantly on the proud record of Respect members in fighting antisemitism.

For 'fighting', read 'fomenting'.

British Back-scratching Corporation

A columnist in The Scotsman raises a good question that I was unaware of:

FROM a Scottish point of view, the most puzzling aspect of George Galloway’s appearance in Washington this week was Bob Wylie.

We first caught sight of the grinning and gangling BBC Scotland reporter at Galloway’s side in Dulles airport. Then, after the MP’s performance in front of the US Senate’s sub-committee, there was Wylie again, popping up to tell us how, in his considered opinion, he thought it had all gone.

Which was pretty well, actually. Oh, there may be a few people yet to be impressed by Galloway’s bluster, but on the whole, Wylie assured us, Washington was knocked out. The MP for Bethnal Green and Bow had faced down American accusations that he’d profited from Saddam Hussein’s illegal oil deals and, what’s more, he’d denounced the US invasion of Iraq.

Galloway, reported Wylie, was the "Braveheart" on Capitol Hill. Braveheart? Come off it. Even Gorgeous George’s most ardent supporters in Britain would shrink from romanticising him in this way. But not the gushing Wylie.

His presence in Washington begs two questions: why did BBC Scotland feel it needed to send its own man when (a) it is currently implementing drastic cost cuts and (b) the BBC’s Washington correspondent, Clive Myrie, was already there and more than up to the job?

Also, if BBC Scotland really, really had to send, why did it have to be Wylie, whose friendship with Galloway goes back years and who, as the Diary pointed out yesterday, received an acknowledgement in Galloway’s autobiography?

Wylie is not an expert on Iraq or on American politics. And in this case, he was clearly not impartial, and neither was BBC Scotland. Shame on them.

The cost-cutting is not the main issue here. When, some years ago, the BBC had a particularly good Washington correspondent, Gavin Esler, it would still absurdly fly out one of its news anchors (the lightweight Martyn Lewis in this case) when granted an interview with the first President Bush. Profligacy is in its culture.

But its lack of control on a clear conflict of interest in Wylie's 'reporting' of Galloway's trip is shocking. The problem is not that Galloway and Wylie are old friends, but that they are political comrades and professional collaborators. Fourteen years they co-authored a book on the Romanian revolution, presenting a highly tendentious thesis favourable to the government of the thuggish Communist apparatchik Ion Iliescu, who had had the good fortune to fall out of favour with Ceausescu and then to find himself in the right place at the right time. If BBC management could see no problem in Wylie's editorialising about Galloway without once referring to their association, then it is manifestly unfit to run a public-service broadcasting organisation.

As it happens, the BBC has available to it at least one (and probably at most one) journalist who, unlike Wylie, genuinely does know Iraq. He is John Sweeney, a foreign correspondent who three years ago brilliantly exposed the bogus character of Saddam Hussein's propaganda campaign against UN sanctions, and thereby earned himself a sustained campaign of hate-mail from Saddam's propagandists in this country. For his pains, he has also earned high praise from George Galloway:

John Sweeney on the BBC the other week, the cheerleader in chief for imperialist wars everywhere on the globe - can always be dragged out to make up and make a propaganda film.

Coincidentally, Sweeney has also written a book about the fall of the Ceausescus, but unlike Wylie's it's a good one. (Sweeney is a friend of mine. I mention this lest anyone accuse me of adopting a Wylie-esque evasiveness in my commendations.)

Readers in Scotland may wish to ask the BBC why they sent Wylie to report on Galloway's theatricals. In the meantime I shall be lobbying the corporation to appoint Sweeney as their regular Galloway correspondent instead.

Galloway on Capitol Hill

Christopher Hitchens, in The Mirror, unfortunately gets exactly right George Galloway's encounter with an unprepared sub-committee of the Senate. As so often with Galloway, bombast and non sequitur served his purpose, to the detriment of public understanding:

The real issue, as the documents make clear, is not whether Gorgeous George got money but whether his patron and associate and contributor Fawaz Zureikat was the beneficiary of oil deals and kickbacks. On this point, Mr Galloway has arranged to be adequately uninformed for some time. He was no better informed yesterday, and thus deflected all questions on to a person who hasn't yet shown up.

Fortunately, not all American observers of Galloway are so easily deflected from critical inquiry. On the Jeremy Vine programme on Radio 2 this afternoon, Colleen Graffy, a professor of law at Pepperdine University and former Chairman of the London branch of Republicans Abroad (and now also a British citizen), squared off against Lindsey German, who was the Respect candidate for London mayor last year. Professor Graffy destroyed her opponent, and I recommend listening to the recording on the programme's web site (the exchange takes up the first 20 minutes of the programme).

Unlike BBC commentators, Professor Graffy was formidably well-informed about Respect and went on the offensive immediately. In the recording, she briskly describes Respect as an electoral front for the Socialist Workers' Party; points out that the SWP's claim that the Charity Commission has "given a clean financial bill of health" to Galloway's campaigning organisation, the Mariam Appeal, is a mightily selective reading of what the Charity Commission has said; points out that Galloway's tactics on Capitol Hill were diversionary; and observes correctly that the SWP, so far from being 'anti-war', was in fact pro-war, but on the side of Saddam Hussein. She even quotes the words of SWP ideologue and Respect council candidate in Millwall, Paul McGarr, during the Iraq War (emphasis added):

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.

The extraordinary thing is that even after these words were read out live on air, Lindsey German complained huffily that it was a lie to describe Socialist Worker as supportive of Saddam Hussein - thereby demonstrating not only that she is herself a liar, but also that she falls short even of the capacity for deviousness: hers was a stupid dishonesty, because it was so transparent. I have commented before on Mrs German's capacity for non sequitur when faced with difficult questions, and she demonstrated it once more in this exchange. When Professor Graffy pointed out the Mariam appeal's financial support for political campaigning, Mrs German expostulated that it had never financed Galloway's political campaigning for Respect or the Labour Party - which had never been claimed in the first place. She was shifty, evasive and clearly unprepared for the assault. That is as it should be for the representative of a pro-fascist cause.

Now he tells us

I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas.

George Galloway MP, statement to US senators, 17 May 2005

Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.

George Galloway MP, interview in the The Guardian, 16 September 2002

From 1972 to 1979, the percentage of Iraq's military equipment supplied by the Soviet Union declined from 95 to 63 percent. Even so, in 1987 the Soviet Union, having provided more than US$8 billion worth of weapons since 1980, was Iraq's most important arms supplier. In its 1987 annual study, Soviet Military Power, the United States Department of Defense stated that, while maintaining official neutrality in the IranIraq War, the Soviet Union had provided extensive military assistance to Iraq, and at the same time, continued its efforts to gain leverage on Iran. In early 1987, Moscow delivered a squadron of twenty-four MiG-29 Fulcrums to Baghdad. Considered the most advanced fighter in the Soviet arsenal, the MiG-29 previously had been provided only to Syria and India. The decision to export the MiG-29 to Iraq, also assured Iraq a more advantageous payment schedule than any offered by the West and it reflected Soviet support for one of its traditional allies in the Middle East.

US Library of Congress, Iraq country study, 1998

BBC spins again

The BBC 'reports':

Earlier this month, Mr Galloway, who was expelled from the Labour Party for his views on Iraq....

Galloway: I do not expect justice, BBC News Online, 17 May

A few days ago the journalist Roy Greenslade complained in The Guardian that George Galloway was unfairly treated by the communications media. I trust that Greenslade - not always an obtuse writer - will withdraw this preposterous claim on acquainting himself with the BBC's deferential coverage of this discredited politician. Galloway, of course, was expelled from the Labour Party not for his 'views on Iraq' but for four specific acts: inciting foreign troops to fight British troops; inciting British troops to disobey orders; threatening to stand against Labour; and supporting a candidate for the Respect 'Coalition' in Preston. On a unanimous vote on all of these charges, he was expelled from the party. The fairness of the procedure was such that he was acquitted on a fifth charge of urging voters in Plymouth not to support Labour.

I would have been delighted had he been expelled for his 'views' on various issues many years earlier. His declared support for the Soviet Union was entirely incompatible with membership of a democratic party, and it is appropriate that he now represents instead Respect, which is an electoral front for the pro-fascist and antisemitic Socialist Workers' Party. But the fact is that his expulsion came only belatedly, and for specific cited reasons, not for his opposition to the Iraq War. Galloway's absurd belief in his own martyrdom was demonstrated immediately after his expulsion, when he declared:

It is clear now that Mr Blair intends to go after Glenda Jackson and Bob Marshall-Andrews QC. His response to the disaster of the war is to attack those who opposed the war.

So far as I am aware, both of those named remain Labour MPs. Mrs Jackson was even allowed to campaign in her Hampstead & Highgate constituency as an anti-Blair candidate. I have often believed, stretching back to the protracted process of expelling members of the Militant tendency from the Labour Party in the early 1980s, that Labour is far too latitudinarian in its membership criteria, and too tolerant of the behaviour of its parliamentarians. It was Galloway's singular achievement to breach even those boundaries.