Oliver Kamm

Knock, knock - is there anyone there who believes this twaddle?

This column appears in The Times today.

LAST WEEKEND the Pope gave a warning against treating religion as a “consumer product” in which one picks and chooses the bits one likes. Though irretrievably atheistic, I have every sympathy with him. Christianity has been shaped historically by St Augustine’s belief in the power of reason to gain knowledge of the world. Our nominally Christian culture celebrates amorphous spirituality more than reason. It thereby has little defence against popular irrationalism.

If you doubt this, consider the ease with which the nostrums of alternative medicine — acupuncture, homoeopathy, reflexology — have become “complementary” medicine, to be offered in conjunction with conventional treatments, despite being devoid of evidence for their effectiveness. Consider too the resilience of such notions as Jesus of Nazareth’s marriage to Mary Magdalene and his founding of the Merovingian dynasty; communication with the spirit world; and the fallacy of “Intelligent Design”. These are so resilient, indeed, as to be topical.

The speculative history of Jesus and its supposed suppression by the Roman Catholic Church is the premise of the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. According to a survey published this week, the book is the overwhelming choice of MPs for their holiday reading. You can try to cite extenuating circumstances: MPs have an instinct for populism, and heterodox fictional accounts of Christian origins do have a distinguished pedigree in George Moore and D. H. Lawrence.

But this is something else. The Da Vinci Code is a testament to the attraction of conspiracy theories driven not by historical evidence but by animosity towards allegedly monolithic institutions. It is popular history for those who find Michael Moore too nuanced.

Spiritualism has, on the other hand, suddenly and surprisingly found a serious chronicler. He is Peter Lamont, whose biography of the Victorian medium, Daniel Dunglas Home, The First Psychic, was published last week. This volume is respectful to its subject almost to the point of hagiography, in a field owing its very existence to admitted fraud. (The first mediums, Kate and Margaret Fox, of Buffalo, New York, produced mysterious rapping and knocks by trickery as a prank to frighten their mother, as Margaret confessed 40 years later in 1888.) In his lifetime, Home was credited among other gifts with the power of levitation: he was reported at one seance to have floated out of a third-floor window and returned by the same route. But his enduring memorial is to have been mercilessly satirised by Robert Browning in Mr Sludge, “The Medium”:

Now, don’t, sir! Don’t expose me!

Just this once! This was the first and only time, I’ll swear, —

Look at me, — see, I kneel, — the only time,

I swear, I ever cheated.

Lamont’s book is less entertaining. On the only important question of Home’s life — were his feats genuine? — Lamont piles up artful caveats before concluding lamely that “we do not always know what is going on . . . perhaps we will never know for certain”.

A taste for the irrational is not scarce in public life, and it is a pity to feed it. Even conditional irrationalism — a studied agnosticism between science and pseudoscience — is liable to encourage the more thoroughgoing article. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the rise of the “Intelligent Design” movement in response to Darwinism.

In some US states, school boards are debating whether to allow the teaching in biology classes of competing explanations of the origins of life. Ostensibly open-minded, and commended as such by President Bush, this policy is clearly inspired by the conviction that the natural world can be explained only by the intervention of a conscious agent. In short, it is Biblical Creationism in less obviously sectarian guise: the latent chaperoning the blatant. It dismisses evolution as “only a theory”, yet curiously fails to lodge the same objection in other disciplines. When mathematicians speak of set theory, no one suggests they be required to give equal time in class to those who dispute that the next number in the set “one, two, three” is “four”. Intelligent Design deserves summary dismissal, but probably will not get it.

A letterwriter to this newspaper last week exemplified the problem. Referring to Christian businessmen in Britain who sponsor schools that teach biology in accordance with the Book of Genesis, he declared: “Even supposing their attitude to evolution were wrongheaded, it hasn’t stopped either one from evolving into a millionaire.” I have an ominous sense that many MPs — including the Prime Minister, who has defended the teaching record of one such academy — would share the assumption that economic betterment is a surer test of educational policy than the cultivation of the life of the mind.

So I make my own recommendation to MPs for their recreational reading. Rudyard Kipling is an unfashionable writer, but he had prophetic gifts greater than any spirit medium. His short story The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat concerns a group of motorists caught in a speed trap (it was written in 1913!), who exact revenge on the local magistrate who also sits as their MP. They set up a bogus “Geoplanarian Society” to embarrass the man. It promptly votes, in the name of the village, to declare that the Earth is flat. The ensuing national ridicule is compounded when the genuine Flat Earth Society turns up to celebrate its “dear friends and sympathisers”.

The longer we indulge irrationalism in public life, the sooner will our own Flat Earthers, in modern dress, arrive to recognise our kinship.

UPDATE: A correspondent points out: "Given that the set of 1, 2 and 3 is {1,2,3}, the "next" number in the set is 1 again as it goes back round. If it were the set of natural integers, 4 would indeed follow 1, 2 and 3 - but you defined a set. Sorry to be pedantic but it really irked me for some reason. Doesn't really disprove your general point about church and state or anything!" It's not pedantic, and I'm glad of the correction.

Kissinger, Chile and the limits of realism

The writer of a letter in The Guardian appears to be bidding for a place in the series 'Great Historical Questions to which the Answer is "No"':

Henry Kissinger - isn't he the bloke responsible for the 9/11 atrocity? September 9 1973, the date of the US-inspired military coup that killed off the democratically elected government of Chile and installed the murderous Pinochet dictatorship.

I have no sympathy for the atrocious Pinochet regime, hold to very different foreign-policy premises from Henry Kissinger, and find much to criticise in his record as Secretary of State. But these questions have no bearing on the myth that Kissinger was "the bloke responsible" for the coup in Chile. No one has ever been able to demonstrate this, for the simple reason that it isn't true. The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by the liberal Democrat Senator Frank Church and comprising a majority of strong critics of the Nixon administration, found "no real evidence" of US involvement in the coup, and its published conclusions have never been refuted in the 30 years since. In 2000 the CIA revisited three outstanding questions about the coup, and while many of my readers will scorn that source, its judgements are strikingly self-critical. The Agency has no incentive at this date to be other than frank about its activities, and acknowledges, among other things, that: "Many of Pinochet’s officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses following Allende’s ouster. Some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or US military." Its main findings include:

We find no information—nor did the Church Committee—that CIA or the Intelligence Community was involved in the death of Chilean President Salvador Allende. He is believed to have committed suicide as the coup leaders closed in on him. The major CIA effort against Allende came earlier in 1970 in the failed attempt to block his election and accession to the Presidency. Nonetheless, the US Administration’s long-standing hostility to Allende and its past encouragement of a military coup against him were well known among Chilean coup plotters who eventually took action on their own to oust him....

CIA actively supported the military Junta after the overthrow of Allende but did not assist Pinochet to assume the Presidency. In fact, many CIA officers shared broader US reservations about Pinochet’s single-minded pursuit of power.

The Church Committee report, and 24,000 declassified documents released by the Clinton administration in 1998, are the only primary sources on US involvement, and despite much fanfare about the latter, they do not contradict Kissinger's own account in his memoirs, and in some respects corroborate it. A good deal of the criticism of Kissinger conflates - whether wittingly or not - a separate coup attempt in 1970 in which the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Rene Schneider, was kidnapped and murdered. There is no question but that Kissinger and Nixon would have wished to see Allende overthrown, but the telephone transcripts demonstrate beyond argument that they did not approve that coup attempt. In an article in Commentary in November 2003 (available for a fee from the magazine's archive), Mark Falcoff noted:

As far as Kissinger (and, for that matter, the White House) was concerned, Viaux [the head of the coup plotters] had been told to stand down, and that was presumably the end of active American coup-plotting. As Kissinger told Nixon by telephone on October 15, reporting on a meeting with Thomas Karamassines of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere division, “This looks hopeless. I turned it off. Nothing would be worse than an abortive coup.” The President responded, “Just tell him to do nothing.” The next day, CIA headquarters cabled its station in Santiago that although “we are to continue to generate maximum pressure” toward a coup, “a Viaux coup . . . would fail” and Viaux should be warned “against precipitate action.” The message was delivered through an intermediary, leaving the CIA with the pious hope that once its wishes had been made known, Viaux would respect them.

Falcoff went on:

In short, deplore as one might the interventionist intentions of Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA, the fact remains that General Schneider was murdered as the result of a botched kidnapping attempt, which—as far as the White House was concerned—had been disavowed and ordered shut down a full week before it happened.

I do deplore those interventions, but Falcoff's is a precise statement of what conclusions the primary sources support. It is all that the primary sources support. Any conclusion beyond it is unsupported by those sources.

The notion of the US-engineered coup (or, as the Guardian letter-writer uncertainly puts it, “US-inspired” coup – a usefully unfalsifiable formulation that abandons the usual historical practice of adducing documentary evidence, in favour of the more speculative realms of psychology) is wrong but immovable. This is a pity for reasons that have nothing to do with political sympathy for Kissinger, or the Presidents he served (whom, incidentally, I regard as respectively the worst and worst-but-one in the past three-quarters of a century, save only for Jimmy Carter).

First, the mythology the Chilean coup engendered in the 1970s and 1980s drove parts of the Left to positions that were little short of paranoid conspiracy theories. I recall fellow-Labour activists earnestly worrying (influenced, I believe, by Chris Mullin’s pulp novel A Very British Coup, and the much superior television adaptation of it) that black helicopters would sweep down into Downing Street to seize and spirit away a radical Labour Prime Minister. This was in the early 1980s, when these activists ought to have been worrying instead that the prospect of any sort of Labour Government with the policies the party had lately adopted was nil, and to have set about rectifying the problem.

Secondly, and more important, the dissemination of a charge against Kissinger that isn’t true distracts from a more sober critical assessment of the foreign policies he represented. On this point, it’s worth looking (again, unfortunately, it requires a fee) at a cordial exchange between Falcoff and Kissinger’s most vocal critic, Christopher Hitchens, in Commentary, April 2003.

I am sympathetic to Hitchens’s broad views on the international order, and (forgive the plug, but there will be more to come) have just finished writing a short book arguing that the spread of global democracy rather than the maintenance of a stable balance of power ought to be the main goal of Western foreign policy. But on the details, Hitchens is less sure. In discussing Chile, he comes off worse in this exchange than Falcoff, who is very strong on the details. But Falcoff’s broad defence of Kissinger is self-defeating. In the article I link to above, Falcoff is at pains to dispel the notion that Chile was any sort of priority for Nixon and Kissinger. Having read the transcripts of Kissinger’s telephone conversations, he concludes:

During September and October 1970—which is to say, between the Chilean election and the congressional vote—the telephone record reveals a Kissinger preoccupied with a full-blown Middle East crisis, Vietnam, a Soviet submarine base in Cuba, the Black September plane hijacking, Nixon’s planned visit to Europe and to the Sixth Fleet, the defense budget, and the Pugwash conference on U.S.-Soviet relations, but with Chile only slightly. Thereafter, there is nothing at all until June 1973, when he and Nixon discuss a failed military revolt against Allende, and then no further references until after Pinochet’s assumption of power with the September 11 coup.

But this is not really surprising. During much of the Allende presidency, Kissinger was in Paris, Moscow, Beijing, or other locales of far greater importance to the U.S. than Santiago. And even when the subject was again broached at the time of the coup, Kissinger was principally concerned with the possible resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew and preparations for his own confirmation hearings as Secretary of State.

Now, of course some countries will be of greater strategic importance to the US than others at any moment, but in stressing that Kissinger had no overarching plan, nefarious or otherwise, for Chile, Falcoff also hints at the poverty of Kissinger’s approach. In the realist pursuit of Cold War alliances, small countries didn’t particularly matter. The most extreme case was the Ford administration’s insouciance over Indonesia’s invasion and annexation of East Timor in 1975, about which – as Hitchens points out, in one of the isolated but palpable hits in his polemic against Kissinger – there is not a single reference in Kissinger’s voluminous memoirs. That’s not all there was to Kissinger’s statesmanship. Almost no one realised it at the time, but the Helsinki Final Agreement signed in 1975 (and much criticised by US conservatives) proved to be of immense importance in the promotion of human rights in the Soviet bloc and the eventual liberation of Eastern Europe from Communism. But Kissinger's indifference to the liberty of small nations was a huge oversight and a destructive legacy, on grounds of the very ‘realism’ that he espoused. A quarter century later, for example, a small and impoverished nation, Afghanistan, was taken over by a totalitarian movement that proved capable of murdering thousands of civilians on the US mainland in a single morning’s satanic work. In overthrowing the regime that gave succour to that movement, we freed Afghans (especially women) from tyranny - and we protected ourselves.

Those of us who support an interventionist foreign policy to spread democracy do so because the liberty of others is our own security. Kissinger is a brilliant man who knows many things, but he never grasped this. If you were to read the interview with Tory leadership contender Malcolm Rifkind in The Telegraph last weekend expounding his opposition to the Iraq War (“If you destroy an existing regime - however evil it may be - you create a political vacuum”), you would note that Kissinger’s failing is a recurring one among Western politicians. There is no more important task in mainstream politics than that it be resisted.

Chatham House once more

A few months ago I posted a couple of comments about Rime Allaf, a Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) fellow and frequent media commentator on the Middle East. I had appeared with Mrs Allaf on a CNN panel discussion in February, and was concerned about the arguments she made then and, more particularly, on her web site. My posts are here and here. My concern, in summary, was that:

Mrs Allaf uses the Chatham House imprimatur to promote a personal web site that comprises in its entirety inflammatory op-ed columns, media citations, a web log and reader comments such as “It is horrible how the Jews have treated the Palestinian people.”

I joined Chatham House not long after this, and took the opportunity of writing to the organisation's director. This is what I said:

Having consulted the Institute's Directory of Expertise, I should like to draw your attention to one aspect of the writings of your colleague Rime Allaf.

I met Mrs Allaf a couple of months ago when we took part in a panel discussion on CNN about President Bush's State of the Union address. It would be fair to say that, while we conversed amicably for what was a very long session, our views on international politics were not in accord. I stress, however, that my comments here have nothing to do with political disagreements with her, but relate to a specific issue. (I apologise, incidentally, for putting this information in an email rather than a letter. As the issue is a convoluted one, I have to provide detailed supporting references; and as the relevant material is published solely on the Internet, it is easier to refer to by email rather than on paper.)

Mrs Allaf's own page in the Chatham House Directory of Expertise refers the inquirer to her personal site for further information, on which she keeps a web log. Her latest entry [9 April - it's still there, if you scroll down] begins:

"On April 9, 1948, members of the Jewish terrorist groups Irgun and Stern Gang massacred over 200 Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin. Right after the crime, they began broadcasting the details of their actions to other Palestinian villages, whose terrified inhabitants fled in haste. Israel Shamir writes that the massacre of Deir Yassin is special for three reasons ...."

The post provides a link to the article by Israel Shamir, and concludes: "Palestine's victims must never be forgotten."

I make no comment here on the rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Arab conflict, or the appalling historical episode of which Mrs Allaf writes; I merely refer you to the source whose judgement Mrs Allaf proffers. "Israel Shamir" is the nom de plume of a writer whose real name is Jöran Jermas. So far from being, as he claims, a leading Israeli intellectual and translator, Shamir is of Russian origin, and has lived in Sweden for the past 20 years. His writings, which are widely circulated on the Internet, are unambiguously antisemitic.

1. In his article "Christmas Greetings to Hellenes" Shamir, apparently a recent convert to the Greek Orthodox Church, maintains that peace in the Middle East cannot come about till the Jews convert to Christianity: "The Jews are forever fighting Christ and the Church; there is no chance for peace in the Holy Land unless the position of the Synagogue is undermined and the Jews saved by the Church."

2. In "Blood Libel: Fact, Fiction or Spook Story", Shamir claims a rational basis for the mediaeval blood libel that Jews ritually murder Christian children, and holds the Dreyfus case to have been the normal workings of justice: "Indeed, the philosemites of [Times columnist David] Aaronovitch ilk brought incredible calamities to mankind and to Jews. They excluded a priori the possible guilt of Captain Dreyfus or Beyliss. Instead of standing aside and allowing the justice to take its due course, they created mass hysteria in France and Russia, thus obtaining acquittals but also undermining popular belief in the judicial system. After Dreyfus and Beyliss trials, Jews rose above the law. This caused the backlash of the 1930s, and the back-backlash of our days, and will probably cause a back-back-backlash of tomorrow [i.e. the Jews have only themselves to blame for the Nuremberg laws and other modern persecutions]."

3. In "The Shadow of Zog" (the title is an approving allusion to the conceit of American neo-Nazis that their country is under a 'Zionist-Occupied-Government'), Shamir maintains that the Iraq War was a Jewish conspiracy: "For a while, the Jewish establishment tried to deny its direct involvement in the Third World War. They furiously rejected references to high and mighty Jews pushing for war as, (you guessed it) "antisemitism". But eventually the denial wall was broken, and in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the culprits, a "band of 20-30 Jewish intellectuals", the Neo-Cons, admitted they did it."

4. In "Rock of Dissent", Shamir declares his affinity with the American neo-Nazi organisation the National Alliance. He welcomes the Alliance as an ally in the struggle against Israel, making clear that his differences with them are matters of semantics only: "It does not mean that one should run forward and endorse the NA get-together. But these people should be worked with, not rejected out of hand. Some of their erroneous ideas could be corrected. If they would just say "affirmation of European legacy" instead of "white supremacy" you would discover that the arguments against them collapse. It is like saying "let us make love" instead of 'fuck you' - the meaning is quite similar, but wording is important."

[The National Alliance is discussed in a recent scholarly work by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, of Lampeter University, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York University Press, 2002, Chapter 1). The late leader of the Alliance, William Pierce, was the author of a notorious cult novel The Turner Diaries, which depicts a forthcoming race war in the United States. The heroes of the story, called collectively 'The Organization', manage to liberate a part of California from Jewish control, whereupon they triumphantly lynch 60,000 anti-racist politicians, journalists and other opinion-formers in a single day. Friends of the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, recall his having read this book.]

In summary, Shamir is an antisemite, racist and pro-Nazi apologist. You should be aware of the apparent endorsement (and I think it is reasonable to interpret the words "Further information can be found on www.rimeallaf.com" as an endorsement and not merely an extraneous link) in the RIIA's Directory of Expertise of a site that promotes his views. I am sure I do not need to spell out the grounds of my concern that one of your designated experts on the Arab-Israeli conflict should be reproducing Shamir's material.

It is, unfortunately, inconceivable that Mrs Allaf is unaware of the character of Shamir's writings. She is an energetic advocate of various pro-Palestinian campaigning organisations, and those groups have for several years, as a warning to their supporters, themselves publicised the fact that Shamir is a purveyor of antisemitic propaganda. For example, Mrs Allaf lists on her site the 'Electronic Intifada' web site; the founder of that site, Nigel Parry, has written that "an increasing amount of the tone and content [of Shamir's writings] was observed by more than a few to fall into what could -- if this hadn't been an Israeli Jew writing it -- best be described as a classic anti-Semitic repertoire".

Nor is this information limited to obscure publications. Only last week, The Times carried a column by Stephen Pollard on the case of Shamir, which noted: "[I]t takes only a quick Google to discover his views and background. He has worked for Zavtra, Russia’s most anti-Semitic publication, and is allied with the Vanguard News Network, set up by an American, Alex Linder — a man so extreme that he was even ostracised by the US neo-Nazi National Alliance."

Two days after Stephen Pollard's column appeared, Rime Allaf reproduced Shamir's anti-Israel writings on her web log.

I concluded by saying that, as I was writing purely in my capacity as a member of Chatham House, I wouldn't be making any public reference to the issue till the Director had had a chance to consider the matter. So he now has, and while (as I did not ask, and do not have, his permission for this) I am not able to quote his reply, I will give him credit that he said he would raise the matter with Mrs Allaf, and was clearly as good as his word. In her next blog entry on returning from sabbatical Mrs Allaf wrote mysteriously:

Things are still busy, but I will make an effort to get back to speed, especially to keep up with those who apparently have way too much time on their own hands, and who are rather fixated on what others write and say.

Perhaps I am not the most assiduous of workers, but even if I were less easily distracted by fripperies, I should still regard the respectful citation of a down-the-line antisemite by a Chatham House Associate as a matter of public interest. Next time you hear Mrs Allaf cited in the press as an authority on Middle East affairs, just remember where she's coming from.

A-bomb's damaging fallout

This column appears in The Times today.

THE 60TH anniversary of the defeat of Japanese aggression enables us to thank those survivors who accomplished it. To the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, on the other hand, it represents an opportunity to inculcate into schoolchildren a tendentious political message.

CND has produced a Hiroshima Education Pack nominally about the dropping of the A-bombs on Japan in August 1945 but giving no indication of the historical debates over that decision. Its treatment of the subject consists in denouncing as a “lie” the notion “that the US dropped the nuclear bombs in order to minimise casualties, claiming that a ground war would have killed many more people”.

The rest of the pack includes a selective history of CND, denunciations of the alleged bellicosity of the current US and UK governments, and a candid admission addressed to CND supporters that “the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an important opportunity for us to raise awareness amongst the general public of the horrifying reality of nuclear war and the need to join CND’s campaign”. There are also role-playing games that, in specifying that “students should be organised in mixed-ability groups to support each other”, charmingly recall an educational idée fixe of a bygone age.

CND’s sole cited source for its historical claims is a long-debunked thesis of 40 years ago. Recent historical research supports what CND denounces as lies. In 1997, D. M. Giangreco, of the US Army Command and General Staff College, concluded after exhaustive research of the primary sources that “the estimate that American casualties [in a ground invasion of Japan] could surpass the million mark was set in the summer of 1944 and was never changed”. In 1998, the Japanese historian Sadao Asada demonstrated, after assessing newly released documents about the surrender, that the dropping of both bombs was crucial in strengthening the position of those within the Japanese Government who wished to sue for peace.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible acts of warfare undertaken to avoid the certainty of far greater casualties on all sides. The charge that the bombs were dropped for cynical reasons of US realpolitik is ahistorical. CND’s dissemination of it to schoolchildren in order to buttress its current campaigns is intellectual irresponsibility of a high order.

Violence and its legitimation

Since Tony Blair presented his proposals for banning incitement to terrorism, many self-consciously clever critics have waxed indignant at his indifference to free speech. Here is Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties) in The Guardian this week:

Mr Blair also promised to criminalise the "condoning, glorifying or justification" of terrorism anywhere in the world - a shockingly broad speech offence that the home secretary had previously tried to narrow down to the still broad concept of "indirect incitement to terrorism". Such a law could criminalise all kinds of debates that have nothing to do with direct incitement. Readers of this newspaper may have to be more careful at dinner parties. Writers of this newspaper ... it doesn't bear thinking about.

She has a point, though not the one she thinks. Condoning terrorism is a broad offence; on a strict interpretation it might catch people who do not directly incite violence. Those who support the government’s proposals should recognise this, and turn the charge back on those who make it. The offence is “shockingly broad” in the proposal because so it is in real life. The distinction between directly inciting terrorism and legitimate if debatable opinions about how to counter terrorism does not necessarily conform to the convenience of Guardian columnists. Some expressions of opinion in that newspaper and elsewhere fall between the two.

The type of speech I’m thinking of does nothing so crude as justifying or glorifying violence. But it legitimates violence. Should that be an offence? It depends on the context. I do not rule it out in principle, and designating some sentiments as incitement to crime may have a bracing influence on public debate. Ms Chakrabarti’s concern that Guardian readers may have to be more careful in what they say at dinner parties is grandiloquent absurdity, but if incidentally Guardian readers become more careful in what they say then I cannot consider this a loss either to the quality of public life or to them.

A couple of months ago the Independent columnist Johann Hari compiled 15 pertinent questions to put to a supporter of George Galloway MP. These included:

Do you believe Tony Blair is "waging war on Muslims both at home and abroad", that he is " a crusader", and "he will burn in the hellfires for all eternity"? If so, would you say so in areas of extreme racial tension to audiences of young and angry Muslim men?

The qualifier in Johann’s question is crucial. Sentiments expressed in, say, an opinion piece in a small-circulation periodical such as The New Statesman, however eccentric, are unlikely to lead anyone to do anything. The identical sentiments expressed in an environment where they are certain to be inflammatory and likely to precipitate violence are different matter. Spot the weasel word in Ms Chakrabarti’s sentence: ‘Such a law could criminalise all kinds of debates that have nothing to do with direct incitement.’

'Tony Blair will burn in the hellfires for all eternity' is not direct incitement. For all I know it may be a recurring theme in pamphlets of the Protestant Truth Society. But it may still, in certain contexts implied by Johann’s question, constitute incitement to crime, and there is every good reason for a liberal society that is the target of religious extremists indoctrinated into terrorism to interpret incitement in precisely the broad way that Ms Chakrabarti fears.

Here are a couple of examples of the type of thing I mean (a third, by Noam Chomsky, and which I alluded to in my post last week, is such a beauty that I am going to devote a separate post to it rather than discuss it here). Neither is direct incitement: both might have that effect, and the authors of those sentiments ought to feel under the contingent threat of prosecution depending on where they speak and write. The obvious recent case is George Galloway (again) in a television interview. David Aaronovitch in The Times recounts them and raises the obvious question:

Speaking on Syrian TV on July 31, in the way one does, Galloway addressed the Arabs of the world with the observation that: “Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners — Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will.” The foreigners in Jerusalem are, presumably, Israeli Jews and I imagine that the metaphorical “doing as they will” attached to the helpless but alluring female cities, does not refer to them being plied with scones and Earl Grey tea.

Of course Galloway has — unlike the silly sheikhs — condemned the bombings as “a crime in any language, in any religion”. He may even mean it. But it isn’t hard to imagine self-styled Mujahidin listening to George and concluding that a strike at the heart of the daughter-rapist’s capital city is a fair return. So was this, in effect, incitement?

It may be.

The second example is an op-ed from today’s Guardian, by the venerable radical historian Howard Zinn. An indication of its thoughtfulness is Zinn’s insistence that:

The Bush administration, unable to capture the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, invaded Afghanistan, killing thousands of people and driving hundreds of thousands from their homes. Yet it still does not know where the criminals are.

Actually the Bush administration knows exactly where the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks are. They’re dead in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a crash site in Pennsylvania. That’s what happens to successful suicide terrorists. Professor Zinn can check this in contemporary newspaper accounts. And, by the way, so far from driving thousands from their homes, the war in Afghanistan allowed, according to the UNHCR, the biggest repatriation of refugees to their homes in 30 years. Since the Taliban’s fall, more than 3.5 million refugees have chosen to return to Afghanistan, anticipating a better life for themselves.

Trying to reason with Professor Zinn is a near-textbook case of futility, and in any event I want to make only one substantive comment about his argument. His article is entitled, “It is not only Iraq that is occupied. America is too.” Unlike many exercises in subeditorial interpretation, the title exactly reflects the argument of the piece. Zinn says:

But more ominous, perhaps, than the occupation of Iraq is the occupation of the US. I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over. I wake up thinking: the US is in the grip of a president surrounded by thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water or the air, or what kind of world will be inherited by our children and grandchildren.

Whether or not Zinn is aware of it, the language he uses here is a close copy of the far-Right aversion to the constitutional character of US democracy. On this view, the US not only has a President whose policies Zinn disapproves of: it is in thrall to illegitimate and alien forces. If the nation is occupied by such forces, then political violence is not criminal, but an act of liberation in obedience to a higher law.

If there is anyone in recent American history who exemplifies this belief, it is one who acted upon it: Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber who imagined the US was controlled by what white supremacists term ‘ZOG’, or Zionist Occupation Government. I have no doubt that Zinn would reject any such analogy between his arguments and those of far-Right ‘survivalists’, and I know he would sincerely be outraged at the massacre of innocents in Oklahoma's Federal building by a neo-Nazi. Any white supremacist who happened to read his argument in The Guardian would be unlikely to appreciate that distinction, however. The parallel between the conspiracist paranoid ravings of the far-Right and the far-Left is not a malign invention on my part to discredit those on the ‘Left’ whose views I oppose: it is a demonstrable feature of recent political debate. The novelist Gore Vidal has written a long polemic (published in The Observer in 2002) alleging that the Bush ‘junta’ allowed the terrorist strikes on 9/11 to happen in order to advance its nefarious plans for world domination. The similarity of this worldview to that of Timothy McVeigh is explicitly acknowledged by Vidal: he describes McVeigh as a "Kipling hero" with an "overdeveloped sense of justice", comparable to Paul Revere.

Is Zinn guilty of incitement to crime? Is Vidal? Not in The Guardian and The Observer or at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where these preposterous notions have been propounded. Elsewhere, they may be. If they and others like them have to start worrying about the legal implications of their remarks if made in the UK, then public debate itself will benefit through the associated clarification of ideas. The legitimation of political violence is not just a matter of opinion; those who hear it should be clear on what it represents; those who indulge in it should be aware of the costs of free speech. If the government is seriously going to press for expansive legislation cracking down on incitement to terrorism, then it should strive manfully to resist the temptation to be cautious.

The new reactionaries

Cook therefore shared with Blair the idea that the Western powers can intervene militarily in countries that they deem to be violating human rights. He simply opposed applying this principle to the case of Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

Professor Alex Callinicos, 'Robin Cook, Iraq and New Labour', Socialist Worker, 13 August 2005 (emphasis added)

A year after the Balkan War liberal and left opinion has once again been urging British military intervention--this time in Sierra Leone. The arguments for intervention are very much the same. The most horrible atrocities are being carried out and, faced with these horrors, people in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, have been begging British troops to defend them and stay in the country as long as possible. It seems the only choice is between intervention and leaving people to the most horrible of fates. What is more, the main opposition to intervention has come from the Tories. They have been denouncing the Blair government for 'risking' British troops in an engagement which seems concerned only with humanitarian issues, as opposed to the west's deeper strategic concerns in the Balkan case. Nevertheless, the logic of intervention is a disastrous one for anyone who cares about the future of people in the most impoverished parts of the Third World.

Chris Harman, 'Fight the power', Socialist Review (journal of the Socialist Workers' Party, controlling organisation of the Respect Coalition), June 2000 (emphasis added)

Nobody in the capital [of Sierra Leone], Freetown, has forgotten how Mr Blair deployed 1,500 British soldiers to defend the city from an advancing rebel army that specialised in hacking the limbs off their victims. Five years after that operation, led by the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines, Sierra Leone is at peace and a decade of turmoil and civil war is receding. Augustus Kamara, 48, showed his gratitude by baptising his son Tony Blair Kamara.

"That powerful British leader saved our country," he said. "Even before my son was born and my wife was still pregnant, I decided: 'If the child is a boy, I will call him Tony Blair.' That man risked his political position to send his army to Sierra Leone. If anything had gone wrong, it would have been the end of his career. Despite all the odds, he sent his soldiers to save us. It was an act of humanity and of heroism and I decided to show my individual appreciation for what he has done."

'Hope in the land where Blair is hero', Daily Telegraph, 5 July 2005 (the article also notes 'bitter disillusion' with domestic corruption).

UPDATE: On this subject, I'm reminded of a considered contribution to political debate by a Respect candidate in the European elections last year. David Aaronovitch noted it in The Guardian:

Ann Thomas, the Respect Euro-candidate for the southwest, claims that Labour has scapegoated asylum seekers and refugees, "despite the fact that Blair's wars in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq have caused people to desert their homes and seek refuge." Sierra Leone, Ann? Do you think that people stayed put during the good ol' hand-chopping days, and then deserted the country in droves once British troops arrived to protect them? Does Ann even know where Sierra Leone is? In every case cited, people have returned home because of "Blair's wars"; the truth being the exact opposite of what Ann Thomas says it is. Honestly, you'd be better off voting for a donkey.

Why Sharon's critics are clueless on Gaza

This column appears in The Times today.

TOWARDS the end of her premiership, Margaret Thatcher sent a congratulatory telegram for the 75th birthday of the Israeli statesman and polymath Abba Eban, asking rhetorically: “How can one not give Abba Eban his due?” Eban, famous for his unfashionably dovish views and dry wit, remarked: “Actually, there are quite a few people in Israel who think it’s possible.”

Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, will be thinking along similar lines after the resignation of his Finance Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in protest at Mr Sharon’s plan for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Mr Netanyahu worries that Israel’s removal of settlements will encourage terrorism. He declares: “I am not willing to be part of a process that ignores reality and blindly proceeds to establish a base for Islamic terror that will threaten the entire country.” While the Israeli Cabinet has approved the plan, public support for it has been slipping.

Mr Netanyahu’s concerns are not groundless, but they are misguided. The principal threat to Israel from suicide terrorism comes from the West Bank, not Gaza, while the moral and prudential arguments for an eventual Palestinian state are unassailable. The merit of Mr Sharon’s strategy is that he recognises these realities while having a shrewder assessment of how to realise them than his foreign critics generally allow for.

Mr Sharon is typically characterised outside Israel as an obdurate warmonger. When he became Prime Minister in 2001 The Guardian headline ran “Israel gives up on peace with Sharon victory”. Sir Gerald Kaufman, the senior Labour MP, in 2002 condemned Mr Sharon as a “right-wing thug” whose policies were “not only unacceptable in humanitarian terms, but … also seriously unsuccessful in dealing with the terrorism”. Last year Tony Baldry, the Conservative chairman of the Commons Select Committee on International Development, declared: “The construction of a security barrier higher than the Berlin Wall may bring the mirage of immediate security to Israelis, but the level of despair felt by Palestinians at being denied an ordinary life can only increase the supply of suicide bombers.”

Myths die hard. Increased security for Israeli civilians is not a mirage at all; Mr Sharon’s policies have been unambiguously successful in curbing terrorism. With the construction of a security barrier (not a “wall”, as anti-Israel campaigners habitually term it, but for most of its length a chain-linked wire fence that could be taken down within an afternoon) and the assassination of successive leaders of Hamas, the number of successful terrorist attacks within Israel fell by more than 75 per cent between 2002 and 2004. The breathing space that these policies have allowed Israelis has encouraged serious thinking about territorial compromise and the outlines of an eventual settlement with the Palestinians.

The dispiriting fact is that no negotiated two-state agreement is likely in the near future. Western commentators who speak of a two-state “solution” adopt a misnomer. A two-state arrangement, with Israel withdrawing to boundaries approximating the pre-1967 armistice line, is not a solution to the conflict, but an outcome of the end of the conflict. The end of the conflict requires something more deep-rooted: a changed relationship and mutual trust between Israelis and Palestinians. As an Israeli analyst, Dan Schueftan, says: “At this stage, it is extremely difficult to imagine how any amount of European funding or sponsorship could produce a mega-gimmick convincing enough to persuade Jews, except in the hard-core Left, to consider a refurbished version of the Oslo act of faith after that failed so miserably.”

This is the context in which Mr Sharon’s plan should be assessed. Israel within its pre-1967 borders was militarily indefensible. After the Six-Day War, in which Israel captured east Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Sinai, successive governments kept these territories juridically separate from Israel and treated them as bargaining counters for future negotiations. That consensus ended with the election of Likud governments in the late 1970s and 1980s, but since the collapse of negotiations at Camp David and Taba in 2000 and 2001 the political terrain has shifted again.

Israeli leftwingers have had to acknowledge the failure of the peace process established with the Oslo accord of 1993. Mr Sharon became Prime Minister because Yassir Arafat rejected the offer of an independent Palestinian state made at Taba, demanded a “right of return” for all Palestinian refugees — a course incompatible with Israel’s existence as a Jewish state — and declared a second intifada.

Mr Sharon, meanwhile, has taken the Right an important stage on from merely accepting the need for negotiations with the Palestinians, and has acknowledged that what he explicitly terms the “occupation of the West Bank” is untenable for Israel and for the Palestinians. His security measures have reinforced a consensus among Israelis for a strategy of defensive deterrence, withdrawal from settlements in Gaza, and direct negotiations for a Palestinian state. The prerequisites for a final settlement include Israelis’ confidence in the ability of the Palestinian leadership to crack down on terrorism and to make their administration of Gaza a success. Israel will feel secure enough to withdraw to the pre-1967 boundaries only when it no longer believes they are continuously threatened. On any realistic assessment, this will take time.

That is why Gaza is important. Mr Sharon knows that Israeli security is ill-served by the diversion of effort to protect 8,000 Jewish settlers among 1.3 million Palestinians. To the settlers’ anguish, he is evicting them as part of a wider plan to create the conditions for dialogue. The wisest course for politicians outside the region is to cease attacking Mr Sharon for not being able to create peace by fiat. The cause of confidence-building and direct negotiations has never wanted for meddlesome outsiders; it should be given a chance to flourish unaided.

Robin Cook

The two most contentious issues in Labour politics in my adult lifetime have been unilateral nuclear disarmament, which the party advocated for much of the 1980s with catastrophic electoral consequences, and the Iraq War. On both issues, the late Robin Cook took the wrong side. He told the Party Conference in 1983, after the worst election result for Labour since the 1930s:

We failed first of all because our policies came across as overwhelmingly negative. Every doorstep I stopped on knew we were against the bomb. Most of them thought we were also against defence. They did not know what we were for. [Quoted in Peter Jones, America and the British Labour Party (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997), p. 192.]

This was a misconception that did Labour substantial damage. In fact the electorate had a pellucid understanding of the distinctive feature of Labour policy, which was that Britain should give up nuclear weapons while getting nothing in return. That proved impossible to sell. The policy was, as Gerald Kaufman declared (at a post-election Fabian meeting at my university), intellectually disreputable.

I recount this not to criticise Cook but to acknowledge his political skill. He was one of the few Labour politicians able to argue the case for the party’s then defence policies cogently and with intellectual weight. On the Iraq War, the manner of his resignation from the Government merited respect from those who disagreed with him just as the manner of Clare Short’s non-resignation earned her the derision of those who did agree with her. But most significant for Cook's political reputation will be, in my view, his assertion of foreign policy with an ethical dimension (not, as he is often misquoted as saying, an ‘ethical foreign policy’).

I strongly support this notion. Ethical standards cannot be everything in foreign policy because policymakers have to make trade-offs among desirable goals and priorities. (It is the principal weakness of Tony Blair’s view of international affairs, with which I am otherwise highly sympathetic, that he does not say this publicly – that, for example, pressing for democracy in Syria, which is part of a genuine ‘axis of evil’ of Islamist terrorism, is a more urgent task than pressing for it in the even-worse tyranny of North Korea, which is not part of an axis at all.) But they mark an essential distinction between progressive values and a conservative realism that, in disregarding the ideological character of oppressive regimes, is far from being realistic.

Cook, as Foreign Secretary, did fine work in two cases of foreign policy with an ethical dimension: Nato’s repulsion of Serb aggression against the Albanian Kosovars, and the deployment of British troops to Sierra Leone to preserve a suffering people from a peculiarly barbarous set of hand-lopping rebels. These episodes in British public policy are, like so many others, brilliantly and entirely unintentionally illuminated by Tony Benn in his celebrated diaries. In his entry for 16 April 1999, Benn records a debate in the House regarding military action in Kosovo: “Cook made a speech that I thought was odious, just repeating the insults to Milosevic personally and the war-crimes question.”

That sentence alone is worth the price of the entire set of Benn’s volumes. It prefigures the man’s later obsequiousness before Saddam Hussein, and indicates starkly the problem of a reactionary and amoral Left indifferent to the sufferings of tyrannised peoples. Robin Cook was anti-war, but he was not part of that sort of anti-war ‘Left’. That is why I respected him, and value the good he wrought on the international stage.

Reasoning about terrorism

Last month Norman Geras wrote in The Guardian about a particular line of reasoning well-represented in that newspaper after the London bombings:

Note the selectivity in the way root-causes arguments function. Purporting to be about causal explanation rather than excuse-making, they are invariably deployed on behalf of movements or actions for which their proponent wants to engage our indulgence, and in order to direct blame towards some party towards whom he or she is unsympathetic.

This is exactly the point, woefully overlooked by Norman’s critics on the newspaper’s letters page (e.g. Professor Scott Lucas: “To warn about the consequences of British and US actions is not to apologise for those of the suicide bombers”). I have cited before an analogy given by another commentator, Anatole Kaletsky in The Times, that is so far unanswered. After the Oklahoma bombing ten years ago in which 168 people died, no one of progressive opinions sought an explanation of Timothy McVeigh’s terrorism in the provocation offered him by racial integration and the prominence of Jews in public life.

Those who object to the analogy on the grounds that McVeigh’s beliefs were iniquitous whereas opposition to the Iraq War was just make two errors (even if you believe, as I do not, that the Iraq War was wrong). First, the London terrorists were obviously more than anti-war protestors: they were, so far as we know, adherents of a totalitarian cause with common ideological roots to neo-Nazism (if you doubt this, see Paul Berman’s superb account of the ideological offspring of a distinctively twentieth-century European nihilism, Terror and Liberalism, especially pp. 52-120). Secondly, in any case the objection is not open to Norman’s critics. Their claim is precisely that explaining terrorist acts is not the same as justifying them; an alleged contributory cause of terrorism does not cease to be such according to the political views of the observer. As Norman says in response to his critics:

If understanding and not justifying or condoning is what it is really all about, why is this 'understanding' discourse never deployed by the same people when racist thugs, angry about immigration, carry out hate crimes? It might be said, well, because their anger is unjustified, whereas Muslim anger over Afghanistan and Iraq is justified. But it's understanding, remember, and not justification, that this has just been said to be about, so the fact that the anger of the racists is unjustified is neither here nor there.

It depends on context. There is no inherent reason that evaluating the motivations of terrorists is wrong. What is wrong is that much of this type of reasoning does not take the form of evaluation at all, but is rather a dogmatic assertion of whatever political views were held in the first place. An example, taken almost at random (in the sense that I saw it without looking for it), came after the Madrid bombings; the then President of the Methodist Conference in the UK, the Rev. Neil Richardson, said in his official capacity:

The perpetrators of the Madrid bombings, and their particular motivations, have not yet been identified. But what is incontestable is that global terrorism, of which Spain is the most recent victim, is bred by injustice and deprivation. Western nations, therefore, need critically to examine their foreign policy.

Richardson’s speculative hypothesis is not ‘incontestable’ at all, but that’s not the issue I’m raising here. (I discuss the ‘root causes’ argument at some length in my forthcoming book on the case for an interventionist foreign policy.) Note merely that Richardson came out with this formulation without even knowing the identify of the bombers. Responding as a Christian leader to an atrocious act, he literally did not know the first thing about the subject, but saw the violent deaths of nearly 200 people as an opportunity to assert his antecedent opinions about foreign policy.

The Methodist President breached an important boundary in accompanying his revulsion at the terrorist attacks with a political thesis that could not fail to temper his message of compassion for the victims. I say that not because Richardson’s compassion was feigned – I’m sure it was not – but because his political opinions, being on his own admission independent of the acts he was discussing, were a non sequitur. That is not how public figures should talk about mass murder. (If I were a Christian, I should probably say that Church leaders in particular ought to avoid that temptation. As the great Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr reflected: “All men are naturally inclined to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity. This is why religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm. The tendency to equate our political with our Christian convictions causes politics to generate idolatry.”)

I am not suggesting that there is a slippery slope from such rationalisations for terrorism to support for political violence. I do insist that immediately adducing the motivations for particular terrorist acts by presenting your own political opinions as if they were disinterested fruits of critical inquiry is the wrong tone at the wrong time.

A similar case has occurred this week with the increasingly bizarre pronouncements of Conservative Party spokesmen. Everything I have said so far applies to the Shadow Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, for his remark that, “I find the suicide bombing totally explicable in terms of the level of anger which many members of the Muslim community seem to have about a large number of things.” This is, first, a calumny against people who may be very angry indeed but would never channel their feelings into terrorism (which is thus not “totally explicable” by such anger – there has to be something else). But it is also a useless and destructive guide to public policy.

Many people reading this will disagree with my support for regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq, and my broad defence of the policies of the current Israeli government. But some at least of those readers are likely to share my support for the emergence of an independent and sovereign East Timor from the oppressive imperialism of Indonesia. Be aware that to Osama bin Laden and his foot soldiers, those causes are indivisible. The overthrow of tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq is a war against Islam; so is an independent East Timor, enforced by “crusader Australian forces”, for it is “part of the Islamic world”. (See bin Laden’s statement on al-Jazeera, 3 November 2001, as reported by the BBC.)

Even when it takes the ostensible form of specific and negotiable causes, the anger of Islamist demands is something we cannot allow to influence our policy. It is, in fact, impossible in practice to ameliorate Islamist anger (the interventions fought by the United States to rescue the Muslim populations of Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, which I supported, had no dissuasive effect on bin Laden’s terrorism), but it is also morally impermissible for a government subscribing to progressive values to attempt it. We must do what is right, aware of the anger this may elicit – and in the cases of East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq, proud of the anger they do elicit.

The views I have criticised in this post are thoughtless and damaging, but I would not regard them as worse than that. The damage is not trivial, though. In violating a boundary beyond which public figures should not go, this type of reasoning buttresses (rather than leads to) some undesirable and noxious elements in public debate. My next post will discuss the respective cases of the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, and a famous linguist and prolific polemicist whose political writings I have been silent about for far too long.

"A little masterpiece of ambiguity"

Jenny McCartney in The Sunday Telegraph makes some commonsensical observations about the IRA’s pronouncements.

It has always been necessary to trawl through IRA statements with the suspicious eye of a Hollywood divorce lawyer, because each sentence is a little masterpiece of ambiguity, mined with get-out clauses. The politicians - such as the former Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble - who in the past have taken great leaps of faith, while clinging to loose interpretations of IRA statements, have ended up floundering in the political bog.

Take, for example, that sentence in last Thursday's statement: "All IRA units have been instructed to dump arms." It does not say "dump all their arms." All IRA units have therefore been instructed to dump some arms - how many, precisely? - and "put them beyond use" in a process overseen solely by the decommissioning head General John de Chastelain, and two independent witnesses.

This isn't new: it is what the IRA offered on August 9, 2001, and promptly withdrew, again in pique, on August 14, 2001. Even last week's statement that "all Volunteers" are instructed "to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means" is both familiar and tortuous in its construction.

The IRA’s strategy of calculated ambiguity has been an integral part of the ‘peace process’ since the organisation’s declared ceasefire in 1994. In the summer of that year, the republican leadership issued a document known as ‘TUAS’ (it can be found in Eamon Mallie and David McKittrick, The Fight for Peace: The Inside Story of the Irish Peace Process (London: Mandarin, 1997), pp. 421-4), which was widely interpreted at the time as standing for ‘Totally Unarmed Strategy’. Those who interpreted it instead as ‘Tactical Use of Armed Struggle’ were nearer the mark. The document maintained that the state of opinion among nationalists – the SDLP, the Irish Government, the Irish-American lobby and Provisional Sinn Fein – was reasonably homogeneous, all of them ‘rowing in roughly the same direction’. This was the outcome – intended and actual - of the Hume-Adams talks between John Hume, then leader of the SDLP, and Gerry Adams: the creation of ‘an Irish nationalist consensus’ in which the Unionists and the British Government would be depicted as the obdurate parties and the obstacles to political advance.

In short, the ceasefire was declared not because violence was rejected in principle and for all time, but because the state of politics in the province and in Ireland was seen as conducive to a different approach. Constitutional politics has always been treated as a second front, not as the definitive abandonment of the original front. The only things that have changed since the start of the peace process have been, as it were, exogenous variables, notably the toughening of American attitudes towards terror since 9/11. Nothing internal to the republican movement has shifted; there has been no reassessment of its ideology, let alone any critical rethinking of its history.

Should that ever take place, there would have to be an understanding that the ideology of republicanism is not, and has never been, progressive. Its invocation of the blood sacrifice has disturbing parallels in other anti-rationalist movements. As Kevin Toolis, whose argument ought to have been recalled last week, wrote in The Times a couple of years ago:

The Easter Proclamation [of 1916] was, and is, a chilling semifascistic rant that is heavy on the power of arms, blood sacrifice and dead children to bring a united Ireland into being. Killing “alien” British soldiers was, [Patrick] Pearse declared, the “fundamental right” of all true Irish republicans. Guns and bombs were the way forward. In the end, Pearse got what he wanted, a honourable execution by baffled British Army generals, but his poisonous legacy lived on, inspiring generation after generation of young Irishmen to take up the gun.

When the IRA bombed a Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen in 1987, killing 11 people, it chose what, by its own perverse reasoning, was a singularly appropriate target. Its victims were commemorating the deaths, and giving thanks for the lives, of those who had fought fascism; in that fight, the IRA had been on the other side. Its Chief of Staff, Sean Russell, died of a perforated ulcer on a German U-boat in September 1940, 100 miles from the coast of County Galway, during an abortive Nazi attempt to land him and his comrade Frank Ryan in Ireland. They had planned to sabotage the allied war effort, and IRA attempts to the same end continued under the coordination of German spies such as Captain Hermann Goertz. Russell remains a revered figure in nationalist circles.

Is it really necessary to dwell on the IRA’s past record rather than welcome their statement? Yes, it is, because peace, as opposed to an armed truce characterised by mistrust and criminality, in the end depends on a state of mind. Trust will require the debunking of cherished myths, plenty of which (as revisionist historians such as Conor Cruise O’Brien and Roy Foster have demonstrated) are shared by constitutional nationalists as well as the IRA. No such re-evaluation is anywhere near to taking place. Perhaps one day there will be a parallel with another cause that sided with Nazism, and which many years later voluntarily accepted its defeat and discredit. But there is, as yet, no F.W. de Klerk of Irish republicanism.