Oliver Kamm

Spiked spiked

Spiked magazine, or rather its reviewer James Heartfield (almost certainly a pseudonym), has responded to my letter. Heartfield writes:

Oliver Kamm complains that I misrepresent him (letters, below; Humanitarian interventionists dig in, 16 December).

I don't. I quote him. If he does not want to be held to account for his arguments that democracy and civil liberties are expendable in the war in Iraq, he should not say those things. And though it is a digression (his, not mine), if Kamm will insist on writing that the Republican cause in Spain was a greater danger than Franco, he must expect to be understood to prefer Franco's victory over Caballero's.

Martin Bell's candidacy in the Tatton election was an important turning point. I wrote at the time that, by turning the election into a question of the sitting MP Neil Hamilton's character, the electors had been denied the chance to vote against Conservative policies (and for the record, LM magazine did not support any of the candidates in Tatton). Oliver Kamm was the pioneer of that anti-political approach, boasting that he had drafted Bell's manifesto so far to the right that Hamilton could not outflank it. In 2001 Martin Bell lost the Tatton Constituency to Tory George Osborne by 8,611 votes.

By his silence on it, I assume that Kamm accepts the main argument of my review of his book: that put into practice, humanitarian intervention involves just as many grubby compromises as cynical realism.

I have sent back the following letter for publication:

Dear Sir or Madam,

One of my historian friends who has debated with 'Heartfield' (presumably a nom-de-keyboard) on the Balkans warned me that he was not the sharpest tool in the box; I should have taken the advice and left well alone. Apart from manufacturing two further arguments that appear nowhere in my book, Heartfield draws an important political lesson from Martin Bell's defeat in the 2001 general election in "the Tatton constituency to Tory George Osborne by 8,611 votes".

Martin Bell did not stand in the Tatton constituency in the 2001 general election.

Yours faithfully,

Oliver Kamm

While on the subject of Heartfield - for the second and last time - I'll deal just with his "holding me to account" for my arguments about civil liberties. From my book, Anti-Totalitarianism, here are the paragraphs he refers to. I have begun by saying there are limits to how far international law can deliver collective security. I go on to say, in a section entitled "The importance of legal precepts" (the sentence Heartfield quotes is in bold):

[T]here can be no dispute among progressives that a sovereign democratic state, acting alone or in concert with allies, must have a regard for due process and its own legal precepts. The most grievous failing of the Bush Administration in its foreign policy has been an indifference to those preconditions of legitimacy.

The anti-totalitarian struggle is one that will probably last decades. What are initially designed in wartime as emergency measures may, therefore, last indefinitely. The inevitable abridgements of liberty that a military campaign requires are not sufficiently well designed to allow us to maintain for long the appearance – and reality – of fairness and due process. Non-governmental organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International overreached themselves in the Iraq controversy by (in the first case) presuming competence to judge the justification for war, and (in the second) complaining that the British government was publicising Saddam’s human rights abuses. But they – and more particularly the Red Cross, whose warnings about Abu Ghraib were not treated with the weight they merited – have an important role to play in shaping policy in this respect. It is essential in the short term that the US administration order a formal system of inspections of detention centres, in which the NGOs should be involved, establish a code of rights for prisoners, and provide for judicial review in cases of terrorist suspects.

According to Heartfield, these paragraphs say "democracy and civil liberties are expendable in the war in Iraq". I hold to the convention that where an intelligent general reader fails to grasp an author's point, the fault lies with the author. For reasons I am too polite to state, I absolve myself of responsibility for any inference Heartfield may draw from my book.

Holiday

No posts for the next few days. Happy Christmas, Chanukah, new year or merely holiday to all.

Spiked review

One journal that doesn't think much of my book at all is Spiked. This is a new one to me, but it was set up by the same people responsible for the now-defunct LM magazine (formerly Living Marxism). On domestic policy, the people behind LM and Spiked represent, in Nick Cohen's words, the decanting of the old soundbites of the right into new bottles. On foreign affairs, they are described by Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian as responsible for "vile deceit" in their libel of ITN journalists covering the Bosnian war:

Living Marxism's attempts to re-write the history of the camps was motivated by the fact that in their heart of hearts, these people applauded those camps and sympathised with their cause and wished to see it triumph. That was the central and - in the final hour, the only - issue. Shame, then, on those fools, supporters of the pogrom, cynics and dilettantes who supported them, gave them credence and endorsed their vile enterprise.

Spiked's reviewer, James Heartfield, comments that my "college debating style, lively enough by the page, is quite incoherent overall". I am "disingenuous" and "shrill", with a "snidey blogging style". I "over and again cut [my] cloth to suit practical realities today" and "assume the pompous officialese of the barrack-room lawyer". And so on.

This is all standard fare, but for reasons I indicate below, I thought it was worth taking up certain characteristics of this article with the magazine. This is my letter for publication:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Knowing your predecessor-magazine's conduct during the Bosnian war, I should have wondered what I'd said wrong in my book Anti-Totalitarianism if you'd had cause to praise it. As it is, you've suprised me for quite another reason. James Heartfield is gratifyingly contemptuous of my arguments for humanitarian intervention - except that they aren't my arguments at all. Was the book really so anodyne that, in order to dismiss it, Heartfield had to manufacture things that I haven't written? Charles Krauthammer recently described the argument of a realist critic as so extravagant a caricature of the neoconservative position on foreign policy that it ought to have been illustrated with cartoons. That expository device would be unavailable to Heartfield, whose review lacks even the kernel of truth that effective caricature embellishes.

Perhaps I could provide for your readers a summary of the thesis that Heartfield declines to divulge. My aim in the book is to defend the Blair-Bush strategy of promoting global democracy, trace its antecedents in left-wing debates about foreign policy, and identify the distinctive contribution that progressives can make to an internationalist coalition. Heartfield maintains that the case for liberal interventionism founders on "all the repulsive details of waging war". Understandably, given that his argument has so obvious and comprehensive a historical refutation (but let us return to Bosnia later), he quickly resorts to the non sequitur of disputing my leftist credentials. He is so determined on this conclusion (and, given the paucity of his other material, tied to it), that he flagrantly misrepresents my argument in order to derive it.

Most shameless is Heartfield's attributing to me a literally Orwellian design for civil liberty and due process. He quotes me: "The inevitable abridgements of liberty that a military campaign requires are not sufficiently well-designed to allow us to maintain for long the appearance - and reality - of fairness and due process." By removing the context, Heartfield presents me as arguing that the western democracies must renounce fairness and due process in order to mount a successful military campaign. My argument is the exact - the exact - opposite: because a military campaign curtails liberties, it is essential that democratic states respect legal precepts. I lament the effect of a military campaign on the rule of law, and urge democratic states to take remedial action. Only an incompetent or dishonest reviewer would have failed to spot that this section of the book is entitled "The importance of legal precepts". In it I argue that "a sovereign democratic state ... must have a regard for due process and the rule of law"; identify "the most grievous failing of the Bush administration in its foreign policy" as "an indifference to those preconditions of legitimacy"; urge a greater role for NGOs such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch in shaping policy on detainees; and call on the US administration to establish a code of rights for prisoners and provide for judicial review in the cases of terrorist suspects.

This is not an isolated falsehood by Heartfield. When he insists "Kamm cannot resist calling anyone who is not 100 per cent with him an appeaser of fascism", the term "straw man" is hardly adequate to his creativity. Outside my discussion of the 1930s, I say this about nobody at all, in any historical debate, anywhere in the book. In my discussion of the arguments on the Left about nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, I explicitly reject the charge that the peace movement's stance was appeasement. I argue that the modern peace campaigners' counterparts from the 1930s are not the appeasers but the professed advocates of collective security who refused to believe there were greater evils than war. This is also my criticism of the mainstream anti-Iraq-war campaigners (as opposed to the SWP/Respect/Stop the War Coalition, who are not "appeasers" of fascism but outright supporters of it), who trusted to an ineffective and destructive containment policy.

So it goes on. Heartfield depicts me "retreat[ing] from the idea that it is possible to build democratic states" when political reality intrudes. He is characteristically misrepresenting my argument that even if Iraq fails to become a stable democracy, she might still be a state where constitutional principles are established, in contrast to the abattoir-regime of Saddam Hussein. I go on to say that there are grounds for being more ambitious than that, and that "there is a pragmatic [i.e. it works, and isn't just a nice idea] case for making the spread of democracy the central goal of foreign policy".

In a surreal coda, Heartfield accuses me of "veering off into a historical defence of.the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco". His only citation for this preposterous assertion is my description of Franco's tyranny as being of regionally circumscribed significance, in contrast to the expansionism of Stalin's foreign policy (of which the shattered Republican cause - shattered by the Soviet Union, that is - became an arm after 1937). Heartfield is plainly unaware of this, but the irrelevance of Franco to European fascist advance is a common judgement in the historical literature. (See, e.g., Stanley Payne's The Franco Regime, 1936-1975, 1987: "despite Franco's uncertain prospects after Allied victory... the likelihood [is] that his future would have been more bleak had Hitler actually won. The Generalissimo's persistent tacking, delays, and dissimulation had eventually so infuriated Hitler that, according to Albert Speer, he swore to get even with Franco by using his domestic enemies to overthrow him." As Heartfield is dismissive of the evidence of the Soviet archives, he should note the consistent message of the German ones. A.J.P. Taylor recorded in "Spain and the Axis", in Rumours of War, 1952: "The third volume of documents from the archives of the German Foreign Ministry ... contains little evidence of a Fascist conspiracy and none at all of British or French connivance in it.") But more fundamental, Heartfield makes a grossly illegitimate inference that "as Kamm means it, [Franco was] the lesser evil". That does not follow at all, and is not my view. Let me try to explain the point to Heartfield with an analogy. I thought at the time, and still do, that apartheid South Africa was a greater evil in the 1970s than Cuban-backed Angola or Mozambique. The fact that apartheid was a system peculiar to South Africa while Communism was an expansionist ideology was irrelevant to the case.

While the unscholarly, ignorant and mendacious character of Heartfield's piece is demonstrable, identifying the influences behind it is a more speculative task. But as Heartfield has no compunction about claiming to know "the formative event in Kamm's thinking", I'll have a go at pop psychology myself. As Heartfield notes, I played a small role in the victory of Martin Bell in Tatton in the 1997 general election. I'm glad to have done so, not only out of loyalty to and admiration for the man, but also because he was an early and important voice in urging humanitarian intervention to stop Serb aggression against Bosnia's multi-ethnic democracy. The predecessor-magazine of Spiked took, of course, a distinctively different stance on the Bosnian war: it libelled honest reporters who told the truth about Serb atrocities in Bosnia. I suspect it was this issue that caused LM magazine, entertainingly and unavailingly, to endorse Martin's opponent in Tatton, the disgraced former minister Neil Hamilton, and that even now it remains, to coin a phrase, the formative event in Heartfield's thinking. Whatever the truth of this, I tried to make contact with Mr Hamilton as soon as LM's endorsement was published in order to give him some well-intentioned advice. It ran: "Mr Hamilton, do not allow your name and reputation to be exploited by those whose standards of veracity and integrity fall so far short of your own."

I hope he took it, and has stuck to it.

Yours faithfully,

Oliver Kamm

Morning Star review

Question: Who says this, of whom? "His claim to be on the left at all is rather thin."

Answer: Andrew Murray, Chairman of the Stop the War Coalition and advocate of "Solidarity with People's [North] Korea", of, er, me.

The comment appears in a 3,500-word review of my book, Anti-Totalitarianism, that Mr Murray has written for the Communist Morning Star, and which is appearing in the newspaper in three parts over Christmas and new year. He kindly sent me an advance copy of the review.

Mr Murray's comments about the thinness of my claim to be on the Left will stupefy regular readers of this site, along with my friends and family. But I have to say that, othewise, he has given a fair account of the book's argument, though he uses different terminology from mine (e.g. he says my politics are "those of an unmodified cold war warrior", whereas I prefer the term "liberal anti-Communist" or "anti-totalitarian".) He concludes:

This is a “left-wing” foreign policy which, for its execution, has... been sub-contracted to some of the most right-wing politicians on the planet. Not only has it led to a human catastrophe in Iraq – which even Oliver Kamm goes some way towards acknowledging – but the backwash from the enterprise is starting to threaten the very principles of “liberal democracy” in Britain and the USA which it purportedly set out to defend.

Mr Murray does, however, say the book is "stimulating", and comments:

Kamm’s writing is lucid and he draws on an extensive study of the history of the British left, handled in a trenchantly partisan manner but free of the student-politic ad hominem point-scoring which, happily, blights the output of “Labour Friends of Iraq”, for example, and the more excitable bloggers. His argument moves along briskly and provocatively.

I feel almost churlish in pointing out that Mr Murray is the author of a short book entitled The Communist Party of Great Britain: A Historical Analysis to 1941, published a decade ago by a group called Communist Liaison. In it he says (p. 74):

That things happened in the USSR which were inexcusable and which ultimately prejudiced Socialism's whole prospect is today undeniable. Whether Communists in the capitalist world could or should have done more than they did is much more contentious.

Mr Murray, in short, believes it is an open question whether Communists in the West did everything they could or should have done in their response to the Great Terror and the Moscow Trials. He is, to remind you, Chairman of the Stop the War Coalition.

Chomsky replies in Prospect III

In my article in the November issue of Prospect attacking the choice of Noam Chomsky as the world’s top public intellectual, I wrote (emphasis added):

Chomsky's first book on politics, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) grew from protest against the Vietnam war. But Chomsky went beyond the standard left critique of US imperialism to the belief that "what is needed [in the US] is a kind of denazification".

In his reply in the new (January 2006) edition of Prospect, Chomsky says:

To demonstrate my "central" doctrine, Kamm misquotes my statement that, "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the US is dissent—or denazification."

Here is the actual quotation, from American Power, p. 17 (emphasis added):

We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent – or denazification. The question is a debatable one. Reasonable people may differ. The fact that the question is even debatable is a terrifying thing. To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification.

Chomsky has quoted just the first sentence, to suggest that he left it an open question whether the US needed "dissent or denazification". He asserts that I have misquoted him as opting for "denazification". Yet in the book, only 20-odd words after the sentence he quotes, he does exactly what I say he does, in exactly the words I quoted. He then withholds that information from the editor and readers of Prospect.

So, as Prospect puts it, "the world's top public intellectual responds to accusations of dishonesty". And the way he goes about responding to my accusations of dishonesty is – of all the extraordinary things - to lie about his source material (in this case his own book). Truly, Chomsky is a phenomenon of our age.

Chomsky replies in Prospect II

In my anti-Chomsky article in the November issue of Prospect, I argued that you cannot make sense of Chomsky's political writings without understanding the centrality of his notion that the US is comparable to Nazi Germany. Here is what Chomsky says in response, in the January issue of the magazine:

To demonstrate my "central" doctrine, Kamm misquotes my statement that, "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the US is dissent—or denazification." The context, which he omits, is a 1968 report in the New York Times of a protest against an exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry where children could "enter a helicopter for simulating firing of a machine gun at targets" in Vietnam, with a light flashing when a hit was scored on a hut. This was a year after the warning by the highly respected military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction… [as]… the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size."

Apart from misquoting and omitting the crucial context, Kamm also fails to tell us how one should react to this performance, aside from his own standard tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes and his dedicated efforts, failing with impressive consistency, to find something to criticise in the efforts to terminate state crimes for which he and I share responsibility, particularly as in a free society, we cannot plead fear as an excuse for silent complicity.

Misquoting and omitting crucial context are serious charges; they are, after all, what I accuse Chomsky of doing, which is doubtless why as a diversionary tactic he turns them back at me. Chomsky's problem is that my accusations are right, whereas his are wrong.

The “denazification” passage appears in American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969. Chomsky refers to the things he mentions in his Prospect article, but the notion that these are a "crucial context" whose omission affects the meaning of what he says is bluster. He claims that the US is in need of "denazification"; that statement is clear, and means the same with or without the "crucial context". It is consistent with the message of his writings on Vietnam and ever since, for he frequently cites supposed analogies between the US and Nazi Germany, and without the "crucial context" of a museum exhibit. For example, also in American Power, p. 279 he states:

[O]ne must applaud the insistence of the Secretary of State on the importance of historical analogies, the Munich analogy, for example. As Munich showed, a powerful and aggressive nation with a fanatic belief in its manifest destiny will regard each victory, each extension of its power and authority, as a prelude to the next step.

The only respect in which Chomsky's complaint about lack of context might make sense would be if he were presenting the "denazification" requirement as a serious hypothesis about the United States, and wished to to present evidence for that judgement. That of course is my point, not his complaint: the US-Nazi analogy is a central and recurring feature of his writings. And that conceit may be speedily dealt with (as in this long post I wrote on Chomsky's early polemics on the Vietnam War). However coarse you consider US popular culture, and however great the injustices and evils of US society and foreign policy - which at the time Chomsky wrote included a long history of racial segregation, the incarceration only 30 years previously of its Japanese-American population, and a brutal war fought in Vietnam - the notion that America is a society comparable to Nazi Germany was, and is, pernicious and frivolous.

UPDATE: Re: my observation that "the US-Nazi analogy is a central and recurring feature of his writings". See my (long) post here on Chomsky's writings on the Vietnam war for further examples. None of these depends on the museum exhibit that Chomsky claims is "crucial context". All unambiguously compare the US or its government to Nazi Germany. This is, as I said in my Prospect article, a notion that is central to Chomsky's political output.

Chomsky replies in Prospect

Noam Chomsky has replied in the new issue of Prospect to my criticisms of him in the magazine's November issue.

I turned with interest to Oliver Kamm's critique (Prospect, November 2005) of the "crude and dishonest arguments" he attributes to me, hoping to learn something. And learn something I did, though not quite what Kamm intended; rather, about the lengths to which some will go to prevent exposure of state crimes and their own complicity in them.

A determination to prevent the exposure of state crimes is, if you are to believe Chomsky, a characteristic of many men far more distinguished than I. Chomsky's accusations of apologetics for state violence, or racism, or Stalinism, are levelled against Vaclav Havel and Abba Eban, Michael Walzer and Jeffrey Isaac, Christopher Hitchens and Michael Ignatieff. Indeed one of the few public figures who escapes such strictures is a man above all others who genuinely can be called a racist and an apologist for state crimes - because he, Robert Faurisson, is a Holocaust denier. Of this fraudulent crank, Chomsky famously declined judgement, other than the speculation that Faurisson was "a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort".

The political issues Chomsky goes on to discuss in his latest piece concern his record over the last decade and a half, from his quietism over the Bosnian war to his writings on and after 9/11. I shall deal with these in a separate post between Christmas and new year. For the moment, in this long post and the two shorter succeeding posts (and possibly in a short letter to the magazine), I shall deal only with Chomsky's dishonesty. These posts slightly repeat each other in the opening; that is because I wish them to stand independently, as I hope one of them at least (the third) will be widely circulated around the Internet and in print. The reason should be obvious when you read it: in responding to a charge of dishonesty in his use of source materials, Chomsky has – in all the absurdly self-defeating places to do it - told an easily-demonstrable fib, and I do not wish him to get away with it.

Chomsky writes:

To demonstrate "a particularly dishonest handling of source material," Kamm alleges that, "[Chomsky] manipulates a self-mocking reference in the memoirs of the then US ambassador to the UN… to yield the conclusion that Moynihan took pride in Nazi-like policies." The topic is Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor, condemned by the security council, which ordered Indonesia to withdraw, to no effect. Moynihan explains why: "The US wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The department of state desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success." He then refers to reports that within two months 60,000 people had been killed, "10 per cent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the second world war"—at the hands of Nazi Germany. His comparison, not mine, as Kamm pretends.

I make no defence of US acquiescence in the annexation of East Timor. In my original article, I commented that this was an issue on which Chomsky's advocacy in the 1970s had been right, and in my book Anti-Totalitarianism I refer to East Timor as an instance where "the pursuit of a stable balance of power [in US Cold War realpolitik] had some horrendous casualties". The casualties of the Indonesian conquest numbered some 50,000 deliberately killed and a similar number dead owing to "resettlement" policies - fewer than Chomsky says, but an appalling historical episode nonetheless. [This estimate, taking account of population statistics, is given by Robert H. Cribb, "How Many Deaths? Problems in the Statistics of Massacre in Indonesia (1965-66) and East Timor (1975-1980)", in Ingrid Wessel and Georgia Wimhofer, eds., Violence in Indonesia, 2001, pp. 82-98.] My political criticism of Chomsky on this issue is not that he condemned the invasion and publicised its consequences - he was right to do so - but that he has ever after used the case of East Timor as one of (in the words of Francis Wheen) "an inexhaustible hoard of analogies and precedents that allow him to avoid the immediate issue" - such as the urgency of Western intervention to stop genocide in the Balkans. My criticism of him in this post, however, concerns his use of source material.

The passage Chomsky quotes by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, US Ambassador to the UN under President Nixon, comes from Moynihan's memoir, A Dangerous Place, 1978, p. 247. Here it is, expanded:

[S]uch was the power of the anticolonial idea that great powers from outside a region had relatively little influence unless they were prepared to use force. China altogether backed Fretilin [a Marxist group that had seized power] in Timor, and lost. In Spanish Sahara, Russia just as completely backed Algeria, and its front, known as Polisario, and lost. In both instances the United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.

It is clear from this context what Moynihan is referring to when he says "the United States wished things to turn out as they did": the defeat of Chinese and Soviet clients in, respectively, Timor and Spanish Sahara. Chomsky manipulates the reference in order to suggest that Moynihan is instead boasting about the accomplishment of mass murder. In other places, Chomsky doesn't merely suggest it, but says it explicitly. He does this in, for example, Chronicles of Dissent, 1992, pp. 252-3:

Referring to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, [Moynihan] says that the United States wanted things to turn out as they did and that he had the assignment of making sure that the United Nations could not act in any constructive way to terminate or reverse the Indonesian aggression. He carried out that task with remarkable success. He then in the next sentence goes on to say that he’s aware of the nature of that success. He says that two months later, reports surfaced that the Indonesian invasion had killed off about 10 per cent of the population in East Timor over a period of two months. A proportion of the population which, he then goes on to say, is about the same as the proportion of people in Eastern Europe killed by Hitler. So he’s taking pride in having stopped the United Nations from interfering with an aggression that he himself compares with Hitler’s invasion of Eastern Europe, and he then drops it at that.

Moynihan does not "in the next sentence" say anything of the kind, because the passage I have quoted marks the end of his reflections on East Timor. The reference to the killing of 10 per cent of the population of East Timor and its comparability to Soviet losses in WW2 does appear in the book, but ruefully, and not in any context related to Moynihan's supposed claims of the effectiveness of the US policy. Moynihan's saying "he’s aware of the nature of that success” is a straight fabrication by Chomsky: no such remark appears anywhere in the book. (In A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West, p. 80, Chomsky embellishes his account further by appending the remark: "A sign of the success, [Moynihan] adds, is that within a year 'the subject disappeared from the press.'" That too is a fabrication: Moynihan merely reports the disappearance of press coverage, and says nothing at all about its being either a desired outcome or a sign of success.)

In my article in Prospect I said that Chomsky manipulates the Moynihan quotation "by running separate passages together as if they are sequential and attributing to Moynihan comments he did not make, to yield the conclusion that Moynihan took pride in Nazi-like policies". I have demonstrated that that is exactly what he does. The example is important, and I choose it deliberately, because it is an instance where Chomsky's indignation was warranted. Yet when you examine his account of this shameless US policy, you find it is simply insupportable. His treatment of source material is dishonest, and his word cannot be trusted. The irony of his reference to Moynihan's book is that a more scrupulous reader (and writer) could have identified in it divisions in US foreign policy that are more than ever with us in current debates. Moynihan (pp. 244-5) holds the UN complicit in the annexation of East Timor because of its increasing indifference to a disinterested concept of human rights:

A theme of our speeches throughout November [1975] had been that to corrupt the language of human rights – the language, that is, of Leo Strauss’s “Modern Project,” the language of “a society consisting of equal nations, each consisting of free and equal men and women” – would soon enough imperil the language of national rights also, and soon enough it did. In December, two fledgling nations were conquered or partitioned by their neighbours, while a third [Angola] was invaded by Communist forces from half a world away. It would be gratifying to report that there were those who made some connection between what we said would happen and what now did happen, but there were none. This perhaps only confirmed our charge that the Charter was being drained of meaning.

It was a theme Moynihan was to return to outside government. My description of US policy in East Timor as shameless is, in fact, Moynihan's. In Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics, 1993, p. 153, Moynihan states:

It happens I was United States representative at the UN when these events occurred. I defended a shameless American policy – Morocco and Indonesia were cold-war allies - with sufficient shamelessness.

He argues that such issues were “too often assessed in terms of cold-war advantage/disadvantage”. If you consider the influence of, say, Paul Wolfowitz on the thinking of the current administration, you find a similar stress on the need to abandon the realist approach of cementing cold-war alliances and to promote global democracy. Chomsky would certainly dismiss this principle of US grand strategy as a mere cover for selfish interests. But if you assume that US diplomacy is a monolith dedicated to the expansion of US material interests at the expense of national independence and human rights, you miss a huge amount of the debates in foreign policy. And Chomsky goes out of his way to obscure these debates by his treatment of sources, and by his habitual comparison of the US to Nazi Germany. The world's top public intellectual, indeed.

"Who runs Britain?", part III

This is my latest comment for the Today programme web log on the subject "Who runs Britain?" It comments on the discussion this morning among three experienced political commentators, which can still be heard on the programme's web site till tomorrow (it's the clip at 8.35am).

The discussion among John Sergeant, John Cole and Julia Langdon was somewhat disjointed rather than being on the theme of a single agent of power. In rough summary, Sergeant and Cole argued around the point that many immense changes in British society have taken place without any reference to politics or Parliament. Ms Langdon maintained that power really lies in what she called the interplay between different institutions, often unobserved by the public.

Given that there is no definitive answer (other than “no one”) to the question “who controls Britain?”, all of the panellists’ points are right in their own way. Certainly there has been a shift in public attitudes, over just a generation, to social issues such as the structure of the family, race relations or homosexuality. On almost all such issues, Britain has become a more tolerant place concerning difference. This has huge cultural significance: one has only to compare the language of popular culture now compared with the 1970s, when racial and sexual stereotypes were a staple of television sitcoms. People will have different views on these cultural changes (I regard them as an unequivocal advance in the quality of public life), but the important point is that they have taken place at a more fundamental level than just legislative changes.

Nonetheless, the role of politics is important in the formation of this public mood. One can see this by comparing British society with the United States. I am a strong Atlanticist and admirer of America’s political culture. But one aspect of American politics that I regard as damaging is the judicial influence in policy-making (a point that John Cole touched on). I support permissive abortion legislation, but regard the management of this issue in the US – a constitutional right to abortion, enshrined in the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade judgement of 1973 – as damaging to civic culture. In removing from the political arena a subject on which many people have strong religious and conscientious objections, and attempting instead to sublimate it in the language of rights, the American system has rendered the abortion controversy incapable of negotiated resolution. The British approach to abortion – legislation by majority vote in Parliament – is, I am convinced, a much better route to social reform and to the creation of social consensus.

Julia Langdon’s remarks replicate the notion of ‘the hidden wiring’ – the title of a book by Peter Hennessy on the structure of the (unwritten) British constitution. It is true that much of consequence is decided by convention rather than anything that can be codified. But the ‘interplay of institutions’ appears to me to be rather weak, and I wish it were more robust. An increasingly corrosive part of our political culture is the ceding of power from Westminster to pressure groups (or NGOs, as they are euphemistically known). The present government is particularly good at creating ‘public consultations’ that, while sounding an unexceptionable way of seeking the insights of civil society, are an ideal arrangement for the loudest sectional interests to exercise unaccountable power. Deliberative democracy is continually menaced by what James Madison, in his Federalist Paper 51, termed “the mischief of faction”. This is a more important (and destructive) source of power than anything mentioned by Ms Langdon.

"Politics"

My apologies that this site - in common, I believe, with every other Typepad site - was unavailable on Friday. It looks as if the Radio 4 Today programme's guest-blog, to which I am contributing, on the question "Who runs Britain?" is also down. Perhaps the producer thought better of the exercise. This post, however, is my comment on Thursday's panel discussion on the programme. The subject was politics, Westminster and the party system; the panel members were Professor Anthony King, Baroness (Shirley) Williams and Lord Butler. My piece is not exciting, but then neither is the subject I was asked to write about.

The wisest comment in this series to date was made by Professor Anthony King in this panel discussion. The answer to the question ‘who runs Britain?’ is ‘nobody and nothing’. Most of today’s discussion, at least from Baroness Williams and Lord Butler, thus centred on the different question of relative shifts of power within the political system. The argument is that the power of the legislature has diminished in recent years compared with the power of the prime minister and the media. (Baroness Williams mentioned also the power of the Treasury, presumably alluding to the unusually influential role within government of the current Chancellor.) This was not the issue at hand, and nor was it correct.

Complaints of the accretion of prime ministerial power are nothing new. Forty years ago Richard Crossman maintained that “the post-war epoch has seen the final transformation of Cabinet government into Prime Ministerial government”. This was nonsense then and is nonsense now.

Discussions of the power of the executive relative to other branches of government and other institutions make little sense apart from the character of the office holders. It so happens that two of the last three prime ministers have been singularly successful, for better or worse, at dominating their respective parties. This had little to do with the power of office or the size of government majority, but was related to the sway that each personality had within the party system and the Commons. Consider a wider historical perspective. Britain has had ten prime ministers since 1945, not counting Tony Blair. Only three held office for longer than five years, while the outstanding counterexample, Mrs Thatcher, was removed from office by her colleagues with such ruthlessness that it has caused ructions within the Conservative Party ever since.

The Prime Minister has a contingent and sometimes precarious constitutional position in which he is unable to direct policy on his own and may face vitriolic public criticism. Tony Blair has dominated the political scene for so long first because of the political weakness of the Old Labour cause that he supplanted, and secondly because the Conservative Party has for well over a decade declined to behave like either a party of government or a serious Opposition. The most effective brake on the power of the executive is for the Opposition to mount a credible case against it.

There is a much better case for saying that power has shifted towards the centre and away from local government, and that the impartiality of public administration has been eroded under governments of both parties. The picture is a little more complicated than that – there has of course been a shift also to different forms of regional government, with devolution – but it is a fair judgement. Certainly the last 20 years have seen a sharp curtailment of the independence of local government in raising revenues, and an expansion of decision-making by politically-appointed committees. That is a significant shift and one that compromises the checks and balances of a pluralist system of government.

In a discussion about who runs Britain, however, this is a secondary issue. The extent to which our political system can influence individual behaviour is quite limited. Public attitudes may be shifted to a certain extent: I am certain that, for example, race relations are better for laws against racial incitement, even though politicians cannot abolish prejudice. But in areas of greater moral ambiguity than the evils of racism (as almost all political issues are), a prudent government will respect those limits rather than try to legislate them away. Governments that fail to adhere to that informal convention of parliamentary democracy will not be around for long.

Shades of linguistic snobbery

This article appears in The Times today.

THIS WEEK the Plain English Campaign announced its annual award for gobbledegook. The winner was the Welsh First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, for stating: “The only thing which isn’t up for grabs is no change and I think it’s fair to say it’s all to play for, except for no change.” It is Mr Morgan’s second award; the first was in 1998 for asking: “Do one-legged ducks swim in circles?”

Yet, while Mr Morgan’s winning entry is cliché-ridden, it is not gobbledegook. It is a statement, comprehensible on first reading, that many outcomes are possible, excepting only stasis. Likewise, Mr Morgan’s comment about ducks, in context, is a clear and arresting metaphor. Had Mr Morgan used the hackneyed equivalent phrase about ursine toilet habits, the Plain English Campaign would have taken no notice.

Every year undeserved attention is paid to a group that might more accurately be called the Obscurantism Organisation. Its gobbledegook award is not about English usage so much as a populist suspicion of ideas. Past winners include Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, for a long analysis involving “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, and “unknown unknowns”. The campaigners described it as “truly baffling”, but the joke was on them. Rumsfeld’s statement was intricate but pellucid. The intricacy was intended to be funny, and succeeded.

The actor Richard Gere won for: “I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I’d think, ‘No, actually I am a giraffe’.” The idea may be peculiar, but the sentences are well constructed and the language idiomatic.

Gordon Brown, when Shadow Chancellor, won for a speech about “post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory”. This is not gobbledegook either. All disciplines have terms that are valuable shorthand for specialists. Endogenous growth theory is an important branch of economics, and if you know what “endogenous” means, you can make an informed guess about its subject matter.

Mocking convoluted English is a public service. As George Orwell wrote: “Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority.” The Plain English Campaign adopts the unrelated approach of intellectual snobbery; British public life has quite enough of that already.

UPDATE: Bob Borsley, who has been very helpful in advising me about Noam Chomsky's contribution to linguistics, draws my attention to this discussion of the Donald Rumsfeld remarks, by Geoffrey K. Pullum, co-author (says Bob) of the best grammar of English:

The quotation is impeccable, syntactically, semantically, logically, and rhetorically. There is nothing baffling about its language at all.... Hate Rummie if you want for political reasons, but don't try to get grammar or logic on your side. There is nothing unintelligible about his quoted remark, linguistically or logically.

A prominent political journalist writes to say that the Gordon Brown remarks are an even worse case for the Obscurantists to cite than I had given credit for. He listened to the speech in 1994, and recalls that Brown remarked that "post-neoclassical endogeous growth theory" was not the stuff of soundbites, i.e. it was a self-mocking reference, rather as Rumsfeld's comments were.