Oliver Kamm

Newsnight on trial

Writing in The Times yesterday, David Aaronovitch issued this apology for his support for the Iraq War:

I do apologise. For Abu Ghraib and Donald Rumsfeld. For not understanding the insurgents. For the looting. For the dire planning. I apologise to the election workers assassinated, the police trainees blown up, the parents of children caught in crossfire and everyone else that the planners and executors of the invasion that I supported, and still support, may have let down by neglect or stupidity. I recognise their bravery and their determination to succeed despite everything.

But a disaster compared with what? Compared with Saddam and sanctions or Saddam and cyanide. And that — the thing that Matthew [Parris] presumably preferred — was not a disaster? Snort.

This is well said, and it needs to be said. In my book Anti-Totalitarianism I try to say something similar:

To say the Bush Administration has made innumerable errors in its conduct of war and occupation is commonplace but not trivial: it is true and important. But the first error, from which much else has flowed, was to plan for occupation after Saddam’s fall in a fundamentally non-serious manner. Elections were delayed; security was inadequate; the failure to secure Baghdad was a disaster; infrastructure was ignored; abominable tortures were practised at the Abu Ghraib prison, to which there was a shamefully complacent response; and the civilian death toll appears to have been substantially higher than the war’s supporters generally expected. These deficiencies and crimes were compounded because we had no idea to what extent civil society in Iraq had ceased to exist under Saddam. That is not an argument against regime change: it is a rueful historical reflection that our intervention came too late, but nonetheless did good.

There is another way of looking at the same issue, however, that BBC Newsnight appears to be taking in tonight’s edition:

With ongoing controversy surrounding the conduct of the war in Iraq and the treatment of terror suspects in the wider "War on Terror", Newsnight is to stage a special programme entitled: "Allies on Trial".

Allegations about the allies' conduct of war in Iraq, counter-insurgency measures and claims of torture in the "War on Terror" - plus the use of "extraordinary rendition" by the US - continue to surface. Jeremy Paxman will chair a special programme exploring whether the allies are guilty of war crimes. The programme, to be broadcast on Wednesday, 14 December will take the form of a trial, with advocates arguing the case for the prosecution and defence with the help of witness and expert testimony.

I am frequently a defender of the BBC against allegations – which I think are mistaken and miss the real criticism of its approach – of political bias. This programme does strike me as inflammatory and unprofessional, however. To present the “Allies on trial” is to arrive at a predetermined conclusion, at least as regards the appropriate form of debate in which western policy in Iraq should be framed.

William Shawcross has written to me to express his own incredulity. The BBC asked him to appear on the programme as a witness for the defence opposite Moazzem Begg; William explained that, while he would be happy to be part of an investigation or discussion, he would not take part in a form of entertainment. I am glad to set down his reasoning, with his permission.

Newsnight has done important work in reporting many areas of the war in Iraq and the war on Islamist terror more widely. A ‘courtroom’ pastiche is a fashionable but frivolous conceit that detracts from that record of excellent and courageous reporting in Iraq by Mark Urban and other correspondents. The allegations about “rendition” need a thorough investigation and merit the closest attention of Newsnight, but a ‘trial’ will do nothing in that regard. The name of the programme and the choice of counsel and witnesses suggest a spectacle more than an analysis. It is especially unfortunate that the ‘trial’ should be scheduled when a British hostage is threatened with death by real criminals in Iraq, and on the eve of the most important election that Iraq (and perhaps any Arab country) has ever had. One has to assume that the timing is deliberate; its effect will be to detract from the sacrifice of British and other forces in Iraq, and belittle the heroism of the Iraqi people in seeking to create a civil society in a nation ravaged by tyranny.

William knows that there are many within the BBC who would share his views on this. I know it too.

UPDATE: A very minor point, but one I mention for the avoidance of any confusion: the penultimate paragraph stating William's views is not a verbatim quotation - hence the absence of quotation marks or indent. It is a statement of his views, largely in his own words and with his permission, but drafted by me. Apologies for not having made this clearer.

"Money"

The Today programme on Radio 4 is running a series and ‘Christmas poll’ on the question ‘Who runs Britain?’ Accompanying the series, three bloggers are writing opinions (here) by rota on each day’s report and discussion. The first was yesterday, and was assigned to me, on the subject of ‘Money’. This is what I wrote.

‘Money’ does not run Britain. You had only to listen to the report and discussion on the Today programme to realise the vacuity of this notion. It was a speculative hypothesis (and in the case of one of the panel interviewees, Noreena Herz, a dogmatic assertion) that was left without explanation, let alone substantiation.

The link between money and power was once obvious. It was depicted in the political caricatures of James Gillray in the 18th century (see, for example, the ‘The Nabob Rumbled’). The commercial giants of that era, the ‘nabobs’ of the East India Company, amassed huge fortunes from trade, and openly used them to buy political influence. But in the 21st century it is much less easy to see how the ability to spend translates into power. It is no answer to say that now the process is shielded from public view. Even though people and corporations with large amounts of money do try to obtain influence, they are frequently and conspicuously unsuccessful. To this day, despite having covertly given money to MPs to press his case, Mohammed al-Fayed is not a British citizen. The billionaire Sir James Goldsmith attempted to swing the political debate by founding his own Referendum Party to fight the 1997 election; it disappeared in a blizzard of lost deposits.

One reason that businessman, entrepreneurs and the super-rich are thwarted is, as Ken Clarke and Bill Emmott pointed out, that wealth is now more dispersed. In the advanced industrial economies there are of course the super-rich – the equivalents of a Vanderbilt or a Ford – but there are many more of them than in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, and wealth is no longer predominantly dynastic.

Nor is it true that power has shifted from a moneyed class to institutions. Evan Davis’s report cited the Clinton administration official who declared that if reincarnated he would want ‘to come back as the bond market, because then you can intimidate everybody’. But this is merely an absurdly hyperbolic way of saying the bond market will charge a premium if it perceives policy to be inflationary. Financial markets will be unable to ‘intimidate’ a government from carrying out its programme if the policy mix is internally consistent (as was not the case, for example, with sterling’s ignominious exit from the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System in 1992).

One interviewee in the report – a bond trader – suggested that the Governor of the Bank of England is the most powerful man in the City. This may be true in the sense that the Bank of England has the power to set interest rates (though the Governor is only one member of a nine-person Monetary Policy Committee, and commentators have lately suggested that things may not be going his way). But it is purely an operational independence to carry out a politically-determined objective. The Bank has the task of meeting an inflation target; what inflation target to set is a political decision.

The final sense in which money could be said to rule was suggested by Noreena Herz, which is that business is able to pressure governments to adopt or eschew particular legislative measures. This is an entirely unconvincing claim. First, it arbitrarily assumes that ‘business’ is synonymous with money; secondly, it assumes that business is a homogeneous force tending to a consistent view, whereas there are many competing businesses with differing policy preferences; and thirdly, it doesn’t explain how this transmission mechanism from money to power is supposed to work. The one point on which I would agree with Ms Herz is that businesses are a sectional interest (or a lobby), and that government needs to treat their representations critically. But this is true of many types of organisation: pensioners’ lobby groups, pressure groups such as Greenpeace or CND, or trade unions. The consistent theme of these organisations’ lobbying efforts is that government should adopt their own policy views while someone else (i.e. the taxpayer) should pick up the tab. Lobbying and lobbyists do, in my view, pose a hazard to democratic government, but this has nothing specifically to do with the corporate sector and still less anything to do with an abstraction called ‘money’.

If you doubt this, consider Prime Ministers’ uncomfortable experiences with entrepreneurs. Richard Branson was scarcely dignified by becoming the public face of Mrs Thatcher’s campaign against litter. Bernie Ecclestone’s donation to New Labour was returned when suspicions were raised that it reflected political favours to do with exemptions from a ban on tobacco advertising (and the issue caused acute political embarrassment for Tony Blair). Britain is a long way from being a plutocracy. It does not even merit the much weaker description of a political system dominated by corporate interests.

Case dismissed.

Guardian and Chomsky - latest

The Guardian's Readers' Editor, Ian Mayes, has written ("with considerable reluctance") a further comment in the newspaper today about the interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes, having received a long and detailed complaint about his ruling:

The new complaint, which has prompted this column, is concerned with what Noam Chomsky, and Diana Johnstone, who was also referred to in the Chomsky interview and in the correction, do or do not believe with respect to the events at Srebrenica and to the description of the massacre itself. It comes in the form of a letter to me of about 4,500 words (an estimate) signed by three people: David Aaronovitch, Francis Wheen and Oliver Kamm. All three write for other publications. Oliver Kamm in addition runs a lively website. They all have opportunities to extend or debate the issues raised in their letter.

So we all do, but Ian Mayes's manifestly incorrect "correction" to the Chomsky interview ran in The Guardian, not in any other publication. Hence our approach to The Guardian, and specifically to its Readers' Editor.

Ian Mayes continues:

I return to my terms of reference, which can be found on the Guardian website. In particular, I refer to the penultimate clause which reads: "The readers' editor can refer to the external ombudsman any substantial grievances, or matters whereby the Guardian's journalistic integrity has been called into question."

There is a temporary difficulty here in that the position of external ombudsman is vacant, although steps are being taken by the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian, to fill it as a matter of urgency. I believe that it is the external ombudsman who should review my conduct of the inquiry leading to the publication of the correction to Emma Brockes's interview if those now dissatisfied with my resolution of the matter wish to pursue it.

So he is passing the matter to a third party. Forgive the fact that I am not going into details here about the content of our complaint. As I have written here several times, we shall be pursuing the matter through whatever channels The Guardian has in place till the newspaper has had the opportunity to consider it thoroughly. Be assured that it is not being allowed to rest.

Sunday Times review

Cambridge historian Brendan Simms reviews my book and Douglas Murray's Neoconservatism in The Sunday Times:

In Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neo-Conservative Foreign Policy, he embeds his argument in an account of the valiant struggle of the Labour mainstream against Soviet apologists within the party, and the threat of world communism. After the disastrous experiment with unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, this “anti-totalitarian” tradition was restored, in a post-cold-war context, by Tony Blair: his famous “Chicago Speech” of April 1999 articulated a liberal interventionist policy for Britain, with Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam the only two dictators singled out by name, long before George W Bush was anywhere near the White House. It is perhaps no accident then that Kamm, like this reviewer, is an active member of the Henry Jackson Society, a bipartisan group devoted to the pursuit of a “Democratic Geopolitics”.

At first sight, Kamm’s enterprise seems eccentric. It is true that no Labour MPs describe themselves as neocons. But there is no need: the legacy of Jackson, the Labour cold warriors and the humanitarian interventionism of Tony Blair provide an authentic lineage within the framework of progressive politics.

Brendan Simms, incidentally, spotted very early a characteristic of debate in British foreign policy that has become important since 9/11, and that I discuss in my book. This is the informal alliance between a supposedly anti-imperialist Left (which, at its extremities in the form of Respect/SWP/Stop the War, has crossed to the far Right) and, on the Right, a 'conservative pessimism' about the outcome of humanitarian intervention. Its fruits were evident in the disaster of British policy in Bosnia, which Brendan dissected in his book Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (2001).

Reader of the year

At this time of year newspapers carry surveys of public figures' choices for "books of the year", and I enjoy reading them. I'm doubtful that everyone who names Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao has read it, but it's not a bad answer.

A bad answer - the worst I've ever seen - is given in The Glasgow Herald by Rev. David Lacy, Moderator of the Church of Scotland:

Read books? The year I am Moderator? I wish!

Or, to put it another way:

1. I am important.

2. I am so important that the performance of my public duties claims my every waking hour.

3. I have no time to devote to fripperies such as reading books.

4. I lack the imagination to see what this says about me.

Perhaps dimly aware of point 4, Mr Lacy demonstrates that he has not wholly neglected the life of the mind during his year of office: "over a precious holiday" (which is the type of holiday enjoyed by important people), he "started a quick scan" of a book. The book thus quickly scanned - or rather the book whose quick scan was begun - was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

CND and Kosovo

This is by way of a postscript to the post immediately below, on Nick Cohen's criticisms of CND. I was trying to recall a particular argument made by Kate Hudson of CND about Kosovo, and, having now tracked it down, thought it well worth highlighting in a separate post.

This is what Ms Hudson has to say about "The Nato war on Yugoslavia" in her recent book CND: Now More than Ever (2005, pp. 211-12):

Britain had a tradition of good relations with Yugoslavia, and particularly Serbia, resulting from its stand against Nazi Germany in World War II. Many regretted the break-up of what had been a progressive and open socialist society that had found a federal and peaceful solution to the complex diversity of communities in the south Slav state. In the early 1990s, a number of MPs, in particular Alice Mahon, Tony Benn and Tam Dalyell, set up the Committee for Peace in the Balkans, to advocate and support negotiated political solutions in Yugoslavia.... [CND] participated in the Committee from the start. The Commitee mounted a No Bombing campaign when Nato bombed the Bosnian Serbs in 1995, but it played a hugely more important role in leading the opposition to the Nato attacks on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now composed only of Serbia and Montenegro) in 1999.

The determined unreality is breathtaking. We learn from Ms Hudson that this progressive and open socialist society had "broken up" and then been subject to the evidently unprovoked aggression of the Western democracies, who disdained the "negotiated political solutions" propounded by such pacific visionaries as Tony Benn. Ms Hudson somehow manages to avoid all mention of the fact that this "federal and peaceful solution", so far as Kosovo was concerned, was destroyed by Milosevic. As President of Serbia, he stripped Kosovo of its autonomy in 1989, thereby denying it the status within the Yugoslav Federation that it had been assured under the 1974 constitution. The "negotiated political solutions" the Committee for Peace in the Balkans came up with were, by definition, euphemisms for crushing popular demands: almost literally every single Kosovar Albanian supported separation from Serbia. A survey in 1995 (cited in Ivo H. Daadler and Michael E. O'Halloran, Winning Ugly: Nato's War to Save Kosovo, 2000, pp. 8-9) found that 43 per cent of Kosovar Albanians favoured joining Albania, while 57 per cent favoured outright independence.

As the world's top public intellectual might put it, if you turn a blind eye to oppression and spurn popular revolt, your spurious rationalisations will lead you to become an apologist for state violence. So it was with Kate Hudson and CND. As I quote below, she even came to an idiosyncratic description of the slaughter by Serb paramilitaries on 15 January 1999 of at least 45 people at Racak. The massacre was described by the head of the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission, William Walker as "an unspeakable atrocity" for which he would not "hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility". By contrast, Ms Hudson called it (emphasis added) an "alleged massacre" in which "evidence has been contradictory and fiercely contested as to whether the Racak victims were civilians or KLA fighters and whether they died in a firefight or close-range shootings". Three of the victims at Racak were women; several were old men; one was a twelve-year-old boy. The wounds inflicted were, according to Walker, who saw the bodies where they lay, close shots in the top and at the back of the head. One victim had been decapitated.

I don't know why I'm so polite about Ms Hudson. Let's just say that I count myself among those she regards as having supported, in Kosovo as in Iraq, "illegal aggression justified by spin and fabrication enabl[ing] might to prevail and deal[ing] a terrible blow to the framework of international law". And I count that, coming from her and from CND, a singular compliment.

UPDATE: Owing to the lateness of the hour, I otherwise unaccountably rendered William Walker's name as 'Weaver' the second time I wrote it in this post. I have gone back to correct this.

Nick Cohen on "Traitors to the left"

Also in this week's New Statesman, see a superb piece by Nick Cohen on the curious case of CND and the Iranian nuclear programme:

Anyone who now believes CND is as much against proliferation as for unilateral disarmament would have been surprised by this autumn's annual conference. Among the guests was the startling figure of Dr Seyed Mohammad Hossein Adeli, the then Iranian ambassador. Iran is building the nuclear power stations CND once protested against - an odd project for a country with one of the largest reserves of oil in the world. Not only the US government but the United Nations and the European Union suspect the Islamic Republic wants the bomb. The obvious course for those sincere about nuclear disarmament is to oppose Tehran as vigorously as they oppose a replacement for Trident. But there's the rub. Standing by its principles would, if only for a moment, have put CND on the same side as George W Bush and Tony Blair, and that would never do.

I rarely link to articles without comment, but this one defies summary and should be savoured as a whole. Nick quotes Kate Hudson of CND (author of a new book, which I shall comment on shortly, giving a highly selective history of the organisation) expressing her opposition to proliferation; but she is ominously reserved in doing so. In fact, Ms Hudson has quite a history herself of discreditable apologetics for the indefensible. As a minor academic in Eastern European politics, she argued fiercely not only for non-intervention in Kosovo but that Serbia was a wronged party. See this article in The Guardian from 2003, where she maintains that the massacre at Racak (what she terms "an alleged massacre of 45 Kosovan Albanians by Yugoslav government forces") was "seized on by the US to justify acceleration towards war".

I am not here going to give a detailed recitation of the preposterousness of regarding Milosevic as more aggressed-against than aggressing; just note the tone. As Ms Hudson is guilty of what Nick calls "throat-clearing" with regard to Iran, so she refers to Serb atrocities with - how can I put this with the most extreme and studied understatement? - an indifference to the demands of socialist or liberal internationalism. As Nick observes:

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we believe there is only so much rubbish the human race can swallow.

John Lloyd on "The Case for Freedom"

John Lloyd reviews my book, and one by Douglas Murray called Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (also published by the Social Affairs Unit) in this week’s New Statesman. In fact, it's a fine essay first and a book review second. He writes:

Under review are the first two (short) book-length arguments for the adoption of neoconservatism in Britain, one of only a few countries in the world in which such an argument can be made with any hope of success. Indeed, it could be said that the arguments come after their time: we already have a neoconservative foreign policy, and it belongs not to the decades-long maturing of the position in the US, but to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Where the US had a line - which Murray traces with economy and vigour - of direct descent from the scholar Leo Strauss and the (Democratic) politician Henry "Scoop" Jackson through Irving Kristol and Allan Bloom to contemporary figures such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the journalist William Kristol (none of whom is now in government), the UK had . . . Tony Blair's instincts. For a few of us on the left - Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Norman Geras, Johann Hari and Kamm - that has been a source of admiration. That a Labour prime minister could cleave through the Gordian knot which has long been Labour foreign policy to take his stand against tyrants has been a vindication, for some of us, of many years of half-shamefaced Labour support.

This is certainly my own position, except that my support for Labour during the 1980s was more shamefaced than that. I voted Labour in the 1983 and 1987 elections when the party programme promised the expulsion of US nuclear bases from Britain. I told myself (and Labour voters whom I met when canvassing, who were uniformly incredulous about the party’s behaviour) that Labour, being unelectable, had no hope of implementing its policies, so we could vote according to our party allegiance without the slightest risk of putting, respectively, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock in Downing Street. I am not proud of this argument, but it is the argument that I used.

John Lloyd graciously describes my book as “an impassioned, fluent and acerbic essay”, and quotes my criticism of a foreign-policy stance on the Left that, in its classical "realism" (which is in fact not realistic at all, owing to its indifference to ideology) about the international order, replicates the disasters of British foreign policy in the Balkans under John Major. (Read, for example, in The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, Noam Chomsky’s feeble, amoral and historically-refuted case against Nato action to disrupt Serb encampments during the Bosnian war.) What is particularly interesting in John's argument is his belief that a post-Blair government will offer continuity in foreign policy:

I cannot believe that Gordon Brown, if he becomes the next prime minister, will seek to withdraw British troops prematurely from southern Iraq; nor do I think his natural instincts in foreign policy are those of a Douglas Hurd/Malcolm Rifkind realist - both of whom, as foreign secretaries in John Major's cabinet, stood pat on Bosnia. And equally, I doubt that David Cameron, if he were to be elected prime minister, would return to that discredited passage in his own party's history: he voted for the invasion of Iraq and appears to agree with the pro-interventionist line taken by Liam Fox, the incumbent shadow foreign secretary.

I think this is probably right (and have thus changed my view somewhat since writing this downcast comment immediately after Labour’s setbacks at the hands of the Liberal Democrats and the far-right Respect ‘coalition’ in the general election). Cameron not only appears to have interventionist instincts but also – the crucial point of the case – recognises that anti-totalitarianism is a strategy for our security as well as for the freedom of others. Brown is untested in foreign affairs (and it has been a serious mistake for Blair not to have shifted him from the Treasury to the FCO), but is known for his closeness to the United States. If there is one thing I hope to have done in my book, it is to show the consistency of Blair’s foreign-policy interventionism with the principles of social-democrat and liberal anti-totalitarianism that the Democrats and Labour Party learned from the failures of collective security in the 1930s, and implemented with success in the late 1940s. There are many criticisms that can be made of Gordon Brown, but no one could accuse him of indifference to the traditions of the democratic Left.

The New Statesman published a breathless article by John Kampfner, now NS editor, in 2003 about neoconservatism in Britain. To support his claims of the nefarious but influential character of the movement, Kampfner grouped together half a dozen journalists with little in common but their support for the Iraq War. It was an idle, frivolous and unprofessional piece, whose thesis foundered on the fact that only one member of this group (my friend Stephen Pollard) had ever owned up to being a neoconservative, while two of them – John himself and David Aaronovitch – strongly objected to the identification (and to the authorial discourtesy). John now writes, however:

Kampfner, who apologised for the distress that his piece caused me, was partly - only partly - right. What I was supporting was not just, as I wrote in the July 2003 issue of Prospect, the invasion of Iraq: it was a foreign policy that the neoconservatives have articulated and made their own. Why I only partly retract the indignation, and why Kampfner is only partly right, is because neoconservatism, as Douglas Murray makes clear, covers much more than foreign policy, even if foreign policy has been its most dramatic stage.

This again, is my own stance. I argue in the book that there is a need for a descriptive term for an interventionist foreign policy that has a greater scepticism about the progressive character of international institutions than does traditional liberal-democratic internationalism. "Neoconservatism" will do, not least because those generally regarded as the founding fathers of that movement are either sceptical about the export of democracy (Irving Kristol) or no longer see a difference between their stance and traditional conservatism (Norman Podhoretz). But I draw a strict line between foreign and domestic policy; I am a liberal rather than any sort of conservative. The house magazine of neoconservatism, Commentary, has had one or two ideological shifts in its long history, but now broadly expresses an aversion to cultural changes – on race, sex, sexuality and censorship – that I regard as civilising influences. The magazine has also given a platform to the advocates of the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design (see this cogent letter of protest to the magazine - requires fee - by the biologist Paul Gross). Most troubling to me (and I wish I’d mentioned it in my book alongside my criticisms of Commentary’s position on gay rights) is an insouciance about race relations, where a determination to uphold the unexceptionable principle of ‘colour-blindness’ in social policy appears to be a principle of higher order than urgent remedial action on racial disadvantage. (I should say immediately, however, that when a conservative activist, Dinesh D’Souza, wrote an unpleasant book called The End of Racism a decade ago, Commentary published a sensible review of it by a long-time Social Democrat and former aide to the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, Arch Puddington. Puddington noted the book’s pitiless tone about the supposed pathologies of black Americans, and expressed understandable alarm at the author’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.)

What I hope to see is a convergence of view on foreign policy akin to the bipartisan approach of most of the Cold War, regardless of differences within this coalition on issues of domestic policy. The interventionist imperative cuts across traditional Left-Right distinctions, as we saw in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But the democratic Left has a crucial role to play in creating and sustaining the movement; hence the argument of my book.

"A good day for anyone employed by a political party"

Writing in The Times, former Conservative Director of Research Daniel Finkelstein has an interesting slant on the election of David Cameron as party leader:

YESTERDAY was a very good day for anyone who has ever been employed by a political party.

You see, working for a party can be exhilarating, but there is a snag. The upside is this — you may get to be present when history is made, although in my case this mostly consisted of being in the room when people resigned or were informed of a fresh political disaster. The downside? Who is going to employ you when it’s all over? …

Karl Hess, the chief speechwriter for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, went looking for work after that election was over. He was turned down by every senator and congressman he approached. He then applied to become the Senate lift attendant. When he failed to gain even this appointment, he went on a welding course and took a job on the night-shift in a machine shop.

Anyone reading this who does work for a political party should be assured that Hess’s fate was exceptional and freely-chosen. In the manner of a minuscule faction of the more zealous wing of American conservatism, he arrived at a peculiarly pitiless doctrine known as anarcho-capitalism, which holds that taxation is indistinguishable from slavery. (The most barking elements hold that taxation is worse than slavery. You think I exaggerate? Consider Paul Craig Roberts, a former Treasury official in the Reagan administration, who has run so far to the protectionist, nativist and isolationist far-Right that he has emerged as a regular contributor to the protectionist, nativist and isolationist far-Left Counterpunch magazine. He maintains that slaves in ante-bellum America “were freer than today’s American taxpayer”.)

Believing that America in Vietnam was comparable to Nazi Germany in Poland, and that American government at home was coercive in levying taxes, Hess advocated and practised ‘tax resistance’. The IRS consequently put a claim on all his future earnings in lieu of unpaid taxes, and Hess then took up welding so that he would have a skill he could barter with. Unsurprisingly, his bartering, like the rest of his schemes, was not a great success. I am relieved that Daniel has not followed the same route since leaving Conservative Central Office, but has got himself a responsible job as a Times columnist and political guru.

(A nice story about Goldwater, incidentally, concerns a militant anti-war protest at the Capitol. Only one Congressman went out to meet the demonstrators; it was Goldwater, seeking his former aide Karl Hess, by now a hirsute militant in the cause. On finding Hess, Goldwater embraced him, aware that politics was a second-order matter compared with the demands of friendship.)

There is no moral to this tale. But the Blairite candidate for Conservative leader was clearly the preferable one. In my book Anti-Totalitarianism I argue that regime change and the promotion of global democracy are a progressive cause but also need to be a bipartisan one. Cameron’s views on the totalitarian threat and its antecedents are very much in acord with this.

UPDATE: Just supposing there might be a reader looking for a copy of my book, please pay no attention to Amazon's estimate of the shipping date. The current estimate is because - I am embarrassed to say, because it appears vainglorious rather than merely informative - they have sold out of their initial consignment, but they are receiving another this week.

Atzmon's "defence" - really

A few weeks ago I noted an article written by one of my regular correspondents, jazz critic David Adler, in the Jazz Times. I hold strongly that aesthetic judgements are independent of political ones, but David raised the conundrum of where politics intrudes into art because the artist is determined to make it do so. The example he discussed was the saxophonist Gilad Atzmon, a former Israeli now resident in Britain whose political line, expressed in his music, is the crudest of demagogic conspiracy theories.

David has kindly sent me an indignant reply by Atzmon published in the December issue of Jazz Times (not online), which is as incoherent as you would expect from a man who believes "we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously". Atzmon offers this evidence of his anti-racism:

Indeed, my band is one of the most successful in Europe. The people who buy my records, vote for me in polls and come to see my band night after night simply refuse to buy your interpretation of my writings and my music. Should they happen to come across your column, they would probably laugh all the way through it, asking themselves, “How can Atzmon be a ‘Jew hater’ if four prominent members of his sevenpiece ensemble are Jewish?”

He really does say this. As David notes in his published reply, Atzmon is no antisemite because some of his best friends are Jewish.

My modesty is not so great that I shall fail to record in addition Atzmon's advising Jazz Times:

In order to brand me a racist and anti-Zionist you must do better than quote Oliver Kamm, who as a Zionist and a supporter of the war in Iraq is naturally opposed to me. In case you didn’t know, on this side of the Atlantic, far less [sic] people are enthusiastic about the killing of innocent Iraqis.

(What is this, by the way? I thought Atzmon was proud of being termed an anti-Zionist. Presumably he meant to say 'antisemite' and has conflated the two labels - something he liberally complains that his political opponents do.)

It's scarcely surprising that Atzmon's most recent tirades (published on the 'Al-Jazeerah' site) include his support for the Iranian President's call for the annihilation of Israel. ("It wasn’t easy for me to watch the Iranian president being bashed from every possible direction. At the end of the day, I tend agree with president Ahmadinejad.") But at least Atzmon is able to discern who's driving - or perhaps I should say, plotting - the outrage against the President:

I avoided the anti-Iranian media blitz. I switched it off for three days and let the international community attack the Iranian president in a single Judeified voice.

Regular readers will, I'm afraid, know what's coming next, and to them I apologise for my predictability. I have discussed Atzmon several times before on this site, and believe I was - owing to a timely message from another of my correspondents alerting me to the man - the first blogger to put on record the nature of his politics. If you go to this post you'll see what I mean about his sentiments. But you'll also see the mutual admiration between this sinister crank and an organisation that commends his bigotry as "fearless tirades against Zionism". That body, the SWP - whose front organisations are the Respect 'Coalition' and the Stop the War 'Coalition' - maintains that it stands on the Left. It is in fact the principal conduit in Britain today for the forces of racism and antisemitism.

UPDATE: David Adler's original column from the October issue of Jazz Times is here. Atzmon's reply in the current issue of the magazine is here. (Both links come from David Adler.) In addition, the Austrian anti-racist campaigner Karl Pfeifer has an apt comment (in German) on the whole wretched business here.