"A true conservative speaks"

I've written a couple of posts this week about the writer Neil Clark, defender of Slobodan Milosevic. As Mr Clark has complained elsewhere that I pursue a vendetta against him, and I do not wish to distress him, I shall not be referring to him again on this site after this post. This is out of redundancy more than altruism. I have described Mr Clark's use and representation of source material in advancing his pro-Serb claims in various national newspapers. As I understand him, Mr Clark indignantly refuses to comment on whether I have accurately identified the source he used and the way he represented it to The Daily Telegraph. Even if Mr Clark does not recognise the gravity of the issue, the point is made and there seems little purpose in going beyond it.

It would be churlish to leave the subject of Neil Clark, however, without gratefully acknowledging him for having recommended to his readers this remarkable article by the Conservative writer Peregrine Worsthorne. Worsthorne maintains that, with Western powers urging the global promotion of democracy, "Muslim paranoia in such circumstances is scarcely surprising". He concludes:

"No compromise with the essentials of the free society," declared a recent Guardian headline. How typical of the liberal mentality. Compromise for everybody else's core beliefs except their own.

Worsthorne's epistemological egalitarianism is extreme but it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Some form of it is held, implicitly at least, by many people - usually along the lines that free speech should be exercised responsibly to avoid slighting people's religious beliefs. And how to manage conflicts of belief is the single most pressing issue in domestic politics and the international order. Worsthorne's method of doing so, however - the balancing, in the interests of order, of the liberal's deep belief in a free society with the believer's ancient transcendental truths - is fundamentally misconceived. The way to manage conflict is not to balance beliefs, but to encourage a culture whereby claims are critically examined and we all agree to abide by the results. When we advance a claim, we have a responsibility to check, and we have a responsibility to be checked.

The challenging of beliefs is a painful business and does cause offence, but it is essential to uncovering errors. The reason "Intelligent Design" - a souped-up version of biblical Creationism - should not be accorded equal teaching time with evolutionary biology in schools is that these are different classes of claim. One generates results, and is science; the other doesn't, and isn't. Darwinism is certainly offensive to some people's deeply-held religious beliefs; that is irrelevant to any public policy issue. So is the offence caused to Muslims by the Danish cartoons. The reaction of some Dutch Islamists to the cartoons nicely illustrates the point. According to an agency report in Haaretz:

A Belgian-Dutch Islamic political organization posted anti-Jewish cartoons on its Web site in response to the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that appeared in Danish papers last year and offended many Muslims.... One of the [antisemitic] cartoons displayed an image of Dutch Holocaust victim Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler, and another questioned whether the Holocaust actually occurred.

Dyab Abou Jahjah, the party's founder and best-known figure, defended the action on the Dutch television program Nova Saturday. "Europe has its sacred cows, even if they're not religious sacred cows," he told the program.

But of course this Islamist has completely misunderstood the force of the objection to the antisemitic cartoons and to the suggestion that the Holocaust was a myth. The reason Holocaust denial is pernicious is not that it is offensive but that it is wrong. It is as wrong as it is possible to get in the making of historical claims. The reason it's wrong is not that some authority declares it, but that anyone can check it making use of primary and secondary historical sources. Any competent historian will thereby uncover its errors. We reject Holocaust denial because it is an offence against history rather than an offence against our sensibilities.

If you start trading off psychic injury against free inquiry you end up with some rather ugly conclusions. Worsthorne himself wrote a squib of a book a couple of years ago called In Defence of Aristocracy. In it he argued (pp. 176-7) that the wartime Vichy regime in France was:

… a blessing in disguise because during the Vichy years, for the first time since the Revolution, the pro-republican and anti-republican elites, at all levels, started to feel able to work together…. Unquestionably the Vichy years opened new wounds on France’s body politic, but these did not cut nearly so deep as the old revolutionary wounds which Vichy did so much to heal.

The "new wounds" to which Worsthorne delicately alludes, and which fortunately did not cut nearly so deep as the old revolutionary wounds, included the deportation of 75,000 Jews and others to Nazi death camps. Neil Clark, it is not entirely tangential to add, declares of Worsthorne ("a true conservative speaks"):

The joint-Prime Minister in my 'dream' New Statesman Peace Party Cabinet is in tip-top form. Come on Sir Peregrine - rescue British conservatism from the neo-conservatives who have hijacked the movement! Your country needs you!

Quite extraordinary. And quite enough.