Oliver Kamm

Atzmon: we need more Holocaust deniers

I have written regularly here about the curious case of Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon is a jazz musician, formerly an Israeli who now lives in the UK, but his most prominent characteristic is that he is a loudmouthed antisemitic demagogue. (See also here. Atzmon defends himself against my charge of antisemitism by pointing that I am a supporter of the Iraq War. Seriously, that's his defence. The man also describes himself as a philosopher.)

Atzmon's latest article, published in part on a political site declaring itself for "compassion for ourselves and our fellow human beings" and in full on his own site, goes beyond even his assertions of the accuracy of the diagnosis given in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It is long, incoherent and execrably written. ("In the past, I suggested a skeptical philosophical take of the notion of the personal narrative in the light of Heidegger’s Hermeneutic criticism of Husserl’s Phenomenology.") It is bizarre, unhinged and contemptuous of those who call attention to oppression. ("As we know, it was different American feminists’ networks that were the first to call a war on the Talibans, spreading the personal accounts of some abused Afghani women. Whether consciously or not [!], they were laying the groundwork for Clinton and Bush’s war against Islam.")

But what is most remarkable and disturbing about Atzmon's piece is his commendation of overt Holocaust deniers. So far as I can work out from the article - and it is difficult to work out from the obscurity and preciousness of his prose - Atzmon declares himself uninterested in the facts of the Holocaust, and is agnostic on whether it even took place. He accepts that Auschwitz was "state terrorism", but goes on to say:

The question of whether there was a mass homicide with gas or ‘just’ a mass death toll due to total abuse in horrendous conditions is no doubt a crucial historical question. The fact that such a major historical chapter less than seven decades ago is scholarly [sic] inaccessible undermines the entire historical endeavour. If we cannot talk about our grandparents’ generation, how dare we ever say something about Napoleon or even the Romans? Personally speaking, I may admit that I am not that interested in the question above. I am not an historian, I am not qualified as one.

Atzmon refers not to historically established facts of the gas chambers but to "the Holocaust belief system". He declares that "unlike David Irving and his bitter academic opponent Richard J. Evans, I do not know what historical truth is". (Evans was an expert witness for the defence in Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000. He demonstrated that Irving systematically distorted the historical evidence to deny the Holocaust.) Atzmon goes on (emphasis added):

While left academics are mainly concerned with signalling out Holocaust deniers telling us what is right and who is wrong, it is the revisionists [i.e. Holocaust deniers] who engage themselves in detailed archive work as well as forensic scrutiny.

That's one way, I suppose, of describing proven fraud (e.g. by the denier Robert Faurisson).

In a preposterous appendix written with lumbering sarcasm, Atzmon makes clear that he believes Irving and his associates are being persecuted because they "aim at establishing a rational, dynamic, lucid empirically grounded narrative based on forensic evidence". And he concludes (emphasis added):

Stopping Bush and Blair in Iraq, stopping those warmongers from proceeding to Iran and Syria is a must. If history shapes the future, we need to liberate our perspective of the past, rather than arresting revisionists [i.e. Holocaust deniers], we simply need many more of them.

Atzmon's judgements speak for themselves and require neither annotation nor labelling from me; you can do it yourselves. But the reason I return to the man's ignorant bigotry again and again is his association with one fixture on the British political scene. Atzmon was an invited speaker at successive annual 'Marxism' jamborees, in 2004 and 2005, organised by the Socialist Workers' Party, the controlling force behind the Respect 'Coalition'. He is touted by the SWP for his "fearless tirades against Zionism". The admiration is reciprocated, for Atzmon declares, as well he might, "I love Socialist Worker. It is the only newspaper in Britain which campaigns against Israel."

SWP Polibureau member and Respect national secretary John Rees, with whom I recently had the rare pleasure of debating an issue of high civic importance, declared at the last general election that "everyone in Respect has a long record of fighting anti-semitism". There must be a misprint in there somewhere.

Arrest Mladic now

This comment appears in The Times today.

CONFUSION REIGNS in Serbia. There are claims, and counterclaims, that General Ratko Mladic, the former commander of Bosnian Serb forces, is negotiating his surrender. Whatever the truth, the protracted character of the hunt for Mladic demeans his victims and discredits Western policymakers.

Mladic is under indictment by a UN war crimes tribunal for genocide. The charge sheet refers to the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica, to whose victims he had promised sanctuary. Yet Mladic has never wanted for deferential treatment.

Six months after Srebrenica, David Binder, of The New York Times, wrote: “I strongly wish to disassociate myself from [an] assessment of the general as a crazed killer.” On departing as commander of the UN protection force in Bosnia, General Michael Rose gallantly accepted from Mladic (who was “at his most charming”) a watercolour painting as a gift. After the Dayton Accords in 1995, US troops failed to arrest Mladic even though their base was only 12 miles from his headquarters; they even announced their visits in advance.

US Administrations are often criticised for not taking international law seriously enough. There is merit in the riposte that Western foreign policy cannot be subordinated to legalistic methods, because the world lacks a supranational authority capable of enforcing legal standards. There were strong arguments for deposing Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War even though UN Security Council resolutions did not authorise it. The US and Nato failure to apprehend Mladic and his political master Radovan Karadzic has, however, shown insouciance about international law by not going after alleged mass murderers.

If, as is rumoured, Mladic is bargaining for a payoff for his family in return for giving himself up, his manoeuvres should be dismissed and the Serb authorities given an ultimatum to seize him forcibly.

The Hague tribunal secured the first ever genocide conviction, that of General Radislav Krstic. By calling “ethnic cleansing” what it really was, the tribunal may have made it more difficult for Western governments to ignore aggressive nationalism. That could only have been accomplished by a juridical route. It is mocked by Mladic’s continued liberty. In Talleyrand’s phrase, this is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.

Stand by Denmark

I try never merely to link to articles without commenting on them, but I have nothing to say about Christopher Hitchens's latest column, about the Danish cartoons, other than to applaud it thunderously:

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let's be sure we haven't hurt the vandals' feelings.

Hitchens concludes:

I feel terrible that I have taken so long to get around to this, but I wonder if anyone might feel like joining me in gathering outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, in a quiet and composed manner, to affirm some elementary friendship. Those who like the idea might contact me at christopher.hitchens@yahoo.com, and those who live in other cities with Danish consulates might wish to initiate a stand for decency on their own account.

Anyone wishing to join me in some act of internationalist solidarity with Denmark, through its London Embassy, is welcome to contact me, and we'll see what we can do.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has written. I am in touch with the Danish Embassy (which naturally does not take a stand on political demonstrations) to discuss how we may most helpfully signal our support.

Chomsky's interviewer

I wrote at length towards the end of last year on The Guardian's interview with Noam Chomsky on his being voted Top Public Intellectual by readers of Prospect, and the newspaper's repudiation of the interview after receiving a complaint by Chomsky. Chomsky's complaints were various, but the principal one concerned the treatment of his views on Srebrenica. I can't link to the interview because, extraordinarily, it was withdrawn from The Guardian's site. But I consider the "correction" issued by the newspaper's Readers' Editor, Ian Mayes, was manifestly incorrect and did a serious injustice to the Guardian writer who conducted the interview, Emma Brockes.

As I explained here in December, I and two other writers with experience of Chomsky's methods and arguments, David Aaronovitch of The Times and Francis Wheen of Private Eye, sent a very long letter to Mayes setting out exhaustively why Chomsky's complaint should have been rejected, and why the "correction" should itself be withdrawn. As yet, we have not made our letter public, because we are still going through the newspaper's appeals procedure. It is taking some time, because Mayes acknowledged that, as our complaint was about him, he could hardly sit in judgement upon it, and that an external ombudsman would need to be appointed if we were to pursue our complaint. (The position is currently vacant.) We have asked that this be done, and I shall report on developments.

In the meantime, I'm delighted to report that Emma Brockes has been shortlisted for Interviewer of the Year in the British Press Awards, announced today.

"Leading Anglican" and other faint praise

The Guardian reports:

Anglican churchmen hit back yesterday in the increasingly ugly spat between the Church of England and the chief rabbi over the general synod's call for disinvestment in a company making bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian homes. They denied that their criticism of Israeli government policy was tantamount to anti-semitism.

In today's Guardian Canon Paul Oestreicher, a leading member of the church's peace and reconciliation movement, who lost his Jewish grandmother in the Holocaust and was a refugee from Nazi Germany, says Jewish groups are engaging in moral blackmail in raising the issue of anti-semitism against critics of the Israeli government. He says: "The main objective of my writing today is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is in effect to be anti-semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler's racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail.

"It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought anti-semitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel's betrayal of its true heritage. When world Jewry defends Israeli policies right or wrong, then anger turns not only against Israel but against all Jews. I wish it was mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible."

I am with Canon Oestreicher at least on the last point. I wish his remarks were mere rhetoric too, but I'm afraid they're worse than that. For many decades, Canon Oestreicher has devoted what little time he can spare from the neglect of his duties to making ill-informed interventions on international politics. I last wrote about him a couple of years ago, and as I have no more intention of dealing with his substantive points now than I did then, I shall merely refer you to that sneering abuse and character assassination, all of which still applies.

Irving and others

After his disastrous libel suit again Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books six years ago, the historical writer David Irving was the beneficiary of some bizarre excuses by genuine historians who ought to have known better. Donald Cameron Watt wrote in The Standard: "Show me one historian who has not broken into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment." Sir John Keegan wrote in The Telegraph that Mr Justice Gray, presiding, had "decided that an all consuming knowledge of a vast body of material does not excuse faults in interpreting it". (Quotations are from Professor Lipstadt's History on Trial, 2005, p. xiii.) These scholars had apparently not only failed to follow the evidence - which demonstrated that Irving's "faults of interpretation" were systematic and ideologically driven rather than accidental - but also overlooked who was the defendant and who the plaintiff in the case.

But in the case being heard today in Vienna, Irving is the defendant. I agree with Richard Evans, who was expert witness for the defence in the libel trial, that Irving ought not to be there:

Richard J Evans, the Cambridge history professor whose forensic demolition of Mr Irving's research was key to that defeat, also criticised Austria's decision to charge Mr Irving, which he said risked making him a martyr to freedom of speech.

"I think the media circus that we see in operation now, with hundreds of reporters and TV and radio crews crowding around the courtroom, shows how counter-productive it all is," Professor Evans told Times Online.

"Irving was virtually forgotten before this trial came up and it's simply drawing unjustified attention to a discredited figure."

The issue for public policymaking is not that Holocaust denial is offensive (though it certainly is that) but that it is false: malevolently, systematically so. The proper policy with regard to malevolent falsehood is to expose it rather than suppress it. That is the task of historians rather than legislators or the judiciary.

But there are three other aspects of the pre-trial report in The Times that are worth commenting on. First, recall that during the Lipstadt/Penguin trial, "Irving radically modified his position: he accepted that the killing by shooting had been on a massive scale of between 500,000 and 1,500,000 and that the programme of executions had been carried out in a systematic way and in accordance with orders from Berlin" (The Irving Judgment, 2000, p. 116). That is, Irving was a Holocaust denier even though he accepted that the Nazis followed a deliberate programme of mass murder. The fact that he now accepts the historical fact of gas chambers at Auschwitz does not necessarily mean he has renounced his past as a Holocaust denier.

Secondly, while there's always a danger of being excessively sensitive about a choice of words, The Times's list of "Death-Camp Challengers" (scroll down the page) is an unfortunate headline. To challenge findings is an integral part of scholarly practice. Men such as Robert Faurisson don't challenge history; they deny it. In a liberal society they have freedom of expression, but the corollary is that a liberal society makes no attempt to rein in criticism of bogus and bigoted manipulations of the truth. Derision, denunication and (in my view, and for reasons that are explained in the next link in this post) removal of Faurisson from his academic post are entirely legitimate forms of counterattack.

Thirdly, note The Times's contention:

In 1979 Noam Chomsky, the linguist and intellectual, courted controversy by supporting M Faurisson’s right to express his views on the ground of free speech.

That is, of course, not an adequate description of the stance that Chomsky took in the Faurisson affair. If it had been, I should have supported him. Chomsky is not himself a Holocaust denier, but he defended the political legitimacy of Faurisson's claims, even if not their factual accuracy. It was a tawdry and discreditable way to behave, and Chomsky's reputation has rightly never recovered. If you seriously believe Chomsky's stance on the issue was an unexceptionable defence of the right to freedom of speech, then I would modestly recommend my own brief account of the case here.

The Secret Speech

There's an interesting piece on BBC News Online by John Rettie, the former BBC correspondent who broke the story of Khrushchev's Secret Speech, denouncing Stalin, to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fifty years ago. It appears Rettie was fed the information by a KGB source, possibly on direct orders from Khrushchev.

For 10 days in February, Moscow's few Western correspondents had been covering the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, where "the cult of personality", a veiled reference to Stalin, was repeatedly denounced. But the night after the congress formally closed, the party's Central Committee building was humming with activity into the early hours, its windows ablaze with light. Why, we wondered, after the congress was over?

And then the rumours began. Khrushchev, it was said, had made a shattering report to a secret session, openly denouncing Stalin by name as a murderer and torturer of party members. This was so traumatic that it is now said some delegates had heart attacks during the speech, and others committed suicide afterwards.

Rettie notes that the speech had immense influence in the Eastern European satellite states, while in the Soviet Union "the [post-Congress] thaw turned to deep freeze". In fact, it was worse than that. The liberalisation was largely - not entirely - in name alone. It could scarcely have been otherwise, because the problem with Soviet rule was not fundamentally one of arbitrary despotism (Stalinism being a variant of Leninism rather than an abnegation of it) so much as a society without law. Two years after the Secret Speech, new "Fundamental Principles of Criminal Law and Procedure" were enacted that had no practical impact whatever. The rule of law is alien to Communism; an independent judiciary can't exist in a society where the Party has a monopoly of power. Among Western Marxists there was in the 1980s a brief rediscovery of the work of Evgeny Pashukanis, a sophisticated Soviet legal theorist whose case demonstrates the point. Pashukanis argued that law under Socialism would be superseded by the Plan - as indeed it was in his case when he was murdered during the purges in the 1930s, according to Stalin's plan.

John Rettie's reference to the rumours of suicide among some delegates who heard Khrushchev's speech reminded me of a letter sent by the great Sidney Hook - pragmatist philosopher, socialist, scholar of Marxism and foe of totalitarianism - to Corliss Lamont. Lamont was nominally also a professor of philosophy (at Columbia), whose contributions to that discipline were nugatory, while his apologetics for Stalin outdid in mendacity almost anyone else on the American Left. Hook wrote to him ten years after the Secret Speech, with Lamont clearly still unable to accept its implications (the letter is reproduced in Letters of Sidney Hook: Democracy, Communism and the Cold War , 1995, pp. 289-90):

Dear Corliss,

Voltaire once remarked that everyone has a natural right to be stupid, but that beyond a certain point it was a privilege that should not be abused. Your letter of 30 June replying to my attempt to reason with you has gone far beyond that point.

I did not suggest that you hang yourself. Nor did Max Eastman. He merely expressed the fear that you would do so after Khrushchev's revelations of the crimes of Stalin, whom you had so zealously supported against the criticisms of [the philosopher] John Dewey, [the Socialist Party leader] Norman Thomas, and other democratic and socialist thinkers. Your thunderous silence as our charges against Stalin were being confirmed seemed to indicate a state of despair. That you should read this fear as a suggestion on our part is such an obvious projection of your own state of mind that it is tantamount to an acknowledgment. I predict that more revelations about Stalin's barbarities will come to light. The longer you live - and I hope you live a long time because personally I bear you no ill, objecting only to your defense of terror - the greater will be your punishment....

Unfortunately Lamont escaped punishment owing to his having, on the evidence of his long life and voluminous polemical writings, no sense of shame. It is an obstinate problem on some parts of the Western Left.

(Max Eastman, incidentally, was another fascinating figure of the American Left, who became a staunch anti-Communist. A friend and English-language tutor of Trotsky, and an early defender of the Russian Revolution, he was the first writer to publish in English the Testament of Lenin, which detailed the factional fights within the Politburo. Eastman probably received the document directly from Trotsky, who then betrayed his friend by repudiating it. Trotsky lied: the document was authentic.)

Our man again

A regular correspondent has asked why I endorse Simon Hughes for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats. It's a good question. I think it's reasonable to have a preference for leader of a party one doesn't support, and in general I favour the promotion within all the main parties of the principles of aggressive liberalism, such as this blog supports. The chances of that happening with the Liberal Democrats as they are currently constituted is nil, and I therefore must adopt other criteria.

Ironically, the leadership candidate I felt was most likely to be sympathetic to those ideals was Mark Oaten, whose political downfall is a sad story. It ought to be recalled - and frequently in the past few years I've found it difficult to do so - that, of all the main parties, the Liberal Democrats took the most principled line on the need to intervene in the Bosnian catastrophe in the early 1990s. The then leader, Paddy Ashdown, was earlier than most in seeing the issues of principle at stake, and I understand from those who were close to him on this issue that he withstood internal party criticism for the amount of time he devoted to it.

The Liberal Democrats' stance on foreign and domestic policy in more recent years has been populist, glib and sometimes highly unprincipled. (The party's opposition to tuition fees is as about as bad a social policy as you could come up with, and is plainly driven by economic interests of the party's core supporters.) In the circumstances, the party is unlikely in the near future to be any sort of voice for a consistent liberalism in British politics. I therefore wish it ill, and choose my preferred leadership candidate accordingly.

I'm also reminded that at the last election I said there were one or two Lib Dem candidates I should like to see returned, and one of those was Chris Huhne. In mitigation, I'll direct your attention to a report in The Times today about Huhne's campaign for the leadership:

In the European Parliament, neither did [Huhne] spend time on foreign affairs nor women’s issues, two other campaign themes. “Chris’s career was extremely effective within a very narrow boundary — the financial services sector,” one MEP said.

During the last full Parliament, between 1999 and 2004, Mr Huhne made 25 speeches to the full chamber, all concerning financial matters. He signed 15 resolutions, mostly about financial matters, though three attacked attempts by religious authorities, including the Pope, to influence legislation.

I never write about the subject here, and it's not the most exciting of issues, but for professional reasons I follow closely the debates on EU financial services directives. Huhne certainly contributed a good deal of knowledge and sense in this area, and that's what I knew of him till recently. (He also co-authored, with the late Lord Lever, a prescient short book twenty years ago on the third world debt crisis.)

As a candidate for the Liberal Democrat leadership, he has shown additional characteristics, delicately described by The Times:

Mr Huhne has thrown buckets of red meat to Liberal Democrat activists in the shape of opposition to a Trident replacement and support for a fuel duty escalator. But he has sought to qualify the positions, raising questions about his judgment.

I came to a definitive conclusion about Huhne when I read this account of the candidates' televised debate:

In a BBC Question Time debate, Simon Hughes and Chris Huhne pushed for troops to leave by the end of 2006. Mr Huhne said he knew from his time in business that deadlines were the best way of ensuring things happened.

What a remark, and what a time to make it. Does Huhne suppose that the setting of an arbitrary deadine will cause the jihadists and Baathists to wind down their operations? Does he expect them to be magnanimous in accepting that they will no longer be provoked by the presence of the occupier? What will Huhne say when these forces, aware that victory has been gained by their suicide attacks on Iraq's nascent civil society, intensify their terrorism and abduct still more hapless and terrified victims? Will he, drawing on his business experience, process the feedback, think outside the box, and proactively reassess his list of actionables? Or will this arrogant and frivolous technocrat recognise that protecting an emerging democracy from theocratic barbarism has some implications for our obligations to others, and security for ourselves?

The Lib Dem leadership is a tough fight, and a fine decision. But in a closely-matched field, I still go for Simon Hughes. May the worst man win.

"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.

Political film-making

I went on Radio 3's Nightwaves programme this week, to discuss politics and film. If you've nothing better to do, you can listen to the programme here (it's the Tuesday edition).

I was on with Frances Stonor Saunders, former arts editor of The New Statesman and author of a study of the CIA's influence in the cultural Cold War, Who Paid the Piper? (a good and formidably well researched book, whose conclusions I think are too harsh). We were primarily there to talk about two new films that are shortly to be released in the UK, Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana. We also took part in a general discussion at the end of the programme about the notion of political films.

Good Night, And Good Luck is a dramatisation of the television anchorman Ed Murrow's confrontation with the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy in the mid-1950s. The director, co-scriptwriter and one of the lead actors is George Clooney. The film has some good points, and I enjoyed it. I said on the programme that the film was excellently shot in atmospheric black and white, has strong performances by the lead actors, and recreates vividly the atmosphere of the smoke-filled newsroom. Unfortunately it's not just the cinematography that's in black and white, but also the script and the ostentatious political message.

The film asks to be judged on the acuity of its political ideas, yet comprehensively misunderstands the politics of the 1950s. At no point does it manage to distinguish anti-Communism from McCarthyism. The liberal and social democratic anti-Communists that subscribed to the principles set out in Arthur Schlesinger's book The Vital Center had no trouble in simultaneously reviling McCarthy and recognising that American Communism was no mere harmless heterodoxy. We know from the decrypts of intercepted Soviet cables under the Venona programme that the accusations against Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were correct. We also know the extent of Soviet covert activity through the CPUSA, and the party's domination of a range of front organisations. These are no longer matters of dispute among serious historians. You won't find reference to this background in Clooney's film. The establishment of a Security Programme in the early Cold War was not a function of paranoia. It was a recognition that, given the nature of Soviet covert activity, and the CPUSA's aims and operations at that time, Communist affiliations were among the factors relevant to assessing someone's suitability for employment in government or defence-related industries. (Recall that in the crisis over Stalin's blockade of Berlin, the leadership of the CPUSA openly declared that in the event of war the Party would do everything in its power to secure a Soviet victory.)

Clooney's film gives no such context, and also misrepresents Murrow's own contribution to the downfall of McCarthy. Murrow was very late in coming to this cause. I point out in the radio discussion that his famous anti-McCarthy broadcast was in March 1954, whereas President Eisenhower had already taken personal charge of the political campaign to bring down McCarthy the previous month. You're not really risking your professional reputation in attacking a maverick right-wing Senator if the Republican President has got there before you.

Good Night, And Good Luck is worth seeing. I can give no such recommendation for Syriana, an enervating and largely incomprehensible "thriller" [sic] about oil, the Middle East, the CIA and nefarious American interventions - I think. The film has been nominated for a number of Academy awards, but its caricature of international politics is so extreme that it might as well have been made as a cartoon. When Michael Moore won his award for the mendacious Fahrenheit 9/11, someone termed it "Chomsky for Dummies". Syriana is Michael Moore for those who find the genuine article too learned and allusive.

UPDATE: A misleading ambiguity crept into the last paragraph. The award for Fahrenheit 9/11 that I was recalling was not an Academy award but the Palme D'Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Thanks to readers for pointing this out.