There is an interview with me today on the US conservative web site, FrontPage magazine. I am talking about the subject of my book, the left-wing tradition of anti-totalitarianism and the case for an interventionist foreign policy. In particular, I try to convince my interviewer, Jamie Glazov, that while he declares he has never before heard of "a longstanding tradition on the American and European Left of militant anti-totalitarianism", the state of his own political education isn't the final arbiter of whether this tradition in fact exists. I also gently rebuke him for his harsh words about the late Susan Sontag, who said some rather foolish things about 9/11 in its immediate aftermath, but whom I shall always respect for her uncompromising statements about apologetics for Soviet Communism, her commitment to the defence of Bosnia against Milosevic's aggression, and her evangelism for European writers to English-speaking readers.
One of the site's commenters, who goes by the pseudonym "Reasonable Person", is clearly unimpressed by my arguments, as he writes:
Beneath his leftist pseudo-sophistication Kamm is a manipulative intellectually dishonest person, who when either asked a direct question or asked to respond to a clear statement stating a well documented fact, responds by stating I do not agree with you as if every historical fact is just a matter of opinion, and then proceeds to name dropping rather than an argument logically thought out and backed up with facts that would give his position credibility. Underneath all this, he is just another self-annointed [sic] elitist of the Fabian Society at Oxford that sees himself and his like masters required to guide the rest of us poor great unwashed to achieve their utopia dream - which is a documented nightmare to date built on hundreds of millions of human corpses.
In fairness to myself - a cause to which I am devoted - the "direct questions" and "clear statements" to which he refers appear to be Jamie Glazov's derogatory claims about Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky. These were not part of the interview but were interpolated by Glazov afterwards, and I had no sight of them before publication. I'm unfazed by this procedure - it's Glazov's site, and he can do what he wants with it - but I should not wish it to be thought that I had failed to come to Susan Sontag's defence when her record was malignly presented. In addition, while regular readers will know that I do not admire Noam Chomsky as a political thinker, not every attack on him is correct, and I would have argued at greater length against Glazov's depiction of him as a totalitarian if Glazov had made the point in the interview rather than adding it later.
UPDATE: Another commenter on the FrontPage Magazine site says of my interview, and addressing himself to the commenter I have just quoted:
You got this clown's number - typical Fabian Society International Socialist that will never say a bad word against a fellow leftist such as Noam Chompsky who is an intellectually incompetent failure academically and a failure as a decent human being.
I can honestly say that this is the first time I have been on the receiving end of a charge of unwillingness to criticise Noam Chomsky.
