Oliver Kamm

Email of the week

I received many emails about my article yesterday arguing that civilised people abhor the BNP and for the same reason reject Respect.

Most comments were clearly from BNP supporters, who decried immigration and took umbrage at the notion that they were uncivilised. "If such contempt for the feelings of ordinary people by the so-called political elite is 'civilised', I'd rather be a savage," writes one. "It seems I'm not alone." Couldn't have put it better myself.

But email of the week came from Clive Searle, who I assume is the same Clive Searle who chairs the Manchester branch of Respect and sits on the party's national council. He writes: "Your an idiot."

Agreed, we shouldn't vote for the BNP – but its twin, Respect, is just as bad

This article appears in The Times today.

“I HOPE NOBODY votes for the British National Party,” declared David Cameron at the weekend. “I would rather people voted for any other party.”

It does not belittle the issue of principle to point to Mr Cameron’s political calculation. The Tories have a chequered history in confronting racism in their own ranks. In 1992 a black Conservative candidate suffered racist abuse from his own constituency association. In 2001 an MP claimed ministers wished to turn the British into a “mongrel race”. Mr Cameron needs to show that the party is purged of such sentiments.

The urgency of confronting racism conceals an oddity in Mr Cameron’s words, however. “Any other party” implies not only the mainstream left, right and centre, along with constitutional nationalists, but also parties of a different ideological stripe. Most prominent of these is Respect, an amalgam of Islamists and Leninists led by George Galloway, MP, which is fighting an energetic municipal election campaign in East London and one or two other localities.

No serious commentator would refer to the BNP as an “anti-immigration party” without also mentioning its neo-Nazi antecedent organisations and ideology. To do so would be politically partial, taking at face value the party’s attempt to win respectability by shedding the more violent elements of its propaganda. Yet Respect is habitually characterised as merely an “anti-war” party, without reference to its history, founders and stated positions. Over recent weeks, politicians, newspaper editorial and religious leaders have denounced the BNP, with scarcely a murmur about Respect. Perhaps it is felt that Mr Galloway’s reputation was damaged irretrievably by his antics on reality television. More likely is that Respect is seen as a party of the fringe, but nonetheless one with a legitimate – even colourful – point of view, much like the Greens.

In the interests of reliable labelling at least, opinion-formers ought to exercise greater scrutiny. Even to describe Respect as anti-war is strictly inaccurate. The Socialist Workers’ Party, for which Respect is largely a front, stated during the Iraq War that “by far the lesser evil would be reverses, or defeat, for the US and British forces” — it appeared, in short, to be pro-war and on the wrong side. But more fundamentally, Respect stands in a tradition whereby parties nominally of the Left can on occasion cross over to their supposed ideological opposite.

It is a cliché, and inaccurate too, to depict politics as circular, with the far Left shading into the far Right. There are Marxist thinkers and organisations with a militant commitment to constitutional democracy. But there are also numerous instances where revolutionary politics have allied with extreme reaction and even fascism. The 1920s and 1930s saw many cases: some French Socialists and Communists went beyond the view that the Versailles Treaty had treated Germany unfairly, and came out in support of Nazi Germany. The Belgian Marxist Henri de Man exercised a powerful influence on Mussolini. A pro-Fascist organisation called the British People’s Party attracted support from socialists and peace campaigners in the late 1930s and 1940s.

When they called for defeat for British and American forces by Saddam Hussein, supposed leftwingers were giving support to a regime consciously modelled on Hitler and Stalin. When (as the SWP has done for the past two years) they entertain at their keynote events a speaker — a jazz musician called Gilad Atzmon — who explicitly believes that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are, whatever their historical provenance, an accurate depiction of modern America, they are allying with classic anti-Semitism. Far-right ideology is the literal content, and not merely the moral equivalent, of their political beliefs. It is little wonder that after the last general election the BNP itself declared: “The future for British politics is the growth in support and power of the ethno-specific political parties like the BNP, the People’s Justice Party and Respect.”

Why, in the circumstances, do liberal-minded people, including Mr Cameron, implicitly regard far-left parties as at least one step up from the political realms inhabited by overtly racist and fascist organisations? And does it matter? I have only a theory on the first question, but a definite answer to the second.

Critical labelling of the far Left is routinely dismissed with the charge of McCarthyism. This is historically unwarranted. In his blustering speeches McCarthy accurately identified not a single Communist agent, while maligning by wild and irresponsible exaggeration New Deal liberals and other democrats. Liberal anti-Communists were appalled at his antics, but the damage was done. A recent dramatic account of the damage that McCarthyism wrought, George Clooney’s film Good Night, And Good Luck, failed to distinguish between the causes of anti-Communism and McCarthyism, or to suggest that American Communism then was a genuine threat to Western security. (Ironically, McCarthy’s unprincipled and destructive methods were not so different from those of the leading Congressional opponent of domestic fascism in the 1930s, Samuel Dickstein.)

There is need not for a new McCarthyism, but for its opposite: a new anti-totalitarianism. There is a common thread in the politics of the totalitarian Left and the far Right, which is to make people’s wishes secondary to pseudoscientific abstractions such as race and historical forces. The far Left and far Right increasingly talk the same language: division, nativism and even deference to religious fanaticism. The BNP’s cult of violence was once expressed in support for the Islamic Republics of Iran and Libya.

It matters that political debate lacks a language for this phenomenon. One way of enhancing our political terminology would be to add to Mr Cameron’s observation. Civilised people abhor the BNP; and for literally the same reason, they reject Respect.

Staggering

Through all his tribulations on foreign policy and 'cash-for-honours', Tony Blair maintains a sense a proportion and a consistent desire: that my own views be printed in the national press. He is fortunate in that a particular press magnate is willing to meet this requirement.

No, I don't believe this vainglorious nonsense either, but one columnist does. He is Peter Wilby, former editor of The New Statesman. Wilby writes in that magazine this week about pro-Blair columnists, and notes the apparent defection of my friend Stephen Pollard from that cause:

Tony Blair's troubles get worse. The Blairite apologist Stephen Pollard has joined the deserters. Pollard is one of those mysterious commentators - Oliver Kamm is another - who claim to be left-wing but hold no discernible left-wing views. Such writers are particularly favoured by the Times, presumably because they allow Rupert Murdoch to have his cake and eat it: he stays onside with the party in power by giving space to its alleged supporters, but keeps his papers ideologically on the right.

I am not privy to the commissioning policies of The Times, but the spread of opinion published in the newspaper appears to me to be wider than that of any other national daily. More to the point, while Stephen is well able to speak for himself, I'm not aware that he even claims to be left-wing. I'm well informed on the subject too, as we exchange denunciatory emails most days.

I, on the other hand, do claim to be left-wing, for the straightforward reason that it's true. My views will be of largely autobiographical interest to me and scant interest to anyone else, but here they are. I support economic redistribution (though on grounds of autonomy, not equality), progressive taxation and a welfare state of very roughly its current scope and size. If you compare Stephen's views and mine on the NHS, a flat tax (which I criticised when it emerged as a Conservative Treasury proposal last autumn), education vouchers, arts subsidies, public-service broadcasting and the licence fee, Europe, immigration or capital punishment, you'll find little common ground. (On the financing of higher education, which I don't count as properly a public good, our views are a lot closer.) I'm also highly critical of the deferential way that New Labour has treated the business lobby, which often presumptuously calls itself 'Britain plc'. Businessmen are no more disinterested promoters of the public good than any other sectional interest. On social issues, I believe the cultural changes of the 1960s have been a civilising influence, and I support permissive abortion legislation and gay marriage. Philosophically, I am a secular humanist; I respect the religious imagination, but have no respect at all for, and militant opposition towards, those who know the mind of God and seek to introduce that revelation into public policy. Ironically, in treating Stephen and me as comparable, Wilby gets the one verifiable fact in his discussion wrong. While I wanted a Labour victory at the last general election, and Stephen did vote Labour, I withheld support from my local Labour candidate (fruitlessly, and probably to her benefit) and voted against her owing to her opposition to the Government's interventionist foreign policy. (My argument was this.)

Under Wilby's editorship, The New Statesman distinguished itself by publishing an editorial immediately after 9/11 holding the bond traders in the World Trade Center partly to blame for provoking their own murder. The following year the magazine speculated on the existence in Britain of a 'Kosher conspiracy', with a cover that, in the words of the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, "was a virtual crash course in antisemitic iconography". In 2003, it published a signed article calling the Prime Minister insane.

When the last of those incidents happened, I recalled this entry, dated 1 March 1984, from the diaries of Tony Benn:

The Sun had an article, 'Benn on the Couch – a top psychiatrist's view of Britain's leading Leftie', in which they said they had fed my personal and political details to a psychiatrist in America who had concluded that I was power-hungry, would do anything to satisfy my hunger, was prone to periods of fantasy and so on.

The Sun's personal attack on Benn was disgraceful. In the 22 years since, it has become a much more responsible newspaper (consider the change in the way it portrays homosexuals in public life). Meanwhile The New Statesman has gone from the editorship of John Lloyd, a voice of reason when the British Left was immune to it, to the editorships of Wilby and John Kampfner ("Blair's Bombs"). Or to put it another way, if it's informed and progressive commentary you want, these days you put The Sun well ahead of the Statesman.

Nightwaves debate

Apologies for the absence of posts in the past week owing to pressures of work. Things should be back to normal next week.

If you're really, really at a loose end this evening, you could listen to me in a debate on the Nightwaves programme on BBC Radio 3 at 9.30pm London time. The subject is, I think, universal values in an unequal world; the programme can be heard here and for up to a week after the broadcast.

No conscientious objector

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a radio discussion about pacifism. I said, among other things, that conscientious objectors' refusal to serve in the armed forces is a cost that a free society even in wartime needs to bear. I'd go further, and say there may be reasons even in an unequivocally just war such as WWII that we should welcome the witness associated with small but historically resilient religious or ethical pacifist communities such as the Amish.

The Herald, which opposed the Iraq War, rightly notes that the RAF doctor who refused to serve in Iraq, Malcolm Kendall-Smith, is not that type of objector:

[A]s a serving officer, who has pledged to obey orders, it is not up to him to pick and choose where he works or to claim to be an authority on the legal case for war, regardless of his private misgivings. To concede this principle would be to invoke chaos. The RAF is right to resist it.

But the newspaper doesn't quite do justice to the full richness of Dr Kendall-Smith's case. It says: "Dr Kendall-Smith's argument is that combatants are morally autonomous agents who can be held responsible for their actions."

In fact we find today that Dr Kendall-Smith's argument has certain nuances, which I merely draw to your attention:

"As early as 2004 I regarded the United States to be on par with Nazi Germany as regards its activities in the Gulf," Kendall-Smith told the court amid a series of bitter exchanges with prosecutor David Perry.

Perry asked: "Are you saying the U.S. is the moral equivalent of the Third Reich?"

Kendall-Smith replied: "That's correct."

Livingstone (and others) on China

The Daily Telegraph comments on Ken Livingstone's ingratiating remarks to his Chinese hosts comparing the Tiananmen Square massacre to the poll tax riot in Trafalgar Square:

They reveal a mentality that, even if he had no other disqualifications, ought to bar Mr Livingstone from office.... His off-the-cuff comments indicate his true outlook: when the lights are thrown on suddenly, the rats have no time to hide. That Mr Livingstone should see any equivalence between the autocrats of Beijing and the Tory administrations of either Lord Liverpool or Margaret Thatcher tells us a great deal about him. For the record, the 1990 riots began as a protest against a tax introduced by a democratic regime. A peaceful march was hijacked by violent anarchists.

This is slightly overwrought, but not by much, and I do agree that on several grounds that Ken Livingstone is unfit to be the leader of municipal government in a great cosmopolitan capital city. His remarks in this case are wrong not because of what they say about his political premises, but because they betray a vacuum where a sense of public service ought to be. Fortunately foreign policy is not part of Livingstone's remit, but even as London Mayor he will come into contact with delegations representing autocratic governments. On those occasions, he need not hector, but he does need to have the imagination to realise the moral compromises that this will involve. Just because you deal with a murderous regime doesn't mean you have to flatter it.

That Livingstone is a vapid and silly man seems to me a better explanation for his latest remarks than The Telegraph's diagnosis of "the horrible morality of some on the far Left, keen to minimise the abominations carried out in the name of Communism". But it's no excuse. An absence of ideological principle easily mutates into acquiescence in the indefensible, and worse. In commenting on China, others have trodden that ground, and their sentiments are not as notorious as they ought to be. It is well known that Edward Heath declared of the Tiananmen massacre: "There was a crisis after a month in which the civil authorities had been defied. They took action. Very well." (Heath claimed, against his critics, that the "very well" was an expostulation rather than being related to the previous sentence - which hardly made it any better.) It's less frequently remarked that this was no blind spot: Heath's was a realpolitik scarcely distinguishable from power-worship. As he wrote in his memoirs, The Course of My Life (1998, p. 647):

Of course it was right to deplore and condemn the brutal suppression which occurred in June 1989 [at Tiananmen Square] but, in general, we in the West must learn to be rather more cautious about judging the political arrangements in other parts of the world by our own subjective standards.

What can you say? Heath's unpopular and ineffectual premiership was marked by a diplomatically successful trip to China, and this may have coloured his sentiments. ("Mao was the first person he had seen in months who was actually pleased to see him," commented one of Heath's friends, according to John Campbell's Edward Heath: A Biography, 1993, p. 635). But his quietism (so apt for the Major/Hurd Conservative Party of the 1990s, I thought) was gross and inexcusable. It still fell short, though, of the most ignoble remark on China I have come across in the past decade. In his diaries, Free at Last!, covering the 1990s, Tony Benn wrote (p. 371) the following entry for 6 June 1996:

Had a long talk to the Chinese First Secretary at the embassy - a very charming man called Liao Dong - and said how much I admired Mao Tse tung or Zedong, the greatest man of the twentieth century. He said that I couldn't admire Mao more than he did. I asked him how Mao was viewed now. He said Mao was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong; the Cultural Revolution didn't work. He said he had been named after Mao - it was amusing.

So for Benn, the greatest man of the last century was the mass murderer who exceeded all others: the one who killed more people even than Hitler or Stalin. He said this to a representative of the Chinese government; and he found it all a bit of a giggle. Most political commentators have warmed to Benn since his near-destruction of Labour as a credible party of government 25 years ago. I find that my contempt for the man only deepens.

Guardian review

The Guardian reviewer Steven Poole selects my book Anti-Totalitarianism as one of his non-fiction choices in the newspaper today. He writes:

In this fizzily pugnacious, stylish essay, Oliver Kamm makes a much better case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq than the US or British governments ever did. Yet it is still problematic. We are, for example, to understand "regime change" as being synonymous with "invasion", even though none other than Paul Wolfowitz has admitted that there were other means. Secular Iraq is supposed to have had something to do with "theocratic fanaticism", and is even, bizarrely, named as the "most likely source" from which al-Qaida followers would have obtained frightening weapons, even though it is and was plain that Iraq was among the least likely sources of such weapons.

Kamm demolishes with puckish vim those on the left who took delight in the Iraqi "resistance" (a term he rightly rejects as loaded, though his own "Jihadists" is hardly any more accurate), or who saluted Saddam's courage and indefatigability. More nuanced and finely argued are his historical discussions of leftists' previous tergiservations [sic] over totalitarianism, before the second world war and during the cold war. Finally, the question of civilian casualties arises, prompting this curious formulation: "The civilian death toll appears to have been substantially higher than the war's supporters generally expected". How many civilian deaths would have been acceptable? No one ever answers that question.

The reason no one answers that question, if indeed no one does, is probably that the values at stake - overthrowing a bellicose tyranny as against the lives lost as a result - are not commensurable. But I shall, in another post, endeavour to answer it.

Oppositional journalism

A couple of years ago John Lloyd of the Financial Times published an important critique of the way the communciations media handle politics. His book is called What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. What the media are doing and ought to avoid is this:

Journalists of all opinions - including senior journalists in the BBC - publish and broadcast scorn for parliament, and claim that they should act as the true opposition to the government of the day. But the media cannot be an opposition, because they will never have (and should not have) responsibility for what they propose. Oppositions, if and when they become governments, do.

Good journalism, of which there is a great deal, may be in danger of losing out to a journalism which pays little attention to facts, which insists on an underlying story of public degradation and political bad faith, and which encourages among its readers and viewers an attitude of either contempt or distrust - all the while excoriating public officials and politicians for presiding over a period of 'voter apathy'.

Unsurprisingly, this argument was spurned by those it implicitly criticised. The investigations editor of The Guardian, David Leigh, responded: "Oppositional journalism punctures self-serving gibberish and exposes unwelcome facts. This helps make democratic society self-correcting."

This week an Irish publisher, The Liffey Press, kindly sent me an unsolicited signed copy of a book from their new list that settles the debate in Lloyd's favour. It is entitled Alleluia America!, by Carole Coleman. Ms Coleman was, between 2000 and 2004, the RTÉ correspondent in Washington, where she made what name she has for herself by being angry with President Bush for believing that a White House interview was an opportunity for him to explain Administration policy rather than for her to do so. The problem, as Ms Coleman has it, was (p. 10): "He was resorting to the sort of meandering stock answer I had heard scores of times and had hoped to avoid." Ms Coleman was put out by such impertinence:

I was now beginning to feel shut out of this event. He had the floor and he wasn't letting me dance. My blood was boiling to such a point that I felt like slapping him. But I was dealing with the President of the United States; and he was too far away anyway. I suppose I had been naïve to think he was making himself available to me so I could spar with him or plumb the depths of his thought processes. Sitting there, I knew that I was nobody special and that this was just another opportunity for the President to repeat his mantra. He seemed irked to be faced with someone who wasn't nodding gravely at him as he was speaking.

President Bush is a notoriously tongue-tied advocate of his cause, but the conclusion to this interview was, on my reading (I haven't seen the tape), a clear victory to him. Ms Coleman demanded to know, with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whether there might be "perhaps a bit more even-handedness from America?", and Bush pointed out correctly that he was the first President to have called for a Palestinian state. But note the assumption implict in Ms Coleman's oddly juxtaposed metaphors of dancing and sparring: that she was an equal and opposite participant in the exchange, who was illegitimately prevented by the President from assuming that role, and who showed commendable restraint in refraining from violence. Ms Coleman needs to distinguish between the roles of journalist and opposition; that she clearly hasn't had the difference explained to her is an indictment of modern broadcast journalism.

The rest of the book comprises a travelogue in which she makes fun of Americans while discovering that - mirabile dictu - "religion is far from a spent force, but has become the driving power that motivates people's lives". I dare say a number of Ms Coleman's viewers back in Ireland feel the same way. The book also carries a recommendation by Michael Moore on the back.

Political violence and the free society

Of the murder of the former British agent within Sinn Fein Denis Donaldson, Dean Godson comments in The Telegraph:

In truth, Mr Blair has become the prisoner of the peace process. Like a gambler who has invested so much, he has to keep heaping on the chips to obtain a return. This has resulted in a combination of credulousness and cynicism, even in the face of murder most foul. What makes this all the more noteworthy is that it sits so ill at ease with his moral clarity on the broader war on terrorism.

This, unfortunately, is right. Moral clarity on terrorism requires distinguishing the force used by the democratic state from the violence of private armies. The PM knows the difference perfectly well, and needs to stand by it, because not everyone does. For some reason, there is a type of fringe academic who is particularly resistant to reasoning along those lines. I referred some months ago to the dispiriting case of a popular historian, Howard Zinn, who had written in The Guardian of "the occupation of the US". There is a difference of kind and not only of degree between disagreeing fiercely with the policies of a democratic government and regarding that government as illegitimate.

There is also a difference of kind between political protest and political violence. Many readers will feel this point so obvious as not to need stating, and some may consider that I am caricaturing those I disagree with by suggesting that the point is not universally recognised. But I am not. Consider this report from a regional newspaper a couple of days ago:

LONDON'S suicide bombings were not the acts of terrorists but just an extreme Muslim demonstration, a Chester professor has claimed.

The attacks that killed 52 people and threw the country into shock last July were part of a long history of demonstrations sparked by British Muslims, according to Professor Ron Geaves.

His controversial comments were made at a lecture given at the University of Chester that attracted dignitaries and members of the Muslim community from around the North West.

As part of his research, the professor's recent report looks at the history of demonstrations by British Muslims.

From the 1980s Salman Rushdie demonstrations to the anti-war protests surrounding the Iraq war, his work charts the changing nature of Muslim communities in Britain.

Prof Geaves said: "I have included, rather controversially, the events in London as primarily an extreme form of demonstration and assess what these events actually mean in terms of their significance in the Muslim community.

"The word terrorism is a political word which always seems to be used to demonise people."

Before yesterday, I had never heard of Professor Geaves (or, to my discredit, the University of Chester). But his argument, while extreme, is not novel. Few would go as far as he does in criticising the term "terrorism" to describe killing 52 civilians, but many would argue that violence in some manifestations, while illegitimate, ought to be considered a form of protest by the voiceless as a counterweight to the violence of the state.

It is true, as Professor Geaves points out, that the word terrorism is used politically in order to denote illegitimacy of certain types of violence. And there's much to be said for that, as there is for referring (as I have done in this post) to the "force" exercised by the security services of a democratic state as against the "violence" of those arraigned against democratic authority. To do this is not queering the argument of those such as Professors Zinn or Geaves; it is to use language discriminately where moral discrimination is essential. The democratic state uses violence, and terrorists use violence; but these acts are not alike.

No one has perceived the essential moral difference more clearly than the historian Conor Cruise O'Brien, who as a Labour member of the Irish government in the 1970s argued cogently (and at great personal risk) against Republican terrorism and its sympathisers. In a lecture on Granada Television in 1976 (reproduced in his book Herod: Reflections on Political Violence 1978, pp. 77-8) he said:

Institutionalized violence is a necessary part of every organized state since without its availability any state would disintegrate. But those who make most use of the term tend to ignore the fact that the institutionalization of violence within a democratic system is the most responsible way available to us for containing violence. Democratic institutions can be altered by non-violent means; the use of violence by the democratic state is subject to scrutiny and criticism, and abuses can be punished and corrected. None of this works perfectly, but it works to some extent, and no such restrictions at all apply to other uses of violence, whether by non-democratic states or by terrorist organizations.

If the violence used by the young men who bombed London's trains and buses last July is classified as "primarily an extreme form of demonstration", it elides the most important aspect of this issue. However great the grievance of a particular segment of our society, even supposing it is justified, nothing is gained in explanatory power and much is lost in other ways by treating political violence as "not the acts of terrorists". We can speculate on what motivated these men, and we can listen to their words on videotape if we wish; but all we know for certain about them on 7/7 is their acts rather than their mental states. They murdered those Polish girls, and that engaged couple from Hereford, among very many others. If you talk of them as Professor Geaves does, then you literally don't understand the first thing about them.

I am close to being an absolutist on the issue of free speech. I believe the state must protect the right to free expression in almost all cases save incitement to crime, incitement to violence and (a close relation of these) race hatred. It must certainly protect the right to offend. There is a corollary to the right to free speech, though, which is the knowledge that free speech is not costless. There will certainly be cases where offensive speech causes psychological harm and distress; my point is that this emotional hurt is no concern of the state, and those who suffer it have no redress in a free society other than to test in the public sphere the utterances that they find exceptionable. That will, I hope, be the fate of Professor Ron Geaves of the University of Chester. Let me encourage any readers who write for the electronic or print media to lift his name from its current obscurity, and expose it to the mockery, derision and denunciation that are his due.

The land of the rising spin

This article appears in The Times today.

THIS MONTH, the American Society of Historians for Foreign Relations will honour the author of a recent work on the role of the atom bomb in Japan’s defeat in 1945. In doing so, it will reward a pernicious thesis already appropriated by anti-Western campaigners for whom the study of history is a device for forcing pre-specified political conclusions.

The author is Tsuyoshi Hasegawa; his book is called Racing the Enemy. Unlike earlier revisionist historians, Hasegawa does not argue that a Japanese surrender might have been secured before the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb. But he depicts America’s development and use of the A-bomb as a race to secure Japan’s defeat before the Soviet Union entered the Pacific War. On this view, the Bomb was a way of countering Stalin’s regional ambitions. Hasegawa disputes that the Bomb was decisive in Japan’s surrender. He argues that Soviet entry into the war played a greater role. (The Soviet Union declared war on Japan between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.)

There is more at stake here than dry academic interpretation. Hasegawa depicts President Truman as driven by domestic pressures “to exact revenge”. He concludes: “This is a story with no heroes but no real villains.” This is an extraordinary absolution of those responsible for Pearl Harbor and the suffering of those who built the Burma Railway. It is balanced by maligning the motives of the Truman Administration, and begrudging the genuine heroism of US statesmen and servicemen. Charged with defeating an aggressive tyranny while minimising loss of life, Truman took decisions that stand up well to scrutiny.

Scholars of America’s campaign have commented on Hasegawa’s “excessive liberty in interpreting his sources”, and “extraordinarily biased and rather dishonest perspective”. Their words will have scant effect on anti-nuclear campaigners. Piling non sequitur on dogmatic assertion, Greenpeace cites Hasegawa’s account as proof that “George Bush’s dream of dominating the world through massive investments in new nuclear weapons repeats a failed project”, and that “preparations . . . to replace Trident should stop”.

There may be good reasons for these policy preferences. If so, they need to be stated independently, without the deus ex machina of a historical work of historic irresponsibility.

NOTE ON SOURCES: The full title of Hasegawa's book is Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University Press, 2005). The author and book are being honoured with the Ferrell Book Prize of the Society of Historians for Foreign Relations. The scholars whose criticisms of Hasegawa I cite are Michael Kort and D.M. Giangreco. Also see comments by Robert Newman. Professor Newman is the author of two influential books on the issue of President Truman and the Bomb: Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (1995, and reviewed here by D.M. Giangreco) and the short study Enola Gay and the Court of History, 2004 (which Amazon has enterprisingly listed, on grounds of the second word of the title, in its 'Gay and Lesbian' section). Newman is, incidentally, a longstanding activist in the American peace movement as well as a scrupulous historian concerned to give a fair and scholarly account of Truman's decision-making. He argues in Enola Gay (p. 145):

The coolly practical men in the American war department, and the politicians of Truman's White House, were not significantly vengeful. Truman recoiled from the possibility of a third atomic bomb on Japan, and ordered that it not be scheduled without his express directive. And try as one might, it is impossible to paint the promises of the Potsdam Declaration as vengeful. Disarmed soldiers were to be able to return home and resume productive lives, in contrast to Japan's enslavement of conquered Europeans and Asians; freedom of speech, religion, and thought were offered. Civilian industries would be permitted, and trade would be allowed on an equitable basis when a responsible civilian government was established. These are not the terms of a conqueror bent on vengeance.

Finally, Robert H. Ferrell, who has written many studies of Truman and for whom the Ferrell Prize is named, has a forthcoming book to be published next month called Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. I have not yet seen the book but I understand that it carries a footnote in which, ironically enough, Professor Ferrell describes Hasegawa's volume as an "unfortunate contribution".

The Greenpeace comments that I cite were published as an op-ed in The Guardian last August on what has come to be known as Hiroshima Day. Note in particular the author's highly dubious claim about an Eisenhower conversation with Henry Stimson, which is not confirmed by responsible historians in this field.