Stuff

Apologies (for the second week running) for an absence of posts in the past week. I hope things will be up to speed again very shortly.

The main political news has, of course, been the Government's troubles at the Home Office and Health, and over John Prescott's affair. I'm with David Aaronovitch:

Right now the only permitted story is of Labour’s implosion for being (or being thought to be) sleazy, mendacious and incompetent. Consequently there is no discussion — even in the lead-up to important elections — of whether things in Britain are generally good, generally bad, whether the Government is largely doing the right or the wrong things, and whether other parties would be better or worse.

Yet, while I think this has been a pretty good Government overall, it's clearly lost authority decisively and is most unlikely to regain it under Gordon Brown (on which see Matthew d'Ancona). The local election results this week will be bloody, possibly decisively so, for Labour. The preferences of this blog are, in order of priority: first, tactical voting to defeat the combined racist vote of the BNP and Respect; secondly, tactical voting to defeat the Liberal Democrats; and thirdly, support for Labour.

On the broader issue of the convergence of the far Right and ostensibly opposed political currents, see this interesting and balanced article by George Michael (not the one you think). Professor Michael notes:

Last year, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran stirred worldwide condemnation by dismissing the Holocaust as a "myth," purportedly used as a pretext for the creation of a Jewish state in the heart of the Islamic world, one of the voices that rose to his defense was David Duke, the former Klan leader (and Louisiana representative) who says he "has dedicated his life to the freedom and heritage of European American peoples." The collaboration of Islamic militants and the extreme right cries out for further study. For there are some indications that the narrative they tell could become more mainstream.

You can, if you have an empty life, listen to me on the BBC World Service Politics UK programme, recorded last week, discussing the deployment of British forces to Afghanistan. My fellow interviewee is a Conservative MP, Adam Holloway, who has recently been in Afghanistan (and was formerly an ITN foreign affairs correspondent). He argues that the troops' task is essential but the Government hasn't prepared public opinion for the dangers; I discuss more generally the policy of regime change.

I shall in the next day or so post something on the late John Kenneth Galbraith, but note here merely the tendency of obituarists to take decent respect for the dead to absurd extremes of historical revisionism. Here is one writer - dispiritingly, a politics academic - who believes that Galbraith "was prepared to risk serious damage to his career in pursuit of truth, issuing, for example, a quite damning indictment of the Allied bombing of civilian targets in Japan when he was director of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and might have been expected to toe the official line." Galbraith (who was a director, not the director, of USSBS) stated in his memoirs, A Life in Our Times (pp. 232-3), after quoting the USSBS's conclusions about the dropping of the atomic bombs: "I had no part in writing this conclusion. By the time it appeared in the summer of 1946, I had moved on to other duties...." The author of the conclusion was Paul Nitze, whose inferences about an early Japanese surrender have been refuted, on the basis of information that USSBS had available to it at the time, by the historian Robert Newman. Galbraith's own comment in his memoirs (p. 232) that "the bombs fell after the decision had been taken by the Japanese government to surrender" is historically without merit.

While on Professor Newman's writings, see his critical account of the tendentious book Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, which I wrote about in a recent short article. Professor Hasegawa's reply to Newman is here.