Oliver Kamm

... but before I go

Relax: this is my only encore. I've only just noticed that I unwittingly provided the raw material with which a writer for the Financial Times, Chris Wilkinson, was able to fashion a straw man in an article yesterday (online only with a subscription) entitled "A paradoxical playwright: Bertolt Brecht was a willing apologist for Stalin's tyranny. But does that devalue his art?":

It is true that, in private, Brecht's views on Stalin were considerably more ambiguous [than suggested by his welcome for Soviet tanks in East Berlin in 1953]. But this hasn't prevented a string of critics from lining up clutching hammers and sickles to beat him with. The latest of these is the journalist Oliver Kamm. Writing in The Times earlier this year, he described Brecht as "a big propagandist for . . . an orthodox communism that followed every twist of Stalin's whims"....

It is impossible to dismiss Brecht's political opinions when looking at his work in the way we might dismiss, say, Pirandello's fascism. Pirandello's views had little bearing on his plays, whereas with Brecht, as the scholar John Willett has pointed out, "no creative artist's politics were ever less independent of his work".

But equally, we should not confine ourselves to the "you're either with us or you're with the Stalinists" mentality of some critics. If Brecht's Marxism forced him, in life, into a polarised world view that necessitated his support of a red-tinted tyranny, in his art it provided an ideal base for him to explore the moral ambiguities that arise in the conflict between an individual and his social conditions....

Kamm condemns Brecht for producing "an exhortatory theatre that mirrored [his] corrosive political obsessions". But even Kamm concedes that some of his plays are actually quite good. He cites The Good Person of Szechwan and Mother Courage as plays that "transcend [Brecht's] political vision to speak to the human condition". But this is to miss the point. Brecht's broader political outlook meant precisely that the "human condition" was inseparable from the material conditions in which the individual lived.

1. I have yet to meet anyone who believes the human condition is separable from the material conditions in which it is lived. If it were, then it wouldn't be the human condition but something altogether more ethereal.

2. Of course Brecht's repugnant politics do not devalue his art. Aesthetic criteria are independent of political judgements. A good writer can use politics to illuminate deeper and more enduring issues, as Brecht did at his best. A bad writer will use his politics to shroud his literary shortcomings. The realist novels of Theodore Dreiser are a pre-eminent example of this latter tendency from the 1930s, the painfully didactic plays of Trevor Griffiths (consider his 1970s period piece The Party, in which a fictionalised Gerry Healy has a starring role) a more recent one. Brecht at his worst was like that.

3. But if a theatre critic is going to venture a political judgement, he'd better get it right. What can Wilkinson mean by (emphasis added) "Brecht's Marxism [that] forced him, in life, into a polarised world view that necessitated his support of a red-tinted tyranny"? Why would Marxism, or a polarised world view, force him into any such thing? Coincidentally, in my article that Wilkinson cites, I referred to a contemporary Marxist whose political writings I am intellectually indebted to, and who treated Brecht with due respect:

The philosopher Sidney Hook recorded in his memoirs that Brecht, when visiting him in New York in 1935, had remarked of the victims of Stalin’s show trials: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook gave him his hat and coat, and showed him the door.

Brecht was - like Maxim Gorky - an appalling man who wrote a few great works of political literature and theatre. This doesn't seem to me a particularly contentious or incomprehensible point, even if it's a morally uncomfortable one.

Intermission

This blog will be closing for the summer, partly so I can spend time writing a book. Till around the middle of August the only posts will be any articles published in the press or comment in the broadcasting media.

I wish my readers pleasant summer months.

Pedantry to little purpose

This comment appears in The Times.

THIS WEEK the Government announced plans to mark the 25th anniversary of the Falklands conflict. The former MP Tam Dalyell objected. A celebration would be a “reckless, stupid thing to do”, reinforcing his “distaste for the Prime Minister”. Dalyell is reputed to possess independent judgment and doggedness. In reality, he is the most overrated Labour parliamentarian since his fellow aristocrat Oswald Mosley.

Dalyell famously posed the “West Lothian question” against proposals for Scottish devolution in the 1970s. After devolution, English MPs would be unable to vote on Scottish domestic matters, yet Scottish MPs would vote at Westminster on the same issues as they affected England. It amounted, argued Dalyell, to the incompatibility of devolution with a unitary state.

Dalyell’s remorseless pedantry has been taken as evidence of a keen constitutional brain. Yet no one suggests parliaments for the Faeroes and Greenland threaten the stability of Denmark. There is controversy in Spain about greater Catalan and Basque autonomy, but no counterpart to the West Lothian question.

In his anti-war campaigning, Dalyell has invariably adopted the worst possible argument. In the Kosovo War, he helped to establish the Committee for Peace in the Balkans. Its impressive title was a euphemism for ignoring the popular struggle against a xenophobic Serb regime. A survey of Kosovar Albanian opinion in 1995 showed 100 per cent support for separation from Serbia.

In the Falklands War, Dalyell alleged, with no evidence but much abuse, that Margaret Thatcher had sunk the Belgrano to thwart a Peruvian peace proposal. In his tract One Man’s Falklands he casually insulted the Falkland islanders, who had “never thought through their long-term future before demanding British military help”. He dismissed human rights concerns under military rule in Argentina as “basically a metropolitan Buenos Aires problem”.

He concluded, anticipating numerous (non-existent) Tet Offensives that would mark Argentine resistance in the next quarter of a century, that “the closeness of the analogy with Vietnam has not been sufficiently considered on the British side of the Atlantic”.

To adapt the dictum of an earlier Prime Minister: after this inglorious record, a period of silence would be welcome.

UPDATE: There wasn't space in a brief piece for a longer quotation from Dalyell on the Falklands, but this one - also from his contemporary account One Man's Falklands - is extraordinary for what it tells us of the man's socialist internationalism. Dalyell believes that Europeans need to get a sense of perspective when it comes to military aggression: "Europeans are appalled by minor military aggressions and coups. In South America, if they are not regarded as routine, at least they have a familiar look."

At least Dalyell had the decency to note in his book that MPs scoffed at this argument when he presented it in the House. What an ethnocentric lot they must have been.

More on smoking bans

A reader takes issue with my liberal case for a ban on smoking in public places. Here's his interesting argument:

I'm not a smoker (or a libertarian) myself, but I am an economist who does have some misgivings about smoking bans, so thought I might send a comment on your piece that Nanny is Right that I have just seen referenced in your blog ...

You're right of course to say that smoking is an externality, although we could argue about the extent of the externality since the health effects of passive smoking seem to be poorly estimated in the sense that the standard errors are quite large, although it might be that people value having fresh-smelling clothes quite a lot.

But, notwithstanding [the lobby group] Forest's libertarian antecedents, there are other well-known ways of abating externalities, namely the use of quotas and taxes. In practice, the government has chosen a quota (of zero) smoking in public places. It seems unlikely to me that the optimal level of any kind of pollution could be zero.

The alternative, using taxation, has of course already been tried, and has been hugely successful in that the level of smoking would be much higher were it not for the tax of over £3 per pack, and in that the tax raises around £10 billion a year.

So, it doesn't seem to me that the only alternatives are a public ban or Coasian bargaining (which you then discount). If the costs of smoking are really so high then tax rises are the libertarian answer since at least they leave people to make their own choices, taking into account the social costs of their actions.

On Failed States

I intend to review at some point Noam Chomsky's new book, Failed States, but in the meantime this snippet from the July issue of Prospect caught my attention:

Failed quotes

The front cover of Failed States, Noam Chomsky's new bodice-ripper, comes emblazoned with a quote from David Goodhart, Prospect's editor. "Chomsky has an authority granted by brilliance," Goodhart is quoted as saying, but casual browsers tempted into making a snap purchase by this endorsement might like to know that in the original quote, the "brilliance" in question referred not to Chomsky's truth-to-power political analysis, but to his work in linguistics.

This particular piece of sharp practice has, I'm sure, nothing to do with Chomsky, but whoever at the publisher is responsible certainly has the example of the Master himself where it comes to manufacturing misconception.

UPDATE: The publicity material for Chomsky's book is here. The first of three examples of "Praise for Noam Chomsky" reads '"Chomsky has an authority granted by brilliance' - David Goodhart, Sunday Times". The full quotation, from an article in The Sunday Times announcing the outcome of Prospect magazine's poll for top public intellectual, reads (emphasis added): "And I think Chomsky has an authority granted by brilliance in one area." It is clear in context what Goodhart means by this. I don't blame Chomsky for the malpractice of his publisher, but malpractice it certainly is.

Oh dear

I'm all in favour of companies' providing (legal) services in response to consumer demand. I also generally think people who hold bizarre or superstitious notions should bear the costs of them, as the corollary of being free to believe them. But this story is repugnant:

Insurers have withdrawn the cover on their virginity taken out by three sisters in the event of the second coming of Christ. Essex-based Britishinsurance.com confirmed it had provided the £1m policy, but said it was reviewed on Thursday following complaints.

The firm said the women from Inverness had renewed the policy since 2000. The cover was meant to pay for the cost of bringing up Christ if one of them has a virgin birth.

Britishinsurance.com managing director Simon Burgess said it had not been the company's intention to offend anyone.

The company, which is based in Braintree, specialises in accident and unemployment insurance.

Mr Burgess said: "The people were concerned about having sufficient funds if they immaculately conceived. It was for caring and bringing up the Christ.

"We sometimes get weird requests and this is the weirdest we have had."

Mr Burgess adds that the Catholic Church is "up in arms" about the policy. The problem with this company's behaviour is not that it's offensive to Roman Catholic beliefs: there's no intrinsic reason for treating anyone's religious beliefs with respect, and none for avoiding offence to them. After I wrote a column recently on Pope Benedict's visit to Auschwitz, I received several letters from the faithful accusing me of being anti-Catholic - which I'm not, but the charge doesn't bother me. Despite deriding in the press the hollow and pernicious notion of 'Islamophobia', I have yet to receive complaints about showing disrespect, but I shall certainly bin them if and when they appear.

But I do object to corporate rapacity at the expense of the simple-minded. Leave the Three Wyrd Sisters alone. (Note also that Mr Burgess has provided insurance cover without knowing what he's insuring. The Immaculate Conception - the doctrine that Mary was conceived without sin - is not the same as the Virgin Birth.)

Labour ructions on Trident

It appears that not everyone agrees with Gordon Brown on the case for Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. The BBC reports:

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's World At One, Ms [Clare] Short accused Mr Brown of showing disrespect for "any kind of democratic process".

"It's part of his desperation that's so humiliating him to prove to the Blairites that he's as right-wing as Blair and therefore that they will keep their promise to hand over to him," she said.

Ms Short added: "It means a lot of people who were happy to see Brown take over as leader will now think there's got to be a contest and we're not willing to support him."

This is hugely encouraging. If there's one thing I, as a Labour sympathiser over many years, don't wish to see, it's a united Labour Party. My book Anti-Totalitarianism discusses at some length the debates on the British Left over 70 years on defence policy, and concludes that a Left that fails to take national security seriously is destined (and deserves) to lose. Clare Short's wing of the Labour Party frequently charged in the furious debates of the 1980s that the government of James Callaghan, just before it left office, had been responsible for commissioning Trident in the first place. This was, of course, absolutely true, and much to Callaghan's credit. The fact that (see the same BBC report) 1,700 delegates at the public sector union Unison's conference voted unanimously to oppose the renewal of Trident just goes to show how important it is that Labour's leadership pays such a forum no attention.

The British independent nuclear deterrent is a marginal part of our defence policy (our membership of Nato being the foundation of our defence), but there remains a good case for it in principle, and an overwhelming electoral argument for it. The electorate might in principle be won for a Gaullist defence policy - one that shuns alliances and is motivated by anti-Americanism - but it will not support a policy of unilateral disarmament. Much better, in that case, for Labour (and the Conservatives) to argue the case for Trident as a part of our defence capability rooted in collective security, than to allow the case for an independent deterrent to be left to isolationists and xenophobes such as UKIP or the BNP.

The inglorious record of British Communism

A fortnight ago I marked the passing of Reuben Falber, for many years Assistant General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and throughout that time a "squalid, low-life, lying, fraudulent, corrupt brute". He was the man who took delivery of large sums of money from the Soviet Embassy and laundered it through party funds.

A reader wrote to ask, among other things, if I had independent grounds for regarding Falber as corrupt and brutish. I gave my correspondent permission to post my reply on his own blog, but as he hasn't done so I assume to my complacence that I managed to answer his questions with complete success. On grounds of Falber's corruption, the answer is implicit but clear, and I reproduce what I said in my reply.

Falber secretly accepted huge sums of money, stashed it, lied about it and kept no records of any kind. As recorded by Francis Beckett (whose book I cited in my post), when asked how much money he'd got: "I haven't a clue. I never kept a tally. It was cash, it didn't go through a bank account or anything like that." Beckett, in a broadly sympathetic account of the history of CPGB, speculates that when the Soviet records are found, in all likelihood the full truth of Falber's activities will be "innocent enough" - which is an extraordinary way of putting it even if you assume that no part of the funds was used by the Falber household. But this is a huge assumption by Beckett - as he fairly records, if Falber was telling the truth in claiming that the money was paid secretly to party branches, then he must have been extremely selective in which branches to favour. When the evidence of the payments came out, the first instinct of many CPGB branches was fury that they'd never seen any of the money. There is also circumstantial evidence that the payments, which Falber claimed had ceased in 1979, continued into the 1980s. Falber's conduct was corrupt in a moral sense, and it would be unreasonably pedantic to deny it was financially corrupt as well merely because we don't have the records of where the money went.

On the matter of brutishness, the answer is even clearer, and I'm reminded of it by the forthcoming anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising. I should have thought it a non-contentious point that a senior official (not just an ordinary member) of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1960s and 1970s merited this description. The party itself supported the Soviet intervention, in a resolution on 3 November 1956. The General Secretary of the Party, John Gollan, maintained: "There is the greatest danger that reaction can obtain victory in Hungary" (quoted in Keith Laybourn and Dylan Murphy, Under the Red Flag: A History of Communism in Britain, 1999, p. 149). Seven thousand party members resigned over this.

So far as I am aware, the CPGB in its inglorious history never resiled from this position, even though it later liked to present itself as independent of hard-line pro-Sovietism and mildly criticised the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. A leading party ideologist (who we now know served as a Soviet agent) explicitly declared in 1969 that Hungary and Czechoslovakia were not comparable, and that the invasion of Hungary was justified on grounds of the potential in that nation for couner-revolution (James Klugmann, Comment, 11 October 1969, cited in Geoff Andrews, Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964-1991, p. 104).

All things considered, I stand by my description of the late Reuben Falber, and offer my commiserations to his family on their connection with an appalling man.

Hungary and the costs of containment

The BBC report of President Bush's trip to Hungary, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Uprising, draws a good parallel:

The symbolic value of a people rising up against a dictatorial regime is close to [President Bush's] heart, says the BBC's Nick Thorpe in Budapest.

When Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, many eastern Europeans remembered the destruction of the statue of Joseph Stalin in Budapest in 1956.

But Hungarians underline that they opposed the Soviet power alone, and their appeals for help from the outside world went unheeded, our correspondent adds.

Critics of the Iraq War often claim that military action was unnecessary because the US and UK were effectively containing Saddam Hussein's regime, much as Western military power and the Atlantic alliance had contained Soviet Communism during the Cold War. (This is a mainstay of the argument of mainstream politicians such as Menzies Campbell and the late Robin Cook. Obviously the position of the Leninists and Islamists of the Stop the War Coalition, who are not anti-war at all but pro-war and on the other side, is different.) The argument allegedly gains weight from the absence of WMD in post-Saddam Iraq.

In my view, this is a misreading of the stability of containment of Saddam during the 1990s. In reality, containment required far more concerted action if it was to succeed, and that action was itself unlikely. I wrote in The Guardian on the third anniversary of the war, making this point:

Many argue that the absence of WMD shows that western policy had been working. It was in reality unravelling fast, and few opponents of war treated the problem seriously. Saddam allowed intrusive inspections only because of the threat of force. Containment of his regime would have meant continuous military deployment in neighbouring states and the no-fly zones; intensified economic sanctions; inspections coercive enough to withstand Saddam's intimidation and fraud; and the support of France and Russia. Even with personalities of greater competence than Hans Blix and higher morals than Jacques Chirac, that commitment would have been inconceivable. Of the permanent members of the security council, only the US and UK could have been relied on.

But there's a further point. Anti-war critics not only overstate the effectiveness of containment, they also understate its costs. If you want to pursue the analogy with the Cold War, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 illustrates how high those costs can be. The West had no counter to the Soviets' subjugation of Hungary, because to have opposed it by any non-diplomatic means would have risked war with the Soviet Union. Direct war with the Soviets might easily and rapidly have become nuclear.

Containment of the Soviet Union in the nuclear age was the only reputable option open to us. A consistent policy of 'rollback' would have risked everything; a policy of accommodation with the Soviets, such as that urged by former Vice-President Henry Wallace in the 1948 US Presidential election, would, for reasons I won't spell out in this post, not have been a reputable course at all. But to recall containment as a desirable policy, as some politicians with short memories do, is an affront to history. It had immense costs - to the captive nations of Eastern Europe, and indeed to our own self-respect, for we were severely constrained in the aid we could give to those peoples. (It's worth recalling, incidentally, that the British and American labour movements have a worthy historical record in supporting democratic political parties and free trade unions against Soviet expansionism.)

Containment of Saddam Hussein was not the only course open to us. There was a plausible argument after the first Gulf War that containment might have worked, but it was predicated on the notion that Saddam's regime was vulnerable to internal revolt. And of course it wasn't: a regime of total terror was able to slaughter scores of thousands of Kurds and Shi'ah in a single month (March 1991) in order to maintain its power. Continuing with containment entailed great human suffering, and also great risks. Whereas the Soviet Union had been a totalitarian and expansionist power (witness its aggression by proxy in initiating the Korean War), it was susceptible nonetheless to traditional deterrence. Saddam, by contrast, launched three wars in 17 years, each of which might easily have resulted in the overthrow of his regime. We weren't bound to containment of Saddam, and containment was an inherently risky and unstable system. But more than that, and as the Hungarian precedent reminds us, containment was a morally corrupting arrangement; we were right to put a stop to it when we did, and can only regret not having done so sooner.

Resources

A reader, Paul Bogdanor (he is the son of the well-known constitutional expert Professor Vernon Bogdanor), has sent me a couple of documents that are well worth consulting.

One is a two-part study from the Journal of Human Rights of the libellous claims of Living Marxism (which is, owing to that libel, no longer living) about the supposedly faked pictures of the Serb-run Trnopolje camp. Part one can be read here, and part two here. The abstract of the article reads:

Among the many images of atrocity that emerged from the Bosnian War, the picture of Fikret Alic and others imprisoned at the Trnopolje camp in the Prijedor region stands out. Taken from a 1992 British television report that detailed the role of camps such as Omarska and Trnopolje in the ethnic cleansing strategy of the Bosnian Serb authorities, the image of Alic has become the focal point of a controversy about how the Bosnian camps were represented, and the political impact and purpose of those representations. Resulting in a legal clash between Independent Television News (ITN) and Living Marxism (LM) magazine, this controversy is the subject of this two-part article. In Part 1, the allegations concerning the filming of the Trnopolje inmates is considered in detail. In Part 2 ... the argument moves beyond the specifics of the case and the camp to an exploration of the historical, political and visual context in which those specificities are located. This involves understanding the significance of the camps in terms of the Bosnian War and the history of the concentration camps, as well as discussing the question of photography and the Holocaust to question how particular atrocities are represented. The articles conclude with the issue of intellectual responsibility and the politics of critique in cases such as these.

The article is pretty much the last word on this vexed subject of intellectual responsibility and war crimes.

Paul has also written a useful document assessing just some of the curious claims of Noam Chomsky, available here. Some of the claims refuted are bizarre and tendentious interpretations, and some outright falsehoods, but what comes out clearly is that Chomsky is not a reliable source in either facts or interpretation of post-war history and international relations.