Oliver Kamm

Labour's leaders

Polly Toynbee writes in The Guardian of John Reid's conference speech yesterday:

This must have been one of the most unpleasantly jingoistic, rightwing rabble-rousers a Labour conference has heard in quite a few years. This was Britishness as from the Millwall terraces. "No no-go areas," he boomed: "We will go where we please, we will discuss what we like." No fool, he's hard to fault on particulars: the poison is all in the sentiment and tone. How proudly he gloated that Cameron had found his policies too extreme. Indeed, if he was one of Cameron's team, that speech would have got him fired.

Reformed old communists have this in common: when they swing the other way, they always go that bit too far. They never take off their combat kit: the progressive social democratic gene is alien to their psyche. So there was nothing progressive about his performance yesterday.

Roy Hattersley will not be alone: his threat to shoot himself if Reid becomes leader could turn into a mass die-in of Labour supporters.

So far as I can tell, Ms Toynbee is arguing that Dr Reid would not be a suitable choice as Tony Blair's successor. Her reasoning is as tendentious as her generalisation about reformed old Communists (progressive social democracy presumably being alien to André Gide and Denis Healey, as well as my particular hero Sidney Hook, never a party member but who supported the Communist candidate for American President in 1932). I thought Reid gave a good speech, and while the evidence of his political judgement is inconclusive despite the number of ministerial posts he has held, I hope he stands for the leadership and wins. Ms Toynbee's criticisms nicely illustrate a fissure on the Left that is well worth opening up further.

I hold liberal views on most of the standard social issues that exercise Guardian readers and columnists. I part company with some of them in their solicitude for the sensibilities of those threatened by "Islamophobia" (an absurdly question-begging term that Ms Toynbee herself, unlike some of her colleagues, rightly scorns) and the civil liberties of the demonstrably shady. After the 7/7 bombings, Charles Krauthammer rightly observed in his Washington Post column:

Early news reports of the London bombings mentioned that police found no suspects among known Islamist cells in Britain. Come again? Why in God's name is a country letting known Islamist cells thrive, instead of just rolling them up?

Quite. I've been highly critical of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner for his obstructiveness in investigating the police killing of a young man wrongly believed to be a suicide terrorist. If Sir Ian Blair spent more time investigating, cracking open and cracking down on Islamist fractions, he would be dealing with, as it were, the root causes of terrorism rather than risking the lives of the innocent on the streets and on public transport. I'm pleased the Home Secretary, like the Prime Minister, plainly has the right instincts to get the police to do the job.

Argument of the week

This comes from Alex Callinicos in Socialist Worker: "The Nazis got children to spy on their parents. New Labour wants Muslim parents to spy on their children."

You'll just have to take my word for it that as well as being the principal ideologist for the racist and totalitarian Socialist Workers' Party, Callinicos is a Professor of Politics at a noted English university. (I have written about him here.)

UPDATE: My mistake: Callinicos was Professor of Politics at York University till last year. I hadn't realised that he has since moved to King's College, London (which of course is also a noted institution), where he is Professor of European Studies. My thanks to a reader at King's for this correction. I should add that one Marxist theorist of great erudition and civilised political views, my late friend Paul Hirst (this affectionate and fine obituary by his colleague Ben Pimlott, shortly himself to die prematurely, appeared in The Guardian in 2003), spoke to me highly of Callinicos's ability as a political philosopher. I mention this because you'd never work it out from reading Callinicos's columns in Socialist Worker.

"No excuses for terror"

Times columnist David Aaronovitch made a fine documentary shown on Channel 5 this week under the title "No excuses for terror". It deals with the perplexing phenomenon whereby parts of the Left either implicitly extenuate or actively ally with violent theocratic reaction. You can see it here; it's excellent.

Some of David's interviewees are my friends, who will forgive me for saying that the most cogent voice on the programme was one I hadn't heard before, making a point that hadn't occurred to me. Julie Nicholson, whose daughter Jenny was killed in the Edgware Road bombing on 7/7, commented on the video made by her daughter's murderer, Mohammad Sidique Khan. Khan's voice and finger-jabbing gestures, she said, indicated not courage but petulance. If you watch the video, you will see that she's right. Mrs Nicholson's point is more than an observation about personal psychology. It has political significance.

Those of us who share Tony Blair's pellucid assessment of terrorism are accustomed to arguing that the terrorist bombings in New York, Madrid, London, Bali and elsewhere are what they are - brutal acts serving totalitarian and xenophobic ends - rather than code for something else. When Osama bin Laden declares (as he did in his 1998 statement "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam") that "it is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God", he is not making a rhetorical plea for a sovereign Palestine on terrority marked by the pre-1967 armistice line. (I recently tried to explain this point myself to a loud but dim demagogue on Sky News.)

But there is also a prevalent notion, sometimes argued by commentators far more intelligent than George Galloway, that the terrorists of 9/11 or 7/7 were agents - albeit destructive - of idealism or even courage. One commentator I greatly respect, the late Susan Sontag, wrote in the New Yorker after 9/11: "And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." I find this - to put it no higher - a terrible misconception.

We don't know the final motivation of the suicide terrorists; we certainly have no grounds for ascribing to them courage, selflessness or idealism. To do that - witness George Clooney's simultaneously stupid and sinister film Syriana - is to posit characteristics that might in principle be diverted into more fruitful ventures. It is one step towards the notion that our Islamist enemies represent a historical force that, for all its destructiveness, calls us to account for our sins of omission and commission in foreign policy, and might be mollified if we were to rectify them.

One of the half-dozen greatest novelists in the language, Joseph Conrad, wrote in one of his two greatest novels, The Secret Agent (page 102 of the Penguin Classics edition), far more acutely than certain modern philosophers of the terrorist bomber. The character known by his nickname of The Professor (for he uses his knowledge of chemicals to manufacture explosives) is a conventional failure possessed of:

... a frenzied puritanism of ambition. He nursed it as something secularly holy. To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world, whose morality was artificial, corrupt and blasphemous. The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition.... He was a moral agent - that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance, he procured for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige. That was undeniable to his vengeful bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind - the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience.

Jenny Nicholson's killer was not a man of courage. He appears to have been an ignorant, vain and inarticulate prig, thereby representing a constant in human affairs. His filmed statement exemplified "personal impulses disguised into creeds". Whatever political action Western governments take in foreign policy will have no effect whatever on personal impulses. Our policy must be to attack the creeds and their advocates directly - breaking up their cells at home, and inflicting catastrophic military defeats on them in Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations they threaten.

London-Paris Festival

Francophiles in London, of whom I am one, will be interested in a London-Paris Festival to be held at the Royal Geographical Society and the Institut Français in South Kensington from 6-8 October. A highlight - I know this, because I heard him speak on the same subject at the Brighton Festival a couple of months ago - is Christopher Hitchens talking about Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Christopher is also in conversation with the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy under the heading:

Christopher Hitchens has always maintained that toppling Saddam and invading Iraq was both a noble and a necessary action. Can Bernard-Henri Lévy get him to change his mind?

I doubt it, I'm pleased to say.

Also at the festival, the outstanding French illustrator and author Jean-Jacques Sempé talks to his British near-equivalent Quentin Blake. For an informed appreciation of Sempé's work, I modestly recommend an article in the Telegraph by his translator, Anthea Bell (who is my mother).

On leadership

I try never merely to link to or quote another writer, for what otherwise is the purpose of a web log? But sometimes I find my own views so cogently expressed elsewhere that there is little purpose in embellishment. In his column in the Evening Standard yesterday (not online, I think), Francis Wheen recounted the shady financial dealings, influence-peddling, mendacity and foreign-policy fecklessness of a man who will address the Labour Party conference today, and concluded:

When Clinton [for it is he] joins him in Manchester tomorrow, the PM ought to feel rather encouraged to see this sleazy, dishonest and downright useless president being greeted as an itinerant saint, only a few years after disgracing himself and his office. If Slick Willie can pull it off, anyone can.

I'm chastened to recall how strongly I wished for Clinton's nomination and election in 1992 (and, to a lesser extent, his re-election in 1996). He appeared to be a representative New Democrat, aware of how far his party had divorced itself from the political mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s. I was encouraged that, in choosing his running-mate, he looked to Al Gore (for whom I then had a lot of respect), ostensibly on his right, rather than construct a 'balanced' ticket emblematic of a supposed party unity. The party's platform in 1992 used language on law and order that sounds modest and sensible - "the simplest and most direct way to restore order in our cities is to put more police on the streets" - yet was never associated with the candidatures of a McGovern or a Dukakis. Clinton's language on welfare reform and defence, and his willingness to challenge Democratic interest groups, were apt and eloquent (surprisingly so, for a man who made an interminable and disastrous nomination speech for Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democrat convention).

Yet, as Francis points out, Clinton turned out to be a useless President and an appalling human being. I hope that at least one of the delegates at the Labour Party conference has the gumption to heckle Clinton on his support for capital punishment; however unlikely to work, it may be the only way to cut through the hypocrisy and unwarranted adulation.

Meanwhile, on the Prime Minister, Stephen Pollard not only expresses my own sentiments but also - weirdly, uncannily - does so in exactly the words I would have chosen:

What a load of hypocritical tossers (pardon my language but it's what they are) those Labour members are. They've spent the past decade bitching about Blair, and now that he's off into the sunset they cheer him to the rafters. Well live with it, you idiots. You're the ones who wanted rid of him, forced him to announce his departure, and rendered him impotent. Ha-bloody-ha: now you're going to have to live with the consequence: Mr Unelectable.

Lib Dem personalities

Daniel Finkelstein comments, regarding this story: "We now know that at the last election the Lib Dem campaign to clean up politics was led by an alcoholic and financed by a fraudster." Daniel recalls this Times article in which Stephen Pollard castigates "the Lib Dems’ hypocrisy and shameful behaviour".

Periodically I have lunch with Messrs Finkelstein and Pollard. I can never get them, even in private, to throw off their natural reserve when describing the Liberal Democrats. Were he less fastidious in observing the conventions of polite debate, Daniel might have written that at the last election the Lib Dems were led by a lying alcoholic. In 2002 Charles Kennedy told a national television audience that he drank "moderately, socially, as you [Jeremy Paxman] well know". As a new book by the Times' political correspondent Greg Hurst points out, this was the occasion on which Kennedy first flatly and publicly lied about a drinking pattern that was far from moderate.

I defended Kennedy on this. Seriously. While no friend of the Lib Dems, I thought that the allegations of excessive drinking were, even if true, an invasion of privacy. I even drew a ludicrous comparison to Winston Churchill, whose political effectiveness was hardly impaired by his prodigious alcohol consumption. And I was wrong. Whereas Churchill was a heavy drinker who was a great political leader, Kennedy was regularly rendered incapable of carrying out his duties even as leader of a minor party, and his party colluded in keeping this from becoming publicly known. In this case (as opposed to, say, Paddy Ashdown's marital infidelity), a politician's personal failings were a matter of legitimate public interest. Supposing the last general election had resulted in a hung parliament, Kennedy might have entered a coalition government and held a senior Cabinet post that he could not have carried out. (Defence? Health? Leader of the House?)

I find this a scandalous reflection on the Liberal Democrats. A debilitating illness, such as Roosevelt's incapacity through polio (which was successfully hidden from the public), need not impair a politician's effectiveness. But Kennedy's alcoholism incontestably did affect how he spoke and behaved in public. The Lib Dems perpetrated a lie, which eventually unravelled only because journalists found documentary evidence of the truth and not because the party discharged what it ought to have regarded as a civic obligation.

The pacifist conscience

When the Christian pacifist Norman Kember was rescued from his abductors in Iraq by the SAS, I commented, of his reaction: "Servicemen took personal risks to free the pacifist captives; tardiness in expressing thanks has the mark of the dogmatist. That is a politer term than bigot, but in this case the difference is a matter only of degree."

I note that a tearful Professor Kember justified himself in an address to a Christian festival this month, as reported by the heartwarming Inspire magazine ("stories to lift your spirits").

At the time Norman was criticised for what some public and press saw as a reluctance to thank his rescuers. Today, he said: “It was one of the strange things in life, we went in peace and came out with the SAS. I’m very grateful to them for releasing me.”

“I still disagree and still feel strongly that armed violence is not the way to solve international conflicts and I said that at the same time as I thanked them.”

There were also those that described Norman as irresponsible for travelling outside the safety zone, which they said put his life and the lives of his rescuers at risk. He contended: “My son-in-law is a volunteer lifeboat man, who goes out to rescue stupid yachtsmen that do silly things.

“People may say I did something silly there but I was rescued by people who, by being in the forces, chose to put their lives at risk so I don’t think that’s a valid argument.”

Unsurprisingly, he's missed the force of the criticism. Yes, British servicemen in Iraq voluntarily put their lives at risk; but the risks they run are not those of lifeboatmen or firemen. Soldiers risk their lives by volunteering for combat. Professor Kember believes they are wrong to do this. That is why Professor Kember is not only graceless but also hypocritical.

Stuff

Apologies for the paucity of posts last week; I was unwell, and am getting back to things. Here are some stories I noticed.

Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post writes aptly:

First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.

And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday's craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam -- this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.

In today's world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.

Moderate voices urge sensitivity to deeply held religious beliefs, and a willingness to apologise where offence is caused. Should He - as I doubt - exist at all, God spare us from moderate voices. Free speech does cause hurt, and - with the exception of incitement to crime - there is nothing wrong in this.

A rather predictable piece by Roy Hattersley in The Times urges mistakenly:

If anybody in Labour’s leadership is interested in the ideas on which “renewal” could be built, Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism, published 50 years ago this month, provides the classic formula for relating the ideals of social democracy to the realities of the modern world.

By "the ideals of social democracy", Hattersley means equality of outcome. This has precious little to do with the realities of the modern world. I'm in favour of economic redistribution, but on grounds of autonomy rather than equality. If it's equality of outcome you want, the quickest route may be to damage the quality of secondary education, as Crosland did quite effectively. For a more sober perspective on New Labour and Crosland, see a letter by Bill Rodgers in the current issue of Prospect:

In historic perspective, and despite Iraq, the Blair governments will probably stand the test of time against the running-down years of Wilson and Callaghan. Tony Crosland himself was not a successful minister, and was passed over as chancellor of the exchequer, the job he really wanted, in favour of both Roy Jenkins—as home secretary the one unqualified success of the 1964 government—and Denis Healey. Crosland's real influence was in the 1950s, before he became a minister.

if there were an award for political evasion of the week, it would be won by The Guardian's leader last Friday on the black American singer Paul Robeson, to whom a memorial was unveiled last week in London. Robeson was courageous in his opposition to racism at home, but that's no excuse for the leader writer to add by way of feeble extenuation of Robeson's more disreputable causes: "In the second half of his life, his pro-communist views made him a pariah in his own land. He was a complex and controversial figure."

The historian Harvey Klehr, who has done much to reveal from the Venona decrypts and other sources the extent to which the Soviet Union infiltrated American institutions, wrote in Commentary in May 1989, with reference to a sympathetic biography of Robeson by Martin Duberman (link requires fee):

In 1949 Robeson arrived in Moscow in the midst of Stalin's notorious anti-Zionism campaign. Uneasy at his inability to find old Jewish friends, he asked to see Itzik Feffer, the noted Yiddish writer. Feffer was brought from prison to Robeson's hotel, where he silently communicated that their conversation was being bugged. Other Jewish cultural leaders, he was able to convey, had already been purged; drawing his hand across his throat, he indicated what was to be his own fate as well. Robeson's response was to include a tribute to Feffer during his last Moscow concert. Duberman extenuatingly suggests that the gesture was "all that he could have done without directly threatening Feffer's life," but that life was doomed anyway; more telling is that on his return to the United States, Robeson vehemently denied the existence of Soviet anti-Semitism.

Feffer was shot in 1952.

Big voice, too many false notes

This article appears in The Times today.

THIS WEEK the Barbican Centre in London is staging a John Pilger Film Festival. To one admirer, Pilger is “a lone campaigning voice in a rising tide of current affairs dross”. Even some commentators more wary of Pilger’s politics declare admiration for his impassioned film-making. Yet Pilger’s documentaries are full of falsehoods. They operate by misdirection, simultaneously denouncing one form of injustice while ignoring or denying others.

Pilger gained prominence in Indochina in the 1970s. According to one contemporary who knew him there, Pilger was a courageous polemicist rather than a reporter. He saw what he wished to see and ignored the rest. Pilger’s documentaries about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge inspired humanitarian fundraising, yet failed to disclose that Communist Vietnam, having invaded Cambodia and installed a puppet regime, was trying to control which starving people were fed and which were not.

Such omissions go beyond partisanship. In asserting what the evidence will not support, Pilger displays little research and culpable incompetence. In a 1982 exposure of slavery in Thailand he “bought” a young girl, only to find he had been duped. A 1990 documentary alleging that SAS members had trained the Khmer Rouge resulted in a libel writ that Central Television settled at substantial cost. Pilger’s 1983 film The Truth Game, alleging systematic mendacity by Western governments over nuclear weapons, was revealed by two authorities to be stuffed with errors. Pilger’s plaintive response that lots of viewers had sent him supportive letters illustrated a stark incomprehension of how historical claims are properly evaluated.

Pilger’s 1994 film Death of a Nation condemned Western complicity in the oppression of East Timor by Indonesia. Yet Osama bin Laden declares the now independent Timor “part of the Islamic world” and rightly Indonesia’s. By his own perverse logic, Pilger — who indecently asserted that “the bombs of July 7 were Blair’s bombs”, on account of the Iraq war — ought to admit responsibility for provoking Islamist terror.

That is not a superficial debating point. Pilger explicitly supports the insurgency in Iraq and describes coalition troops as “legitimate targets”. By reputation the exemplar of radical conscience, Pilger turns out to be the voice of brutishness.

Celebrating John Pilger

I posted a comment a couple of weeks ago pointing to the oddity of anti-war campaigners' attacking President Truman over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagaski. I explained in the post why, if I were an opponent of Tony Blair's foreign policies, I would avoid any such arguments, for fear of confirming the claim made by interventionists that current Anglo-American policies stand in an established tradition of liberal democratic internationalism and anti-totalitarianism. I haven't yet written the follow-up post on why the historical claims made by the critics of Truman are wrong, but will do so shortly. This post is indirectly connected to the subject, and is prompted by my noticing (through Stephen Pollard) that the Barbican Centre in London is holding a John Pilger Film Festival this month.

There is a widespread view that, while Pilger's political judgements of recent years are not to be taken seriously (for example his assertion in 2003 that "the current American elite is the Third Reich of our times"), his earlier documentary films remain an important as well as impassioned source of social criticism. I've seen a fair amount of Pilger's work, and I don't agree with this. His films are loaded and flawed; his political judgements are histrionic; his research is nugatory. These are longstanding characteristics.

Pilger's best known work is his reporting from Cambodia in the late 1970s, depicting the horrific consequences of Pol Pot's despotism. I recall watching this at the time, and finding excruciating Pilger's account of these depravities. Yet there was something wrong - or rather, something missing. It was picked up by Clive James, then television critic of The Observer, whose account I'll quote at length because - always an astute and informed commentator as well as critic - he got Pilger's methods exactly right. In The Observer, 4 November 1979 (and included in his collected television criticism The Crystal Bucket, 1981, p. 228), James reviewed Pilger's film Cambodia: Year Zero. James commended Pilger's showing the hideousness of Pol Pot's crimes, but added:

Nevertheless, Pilger might have found a few unkind things to say about the North Vietnamese, who, I seem to remember, have recently taken to offering their internal enemies the opportunity of going on long yachting expeditions with insufficient regard to safety precautions [these were the 'Boat People']. Pilger loudly accused the international relief organisations of playing politics, but forgot to mention the possibility that the North Vietnamese might be playing politics themselves. The way he was telling it, they were philanthropists. He was there and we were here, but it was hard to quell the suspicion that one of the reasons he was there was that North Vietnam likes the way he presents such a neat, easily understandable picture.

With generosity and understatement, James identified the hollowness even of Pilger's most celebrated work. His point about the Vietnamese was confirmed by those who, unlike James, were there rather than here, such as the journalist and author William Shawcross. A year later, Pilger's follow-up programme Cambodia: Year One was broadcast. Clive James commented in his Observer column on 14 September 1980 (reprinted in his collected criticism Glued to the Box, 1983, pp. 116-7):

In Cambodia: Year Zero Pilger claimed that the North Vietnamese wanted to help the Cambodians but that aid from Western relief agencies was tardy. In my review of the programme I said that there seemed to be a lot of independent evidence to suggest that the Western relief agencies were being denied access to Cambodia by the North Vietnamese. Pilger wrote a letter to the Observer calling me a McCarthyite for saying this, but in fact subsequent evidence proved that he had indeed been wrong on this very point.

However well the North Vietnamese are behaving now - and apparently they are behaving so well that Pilger deems it tactless to mention the Boat People - there can no longer be much doubt that they were obstructive then. Yet for some reason Pilger can't bring himself to modify his account of the past. Does this obstinacy spring from pride at being the man on the spot, or is he afraid that a full picture of reality will be too complicated for us to grasp?

Even in Pilger's most highly regarded and influential work, the essential qualities shine through. His acounts are partial or unreliable; when their deficiencies are pointed out, his response is to bluster. Imagine - if you haven't seen it - what the rest of his output is like. Of those films I've seen, the worst of the worst is The Truth Game, screened in 1983 at the zenith of the influence of Europe's anti-nuclear movement. I'm disappointed this isn't being shown in the Barbican's season, as I would like to see it again. From what I recall, its production values were low, with Pilger's portentous insinuations of official deceit combining with the quaintest visual aids. But a more professional film would still have foundered on Pilger's message. In the words of Sir Lawrence Freedman (The Price of Peace: Living with the Nuclear Dilemma, 1986, p.13) The Truth Game was "a tendentious television documentary which had sought to demonstrate how mendacious governments were in handling nuclear issues but which was in fact riddled with errors of its own."

Pilger's thesis is relevant to my opening comments on Truman and the A-bomb because, like the campaigners I have quoted, Pilger dates the supposed mendacity of Western governments on the nuclear issue from the dawn of the nuclear age. It is a constant theme in his account of US foreign policy. For example, he wrote in the New Statesman, 18 August 2003:

The official truth was that the bomb was dropped to speed the surrender of Japan and save Allied lives. Today, as the public becomes more attuned to the scale of government deception, this was probably the biggest lie of all. As the historian Gar Alperovitz, among others, has documented, US political and military leaders, knowing that Japan's surrender was already under way, believed the atomic bombing was unnecessary.

In my next post on this issue, I'll demonstrate with reference to an overwhelming body of recent scholarship (some of whose authors I'm fortunate to count among my correspondents) that Pilger's historical claims are nonsense and his sources untrustworthy. (As one genuine scholar of the US and WWII, Robert Maddox of Pennsylvania State University, puts it in his Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision, 1995, p. 2, "despite the appearance of meticulous documentation [Alperovitz's work] was based on pervasive misrepresentations of the historical record".) But my point in this post is to demonstrate how Pilger reasons and the naïve way he arrives at his conclusions.

As it happens, The Truth Game received an appalled critical reception. Lawrence Freedman, then as now Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, and author of the standard account of The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, wrote with William Shawcross in the magazine New Society, 17 March 1983, a long account of the film's errors, entitled "Games with the Truth". If you have access to a library with back copies of the magazine (which has long since been submerged in The New Statesman), it's well worth reading the article and following the controversy it generated. (So far as I know there is no online version. The libraries I use are the London Library in St James Square and the University of London Library at Senate House, both of which have print copies.)

Freedman and Shawcross's article had to be long, because Pilger's errors were so serious and numerous. The authors concluded temperately:

In this article we have sought to examine only a few of the more startling errors in the 'unofficial truth' Pilger proposes. Not every assertion in The Truth Game is wrong. But so many are that it canot be treated as a serious analysis.

Pilger replied, intemperately, to Freedman and Shawcross in the next issue. The opening words of his article are, to my mind, an encapsulation of his method and limitations: "I would like to thank the many people who have written and phoned, offering me studies and sources...."

These, then, were "studies and sources" proffered after Pilger's film had been aired. Amazingly, Pilger regarded his thesis as a work in progress rather than as a conclusion to be inferred from scrutiny of the historical sources. Pilger's premise appeared to be that truth in this area could be determined by the extent to which people shared his political views rather than his fidelity to primary and scholarly secondary sources. He protested in his article that he had received many letters in response to the film, of which 900 were in favour and only three against: "With one exception," he announced, "we have never known such a positive response to a film." So, by Pilger's lights, that settled that one.

The damage was done. Despite having one further go, which merely compounded his difficulties, Pilger had disclosed more than was strictly prudent about his criteria for historical inquiry. Concluding the debate, Freedman wrote:

Our concern is not, as Pilger seems to think, to obscure his thesis by 'smearing' it, but to point out that it has no factual basis. Perhaps we are being mundane, but we simply think that those engaging in the nuclear debate, on either side, should show respect for the evidence and for the audience. Pilger has not done so. We are pleased that his friends have sent him 'studies and sources'; we hope he now uses them.

Pilger is well known for the extravagance of his rhetoric and his emotive presentation. But these are less serious deficiencies than the way he treats historical sources. Perhaps it is because he believes so strongly in the notion of official deceit that Pilger disregards historical inquiry when forcing his prespecified conclusions. But whatever the reason, that's what he does, and that's what deprives his work of any redeeming characteristic.