Oliver Kamm

Scientology again

I and others have posted recently in support of the BBC journalist John Sweeney for his brave reporting on the sinister Church of Scientology. My local paper, the Brighton & Hove Argus has since recalled an earlier investigation of the cult, whose headquarters are nearby:

In 1994, The Argus published a damning exposé of the East Grinstead-based "religion".

Former chief reporter Paul Bracchi, who secretly infiltrated the cult, remembers how its followers relentlessly threatened and pursued him in revenge for criticising their deceptive and manipulative methods. Here Mr Bracchi, who now lives in London, tells the chilling story of how he was stalked and intimidated for months afterwards, even receiving a bullet in the post at The Argus headquarters in Hollingbury.

It's worth reading in full. Note again how the comments at the end of the article are clearly orchestrated.

I noted a couple of years ago, in another context, that Sweeney has the best of enemies. In the words of George Galloway MP: "John Sweeney on the BBC the other week, the cheerleader in chief for imperialist wars everywhere on the globe, can always be dragged out to make up and make a propaganda film."

I'm proud of him.

Too much "understanding"; not enough condemning

You know exactly the type of reasoning. Here's the Liberal Democrat peer, then an MP, Jenny Tonge after her sacking from her party's front bench in 2004: "I was just trying to say how, having seen the violence and the humiliation and the provocation that the Palestinian people live under every day and have done since their land was occupied by Israel, I could understand and was trying to understand where [suicide bombers] were coming from."

Of such rationalisations for terrorism, the historian and former Irish cabinet minister Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote - in the context of Northern Ireland - many years ago (Herod: Reflections on Political Violence, 1978, pp. 11-12):

What was most oppressive was not the legitimation of violence in itself, but the frivolity of this legitimation, the refusal to see that it was legitimation, or that legitimation was important. 'Violence is a by-product of the partition of our country' is a statement by a political leader - Mr Jack Lynch, now [1978] Taoiseach [of a Fianna Fail government] - who has often and sincerely condemned the IRA. But if you tell him that in that and similar statements he and his friends have provided the IRA with its charter of legitimacy, and that it is a sense of legitimacy which sustains a fighting force and keeps up the killing, then he will look at you with those hurt eyes: 'How can you say that of me?'

The form of the argument has been dissected by philosophers including Michael Walzer (see his "Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses", in Arguing About War, 2004, pp. 51-66) and my friend Norman Geras here. I will point merely to one pragmatic objection, which is implied by Norman's comments in the post I have linked to. Once you grant legitimacy to violence by invoking its supposed "root causes", there is no inherent reason for failing to apply it more widely.

I have seen today probably the apotheosis of such argument, and certainly confirmation of my point. It comes from Pat Buchanan. Buchanan is a sometime contender for the Republican Presidential nomination and co-founder of the American Conservative magazine. He has, as reported by the Anti-Defamation League in 1991, a "disturbing pattern of baiting Jews and attacking Israel". He is an isolationist and - I have no hesitation in applying the term - an anti-war campaigner. This is what he has to say this week in support of the campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination by the paleo-libertarian Congressman Ron Paul (emphasis added):

Rudy [Guiliani, in a candidates' televised debate] implied that Ron Paul was unpatriotic to suggest the violence against us out of the Middle East may be in reaction to U.S. policy in the Middle East. Was President Hoover unpatriotic when, the day after Pearl Harbor, he wrote to friends, “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten.”

Pearl Harbor came out of the blue, but it also came out of the troubled history of U.S.-Japanese relations going back 40 years. Hitler’s attack on Poland was naked aggression. But to understand it, we must understand what was done at Versailles after the Germans laid down their arms based on Wilson’s 14 Points. We do not excuse — but we must understand.

Some years ago Buchanan wrote a disgraceful book, A Republic, Not an Empire, 1999, which maintained that our side's security guarantee to Poland in 1939 was inexcusable provocation. To plead for "understanding" of Hitler's aggression against Poland at least has the merit of consistency.

It makes no difference to the disrepute of Buchanan's position but is incidentally worth mentioning that his historical argument is illiterate. German surrender in 1918 was not based on President Wilson's Fourteen Points. Wilson had promulgated those Points on 8 January 1918 - without consulting Britain and France, who were not formally "allies" but "associated powers" of the United States. Germany belatedly sought peace not in January but in October of that year - after demonstrating an altogether different understanding of a peace settlement (with its imposed Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on the nascent Bolshevik regime) and an unabashedly aggressive stance towards British and American civilians (with the sinking of the passenger ship the Leinster).

It was thus inevitable and reasonable that Wilson - to whom the new German Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, turned to negotiate peace terms - would insist that matters had moved on. A negotiated settlement had to prevent future German aggression and secure Germany's transition to a constitutional state. The notion that the Versailles Treaty imposed a punitive peace is a myth. The Treaty in reality wasn't harsh enough. Had it imposed partition on Germany it might have stymied the rise of Nazism. It would also have dealt with the real "root cause" of WWI: an autocratic, militarist and expansionist German state bent on war. Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, the infamous "war guilt" clause specifying Germany's responsibility for war, was strictly correct.

(Conspiracies do happen in statecraft, and German planning for war was an instance. The historian Fritz Fischer, of the University of Hamburg, concluded in the 1960s, from archival research, that German war plans had been formed at a War Council called by Kaiser Wilhelm in December 1912. There is debate about how far the so-called Fischer school is justified in this claim; but to my knowledge, while there are differences of emphasis among scholars of German history, no one has refuted the central case. A useful English-language obituary of Fischer, summarising his contributions, can be found here. I would be completely astonished if Pat Buchanan were familiar with this literature.)

I said the historical issue was incidental to the quality - or lack of it - of Buchanan's position, but in fact there may be a slight relevance. There must be few pundits in the UK more pro-German than I, but it is of course the Federal Republic established in 1949 whose political culture I admire. The reason for my admiration is that the nation then broke completely not only with Nazism but also with the traditions of xenophobia, militarism and authoritarianism that had (excepting the brief and doomed Weimar experiment) been integral to Germany's approach to the world since the mid-1890s (the so-called Weltpolitik). With inconsistency, sometimes imprudence, for a long time criminal insouciance, and massive loss of life (especially, for Britain, in 1914-18), our side helped transform Germany to a constitutional order anchored in the liberal West. All my readers (excepting probably one: hello, Mr Irving) will share my view on the tardiness of the West's response to Nazi aggression. It's important to stress that there was also far too much "understanding" of Wilhelmine aggression after the fact. There may be times for dealing with autocrats less absolute than Hitler; there is never a time for regarding them as legitimate state actors whose feelings we must empathise with.

Debunking Rommel

Among the catastrophes engineered by Nazi Germany was its prolonging by at least two years a war it had already lost. The decisive turn was the string of German defeats at El Alamein (the second battle lasted from 23 October to 4 November 1942), Stalingrad (German surrender came in February 1943) and the battle of Kursk (July 1943). The early date of the first of those defeats almost certainly contributed to the flowering of an unjustly favourable historical reputation for the defeated Field Marshal Rommel. There was an important story last week in Der Spiegel (in English here):

Gentleman warrior, military genius. The legend of Erwin Rommel, the German Field Marshal who outfoxed the British in North Africa, lives on. But a new TV documentary seeks to correct that image by arguing that his victories nearly brought the Holocaust to the Middle East.

If Erwin Rommel, lauded as a master military tactician even by his enemies, had managed to fight his way through North Africa, he would have sealed the fate of thousands of Jews who had fled to Palestine from the Nazi terror in Europe.

A new documentary broadcast on Germany's ZDF television channel this week seeks to correct Rommel's image as a gentleman warrior whose campaigns in North Africa weren't connected with the murderous wars of destruction Nazi Germany unleashed in Europe.

Separately, recently published research by two Stuttgart-based historians, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, claims that Hitler had worked out plans to extend the Holocaust to the Middle East, and that the Nazis had forged an alliance with Arab nationalists who wanted to drive the Jewish refugees out of Palestine -- a murderous version of German-Arab friendship founded on common hatred of Jews. Jews living in the Middle East were petrified by Rommel's victories. After seizing the British fortress of Tobruk in Libya in June 1942 he set his sights on the Suez Canal, on Palestine and the oil fields of the Middle East.

Fortunately, Rommel never reached Suez. Had he been successful, a pax Germanica would have followed the same pattern as in occupied Europe. The fate of Jewry in Palestine would have been entirely predictable. As the article goes on to note, Hitler had his willing auxiliaries in the region. Rommel's benign historical reputation derives from his failure and suicide, and nothing else.

Kouchner and Iraq

I noted yesterday the peculiarity of The Guardian's publishing an article purporting to be about Bernard Kouchner by someone who doesn't speak French, has no background in French politics, and evinces no knowledge of the central aspects of the new foreign minister's long and notable career. That, I'm afraid, is just to start with. Let us now turn to the argument - such as it is - of the article, by the blogger Neil Clark, who writes:

It's not a bad reward for being proved wrong. Bernard Kouchner, alone among prominent members of the French Socialist party in welcoming US-led military intervention against Iraq, has ended up not in the political doghouse but in the Quai D'Orsay, as the foreign minister of France.

Here, by contrast, is an article from Le Monde last Friday, entitled "La dernière mission du docteur Kouchner", which quotes the foreign minister directly:

Sur l'Irak, il rappelle que, sans partager le ton de la diplomatie française à l'époque, il était contre la guerre. "Ma position, nous dit-il, c'est celle que j'ai exposée dans un point de vue intitulé "Ni la guerre ni Saddam", publié par Le Monde le 4 février 2003", alors que les troupes anglo-américaines se préparaient à l'assaut. "C'est la seule que j'aie défendue, et j'écrivais : "Avant tout, nous souhaitons que les membres du Conseil de sécurité (de l'ONU) organisent sans délai une conférence internationale qui mette en lumière les exactions de Saddam Hussein et amplifie la pression conduisant à son départ, au lieu de tout faire pour fabriquer un nouveau héros. Nous ne souhaitons pas la guerre, mais nous ne voulons pas que le martyre du peuple irakien se poursuive. Non à la guerre, non à Saddam Hussein.""

Here is my translation (the ellipses indicate merely where I have taken out the reporters' interpolations):

Regarding Iraq, [Kouchner] recalls that, without sharing the tone of French diplomacy at the time, he opposed the war. "My position ... is the one I expounded in a viewpoint entitled 'Neither war nor Saddam', published in Le Monde on 4 February, 2003.... It is the only one I have defended. I wrote: 'Above all, we wish the members of the UN Security Council to organise without delay an international conference to make clear the abuses of power of Saddam Hussein and increase the pressure leading to his departure, instead of doing everything to manufacture a new hero. We do not wish for war, but we do not want the martyrdom of the Iraqi people to continue. No to war, no to Saddam Hussein.""

It was, indeed, a very different tone from that of President Chirac's diplomacy. For reasons I argued here, in a review of Paul Berman's fine book Power and the Idealists, I doubt that Kouchner's proposals could have succeeded; a rupture in European diplomacy was inevitable. But I wish they'd been tried, and that Kouchner had been a leading figure with Tony Blair in influencing policy towards Saddam. Many disasters for the people of Iraq might have been mitigated or avoided that way.

Counterfactuals about European diplomacy, while of great historical interest, are not however the subject of this post, which can be stated succinctly. The central "fact" of Clark's article is wrong. Kouchner opposed military intervention in Iraq; he said so at the time, and publicly. How much more public can you get than writing an opinion column in one of the world's great newspapers? Clark, in short, wrote an article on a subject that he knew literally not the first thing about, and that anyone reading the French press last week would have been more competent to discuss. Clark was never going to be in that fortunate position, because he can't read French, but it would still have been possible for him to test his thesis against the evidence of Kouchner's well publicised contemporary statements in English. Here, for example, is a report of a lecture he gave at Harvard in March 2003:

While strongly denouncing war in Iraq, Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontieres) founder Bernard Kouchner called for the removal of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power at a special lecture, "Iraq: The International Dilemma," on March 14 in Snyder Auditorium.... An audience member who identified himself as an Iraqi insisted there is no alternative to the war, but Kouchner replied that removal of Hussein "by any means" is not the way to go.

For good measure, Clark's article goes on to condemn "the pro-war Democratic senator Joe Lieberman". It's a comparatively small point, but Lieberman in fact was returned to the Senate in 2006 running as an Independent, and is listed in Senate records as an "Independent Democrat".

Whether you agree with him or not, Bernard Kouchner is - quite apart from his diplomatic office - among the most significant figures in European public life. He, his compatriots and The Guardian's readers deserve better than this.

Kouchner's appointment

This is a tardy comment on the appointment of Bernard Kouchner as French foreign minister. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's comments are noteworthy:

"It's an amazing appointment, a stunning event in French foreign policy," said Richard Holbrooke, the former American ambassador to the United Nations who negotiated the peace agreement for Bosnia and is one of Kouchner's closest friends.

"He's motivated by an anti-totalitarian drive whether he sees injustice from the left or the right," Holbrooke said. "It will be very positive for U.S.-French relations because he does not come with a visceral anger towards the American 'hyperpower.' "

Kouchner's appointment is a shrewd move in domestic politics, as it throws the Socialists, who have now expelled Kouchner from membership, into confusion and deprives them of a prominent figure. Sarkozy has simply outmanoeuvred his opponents, much as François Mitterrand proved a formidable tactician against his nominal allies, the Communists, in the 1970s while being part of the Union de la Gauche. (It's often forgotten that the Socialists were initially much the junior party to the Communists.)

More important, though, is Kouchner's philosophical stance. There is an excellent account of this, and of Kouchner's place among the soixante huitards, the rebellious generation of 1968, in Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists. (A new edition has just been published that includes a foreword - which I have not read - by Holbrooke. I reviewed the first edition of the book here.) Some of the less informed commentary in the British press appears unaware that Kouchner has been a prominent figure in debates over humanitarian intervention since long before the Iraq war. In some respects he is a more Blairite figure than Tony Blair.

Kouchner's great achievement was the founding in 1971 of Médecins Sans Frontières, which drew on his experience and that of other aid workers in the Biafran crisis. MSF's significance is aptly described by David Rieff in an invigorating but flawed book A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, 2002, p. 83:

It is, in an important sense, the conscience of the humanitarian world. For all its self-confidence (some, even within MSF, would say arrogance), it is constantly reexamining its criteria in terms of both its moral and its operational presuppositions, refusing to conform and play the obedient member of the "humanitarian community", and attempting to chart new directions for humanitarian action.

Yet instead of contenting himself with being one of the great and good among humanitarian NGOs, Kouchner insisted that humanitarian intervention needed to be an axiom of state policy and not merely the voluntary sector. He declared (as quoted by Rieff, p. 97), "It is not so much that humanitarians must learn to be political as that states must learn to be humanitarian." It was partly this notion that led to Kouchner's highly public break with MSF and his founding of Médecins du Monde in 1980, and to his accepting the role of special representative of the United Nations secretary general in Kosovo. Clearly his is a controversial view - which I subscribe to and have argued in numerous fora, so will not rehearse here. But you can't sensibly comment on Kouchner's foreign policy stance without looking at this background (well covered by, for example, this profile of Kouchner by Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times from 2000 - link requires fee). Kouchner's is, as Holbrooke says, an amazing appointment - in the best sense.

NOTE: There is a secondary issue, but one worth noting in passing. If you look at the post below this one, on an unrelated subject, you'll find a quotation from an astute observer and longstanding resident of the UK, Agnès Poirier, writing in Libération. That newspaper is very roughly comparable to - though much younger than - The Guardian (for which Agnès also writes regularly), being a notable paper of record with a left-of-centre editorial stance. For comment on UK issues, Libération will naturally turn to a writer who knows the politics, culture and language of this country. You will not find comparable enlightenment from a piece in The Guardian this week about Bernard Kouchner from someone who does not speak French, has no background in French politics, and evinces no awareness of Kouchner's experience in Biafra and MSF. (The article is here. As some readers may recall, last year I noted the reliance of its author, Neil Clark, on "information" gleaned from an obscure group that promotes Srebrenica-denial, and his inaccurate representation of that source to an editor.) For an informed perspective from a critic of the new French president, I recommend a cogent short book Agnès wrote last year called Le modèle anglais: une illusion française. It is the best argument I have come across for French exceptionalism, and it makes many serious criticisms of, among other things, "la presse d’outre-Manche".

The Tyranny of Moderation: Respect and Civility are the Enemies of Free Speech

This article appears in the current issue of Index on Censorship.

‘The traditional balance between free speech and respect for the feelings of others is evidently becoming harder to sustain,’ lamented the columnist and panjandrum Simon Jenkins in The Sunday Times. He was writing of the controversy then raging over the publication by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed. ‘The best defence of free speech can only be to curb its excess and respect its courtesy,’ Jenkins concluded.

A year later, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and its director stood trial, in a case brought by two Muslim organisations, for publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion (‘injure stigmatisant un groupe de personnes à raison de sa religion’). The magazine had reproduced the offending cartoons and added one of its own for the cover.

Jenkins is the voice of moderation and civility. A declared libertarian, on homosexual law reform to fox hunting, he perceives that a fair society strives to hold values in balance rather than pursue absolutist demands for one at the expense of another. An American equivalent might be the writer KA Dilday. Commenting on the Charlie Hebdo case on the openDemocracy website, she protests that she is ‘not a great believer in policing speech’. Yet she does see ‘some sense of justice’ in such proceedings. They are, after all, effective in stimulating debate and drawing attention to grievance, in a way that France’s ‘warrior-philosophers’ in support of the word do not acknowledge.

The voice of moderation, civility and balance is, in short, politically toxic. It makes the false assumption that having regard to the feelings of others – a virtue in personal affairs – is any concern of public policy. It urgently needs to be rebuffed.

The conflict between religious sensibilities and freedom of publication long predates the Danish cartoons affair. Yet, in British politics and society, the main complainants till the 1990s were orthodox Christians, and their stated concerns were of a general erosion in mores. In 1977, Mary Whitehouse on behalf of her National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association won a famous legal victory in a private prosecution against the newspaper Gay News. Her objection was to a poem depicting Christ as a promiscuous homosexual, which she claimed was a blasphemous libel against the Christian faith. Even at the time, the conviction was widely seen as a legal idiosyncrasy and a social anachronism. Had Mrs Whitehouse couched her claim instead as a complaint about injury to the feelings of Christian believers, she would have had no legal recourse and almost certainly been ignored by mainstream opinion. Yet she would have been anticipating a notion that has in the last two decades become not only common in those same circles but almost axiomatic among some of them.

More than a decade later, Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for the murder of a British citizen, Salman Rushdie, for writing a novel. Muslim leaders in the Indian subcontinent had already condemned the book, The Satanic Verses, for containing insults to Islam. The fatwa made the issue a central one of international politics; and at that point a distinctive claim emerged in western debate.

As in many events of recent British political history, one of the most informative sources – if often unintentionally so – is the voluminous published diaries of former cabinet minister Tony Benn. In his diary entry for 15 February 1989, Benn describes a debate on the Rushdie case held at a meeting of the Campaign Group of left-wing Labour MPs. Some of the responses he records, although cliché-ridden, are recognisably traditional statements of radical politics: ‘Mildred Gordon [a former Trotskyite who had become an MP in her 60s] said all fundamentalists and all established Churches were enemies of the workers and the people.’ But Benn then turns to Bernie Grant, MP for Tottenham, now deceased, who was often wrongly described as among Britain’s first black MPs. Benn states: ‘Bernie Grant kept interrupting, saying that the whites wanted to impose their values on the world. The House of Commons should not attack other cultures. He didn't agree with the Muslims in Iran, but he supported their right to live their own lives. Burning books was not a big issue for blacks, he maintained.’

The notion that free speech was an ethnocentric imposition on other cultures, to which a properly egalitarian politics would extend respect, has, in a less crude and populist form, developed mightily since. The soft form of that principle is that a culture founded on the free play of ideas needs to exercise restraint in the face of the sensibilities of others. As the Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has put it: ‘Instead of being obsessed with laws and rights – approaching a tyrannical right to say anything – would it not be more prudent to call upon citizens to exercise their right to freedom of expression responsibly and to take into account the diverse sensitivities that compose our pluralistic contemporary societies?’

Sentiments such as these became established with the Rushdie affair, and have proved an enduring component of our political culture. In 1990, a year after the fatwa, Rushdie wrote: ‘I feel as if I have been plunged, like Alice, into a world beyond the looking glass, where nonsense is the only available sense. And I wonder if I’ll ever be able to climb back through.’

Western political leaders were adept at speaking that form of sense. The first President Bush ventured boldly, a week after the fatwa was issued, that the threat of assassination was ‘deeply offensive’. The Japanese government anguished and declared: ‘Mentioning and encouraging murder is not something to be praised.’ The Chief Rabbi in Great Britain, Dr Immanuel Jakobovits, remarked with ostensible balance but genuine callous stupidity: ‘Both Mr Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom of speech.’

Surveying these judgements, the writer Jonathan Rauch, in his 1993 book Kindly Inquisitors (from which I have taken the quotations), identified a tendency among Western intellectuals that would repudiate the sentence but not the notion that Rushdie had committed a crime: ‘If we follow this path, then we accept Khomeini’s verdict, and we are merely haggling with him over the sentence. If we follow it, then we accept that in principle what is offensive should be suppressed, and we are fighting over what it is ... that is offensive.’

This is the missing element in debate over the scope and regulation of speech. The notion that free speech, while important, needs to be held in balance with the avoidance of offence is question-begging, because it assumes that offence is something to be avoided. Free speech does indeed cause hurt – but there is nothing wrong in this. Knowledge advances through the destruction of bad ideas. Mockery and derision are among the most powerful tools in that process. Consider Voltaire’s Candide, or H L Mencken’s reports – saturated in contempt for religious obscurantists who opposed the teaching of evolution in schools – on the Scopes ‘Monkey’ Trial.

It is inevitable that those who find their deepest convictions mocked will be offended, and it is possible (though not mandatory, and is incidentally not felt by me) to extend sympathy and compassion to them. But they are not entitled to protection, still less restitution, in the public sphere, even for crass and gross sentiments. A free society does not legislate in the realm of beliefs; by extension, it must not concern itself either with the state of its citizens’ sensibilities. If it did, there would in principle be no limit to the powers of the state, even into the private realm of thought and feeling.

The debate has not been aided – it has indeed been severely clouded – by an imprecise use of the term ‘respect’. If this is merely a metaphor for the free exercise of religious and political liberty, then it is an unexceptionable principle, but also an unclear and redundant usage. Respect for ideas and those who hold them is a different matter altogether. Ideas have no claim on our respect; they earn respect to the extent that they are able to withstand criticism. Even some vocal defenders of liberty stumble on this point. The human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell wrote recently, of a particularly slanted television debate: ‘Even the supposed Muslim moderates on last night's programme exuded a whiff of hypocrisy. Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) claimed: ‘We do not wish to impose our way of life on anybody. All we want is to live in respect with one another.’ Fine sentiments. Shame about the reality.’ It is not, in fact, a fine sentiment to require respect. Respect is not an entitlement. It is, at most, a quality that is earned by the intellectual resilience of one’s ideas in the public square.

A further complication in the debate is a return – rather an opportunistic one – to the concept of mores and its subclass, taboos. In December 2006, the theocratic regime in Iran staged a conference denying the Holocaust, apparently as a retaliatory gesture over the Danish cartoons. I happened to speak in a debate in London the following month with a representative of the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala, who explicitly treated as analogous the two provocations. There had been ‘no need’, he said, of the Conference. This was entirely to miss the grounds of objection to it. Holocaust denial is wrong not because it is offensive but because it is false. It is a speculative hypothesis that can be consistently maintained only by ignoring or faking historical evidence. There are laws in some European countries against this form of antisemitism, and they are misconceived and pernicious for similar reasons to those I have argued. The exposure of Holocaust deniers’ claims is the province of competent historians rather than lawyers. The quality of offensiveness is irrelevant to that issue.

Beyond this is a pragmatic question. If those with deeply held convictions find they receive compensation for injured feelings, then mental hurt is what they will seek out. As one group succeeds, then others will perceive the incentive to fashion comparable demands. In Birmingham two years ago protestors forced the closure of a play, Behzti by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, which depicted the abuse of Sikh women by Sikh men. With inapt jocularity but succinctness, a BBC correspondent reported: ‘If you had to write a theatrical pitch for what Birmingham has just witnessed over the play Behzti, you could do it in seven words: Play offends community, community protests, play cancelled.’

Campaigners from a pressure group called Christian Voice then, not coincidentally, pressed their own demands. The stage show Jerry Springer – The Opera faced protests and threats of prosecution for blasphemy when it was shown on BBC television in 2005 and when it went on tour in 2006. ‘I can say with some feeling that the show is crude, offensive and blasphemous in the extreme,’ wrote the organisation’s director in a letter to theatres urging that they cancel the performances. And, given the precedent, why would he not have issued such a demand?

Trying to make sense of the Behzti affair for French readers, the London correspondent of Libération, Agnès Poirier, wrote: ‘Dans une situation pareille, on attend d’un gouvernement qu’il défende l’auteur menacé.’ She noted that the British government minister responsible for community relations, Fiona McTaggart, had in fact done no such thing. Rather, Ms McTaggart had welcomed the return of calm after the cancellation of the play. Often it takes a detached observer to appreciate fully the corruption of one’s own political culture.

This malaise is always a likely outcome of recognising a right to be respected. Respecting the beliefs and feelings of others is a lethal affectation in public policy. It is easy to depict freedom of speech as liable to cause hurt, precisely because it is true. The policy that follows from that is counterintuitive but essential: do nothing. The defence of a free society involves not taking a stand on its output, but insisting on the integrity of its procedures.

Oliver Kamm is an author and columnist for The Times

Enough Cape Cod codswallop

This column appears in The Times today.

“Cape Cod is prime getaway for Gordon Brown,” reported the Cape Cod Times last week. This was a reasonable story for a local newspaper. Less explicable is citing the same information as a clue to foreign policy under Mr Brown.

“His adoration for Cape Cod, and its supposed Kennedyesque glamour, knows no bounds,” complains the New Statesman. The comment editor of this newspaper conversely concludes with satisfaction that Mr Brown may prove more pro-American even than Tony Blair. How so? “He holidays in America.”

The only reason to infer Mr Brown’s foreign policies from his holiday destination is lack of other evidence. Mr Brown is a co-architect of new Labour, but new Labour was never very interested in foreign policy. Its 1997 manifesto made no mention of the US at all.

Transatlantic relations have often been warmer under Labour than Conservative prime ministers. Recall Eden’s Suez debacle, Heath’s distance from the US over the Yom Kippur War, and the rifts caused by John Major’s quietist policies over Bosnia. Mr Blair’s Atlanticism stands in the historical mainstream of British social democracy, and Mr Brown’s identification with Mr Blair’s Iraq decisions has survived the White House’s mismanagement of the war.

But my best guess is that consistency between Mr Blair and Mr Brown will be more rhetorical than heartfelt. The Chancellor will emphasise humanitarian intervention, but by soft power and through multilateral institutions. His model will be the diplomacy of Bretton Woods rather than President Truman’s protracted and electorally risky military commitments. This would not in my view be sensible, but the Middle East more than Massachusetts will determine Brownian policy.

— In lapidary inscriptions, said Dr Johnson, a man is not on oath. Yet the writer Christopher Hitchens does see demerit in dissembling. Interviewed last week about the late Rev Jerry Falwell, Hitchens commented: “I think it’s a pity there isn’t a Hell for him to go to.”

Is there merit in the mild hypocrisy of not speaking ill of the recently deceased? Not in the case of public figures who influence policy or exercise office. After 9/11, Falwell held responsible not the theocratic fanatics who ordered and committed mass murder, but American feminists, homosexuals and civil libertarians. A toxic figure in life is not less so in posthumous influence.

— Jerry Falwell was not, after all, taken in the Rapture, when the elect will be lifted up. A fascinating new book, Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood, traces the development and decline of an equally compelling notion. If you anticipate the Tribulation and believe in intelligent design, it is difficult to dismiss the scriptural evidence that the world is flat. How otherwise to explain the reference in Job to “the ends of the earth”?

Tory revisionism

My friend Stephen Pollard is a creative political thinker for whom I have much respect. A couple of years ago the Centre for Policy Studies published a pamphlet by Stephen in which he offered disinterested policy advice for the Conservative Party after its three successive election defeats. He summarised his argument in an article for The Guardian, where he proposed that the Tories champion "genuine public-sector reform, based on equality of access, and buttressed by individual liberty". To that end, he argued for policies including school vouchers and a flat tax.

I have no stake in internal Tory debates. Though I consider Gordon Brown has disfigured public life with his prolonged disloyalty to the Prime Minister, I still back a Brown-led Labour Party against David Cameron. But I believe strongly that the best system of government for a mature democracy is one where two parties of, respectively, the moderate Left and the moderate Right dominate the political system and compete for the centre ground. That aim will be set back if the Tories act on Stephen's recommendations. I argued here against the Conservatives' proposals for a flat tax. (I reproduced here the Shadow Chancellor's reply, which appears to have been truncated on The Times's website.) I haven't written about school voucher schemes, but I believe their advocates greatly overestimate the efficiency gains and overlook the inequitable consequences. Vouchers would in effect subsidise those who already send their children to private school - an outcome I can see no merit in.

Last week Stephen intervened again in Conservative debates by criticising the Shadow Education Secretary, David Willetts, on the issue of grammar schools. In an article in The Daily Mail, Stephen argued:

So what's the marvellous notion that David Cameron's Conservatives have come up with?

Ditch any remaining attachment to the one proven, successful type of state school that's left.

In a speech, David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, announced that although a David Cameron government would not close down the 164 remaining grammar schools, they would ignore them in their plans.

In other words, when it comes to selecting pupils by ability, nothing separates the Conservatives from the most extreme Left-Wingers of the Labour Party.

What a travesty.

(Readers' comments appended to an article don't prove anything, but I particularly liked the commendation Stephen received from one Ray Douglas: "Like people who oppose the many benefits of traditional marriage, grammer school opponents have the same closed mindset, who never let inconvenient facts get in the way of their ideology.")

It's no travesty; it's a recognition of the principles of equity and (which is not at all discreditable) political prudence. The battle within the Conservative Party over selective education was closed not last week but under the last Labour government - at the 1977 Conservative Party conference, where the grammar schools' most articulate champion, Norman St. John-Stevas, accepted that there could be no return to the 11-plus examination. The only notable consequence in this context of the Tories' taking office two years later was the continuation of around 150 grammar schools, while some 85% of secondary school pupils went to comprehensives. This dominance of comprehensive education will not change, for the practical reason that selective education is the opposite of parental choice, and parents will not stand being treated like that. Existing grammar schools are in effect a sectional interest; the Conservatives will not be a national party while they are identified with this minuscule segment of the education system.

(Why, incidentally, is it relevant to the merits of a political party's proposals where its senior figures went to school? It isn't, of course; so we must assume from The Mail's handy table - not part of Stephen's article, but of the news story - that the paper's editorial voice is that of unreflective populism, as if we didn't know.)

Dream ticket

This is some way in advance, but on 20 November Sir Malcolm Rifkind and I will be opposing the motion "Britain doesn't need Trident" in a debate organised by Intelligence Squared at the Royal Geographical Society. Proposing the motion will be Simon Jenkins and Baroness Helena Kennedy QC. Tickets are a steal at £25.

I argued for a new generation of British independent nuclear weapons here, in response to a surprising anti-nuclear campaigner: Sir Malcolm's successor as Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo.

Offence and free speech

In December 2004 Nick Cohen wrote in The Observer:

Things have reached a pretty pass when the reporters of the Daily Mail can look down on liberal London from the moral high ground. But such is the likely result of a rumbling scandal about the treatment by Index on Censorship of the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last month.

The idea that Index could have been at the centre of a scandal would once have been absurd. It was founded by Stephen Spender in the early 1970s to fight for the right of Soviet dissidents to speak freely. Vaclav Havel, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Arthur Miller, Aung San Suu Kyi and many another clear and strong voice used its pages to denounce the suppression of opinion wherever it occurred. Yet when it contemplated the warm corpse of a film-maker who had been ritually slaughtered for dramatising violence against Muslim women, its instinctive reaction was so hateful it still has the power to shock six weeks on.

Index giggled.

Yes, it did. The Index article Nick was referring to was called "Free speech fundamentalist on a martyrdom operation", by the magazine's Associate Editor, Rohan Jayasekera. It has to be read to be believed. Jayasekara wrote:

Van Gogh ... roared his Muslim critics into silence with obscenities. An abuse of his right to free speech, it added injury to insult by effectively censorsing their moderate views as well. [Pim] Fortuyn and van Gogh freed the Dutch from responsibility to rationally debate the country's cultural crisis.

He created a perfect forum for free speech, one where nothing could be left unsaid, no matter how vile, bigoted or just plain false. So without fear of further disturbing already ravaged public sensitivities, you may applaud Theo van Gogh's death as the marvellous piece of theatre it was.

The magazine's Editor-in-Chief, Ursula Owen, and Acting Chairman, Jonathan Freedland, issued a defensive statement a fortnight after the article was published.

What this article represented was one, individual view in a debate that has raged among advocates of free expression for centuries. Should the right to free speech be absolute and total, in all situations, or are there some circumstances when respect for the freedoms of others places limits on that right? Famously, does the right to free speech include the right to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre? To defame whole classes of people: blacks, homosexuals, Muslims? To deny historical events, like the Holocaust?

Rohan Jayasekera’s piece considered the second position - that sometimes free speech has to be limited by our responsibilities – and it castigated Van Gogh for his failure to recognise that. He did so robustly and in a style that was, inevitably, not to everyone’s taste.

Some readers have called for the piece to be pulled or even for Rohan to lose his job. Neither of these things will happen. Surely, the one place where you can express your views robustly, even offensively, without fear of the censor’s blue pencil, should be in Index on Censorship — even if the view in question is a call for some limits on free expression.

I found this at the time, and do now, an extraordinary statement. I'm not in favour of removing an article once a magazine has published it, but of course Jayasekera should have been sacked. As he still holds the post, he should be now. Index on Censorship campaigns for free speech; Jayasekera doesn't agree. To point out he is in the wrong place is an issue not of censorship but of simple intellectual integrity. If the Chairman of the Natural History Museum turned out to be a Young-Earth Creationist, he'd be invited to seek alternative employment too.

The latest issue of Index on Censorship, published this week, does however revisit the broad question of offence and free speech, in the context of British debates. The theme of the issue is the fate of free speech ten years after the election of New Labour. It includes an article entitled "Respect and Civility are the Enemies of Free Speech", by - ahem - me, which gives a very different view of the question from Jayasekera's. It is not online, I think, but the article argues that the voice of moderation, civility and balance on the issue of free speech urgently needs to be rebuffed:

Respecting the beliefs and feelings of others is a lethal affectation in public policy. It is easy to depict freedom of speech as liable to cause hurt, precisely because it is true. The policy that follows from that is counterintuitive but essential: do nothing. The defence of a free society involves not taking a stand on its output, but insisting on the integrity of its procedures.