Oliver Kamm

Abortion analogies

The Times's US editor, Gerard Baker, whom I have known a long time and respect, drew an extraordinary analogy in his column on Friday (emphasis added):

After years of wondering whether we’ll ever change society’s permissive attitude towards abortion, I’m convinced that we will some day come to view it in the way we now view slavery, a moral abomination that generations simply became inured to by usage and practice.

The big difference, of course, is that abortion is worse than slavery. Not just in the obvious sense that it involves the taking of life rather than liberty. But because our current debate suggests that deep down most of us really know there’s something quite wrong with abortion.

Say what you will about the slaveowners, I doubt many of them sat around agonising about their decision to keep Uncle Tom and his family chained to the shack at the end of the drive. I doubt they justified it, after much soul-searching, by saying they were only painfully exercising their “choice” to own slaves so they wouldn’t have to sacrifice their standard of living.

I'm convinced - as convinced as I am of anything in the realm of ideas - that the conviction that abortion is comparable to or worse than slavery will ever be the preserve only of a determined but minuscule minority. That minority will have, and ought to have, no purchase on public policy. I hold this conviction not on grounds of when, beyond the point of conception, life begins; no one can answer that question, and I'm far from competent even to frame it. That question is metaphysics (or theology, which is not a branch of human knowledge at all). You either believe it or you don't. Western society is well beyond the historical stage where it was possible to have widely shared, let alone universal, convictions about such questions - any more than we have universally shared convictions about first and last things, or the foundation of ethics. Unless we are defeated by the forces (themselves heterogeneous) agitating for the repeal of the Enlightenment - notably, but not only, militant Islam - we'll never get back there.

That's a good thing. The Enlightenment extended our ideas about obligations, and gave rise to the notion of universal human rights. But we can't invoke that principle to settle political disputes over abortion legislation, because there is no such shared assumption - as there self-evidently is in the case of slavery - that a pregnancy terminated at an early stage involves any violation of human rights. The "of course" in Gerard's analogy supports the whole structure yet is entirely out of place.

The reason we regard abortion as a weighty issue of individual conscience is not that we all, deep down, regard it as wrong; it is that abortion, by definition because it disposes of a foetus, is a destructive act. That doesn't make voluntary and freely chosen abortion immoral. I dispute that abortion below a certain time limit (about which there is no obviously right answer and plenty of room for legislative deliberation) is a moral issue at all, other than in those cases where abortion is morally required. Most of all in this debate, I share a view articulated by an exponent of a tradition that Gerard is as familiar with as anyone: American conservatism. The late philosopher Robert Nisbet wrote some years ago (Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, 1982, p. 5) of:

... the danger to the social fabric and to individual liberty that is posed by the ranks of the aggressive antiabortionists. In denying the right of the woman or of her family to terminate pregnancy, these soldiers of righteousness strike at the heart of both family and individual rights.... The moralizing and sentimentalizing about embryo and infant has reached its highest point of intensity in human history in the United States, and there is no sign that its ravaging of the social bond and its wanton commitment of the issue to the centralized state will abate.

I put the greater stress on individual liberty. The legal and cultural shifts since the 1960s regarding abortion, homosexuality and other issues are to my mind obviously an enhancement of liberty and of a civilised society. But the greatest impediment to the spread of Gerard's argument is that it's inimical to family life. Parents will always support a daughter's choice when she has an unwanted pregnancy. It's the humane and commonsensical thing to do, and it's right that our legislation incorporates that common sense.

Hamas and Israel

Con Coughlin writes in the Telegraph:

Welcome to the new Islamic Republic of Hamas-stan, where every Palestinian woman is obliged to wear the veil and all traces of corrupting Western influences, from pop music to internet cafés, are strictly banned.

The creation of a mini Islamic state in Gaza now appears the most likely outcome as the militant Palestinian group Hamas strikes against the more secular-minded government of President Mahmoud Abbas.... The Gaza Strip, the 20-mile stretch of desert scrub wedged between Israel and the Sinai Desert, has never been a happy place. The majority of the 1.4 million Palestinians who live there are mainly refugees from Israel's 1948 war of independence and have rarely seen their living standards rise above subsistence level. But the addition of religious fanaticism to economic privation has severely worsened their plight.

That last sentence is the immediate and most important point about Hamas's drive for power. A mini-state founded on theocratic fanaticism will be a catastrophe for those who have to live under it - for their liberties, their livelihoods and their physical safety from the faithful. (A minor point of terminology: Coughlin refers to Hamas and Hizbollah as "two Iranian-backed, Islamic fundamentalist organisations dedicated to [Israel's] destruction camped on its northern and southern borders". Technically, fundamentalism is a current within Protestantism and not any other faith. Hamas, being a genuinely totalitarian and terrorist organisation, is a lot more dangerous than the demagogic conspiracy theorist Pat Robertson or the late and unlamented Jerry Falwell.) It was, moreover, predictable - it was indeed predicted, by western analysts familiar with the region rather than newspaper editorialists prone to wishful thinking - that the experience of political office was most unlikely to moderate Hamas in its demands or its methods.

What this means in the short term, and probably for much longer, is that Israel's strategy since the failure of the Oslo accord is the only feasible one. I tried to summarise this strategy in a piece I wrote in 2005 setting out the rationale for the Sharon government's disengagement from Gaza:

Mr Sharon, meanwhile, has taken the Right an important stage on from merely accepting the need for negotiations with the Palestinians, and has acknowledged that what he explicitly terms the “occupation of the West Bank” is untenable for Israel and for the Palestinians. His security measures have reinforced a consensus among Israelis for a strategy of defensive deterrence, withdrawal from settlements in Gaza, and direct negotiations for a Palestinian state. The prerequisites for a final settlement include Israelis’ confidence in the ability of the Palestinian leadership to crack down on terrorism and to make their administration of Gaza a success. Israel will feel secure enough to withdraw to the pre-1967 boundaries only when it no longer believes they are continuously threatened. On any realistic assessment, this will take time.

It should be obvious that Israel is nowhere near a position where it may have confidence in the pacific intentions of its adversaries, given the conditions that Coughlin refers to. The idea of a two-state arrangement between a secure Israel and a sovereign Palestine is the only equitable arrangement for the longer term, but it is a misnomer to talk of a two-state solution. A negotiated territorial settlement between a secure Israel and a sovereign Palestine is not a solution to the conflict but an outcome of the end of the conflict. Whatever your judgement of the historic rights and wrongs of the conflict, it is very difficult to see what diplomatic options Israel has other than the course it is actually pursuing: unilateral disengagement in recognition of the fact that there is no prospect of a negotiated settlement. Israel cannot deal with a Hamas-led state, because Hamas's ambitions are not limited, and Israel's allies (as Western nations should certainly think of themselves) should acknowledge this.

In principle this course should lead to Israeli withdrawal from the populated centre of the West Bank as well as the now-evacuated Gaza, while retaining certain territories (notably a strip along the Jordan and the Dead Sea) necessary for defence. Most of the settlers - who are way outside the consensus in Israeli politics - will thereby remain under Israeli jurisdiction, while most of the settlements will be dismantled or relocated (mainly to Galilee and the Negev). But central to this outcome is the recognition that a permanent settlement, including a territorially contiguous Palestinian state, depends on Israel's being secure against Iranian-backed Islamist groups who aim for its destruction. Disengagement and deterrence are two sides of the same policy. It will be a long haul, and the place of Western nations is on the side of those who are directly threatened by Islamist fanaticism: respectively, the Palestinians in Gaza and the democratic nation of Israel.

The Cold War, activism and evidence

One of the historical episodes on the European and American Left that most interests me is the early Cold War, after the defeat of the Axis powers in WWII. In many respects, it was Labour's finest hour. Clement Attlee's government and the Labour Party itself gave vital support to democratic parties of the Left and free trade unions in Europe to resist Soviet expansionism and Communist infiltration. Ernest Bevin was at the same time probably the most significant Foreign Secretary in British political history. He achieved the difficult balance of withdrawing from some overseas commitments that Britain, with a desperately weakened economy, could no longer maintain, while encouraging the United States to commit itself to the collective security of Western Europe. Why Labour took this course, instead of pursuing fanciful schemes for a socialist commonwealth of Europe independent of the US and USSR, is a fascinating historical question.

Meanwhile, American liberals engaged in their own anguished debates. Those who prevailed recognised that there could be no common front on the Left against the forces of conservatism, and that, in the contemporary words of the historian and Democratic activist Arthur Schlesinger Jnr (The Vital Center, 1949, p. 235): "It is idle, I believe, to delude ourselves into thinking that totalitarianism and democracy can live together happily ever after." The so-called Cold War liberals and social democrats urged and supported the stance adopted by President Truman: containment of Communism (the Truman Doctrine); reconstruction of Europe (the Marshall Plan); and recognition of a limited but genuine domestic security problem in that the Communist Party of the USA was a vehicle for espionage rather than an ordinary political party of heterodox views. These principles were far from the demagogic blustering and wild exaggeration that came to be known as McCarthyism. Senator McCarthy in fact never succeeded in identifying a single Communist agent, and his campaign was reviled by the Cold War liberals - only one of whom (Hubert Humphrey, later Vice-President) ever entertained the notion that the Communist Party should be an illegal organisation.

With that historical preamble in mind, let me turn to what I immediately concede is the softest of soft targets, the relevance of which I shall hope to intimate in closing. It is an article in this week's edition of Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers' Party. The SWP is a totalitarian and antisemitic organisation that forms the mainstay of the Respect 'Coalition', whose national secretary - a member of the SWP politbureau - I have from time to time debated with on television. Respect is a coalition only in the sense that it comprises an alliance between Islamists and Leninists - or, in the phrase of Christopher Hitchens, worshippers of the one god lined up with worshippers of the one-party state. The article that caught my eye from this week's edition of the paper is called "The US and Cold War Strategy" by one Richard Seymour. Seymour is a blogger, whose output is usefully summarised - I won't link to it myself - in a single quotation in this post by my friend Norman Geras, a genuine Marxist scholar.

Seymour's theme is that tensions between Russia and the West presage a new Cold War: "It is a chilling prospect. The Cold War, which began in 1947 with the US’s Truman Doctrine, marked a shift in US policy against Russia and brought the world closer to destruction than it has ever been."

It would be invidious, and not my point, to go through this article's various inanities minutely and individually (starting with the proposition that the origins of the Cold War apparently had no connection with any actions by Stalin). I'd merely point out three characteristics of the piece.

First, I can recognise what Seymour has read, and more particularly what he hasn't, in constructing (I won't say "writing") his argument. I once noticed him lifting, without attribution, "information" taken from a publication by Noam Chomsky, who is not a reliable source of historical scholarship. Consider what Seymour says in this article:

That strategic interests, and not alleged Soviet machinations, were at the heart of US policy was clear. George Kennan wrote in a Policy Planning study in 1948, “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.

“Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.”

I'm certain Seymour hasn't read Kennan's original document, known as "Policy Planning Study 23: Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy", and which can be read in full here. I suspect that Seymour has taken it from a pamphlet by Noam Chomsky entitled What Uncle Sam Really Wants, 1993. I quote the relevant passage; note in particular the ellipsis in Chomsky's rendition of Kennan. Seymour doesn't include the ellipsis, but the form of his edited quotation follows Chomsky's exactly. Here's Chomsky:

Kennan was one of the most intelligent and lucid of US planners, and a major figure in shaping the postwar world. His writings are an extremely interesting illustration of the dovish position. One document to look at if you want to understand your country is Policy Planning Study 23, written by Kennan for the State Department planning staff in 1948. Here's some of what it says:

"we have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population....In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity....To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives....We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

PPS 23 was, of course, a top-secret document. To pacify the public, it was necessary to trumpet the "idealistic slogans" (as is still being done constantly), but here planners were talking to one another.

The trouble with this argument, as - if I'm right in assuming that he hasn't read the original document - Seymour won't have realised, is that it's a classic Chomskyism: the quotation has been excised from its context, artfully edited and then twisted to insinuate pretty much the opposite of what Kennan was arguing. I encourage you to read the full passage from Kennan, which Chomsky has ruthlessly edited. It comes in section VII of the document, entitled "Far East". You should note immediately that Chomsky has omitted a sentence that I would argue is crucial to the message Kennan is giving (my emphasis): "For these reasons, we must observe great restraint in our attitude toward the Far Eastern areas." That is very far from a call for imperialist domination. If you wish to examine Kennan's argument, and Chomsky's use (in fact, distortion) of it, I recommend this illuminating and careful discussion by a gentleman called Russil Wvong.

Secondly, Seymour could hardly signal more effectively his incapability in the subjects he's discussing than by declaring:

Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that dozens – sometimes he claimed hundreds – of communists were active in the government. Through the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was able to bully and slander hundreds of US citizens.

It's an astonishingly common error, but still a dead giveaway that the accuser hasn't thought about what he's saying. Senator McCarthy was able to do nothing at all "through the House Un-American Activities Committee", because he - as the title "Senator" indicates - was a member of the Senate, whereas the House Committee - as the title "House Committee" indicates - was a committee of the House. The US Senate and the US House of Representatives are not the same thing.

But if the point of commenting on Seymour's article were merely to observe its stupidity, there would be little purpose in the exercise. My third observation deals with an issue of greater importance, which is the flabbergasting proposition, given a separate section in the article, that in the celebrated espionage trail of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, the defendants were innocent - or, as Socialist Worker puts it, "executed on trumped up charges by the US state".

I don't know whether Seymour is aware that he's doing this, but his account could have been taken verbatim from contemporary apologists for Stalinism. Most revealing, there is the preposterous notion that the trial of the Rosenbergs was part of an antisemitic conspiracy by the US authorities. It is a revealing fiction: the Soviet Union adopted this line at the time, because it wished to divert attention from a real case of antisemitic persecution, the Slansky Trial in Czechoslovakia. The modern SWP, having (as I argued here) allied with classic antisemitism, is adopting the same notion.

There are a lot of things one can say about the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs more than half a century later. Ethel's conviction was secured on tainted evidence (her brother's testimony) that ought to have been ruled inadmissible. The prosecution case was flawed; the prosecutor, Roy Cohn, was a vile man who behaved improperly; the conduct of the trial was unsatisfactory; the capital sentence was unjust. (I am opposed to capital punishment in principle, even in the case of Saddam Hussein or Adolf Eichmann.) But the one thing you cannot possibly say about it is that the charges were false and the Rosenbergs were innocent.

Even the Rosenbergs' most indefatigable hagiographers, Walter and Miriam Schneir, abandoned their increasingly beleaguered position in 1995 and acknowledged that Julius Rosenberg had indeed been a spy for the Soviet Union. The Schneirs made this belated admission because in that year the first transcripts of decrypted Soviet diplomatic communications captured under the VENONA project were made public. VENONA proved beyond any possibility of doubt that Julius Rosenberg was a spy, his wife was his principal accomplice, and they were guilty as charged of conspiracy to commit espionage. All the evidence - literally all - that has emerged since has merely confirmed this conclusion (for example, the memoirs, published in English in 2001, of the Rosenbergs' Soviet controller, Aleksandr Feklisov).

The Rosenbergs' guilt was not merely a nominal matter. Julius Rosenberg passed information to Feklisov on no fewer than 100 different US programmes, including the atomic programme. The Soviets would doubtless have obtained this information from other sources at some time. Yet the information the Soviets had at that time certainly emboldened Stalin in his post-war diplomacy. It has surprised historians for 50 years that Stalin was so rash as to allow Kim Il-sung to attack South Korea, thereby triggering a Western military response. One possible inference is that Stalin not only saw the limited military utility of an effective US nuclear monopoly (the Soviets had few atomic bombs and no means of deploying them against the US), but also expected that effective monopoly to be eroded soon enough. Rosenberg did not cause Stalin to do what he did in the international arena, but he did have some impact on the timing of what Stalin did, and that - bearing in mind the casualties of the Korean War - was heavy enough a responsibility.

Now, assessing quite how much damage was done by the Rosenbergs' espionage is a legitimate matter for debate, about which I've just stated my own view. What is not a matter for debate any longer is the fact of that espionage and our certain knowledge that the Rosenbergs were guilty. It is not possible to write in any informed way about the Rosenbergs - and has not been possible for a dozen years - without referring to the VENONA transcripts and what they revealed. We must assume, for there is no other explanation for his silence on the matter, that Richard Seymour is clueless.

This will be no surprise to readers who have persisted so far, and the conclusion inevitably prompts the question raised by the columnist George Monbiot in another context (described in the post below this one): "Why do I bother with this moron?"

Well, I think it's an interesting case study because - and only because - of what it tells us about a particular approach to history or indeed any other form of inquiry. There is a strong current in today's political debate that stresses "scholar-activism", as recounted in this admiring article. Those often cited as important intellectuals of this type include (as mentioned in the article I've linked to) Noam Chomsky, Manning Marable, Howard Zinn, Cornel West and others. I don't, in this post, comment on the scholarship of these figures but I do reject the proposition that scholarship and political activism are comparable, let alone coterminous, activities. (When, in the premable to this post, I referred to Arthur Schlesinger Jnr, I described him as a historian and a political activist, in that order and distinguishing the two roles.) A damaging implication of that premise is that one criterion of the reliability of a scholar is his promotion of political views that are congenial to the reader.

The problem is particularly obvious in the case of totalitarian politics, as in the case I have discussed. The most cogent advocate of the SWP's Leninist politics was the late campaigning journalist Paul Foot, who entitled one of his books Words as Weapons. Foot was widely admired and liked: see, for example, articles by two writers whom I admire and like, Nick Cohen and Francis Wheen. (My much more critical assessment of Foot - whom I didn't know - is here.) But I find Foot's premise in that title revealing in a different way from the one he intended.

Foot was almost certainly alluding to F.D. Roosevelt's wartime admonition that "in this war, we know, books are weapons". But a liberal society, though it must be prepared to defend itself against tyranny, is not itself in a state of war. It is a balance of conflicting interests and competing claims to scarce resources, where those conflicts must be resolved by democratic means. In that task, books are not weapons; they are books. They make us at home in the world, expand our knowledge and educate our sensibilities. If they are made subordinate to political activism, then ignorance will always result - as you will see most boldly in the case I have discussed.

UPDATE: While the verdict on the Rosenbergs is now a matter of historical certainty - they were guilty - their apologists, bizarrely, will skirt round the issue. See this account of a forum held last year to discuss the "artistic influence" of the Rosenbergs, rather than the embarrassing matter of their treachery, totalitarianism and deceit. The author of the article, Joseph Rago, nicely summarises the issue:

But why would "the artist"--let alone anyone--still be hung up on the Rosenbergs? To plow through the evidence for the millionth time: While the trial of the Rosenbergs was flawed by technical improprieties, their crimes are not uncertain or unresolved. Julius Rosenberg, with Ethel as his accomplice, was the head of a sophisticated spy network that deeply penetrated the American atomic program and relayed top secrets to Stalin's Kremlin. In his memoirs Nikita Khrushchev noted that the Rosenbergs "vastly aided production of our A-bomb." Joyce Milton and Ronald Radosh wrote a damning account of their activities in "The Rosenberg File" (1983). And the Rosenbergs' guilt was corroborated by the 1995 declassification of the Venona documents, thousands of decrypted KGB cables intercepted by the National Security Agency in the 1940s.

The notion that anyone would today deny their fundamental complicity in Soviet subversion is extraordinary, almost comically so. But comedy was not quite the mentality at the Rosenberg event. "Ambiguity is the key word, I think," said Mr. [E.L.] Doctorow, regarding our understanding of the past, though in this instance ambiguous is precisely what it is not.

I recall a long article from 1995 in the Sunday Times magazine by an author called Peter Millar. It was a sentimental account of the campaign of the Rosenbergs' sons to clear their parents' name of the calumny that they had been guilty of espionage. The author's byline stated that he was writing a book on the Rosenberg case.

That same year the VENONA transcripts were declassified. Millar's book has, unsurprisingly, never appeared.

"Truth seekers"

Having referred disparagingly a few days ago to the radical historian Howard Zinn, I do not propose to make this "Howard Zinn Week" on my blog. But here's a singular development.

Professor Zinn is the author of a popular book called A People's History of the United States. It has been through many editions. Another historian of left-wing views, Michael Kazin, has described the book as "polemic disguised as history". I demonstrated here, with reference to his treatment of a central issue of world history in the 20th century, that Professor Zinn's scholarship is feeble and ignorant.

Let us turn now to what is and will remain a central issue of world history in the 21st century. Writing in Scientific American in 2005, the sceptic Michael Shermer noted:

[S]ome people think the Pentagon was hit by a missile; that U.S. Air Force jets were ordered to "stand down" and not intercept Flights 11 and 175, the ones that struck the twin towers; that the towers themselves were razed by demolition explosives timed to go off soon after the impact of the planes; that a mysterious white jet shot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania; and that New York Jews were ordered to stay home that day (Zionists and other pro-Israeli factions, of course, were involved). Books also abound, including Inside Job, by Jim Marrs; The New Pearl Harbor, by David Ray Griffin; and 9/11: The Great Illusion, by George Humphrey. The single best debunking of this conspiratorial codswallop is in the March issue of Popular Mechanics, which provides an exhaustive point-by-point analysis of the most prevalent claims.

The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics). All the "evidence" for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy. Such notions are easily refuted by noting that scientific theories are not built on single facts alone but on a convergence of evidence assembled from multiple lines of inquiry.

Note one of those volumes of conspiratorial codswallop, The New Pearl Harbor. Its author, David Ray Griffin, a retired professor of theology, has received notable academic endorsement for his book - not by anyone competent in the fields covered by Popular Mechanics, but by professors of theology. You can see those endorsements here. "This is a must read for all who want to get past the conspiracy of silence and mystification that surrounds these events," says John B. Cobb Jr, Professor of Theology, Emeritus, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University. "A must read for anyone concerned about American foreign policy under the present administration," concurs Rosemary Radford Ruether, Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA.

Professor Cobb is the leading modern exponent of an idea called process theology. He has co-written a book with Griffin entitled Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, 1976, the central idea of which (pp. 41-62) is that God represents "Creative-Responsive Love" and acts in the world by persuasion rather than coercion. If you think this sounds like mumbo-jumbo, I would not seek to dissuade you (and I am godless anyway). Professor Ruether has, on the other hand, written serious studies of the theological roots of Christian antisemitism. She merely has no historian's understanding of why paranoid conspiracy theories fail to meet minimal criteria for plausibility.

How fortunate, then, that Griffin's book also receives comments from a historian. But that historian - as you will have seen coming many miles off - is Howard Zinn. Zinn comments:

David Ray Griffin has done admirable and painstaking research in reviewing the mysteries surrounding the 9-11 attacks. It is the most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation of the Bush administration's relationship to that historic and troubling event.

You can only wonder whether some new edition of Zinn's People's History will explain the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon with reference to Griffin's crank accusations against the US administration. But this much is clear. You cannot be a historian and a Holocaust denier, because the only way to maintain that the Holocaust never took place is to ignore or fake the historical evidence. (My reader David Irving is usually referred to not as a historian but as a "historical writer" because of his treatment of source material.) You cannot be a biologist and a Creationist, for similar reasons. You cannot be a physicist and believe in perpetual motion machines. And you cannot, Professor Zinn, be a historian and give the time of day to the pernicious and unambiguously stupid notions promulgated by the 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

As George Monbiot asked plaintively in The Guardian, with reference to the 9/11 "truthseekers", a few months ago: "Why do I bother with these morons?" Prospective readers of Professor Zinn's work might profitably ask themselves the same question.

Feral media

Considering Tony Blair's important speech yesterday comparing the media to a "feral beast", The Independent's editor, Simon Kelner, in a signed front page statement, appears to take it as a personal affront. Under a bold paragraph taken from the PM's speech, criticising The Independent, Kelner writes:

What clearly rankles with Mr Blair is not that we campaign vociferously on certain issues, but that he doesn't agree with our stance. What if we had backed the invasion of Iraq (like [sic], for example, we supported the interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone)? Would he then be attacking our style of journalism? Of course not. We are unapologetic about our opposition to Iraq, the biggest foreign policy folly of our age, and we shall continue to hold him and his government to account.

Would he? I don't know. But I'll happily give my view, as a supporter of the PM's foreign policies. I'd attack The Independent's style of journalism regardless of its editorial line, for the reason Blair stated: "Today it is avowedly a viewspaper, not merely a newspaper."

The Independent does not recognise a distinction between news copy and editorial comment. Since its birth in 1986, it has had many distinguished commentators, starting with the late Peter Jenkins. Quite recently in its history, however, The Independent has ceased to discriminate between that function and the provision of the news. In eliding that distinction, the paper has diminished the quality of its own comment (not that of its contributors, but the paper's own editorial voice), which is shrill and hectoring rather than analytical. The newspaper's comment in response to the PM largely confirms his diagnosis by contriving to miss this point.

The communications media are of course entitled to take editorial views. It ought not to be, and they ought not to see it as, their function to act as opposition to an elected government. Part of the reason for that is pragmatic: they are thereby hampered both from reporting the news properly and from adopting a critical distance necessary to venture informed judgements. Consider the newspaper's further coverage of the PM's speech by its political editor, Andrew Grice, who gives an account of the history of relations between Tony Blair and the media. Read it carefully, and pay particular attention to Grice's rendition of the conflict between Downing Street and the BBC over the case adduced for the Iraq War:

The collision came as they tried to spin a war. Two dossiers were published as Mr Blair sought to win public support for his private pledge to George Bush to back a US invasion of Iraq. The first drew selectively on intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destructionand claimed he was planning to be able to deploy them within 45 minutes. The second, or "dodgy" dossier, relied on huge chunks of a student's thesis culled from the internet.

Alastair Campbell, the communications director, declared war on the BBC when it doubted the veracity of the claims. The hunt for the mole closed in on David Kelly, a government weapons expert, who committed suicide. Although No 10 won its battle at the Hutton inquiry into Dr Kelly's death, it was a pyrrhic victory. BBC heads rolled but the evidence revealed during the inquiry damaged the Government. Mr Blair recognised that Mr Campbell had to go.

What is notable about this passage is that it entirely omits the government's side of the dispute. To read it with no background in the subject, you would assume No 10's communications director was railing against the BBC for its farsightedness in doubting the accuracy of those dossiers. The reason was in fact that a BBC journalist asserted on national radio that the Government had made a claim relating to national security that it knew to be false. That charge was itself false. The journalist in question, Andrew Gilligan, levelled it without justification or evidence, or even keeping an accurate record of his interlocutor's comments. That abdication of professional responsibility was compounded by the BBC's Director General, Greg Dyke, who failed to read the transcript of the broadcast for a further three weeks. It is striking that Grice's account contains no reference to this incident and mentions neither of those names. As such, it is - there's no way round this, and I would be interested to know whether Grice even realises what he's done - a biased and unreliable comment that undermines the distinction between fact and opinion.

I should mention that The Independent today also carries an opinion column by Steve Richards that praises Blair for having "made one of his more courageous speeches" - which is also my view. But then it's not part of my criticism of the newspaper that it lacks a spread of opinion on its comment pages. My criticism is that the newspaper elsewhere in its pages has a surfeit of opinion, overwhelmingly in one direction, where it should have none.

Iraq and legality

The Independent reported yesterday:

The head of the Royal Navy at the time of the Iraq invasion was so worried about the legality of the conflict that he sought his own private legal advice on justification for the war.

Admiral Sir Alan West, the First Sea Lord, approached lawyers to ask whether Navy and Royal Marines personnel might end up facing war crimes charges in relation to their duties in Iraq. The extraordinary steps taken by Sir Alan - which The Independent can reveal today - shows the high level of concern felt by service chiefs in the approach to war - concern that was not eased by the Attorney General's provision of a legal licence for the attack on Iraq.

Indeed. You have to go a long way into this report - to the ninth and penultimate paragraph - before you come to a grudging but surely important point:

In the event, the advice Admiral West got from the lawyers was that the invasion could just about be justified due [sic] to Saddam Hussein's flouting of United Nations resolutions, although the question of how much time Iraq should be given to comply would have to be considered carefully.

I deliberately make only a restricted claim here. I recognise and urge the importance of a rules-based approach to policy, and have argued it recently in the case of the BAE payments scandal. But I am uneasy nonetheless about the sublimation of political disagreement in international law. I can't express this point more succinctly than I did in my book Anti-Totalitarianism a couple of years ago, discussing the arguments of the international lawyer Philippe Sands in his Lawless World, so I take the idle blogger's prerogative of quoting myself:

International law is not like domestic law in a constitutional democracy, in which there is a universally accepted set of conventions and statutes that is applicable to everyone and that may be enforced against anyone who breaks it. The international order, unlike a constitutional democracy, is anarchic: there is no supranational body that exercises sovereignty and that thereby has the power to implement law. Regardless of whether that is a good or a bad thing (I think it is a good thing), it is an inevitable feature of modern international politics: the more a state, by virtue of the spread of democratic government, is responsive to the mores and customs of its people, the less likely it will be to cede sovereignty to a higher body.

This is, in my view, a problem for a reflexive appeal to international law in judging the policies of democratic governments. An example of such an appeal comes from Martin Bell on "Comment is Free" last August: "Alone among the countries of Europe, Britain has played a leading part in waging a war described by the United Nations as illegal." The United Nations has made no such statement; I'm sure Martin was alluding instead to a statement made in September 2004 by Kofi Annan, a civil servant with no democratic legitimacy and no competence to make up policy for the organisation he served. Annan was making a judgement that the crucial point mentioned in the legal advice procured by Admiral West was immaterial. And in doing so, he was making a clearly political judgement, along the lines depicted in 2004 by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution:

[I]ronically many of the individuals who were most in favor of international law were most strongly opposed to the war or to holding Saddam accountable. And that to me had a certain contradiction because Saddam was in violation of international law. He was in violation, as the Bush administration repeatedly said, of more than a dozen U.N. Security Council resolutions. And the idea that the world would simply watch and let that happen and do little or nothing about it struck me as making a mockery of international law. So on this point I gave the Bush administration some credit. They were usually seen as being critics of international law and yet in one very important sense they were also trying to uphold it. So I thought what we needed was the Bush administration's willingness to confront Saddam and to make sure that his violations of international law were not ignored, but a little bit more of a multilateral approach in figuring out the strategy to do that appropriately.

(O'Hanlon is among the best thinkers in the Democratic Party on foreign policy. I recommend his book, co-authored with Kurt Campbell, Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security, 2006. The view of his that I've quoted is my view too. The multilateral strategy that he wished for in Iraq was, of course, stymied by the stupendously corrupt President Chirac, but it is fair to say that the Bush administration's diplomacy was gratuitously unilateralist nonetheless.)

In short, assertions of the illegality of the Iraq War produce more questions than answers. It is beyond argument that the British government sought and received independent legal advice before going to war; we know that that advice stated that Iraq's violation of UN Security Council Resolutions 678 and 687 was sufficient warrant for military action. Those resolutions marked the conditions for ceasefire of the first Gulf War in 1991; their demonstrable violation by Iraq meant, in effect, that Saddam continued to be an aggressive party waging war. Christopher Greenwood, Professor of International Law at the LSE, advised the government, and he set out his view in a memorandum to the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs in October 2002. I have heard a prominent journalist gratuitously insult Professor Greenwood, who so far as I know has no political affiliation, by suggesting he was not independent. Resort to that type of argument is, I'm afraid, an indication of the quality of the argument that Tony Blair acted illegally. If the Independent report is correct, then we must infer that independent legal advice given to Admiral West concurred with independent legal advice given to the government. The Iraq War was sanctioned by existing UN Security Council resolutions.

That is important for reasons other than the Iraq War itself. The calls for an independent inquiry into the reasons for going to war (as unsuccessfully proposed this week by the Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague) are the unscrupulous expedient of Tony Blair's opponents, who have failed to defeat him any other way. In this respect, they are merely a soft form of a wheeze reported in The Scotsman yesterday:

SCOTLAND'S Lord Advocate was today urged to prosecute Tony Blair as a war criminal for the invasion of Iraq. Former MP Jim Sillars said he had written to Elish Angiolini with a 10,000-word document setting out a formal complaint against the Prime Minister. And he said Scots law allowed Mr Blair to be put on trial despite such a move being ruled out south of the Border. Mr Sillars emphasised that despite his political past - first as a Labour MP and then as SNP MP and deputy leader - the complaint against Mr Blair was based on legal principles and case law and was not a political initiative.

Older readers will recall Mr Sillars. He is a dim Gallowayesque figure whose vanity once found an outlet in his own Scottish Labour Party (swiftly rendered impotent by Trotskyite infiltration). But the effrontery of his claim that his latest initiative is founded on disinterested legal principle will surprise even those who had thought themselves familiar with his brazenness. It is strictly correct to say that the complaint of Jim Sillars and many others is not a political initiative, but that doesn't mean it's a legal initiative either. It's an attempt to circumvent the political process by quasi-judicial means. As such, it's an attack on parliamentary sovereignty and democratic government, and it's time democrats fought back.

UPDATE: One of my lawyer correspondents has written on this point, and I quote his email with permission:

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of international law by either the First Sea Lord or the Independent in this report. It is immaterial from a war crimes perspective whether the actual conflict is legal or not. Combatants would not face war crime charges for simply participating in an illegal conflict. Prosecutions would solely be based on whether the actual conduct of combatants had the quality of being a war crime. This standard would be the same for both a legal or illegal conflict. Is there mischief at work here by the Independent? It would be perfectly legitimate for the First Lord to seek legal advice about potential combat operations and whether they would or could constitute war crimes as he has a duty to ensure that this does not take place. However I am troubled, if the report is accurate, by a leader of a constituent part of our armed forces to be seeking independent legal advice about whether the actual conflict is legal or not. What would he have done if the answer came back stating that it was illegal? Surely it is the role of the First Lord to ensure that those under his command operate as best as possible in a manner consistent with international law during the actual conflict and not to try and second guess whether the actual conflict is or is not legal.

Bizarre people

"Blimey, there are some bizarre people in this world," observes Daniel Finkelstein.

Tell me about it. Do you know who, as we speak, is scheming for the spread of Islamism in Europe and the doing down of the Jews? The US government, Senator Joseph Lieberman and I are doing these things - as you can find out here. Don't overlook the comments; the bovine stupidity of the first one, from the editor of the site, as he realises what he's got himself into, is a pearl of great price.

The Web, as not only Andrew Keen has noted, is the happy hunting ground of the boneheaded and the bizarre, but when you come across stuff like this you realise that nutters are rarely benign. Racist conspiracy theorists of the far-right fringe (often allied to racist conspiracy theorists of the far-left fringe) afflict Zionism as they do any other legitimate nationalism, and they are always repugnant.

"The cult of the amateur"

Newsnight discussed a week or so ago a new book called The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen. The book's self-explanatory subtitle is "How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy".

I know of Keen only from an interesting recent article in The Sunday Times by Bryan Appleyard, where Keen and Jonathan Freedland (and, less serious, I) are cited as examples of a backlash against the Web. I've since been looking forward to the publication of Keen's book. According to Newsnight:

[Keen] expresses his concern for the profligacy of online amateurism, spawned by the digital revolution. This, he feels, has had a destructive impact on our culture, economy and values.

He says, “[They] can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels”.

He complains that blogs are “collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture”.

He claims that Wikipedia perpetuates a cycle of misinformation and ignorance, and labels YouTube inane and absurd, “showing poor fools dancing, singing, eating, washing, shopping, driving, cleaning, sleeping, or just staring at their computers.”

I haven't yet read Keen's book, but I have much sympathy with these criticisms and recommend the two extracts that you can find on the Newsnight site.

A biographical curiosity is that Keen is apparently the great-nephew of Reuben Falber, a former assistant general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Falber's name will be unknown to almost all my readers, but I wrote a balanced appreciation of the man's life and work here when he died in 2006.

Language and assimilation

The BBC reports comments by Ruth Kelly:

The amount of official material being translated by bodies such as councils should be cut to encourage immigrants to learn English, Ruth Kelly has said. The communities secretary said there were cases - such as in a casualty ward - where translation was necessary.

But, she told the BBC's Politics Show, translation had been "used too frequently and without thought". Ms Kelly said that learning and using the English language was "key" to helping migrants to integrate.

Mrs Kelly's remarks have drawn criticism, however:

Former Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, disagreed with Ms Kelly.

He said: "If you do not provide that material for them to be aware of what's happening in the society or issues of particular help, they will remain sort of isolated.

"They will not really get the benefit, nor will they be able to contribute in a positive way."

Mrs Kelly is exactly right on this, while, as you would expect from past form, Sir Iqbal Sacranie is talking nonsense. It's worth saying why. (It's also worth noting in passing that Sir Iqbal is, by his standards, being responsible and moderate in merely being nonsensical. As Salman Rushdie wrote in The Times in 2005: "If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Mr Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.")

Here are two propositions about foreign languages. First, the monolingualism of British public life - the fact that fluency in a foreign language is rare even among the educated - is a weakness in our culture and our understanding of the world. Secondly, the fact that we have - unlike, say, Belgium or Canada - a single national language, notwithstanding the persistence of Welsh and Gaelic in parts of the UK, is a civic asset. These views are distinct and entirely compatible; I hold them both strongly.

On the first point, I yield to Agnès Poirier, writing in The Guardian a few months ago in response to a particularly obtuse argument about language study:

[T]o invoke the redundancy of foreign language study is like shooting oneself in the foot. As everybody who is sound of mind knows, learning the languages of others improves your knowledge and use of your own. Others hold a mirror in which you can at last see yourself and understand who you are.

On the eve of the fall of the Roman empire, there must have been many in Rome who thought that Latin ruled the world and that there was no need to learn what the people on the outside thought and how they lived. To brand foreign language study snobbish and useless is to open the way to one's own decadence.

Decadence is a strong word but apt. I gave a slightly pathetic example recently where The Guardian itself published a column purporting to be about French politics. Its author managed to get wrong the central "fact" of his argument by the simple expedient of not being able to read French and therefore knowing less about his chosen subject (the new French foreign minister) than every reader of Le Monde, which had covered it properly three days earlier. I have never come across a comparable case, even allowing for the difference between news copy and freelance comment, in a French or German newspaper's coverage of British politics. And trivial though the example be, it recalls a judgement that I think of quite often by the language authority David Crystal in his English as a Global Language, 1997 (pp. 139-40):

In 500 years' time, will it be the case that everyone will automatically be introduced to English as soon as they are born...? If this is part of a rich multilingual experience for our future newborns, this can only be a good thing. If it is by then the only language left to be learned, it will have been the greatest intellectual disaster the planet has ever known.

The insouciance - not just the ignorance - with which we British approach foreign languages is already an intellectual disaster. The impoverishment of our national life is immense.

On the second point, I am entirely with Ruth Kelly. The term multiculturalism carries a political stigma (deservedly so, considering how the concept is now used), but the presence of numerous national and linguistic groups in British society is a strength. I have had the good fortune to spend most of my life in highly cosmopolitan cities. I grew up in Leicester, and after graduating I lived for many years in Stockwell in south London. It was fascinating and often moving, in both places, to find the strength of linguistic ties in the home life of friends for whom - or for whose parents - English was not a first or even necessarily a familiar language. Those group attachments are, however, secondary to a common British citizenship whose individual members have equal rights under law. Forging a common citizenship almost requires, and is certainly eased by, having a single, official language. Charles Krauthammer wrote an excellent column in Time last year on the equivalent American debate:

History has blessed us with all the freedom and advantages of multiculturalism. But it has also blessed us, because of the accident of our origins, with a linguistic unity that brings a critically needed cohesion to a nation as diverse, multiracial and multiethnic as America. Why gratuitously throw away that priceless asset? How mindless to call the desire to retain it "racist."

I speak three languages. My late father spoke nine. When he became a naturalized American in midcentury, it never occurred to him to demand of his new and beneficent land that whenever its government had business with him--tax forms, court proceedings, ballot boxes--that it should be required to communicate in French, his best language, rather than English, his last and relatively weakest.

English is the U.S.'s national and common language. But that may change over time unless we change our assimilation norms. Making English the official language is the first step toward establishing those norms. "Official" means the language of the government and its institutions. "Official" makes clear our expectations of acculturation. "Official" means that every citizen, upon entering America's most sacred political space, the voting booth, should minimally be able to identify the words President and Vice President and county commissioner and judge. The immigrant, of course, has the right to speak whatever he wants. But he must understand that when he comes to the U.S., swears allegiance and accepts its bounty, he undertakes to join its civic culture. In English.

Exactly. If you want an indication that Ruth Kelly is right and moderate in her hope that councils will cut the amount of translated material, consider - of course - the debased multiculturalism practised by Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Authority. On the Mayor's web site, you'll find a helpful page outlining his role - in German. If there is a single person (other than the translator, whom I don't blame for accepting the commission) anywhere in London who benefits from this I should be astonished. It is a waste of public funds in the service of puerile gesture politics, and it should stop.

"Misrepresentation of a conflict"

I've written two posts recently taking issue with commentators who have criticised current Anglo-American foreign policy from their understanding of the peace settlement that concluded World War I. The commentators are, respectively, Simon Jenkins and Pat Buchanan. Jenkins is an urbane and civilised man whereas Buchanan is a demagogue, and I do not imply that they make the same argument or have the same interpretation of 20th-century history. But they do have this much in common: a conviction that the post-WWI settlement was punitive and destabilising. From this historical precedent, they infer that current Western foreign policy, by being indifferent to or uncomprehending of the injustices that others perceive in our conduct, is needlessly provocative. (A peculiarly repugnant popular term for this notion - as argued with indecency and indecent haste here by the author Chalmers Johnson, a fortnight after the destruction of the Twin Towers - is "blowback".)

I've argued that this view of WWI and its aftermath, while popular, is - even in its softer form as expounded by Jenkins - against the weight of recent scholarship in German and in English. I found by chance today, when looking for something else, coverage of this subject on the BBC History website. I'm bowled over by it.

I'd expected a site for a general readership would be an anodyne summary of dates and persons with some reference to current debates. In fact, that part of the site devoted to World Wars is excellent, and the section covering WWI is superb. I particularly direct you to two articles. The first is entitled "World War One: Misrepresentation of a Conflict" by Dan Todman. The misrepresentation Todman refers to is the picture of the war gained from popular historians such as the late Alan Clark and films such as Oh, What a Lovely War (or, more recently, Blackadder), which stress the futility of the war and the incompetence of the British generals. He notes:

The self-reinforcing power of these myths gives them tremendous power. Since the 1980s, a boom in carefully conducted archival investigation has done much to uncover the war’s complexity: how it was fought and won by the British army on the Western Front, how domestic support and dissent were encouraged and managed, and how the war was remembered.

Yet this academic research has had almost no impact on popular understanding. This should not be a cause for despair or disdain. Societies have always misrepresented the past in an attempt to understand the present.

The second article is entitled "The Origins of World War One" by Gary Sheffield. Even if you think you're not especially interested in the subject, I urge you to spend ten minutes reading this. It's a small masterpiece of concision about the event that dominated the twentieth century. Dr Sheffield wrote a fine book a few years ago (simultaneously with the article, I think) entitled Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities, 2001, which expounds his case in detail. (The book is especially strong on British military strategy; Sheffield was formerly Land Warfare Historian at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, and is now Professor of War Studies at Birmingham University.) Sheffield states that case in a brisk conclusion to the article:

Far from being fought over trivial issues, World War One must be seen in the context of an attempt by an aggressive, militarist state to establish hegemony over Europe, extinguishing democracy as a by-product. To argue that the world of 1919 was worse than that of 1914 is to miss the point. A world in which Imperial Germany had won World War One would have been even worse.

And, I might add, a world in which Imperial Germany had lost but suffered nugatory consequences would have been almost as destructive. As it turned out, the consequences were nothing like stringent enough.

It's my impression that even many who stand roughly where I do politically, on the Left and espousing militant anti-totalitarianism, do not necessarily hold this view. For example, one of the greatest socialist theorists of the last century, the American pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook, whose works have influenced my political thinking more than any other modern writer, did not. In his outstanding political memoir Out of Step, 1987, Hook recalls (pp. 298-9) his grave error in initially opposing US entry in WWII. He changed his mind in 1940, but one of the reasons for his earlier anti-war stance was a conviction "that the causes of World War II were essentially the same as those of WWI" - which members of the Socialist Party had resisted as an imperialist war. In fact, the causes of WWII were essentially the same as those of WWI. Wilhelmine Germany was not Nazi Germany, and did not pursue genocidal aims (or at least not in Europe; Africa was a different matter). But in both cases, an aggressive, militarist and autocratic Germany sought domination of Europe and needed to be defeated rather than merely rebuffed. Hook came belatedly (rather like George Orwell) to the right position on WWII, having at first mistakenly believed that war would be a precursor to American fascism. But he never came to see that his fellow American Socialists, who had shown much courage in defending their position against mob violence and intimidation, had misunderstood WWI as well.

History of course does not follow neat schemes. How we interpret the appalling conflagration of WWI - in particular what it was about and how those issues were settled - does not necessarily tell us much of importance, if anything, about how Western statesmen 90 years later should deal with autocratic states such as Iran and semi-autocratic states such as Russia. But I'm not the one saying it does. It is critics of the Blairite stance in foreign affairs who are apparently turning to this supposed historical analogy; and they have it all wrong.

NOTE: One of these days, I shall write a proper appreciation of Sidney Hook. Hook's life closed at a historically fitting moment. Born in 1902, he lived just long enough to witness the collapse of the East European police states that had debased the name of socialism and which he had determinedly opposed. Only a matter of months before that he had engaged in one of his periodic controversies with an academic opponent less skilled in debate than he. The opponent in this case was the radical historian Howard Zinn, the feebleness of whose historical grasp I commented on at length in this post. In their exchange, Hook and Zinn debated "How Democratic Is America?"; Hook is not right in every respect (his distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is otiose), but you can forgive the occasional hyperbole for the ruthlessness of the demolition.

UPDATE: In the original version of this post I mistakenly identified Dr Gary Sheffield as a historian at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. His current post is Professor of War Studies in the Department of Modern History at Birmingham University; I have altered the post accordingly.