Oliver Kamm

Publishers' readers and responsibilities

Daniel Finkelstein puts a non-story in its place:

The story of the man who sent Jane Austen's work to agents and publishers has been all over the place today. We were invited to laugh at the recipients who sent back polite rejection letters.

But, really, how silly were they?

There are two perfectly reasonable explanations which don't make them look so foolish.

The first is that upon receiving a book that began "It is a truth universally acknowledged", the agents and publishers sighed, thought "not another one" and sent a polite rejection note without reading all that much more.

The second, even more likely, explanation is the manuscripts were not read at all.

I'm sure the second explanation is the right one, in which case the publishers and agents were certainly doing their jobs properly. Many people believe they have a novel within them; almost none is right. It is not the function of a publishing house to serve these people (other than in the trivial sense that they, like the rest of us, are members of the reading public), any more than I have a responsibility to give a sympathetic hearing to an insurance salesman who cold-calls when I'm having dinner.

The man who passed off Jane Austen's work as his own was making a point that he can't find a publisher for his own novel. I'm unmoved by his predicament. His rights are not infringed if a commercial enterprise declines to publish him, and nor are yours and mine by being unable to read his work. Literary publishing is not an arm of the social services, and I would be worried if those engaged in the production of books by their authors, for their readers, were to spend their professional time doing something else, such as reading an unsolicited manuscript on the minuscule possibility that they might uncover a masterpiece.

Nor, incidentally, does it refute my observation to point to the undoubted cases of authors who have enjoyed commercial success after receiving rejections by mainstream publishers. We have a family anecdote on this. Many years ago a leading publisher in the UK commissioned my mother to read a book in German and make a recommendation about a possible English edition. My mother's report for the publisher said - I paraphrase, but not roughly - that the book was sub-literate and preposterous, had been written by an obvious ignoramus, and that no reputable publishing house would waste any time or risk its good name in associating with it. The publisher took note of this firm recommendation and decided not to commission an English translation.

So another English publisher brought out the book instead. The author's thesis was that extraterrestrial beings had visited Earth in ancient times and built, among other marvels, the statues on Easter Island, Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid at Giza. The author's name was Erich von Däniken, and his book - under the English title Chariots of the Gods? - became one of the great bestsellers and publishing sensations of the 1970s. He followed it with more than twenty other works in the same vein and to comparable public acclaim. But my mother's recommendation had been right; likewise the original publisher's decision to act on it.

Editorial decisions of our time

The Guardian today hands itself over to what it calls the Iraqi "resistance" - a term loaded with historical connotations. The plenipotentiary Seumas Milne writes:

Until now, the resistance groups have operated entirely underground and their leaders have communicated with the outside world mainly through internet postings, if at all.... Now they have decided to speak to the western press for the first time as they prepare to launch a public face and a common political programme in anticipation of eventual American and British withdrawal from Iraq. Seven of the most important Sunni-led armed organisations - excluding al-Qaida and the Ba'athists - have agreed to form a united front and have drawn up a series of demands to form the basis of future negotiations with the occupation forces.

Milne has no doubt what this means:

At the heart of the new insurgent alliance is a rejection of the murderous sectarianism that has come to grip Iraq - and the role of al-Qaida in particular. Most striking is the case of Zubeidy, whose hardline salafist (purist Islamic) group Ansar al-Sunna recently split in half over the issue (his faction is now called the Legitimate Committee of Ansar al-Sunna - Goure says such splits are endemic in the resistance movement). "We wanted to unite with other resistance forces, but the other group is moving closer to al-Qaida and refused. Al-Qaida has brought benefits and problems," Zubeidy says. "They attack the US occupiers. But every day the problems they bring become greater than the benefits.

"Resistance isn't just about killing Americans without any aims or goals," he continues.

Well, thank goodness for that: someone might have got hurt otherwise.

I'm chastened to recall that in the none too distant past - last Thursday in fact - I wrote that in my adult lifetime The Guardian had got far more things right than it had wrong. I hope that the newspaper will expound promptly its editorial stance on this conflict. It ought to say that, while it opposed the decision to intervene militarily in Iraq, it unreservedly supports the efforts of our troops in Iraq, operating under a UN mandate, to defeat a Baathist-Islamist alliance that pursues through terror the overthrow of nascent constitutional government. How could a voice of progressive politics fail to do this?

Reasons to stand firm against the thug Putin

This article appears in The Times today.

In the throes of a terrible death, Alexander Litvinenko had no doubt who was ultimately responsible for his condition: “The howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.”

Failure to hand over Andrei Lugovoy, the former KGB agent, accused of Litvinenko’s murder, amply justifies the expulsion of four Russian diplomats from London this week. The unspecified “serious consequences” threatened from Moscow should be ignored, but also exploited. Unjustified as any retaliation would be, it would confirm the destructive bent of policy under Vladimir Putin. The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, states the obvious when declaring that the Government neither sought nor welcomed the altercation with Moscow. Yet it ought to stimulate an overdue reassessment of our foreign policy aims and alliances.

The murder of Litvinenko is not an obscure dispute unrelated to our interests. His fate replicated that of other opponents of Putin’s regime – most obviously the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered last October. But this time the victim was a British citizen, killed by unspeakable means in our capital city. The Government must remain obdurate about the extradition of Lugovoy first because it is our affair, and secondly because justice will be served no other way. The former KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky stated bluntly of Litvinenko’s murder: “Of course it is state-sponsored. He was such an obvious enemy.” There are, to say the least, grounds for scepticism that the Russian state system will be disinterested in its dealings with the accused.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Alexander Grushko, has declared that the British Government’s response would complicate anti-terrorist and security policies. The issue is first about criminal justice, but one of the incidental benefits of confronting the Kremlin will be to expose the fiction behind Mr Grushko’s remarks.

At his summit with Mr Putin in 2001, George Bush declared: “I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” As is always likely when inferring information from that source, the spirit world deceived. Mr Putin’s rule has been marked by thuggishness and obstructionism. Recall his meddling in the Ukraine; and his encouragement of Iran’s nuclear deception and opposition to effective sanctions.

Among the failures of the Bush Administration has been a gratuitously abrasive diplomacy with European allies combined with an unreasoning trust in Mr Putin’s intentions. Given new and better leadership in France and Germany, and confirmation of appalling and possibly criminal leadership in the Kremlin, our Government has every reason to stand firm in demanding justice.

Galloway's suspension

I am neither naïve nor squeamish concerning parliamentarians' conduct, but this report is extraordinary. Let me direct your attention in particular to paragraph 345:

Mr Galloway has consistently denied, prevaricated and fudged in relation to the now undeniable evidence that the Mariam Appeal, and he indirectly through it, received money derived, via the Oil for Food Programme, from the former Iraqi regime...

For the man to make a feeble joke sooner than acknowledge the implications of that conclusion is testament to a shamelessness entirely outwith my experience of discredited MPs.

UPDATE: It's only fair to add a link to Galloway's response to the report and the Select Committee's recommendation that he be suspended. This is what he has to say:

The committee appear utterly oblivious to the grotesque irony of a pro-sanctions and pro-war committee of a pro-sanctions and pro-war parliament passing judgment on the work of their opponents, especially in the light of the bloody march of events in Iraq since this inquiry began four years ago.

They describe that as questioning their integrity and bringing parliament into disrepute. The house would do well to honestly calibrate exactly how its reputation on all matters concerning the war in Iraq stands with the public before deciding who precisely has brought it into disrepute.

The only sense I can make of these remarks - and I can genuinely see no other way of interpreting them - is that Galloway believes his conduct is justified because he holds a particular set of political opinions. I may be on my own here, but I don't find that a strong defence.

Incidentally, note too the report's observation (paragraph 347):

In the course of its life the Mariam Appeal enjoyed a total income of over £1.4 million, mainly derived from 3 overseas sources. No audited accounts were ever produced by the Appeal, but of this, it seems likely, on the information available to me, that up to £100,000 was expended on the care of Mariam Hamza herself. The great bulk of the Appeal's expenditure went on its campaigning activities. The propriety of this expenditure is not a matter for me: it is for the Charity Commission and the Appeal's trustees. I simply make the point that the sums of money involved in the Appeal were substantial, indeed way beyond those involved in most political campaigns run by Members. The issues involved are serious. The matter of Mr Galloway's conduct in relation to the Appeal cannot simply be dismissed as in his words "… a spat over the funding of political campaigns".

In 2003, Galloway was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman for Newsnight, where this exchange about the Mariam Appeal took place:

JEREMY PAXMAN: Will you open the accounts?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Yes.

I point this out specifically for the benefit of political reporters such as, but not only, Nick Assinder of BBC News Online. Rather than marvelling that (in the words of Mr Assinder, who is easily impressed) "this controversial, much-criticised MP is a performer who gives great value for money", they might care to ask Mr Galloway why no audited accounts were ever produced that would have allowed an informed judgement on what "value for money" had been realised by the Mariam Appeal.

Srebrenica commemorated

Last week marked the twelfth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica. The Guardian reported:

Hundreds of newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre were reburied Wednesday, their relatives sobbing as the thin green coffins were laid in the ground on the 12th anniversary of the mass wartime killing. More than 30,000 people turned out for the ceremony where a child read aloud the names of the 465 victims identified after being found in the many mass graves around Srebrenica. Before the ceremony, sobbing women moved among the coffins, searching for their loved ones' names and hugging each other for comfort....

Every year, more victims' bodies are found in dozens of mass graves around Srebrenica. DNA tests and other forensic methods have led to the identification and burial of more than 3,000 victims, including Wednesday's 465.

The report doesn't say this, but the harrowing work of identifying the victims' remains is carried out by an organisation called the International Commission on Missing Persons. The organisation was described at length in The Scotsman a few months ago, and I refer you to that article again. (I paid tribute to its work in this post.) I can't imagine what solace for the victims' families would entail, but the cause of historical truth and accounting for genocide depends on people such as the ICMP.

Also, on this subject, see a recent long article by Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, who covered the war in Bosnia with singular courage and skill. Ed worries, with reason, that the symbol of Srebrenica may occlude historical reckoning for the other barbarities committed by Bosnian Serbs (and of course orchestrated by Slobodan Milosevic's regime):

It is time to confront a bitter reality: that the estimable and intense focus on Srebrenica, and the massacre’s iconographic centrality in the memory of the slaughter in Bosnia, is double-edged. The fact is that Srebrenica - both the brutality of the killing and calculated betrayal by the so-called ‘International Community’ - was a not an isolated event; it was the culmination of what had been happening, and was allowed to happen by the West, for more than three years before the massacre. Srebrenica involved the avoidable slaughter of 8,000 people over five days, after the equally avoidable mass-murder of hundreds of thousands of others over three years. Srebrenica is the emblem of those other massacres, concentration camps, savage ‘ethnic cleansing’ on a vast scale, organised mass rape, relentless shelling of civilians - women and children - and of hospitals - and the bloody siege of a great capital, Sarajevo, while the ‘international community’ either connived with the Serbs (as in the cases of Paris and London) or else looked on and dithered, forbidding the Bosnians to arm themselves and mount effective resistance to the Serbian juggernaut.

"Comment is Free" again

I commented almost a year ago about The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site after a few months of its operation. CiF is an imaginative venture that I enjoy reading and sometimes contribute to. But I noted a substantial problem with the site, and have since raised it with CiF's editors. This was what I said:

The intention of drawing readers into the conversation has had consistently appalling consequences, at least in the posts that I have followed. The threads below the posts have been skewed, and in some cases dominated, by contributors who hold exceptionally peculiar ideas and appear susceptible to anti-Jewish notions.

The newspaper today carries on its Comment page and CiF an extract from a speech by Shimon Peres on his induction as President of Israel. It's an effective piece of rhetoric (which I mean in the proper, non-derogatory sense of the term), by a statesman and deserved Nobel laureate of experience and wisdom. Cast your eye for a moment, and not much more, down the readers' comments that are appended to the piece. They are, with a few exceptions, what you would imagine them to be but worse. "And the so-called democratic leader steps up with a Hitler-like speech referring to only Jews as human, only Jews as part of his grand dream, his liebensraum [sic], his occupation, his glorious war machine," declares one contributor.

I am close to being an absolutist on free speech. I do not, however, consider that defending someone's right to utter pernicious sentiments obligates you to provide the vehicle by which he may do so. I can see no benefit either to The Guardian or to the quality of public debate in CiF's providing a bulletin board for antisemitic cranks and sundry flat-earthers, and cordially invite CiF's editors to reflect further on what they have created.

UPDATE: Fair enough: Georgina Henry, the editor of "Comment is Free", closed the thread later in the day owing to the number of comments that contravened the site's talk policies.

Greenham remembered

I've received a circular from a Guardian journalist, Lindsay Poulton, about an interactive website called Your Greenham. The site is produced by GuardianFilms, and it "records the actions, memories and history of one of the most remarkable protests in modern history", viz. the women's peace camp at RAF Greenham Common in the 1980s. As the email requests recipients to pass on its message to "at least 10 people, [for] that way the spirit of protest will again reach thousands", I'm glad to relate its subject to my at least ten readers.

I don't mean to sound ungracious about this. The site is worth looking at. It's attractively designed, has much interesting contemporary material, and records a notable event in recent British social history. I would not put it any higher than that, however. I wrote a brief comment in The Times last September, on the 25th anniversary of the founding of the camp, expressing my scepticism about the political significance of the Greenham women's campaign. I will also quote myself, I'm afraid - as I can't be troubled to find alternative words for the same thought - from my book Antitotalitarianism on why the campaign was misguided (emphasis added):

European opposition to Nato strategy in the early 1980s reflected a curious belief – reinforced by loose talk from a new President, Ronald Reagan – that a new generation of intermediate-range missiles was being deployed in order to fight a ‘limited’ nuclear war in Europe. The notion was preposterous. The rationale of Nato’s deployment was the opposite. [German Chancellor Helmut] Schmidt himself was regarded as the begetter of this deployment, in a speech he gave to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in 1977. In it, he worried publicly about the credibility of extended deterrence in Europe when the Soviet Union was deploying its own new intermediate-range missiles, the SS-4s and SS-5s. Nato’s purpose was to tie the United States to the defence of Western Europe. If the Soviets threatened to use missiles in the European ‘theatre’, and Nato had no weapons of comparable range but only the US strategic nuclear arsenal with which to retaliate, then they might calculate that the US would be deterred from retaliating. In short, deterrence might fail because of a gap in the system of extended deterrence on which Nato strategy rested.

Cruise and Pershing II missiles were intended to resolve this problem, by providing the US with more options than just the strategic nuclear arsenal in the event of Soviet aggression. With the deployment of Nato’s euromissiles, a Soviet nuclear threat would be less credible. A so-called limited nuclear war became less likely with a strengthening of deterrence and the reaffirmation of the US commitment to Europe’s defence. But the peace movement maintained the opposite, completely misunderstanding Cruise and Pershing as a means for the US to avoid becoming embroiled in a strategic nuclear war. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators thus filled the streets of European capital cities in the early 1980s because of a mistake.

I believed at the time, and do now, that the campaigners of CND and the Greenham peace camp might have made a useful contribution to the defence debate of the 1980s. Nato's strategies and deployment were becoming increasingly complex when the essential task of nuclear deterrence had not altered. Effective deterrence required far more than a minimum capability of a few ICBMs or SLBMs. But it was almost certainly not true that, as Ambassador Paul Nitze and the Committee on the Present Danger energetically maintained, there was a "window of vulnerability" in US nuclear deployment, the closure of which required a new MX missile system with a complex and expensive basing mode. There was room for a campaigning organisation to inject that note of scepticism into public discussion of defence policy.

The Greenham peace campaigners, CND and the American nuclear freeze movement were, however, very far from being that type of influence. I consider their impact to have been severely damaging to the quality of public debate, and - more parochially, but it's an issue I care about - to the political health and electoral standing of the Left. The Greenham campaigners' initial demonstration, where 30,000 women linked hands around the Greenham base, was imaginative and gained much favourable publicity for their cause. That was their high point, however. Ever after, they stood out as an anti-intellectual force in their demonstrations and statements. You will see this if you consult Your Greenham. The first video clip (the "March to Greenham" item) opens with a statement of outrageous falsehood: "The US deployed Cruise missiles all over Europe as part of Nato strategy for fighting a limited nuclear war." For "fighting", read "avoiding".

Other contemporary film clips bear out my point: a demonstration in Parliament Square of women "keening" (their word, meaning lamenting and wailing); an elderly lady shouting at journalists covering her protest that they had undergone a "spiritual lobotomy". I recognised one of the talking heads, interviewed specially for the site, as Helen John, who declares to camera: "Being born female on this planet is like being born behind enemy lines." A campaign founded on such premises, and with those techniques of persuasion, was never going to elevate public debate or inspire respect.

There is a final oddity about the site, which I recommend despite my reservations about its partial judgement. Among the materials are contemporary articles about the protest from The Guardian. These are either supportive op-ed columns or sympathetic reporting. Yet there is no reference to the fact that the newspaper itself supported the deployment of Cruise missiles, and advanced cogent reasons for its position. I hope that Guardian journalists will locate and republish these leading articles. For all its idiosyncrasies, the newspaper has in my adult lifetime got far more things right than it has wrong, and this was one notably astute judgement.

Sarkozy and historical precedent

I should give credit where it's due. A few weeks ago I noted the oddity that The Guardian had commissioned a piece castigating the Foreign Minister of France from someone who has no expertise in French politics and is unable to read French. As was the newspaper's risk in those circumstances, the resulting article evinced less familiarity with its subject than that possessed by every reader of Le Monde, which had covered the same topic accurately three days earlier. I suggested that The Guardian might do better in future, for critical analysis of politics under President Sarkozy, to refer to its regular contributor Agnès Poirier, a formidable opponent of what she terms in a recent book Le modèle anglais: une illusion française.

The Guardian does that today, with a caustic piece by Agnès about Sarkozy. She compares the President not, as numerous commentators do, to Napoleon Bonaparte, but to "Napoleon the third, the great man's nephew, the dandy dictator and liberal emperor who ruled from 1852 to 1870. And this, my friends, is not good news for France." (Napoleon the second, the son of Napoleon Bonaparte and known as l'Aiglon, never reigned in France.)

I don't usually link to articles without commenting on them, but I draw this one to your attention because it's a striking argument that, if you extend it to European diplomacy, could hardly be more derogatory towards its subject. Agnès comments that: "Although short-lived, the [Paris] commune [of 1871] and its effect on world history proved far more important than 18 years of Napoleon III's prosperity." The same was true, and on a greater scale of historical significance, of German unification. Napoleon III did as much as anyone to create this immense shift in the international order - purely unintentionally and by ineptitude. By declaring war on Prussia in 1870, Napoleon ensured the emergence of a united Germany under the Prussian crown, whose position Bismarck, as Chancellor, then consolidated with various alliances. There were big differences between Bismarck's approach in the 1870s and that of Wilhelmine Germany from the 1890s. But if you accept the argument that the cause of WWI, as of WWII, was aggressive German militarism, you can draw a not altogether fanciful line from the uselessness of Napoleon III through to the horrific bloodshed of 1914-18.

Bomb scare: Japan's dangerous victimisation myth

The New Republic publishes a piece from me today about recent political controversy in Japan. Last week the Japanese Defence minister provoked outrage - which forced his own resignation - by declaring, of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945: "I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped."

My article is available here - to read it, you need to register for the site, which is free. I argue that the Minister's statement, which was widely designated even by the international press as a gaffe, was in fact commonsensical, and that:

... Japan's wartime myths and their replication in global anti-nuclear protest ought to be countered. "Nuclear weapons are absolute evil," declared one Japanese politician from within the governing coalition this week. No, they are not: It depends who has them. Nuclear weapons have been instrumental in defeating and containing totalitarianism. For the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that civilized states can do without an ally, even an implicit one, who possesses them. The diplomatic posturing and misrepresentations of the last few days could do with a terse American dismissal, for all our sakes.

Writers and politics

Salman Rushdie has a letter in The Guardian today in which he declares it "bizarre and untruthful to say that I have a 'fondness for the Pentagon's politics'". The charge was made in in Saturday's paper by Terry Eagleton, who lamented: "For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." Eagleton's is a ludicrous remark that exemplifies the man's incapacity as a critic. The only conception he has of "questioning the foundations of the western way of life" is his own set of political opinions.

But while I pay tribute to Rushdie's courage over two decades and particular dignity in recent weeks, I direct your attention also to an accompanying letter from one M. Schachter: "Many people from eastern Europe remember Hugh MacDiarmid much less fondly than Terry Eagleton, as the man who reacted to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 not by leaving but rejoining the Communist party."

Yes, Eagleton really did eulogise the old fraud, describing him as "the great communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid [who] died just as the dark night of Thatcherism descended". Conservative government, to Eagleton, was a "dark night"; Soviet tanks don't warrant a mention against such a nightmare. The best description of MacDiarmid I have come across was Kingsley Amis's, when he referred in a review to "vole-faced, red-shirted Hugh MacDiarmid, arguably (as one tribute has it) the greatest Scottish poet since William McGonagall, inferior to him only in sense of irony". (The reference is cited in a footnote in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader, 2000, p. 817.)

Substantiating Amis's judgement is the work of a moment. My copy of the selected poems (I've never run to more than that) of MacDiarmid includes the execrable "First Hymn to Lenin", published in 1931, which assures the dead tyrant: "Christ's cited no' by chance or juist because/ You mark the greatest turnin'-point since him/ But that your main redress has lain where he's/ Least use - fulfillin' his sayin' lang kep dim/ That whasae followed him things o' like natur'/ 'Ud dae - and greater!"