Oliver Kamm

Okinawa and historical memory

I wrote a piece a couple of months ago for The New Republic about the implications of a fierce political controversy in Japan. (My article, for the online edition of the magazine, is here but is behind a subscription barrier.)

Last July, the Japanese Defence Minister, Fumio Kyuma, maintained in a broadcast speech that the dropping of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been an inevitable way for the US to end the Pacific War. "I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped," he declared. The statement caused such outrage that Kyuma apologised profusely and resigned. Yet his judgement was plainly right. Historians of the Pacific War - Japanese scholars as well as American ones - would and do regard it as a statement of the obvious. I maintained in my article:

It has long been the task of America’s friends abroad to convince our compatriots how important – not for America, but for them – is a transatlantic alliance founded on nuclear deterrence. Yet, as memories of the catastrophe wrought by Imperial Japan recede, it would take little mutation in Japan’s constitutionally mandated pacifism for it to become anti-American. The current protest over Kyuma's remarks exemplifies this ugly undercurrent.

In fairness, and especially as the continuing controversy over the content of Japanese school textbooks was one of the concerns I raised, I should point to this story from the BBC yesterday:

More than 100,000 people in Japan have rallied against changes to school books detailing Japanese military involvement in mass suicides during World War II. The protest, in Okinawa, was against moves to modify and tone down passages that say the army ordered Okinawans to kill themselves rather than surrender.

Okinawa's governor told crowds they could not ignore army involvement.

Some conservatives in Japan have in recent years questioned accounts of the country's brutal wartime past.

Saturday's rally was the biggest staged on the southern island since it was returned to Japan by the United States in 1972, according to the Kyodo News agency.

More power and much credit to the protestors. Recalling the horrors of the Battle of Okinawa is crucial to understanding correctly the later Hiroshima decision. One of my correspondents, the historian D.M. Giangreco, has written the definitive treatment of the importance of Okinawa in Truman's decision-making. This research was published as "'A Score of Bloody Okinawas and Iwo Jimas': President Truman and Casualty Estimates for the Invasion of Japan", in Pacific Historical Review, Feb 2003, and is reprinted in Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, ed. Robert J. Maddox, 2007, pp. 76-115.

Dennis states, on recounting the discussions within the administration: "Truman's multiple references to Okinawa - specifically his comment of the invasion operations representing 'an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other' - indicate clearly what he believed would be the magnitude of the fighting [in a conventional invasion of Japan]." In conclusion, he quotes the judgement of George F. Kennan, the most significant figure in US diplomacy in the past century, writing in 1997 (in communication with Dennis): "I have no doubt that our leaders, General Marshall among them, had good reason to anticipate a casualty rate of dreadful and sickening proportions in any invasion of Japan."

These considerations do not resolve, though in my view ought powerfully to inform, ethical debates over the use of the A-bomb. They do undermine unwarranted historical assertions to the effect that the Pacific War would have swiftly ended without recourse to the Bomb, and that Truman was aware of this. Okinawa demonstrated both the unmitigated brutality of Japan's rulers and the immense costs that the United States bore in order to secure the defeat of an aggressive totalitarianism.

Irving, the unsinkable rubber duck

Talk of the devil: only yesterday I referred to my reader David Irving, the Holocaust denier and racist. Today The Guardian recounts Irving's unvanquished ambitions:

This week David Irving, the discredited British historian who was described by a high court judge as a Holocaust denier and a racist, says he is launching a comeback with a speaking tour of British cities and a series of new books. "I have kept a low profile for several months because I have had to sort out where to live and to address my financial situation," said Mr Irving, who was declared bankrupt in 2002 after an unsuccessful libel action over claims he was a Holocaust denier. "But now I am ready to start again."

I am a fierce supporter of Irving's right to express his views without legal hindrance and the threat of prosecution. That doesn't mean I pay attention to his views, and I confess I had lost track of, and any interest in, the tergiversations of his account of the genocide of European Jewry. In his disastrous libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000, Irving - faced with at least the nominal requirement to be seen to pay some attention to documentary sources - "radically modified his position: he accepted that the killing by shooting had been on a massive scale of between 500,000 and 1,500,000 and that the programme of executions had been carried out in a systematic way and in accordance with orders from Berlin" (The Irving Judgment, 2000, p. 116). This opportunistic revision didn't prevent Mr Justice Gray, whose words I've just quoted, from concluding that Irving was indeed a Holocaust denier.

Now, Irving tells The Guardian, his views have "crystallised":

Asked if he now accepts there had been a Holocaust against the Jewish people he said he was "not going to use their trade name". He added: "I do accept that the Nazis quite definitely, that Heinrich Himmler, organised and directed a programme, a clandestine programme, for the liquidation of European Jews ... and that in 1942-43 alone over 2.5 million Jews were killed in those three camps." He added that Hitler was "completely in the dark" about the programme.

What is there left to say about such arrant nonsense by a discredited and dishonest man? On 2 April 1945, Hitler explicitly declared that National Socialism would earn eternal gratitude for exterminating the Jews of Germany and Central Europe ("So gesehen wird man dem Nationalsozialismus ewig dafür dankbar sein, daß ich die Juden aus Deutschland und Mitteleuropa ausgerottet habe"). The words were recorded by his secretary and appear in Hitler's Politisches Testament : Die Bormann Diktate vom Februar und April 1945, edited by the late Hugh Trevor-Roper.

One of the many damning features of The Irving Judgment concerns "Irving's readiness to challenge the authenticity of inconvenient documents and the credibility of apparently credible witnesses" (paragraphs 13.148-13.150, pp. 342-3). Mr Justice Gray declares:

I accept that it is necessary for historians, not least historians of the Nazi era, to be on their guard against documents which are forged or otherwise inauthentic. But it appeared to me that in the course of these proceedings Irving challenged the authenticity of certain documents, not because there was any substantial reason for doubting their genuineness but because they did not fit in with his thesis.

There are thus no prizes to my other readers for guessing how Irving deals with the documentary evidence I have just quoted. Not long ago Mr Irving urged his tiny band to write to me and the editor of The Times to complain about the injustice of a brief reference to him in an article of mine about the late Kurt Vonnegut. If he wishes to complain again, I can assure him he will have my undivided inattention.

Chomsky: more from a conspiracy theorist

I commented on a review by Jonathan Rauch, published in the Washington Post this month, of a new book by Noam Chomsky called Interventions. It was an astute review. Rauch captures Chomsky's techniques thus: "This kind of tendentious whimsy is more peculiar than interesting; as the pages turn, one becomes inured to it and begins to yawn."

In a spirit of latitudinarianism, I refer you now to Chomsky's reply. It's interesting not for what it says - it merely reiterates the tendentious whimsies Rauch has identified - but for what it reveals of the way Chomsky perceives the world. Here is his introduction:

The letter to the Washington Post that follows was written as an experiment, to see just how low the editors would sink in their efforts to block a book containing evidence and analysis that they do not want to reach the public. The letter is a response to a crude and vulgar diatribe, in the form of a review of my collection Interventions. In response, I wrote a point-by-point refutation of each charge, a straightforward matter, as the editors doubtless understand. The letter was sent to the Post immediately, altogether four times, with a request for acknowledgment of receipt. Unpublished, no acknowledgment of receipt. Two weeks after the review appeared, Sept. 16, the Post did publish two letters responding to it. The letters were critical of the review, but acceptable by the standards of the editors, because they left the lies and slanders standing -- the authors could have had no way to refute them without a research project.

I think it is fair to take the editors' silence to demonstrate that they know precisely what they are doing, and are too cowardly even to acknowledge receipt.

- Noam Chomsky

If you doubt that Chomsky belongs in the ranks of conspiracy theorists, this tirade should convince you. To Chomsky, there are the acknowledged truths that he utters and that are tacitly recognised by his enemies; the editors of the principal newspapers consciously choose to suppress those truths sooner than allow their readers to learn of them. The fact that Chomsky's letter is appreciably longer than the review it purports to answer is, of course, of no significance in explaining the Post's decision not to publish it.

In short, Chomsky has no more idea how newspapers work than he has of the conventions of public debate. His premise that the letters pages of major newspapers should be open to him at any time did remind me of past form, however. In one of the numerous collections of "interviews" (they were not probing interrogations) published under his name in the 1990s, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, comes this singular exchange:

How many letters of yours have they [the newspapers] printed?

Occasionally, when an outlandish slander and lie about me has appeared there, I've written back to them. Sometimes they don't publish the letters. Once, maybe more, I was angry enough that I contacted a friend inside, who was able to put enough pressure on so they ran the letter.

The hold of the corporate media is so tight that it unravels as soon as Chomsky calls in a favour and pulls a few strings. Bear in mind, too, that - judging by his invocation of precisely these terms when applied to the Rauch review - Chomsky's notion of what constitutes lies and slander doesn't usually accord with commonsense definitions. A better descriptor for what he means would be "criticisms of me, Noam Chomsky, that I reject". Chomsky has no more right of access to the communications media to respond to every criticism than you and I do, and his treatment by the press strikes me as unreasonably respectful.

Hess and the Cold War

This is an interesting story, from The Independent:

Rudolf Hess, the one-time deputy of Adolf Hitler who spent 42 years in prison as a Nazi criminal, was the subject of an extraordinary Cold War tussle over a sustained campaign of "mental cruelty" by his Soviet guards.

Secret British documents about the maverick Nazi's conditions in Berlin's Spandau Prison during the 1970s show how an octogenarian Hess was at the heart of a bizarre tug-of-war between the four victorious Allied powers who shared responsibility for guarding him after he was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg Trials.

The life and death of Hess, who secretly flew solo to Scotland in 1941 claiming he had Hitler's permission to negotiate a peace deal with Britain before then faking a mental breakdown, has been the subject of enduring fascination after he spent 21 years as the sole inmate of Spandau. He was found hanging in a summer house in the prison garden in 1987, aged 93.

But the details of the austerity of the regime imposed on Hess, one of the leading lights of Nazism in the 1930s, remained unknown until the release of papers yesterday at the National Archives in Kew, west London, showing how the British felt obliged to protect him from Moscow's desire that he "drink his retribution to the bottom of the cup".

There have been many theories about Hess's bizarre mission in 1941, ranging from unsubstantiated speculations about Hitler's knowledge of the mission to crank conspiracy theories that the man in Spandau was not the real Hess. The simplest explanation is the most plausible. Hess, having lost his status in the Nazi hierarchy, sought to ingratiate himself once more with Hitler. We know that Hitler was furious after Hess's capture, stripped Hess of his party offices and gave orders for his execution on his repatriation to Germany. Hess's was a pathetic venture. It embarrassed the British government too, and had no bearing on the conduct or outcome of the war. As Lord Bullock put it in his magisterial biography Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, 1992, p. 780: "Resentful and frustrated, Hess cast around for some spectacular act of devotion which would recapture the favour of the Leader whom he still regarded with dog-like devotion."

The details of Hess's incarceration are in keeping with this. He was a Nazi and a virulent antisemite - and a misfit who was, on any objective standards, cruelly treated by his Soviet captors. According to today's report:

A series of strictures imposed on Hess by Spandau's Russian representatives, including the forced removal of his reading glasses and a decision to deprive him of a notebook to write down his thoughts, led the British governor of the prison to conclude that his Soviet colleagues were determined to break Hess amid calls for his release as he reached his 80th birthday in 1974....

The documents state that Hess was also refused access to books, had letters over-zealously censored and delayed, and was barred from seeing a lawyer because of Russian objections.

I felt while he was still alive, and am still more of the view now, that there was an overwhelming case for releasing Hess after two decades' imprisonment (which had been the sentence served by Albert Speer). That case was not aided by the mendacious claims of Hess's late son, Wolf Rüdiger Hess, a disgusting man whose motivation was as much admiration for Nazism as it was filial concern. There was no argument from justice for Rudolf Hess's release; the only proper argument was from clemency.

A secondary thought that occurred to me on reading today's reports concerns one of my readers, the Holocaust denier David Irving. I won't link to Mr Irving's site, but you can take my word for it that I'm citing correctly his comments on the death of Wolf Rüdiger Hess in 2001:

Generations of spineless western prime ministers preferred to allow Rudolf Hess, a latent schizophrene, to rot in jail, hoping that he would die soon; after twenty-five years he eventually allowed Wolf Rüdiger, now a grown man and a successful architect, to come and see him. While the Russian guards generally turned a blind eye, the western guards were pitiless in application of rules set by judges and commissions long since deceased.

The files released yesterday make clear that it was not Western but Soviet administration of Spandau that inflicted mental cruelties on Hess. Which of Irving or the late Wolf Rüdiger Hess is responsible for the myth hereby exploded is not especially important, as the term "racist faker" fits them equally well. It's a small point worth noting, nonetheless.

Gavin Cameron

One of the pleasures of blogging is that I have acquired over the years a stable of regular correspondents in academia and other areas of specialist knowledge in subjects that I write about. These various experts are of immense help in criticising my arguments, or pointing out errors of fact and interpretation in them. The articles I write for wider publication are less fallible than they otherwise would be if I didn't have these correspondents.

I'm very saddened to read in The Times today an obituary of one of my correspondents, Gavin Cameron, Reader in Macroeconomics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Gavin suffered from cystic fibrosis, and died earlier this month at the age of only 38. As we never met, I feel a little presumptuous in marking his death. I can only say that, just from our correspondence, I can easily recognise the intellectual and expository gifts that the obituary refers to.

He had a remarkably wide range of expertise, an abiding interest in economic policy and a talent for cogent expression. Those who worked with him appreciated his astonishingly quick grasp of arguments, his ability to work through long logical sequences, and his outstanding programming skills.

Here is an email I received from Gavin after I had written a piece in support of a smoking ban. (My policy with emails is to publish them only with permission, and then not to identify the author by name.) His criticisms are a pellucid argument that the alternative courses I present do not exhaust the available policy options. The ellipses mark where he graciously said that he enjoyed reading this site; I took the sentence out when posting his comments here, but I much appreciated it. I'm terribly sorry that I won't hear from him again, and that his academic field, his university and most of all his wife have lost such a talented man.

No nukes, no gays

Only The Guardian could put it this way:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, told Americans yesterday his country had no nuclear weapons programme, but then called his own credibility into question by insisting it had no gay people either.

"But"? "But"?

Newsnight debate

A small plug: Newsnight, from the Labour conference, conducts its own debate tonight on Iraq. I'm one of the participants, with Mike Gapes MP, Bob Marshall-Andrews MP and the comedian Mark Steel. Gapes and I argue that the decision to intervene was right. Marshall-Andrews is a prominent critic of the war and of the Blair government. Steel is a longstanding member of the Socialist Workers' Party, and thus in no sense an anti-war campaigner: he is a supporter of the war effort of the other side.

UPDATE: You can see our debate (an edited version of it) here.

"Undercover Lib Dem"

The BBC reports:

Brian Paddick has said he is relieved to have joined the Lib Dem ranks after a career in the "authoritarian" police. The former Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner said he had been "a police officer working undercover - as an undercover Liberal Democrat".

Mr Paddick is one of three Lib Dems vying for the chance to take on Ken Livingstone in May's London elections.

Mr Paddick clearly thinks he was making a witticism. His party leader ought to have struck him down for that. I began my career in public service. When you are in that position, you are of course perfectly entitled to hold political views. But to declare that while you were discharging your duties you were in fact advancing your party political views directly undermines the ethos of public service. In one sentence, Mr Paddick has shown he's unfit for public office.

"A chilly blast of censorship"

The last few days have seen a new case of a phenomenon I have written quite a lot about, viz. legal threats issued against bloggers. The Times reports:

One is a billionaire businessman and former prisoner from Uzbekistan who is the second largest shareholder in Arsenal Football Club.

The other is the Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames Boris Johnson, who hopes to be Mayor of London.

In a chilly blast of censorship the lawyers of Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov yesterday stifled his arch enemy Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. But in the process, the ebullient Mr Johnson found himself silenced too.

The seemingly irrepressible Tory became an innocent victim of a bitter internet war between Mr Usmanov and Mr Murray.

Mr Usmanov’s libel lawyers Schillings have spent weeks warning websites and journalists about repeating Mr Murray’s blog allegations about their client’s past. Now the web server has cut off the former ambassador’s link to the wider world. Caught in the collateral damage are a host of opinion formers’ websites including Bloggerheads by Tim Ireland and the Sandwell Labour councillor Bob Piper.

Now, my knowledge of football is close to zero and my sympathy for Mr Murray's political campaigns is limited. I regard laws on defamation in England as absurdly biased towards the plaintiff but as nonetheless in some form a necessary part of public life. Moreover, in order to keep separate the issues of internet speech and the content of particular speech I have deliberately not read the allegations made against Mr Usmanov, and I wouldn't be able to judge their veracity even if I knew what they were. But I'm perfectly certain that this episode represents a gross intrusion into the rights of free expression. On that premise, I give Mr Murray my support.

I've commented before, in the context of the Mumsnet libel settlement, on the threat to free expression represented by libel laws that hold a publisher liable for the content of comments posted by a third party. The Usmanov case goes a step beyond even that disturbing state of affairs, for it has led to the closure of blogs that have nothing to do with the complaint. And in the case of the websites that the Usmanov complaint directly addresses, the threats are unconscionable. There has been a long discussion on this subject at Harry's Place, where Mr Murray has posted this comment:

The key point is that I stand by what I said and stand ready to justify it in a British court of law, and to call lots of witnesses to help me. I have made completely clear to Schillings that I am not running away and am ready for the legal case.

Schillings however, rather than sue me, have threatened and intimidated others into closing down websites, without ever the truth or falsity of the facts about Usmanov being tested in court. That is a very dangerous precedent indeed.

Yes, it is. I was invited by one of the news programmes on terrestrial television to discuss this issue on Friday evening, and I regret (and apologise to Mr Murray) that I wasn't able to do it. The issue of principle is important and needs airing, which is why I raise it here.

I should, however, to clear up any possible confusion, state what my interest in the subject is and what it is not. The invitation to discuss the subject on air came because I am, so far as I know, still the only British blogger ever to have received a libel writ. But, as my regular readers will know, there is no parallel whatever with the Usmanov case, and I do wish to stress this. The complainant in my case, an eccentric pro-Milosevic blogger called Neil Clark, was handicapped from the outset of his campaign to shut me up by the dual misfortune that (a) I could prove the truth of my comments about him, and consequently would not in any circumstances yield to his demands to censor myself, apologise to him and pay him damages; and (b) he was stupefyingly clueless. (I detail here, most recently, Clark's gross misrepresentation of source material and the ineptitude of his purported legal threats, which represented - and were instantly dismissed by the Court as - an abuse of the legal process. I regret to report that even after his unfortunate experience, in which - owing to my decision not to bill him for the costs of my legal representation - he escaped far more lightly than he might have done, Mr Clark imprudently reinforced his discomfiture by means of the stupidest Internet imposture I've ever seen.)

In short, my experience was close to a joke, if a somewhat laboured one. The legal expedients that are being practised in Craig Murray's case are no joke at all. With that distinction stressed and understood, I shall be glad to explain the grounds of my support for threatened bloggers to anyone who will listen, and in any forum.

Chomsky and conspiracy theory

I argued in a post earlier this month that Noam Chomsky ought properly to be considered a conspiracy theorist rather than a political thinker. The particular example I gave was a comment about the terrorist Abu Nidal, from Chomsky's book Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, 1983, p. 78:

The PLO has charged that he [Abu Nidal] is an Israeli agent, noting that his operations "frequently serve Israeli interests indirectly," a charge that is "one of the assumptions you bear in mind" according to a French secret service specialist. It is generally assumed that he is supported by Iraq, sometimes Syria, where his offices are located and where he appears to have access to considerable funding.

One of my regular academic correspondents has kindly drawn my attention to a reference on this subject that I wasn't familiar with and am glad to pass on to my readers.

The notion that Abu Nidal was in reality an Israeli agent is devoid of empirical support. It rests entirely on the assertions of PLO spokesmen (i.e. Abu Nidal's enemies) and on the supposition that, because his actions were so conspicuously brutal (e.g. the Rome and Vienna airport atroicities) and hence counterproductive to winning sympathy for the Palestinian cause, they can only have been committed at the behest of the Israelis. It is, in short, pure conspiracy theory of a familiar form.

This conspiracy theory overlooks the obvious and plausible explanation that Abu Nidal committed horrific acts because he was a bloodthirsty, sadistic killer. He was, after all, unstable enough to destroy his own organisation, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, in 1987 through bloody purges and mass executions of its cadres in Libya. My correspondent points to a book by Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993, 1999, pp. 600-01, as reference to this episode. More generally, it's an object lesson in the difference between scholarly research in international politics and the type of groundless insinuations that are the staple of Professor Chomsky's writings in the field.