Stuff

The stridently unlettered paleo-libertarian polemicist Justin Raimondo wrote an encouragingly worried article in the nativist far-right American Conservative magazine a couple of years ago entitled "Hillary the Hawk". He wrote:

If the Democratic establishment’s stance on the [Iraq] war is at odds with the party’s antiwar activist base, then their outright warmongering on the Iranian issue puts the two factions on a collision course... If Hillary [Clinton] maintains her lead in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes—and with over $21 million in the bank, she’s way ahead of any potential rivals—and the party establishment effectively strangles insurgent antiwar activism at the grassroots level, an increasingly “isolationist” electorate will be faced with a choice between two interventionist candidates....

I don't believe that electorates in the US or the UK are "increasingly isolationist". They are against losing, not against intervention, and the gains made by the Coalition forces under exceptional leadership since the US troop surge peaked last June have altered the dynamics of the US Presidential race. I hope that the election will be fought between Senators McCain and Clinton, either of whom would be welcome from the point of view of European Atlanticists. Meanwhile, the outcome of the Nevada and South Carolina primaries has precipitated what is obviously the top story of the day, which I bring to you far too late.

I wrote last month of an enjoyably ferocious review of a book by a sociologist called Steve Fuller, who was an expert witness in a disastrous defence case for the teaching of the pseudoscience of "Intelligent Design" in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. Professor Fuller has alerted me to his reply to that review, and I draw it in turn to your attention in turn.

With some apprehension, I turn to a subject that I had undertaken, as a personal favour to a loyal reader, not to touch again. My interlocutor, who is a journalist with much experience and knowledge of the Balkans, begged me to avoid the subject of Mr Neil Clark, who is not. Mr Clark's principal but limited fame rests rather in legal matters, about which I can reasonably claim to have rendered him involuntarily better educated, and periodic fiascos in his encounters with source material. My interlocutor, who is as bemused by Mr Clark's political assertions as the rest of my readers will be, felt that Mr Clark had nonetheless endured disproportionate attention. I agree, and acknowledge my own culpability. Even so, there is one last aspect of Mr Clark's mental furniture that may be worth noting.

Mr Clark is to be found blogging indefatigably at "Comment is Free". Last week he complained that "for his pro-Yugoslav stance, Milosevic was rewarded with over a decade of demonisation in the west's media". Attending to the merits of this proposition would clearly not be a fruitful exercise, but one comment below the article pointed to a characteristic of Mr Clark that I hadn't previously realised. In 2004 Clark wrote a similarly exculpatory piece that included this sentence (emphasis added): "In the case of the worst massacre with which Milosevic has been accused of complicity - of between 2,000 and 4,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 - Del Ponte's team have produced nothing to challenge the verdict of the five-year inquiry commissioned by the Dutch government - that there was 'no proof that orders for the slaughter came from Serb political leaders in Belgrade'.”

I have caught Mr Clark before in promoting factoids derived from a "Srebrenica denial" outfit (an obscure American organisation called the International Strategic Studies Association) and affecting that this was a reputable source. But it was news to me that he is himself a Srebrenica denier. The true figure of at least 7,000 to 8,000 victims killed in that act of genocide is established and recognised by the Serb government. By analogy, recall that even in his libel suit against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in 2000, my reader David Irving maintained that 500,000 to 1.5 million Jews had been murdered on orders from Berlin (The Irving Judgment, 2000, p. 116). He also said more recently that Himmler had had a programme for extermination of the Jews, and that "in 1942-43 alone over 2.5 million Jews were killed in those three camps". Irving remains, despite these qualifications, a Holocaust denier.