Oliver Kamm

Debating Castro's legacy

The lead item on Newsnight last night was Castro's departure. I was one of the studio guests debating the issue. The others were a Cuban-American activist, Frank Calzone; a pro-Castro Cuban journalist, Pedro Perez-Sarduy; and, inevitably, George Galloway. You can watch the programme on the Newsnight website till tomorrow's edition replaces it, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it. At one point Galloway advanced an unusually labyrinthine "Bush-Hitler" analogy, and I regret that my sniggering off-camera was clearly caught by the microphone. In the circumstances, I asked Mr Galloway not to make me laugh as he was the one with a record as long as my arm of justifying autocracy across the globe.

Dramatic muse

I know, I know, this is the softest of soft targets, and I did undertake to leave him alone. But Neil Clark has posted once more on "Comment is Free". Last time he unmasked the Bilderberger conspiracy that controls Tony Blair and that has installed the spawn of Satan in the White House. This time he sticks to the more prosaic conceit of urging the resurrection, after three decades, of the Prices Commission - in order (presumably) to instruct the Chinese to curb their economic growth rate owing to the upward pressure it exerts on oil prices.

I regret that, under his last CiF piece, I did post a comment myself relating what I had found when following the "Bilderberger" link that Mr Clark had provided. It was a rum assortment of items, comprising the occult, the weird and the racist. I understand that Mr Clark was upset that I had done this, and I therefore volunteered to the editors of CiF that I would in no circumstances post any further comments under an article by Mr Clark. (I stress that CiF's editors did not ask this: I told them, unsolicited, that I would give Mr Clark the break that I believe he needs, and desist from any further comment on his pieces for the site.) I therefore am posting the following observation here, and not there, even though - as a mere correction on a point of fact - it would clearly be welcome in any circumstances.

Mr Clark begins his piece (including a Wikipedia link that I'm afraid I baulk at repeating): "'It is difficult to be kind when the price of everything is so expensive,' bemoaned the Good Woman of Szechuan. Whatever would Berthold Brecht's heroine have made of Britain in 2008?"

There is no dramatist called Berthold Brecht. The author of The Good Woman of Setzuan is Bertolt Brecht. Brecht was given the birthname Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, but he is universally known in the literary and the German-speaking world by the name he took when adopting the second syllable of the name of his friend Arnolt Bronnen. (This wasn't necessarily the gracious gesture that might be supposed. One of Brecht's biographers, John Fuegi, in The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, 1994, p. 93, suggests: "For Bronnen it was a form of marriage. For the new Bertolt, all it meant was a somewhat less aristocratic-sounding name and perhaps nothing more.") I regret that I do not have the text of the play in front of me, in either German or English, so cannot check Mr Clark's quotation for him, as - in deference to his record for accuracy - I otherwise would.

Cuba after Castro

Fidel Castro will not return. I hope to write something about his inglorious rule and its damaging consequences far beyond Cuba. In the meantime, I modestly direct you to a piece I wrote for The Times last month on Western policy towards Cuba, anticipating Castro's permanent departure. This point is, I hope, not lost in assessments of Castro's political legacy:

The most perverse aspect of Western attitudes towards Cuba is not a misconceived US embargo, but a widespread romanticism towards its target. Today's antiwar campaigners appear unaware that the historical figure who more nearly than anyone brought the world to nuclear destruction was Fidel Castro. In the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Castro cabled Khrushchev and urged a nuclear first strike in the event of a US invasion of the island. (Khrushchev responded to his volatile ally with understated reason: “Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I consider this proposal of yours incorrect.”)

I didn't have space in the article to quote Castro's cable directly, but here it is. It was sent on 26 October 1962, and is quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, 1997, p. 277:

"[If the imperialists] actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba in violation of international law and morality, that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear and legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other."

Less serious, I was unfazed to find that last month the misnamed Cuba Solidarity Campaign announced: "Cuba supporters respond to Times slurs" - the slurs being contained in the "viciously anti-Cuban article" by me. To a certain type of "solidarity" campaigner, nothing will do but obeisance to Third World autocracies. The fact that my article was arguing against the US economic embargo was either unnoticed or uncomprehended.

Moscow and la Hudson

This post appears on "Comment is Free".

CND is as relevant today as it was in the cold war, argues the organisation's chairman, Kate Hudson. I think it unlikely that the campaign will win anything resembling the levels of public support seen in its 1980s heydays, when even so it found public opinion stubbornly resistant to a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. But more important, CND forfeited any claim to be taken seriously as a critic of nuclear arms when it comprehensively misunderstood the dynamics of the cold war. Its campaigns now are no more intellectually reputable, and in some respects less so.

I have no memory of CND's first wave of widespread public sympathy, in the 1960s, but I do recall what motivated its 1980s revival. There were justified concerns about the direction of western nuclear policy. Countering the risk of nuclear blackmail required more than a minimum nuclear deterrent. But by the late 1970s, nuclear strategy and weapons procurement had become needlessly complex.

One example. A frequent theme in US debate - one particularly associated with the late Paul Nitze and the committee on the present danger - was that American land-based Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were vulnerable to a Soviet first strike. That so-called "window of vulnerability" meant, so Nitze and other hawks argued, that the US should develop and deploy a new land-based MX missile system, whose method of basing would withstand a first strike.

The fear was probably groundless. Soviet leaders were brutal and expansionist, but not irrational. The likelihood of a successful pre-emptive strike was minuscule, and preventive measures were relatively straightforward. The debate on modernising America's strategic triad of ballistic missiles based on land, at sea and on aircraft would have benefited from a sober assessment of what the US and the Atlantic alliance needed for effective deterrence. The same was true of Nato's forward strategy in Europe.

Had CND confined itself to a critique of redundant weapons systems and abstruse Nato doctrine, it might have had a useful effect on public policy. Instead its blanket opposition to nuclear deterrence was ill-reasoned and misleading. On no issue were these characteristics more evident than the campaign to reverse Nato's 1979 decision to deploy Cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe. Disarmament campaigners claimed that these Euromissiles were first-strike weapons intended to fight a war "limited" to Europe. As one CND pamphlet put it in 1983: "Only the argument that Cruise is part of a programme to enable Nato actually to fight a nuclear war makes sense ..."

This factoid was inflammatory nonsense. The purpose of Cruise was to fill a gap in the system of extended deterrence on which Nato strategy depended, and thereby make a so-called limited nuclear war less likely. The gap had been opened up in the first place by the Soviet deployment of a new generation of intermediate-range missiles. At the behest of European governments - specifically the German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt - Nato deployed Cruise and Pershing in response, as a reaffirmation of the US commitment to Europe's defence.

The misinformation promulgated by CND combined with a calumnious stereotype of bellicose, trigger-happy American leaders. As it turned out, and confounding both his anti-nuclear detractors and his conservative adulators, President Reagan was a convinced nuclear abolitionist. Contrary to popular belief, he changed course and adopted a highly public rapprochement - signalled by his saccharine "Ivan and Anya" speech in January 1984 - with the Soviet Union 15 months before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Gorbachev responded; but Reagan initiated. (A well-documented case for this chronology is Beth A Fischer's 1997 book The Reagan Reversal.) In my view, Reagan's vision of total nuclear disarmament allied to ballistic missile defences was utopian and dangerous. But the relevant point for this discussion is that CND was completely wrong-footed by shifts in international relations in the mid-1980s, and has never come to terms with them.

But there was something worse about CND's campaigning. Hudson asserts that CND has always been a "broad church" and has never been pro-Soviet. It would indeed be unfair to regard CND as agents of the Kremlin. The problem was, rather, that CND considered the Soviet Union a defensive actor in world affairs, and communists within its ranks a legitimate and even honoured mainstay of the peace movement. These were ruinous misconceptions.

Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a former member of CND's national council, professor Vic Allen, confessed to the BBC that he had passed information to SED officials in East Germany. CND's hurried press release (September 19 1999) on the affair was astonishing. It denied what no one had asserted, namely that Allen had swung CND behind the Soviet Union. It also insisted that Allen had been "entitled to his views". So support for a police state was, by CND's lights, merely a personal idiosyncrasy.

This attitude might explain why Hudson is the current chairman of CND. She is a member of the Communist party of Britain, which unabashedly declares its solidarity with the totalitarian nightmare-state of North Korea. I do not claim for a moment that all CND members share her views. I am merely incredulous that members of what is supposedly a broad pressure group should find Hudson's views compatible with the cause of peace. At a minimum, I do not believe Hudson is as exercised by the prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea as, say, I am.

Consider, too, CND's approach to Iran's nuclear diplomacy. Supposedly a supporter of UN mechanisms for countering nuclear proliferation, CND in February 2006 "expressed regret at the IAEA's decision to report Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme". Throughout its history, CND has been muted in its attitude to autocracies while depicting democratic governments in extravagantly disparaging terms. During the Falklands war, the sainted EP Thompson wrote preposterously of Margaret Thatcher: "Her administration has lost a byelection in Glasgow and it needs to sink the Argentine navy in revenge." So much for UN security council resolutions and the principles of international law. But CND today is something novel: a peace movement prepared to collude in nuclear proliferation, some of whose leadership actively support the vilest regime in the world.

An open letter to the editors of Media Lens - finis

Gentlemen,
It is past time that I concluded my review of your excursions in the historiography of the Pacific War. I invited you to confirm what you seemed diffident about stating explicitly, viz. that you had no intention of writing to the film critic David Thomson or the BBC director Stephen Walker to apologise for having lectured them with "information" that you now know to be unreliable. It is 14 months since you learned, from my blog, that historians have known since 1995 that the conclusion of the US Strategic Bombing Survey - the counterfactual of an early Japanese surrender even if the A-bomb had not been used - is not supported by the same survey's body of evidence, and that citing that conclusion is a nice example of swallowing official propaganda because you wanted to believe it. You have since had the dispiriting experience of finding that academic historians confirm what I told you in the first place.

So far as I understood your position, you believed that no correction of your erroneous historical claims was necessary; and the reason none was necessary was that I am a supporter of the Iraq War. My readers will be unsurprised, as I am unfazed, that you decided against stating this position explicitly. I would have been genuinely and pleasantly astonished, however, if you had taken the reputable course of apologising to the journalists you'd harangued and who turned out to be better informed than you. Media Lens is known for never owning up to errors and never publishing corrections - a standard part of the way journalists operate. As George Monbiot told you in 2002: "Rather than offering a clear, objective analysis of why the media works the way it does, who pulls the strings, how journalists are manipulated, knowingly or otherwise, you appear to have decided instead to use your platform merely to attack those who do not accept your narrow and particular doctrine."

I find your position dishonest but I was prepared for it. I am beyond incredulity, however, at your citing once more in your defence a hapless figure whom I had assumed you'd discreetly retired from this discussion: "In our January 6, 2004 Media Alert on the terrible atomic bomb attacks on Japan, we cited a highly respected historian - Howard Zinn."

We have been through this. Howard Zinn is not "a highly respected historian", and your resort to obsequious honorific is a nice indicator of your insecurity. Zinn's magnum opus is a largely worthless popular book neatly summarised by the left-wing historian Michael Kazin as "polemic disguised as history", whose author is "an evangelist of little imagination for whom history is one long chain of stark moral dualities". Zinn has no record of scholarly attainment in the study of the Pacific War. His one essay on the subject that I'm aware of accepts the USSBS conclusion on the "early surrender" counterfactual without a trace of scepticism or critical inquiry. When you consider that Zinn's idea of "admirable and painstaking research" is a book claiming that 9/11 was an "inside job", his unquestioning approach to the USSBS conclusion doesn't seem so surprising. He will, after all, believe literally anything that accords with what he is ideologically predisposed to wish were true.

It was, in the circumstances, unfeeling of you to appeal to Zinn for help after I had first pointed out your ahistorical assertions on the A-bomb. You will doubtless remember what happened next. Zinn hadn't read the very source he claimed to be citing; had no awareness of death rates in the Pacific War; completely misunderstood the significance of messages sent from Tokyo to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow; evinced no familiarity with recent historical research on the Japanese surrender; and cited a paper (about Iwo Jima) whose import he had misunderstood and whose author he misidentified. Your disasters in this debate stem in the first place from having read nothing on the subject bar Professor Zinn, so it was hardly likely that he would be of material assistance to you in your distress. It would be churlish of me, however, to refrain from granting that, while Zinn may be a clueless crank, he is far from the most absurd of the purported "credible sources" for your work. (If you're not familiar with the mishaps of "Neil Clark, a Balkans specialist" in his encounters with source material, let alone with his unavailing efforts to prevent public exposure of them, then a rich and diverting source of recreation awaits you.)

So far as I can work out from your evasiveness, you now accept the unreliability of USSBS - which will be bad news for Zinn - but insist that it doesn't matter because it is only "one part of the evidence for the key argument", viz. that the bomb was unnecessary for securing Japanese surrender. Extraordinarily, you still haven't grasped that your new deus ex machina Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is no support to you. Hasegawa does not agree, as your initial cited source Gar Alperovitz has spent 40 years maintaining, that Japan was trying to surrender before the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I take particular exception, in explaining this point to you by means of direct quotation from Hasegawa, that you accuse me of misrepresenting Hasegawa's wider thesis. I was in fact starting from the impossibly low base of your own knowledge of this subject, and pointing out that Hasegawa directly contradicts your (and Zinn's, and Alperovitz's) previous assertions. There is a great deal wrong with Hasegawa's wider thesis of a "race" to the bomb, and I'm happy to explain it to you; but in your misnamed "Cogitation", you weren't even at the stage of understanding what that thesis was or how it related to the historiographical debate.

As you were not aware when you first wrote to the luckless David Thomson, the debate has moved on from the old revisionist arguments about "atomic diplomacy" and the "early surrender" counterfactual. Hasegawa's argument is about the importance of Soviet entry into the war relative to the shock of the bomb. He maintains that without Soviet entry into the war, Japan would have continued fighting until rendered incapable of doing so by several A-bombs, by a conventional invasion, or by a naval blockade. It is - believe me - not possible for you to accept both Hasegawa's argument and Zinn's claim to you that: "In Japan, the Emperor was supreme, and he clearly wanted to arrange surrender terms, hence the dispatch of an envoy to Moscow."

If you are going to evacuate yourselves from the wreckage of your earlier position, as taken from Zinn, you need to know first what you're giving up, and secondly what the problem is with your new position. The problem with Hasegawa is that his supporting material has been shredded by critical reviewers. I have already told you that I have no interest in your "Buddhist philosophy of compassion", but I note that this path to enlightenment is evidently compatible with a highly advanced personal vanity. You expostulate that I "have outrageously accused Hasegawa of 'manipulation of source material'". Gentlemen, you are not competent to judge Hasegawa's use of source material: you haven't even understood what Hasegawa's argument is, let alone what evidence supports it. But if you wish to argue this point, then I'm game.

I refer you again to the case of Hasegawa's misrepresentation of the eyewitness accounts of President Truman's press conference announcing Soviet entry into the Pacific War. Wishing to present that decision as a blow to Truman, Hasegawa maintains that these contemporary press reports, from the Washington Post and the New York Times, depict a man suffering "profound disappointment". Hasegawa leaves out of his account the following sentences from the NYT report (emphasis added): "[Truman's] concluding words, 'That is all,' were all but drowned out by the scramble of news and radio reporters for the nearest exit to rush to their telephones. Mr. Truman and White House officials present rocked with laughter at the sensation his 'simple announcement' had precipitated."

When my correspondent Michael Kort observed, in a review here, that Hasegawa had left out this relevant material - which casts doubt on the notion that Truman was a severely disappointed man - the point appears to have been well taken. In his edited volume The End of the Pacific War, 2007, p. 224, Hasegawa repeats his assertion about Truman's press conference but removes the footnoted references to the contemporary press reports, thereby making it impossible for the reader to check the accuracy of his account. There may well be a compassionate Buddhist explanation for this, but as those ancient mysteries are closed to me I shall boringly repeat my observation about Hasegawa's manipulation of source material to fit a prespecified conclusion.

I have dealt at some length and in several posts with your misconceptions on this issue, for various reasons. The subject is of immense intrinsic importance even if your opinions are not. Dispelling some of the hoarier myths about Truman's A-bomb decision is a worthwhile aim of historical argument. On a parochial level, I was taken aback by your insulting manner towards a working journalist who had written a perfectly defensible comment on a subject he understood better than you. I also wanted to see if Media Lens would have the grace to acknowledge error and draw back when made to confront the limits of its understanding.

Taking these factors together, I find it easier to draw a definitive conclusion about Media Lens than I do about the debates over the Pacific War. The co-founder and editor of Media Lens David Edwards is, in one important respect, of a character with David Cromwell. It is this. As a matter of demonstrable fact and not speculative hypothesis, David Cromwell, founder and editor of Media Lens, is an ignoramus.

Yours fraternally,
Oliver Kamm

UPDATE: I have corrected an erroneous date in this post. I originally wrote that George Monbiot had made his comments about Media Lens last year. I have no idea why I said this, as the exchange in fact took place in 2002. I have altered the date accordingly. I know George slightly (we once took part in a radio programme together, and have since corresponded); while our politics are highly dissimilar, I find George a cogent advocate and a very nice man. Of relevance in the exchange I've quoted, he is from my experience an intellectually honest exponent of far-left views. That is not something that could plausibly be said of the editors of Media Lens.

Kingmaker

The great Stephen Leacock wrote in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, 1912:

"I have had some small connection with politics and public life. A few years ago I went all round the British Empire delivering addresses on Imperial organization. When I state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Union of South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turco-Italian war, I think the reader can form some idea of their importance."

I know what he meant. In July 2005 I called for the resignation of John Kampfner as editor of the New Statesman. Not three years have passed, and Kampfner has acted on that demand.

Media Lens, oh yes II

This is my reply to the reply sent by Media Lens's editors to my open letter. If you follow me.

Gentlemen,
Thank you for your message. I shall be delighted to intercept each of the tangents along which you scurry, but I must first point out that you have carefully contrived to ignore the only issue I raised.

I have no interest in your "Buddhist philosophy of compassion". My letter concerned solely your fidelity to the principles of historical inquiry. In your unsolicited email to the film critic David Thomson, and before that your "media alert" to Stephen Walker of the BBC, you brandished without the remotest caution or scepticism the 1946 "early Japanese surrender" counterfactual presented by the US Strategic Bombing Survey. After I reassured Mr Thomson that recent scholarly research indicated that USSBS's conclusion was not supported by the survey's own evidence, you belatedly sought the opinion of more serious personalities than the 9/11 truth seeker Howard Zinn. I observe with complacence that you have thereby found my observation confirmed. Testimony by Japanese leaders during USSBS interrogation did not substantiate the "early surrender" counterfactual. Yet, as Gian Gentile observes in the seminal article to which I referred Mr Thomson and, by extension, you ("Advocacy or Assessment? The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany and Japan", Pacific Historical Review, February 1997): "The survey authors, however, chose not to use this testimony; evidence that challenged their conclusions stayed in their unpublished files."

I thus invited you to state whether you would be issuing a correction to your earlier claims - by, for example, writing to the journalists whom you had targeted yet who had been better informed than you, and much less susceptible to official propaganda. It appears from your message that the answer is no: either, I surmise, because you believe your statements about USSBS are consistent or because you consider that any difference is a mere nuance. As this is so surprising an inference, and these are such patently insupportable claims, I should be grateful to have it confirmed directly that I have properly understood you before I address your remarks in detail.

Let me in the meantime correct one misapprehension on your part and provide one item of information on my readers' behalf.

1) I did not accuse you, Mr Cromwell, of failing to evince "mastery of the subject": I called you an ignoramus. The terms are not synonymous. The reason I disclaim mastery of the subject is that my reading encompasses only the secondary literature in English; but I do know that literature well. You are unfamiliar even with the correct spelling of the name of your own cited source, the debunked and unscholarly polemicist Gar Alperovitz.

2) You protest: "We always base our work on carefully referenced credible sources.... If some people take us seriously, it's because we offer credible sources and rational arguments." My readers will be overjoyed to discover that among your credible sources is a gentleman you refer to as "Neil Clark, a Balkans specialist". Mr Clark is a blogger and monoglot schoolteacher in Oxford, whose Balkan specialism lately extended to a ruinous unfamiliarity with the distinction between the world's leading NGO in security policy, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and an obscure Srebrenica-denial outfit, the International Strategic Studies Association. Only last week he provided further recreation by referring readers of "Comment is Free" to another credible source, a website identifying Prince Charles as the antichrist and President Bush as the spawn of Satan. Mr Clark's best known work includes his stirring designation of Slobodan Milosevic as a "prisoner of conscience", and extensive laudatory remarks about himself in the third person and under female pseudonyms on other people's websites. Further comment on your credible source would be superfluous, though that won't stop me.

Yours fraternally,
Oliver Kamm

Media Lens, oh yes

The editors of Media Lens, David Cromwell and David Edwards, have replied to my open letter about their inconstant claims on the A-bomb. You may read their letter on their website, here. On the organisation's message board - a rest home for those who find the readers' threads at "Comment is Free" too learned and allusive - there is an anguished discussion on whether the editors were right to do this. Cromwell and Edwards are themselves torn: on the one hand "we've always found Kamm's style of debating just so unreasonable", yet "he's been pretty insistent and it was actually quite interesting to take a closer look beneath his ultra-confident style at what's actually there". Actually.

Meanwhile "Neil R" protests about my rudeness, which is second only to Nick Cohen's:

"I think this is pretty clear! There is no point responding to this egregious individual any further! He has been trying to elicit a response for some time, and his open letter has done so! I think this is a mistake. Kamm should be ignored.

"Cohen's comment of course show just how disgusting and reprehensible this individual has become. It is hilarious to consider that these people actually believe they are progressive."

After a little while (and a mild admonition from the editors), Neil R reflects further:

"Cohen said in his comment: 'Come now, Oliver, this is transparent. You are worse than the visitors to Bedlam who used to shake the chains of the lunatics to provoke a reaction.'

"On further thought this comment does somewhat give the game away. Cohen doesn't perhaps necessarily mean just you guys as this is a comment on Kamm enabling a limited number of comments to be posted for the general public. This is more an illustration of what Cohen really thinks of the general public."

Trust me on this, Neil. I know Nick Cohen, and his comment is about you.

Kate Jones

The Times carries an obituary today for the literary agent Kate Jones, who has died of liver cancer at the age of 46. Kate showed loyalty beyond the call of professional obligation to her authors, as the obituary makes clear in just a sentence: "During her post-cancer sabbatical, Jones took on the unrestful task of being Martin Bell’s agent for his campaign in the 1997 general election, when he stood as an Independent against Neil Hamilton in the 'safe' Conservative seat of Tatton, and won."

Those who watched the 1997 election results on television (I attended the Tatton count, but later saw the BBC election video) may just recall an image of Martin standing in front of a seven-foot transvestite, while flanked by my cousin Melissa and also by Kate, her arms aloft in triumph. It's easy to be wise after the event, when we know the damage that Mr Hamilton had inflicted not only on his reputation but also on the fortunes of the Conservative Party nationally. But it was quite an undertaking to be election agent in a quixotic campaign for what was nominally one of the Tories' safest seats (and is now again, with George Osborne as the sitting MP). Kate did it with style and congeniality, and complete success. I last saw her in May, when old friends from that venture held a dinner to mark the tenth anniversary of the Tatton campaign. I shall remember her with great respect and affection. And while I'm saddened by Kate's passing, I relished the penultimate sentence of her obituary: "When liver cancer was diagnosed and found to be incurable, only five days before she died, she and her husband drew up a short but pleasing list of people she would thankfully never have to deal with again."

Open letter to the editors of Media Lens

Gentlemen,
I was interested to read your recent article “Racing Towards The Abyss: The U.S. Atomic Bombing of Japan” on your website. I note in particular your reference to the US Strategic Bombing Survey’s conclusion in 1946 concerning the likelihood of an early Japanese surrender even had the A-bomb not been used. You rightly cite the Stanford historian Barton Bernstein on the contradictory character of the USSBS conclusion compared with the survey’s own evidence. (In fact, Bernstein has been sounding caution on USSBS for more than 30 years, and not only in the 1995 article that you reference – see his edited volume The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues, 1976, p. 52.)

Forgive my ungraciousness in pointing this out, but I can’t help noticing that you thereby inflict enormous collateral damage on everything that Media Lens has previously said on the subject. Fortunately, the initial letter you wrote to the film critic David Thomson in October 2006, in which you quoted the USSBS conclusion without reservation or scepticism, will have caused no lasting misconception (other than perhaps to Media Lens supporters). Modesty prevents me from pointing out the reason for this fortunate consequence; I merely observe that after you posted your letter on the Media Lens message board, I wrote to Mr Thomson and explained that you were not to be taken seriously as a commentator on the Pacific War. I noted in particular:

“Cromwell is evidently unaware that the assertions of the Pacific report of the US Strategic Bombing Survey concerning Japanese surrender have been refuted using information that was available to the report's author, Paul Nitze, at the time he wrote it (Robert P. Newman, "Ending the War with Japan: Paul Nitze's 'Early Surrender' Counterfactual", Pacific Historical Review, May 1995; Gian Gentile, "Advocacy or Assessment? The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany and Japan", Pacific Historical Review, February 1997).”

However, in your article in the New Statesman, “A strange kind of normality”, 19 January 2004, you stated:

“On 5 January, the BBC, in its 12-part documentary series Days That Shook the World, aired a programme on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Just 35 seconds were spent on the justification for an attack that incinerated 100,000 civilians. The claim that the attack was required in order to avoid a million US casualties during an invasion of the Japanese mainland went unchallenged.

“I wrote to the writer and director, Stephen Walker, providing evidence that no serious effort had ever been made to estimate the likely costs of invasion. I asked him if he knew that the US Strategic Bombing Survey had interviewed 700 Japanese officials after the war and concluded that "certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated".

“Reviewing all the available evidence, the American historian Howard Zinn concluded that the atomic bombings had nothing to do with avoiding casualties or forcing surrender. “They were about "the aggrandisement of American national power". The US was letting the world - and the Soviet Union, in particular - know who was in charge.

“At our prompting, more than 100 people sent e-mails asking the BBC about the 35 seconds and the lack of balance.”

I leave aside, for now, your extraordinary claims that Professor Zinn reviewed “all the available evidence” and that “no serious effort had ever been made to estimate the likely costs of the invasion”. I am concerned merely with your having persuaded more than 100 people to write to the BBC on the basis of evidence that you now acknowledge, after belatedly consulting more serious personalities than Zinn, was flawed and contradictory.

Given that Media Lens’s declared aim is to “correct for the distorted vision of the corporate media”, I should be glad to know if you will be correcting for the distorted vision of Media Lens. I suggest that your most direct course might be a letter of correction to Stephen Walker, copied to the New Statesman and posted on your organisation’s message board.

Despite my criticisms of your behaviour towards David Thomson and my expressed views on your competence to engage in this debate, I’m glad that you have extended your researches beyond the popular history of Howard Zinn. I am certain that in doing so you will have rendered yourselves less susceptible in future to the claims of official propaganda by the military-industrial complex.

Yours fraternally,
Oliver Kamm