Oliver Kamm

The New Party

A reader called David Lindsay tried to post a comment to this site last week (under my post "Not the whole story"). For some reason - possibly the long list of names - his comment was wrongly caught by my spam filter, and I regret that it took me a while to notice this. As some of those whom Mr Lindsay addresses are, to my knowledge, readers of this site, I am belatedly and with due apologies for tardiness publishing his comment as a separate post. Here it is.

To those listed on the website of the Euston Manifesto: Norman Geras, Damian Counsell, Alan Johnson, Shalom Lappin, Jane Ashworth, Dave Bennett, Brian Brivati, Adrian Cohen, Nick Cohen, Anthony Cox, Neil Denny, Paul Evans, Paul Gamble, Eve Garrard, Harry Hatchet, David Hirsh, Dan Johnson, Gary Kent, Jon Pike, Simon Pottinger, Andrew Regan, Alexandra Simonon, Richard Sanderson, “David T”, Philip Spencer, Jeffrey Alexander, Paul Anderson, Joe Bailey, Ophelia Benson, Paul Berman, Pamela Bone, Robert Borsley, Michael Brennan, Chris Brown, Julie Burchill, Mitchell Cohen, Marc Cooper, Thomas Cushman, Heather Deegan, Jon Fasman, Luke Foley, Raimond Gaita, Marko Attila Hoare, Quintin Hoare, Anthony Julius, Oliver Kamm, Sunder Katwala, Jeffrey Ketland, Matthew Kramer, Mary Kreutzer, John Lloyd, Denis MacShane MP, Kanan Makiya, John Mann MP, Jim Nolan, Will Parbury, Greg Pope MP, Thomas Schmidinger, Milton Shain, Hillel Steiner, Gisela Stuart MP, George Szirtes, Michael Walzer, Bert Ward, Morton Weinfeld, Jeff Weintraub, Francis Wheen and Sami Zubaida.

And to those listed on the website of The Henry Jackson Society: Rt. Hon. Michael Ancram QC MP, Gerard Baker, Paul Beaver, Prof. Paul Bew, Prof. Vernon Bogdanor, Nicholas Boles, Chrsi Bryant MP, Damian Collins MP, Colonel Tim Collins, Prof. Paul Cornish, Sir Richard Dearlove OBE, Major-General John Drewienkiewicz, Mark Etherington, Sir Philip Goodhart, Michael Gove MP, Jonny Gray, Robert Halfon, Fabian Hamilton MP, Oliver Kamm, Jackie Lawrence, Prof. Andrew Lever, Dr. Denis MacShane MP, Fionnuala Jay O'Boyle MBE, Stephen Pollard, Greg Pope MP, Lord Powell of Bayswater, Andrew Roberts, David Ruffley MP, Dr. Jamie Shea, Dr. Irwin Stelzer, Gisela Stuart MP, Rt. Hon. Lord Trimble, Edward Vaizey MP, David Willetts MP, Prof. Alan Lee Williams OBE, Brendan Simms, Alan Mendoza, James M. Rogers, Gideon A. Mailer and Matthew Jamison.

If we can (and we will) find a pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker and anti-war candidate to contest each region at next year's European Elections, thereby giving a voice to economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative British and Commonwealth patriots, then I dare you to put up an Independent candidate (not necessarily put up as one yourself, just find and back one) in each region on the Euston/Jackson ticket. Wherever we stand a candidate who actually lives in the region in question, then I dare you to do the same. And I dare you to put up Kamm wherever he lives (London, presumably).

Go on.

I dare you.

I first came across Mr Lindsay a few months ago when my comrades at Harry's Place reported his launch, by blog, of what appears to be, to this day, a one-man political party calling itself the British People's Alliance. The Alliance is opposed to immigration, Europe and artificial contraception. It favours military rule as an alternative to the moral chaos that is today's party system. I followed the link to his blog that Mr Lindsay provided and found that the party has ambitious if somewhat labyrinthine plans. I wish him personal fulfilment in this venture.

The comment below his post that purports to come from me is obviously not genuine. I do, however, share Mr Lindsay's support for the institution of the family. One of the reasons - though not the most important - that I have long favoured the right of same-sex couples to marry and adopt is that I believe in extending the benefits of family life more widely than they traditionally have been enjoyed. Similarly, I regard the 1967 Abortion Act as a civilising reform partly owing to the support it gives to family life.

Chomsky and NMD

The message of the world's top public intellectual does not vary, incidentally, in character or accuracy. Here's an article from Noam Chomsky last month in which he argues: "It is well known on all sides that missile defense is a first strike weapon."

See what I mean? It is not well known at all, for the uncomplicated reason that it isn't true; yet the affectation of exposing official deceit appeals to a certain constituency, especially those of college age.

Those who argue for a missile defence system (such as Michael O'Hanlon and James Lindsay of the Brookings Institution) acknowledge that no arrangement could be 100 per cent reliable and that a determined adversary could in any case construct countermeasures, such as using decoy warheads in addition to real ones. The logic of missile defence is rather that, faced with an adversary with a limited nuclear arsenal - as is likely to be the case with North Korea and Iran in the near future - then something short of complete reliability might nonetheless be effective. Missile defence would thereby strengthen deterrence.

When President Reagan proposed his own Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, he conceived it (absurdly) as a means of securing the abolition of nuclear weapons. SDI would make nuclear weapons redundant, he believed. To that end, Reagan proposed sharing the technology with the Soviet Union. (This is confirmed by the transcripts of his conversations with Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit in 1986: "We are ready to share our accomplishments in strategic defense.") I recount this because US nuclear policy has by no means been the consistent one that Chomsky imagines. On two occasions in the nuclear age - the Acheson-Lilienthal and Baruch Plans of 1946, and Reagan's proposals on SDI - the US has even proposed abolishing a technological monopoly that it then enjoyed.

The UN's conspiracy crank

David Aaronovitch has an excellent piece today in The Times about the appointment by the UN Human Rights Council of Professor Richard Falk to investigate violations of human rights by Israel. Falk has already declared his hand in advance of his investigation. Last week he confirmed to the BBC that he believed Israeli actions in Gaza were comparable to the conduct of Nazi Germany. As David observes, the man is not a UN "expert" so much as a conspiracy crank.

Like David, I believe in the UN. Objections to Professor Falk's role ought not to be left only to a particular cast of pro-Israel campaigner that sees only malevolence in UN designs. This appointment is worse than a disgrace: it is manifestly absurd when judged by the purposes of advancing liberal-democratic internationalism. It makes sense only in the context that David describes:

"The implication of this logic is simple. The UN Human Rights Council doesn't give a toss about the human rights of the Palestinians in the sense of wanting them upheld. Its majority is far more interested in using Israel as a stick to beat the US with, or - in the case of Islamic states - as a bogeyman to dampen down domestic discontent."

I make two additional observations about Falk. First, it is certainly right to describe Falk as a conspiracy crank. David refers to Falk's expressed admiration for the 9/11 "truth" polemics of a theologian called David Ray Griffin. In his own book, The Great Terror War, 2003, Falk is not obscure in what he wishes to say about 9/11. He opens (pp. 1-3) with a section entitled "Echoes of Pearl Harbor?"; note the artful question mark, which neatly insinuates the conspiracy theory that guides Falk's treatment of 9/11. Falk comments:

"The American public has never looked back to examine the evidence that has raised serious doubts among respected historians about the surprise nature of the attack, suggesting that the pro-war forces gathered around FDR had convincing advance knowledge that a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in the offing, but chose to ignore such warning. Historians continue to quarrel over whether this dynamic was part of a deliberate plan to lure the country into World War II or whether it represented some sort of bureaucratic snafu at higher levels of government of such gigantic proportions as to be barely credible."

I will postpone till another time a consideration of the historical illiteracy that is Falk's treatment of US entry into WWII. I note here merely that Falk echoes exactly the conceit of the 9/11 conspiracy nutters (the notion has since been advanced at length in David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11; the book carries a foreword, to his own disgrace and the embarrassment of Labour supporters, by the former minister Michael Meacher). Falk says (p. 2) that: "There is nothing comparable [in his remarks about Pearl Harbor] to this great Terror War." But what he means by that is that the war on Islamist terror has unfortunately not provoked public opposition on the scale of the opposition to WWII. He comments wistfully: "At least in the 1940s there was a certain ambivalence about recourse to war associated with strong isolationist sentiments that enjoyed significant backing in the Congress and the grassroots, especially in the Midwest."

My second observation concerns an op-ed Falk wrote for the New York Times on 16 February 1979. I have it in front of me. The title is "Trusting Khomeini". It is a credit to the sub-editors of the NYT that they managed to encapsulate in just two words what Falk's article is about, though perhaps a better participle would have been "lauding". Falk complains: "President Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski [Carter's National Security Adviser] have until very recently associated [Khomeini] with religious fanaticism. The news media have defamed him in many ways, associating him with efforts to turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent anti-Semitism, and with a new political disorder, 'theocratic fascism,' about to be set loose on the world."

Well, fancy that. Falk knows better, however, insisting that "the depiction of [Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false". On the contrary: "Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country."

I need make no comment on this beyond the fact that Falk is an extreme example of (in the literary critic Lionel Trilling's phrase) the adversary culture: a man so bitter about the failings (not all of them imagined) of liberal democracies that he will perceive salvation even in the most reactionary and despotic of movements overseas. Incidentally, the authorial by-line to his NYT article states that Falk "recently visited the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini [in exile] in France". It doesn't give the name of Falk's travelling companion, but this was – bien sûr – the former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark. Clark, as Ian Williams pointed out in an illuminating piece some years ago in Salon, is "the war criminal's best friend". I recommend you follow that link, and also read this piece by Christopher Hitchens, to see what that description entails. I acknowledge that my readers will consider this an extreme claim, but I consider that Ramsey Clark's enthusiasm for mass murderers and despots exceeds even that of anyone else called Clark.

Methods of genocide denial

Genocide denial is an ugly subject. I wrote a post about a recent variant a few months ago, relating to Ed Herman, one-time collaborator of Noam Chomsky. Herman has devoted himself in recent years to rubbishing the notion that 8,000 Bosniaks were massacred at Srebrenica. In an article last October entitled "Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights Threat: Yugoslavia and Rwanda", published in the far-left Z Magazine, he went one better, and insisted: "To an amazing degree, the Western media and NGOs swallowed the propaganda line and lies on Rwanda that turned things upside down."

I was reminded of this monstrous article and of Herman's fellow-travellers when reading this post on the Counterknowledge blog of Telegraph journalist Damian Thompson. It refers to one Robin Philpot, a Canadian journalist and a denier of the Rwandan genocide, whom I had mentioned as one of Herman's sources.

This is the first of two or three posts I shall write about recent instances of genocide denial. I do so to illustrate two points. First, the methods of genocide denial are consistent across time and place. The denial of the Srebrenica massacre really does employ the same methods as Holocaust denial. My second point is that genocide denial is politically heterogeneous. You find it on the Left as well as the far Right, though these tendencies have much in common with each other.

I first came across the phenomenon, in its most notorious and extreme form of Holocaust denial, in my teens. My languages teacher, who had been a child refugee from Nazism and whose parents had died in the camps, told me of an incident that happened when she had been introducing a travelling exhibition about Anne Frank. A prominent local member of the National Front (this was in Leicester, where the organisation received a substantial vote at that time) came up to her afterwards, introduced himself, and handed her a pamphlet. I can't remember it, but I'm certain this pamphlet would have been one called "Did Six Million Really Die?", under the pseudonymous authorship of a "Richard Harwood".

Harwood's real name was Richard Verrall. Verrall was editor of the National Front journal Spearhead. His was the first popular exposition published in English of the notion that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by international Jewry. Over the years I've acquired Verrall's pamphlet and a small library of the main pseudo-scholarly works advocating this view (though if you visit my house, you will not find them on open shelves). These are all either in French or in English; for obvious reasons, this sort of material doesn't get disseminated in Germany.

I give no link, but Verrall's pamphlet is now also widely distributed on the Web on far-right and Islamist sites. Its concluding section begins:

"Without doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the extermination question has been the work of the French historian, Professor Paul Rassinier. The pre-eminent value of this work lies firstly in the fact that Rassinier actually experienced life in the German concentration camps, and also that, as a Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi, nobody could be less inclined to defend Hitler and National Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical truth, Rassinier spent the remainder of his post-war years until his death in 1966 pursuing research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six Million and the legend of Nazi diabolism."

Extraordinarily, in a polemic that sets a methodological standard for lying about history, this paragraph includes an important truth. It's not often realised that (as Paul Berman rightly notes in his Terror and Liberalism) Holocaust denial began on the French Left. The first person systematically to advance the proposition that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by international Jewry was Paul Rassinier, a French Socialist and Resistance fighter who had indeed been imprisoned at Buchenwald. There is a fine biography of him by Nadine Fresco, Fabrication d'un antisémite, 1999. As the title implies, Rassinier became an embittered antisemitic crank. He died in 1967 (not 1966 as Verrall/Harwood claims), having acquired a handful of followers. Rassinier's principal disciple, Robert Faurisson, is very much with us.

Noam Chomsky famously provoked controversy by coming to Faurisson's defence in 1981 - ostensibly on grounds of free speech, but in fact with other remarks attached. During the controversy, Chomsky insisted to one critic (for sources, see here): "I see no hint of antisemitic implications in Faurisson's work." Chomsky is not a Holocaust denier, and no serious critic accuses him of being an antisemite. But Chomsky's defence of Faurisson is not the libertarian one, which I agree with, of the right to free speech for Holocaust deniers. He clearly defends the legitimacy of Faurisson's views though not their factual accuracy. If you doubt this, consider Chomsky's remark on the masthead of this site and similar sentiments about far greater men than I, such as Vaclav Havel and the late Abba Eban. In Chomsky's universe, "tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes" is done by liberals and moderate left-wingers. Faurisson genuinely is a racist who does acquiesce in the greatest crime of our age, by denying it even took place. Yet you won't find Chomsky describing Faurisson in the terms he uses to describe, well, me.

The proponents of genocide denial are not a weighty force, and some of them are very trivial indeed. But there are reasons for refuting them.

First, while I don't wish to sound melodramatic, once you let go by default the arguments of Herman and others, you have in effect granted the legitimacy in debate of the equivalent methods of reasoning of Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial, pace Chomsky's frivolous and absurd remarks, necessarily has malevolent implications.

Secondly, it's surprising how some of the propositions of genocide deniers can insinuate themselves into respectable forums without their being recognised as such. I noted an example last year when the novelist Kurt Vonnegut died. In his best known work, Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut directly relies on the discredited claims of my reader David Irving concerning the death toll at Dresden. Portraying the Allies as war criminals while downplaying the crimes of the Nazis is one the techniques of Holocaust deniers such as Irving.

Thirdly, there is matter of honour. It is plainly not logically impossible that fewer than 8,000 men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica; but the means by which Herman and his followers advance that conclusion are a violation of the methods of critical inquiry. That's what is wrong with genocide denial - not that it's an offence to our feelings, but that it's an offence against historical truth.

Fourthly, while the proponents of genocide denial are on the fringes of Western intellectual life, this is not necessarily true elsewhere. Holocaust denial has gained ground in the Muslim world. In particular, it's espoused by the puppet-president of a state that seeks a nuclear capability and anticipates the extinction of the Jewish state.

On free speech

I'm a near absolutist on free speech. I wrote a piece last year for the estimable Index on Censorship in which I argued my case. While free speech hurts and offends, there is nothing wrong in this. In almost no case is anyone entitled to restitution or protection. (The strictly limited exceptions are where there is 'clear and present danger'; incitement to crime; or defamation. By defamation, I naturally mean a statement that is damaging and false. I do not mean - as one reader of this blog has rueful cause to recollect - a statement that is damaging and true; and I have gone to some trouble and expense to assert that distinction.)

There is a case - argued by my correspondent Karl Pfeifer, a Holocaust survivor who has done great work in opposing racism - for laws forbidding the expression of National Socialist ideology in countries where it has caused such catastrophe. But it's not a view I share, and I condemned without reservation the gaoling of my reader David Irving by the Austrian courts in 2006. There is no speech more disreputable and fraudulent than Holocaust denial; but the reason it's objectionable is that it's false, not that it's offensive. The only proper recourse to it is the discipline of historical scholarship and critical inquiry, as opposed to the fakery practised by Irving.

I say all this by way of preamble to something not important in itself but suggestive of wider issues nonetheless. I receive at one remove the newsletter of the Stop the War Coalition, which - as my readers know - is a coalition only in the technical sense of binding Islamists and Leninists. I quote from the lastest issue:

Stop the War Coalition is asking as many people as possible to help create a wall of sound to accompany Tony Blair as he gives a lecture on Faith and Globalisation at Westminster Cathedral in London on Thursday 3 April. (See http://www.rcdow.org.uk/lectures/)....

We want people to bring musical instruments and sound making implements of every kind -- drums, trumpets, saxophones,violins, cymbals, whistles, sirens, horns, rattles, saucepans and cans to bang; we want every type of band, choir and musical group to join us, all with the aim of drowning out the speech of a man who should not be in a cathedral pulpit but in the dock of a criminal court.

Please come at 6.30pm. Blair will speak at 7pm. Spread the word among as many people as you can and encourage them to join us on the night we aim to drown out Blair's shameless lecture.

The Stop the War Coalition is a totalitarian organisation for whom the principles of free speech are as inconceivable as Darwin's natural selection was to the late Rev. Billy James Hargis. But I hope the import of this sort of campaigning is not lost on those who might otherwise sympathise with what they take to be the Coalition's purported (though bogus) anti-war message.

The master of conspiracy theory

In December 2001, Slate magazine published a nicely researched article by Seth Stevenson dissecting a conspiracy theory that had suddenly grown up around the US-led intervention in Afghanistan. You're bound to have heard this theory: the war was really about oil, and specifically an oil pipeline that the West wished to build through Afghanistan.

Stevenson did what a careful writer would do with an unsubstantiated and bizarre speculation. He traced its origins and assessed the "evidence" cited in its support. He noted that it was compatible with any evidence. Before 9/11, the West was accused of supporting the Taliban in order to secure an oil pipeline. After 9/11, the West was accused of seeking to overthrow the Taliban in order to secure an oil pipeline. In short, as is characteristic of conspiracy theories, the oil pipeline theory is unfalsifiable. Stevenson concluded:

Why does the bombing-for-pipelines theory hold such appeal? For the same reason the supporting-the-Taliban-for-pipelines theory attracted so many: There's evidence that points in that direction. Unocal did want to build a pipeline through Afghanistan and did cozy up to the Taliban. Bush and Cheney do have ties to big oil. But theories like these are ridiculously reductionist. Their authors don't try to argue conclusions from evidence—they decide on conclusions first, then hunt for justification. Also, many thinkers are comfortable with the conditioned response that dates back to Ida Tarbell vs. Standard Oil: When in Doubt, Blame Oil First.

What's absurd about the pipeline theory is how thoroughly it discounts the obvious reason the United States set the bombers loose on Afghanistan: Terrorists headquartered in Afghanistan attacked America's financial and military centers, killing 4,000 people, and then took credit for it. Nope—must be the pipeline.

Here, on the other hand, is what a non-careful writer does with an unsubstantiated and bizarre speculation - John Pilger, in his latest commentary posted on ZNet (though I think published elsewhere earlier this year):

The truth about the "good war" is to be found in compelling evidence that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not the Taliban's links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to fight America's proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s.

And you know what's coming: "a secret memorandum of understanding the mullahs had signed with the Clinton administration on the pipeline deal". So the US supported the Taliban for the oil; and it overthrew the Taliban for the oil. And this is advanced without evidence, "compelling" or otherwise, and in prose that is functionally illiterate ("the Taliban, whom, as a result, were deemed in Washington..."). Some people consider Pilger a voice of conscience and a master of campaigning journalism. I'm afraid he's something worse than - as I described him here - the voice of brutishness.

Have a break

I have to report that there has been reader resistance to my proposal to abstain from further comment on the interventions and views of Neil Clark. I'm very surprised. I mentioned that one or two people dear to me had implored me to resist all temptation to comment on Mr Clark's singular opinions. In fact it was just one - a reader who knows better than most the fatuity of Mr Clark's belief that Slobodan Milosevic's "worst crime was to carry on being socialist", but who felt human sympathy on Mr Clark's wounded state. I expected this would be a widespread sentiment, and perhaps it is.

But Mr Clark does and says unusual things, and these are in the public domain. I carefully refrain from ever making comments about his award-winning weblog, where he has exposed among other things Milosevic's murder by poison (the murderer was something called the New World Order). I stick to commentaries he makes in published sources, some of which will have been solicited and some (I assume) are Mr Clark's unmediated ideas. As I understand his objection, Mr Clark maintains that my own critical remarks about his writings represent a campaign of criminal harassment designed to deprive him of work. I do in fact consider Mr Clark to be a large uncompensated risk for anyone who commissions opinions from him on politics and history, owing to the evidence that he is not a master of those subjects, is prone to fiasco in his encounter with source material, and is dishonest. But - as I told Mr Clark when he first started writing to me to threaten legal action for pointing out that he had not stated source material accurately - these observations represent fair comment on a matter of public interest, as well as statements that are demonstrably true. (On other subjects of interest to Mr Clark, such as the World Pipe-Smoking Championships in Poland, I make no judgement on his work and assume the reliability of his sources.)

What I will say and resolve is this. While I enjoyed my telephone conversation last week with the desk sergeant from Abingdon Police Station, I had to sympathise on his voluble incredulity at the waste of his time that Mr Clark's complaint represented. As Mr Clark, through an abuse of process, has also wasted the time of his local County Court, I believe a moratorium on criticising his work is in the public interest. A man who identifies the Bilderberg threat to British national sovereignty also clearly needs a break, in his own interest. And from me, Mr Clark will get one.

Blair and his masters

In an essay in Prospect magazine last year, Timothy Garton Ash commented: "[T]he prospect of joining what is now the EU has encouraged country after country, from Spain and Portugal 30 years ago to Croatia and Turkey today, to transform its domestic politics, economy, law, media and society. The EU is one of the most successful engines of peaceful regime change ever. For decades, the struggle for freedom and what is emotively called the 'return to Europe' have gone arm in arm."

Garton Ash's judgement is in my view beyond serious dispute. It is the principal way the EU serves as a force for good in world affairs, and the main reason I favour closer European integration. One factor in my unhesitating Labour vote in the 2001 general election was the warning of the then Tory leader, now Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague that: "Tony Blair has made his intentions clear. If he is re-elected, he will speed up the process of European integration." And it's partly because I desire the strengthening of European institutions that I think Tony Blair would be an apt choice for the new post of President of the EU Council.

Not everyone agrees. My friend Agnès Poirier believes, with some historical warrant, that "the election of Blair to this position would be highly ironic, if not tragic: an Englishman as Europe's first president!" But while Agnès is an informed analyst of European politics and diplomacy, she may - perhaps owing to that very specialism - have overlooked certain subterranean factors highlighted by other critics of Tony Blair. For example, one thought-provoking article also published on "Comment is Free" last month pointed to the unaccountable and covert influences working through the former PM: "Ever since he attended his first Bilderberg conference in 1993, Tony Blair has never disappointed his powerful masters."

If you follow the link the author provided in support of his contention, you'll arrive at a site that exposes numerous stories that the mainstream media fail to report: the Satanic world order uncovered by the 9/11 truth movement; the links between the Bilderberg Group and al-Qaeda; the "666 calculator machine" created from careful study of the Book of Revelation; the proof thereby derived of Prince Charles's identity as the antichrist; and the occult devotions practised by both President Bush and Senator John Kerry (as well, obviously, as the first President Bush and his father before him).

I recalled these points when reading an interview this week with the Belgian elder statesman Viscount Etienne Davignon concerning Blair's suitability for the EU role:

"The 75-year-old politician is known as ‘Mr Belgium’ and is internationally respected. He is a former aide of Paul-Henri Spaak, one of the EU’s founding fathers and, currently, a vice president with the Suez conglomerate. He added: 'Blair would need to command widespread support for his candidacy and this is something he lacks. All things considered, I believe there are better candidates for this very important job than Tony Blair.'"

Some of the criticisms ventured in the interview mirror Agnès's. (On one of those issues, though - the Schengen agreement on internal borders - I consider there are good reasons for the UK to be treated as a special case. We don't have identity cards, and we have a demonstrated problem with domestic terrorists receiving training abroad and then returning home.) But at the end of the interview I did a double take, for it revealed something I had not known and that is so counterintuitive that I have added emphasis: "Davignon, also chairman of the influential Bilderberg Group, believes Blair’s support for the war in Iraq would also count against him."

My friends, these people are ruthless in their cunning.

Not a parody - finis

I fear that the post immediately below this one might have been inadvertently confusing in one respect. A comment underneath the post suggests that there is an issue of free speech involved in Neil Clark's urging the Abingdon Constabulary to crack down on this website. I appreciate the concern, but the issue - really - is more mundane, and I have every sympathy with the desk staff at Abingdon Police Station.

Let me explain. If the Abingdon Constabulary receives a complaint from someone off the street that a serious criminal offence (e.g. harassment) has been committed, then the Abingdon Constabulary has an obligation to treat that complaint seriously until further information becomes available. The relevant further information in this case is that the complaint derives from Mr Neil Clark, whom no one has an obligation to treat seriously.

I wondered how best to explain this point to the public servant in Abingdon who had found himself the unwitting victim of Mr Clark's personal rebellion against the law on wasting police time. It's not difficult. To illustrate Mr Clark's disingenuity requires context; but to demonstrate the workings of Mr Clark's mind does not. Mr Clark is not backward in expressing his conviction that, just as the affairs of state are threatened by a malign conspiracy, so is he. (A nice example may be found here, where Mr Clark - confident that no one would be able to penetrate the online disguise he had adopted - expresses his feelings on the forces that have conspired against him. I have invariably judged Mr Clark's imprecations so deranged that I have never sought their removal from any site where they appear.) Those who work in public service, as I once did, periodically have to deal with people who reason this way, and the hazard is usually recognisable at an early stage of the encounter. I'm sorry that the desk staff at Abingdon Police Station have been put to that trouble, and I'm concerned to relieve them of the irritant in future.

Another comment under my post also raises a matter that weighs on me: "Neil Clark clearly has some serious demons. Why, then, do you delight in taunting him in this distasteful way? If you feel you must respond to his attacks on you, do it like a grown up. If not, ignore him."

It's a serious point, which in more moderate form has been made even by one or two people dear to me. I can't argue against it. It has particular force as Mr Clark's already idiosyncratic opinions - on, e.g., Milosevic, Srebrenica, the Iraqi interpreters, capital punishment, the Bilderbergers - are expressed in increasingly pathological form. But I do maintain that I have protected Mr Clark from the most damaging consequences of his behaviour. After his catastrophically misguided attempt at legal action, I might have landed him with a hefty bill for his abuse of the legal process. Against the advice of professional and journalistic colleagues, I decided instead to bear the cost myself. Further, when I notified the then Readers' Editor of The Guardian (which had posted a brief article on its website reporting Mr Clark's legal threats) of the inevitable outcome of the case, I deliberately withheld one aspect of the affair: Mr Clark had lied directly to the newspaper, in order to present his claim as a serious one. The lie was that Mr Clark was acting after taking legal advice. (It had long been obvious to me and my advisers, from Mr Clark's bizarre behaviour, that his lawyer was an imaginary construct. The Guardian can check this by asking Mr Clark for a copy of the invoice issued by this "lawyer"; none will be forthcoming.) Mr Clark doubtless felt this was a minor embellishment, but advancing a fabricated story to a newspaper is not a trivial matter.

Mr Clark indeed has his demons, and it is no pleasure to me to observe them. It is for that reason, as well as to dissuade him from causing further public nuisance, that I abjure further comment on them and on him. But that is all. When he wrote to me continually to threaten terrible legal consequences, and more recently when ululating to his local constabulary, Mr Clark - rather than refute my observations, which he is unable to do - would invariably complain that I was "jeopardising his career". I don't know whether that is so, but it is not of the highest importance to me. If you make your opinions public, then public scrutiny is what you will get (if you're lucky). If Mr Clark - not in a private capacity but as a public commentator - lacks the ability to get things right and the honesty to put right things he has got wrong, then it is fair comment and in the public interest to point this out. I regret the distress that Mr Clark has been caused (especially as it is self-inflicted), and hope that it will be lessened. But I do not regret having ensured, at some inconvenience and expense to myself, that knowledge of his standards of competence and probity is in the public domain, where it will remain.

Not a parody

"Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment" ran Dorothy Parker's composition for her tombstone. Likewise the diverting narrative that is this post.

Yesterday morning I got a telephone call from a bewildered gentleman at Abingdon Police Station saying he had received a complaint from a Mr Neil Clark. Mr Clark (pictured) is the author of such essays as "Milosevic, Prisoner of Conscience" and (regarding the Iraqi interpreters in fear of their lives) "Keep these Quislings Out". He is also an imaginative theorist of global conspiracy.

But as well as being a fool and a fanatic, Mr Clark is a fabulist, a fantasist, a faker and a fabricator. (For economy's sake, I confine myself to the letter F.) Readers may recall that I once exposed Mr Clark's reliance, in a published article (irrelevantly, a review of a book by me), on a disreputable source that it turned out he had not represented accurately to the relevant editor. The source was a right-wing Srebrenica-denial organisation in the US, whose name Mr Clark had apparently confused with that of the scholarly and impartial International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. As my observation was true, and was easily demonstrated with reference to Mr Clark's own emails to the editor, I was immovable when Mr Clark mounted an impressively inept attempt at libel action. In order to stress the weight of his claim, Mr Clark additionally adopted the imprudent course of lying directly, and in an attributed quotation, to a Guardian journalist, Dominic Timms, and then manufacturing a variety of online female identities in order to remove reference to the inevitable outcome of his complaint. I demur from telling this undignified story further, and revert to the present.

I learned from my interlocutor at Abingdon Police Station that Mr Clark was upset about disobliging references to him on the World Wide Web. Mr Clark had meticulously assembled a file of these, to which presumably this post will be added. Among the cases Mr Clark had collated was an observation from me that, by dint of being unable to read such specialised material as France's leading daily newspaper, he had contributed an erroneous comment to The Guardian last summer concerning the position of the French Foreign Minister on the Iraq War. Mr Clark maintained – as this example surely demonstrates - that he was the victim of a campaign of criminal harassment orchestrated by me.

I sympathised with my interlocutor on his predicament. I explained that Mr Clark had once had an unfortunate experience with the English legal system, in which he had wasted court time at what would have been his expense if I'd resolved to issue a claim against him for costs. Possibly for this reason, after a sobering encounter with a leading libel lawyer whom I had retained for my defence and who rambunctiously explained to Mr Clark that his conduct represented an abuse of the legal process, he now prefers to waste police time at public expense. My interlocutor ventured wearily that the matter merited no time of his, but it appeared from my business address that I enjoyed a measure of professional success greater than that of a man in Botley; could I not therefore just abstain from interest in Clark's pronouncements? I naturally resolved to do all in my power to make life easier for the Abingdon constabulary than it has been in the very recent past.

And, Reader, I am a man of my word.