Oliver Kamm

Hiroshima and Le Monde

The Times reports:

France's most authoritative newspaper has been forced to admit that it was fooled by gruesome photographs, supposedly of the 1945 atomic attack on Hiroshima, which have stirred anti-American sentiment this week.

Le Monde devoted a page to a report on “Hiroshima: What the world never saw” last weekend. It recounted the discovery of “ten pictures hidden for more than 60 years by an American soldier which show for the first time the victims of the bomb dropped on the Japanese city on August 6, 1945”. It emerged however that the pictures, from the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, depicted the aftermath of a 1923 earthquake near Tokyo. They were immediately recognised by experts in Japan and the US....

Le Monde's presentation of the pictures invited disapproval. The photographs, found by Robert Capp, a soldier, and given in 1998 to the Californian Institution, offered a view of Hiroshima that had escaped US censorship, said Le Monde. The US media had been strangely silent on their discovery this year, it added. “The horror of the photographs again prompts the question: was the atomic bomb the only way of ending the Pacific war?”

The historical question - which does not resolve the ethical debate, but ought in my view to inform it - can be answered with a high degree of probability. The A-bomb was the only way to avoid hundreds of thousands of American casualties in direct combat in a conventional invasion, and millions of civilian deaths in Japan and the captive nations of the Japanese empire. That conclusion would not have been affected by Le Monde's leading questions, but it is nonetheless an extraordinary blunder by a great newspaper not to have checked the provenance of these photographs. (Note also a statement by the American academic, Sean Malloy, who had disseminated the photographs.)

UPDATE: Two other points on this story. The historian Sean Malloy is quoted in the International Herald Tribune thus:

"If these [photographs] had been in a cardboard box," Malloy said, "I would have asked more questions. But they came from a well-respected, nationally known archive. That explains why a lot of people should have asked more questions."

Malloy is a reviewer in the current issue of the Journal of Military History. His review (not online) is of the book Hiroshima in History, edited by one of my correspondents, Robert James Maddox, which I have previously recommended. Malloy describes the book as "a useful compendium", but claims that the essay by Professor Maddox "overreaches". Ironic, in the circumstances.

Andrew Sullivan presented the photographs with his judgement that, till now, "we've been sheltered from the full force of the human horror of Hiroshima". Andrew has since noted on his blog that the photographs are disputed, but I wouldn't agree with him on this in any event. Knowledge of the horrific suffering caused by the A-bombs is ingrained in our culture. It has been so since at least the publication of the journalist John Hersey's famous account in The New Yorker in August 1946. It's right that it should be, for pragmatic reasons as well as moral ones, to maintain the taboo on use of nuclear weapons. What is not ingrained in our culture, and ought to be, is the immense human costs (to within, say, the nearest million deaths) of the Japanese Empire from 1931 to 1945.

It is not my argument that the barbarism of that Empire justified use of the A-bomb. It is, rather, that even a delay of a few weeks in the Japanese surrender (which came when it did owing to the shock of the bomb) would have cost more civilian lives than were lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

UPDATE II: Note the unsubtle buck-passing in Professor Malloy's statement, quoted above. Here's what the Hoover Institution, where the photographs are kept, has to say (emphasis added):

A recently released book, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb against Japan, by Professor Sean L. Malloy of the University of California, Merced, includes three photos from the Robert L. Capp Collection held in the Hoover Institution Archives. The collection was donated by Mr. Capp in 1998 and opened to researchers in 2007.

The Capp Collection includes photos taken by Mr. Capp, a U.S. serviceman who was on the ground in Hiroshima soon after the bombing, as well as photos developed from film he found outside Hiroshima.

In the oral history (which is part of this collection), Mr. Capp indicates that the photos he took, that are part of the collection, were of the devastation of Hiroshima. He adds that the collection also contains photos that he did not take but that were developed from undocumented and unattributed film that he found in Hamada.

On Prof. Malloy’s website, he acknowledged the Hoover Archives’ statement that the photos were from an unknown photographer and he asked for assistance in identifying them—which came quickly. This information, along with further investigation, indicates that the undocumented photos appear to be from the Kanto earthquake of 1923.

As ever, Hoover’s goal is to provide accurate information about our collections and to document fully the collections’ history. Our goal is not to draw conclusions from collections—we leave that to the scholars who use the archives.

That's a cruel riposte, but a fair one. Malloy put these pictures in a book; but he hadn't checked their provenance. It's difficult to understate the magnitude of such an error in an academic historian.

Political flat-earthers

Ian Williams, a journalist who is not always this obtuse, has a bizarrely ill-informed piece on Comment is Free decrying the New York Times for appointing a conservative columnist. Williams comments that "conservative newspapers rarely if ever allow a left or liberal voice unmoderated, unchallenged or unanchored on their pages - which probably accounts for the wails of horror from the American left at the news that the New York Times has engaged Bill Kristol as a regular columnist".

Williams's argument appears to be a conspiracy theory about Rupert Murdoch and an extended wail about Kristol. I have never met either man and I don't understand Williams's objections. It does appear to me that having a range of opinion among columnists is a good thing and that Kristol is a lucid writer, but evidently Williams sees more fundamental issues of principle that are obscure to me. So I'll content myself with pointing out his obvious errors.

1. As the Murdoch press is a particular target of Williams, it's worth pointing out that no newspaper in the UK has a broader spread of opinion regularly published than The Times. From my own experience, it's common for an article such as this to be followed immediately by an article such as this.

2. A.M. Rosenthal, the former executive editor of the New York Times, was not a "regular conduit for neoconservativism [sic]". He published the Pentagon Papers, which did grave damage to the credibility of US decision making in the Vietnam War. Rosenthal was, however, an outspoken supporter of Israel, which I suspect is what Williams has in mind - in which case he should not be so coy.

3. Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol's father, did not "coin neoconservativism [sic]". The term was invented by the socialist Michael Harrington and was intended to be abusive. Like many such epithets in history (e.g. "Methodism") a derogatory term was then adopted by its intended targets and drained of that connotation.

4. To describe the twin principles of neoconservatism as "that Israel could no wrong and the Soviet Union no right" is intellectually idle. For most of the past 15 years neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz have been strongly critical of Israeli policy (i.e. as too accommodating). Look at Commentary magazine throughout the 1990s and you will find fierce (and in my view seriously misguided) denunciations of Israel's political class for adopting what contributors dismissively called the "Oslo syndrome". Williams might retort that he meant neoconservatism was a hawkish pro-Likud stance, in which case he would still be wrong. Podhoretz's views on Israel are very different from a supposed neoconservative such as Daniel Bell (Irving Kristol's friend and associate for many decades), who has long been sympathetic to the Israeli peace movement. On this question and on many other aspects of foreign policy, only an ill-informed and uninquisitive writer (Johann Hari is another) would treat neoconservatism as an unvariegated and unchanging phenomenon.

5. Williams's account of the neconservative objection to the Soviet Union is absurd. That objection was that Communism was an illegitimate system and an immutable one. The second part of that criticism was patently false. The first, however, was far more perceptive than the alternative view advanced by Senator J. William Fulbright (the segregationist who would probably have become Secretary of State if George McGovern had won the Presidency in 1972) that "the broader purposes of our own policy and of world peace require us to live in the greatest attainable harmony with the Communist governments of the world". It was views such as Fulbright's that caused the split in the Democratic Party in the 1970s between followers of McGovern and those of Senator Henry Jackson.

6. It's a minor point, but one I shall not resist the temptation to point out, that Williams hasn't checked his historical facts when using flat-earthers as a metaphor. Columbus's voyage had nothing to do with debates on the shape of the earth. As Christine Garwood states in her recent account of the most notorious of crank ideas Flat Earth, 2007, p. 3: "[E]ducated medieval people did not believe the earth to be flat, and it was neither Columbus's intention nor the outcome of his voyage to demonstrate to doubters that it was a globe."

7. This is probably the CIF editors' doing rather than Williams's, but the link provided to the discussion board of the Flat Earth Society doesn't serve the purpose that they imagine. It is a spoof site, not a genuine case for flat-earthism. The genuine Flat Earth Society, more properly the International Flat Earth Research Society of America (located, as you might expect, in California), appears to have been in suspended animation since the death in the 1990s of its leader Charles Johnson, a true believer. Again, this is a minor point - but if you're going to make hyperbolic comparisons to reinforce your argument, it's as well to know what you're dealing with.

Alterman retrenches

A few weeks ago I commented on an article by the media columnist of The Nation, Eric Alterman. Alterman had purported to expose right-wing bias in media coverage of the death of General Paul Tibbets, pilot of the plane that dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. According to Alterman:

"When Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets died November 1, the New York Times repeated Tibbets's contention that 'It would have been morally wrong if we'd have had [the atomic bomb] and not used it and let a million more people die.' That virtually no reputable historian would put the casualty figure for a US invasion of Japan anywhere near that high (leaving aside the question of whether an invasion would have been necessary) was not mentioned in the story."

In my post I explained why Alterman's remarks were unlettered and ignorant. I can name off the top of my head at least a dozen historians who would concur with Tibbets's judgement. These are not only "reputable" figures but leading and even definitive scholars in such relevant fields as the Truman administration, the Pacific War, American diplomatic history, modern Japanese history, American military history, and Soviet history. I cited, among others, my correspondent D.M. Giangreco, whose study in Pacific Historical Review, February 2003, of the administration's casualty estimates for a conventional invasion of Japan was described by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jnr (also a "reputable historian", as it happens) as "a masterful job of historical research and argument... You have demolished the claim that President Truman's high casualty estimates were a postwar invention."

In short, there was no way Alterman could sustain his claim. At the very least and most charitable, you have to conclude that his demonstration of media "bias" rested on having read nothing of the historiographical debates on the Pacific War that have taken place in the last twenty years. I'm grateful to Jamie Kirchick, who writes for The New Republic and blogs at Commentary magazine, for drawing my attention to a an odd and emotional reply by Alterman. Alterman begins by making clear that he's doing me a favour:

"[A]s for the right-wing blogger, I never heard of him either, but he's gotten some pickup among right-wingers, and I now I see that my friends at History News Network have now both run it and linked to it. I wonder if they know who he is or why he should be taken seriously, as I sure don't."

It's true that my post was linked to by a number of conservative writers in the US, such as Jonah Goldberg of National Review. That's life: Alterman had made confident assertions on a subject he didn't understand, I was the messenger of bad news that he had thereby made himself look foolish, and political commentators whose views I don't necessarily share (I of course am a left-winger, not a right-wing blogger) kindly thought this information was worth sharing with their readers. There is no inherent reason that Alterman should have heard of me (though we write for one or two of the same publications, and in his agitation he has evidently forgotten that he's linked to this blog in the past), nor do I expect him necessarily to take me seriously. But I do expect him to take seriously the body of scholarship that I referred to in my post, for it is important material that refutes Alterman's assertions on a subject that he elected to write about.

Alterman's response, according to the post I have linked to, is not to mention that material or give to his readers any hint of its existence. As Jamie observes: "Alterman provides no links to these critiques that would otherwise help the reader understand this intellectual dispute." It is singular and in my judgement dishonest that, while affecting to counter my criticism of his article, Alterman neither quotes nor links to those criticisms. All he indicates of my argument is this:

"But since they [i.e. History News Network] are definitely a place I think people should be able to trust, have, and put the racism charge in the headline, now twice, I feel compelled to respond to the racism point, at least (as I simultaneously express my disappointment in HNN's judgment on this score). Regarding my alleged anti-Japanese racism, this Kamm fellow writes, "The most charitable explanation I can give is that Alterman is (unlike the late General [Paul] Tibbets) sufficiently ethnocentric not to take into account the deaths of Japanese civilians that would have resulted from a conventional invasion and blockade of the home islands..." "

By the words "at least", Alterman of course means "at most", for he makes no attempt to defend himself against the charge that he has misrepresented the state of historical scholarship. (Those ellipses in his quotation are judiciously placed, as they excise my observation in the same sentence that Alterman is "entirely unaware of research by American and Japanese historians published in the last 20 years concerning the conclusion of the Pacific War".) And of course I didn't say in the first place that Alterman was an anti-Japanese racist. I used the term "ethnocentric", whose meaning Alterman appears not to know.

Let me give an example from the same area of study. It is certain that all my readers know that Nazi Germany murdered around six million Jews. (I leave aside, for simplicity's sake, my reader David Irving, who is a faker.) It is not certain that all my readers know with the same precision the number of people killed by Imperial Japan, throughout its empire, in the same period. Indeed, unless you're a specialist in the Pacific War, it's unlikely that you'll know that figure, and if you venture an estimate from your general knowledge, you'll probably understate it. (It is in the region of 20 million. In the 14 years of war between Japan and China till 1945, that number was itself substantially exceeded by the number of Chinese noncombatant deaths alone.) This isn't because my readers are ill informed about world affairs, and it certainly isn't because they're racists. Nor is it because Imperial Japan was a less malevolent actor than Nazi Germany: I consider they were forces of a similar type. It's because educated people in the English-speaking world and in Europe generally regard the war in Europe as the dominant theatre in WWII. Many have family histories (as I do) that are touched by Nazi barbarism. The view from China would be different. The difference is an instance of inevitable ethnocentrism - not racism, but looking at the world from a particular standpoint.

In suggesting his own ethnocentrism, I am certainly more generous than Alterman is in his casual libel of American policymakers of the time. He protests:

"The focus was always exclusively on the likelihood of U.S. casualties in the case of an invasion. Any politician who expressed any sympathy for those poor Japanese civilians would have been run out of town on a proverbial rail. The point for virtually all Americans at the time of this debate was to "kill the bastards," and hence, there was little debate or discussion over the firebombing of Tokyo, also designed to obliterate civilian lives. Hence, this Mr. Kamm fellow is attacking my column for merely addressing the historical issue in question, which, hello, is what historians do."

There was a lot of popular racism against the Japanese, but neither Roosevelt nor Truman - to take two rather important examples of American politicians - held anything like the attitude to Japanese civilians that Alterman claims. Henry Wallace (FDR's Vice-President) wrote in his diary for 10 August 1945 (i.e. the day after the Nagasaki bombing): "Truman said he had given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, 'all those kids.'"

Alterman concludes not with an evidence-based proposition of the type that historians advance, but with a dogmatic reassertion of his initial fallacy: "I was merely calling attention to what struck me as the Times' myopia in reporting [the A-bomb issue], as well as its mistaken inference that the historical record supported Mr. Tibbets' contention, which is [sic] clearly does not."

I see little purpose in being diplomatic about this performance, if only because Alterman does explicitly present himself as an expert on US foreign relations and US history. From my observation, he's not up to it. If he wishes to persist in his statement of what the historical evidence "clearly" shows on the A-bomb decisions, then I invite him to demonstrate it, at long last. I shall be glad to debate that evidence publicly with him, online or in person, at any time.

Pilger and his public

Marko Attila Hoare has written an interesting account of a recent exchange with John Pilger. Pilger was speaking at Kingston University (where Marko teaches in the history faculty) and was evidently unprepared for close questioning about his imaginative claims concerning the causes and consequences of Nato's intervention in Kosovo. Do read it; it accords with my impression of Pilger's insouciance regarding accurate reporting and his brusqueness when contradicted. (Marko also notes the singular fact that Pilger cites in his support "the Balkans writer Neil Clark". Case closed: Mr Clark is, as I have regretfully but necessarily demonstrated, an ignoramus and faker.)

Pilger's aversion to criticism was nicely captured a few years ago by David Aaronovitch in his then Independent column. "There is," said David, "a convention among newspapers, quaint but sweet, that columnists are not allowed to reply to letter-writers. No matter how traduced we may feel by the author of an angry epistle to the editor; the line is that we have had our say, and that's that." It's a useful convention. (It's also one I can reasonably claim to adhere to with some punctiliousness. The Guardian last year published not a letter but an op-ed insinuating without evidence that I favoured a nuclear first strike on Iran. Having already had my say - in a piece that wasn't about, and didn't mention, Iran - I didn't consider demanding a right of reply to so pitiful and deranged a falsehood.) That convention - and it is, of course, no more than that - was not observed by Pilger, who had lately written to The New Statesman to condemn the magazine's "mean, ignorant and lazy non-journalism" (by Johann Hari) about him. The NS is a magazine to which Pilger was, and remains, a contributor.

My only personal experience of an exchange with Pilger took a similar form. In its first years, The Independent ran a feature called "Heroes and Villains" in its Saturday magazine. A writer or public figure would write 1,000 words on a personality who fitted one of those categories. Pilger contributed a column in (I think) 1990 in which he expounded the merits of his personal hero Noam Chomsky. This saccharine piece dealt in a predictable way with the two principal episodes of controversy in Chomsky's political writings. These were Chomsky's defence of the political legitimacy (not merely the right of free speech) of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, and his dismissal of the atrocity accounts of refugees fleeing Cambodia in the late 1970s. Pilger made no mention of these issues, so I wrote a letter to the magazine making good the omissions. Three weeks later the magazine published a response from Pilger in which, sure enough, he referred to my observations as "scurrilous", and declared theatrically that for exposing official deceit and telling truths "Chomsky must bear the burden of the Kamms". And I was just a letter-writer to The Independent.

Much more recently I wrote a short column summarising Pilger's life's work:

In asserting what the evidence will not support, Pilger displays little research and culpable incompetence. In a 1982 exposure of slavery in Thailand he “bought” a young girl, only to find he had been duped. A 1990 documentary alleging that SAS members had trained the Khmer Rouge resulted in a libel writ that Central Television settled at substantial cost. Pilger’s 1983 film The Truth Game, alleging systematic mendacity by Western governments over nuclear weapons, was revealed by two authorities to be stuffed with errors. Pilger’s plaintive response that lots of viewers had sent him supportive letters illustrated a stark incomprehension of how historical claims are properly evaluated.

Pilger’s 1994 film Death of a Nation condemned Western complicity in the oppression of East Timor by Indonesia. Yet Osama bin Laden declares the now independent Timor “part of the Islamic world” and rightly Indonesia’s. By his own perverse logic, Pilger — who indecently asserted that “the bombs of July 7 were Blair’s bombs”, on account of the Iraq war — ought to admit responsibility for provoking Islamist terror.

A reader of Harry's Place, which last week was discusing Pilger too, has pointed out that The Truth Game can be seen on the Web here. I watched it yesterday, having not seen it since its original broadcast. I fear I understated when I said it was stuffed with errors. The contemporary critics whom I referred to were Lawrence Freedman, then as now Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, and the journalist William Shawcross. Their evisceration of Pilger's film was published in New Society (long since merged with The New Statesman) for 24 March 1983, under the title "Games with the Truth". Pilger's errors and distortions were various and numerous; I cite from Freedman and Shawcross's critique only three.

1. Pilger stated: "On 7 August 1945, President Truman announced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima with these words. ' The experiment,' he said, 'has been an overwhelming success.'"

Freedman and Shawcross comment: "Truman's announcement of the destruction of Hiroshima was released on 6 August 1945. It does not contain the words Pilger cites."

2. Pilger stated: "In 1979 a secret committee of NATO decided to base 572 cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe.... The unofficial truth is that the cruise was designed for a nuclear war in Europe and will be controlled by the US."

Freedman and Shawcross comment: "The NATO commitee was not secret. The decision was taken by the NATO Council on 12 December 1979 in a blaze of publicity.... The very fact that cruise and Pershing are US weapons targeted against the Soviet Union means that if they were used they would ensure that nuclear war was not limited to Europe. One of us, Lawrence Freedman, stressed the role of European governments in encouraging the US to deploy the missiles for that purpose, when Pilger interviewed for The Truth Game (but this was not used in the film)."

3. Pilger said that a British Army manual for 1960, which discussed the use of nuclear weapons, showed that "the planning for a limited nuclear war in Europe began at least 22 years ago. But hadn't we been led to believe that nuclear war as a practical military option is only a recent development?"

Freedman and Shawcross comment: "No, we had not been led to believe that! This reinforces our point that the idea of 'limited nuclear war' is not new, as Pilger claims in The Truth Game. Tactical nuclear weapons have been around since the fifties."

Pilger replied in the magazine two weeks later. He began disastrously, by saying: "I would like to thank the many people who have written and phoned offering me studies and sources...." Freedman and Shawcross then went through Pilger's new series of errors. They concluded: "Our concern is not, as Pilger seems to think, to obscure his thesis by "smearing" it, but to point out that it has no factual basis. Perhaps we are being mundane, but we simply think that those engaging in the nuclear debate, on either side, should show respect for the evidence and for the audience. Pilger has not done so. We are pleased that his friends have sent him 'studies and sources'; we hope he now uses them."

Freedman and Shawcross made no exaggeration in their refutation of Pilger. So far as I can tell, Pilger's quotation - which are his opening words in the film - about "the experiment" of the Hiroshima bombing is not only absent from President Truman's announcement of 6 August 1945 but is a fabrication. It appears to be merely an adaptation of a notion widespread among Truman-bashers prone to conspiracy theory. For example, Kate Hudson, CND's chairman, has written in her book CND: Now More than Ever, 2005, p. 23: "Given that it was absolutely unnecessary to drop the [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] bombs to end the war, it seems likely that this macabre experiment was another factor in the US decision to bomb, and to bomb twice." The first two words of that sentence are characteristic of Ms Hudson's technique of advancing unsupported and ahistorical assumptions to reach a prefabricated conclusion. It is ironic, to put it no higher, that a film portentously called The Truth Game should operate still less scrupulously.

John Pilger recently declared: "That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now." And on that point, it would be churlish to disagree.

Thug of the Year

Time magazine's choice of Vladimir Putin as Person of the Year is in the first place absurd, because there was an obviously more important and benign candidate in General Petraeus. But it will have consequences as well. Note the observation of Putin's spokesman: "We treat it as an acknowledgement of the role that was played by President Putin in helping to pull Russia out of the social troubles and economic troubles of the 1990s."

Or to put it another way, a thuggish regime will treat it as endorsement of a programme you would expect from a former KGB officer. Anway, here are the accolades Time is acknowledging, or perhaps is not: meddling in Ukraine's elections; undermining Middle East peace negotiations by making unilateral overtures to Hamas; gross ineptitude in dealing with the administration in Georgia, and its breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; intimidation and ballot rigging in Putin's own farcical election; encouraging Iran's serial nuclear deceptions; and the unspeakable murders - by, er, hands unknown - of opponents of Putin's actions and arbitrary rule. It is a record well worth marking, indeed; but not in this way.

A good man defends his reputation

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week:

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg Thursday acquitted an Austrian journalist of "causing the suicide" of a German professor who claimed that the Jews declared war on Germany in 1933. The ruling was handed down in a complicated case involving freedom of speech, libel and anti-Semitism.

The court found in favor of veteran journalist Karl Pfeifer, ruling that Austrian courts failed to protect Pfeifer's good name. The court ordered the Austrian government to pay Pfeifer 5,000 euros in damages and 10,000 euros in court costs.

Mr Pfeifer is a redoubtable anti-racist campaigner and a longstanding correspondent of mine. (You can read his articles in English in the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight.) He has kindly kept me in touch with this case. The Court judgement can be read here. The case, in brief, is this.

In 1995, Mr Pfeifer published an article accurately recounting and aptly commenting on the views of a Nazi apologist, one Dr Werner Pfeifenberger. Pfeifenberger sued Mr Pfeifer for defamation and lost. In 2000 the Vienna Public Prosecutor indicted Pfeifenberger under the law forbidding Nazi activities, the National Socialism Prohibition Act. Pfeifenberger committed suicide shortly before his trial was due. A month later, a far-right weekly, Zur Zeit, accused Mr Pfeifer of having driven the "Catholic" Pfeifenberger to his death. Mr Pfeifer sued. A Viennese court ruled in his favour, but Zur Zeit appealed and won its case. Mr Pfeifer then appealed to the European Court against the Austrian courts and government. The complaint was accepted in December 2005 and the judgement was issued on Thursday this week. In the case of Pfeifer v. Austria, Mr Pfeifer won.

I have written quite often about the issue of libel, as English law in the case of Internet publication seems to me a mess and an affront to the principles of free speech. (Oddly enough, I have some personal familiarity with Austrian libel law, and have come to the provisional conclusion that the same is true there.) But I have no doubt that laws on defamation are necessary, and that a citizen of a free society must have a right of redress for damage caused to his reputation. Mr Pfeifer's case clearly comes into that category. He defended himself against an initial worthless action by a bigot. A hate-sheet then made an outrageous accusation against him, and the Austrian court system failed to protect his reputation. I congratulate Mr Pfeifer on his determination to right that injustice and am delighted by his victory.

Dissecting media "bias": the case of Eric Alterman

When taking his leave of The Nation in 2002, its longstanding columnist Christopher Hitchens remarked that the magazine was "becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden". This was altogether too kind, I feel: the magazine has nothing like so reasoned a message.

Take The Nation's "Liberal Media" columnist, Eric Alterman, a professor of English and of Journalism. Readers of The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site can sometimes find Alterman commenting on American politics, as in his judgement a few months ago that:

Well, I think you have be some combination of crazy, ignorant, dishonest or ideologically obsessed to believe that Islamic fundamentalists want to kill us because of "who we are" rather than "what we do", but on their lists of grievances, the never-ending presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, coupled with US support for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank would rank one and two.

The never-ending presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia ended (barring a few training personnel) in 2003. The US continues to press for the creation of a sovereign Palestine. Osama bin Laden has hardly kept secret his assurance that "every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hate toward Americans, Jew, and Christians: this is part of our ideology" ('Interview with Usama bin Laden’, December 1998, included in Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East: A Documentary Reader, eds. Barry Rubin & Judith Colp Rubin, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 156). And, by the way, "fundamentalism" is a term used properly only when discussing movements within Protestantism.

But Alterman outdoes himself when writing for a domestic audience. In his current Nation column he adduces, as an instance of media bias, a subject I fear I need to return to:

When Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets died November 1, the New York Times repeated Tibbets's contention that "It would have been morally wrong if we'd have had [the atomic bomb] and not used it and let a million more people die." That virtually no reputable historian would put the casualty figure for a US invasion of Japan anywhere near that high (leaving aside the question of whether an invasion would have been necessary) was not mentioned in the story.

What can you say? The most charitable explanation I can give is that Alterman is (unlike the late General Tibbets) sufficiently ethnocentric not to take into account the deaths of Japanese civilians that would have resulted from a conventional invasion and blockade of the home islands, sufficiently casual not to distinguish between deaths and casualties, and entirely unaware of research by American and Japanese historians published in the last 20 years concerning the conclusion of the Pacific War. I can name off the top of my head at least a dozen leading historians in this field who would concur with Tibbets's judgement, owing to their knowledge of Japanese military preparations on Kyushu, the Americans' experience of battle at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the casualty estimates used by the Truman administration, the number of American medals struck in anticipation of the appalling costs of a conventional invasion, and other factors.

One of my regular correspondents, the military historian D.M. Giangreco, wrote a definitive paper on the administration's casualty estimates, 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 reprinted in Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, ed. Robert J. Maddox, 2007, pp. 76-115. From his scrutiny of primary sources, he observed: "Truman's much-derided accounts of massive casualties projected for the two-phase invasion of Japan are richly supported by US Army, White House, Selective Service and War Department documents produced before the use of nuclear weapons against Japan and stretching back through the last nine months of the Roosevelt administration."

In his paper, Dennis quotes from a letter to him by George F. Kennan, the most significant figure in US diplomacy in the past century and chief of policy planning to General George Marshall immediately after the War. Writing in 1997, Kennan concurred: "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." After the publication of his paper, Dennis also received the views of Arthur Schlesinger Jnr (quoted in a letter by Dennis published in The Journal of Military History, January 2004): "The Pacific Historical Review paper is a masterful job of historical research and argument.... You have demolished the claim that President Truman's high casualty estimates were a postwar invention."

Previously I've offered to debate publicly with anyone who dissents from the heroism of General Tibbets in the European and Pacific theatres of WWII, but Alterman makes it much easier for me. I challenge him to debate publicly the proposition, which I infer from his article he must be advancing, that Arthur Schlesinger Jnr and George F. Kennan were not "reputable historians". (How fortunate, from Alterman's point of view, that he introduced the weasel word "virtually" to cover himself. It certainly has a huge amount of work to do.)

That, I fear, is not all. Alterman goes on to remark (emphasis added):

Similarly, the obituary [of Paul Tibbets in the NYT] recounted the furor over the 1995 Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian--in which veterans' groups pressured the museum into censoring the exhibition's relatively fair-minded historical presentation of Harry Truman's decision to drop the bomb on two civilian cities--but failed even to refer to the fact that the veracity of the Smithsonian's original presentation was never seriously questioned by historians.

I invite Alterman to read, as he plainly hasn't, the study of this dispiriting affair by another of my correspondents, Robert P. Newman, Enola Gay and the Court of History, 2004. Professor Newman took the trouble to examine the entire museum archive about the controversy. He concluded that (p. 133), in the dispute between the museum and protesting veterans' groups, the museum had "offered not facts, but a fraudulent account of Japan's willingness to surrender. In any unbiased historiographic evaluation, the veterans win hands down."

The mother of ironies is that Alterman's article purports to dissect media bias. I've often argued with reference to the BBC that the greatest source of media "bias" is not design but ignorance. I couldn't wish for a more convincing demonstration of the point than Alterman. There is collateral evidence that nothing in the way of questions, let alone independent thought, will deflect him from the answer he first thought of. He begins his piece by quoting a character in Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll:

"The propaganda paper and the capitalist press arrive at the same relation to the truth.... Because 'all systems are blood brothers'.... Giving new meanings to words is how systems lie to themselves, beginning with the word for themselves--socialism, democracy.... An invasion becomes fraternal assistance."

Alterman comments: "Whether Stoppard had the US media and the invasion of Iraq in mind I cannot say, as he did not grant my interview request."

The notion that the Czech-born Stoppard might possibly have been writing about the Soviet invasion of Czecholslovakia in 1968 is clearly impossibly reductionist for a certain type of media commentator, for whom Iraq is the prism through which all art and politics are to be interpreted. No wonder Stoppard declined the interview request.

"A standard bearer of peace and stability"

Last July The Guardian reported on the launch of Press TV, Iran's state-run English-language news channel:

At the launch of Press TV, at the headquarters of state broadcaster IRIB, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said its goal was to counter "propaganda" peddled by western channels. "Knowing the truth is the right of all human beings but the media today is the number one means used by the authorities to keep control," he said. "We scarcely know a media that does its duty correctly. Our media should be a standard bearer of peace and stability. "

I shall be taking part in a debate on Press TV's Forum show, presented by Andrew Gilligan, on Saturday afternoon. I think it's prerecorded, so I will find out when it will be shown; I believe the programme is broadcast online. The title of the debate is: "Is Iran inviting attacks?"

Not to give my debating line away, but I think this is the wrong question. It would be more appropriate to ask "Is Iran threatening attacks?", to which the prudent answer appears to me to be yes.

Wikipedia responds

In my Times column yesterday I described Wikipedia as a pernicious influence on intellectual life. You can read here the response of Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder and guru, to my argument.

Wisdom? More like dumbness of the crowds

This article appears in The Times today.

A new web tool was launched this week. The WikiScanner allows users to track changes made to the phenomenally popular online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. By comparing those changes with blocks of IP addresses, the editors of Wikipedia entries may be identified according to their location and the organisation from which they post.

The removal of unflattering references to particular corporations has been traced back to computers at the relevant companies. Someone at Labour’s headquarters altered a section about the Labour Students organisation to remove a reference to career politicians.

The development of technology that exposes such shenanigans could be taken as evidence of the self-correcting nature of cyberspace. It ought to be seen instead as a lesson in how easily information can be manipulated in a culture that prizes “user-generated content”.

Wikipedia relies on the wisdom of crowds. Knowledge is fluid. A definition contained in a reference work can never be regarded as complete and definitive. More reliable information emerges through continual revision. Consequently, anyone can edit an entry in Wikipedia. Many articles are plainly useless, but owing to the democratic nature of the medium the way is always open to incremental improvement.

Some may find this a seductive vision of the spread of knowledge. I find it alarming. It combines the free-market dogmatism of the libertarian Right with the anti-intellectualism of the populist Left. There is no necessary reason that Wikipedia’s continual revisions enhance knowledge. It is quite as conceivable that an early version of an entry in Wikipedia will be written by someone who knows the subject, and later editors will dissipate whatever value is there. Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices.

This is an inherent flaw. The problem is not that there are too few voices in the editorial process, who can skew the result, but the opposite. Participation is prized more than competence. When a prominent Wikipedian who claimed to be a tenured professor of divinity was revealed instead to be a young college dropout, the site’s founder Jimmy Wales responded that he was unconcerned. The notion that a false claim to knowledge is wrong is not part of Wikipedia’s culture.

The WikiScanner is thus an important development in bringing down a pernicious influence on our intellectual life. Critics of the web decry the medium as the cult of the amateur. Wikipedia is worse than that; it is the province of the covert lobby. The most constructive course is to stand on the sidelines and jeer at its pretensions.