Oliver Kamm

Lives ill led

There was a lively comments thread under my post last week about the late Ralph Miliband, Marxist theorist and minimiser of the crimes of Pol Pot. One comment came from a regular correspondent, David Boothroyd (author of the invaluable Politico's History of UK Political Parties, 2001):

'De mortuis nil nisi bonum' has always been voluntary, not compulsory. In 1971, when the reactionary former Lord Chief Justice Lord Goddard was given a good kicking in Bernard Levin's Times column, there was a loud protest by Goddard's friends over the unfairness of attacking a man who could not answer back, and the poor taste of doing so just after Goddard's death. Levin responded that he had said everything in his column, and more, while Goddard was alive.

In reply, I recalled also a column that Bernard Levin wrote shortly after the death of the literary critic and Communist Party intellectual Arnold Kettle. (Kettle was Professor of Literature at the Open University, and father of the Guardian journalist Martin Kettle.) I said that this article didn't appear to have been published in Levin's collected columns, but in fact I was mistaken. The column, which was published in The Times on 5 January 1987, appears in Levin's All Things Considered, 1988, pp. 195-200. This article, which I recall drew the anger of Eric Hobsbawm, noted the euphemisms of the character testimonials in Kettle's obituaries, and concluded:

I shall now be accused of a cowardly attack on a dead man, and of spitting in his grave. Allow me to reply, in advance of the accusations. It would have taken no courage for Arnold Kettle, in free Britain, to tell the truth about Communism. By his lifelong refusal to do so he spat in the grave of Communism's millions of victims.

I am with Levin on this. I consequently took particular exception to the Guardian obituary last year, written by Hobsbawm, for the CPGB theoretician Monty Johnstone. So I wrote my own version, filling in certain points that Hobsbawm had left out - notably Johnstone's unwavering belief that British Communists had been right to support the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Not for the first time after writing about deceased British Communists, I received a stern message of protest from the blogger Chris Bertram, a former member of the editorial board of New Left Review. As I recounted last week, Bertram copied his email to Norman Geras, with the instruction that Norman explain to me the shamefulness of my remarks. My practice when Bertram writes to me along these lines is to answer his questions and charges as fully as I can, and give him permission to publish my replies on his blog. He then doesn't publish them, so I assume that I've answered his objections satisfactorily, till the next time. Accordingly, as an indication of my policy with regard to those of disreputable opinions, I reproduce below my responses to Bertram's complaints. Here is the first.

Dear Chris, I accept I'm slightly hampered in assessing Johnstone's politics by the paucity of his output. He wrote one long pamphlet in the Eurocommunist debates (so would have been late 70s) in which he advanced his position by reference to a highly idiosyncratic reading of Lenin, who he argued was a democrat. You can, of course, advance such a case by highly literalist readings of The State & Revolution, just as some people used to argue that the Soviet Constitution of 1936 proved Stalin's democratic credentials. I don't need to say what's wrong with that argument, or with propounding the progressive character of a tyrant who stressed the "mass character of the terror" and urged his associates to implement it (e.g. 500 hostages shot after the assassination of Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka). Unfortunately my copy of Johnstone's pamphlet has parted company with me over the years, and I refrained from mentioning this casuistical masterpiece only because I try not to recount arguments from distant memory.

The piece I did cite, however, is sufficient for the inference I drew. There is a great deal more that I might have said about it, especially Johnstone's defence of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. I came across this volume (which is in the London Library, though not on open shelves) a few years ago when I was tracking Hobsbawm's political tergiversations. I did this independently, but found shortly afterwards that Martin Shaw had referenced the same piece by Johnstone in an essay about Marxism and the Peace Movement, included in a volume called Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the 20th Century, eds. Richard Taylor & Nigel Young, 1988. I don't have the book in front of me, but Shaw referred to Johnstone's comments on Poland as either disgraceful or scandalous (or some close equivalent). "Despicable" would be my adjective of choice.

I'm willing to believe that Johnstone was a man of amiable character. Why his personal characteristics should have weight in my judgement of his politics is entirely obscure to me. If, however, Norman were to explain the shameful character of my remarks, then I would listen attentively and respectfully. But I believe it would exceed even his powers of exposition to mount a convincing defence of the politics of a man who commended Soviet imperialism in formal alliance with Nazi barbarism - even a defence that it was an honourable error. Johnstone's wasn't an honourable error: it was a bloody disgrace.

I wouldn't have doubted, by the way, that like Norman and me (and unlike a perplexingly large number of bloggers) you treat private emails in confidence rather than as material for your blog. But if you do wish to write a blog post on this subject, you're welcome to reproduce these comments.

Kind regards.
Oliver

And here is the second, after Bertram had replied.

Dear Chris, Now you've confused me. I had thought you were taking issue with my judgements about Monty Johnstone, just as you queried on erroneous grounds my depiction of the crooked money-launderer Reuben Falber on his death last year. Yet it turns out you agree with me. The only part of my post with which you indicate dissent is my final sentence, and then on the grounds that you are personally offended by it. I'm afraid you probably will need to prevail upon Norman to explain what's shameful about that, as it is not self-evident and you appear unwilling to accomplish the task yourself.

It is true that in a normal case a person's life is not encapsulated in his episodic political judgements. We are not dealing here with a normal case. Johnstone was not a social democrat, a Green, a Bevanite, or a radical anti-war socialist of the type symbolised by Norman Thomas in the US and the ILP in Britain. All of those are affiliations within the spectrum of democratic politics, and are compatible with leading an exemplary life (Thomas being a case in point). Johnstone, however, was a Communist. His party advanced a totalitarian ideology and certain of its leading figures were covert agents of the Soviet Union (e.g. James Klugmann). His life's work - for he had no other profession for 50 years after taking up a party post - was to advance the political cause of Lenin, who is exceeded only by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao as the worst tyrant of the 20th century. He defended the Soviet Union's pact with Nazi Germany and imperialism in central Europe. As I wrote in The Times recently, in connection with Christopher Hitchens's comments on the Revd Jerry Falwell: "Is there merit in the mild hypocrisy of not speaking ill of the recently deceased? Not in the case of public figures who influence policy or exercise office.... A toxic figure in life is not less so in posthumous influence."

Johnstone fortunately held no public office. But his life was a public one, geared to exhortation on political matters. That comprised not sound judgements on some things and ill judgement on others - as one might say of Willy Brandt, to name one of my counterexamples - but consistent and overriding adherence to totalitarianism. In short, his life was one of discredit and disrepute. As The Guardian omitted to note this, I have taken upon myself the obligation of the public commentator to fill in the missing information.

As before, you're welcome to publish this if you wish.
Oliver

I'm uncomprehending why it should be considered "nasty" and "vicious" - which, to my complacence, are sometimes adjectives applied to me - to make factual observations about the considered opinions of public figures. As far as I know, no one else in print has picked up the fact that Eric Hobsbawm implicitly believes the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 was "a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion". When the nonagenarian historian dies, I shall be as unconstrained in recalling Hobsbawm's position as I am in pointing it out now. There may be a statute of limitations in common law; it would be an odd sentimentality if there were one also for perverse historical judgements, and I certainly don't observe it.

Stuff

There was a fine piece in The Times yesterday by Rosemary Righter on the regime in Burma, and our responsibilities. She argues:

Governments with the power to help must insist on doing so, with or without the junta's co-operation - with the approval of the UN Security Council if they can, and without it if they must. Governments had the approval neither of Saddam Hussein nor the Security Council in 1991, when they airlifted aid to fleeing Kurds in northern Iraq. The idea that states can do what they please within their borders has been modified since 1945 by a growing acceptance that states have responsibilities as well as rights, and that gross violations of those responsibilities are an international concern. Forcing aid on the regime would be a risky venture; but to cite sovereignty as the reason why nothing can be done without its assent would be to let this foul regime get away with mass murder.

On a slightly wider issue of the consequences of political repression, see also David Aaronovitch's column today. The principle of sovereignty is among the most prominent causes of avoidable suffering in the world today. I shall be writing quite a lot on this subject.

In The Guardian, Stephen Pollard writes of the impact of political memoirs. What matters for memoirs is the timing. I can think of only a very few memoirs with any wider significance. Those by Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins are fine books in their own right; on a more restricted canvas, though it's a fat volume, Nigel Lawson's account of his Chancellorship is also of enduring interest.

The Berkeley economist and former Clinton administration official Brad DeLong kindly offers me critical support in the murky business of the late Ralph Miliband, Marxist theorist and minimiser of the crimes of Pol Pot. Professor DeLong has himself had cause to query the views, on another issue, of the blogger Chris Bertram, an academic at Bristol University and an impressive candidate for "the stupidest man alive crown". For reasons I explain in the comments below my post, I think that description understates the problems with Bertram's political idiosyncrasies.

Let's turn now to Britain's newest political party. There is a pertinent comment below my post of a couple of days ago on "Blair's greatest error". It reads:

Sorry to post this on a thread where it isn't relevant. But the long comments thread discussing David Lindsay, a few posts down, is now closed. I assume this is automatic, but since David had already claimed, even before it closed, that you had closed the thread yourself as an admission of defeat, I wonder if there is a way of keeping it open, or of opening another? Also, it's really funny.

We are back to David Lindsay, founder and sole member of the British People's Alliance, and contributor of long comments posted to this blog about the "genocidal vermin" who read it and others of my "filthy kind". As I understand its position, the party favours a military coup to sweep away the decadent junta at Westminster. It opposes abortion, contraception, Europe and immigration. My readers know far, far more of this nascent mass movement than I, and they have kindly provided copious details in this comments thread. As comments on this blog are automatically closed after a week, that thread has indeed come to a natural end - but it is quite funny. Accordingly, I ask its contributors to keep a close watch on our future rulers and to feel free to use the comments thread under this post for any further insights.

If I go to Mr Lindsay's blog - which appears to be all that currently exists of the British People's Alliance - I find, for example (and as I had not realised before), that the party also defends the heroic cause of biblical creationism: "Try pointing out," suggests Mr Lindsay, "that the theory of the survival of the fittest is tautologous, since the only way to spot the fittest is that they are the ones that survive."

Much to my regret, I can claim nothing other than a layman's interest and certainly no specialist knowledge in evolutionary biology. But I'm reliably informed that "it has never once happened in the history of science that a theory achieves mainstream status, only to fall apart when a clever outsider notices a simple logical oversight". The leader of Britain's newest political party is a man of conspicuous talent, then.

More on Miliband père

This, I fear, is a a long but not a weighty post. It expounds a matter of policy to do with this blog.

If there is one thing that my readers are entitled to, and I believe have come to expect, it is coverage, conducted with a due sense of decorum and respect, of aged or deceased personalities of the far Left. My subjects have included the historian Eric Hobsbawm, who believes "only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain [the communist systems] from 1957 until 1989" - which makes you wonder what a really violent crushing of the Prague Spring would have looked like.

I have also written of the late Reuben Falber, who as Assistant General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain secretly took delivery of large wads of cash from the Soviet Embassy and laundered it through the party's pension fund. More recently, I noted the death of Monty Johnstone, defender of British Communists' "justified support on the diplomatic plane for the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact" (i.e. cheering the Nazi-Soviet pact).

You get the idea. There are stories here worth the telling - and for some reason, the obituaries carried by The Guardian whenever one of these scoundrels shuffles off this mortal coil invariably either scurry past or miss out altogether the interesting bits. I don't wish to exaggerate the public service I provide in this respect, as it's a personal recreation as well - but there genuinely is a gap in the market for political commentary here.

In the past, when endeavouring to fill that gap, I have reliably received copious angry messages at my business email address from a blogger called Chris Bertram. I believe that Bertram, who teaches philosophy at Bristol University, was once part of the editorial board of New Left Review. Despite his long service in that political milieu, he is never clear - or at least not to me - what his objections to my treatment of it consist in. Our correspondence thus takes an unvarying form. I respond to his questions and charges as fully as I am able, and press him on what he has found exceptionable in my comments; but the best I can get out of him is that he is offended. As my regular readers will know, I find this always a feeble argument for anything, and as Bertram has never advanced beyond that critique I'm unable to meet or even understand his objections.

The last time he did this, in response to my post about the CPGB theoretician Monty Johnstone, Bertram puzzlingly copied his missive to Norman Geras with the instruction that Norman explain to me how shameful were my remarks. Norman prudently refrained from entering into the correspondence, though I should have been glad to hear an argument (as could safely have been relied upon) more cogent than the state of Bertram's sensibilities. In any event, my approach is explained in a Times column last year. Referring to comments by Christopher Hitchens concerning the Revd Jerry Falwell, I wrote: "Is there merit in the mild hypocrisy of not speaking ill of the recently deceased? Not in the case of public figures who influence policy or exercise office.... A toxic figure in life is not less so in posthumous influence."

Those elderly or deceased figures I have mentioned have fortunately not held public office. They have, though - like Jerry Falwell - led public lives geared to exhortation and influence. I should be glad if any reader were to take up the task that Bertram has eschewed, and explain what is objectionable - not "offensive" or "nasty", because those aesthetic considerations don't concern me - about critical scrutiny of such lives once they've ended. I suspect that the explanation is either sentimentality of a type that adults ought not to indulge in, or a desire to prettify political lives that are far from reputable.

I'm confirmed in this inference by the finding that Bertram's solicitude extends to those who've been dead a long time as well. You can read here a post by him referring to my remarks on the late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband, father of the Foreign Secretary. I don't wish my readers to think me sensitive, but I take issue with Bertram's description of me as "a vicious little merchant banker". It is not technically true that I am a merchant banker, though I grant that I work in a related field.

Unfair though it would be to pin these on Bertram, his post carries a grandiloquently demented thread of 275 reader comments devoted to expounding the achievements of Soviet Communism. ("'Eliminating the kulaks as a class' clearly is not the same as 'eliminating the kulaks'," insists one defender of the heroic legacy of Josef Stalin.) Fortunately, Bertram's own indignation on Miliband's behalf is scarcely more sophisticated or reputable. He defends Miliband on the grounds that the man "didn’t appreciate how horrific the Pol Pot regime had been, or didn’t believe all the reports". Yes, that's the defence; and Bertram concludes, with reference to the paper that I linked to:

Miliband argues, correctly, that all that resulted from [Soviet] interventions was alienation from the socialist cause, and the installation of weak puppet regimes without popular legitimacy. You’d never gather that from reading Kamm’s blog, though. He presents Miliband’s attack on Soviet tankism as an apologia for massacre. That wasn’t how it would have been read at the time. In fact, it isn’t how a fair-minded person would read it now.

No careful writer makes confident assertions about how something "would have been read", without first investigating how it was in fact read. The tortuousness of Bertram's tense demonstrates that he is no careful writer, because he hasn't done this. Indeed, I don't know why I'm being so polite about a man who can regard so frivolously Miliband's dismissal of the refugee accounts from Cambodia. You don't need to take my word on this; consider instead the account of Miliband's highly sympathetic biographer, Michael Newman, in the book I cited in my post (Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left, 2002). Newman is desperate to think the best of his subject, and his understatement is blackly comic in its equivocation. But he doesn't shirk the painful facts (in a footnote, p. 318):

Miliband's immediate reaction to the intervention [in Cambodia] had been to condemn the Vietnamese action and to argue that, however awful the Cambodian regime had been, there was no justification for external intervention unless it had been called for by "an authentic liberation movement". In the light of subsequent knowledge about the Pol Pot regime, this would seem an inadequate discussion of the issues but even at the time it was rather surprising. There had been reports of atrocities immediately after the seizure of power by the Khmer Rouge at the begininng of January 1975 and it was curious that Miliband treated the intervention as if "normal" rules applied. Soon after their invasion in 1979 the Vietnamese produced evidence of mass graves on a horrendous scale and in July claimed that the Pol Pot regime had murdered three million people. This was no doubt an exaggeration but authoritative sources still claim that approximately 1.7 million were killed. However, Miliband appears to have been influenced by the views of [Noam] Chomsky who published a two volume work co-authored with E.S Herman in 1979, entitled The Political Economy of Human Rights....

For many of my readers, all will now fit into place. Newman gives the briefest of expositions of Chomsky and Herman's thesis, and specifically these authors' claim that Khmer Rouge atrocities were predominantly the work of local officials rather than part of a plan by the regime. (This notorious article by Chomsky and Herman, in The Nation, 6 June 1977, speaks pointedly of "alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities" and "the extreme unreliability of refugee reports".) Newman delicately concludes: "This appeared difficult to reconcile with the evidence that emerged after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979."

Of course it was "difficult to reconcile" with evidence from long before that date too. My friend William Shawcross wrote in March 1976 of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge, in "Cambodia Under Its New Rulers", New York Review of Books. (Those who imagine John Pilger to have a record of pioneering journalistic achievement on this subject might consider how much later he was in covering it than William - not until Vietnam had ceased treating Pol Pot as an ally, in fact.) But Newman has it right, nonetheless. Newman then refers to the contemporary readership of the malevolent stupidity that so impressed Miliband - or rather to one especially acute reader, the political theorist and sociologist Steven Lukes.

Lukes wrote to Miliband on 23 October 1980 pointing out that Chomsky and Herman's treatment of Cambodia was "little short of disgraceful". He then published an article to that effect in The Times Higher Education Supplement, 7 October 1980. Newman takes up the story:

On 5 December 1980 Miliband told Lukes that he was extremely unhappy about his article and he came close to endorsing Chomsky's position. Chomsky also reasserted his views in a bitter letter to Lukes on 7 December 1980 (sending a copy to Miliband), after which Miliband wrote to Lukes again insisting that Chomsky's letter had made "a case for you to answer, given the gravity of your charges".... Lukes reasserted his position in a column in the THES on 27 March 1981 entitled "Suspending Chomsky's Disbeliefs". Making no concessions to Chomsky, he again dismissed the view that the terror was not centrally planned, argued that many of those upon whom Chomsky had relied had now changed their views, and suggested that it was up to Chomsky to do the same.

Well might Newman conclude, with that peculiar talent for genteel circumlocution:

Few would now contradict Lukes's view and Miliband's judgment in aligning his position so closely to that of Chomsky appears questionable. Without any real expertise on the area, he had understated the enormity of the crimes and endorsed a particular interpretation which appeared to minimise the responsibility of the Pol Pot regime itself.

It would be cruel to belabour the point, so I'll get it over with quickly. Recall Bertram's insistence that those reading Miliband's views at the time would have regarded them as an unexceptionable statement of opposition to Soviet tanks in Eastern Europe. If I were being generous, I'd refer to the prerogative of the blogger to make arbitrary, ahistorical and fatuous pronouncements on the basis of zero research. In the further case of my indefatigable correspondent Bertram, I'm already familiar with the inverse relationship between the passionate intensity of his convictions and the amount of knowledge invested in their formulation. But in the specific case of Bertram's presenting a disgraceful argument as something percipient and principled, I'd add a rider: the man's a fool.

A word, incidentally, on Marxist theorists, about whom one comment on my earlier post was dismissive. That isn't a view I share, even where Ralph Miliband is concerned. I have referred in print to Miliband once, in an article for The Jewish Chronicle last year. If you read it, I believe you'll find it quite generous to him. I have a certain respect for his intellectual legacy. One of his books in particular, Marxism and Politics, 1977, strikes me as valuable and lucid - even if a shade pointless in its attempt to invoke Marxist categories against insurrectionary strategies.

There are other Marxist theorists, moreover, for whom I have nothing but respect. The late pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook, whom I quoted in this post, is the single most important intellectual influence on my politics. He lived just long enough to see the collapse of regimes in Eastern Europe whose political legitimacy he had worked tirelessly to undermine. I wish I had written to Hook while he was alive. I have exchanged views about him at length with the writer Paul Berman, who did know him and admires his work as I do. I have benefited from the friendship, scholarship and conversation of two noted Marxist thinkers of a more recent generation than Hook, Norman Geras and the late Paul Hirst. (I regret that I met Norman for the first time only after Paul had died prematurely in 2003, and I was thus not able to introduce them. There was a wonderful obituary published in The Guardian by the labour historian Ben Pimlott, who was Paul's colleague at Birkbeck College, where I had the good fortune to study under them. Ben himself died tragically young, in 2004, of leukaemia.)

But a Marxist thinker who associates with the cause of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman in foreign affairs deserves censure. The late Ralph Miliband receives mine.

Points from the blogs

The Counterknowledge blog notes the case of an academic, Nicholas Kollerstrom, who has been stripped of an honorary post by University College, London, for publicly espousing Holocaust denial. I am a near-absolutist on free speech and a strong opponent of legal proscription of Holocaust denial. I consider it a human right to be a bigot and to express bigoted views. But I support UCL's action. The issue is not one of personal liberty or academic freedom. It's about the purpose of the academy. Holocaust denial is a demonstrably false claim about history. It can be promoted consistently only by ignoring or doctoring the evidence. Indeed, the two most prominent Holocaust deniers in the West, my reader David Irving and Robert Faurisson, have been found in courts of law (in the UK and France, respectively) to have engaged in fakery. By taking the stand that it has, UCL has properly insisted that its academics adhere not to a particular view but to a method, that of critical inquiry.

On "Comment is Free", Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society has a piece praising Tony Blair's support for the right of same-sex couples to adopt and his refusal to grant an exemption to Catholic agencies. I agree on both points.

Harry's Place, one of the big sites for political blogging, has a new design and a new location. It looks smart, and I wish my comrades well. If there is one change I would encourage them to make in their new home, it is to devote more space to the activities of the now ruptured cause of George Galloway MP and the London mayoral candidate Lindsey German. More articles, many more articles, like this, in fact.

Last week a blogger, David Lindsay, posted trenchant comments here expounding his plans for the (as yet) one-member party he has established to oppose immigration, contraception, abortion and the European Union. Mr Lindsay further challenged the junta that rules this country to run me as their candidate in the 2009 European elections. I was pleased that Mr Lindsay gamely if a tad evasively responded in the comments thread to some pretty searching questions posed by my readers. I mention it here in the hope that three of those readers, Gary, Simon and Michael, will keep us informed of this nascent movement, for I found the discussion enjoyable and enlightening.

UPDATE: See also Nick on the Kollerstrom case.

Links added

With scrupulous political balance, I have added to my links the group blogs of, respectively, The Independent (Open House) and The Spectator (Coffee House), both of which I like reading. On Open House, John Rentoul nicely interprets the Delphic pronouncements of Gordon Brown. On Coffee House, James Forsyth notes the PM's most glaring problem, but understates.

There is an irony here. Brown has not confounded reasonable expectations. It was obvious from his disloyalty to Tony Blair that Brown would be a self-absorbed Prime Minister of little use in running a government. It turns out he has little more competence than John Major, and I take absolutely no displeasure in remarking upon it.

Auld acquaintance

Sorry for the silence this week. Much has happened in the worlds of politics, law, commerce and finance. But you may not have seen this story (not on-line) from "The Whip" column in today's Sun, written by the estimable Katherine Bergen:

That wacky couple Christine and Neil Hamilton have taken on a variety of jobs since they left the political scene. The Whip was interested to hear that this week they popped in at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in South London, where they took second billing to a chain-wearing, whip-lashing S&M duo called Topping and Butch. "The Hamiltons did a camp cowboy act," titters The Whip's source. "They wore blonde wigs and stetsons, sang songs and told a couple of stories." Yee haw!

Just thought you'd like to know.

Stuff

Here are some things worth reading (or not, as the case may be).

If there is one cliché worth avoiding in the wars over free thought it is this observation offered by Nigel Hawkes in The Times as a supposed defence of religious faith against the claims of science: "While science answers the 'how' questions, it leaves the 'why' questions hanging in the air."

I have problems with Richard Dawkins's exposition of atheism, but I share his impatience with this sort of apologetic, on the grounds that "if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think religion can?" (The God Delusion, 2006, pp. 56.) Hawkes evidently thinks he's making a telling point with his observation that: "To deny religion is to dismiss most of human history as an error, only now being corrected." I know literally no one who would "deny religion" in the sense of disputing its salience in human history. But whether there exists a personal God with an interest in our affairs is surely a question with a right and a wrong answer. I see no particular reason to demand of religious believers justification for their faith, provided - and it's an important qualification - they leave me alone. But I have little patience with the notion that those of us who reject, in the words of the Apostle Paul, the things which are not seen and are eternal, are somehow being obtuse in taking the question seriously. There is a point of honour here. Religious belief is a body of dogma, not of knowledge.

It's a common belief that Tony Blair's highest point as premier was the Good Friday Agreement and his lowest was the Iraq War. I doubt that this will be the verdict of history, in either respect. In the Sunday Telegraph, Kevin Myers comments on the "grotesque legacies" of the Belfast Agreement, and I have much sympathy with what he says:

The Agreement has turned religion from being just a denominational and theological matter into a permanent political identity. Meanwhile, the compromises made to keep Sinn Fein-IRA in countenance, regardless of all else, have effectively destroyed the centrist parties, the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP. Left standing are the two groups that have been the authors of so much misery, bigotry and suffering down the decades: Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, and of course, the political arm of the IRA, Sinn Fein.

Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal, maintains that Barack Obama has "taken political risks to show moral leadership". But then Rauch offers this chilling qualification:

Lord knows, the public is right to want a change from the bullying hyperpartisanship of Bush-era Republicanism. I'm not saying that Obama should take the low road. But I'm old enough to remember the last time the voters got tired of divisiveness and went shopping for a politician with a purifying personality. We don't need another Jimmy Carter.

Pat Buchanan's American Conservative magazine is home for some hair-raising prejudices. It stakes out a position of isolationism, nativism and domestic reaction (like the Daily Mail, though without, so far as I know, the astrology and junk medicine). The expertise of some of its contributors is difficult to understate. They include Justin Raimondo (of whom I've commented here) and - my readers will be overjoyed to learn - Neil Clark. But the magazine has just posted something worth noting by the historian Andrew Bacevich. His piece is entitled "The Right Choice? The conservative case for Barack Obama".

Some background is in order here. I referred a few days ago to the isolationist movement of the 1930s and early 1940s in the United States. One of its most prominent intellectual influences was the historian Charles Beard, who advanced the Jeffersonian aversion to "entangling alliances". In his book American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, 2002, Bacevich makes a qualified defence of Beard's approach to foreign policy. Beard's reputation has never recovered from the publication in 1948 of his book President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941, in which he attacked FDR for supposedly provoking the Pacific War. But this perverse and disreputable work does not necessarily invalidate his criticism of the principles of interventionism, and it's this that Bacevich seeks to resurrect.

I have strong objections to Bacevich's case, but will argue them another time. (Note, incidentally, that in 1994 Bacevich was advancing Beard's principles against "the paleo-Wilsonian clamor for intervention in Bosnia where American airpower will presumably untie the knot jerked tight by centuries of animosity". This was a nice instance of Bacevich's incomprehension of the Bosnian war as an intractable communal conflict rather than - as it was - a war of genocidal aggression by one side. When Nato airpower was indeed employed the year after Bacevich wrote his derisive comments, it speedily forced the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table.) I note here only what Bacevich concludes about the choices in the Presidential election: "For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one."

On this point I'm hopeful Bacevich is right. I do not believe McCain represents conservative principles, which is the reason I favoured him from the outset for the Republican nomination.

Stuff

Here are some things worth reading.

In The Sunday Times, Martin Ivens comments on Gordon Brown's uncomfortable embrace of Ken Livingstone:

"London’s election day, May 1, is [Brown's] opportunity to stop the rot. But the prime minister can help his new friend Livingstone only so much. Ken is Ken, a maverick whose fortunes go up or down according to his erratic behaviour and the antics of his wild friends. He is only semidetached Labour at best. It’s an odd twist of fate that puts Gordon’s future in his hands."

It's odd, but it's not the workings of fate. I regret to say it's the workings of Tony Blair, who welcomed Livingstone back into membership of the Labour Party for the transparently opportunistic reason that he wanted a Labour victory in London in 2004 to soften the headlines about Labour losses in municipal elections elsewhere. It was a bad and unprincipled decision, and it's appropriate that it should cause the party indignity now.

In The Observer, Agnès writes sympathetically of Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz, former wife of President Sarkozy.

"Finally marrying the man for whom she twice left President Sarkozy, just weeks after his high-profile betrothal to the celebrated beauty Carla Bruni, may be seen as astute revenge. But it may also be the triumph of true love over Sarkozy's meretricious style."

It is at least a choice of personal fulfilment against a certain concept of duty, and you have to have some sympathy for this. Consider, by contrast, the stoicism of Claude Pompidou, who died last year at the age of 94. Through no fault of her husband's, but especially owing to the unfounded smears known as l'affaire Markovic, the glamorous and cultured Mme Pompidou was deeply unhappy as the first lady, later stating: "L'Elysée, c'est pour moi la maison du malheur." But she was convinced that her "absolute destiny" was by her husband's side.

The Telegraph carries a profile of General Petraeus. He is not a man given to overstatement or bombast:

'"We don't talk turning points, there are no lights at the end of the tunnel, we don't do victory dances, and we've moved the champagne to the back of the fridge," he tells me over a mid-morning coffee, his fourth in a day that typically starts with a five-mile dawn run. Neither he nor his close colleague, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker, are either optimists or pessimists, he says. In a way it makes sense. The former, after all, have tried before out here and failed. The latter, presumably, would never set foot in post-Saddam Iraq in the first place.'

I wrote recently about the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in favour of my correspondent Karl Pfeifer, who had been defamed by right-wing extremists and then deserted by the Austrian courts when he tried to defend his reputation. Last month, Mr Pfeifer gave a lecture to the Wiener Library in London about his experience; the transcript is here, and I urge you to read it. He is a brave and determined man. Mr Pfeifer has also sent me a link to an article of his (in German) in the Viennese newspaper Der Standard. It discusses the disturbing possibility of coalition between Austria's Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). Extraordinarily, some leading Social Democrats decline to rule out such a prospect. I shall have more to say about this in due course.

Here is an interesting blog post about one of the hoarier stories of the weekend: of all things, an attempt to claim historical veracity for the forgery known as the Shroud of Turin. I do not respect religious believers' convictions, but neither do I go out of my way to confront them. When religious apologetic is disguised as something else, however, then it's worth taking a blunderbuss to a mite. The superstitious fascination for religious relics is, like the Shroud itself, literally mediaeval. It is moderately scandalous that the BBC should have screened an alleged documentary on a "mystery" that is not mysterious, and to have filed a breathless write-up of this mumbo-jumbo under - so help me - "Science & Nature". The presenter of the programme and author of the associated promotional tract is Rageh Omaar, of whom I have had cause before to remark that he is no thinker and no writer.

One of the things I find perplexing about the cultists of the Shroud is how they reconcile their position with faith in the divine inspiration of Scripture. The Gospel accounts (e.g. John 19:40) suggest that Jesus's body was washed and anointed, in accord with Jewish burial custom. Yet the cultists believe the Shroud bears stains of Jesus's blood. If you have an answer to this conundrum, please don't post it here; I'm content to live without it.

Benn and the peace movement

I went on Press TV's Forum programme this evening. It's pre-recorded and will be on the programme's website after it's been broadcast (sometime next week, I expect). The format is that of the BBC's Question Time; Andrew Gilligan is the moderator. The subject of this debate was the anti-war movement and what it had achieved. Tony Benn, two other anti-war campaigners and I were the guests.

My thesis on this is similar to my view of CND's opposition to Nato strategy in the 1980s. I think the movement is wrong, but there's an important place in principle for a peace movement in British politics. Before the Iraq War, it might have played a useful role in arguing whether there were pacific means of compelling Saddam Hussein to adhere to UNSC resolutions. But in practice the organised anti-war movement - and specifically the Stop the War Coalition, of which Benn is President - is not that type of questioning campaign, nor is it part of the political mainstream. Benn's plain speaking to the tyrant Saddam Hussein is well known ("I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?"). It's Tony Blair whom Benn regards as the war criminal, while the fatuously named Coalition (so broad a movement that it brings together secular and theocratic advocates of totalitarianism) is opposed not to war but to our side.

Recalling a television debate he did with Benn during the European referendum campaign in 1975, the late Roy Jenkins wrote in his memoirs (A Life at the Centre, 1991, p. 410): "His methods were to my mind illegitimate in that he never replied to any argument, but merely moved on to a still more extravagant statement when the previous one was challenged." I cited this remark during my own debate with Benn because here he was exemplifying the identical technique before my very eyes. One reviewer of the latest volume of his diaries - a trivial, vainglorious and astonishingly sentimental work - described Benn as the nearest thing British politics has to a national treasure: "Most of the hostility of 25 years ago is clearly pointless and gone." Not on my part, it isn't.

After the programme Andrew Gilligan genially suggested that I appeared to get a buzz from being the most hated person in the room. This is not strictly true, but there are audiences you try to win and audiences you try to rile. I'm moderately pleased to say that no one has ever expressed scepticism, or at least not to me, at my ability to do the second.

The weakest Chancellor

John Rentoul comments on a "dull, intellectually soft Budget, in which the main interest lay in the secondary cast of characters". That's true. The oddity of this Budget is that one of those secondary characters was the man delivering the Budget speech.

Alastair Darling is not the worst Chancellor since the war - that would be Anthony Barber, who in the words of the late Edmund Dell held the post "in little more than name [and] bequeathed to his successor a total breakdown in economic management". But he is the weakest. No Chancellor that I can think of was more obviously lacking his own authority and dependent on the Prime Minister's.

In the sterling crisis of 1976, Denis Healey depended on the support of James Callaghan to secure Cabinet approval of the terms of the IMF standby loan. But he also plainly won the argument in Cabinet against the protectionist proposals of Tony Benn and (less absurdly) Tony Crosland. He was a strong Chancellor with a weak hand, and dealt it skilfully. Norman Lamont's pursuit of a doomed exchange rate target destroyed his own credibility and that of John Major's government. But Lamont was in this with the rest of the government. After the ERM debacle, he in fact followed a sensible and successful course. Lamont's political views are extreme and objectionable, but the monetary framework he put in place was one that Labour rightly built on and ought to have pursued before. (In the inter-war years, and especially the early 1930s, price stability as an alternative to the Gold Standard was a view with some influence in the Labour Party. This was, for example, the view of Ernest Bevin, who had served with Keynes on the Macmillan Committee on Currency and Finance.)

Darling is unlike anyone else. He's a weak Chancellor dominated by the PM and the PM's record. He holds office in a dysfunctional government that contains few people of real talent. (This has been a problem throughout Labour's term of office. Outside the highest offices of state, there have been not many ministerial successes and very many who were plainly not competent. I have nothing against the man, but recall Gavin Strang - if you can.) The future is not bright.