To intervene or not

Mahmood Mamdani has been a recent presence in the media arguing against a military intervention in Darfur. He elaborated on this in a long piece in the London Review of Books. I am not in the position to argue with him on the facts on the Sudan but I am concerned by the concluding remarks of the essay.

… peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention.

The purpose of this is seems to be to de-legitimate intervention by associating it with imperial designs, which have nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of intervention. This is a familiar line of argument. The obvious objection, that the chroniclers of abuse may indeed be disinterested in anything other than the righting of wrongs and be human beings appalled by human cruelty, rather than sinister agents of imperial aims, is one that needs to be taken seriously. However, there is more to it than that. Whatever the motive for recording it, slavery and genital mutilation are, by any standards, an abomination and do not cease to be so simply because they are recorded by colonial officers. The victims are not fussy where their liberation comes from and it is often only global and regional powers that have the ability to act.

Humanitarian intervention is more frequently the language of the oppressed which the big powers ignore, a sentiment echoed by some bitter voices from Zimbabwe on Radio 4 this morning. Not only that, non-intervention is not some act of benign neutrality, it is always partisan. It ensures the victory of the strong.

That said, intervention can be self-serving and can fail. However, the record of non-intervention is permanently stained, not just by Bosnia and Rwanda, but by the deaths of fifty million consequent on the failures of the Rhineland, Abyssinia, Spain, and Czechoslovakia. There are painful judgements to be made, I was an opponent of the Iraq war though not of regime change, but our presumption should be towards action rather than inaction. The big question is always what form that intervention should take.

Mamdani may well be correct that an armed intervention could make the situation worse in Darfur. That is a judgement I am not qualified to make. However, when he moves from the specific to the general I am reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 essay, Peace and Violence. In it he argues that establishing peace by merely ensuring the absence of war is not sufficient. Instead a peace camp should raise its standard in opposition to violence of all kinds, especially the violence of a state against its own citizens. He wrote,

To achieve not just a brief postponement of the threat of war, but a real peace, a genuine peace erected on sound foundations, it is necessary to fight the `quiet', hidden forms of violence no less fiercely than the `noisy' kinds. The aim must be not only to stop the rockets and cannons, but also to set the limits of state violence at the threshold where the need to defend society's members ceases. The aim must be to outlaw from the human condition the very idea that some are permitted to use violence regardless of justice, law and mutual agreements.

Peace will then be served not by those who count upon the good nature of the men of violence, but by those who are incorruptible, unbending and tireless in their insistence on the rights of the persecuted, the oppressed and the murdered.

This widespread error of defining peace as 'anti-war' rather than `anti-violence' has naturally also led to a mistaken estimate of the role of certain politicians in the struggle for peace. The best fighter for peace comes to mean someone who collects laurels at airports and in parliaments, who will pay any price to ward off the breath of war…; who is prepared to make any concessions to gain a break in the press recriminations and create a breathing space for trade and pseudo-prosperity. On the other hand people who point out the global dangers to peace from all types of violence run the risk at times of being called `warmongers' - or at least will be called so behind their backs.

How prescient.

Democratiya

Just in case you had failed to notice issue 8 is now out. I am particularly interested in the pieces on Ernest Bevin. However, all of it looks as interesting as ever. Happy reading.

Churchill and anti-Semitism again

The issue of Churchill’s attitude towards Jews has arisen again. The Observer has printed an article, based on a press release, referring to,

… a 70-year-old document in which the future Prime Minister wrote that Jews may 'have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer', inviting terms of abuse such as 'Hebrew bloodsucker'.

The Observer had the sense to check by referring the document to Churchill’s official biographer, Martin Gilbert. His response was,

… the article was not written by Churchill at all, but rather his ghost writer, Adam Marshall Diston. He added that Churchill's instructions for the article were different in both tone and content from what Diston eventually wrote, and pointed out that Diston was a supporter of Oswald Mosley, the notorious fascist and anti-Semite. Churchill had stopped its publication in a newspaper.

This is reminiscent of an earlier post of mine on an article by Maleiha Malik, prompting an interesting, constructive and friendly email discussion with the author.

At heart is an approach to historical research, especially in areas that are well known, of seeking the sensational and privileging a single contrary document against a lengthy and established historical record. Malik had used a single article, but responsibly, placing it in the context of an anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik campaign in the Times. However, the same article had been misused by Neo-Nazis to validate the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy.

This technique always reminds me of confession evidence in miscarriages of justice where the single confession under duress overrules the hundreds of previous and subsequent denials. It makes for a good article but poor history. The problem is publicists love things like this, especially when a new book is due out, regardless of the views of the author. As for Churchill, his profound admiration of the Jews and life-long Zionism may have, at times, been tinged with the condescension and prejudice of the age, but he was no anti-Semite.

Hobsbawm and Spain again

Will has emailed me with a link that provides a much fuller critique of Hobsbawm's piece on intellectuals in the Spanish Civil War than my earlier post. Steven Schwartz's "Eric Hobsbawm's Stalinist Homage to Catalonia" places the emphasis on Catalan and Spanish scholarship and experience to take a libertarian left position on the war and to launch an attack on Hobsbawm. He concludes,

The Spanish knew so many things that Hobsbawm will never know – and above all, they know that while Orwell’s methods might not have guaranteed the victory of the Spanish Republic, those of Stalin and his admirers assured its defeat.

It is long but worth reading. The full article is here.

The future belongs to us

Never mind the various illuminati, aliens, Freemasons, Neo-cons, etc., etc. It is the fatties you have to watch out for. Our nefarious schemes are working. In twenty-five years we will be the majority. Then power unlimited will be ours. Watch out thinnies. Gillian McKeith will be the first into one of our force feeding camps and you may be next.

The Trap

I have just watched the first Adam Curtis film in the new series. As always, it is a curious mix of the interesting and the overblown. The signs on this one are ominous though as it seems to be leading to the 'democracies are really tyrannies' argument, something that obscures a few empirical facts (like the failure to abolish elections, imprison your opponents, murder your rivals, commit genocide, etc.). However, we must wait and see.

Tonight was about 'freedom' but was really an assault on managerialism which was linked to, I kid you not, The Cold War, Game Theory, Public Choice, Friedrich Hayek and R D Laing. Phew!

The film did hint at, though not carry through, a critique of cynical thinking that has leaped the barrier into full blown paranoia, which I see as the root of much conspiracy theory. I liked that but Curtis' picture of market theory is a caricature and his view of managerialism is flawed.

How I hate managerialism! It torments the life out of me and has made much working life miserable, stifling initiative and damaging what it is supposed to promote. But Curtis really doesn't do it justice. It didn't begin with game theory. What were Stalin's 5-year plans after all? They were number and target driven all right. And this points to an important fact. Managerialism has never been about liberation. Only its most optimistic advocates saw it as rooted in some form of liberty. It is about control and is a system of domination. Its roots are to be found on the left and right. It is in Taylorism, in Fabian technocracy, Stalinism, as well as some aspects of 'market' thought that Curtis picks up on. This is what Hayek was writing against, not advocating. It is what Orwell opposed. It is what Braverman wrote about, and libertarians of left and right railed against. This isn't a curious by-product of ideas that promised more liberty, but a systematic attempt to impose central control for whatever purpose. It is about centralised authority breaking the power of the autonomous.

Right target Adam, wrong analysis.

UPDATE

I posted this before reading Norm's exquisite parody. He clearly has psychic powers as he described the programme I watched without having seen it.

UPDATE TWO

Madeleine Bunting liked the programme. I knew I had been too kind about it.

To deter is human

Oliver Kamm has a pop at CND again and the thrust of his argument is absolutely correct. The deployment of medium range missiles to Western Europe was about tying the US into the defence of Europe and securing a credible deterrent against the Soviet Union, just as he says. Kamm argues that CND got it badly wrong as,

… the anti-nuclear movement claimed that MX in the US, Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe and Trident for the UK were weapons designed to fight rather than deter a nuclear war.

The problem with Kamm’s analysis is that for a deterrent to be credible it has to be useable and thus nuclear weapons had indeed to be part of a war fighting strategy. ‘Massive retaliation’ simply was not credible. It was the equivalent of a suicide pact. The result was that NATO developed the strategy of ‘flexible response’. This accepted the assumed numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact’s conventional forces, but if there was a breakthrough by Soviet troops this would act as a ‘trip wire’ that would allow the first use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Whilst some of the anti-nuclear movement did misconstrue both Soviet and American intentions, the thoughtful critics of nuclear policy accepted that this strategy did indeed strengthen deterrence. Their concern was what would happen if deterrence failed. ‘Flexible response’ could have turned into the Schlieffen Plan for a nuclear age and become intensely dangerous, especially as ‘prevailing’ in a nuclear war necessarily meant being the first to attack. Kamm ignores this argument, though it is present in much of the anti-nuclear material of the 80’s.

This is far from being “intellectually disreputable”. It gets to the heart of the problem of deterrence theory. For a deterrent to be credible people have to be prepared to use it, yet if it is used its whole purpose will have failed and unleashed precisely what it is there to prevent. This is normally an acceptable risk, but the CND argument is that nuclear weapons are so overwhelmingly destructive that the risk undermines the effectiveness of deterrence and could possibly destroy human civilisation. It also places a reliance on human rationality that is not always borne out by experience. It is not enough simply to state that the weapons deployment was defensive and necessary, it is important to engage with the big question of the consequences of a possible failure caused by reckless, rather than rational, statesmen.

The house that Nikolai built

Just in case you ever doubt the human capacity for lunacy see here

Free - to have fun

Peter Wilby lost a lot of my respect when he wrote an unpleasant review of ‘What’s Left?’, but his piece in Thursday’s Guardian was actually quite sane. He argues that “It isn't transport policy or education policy that hits poor people hardest. It's poverty.” He continued,

This may seem a very obvious point. But the right has spent the past 30 years trying to convince everybody that it isn't true. Even policies designed to tackle poverty directly are said to make it worse. The minimum wage, we were wrongly told, would destroy jobs. Welfare is said to rot character, or to trap people in poverty - a problem that could be easily solved by making many means-tested benefits universal or possibly, as political philosophers such as Columbia University's Brian Barry propose, introducing a basic subsistence income that everybody receives from the state.

Well some of the ‘right’, anyway. There are a number of loons who insist that a good dose of cutting welfare will give the poor the incentive to get off their arses and become self-reliant without actually spotting that the most enterprising might do that through robbing their mews cottage. I can only see the withdrawal of subsistence as an act of violence against the poor if unaccompanied by alternatives. But the idea of a citizen’s income is one that has had followers amongst libertarians and redistributionists alike. Brian Barry is from the social democratic left, building on Robert Theobald’s 1966 book, The Guaranteed Income: The Next Step in Economic Evolution?. But the scheme has also been supported by the likes of Milton Friedman, whilst the Centre for Policy Studies issued a pamphlet in 1984 on it (Stephen Davies: Beveridge Revisited: new foundations for tomorrow's welfare), and The Institute for Economic Affairs has published on it too. I believe that it is still Green Party policy.

Whilst libertarians would agree with Wilby that ‘the big state that the right so deplores could be a great deal smaller’ if the basic income eliminated the complex mire of income-related benefits and interventionary schemes and programmes, this is not the main argument that unites left and right libertarians.

The exercise of liberty can only be meaningful if it is without artificial constraint. Economic insecurity militates against risk, poverty incapacitates people, stripping them of even simple choices. Collective measures to ensure security liberate people in all kinds of different ways. At the moment the government is deeply wedded to the idea of conditionality, not only based on income but also on behaviour. In repeating its mantra of ‘no rights without responsibilities’ it is extending its power to attempt to shape behaviour to meet its own idea of what a ‘responsible’ citizen should be. Of course that idea is firmly middle class. It is working class attitudes and mores that are attacked – ‘they are fat’ – ‘they smoke’ – ‘look at their disgusting children with their hoodies’. This is nothing new. The following is a quote from a Devon fisherman about temperance campaigners, published in 1911,

There's a lot to be learnt in pubs, an' 'tis a fine affair, I reckon, for to hae a good chatter over a glass or two o' beer. If you didn't do that you'd go to bed an' sleep. An' that's all some o'em wants 'ee to do, seems so - work an' sleep - an' never enjoy no life.

The citizen’s income is certainly worth exploring and there are organizations like the Basic Income Earth Network and the Citizen's Income Trust promoting it. The attraction lies in the fact that it can be more than just an anti-poverty device, it can enhance liberty and let people enjoy a life – their life, the life they want to lead. They can have fun too.

The Uses of Literacy

Last week the Guardian commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy:

Fifty years ago this month, an obscure lecturer in Hull University's adult education department was surprised to find his opinions prominently displayed across the pages of several popular newspapers.

As an obscure lecturer in Hull University’s successor to the Adult Education Department, the Centre for Lifelong Learning, I felt a pang of pride. This post is not about the book, it is just to celebrate the fact that, unlike so many Adult Education departments, we are still here and, for the time being, thriving. The 80’s and 90’s were difficult decades for all Adult Education much was lost. With the election of Labour in 1997, many of whose leading lights owed their careers to Adult Education, I thought that at least the damage would stop. Instead it has continued apace. It is a disillusion and disappointment that I find hard to forgive.

Dance of the Sugar Plump Fairy

Apologies again for the lack of posts. Work has been very busy and that includes teaching a new Tuesday evening class. This meant that I missed the fatties night of the year. The Big Ballet started its UK tour in Hull.

All the way from Russia, this company has a minimum weight qualification for budding ballerinas - 17 stone. Brilliant. What role models.

Whatever happened to the heroes?

Nigel Willmott writes a good piece on the abolition of the slave trade making the point about the movement being far wider than Wilberforce's Parliamentary campaign (it is much better than Richard Gott's - see my earlier post). His arguments are reflected in an excellent article in the Economist (via Normblog).

The association of broader campaigns with single figures or movements is very common in the popular historical imagination. For example, the campaign for women's suffrage is almost entirely associated with the Pankhursts. In fact, their militant organisation split from the larger and older non-militant NUWSS, yet the name of Millicent Fawcett does not trip as easily of the tongue when mentioning 'votes for women'. Also, those who have read Thomas Keneally's excellent "Schindler's Ark" will have seen that Schindler was not the lone hero as portrayed in Spielberg's film, but part of a network of rescuers in Nazi occupied Poland.

Perhaps we need the hero figure to remember and commemorate, and I certainly do not begrudge Hull its celebrations of Wilberforce this year. Nor is this always the 'safe' choice, as Willmott implies, otherwise the non-militant suffragists would be the ones with the monuments. What we should not do is to confuse this commemorative effort with academic history. History is always complex and is rarely reducible to single individuals, however decisive their interventions, or to ideological or historicist frameworks of explanations. This complexity explains its endless fascination. Let us enjoy seeing something as significant as the ending of the horror of the Slave Trade brought into the limelight and hope it draws people further into a deeper appreciation of history.

Banana benders bent

Apologies for light posting but I have to earn a living from time to time.

The bottle of Jacob's Creek was just the right accompaniment to the delightful sight of an Australian defeat, good wine but you lost boys.

Well done Saints, one day it will be Swinton (oops, too much wine methinks).

Hope for education from Scotland

Will has emailed to draw my attention to a quote posted at Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Republic . The passage, taken from an intriguing looking book, Andrew Lockhart Walker's The Revival of the Democratic Intellect, speaks to me at a time when narrow vocationalism is dominant.

People who attend schools are too often approached as merely fodder to meet our society's needs. Education begins in acknowledging what a libel on their natures this is. Teaching should be an attempt to meet the needs of the taught, not of the teachers. Illich's distinction between 'hope' and 'expectation' is relevant here. We should never, through a desire to equip them with the means for having expectations, forget that what they have a right to is hope. A career is a poor substitute for a life.

Just when the crushing demoralisation of life-destroying educational instrumentalism is about to finish you off, something like this gleams through the gloom and renews hope with its ardent idealism. There is only one problem; with a career you get a salary.

Spain and the left in the 1930's

There is a long and interesting piece in the Guardian by the historian Eric Hobsbawm. Supposedly about intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War, I read this with a growing sense of unease as I felt it slipping into a sophisticated apologia for the intellectual Stalinists of the 1930's.

There are some occasions when I fully agree with him. For instance, He rightly protests at the 'should have' approach to history, where political protagonists play around with the past for their own purposes;

"Today it is possible to see the civil war, Spain's contribution to the tragic history of that most brutal of centuries, the 20th, in its historical context. It was not, as the neoliberal François Furet argued it should have been, a war against both the ultra-right and the Comintern - a view shared, from a Trotskyist sectarian angle, by Ken Loach's powerful film Land and Freedom (1995). The only choice was between two sides, and liberal-democratic opinion overwhelmingly chose anti-fascism".

This sense of the necessity of a choice between fascism and anti-fascism was the force that propelled so many people into the arms of the Communist Party and I cannot quarrel with Hobsbawm's personal recollections of the urgency of the times. However, in doing so they were embracing a terrifying regime that was slaughtering its own at home and had carried out a genocide of the peasantry, it required faith rather than judgement and a revulsion with the liberal democracies in which they lived to make that commitment. For the rest of Hobsbawm's essay anti-fascism seems to becomes synonymous with Communism and the liberal democratic element drifts slowly out of sight.

The failure of the liberal democracies to aid the Republic and the absurdities of the Non-intervention Pact (how it resonates with the arms embargo to Bosnia) helped with Communist recruitment. It is too easy to talk of 1930's Communists in terms of moral failure without acknowledging the culpability of the regimes that palpably botched the challenge of fascist aggression. However, the most powerful, and moral, opposition to fascism did not come from Stalinism but from liberal democracy. Anti-fascism was not the monolith it may have appeared at the time of the Popular Front.

Hobsbawn throws out crumbs like,

"Moral revulsion against Stalinism and the behaviour of its agents in Spain is justified. It is right to criticise the communist conviction that the only revolution that counted was one that brought the party a monopoly of power."

But then he neatly brushes them aside as being "not central to the problem of the civil war". The necessity to win the war was the overwhelming concern, and the dilemmas that Hobsbawm pose were real enough. The two main ones were the need for military efficiency and for solidarity between all forces opposing Fascism, leading to a necessary conflict over the nature of the Spanish revolution. This he describes as related to the schisms in the left. In essence, it was the conflict between Marx and Bakunin. In any such quarrel, my prejudices would always lead me to tend to support Bakunin; Hobsbawm comes from the opposite side.

"Marx would have had to confront Bakunin even if all on the republican side had been angels. But it must be said that, among those who fought for the republic as soldiers, most found Marx more relevant than Bakunin - even though some survivors may recall the spontaneous but inefficient euphoria of the anarchist phase of liberation with tenderness as well as exasperation".

But this is not quite true. The dilemma posed by the revolution wasn't a product of the arguments of the First International written in blood on the Spanish landscape. This was not a conflict between Marx and Bakunin, but between Stalin and Bakunin. It was between totalitarian centralism and autonomous collectivism or, as Hobsbawm puts it, "between libertarian enthusiasm and disciplined organisation". Arguably, the reality of Stalinist tyranny may well have forced Marx into alliance with his bitter rival. All the while, sitting on the sidelines, was the very liberal democracy the war was nominally being fought to defend.

The perceived need for unity to ensure victory also leads Hobsbawm into support for the suppression of the truth. He damns Orwell with faint praise -"Only in the cold-war era did Orwell cease to be an awkward, marginal figure". Despite acknowledging that he told the truth in Homage to Catalonia, the book's initially poor sales were enough to allow him to argue for its lack of significance to the times.

My respect for those volunteers who went to fight in Spain makes outright condemnation difficult. If faced with the same dilemmas I have enough self-knowledge to realise that I would chicken out and make big speeches from a safe distance. Their commitment shamed their governments, though their courage was scarcely rewarded by the period between 28th August 1939 and 22nd June 1941 when Communists, far from being a bastion of anti-fascism, became the Nazi's allies. Those of us fortunate enough to have lived in Western democracies cannot guarantee that we would make the right choice faced with the profound threat posed by fascism. Hobsbawm is right to celebrate them, but his real purpose is the defence of intellectuals against those like Orwell who saw them as fatally compromised by a dalliance with Stalin.

Ultimately, this results in an exercise in wishful thinking used as a technique for the defence of intellectuals against polemicists, from George Orwell to Nick Cohen. Hobsbawm sees the writers and artists of the war as the creators of an historical record that excoriated fascism in Spain. He writes,

"But it is largely due to the intellectuals, the artists and writers who mobilised so overwhelmingly in favour of the republic, that in this instance history has not been written by the victors".

Any empirical historian would point out that the nature of fascism and the growing isolation of a repressive Spain in the context of the growing prosperity of post-war Europe would have ensured it a pretty bad press. And, of course, Franco may have won in Spain but fascism was defeated comprehensively elsewhere and the regime collapsed with his death. The victors did write the history, it was just that it was banned in Spain until after 1975.

Hobsbawm's optimistic conclusion is that "in creating the world's memory of the Spanish civil war, the pen, the brush and the camera wielded on behalf of the defeated have proved mightier than the sword and the power of those who won". However, what proved the mightiest of all was the ultimate victor of the wars of the 20th Century, the very capitalist liberal democracy that so many intellectuals despised and wished to see overthrown. It was the triumph of Enlightenment values that ensured that the Fascists got the press they deserved, not the literary works of Stalinist fellow travellers.

Bloody students

Ministers have been congratulating themselves on their Higher Education student funding policy as they breathe a sigh of relief at an increase in student applications this year, without considering whether the rise in numbers might be despite, rather than because of, their policies. I thought that there might be a significant overall deterrent effect in the new higher fees and loans. I was wrong. However, this isn't the main argument against the policy; it is the one that should most bother a left party - equity.

Much is made of the boost a degree gives to lifetime earnings and the argument that students should pay more towards their degrees is fairly made, but all students pay the same regardless of the benefit they receive. Those who use their degrees for corporate management, accountancy, commercial law etc. pay the same as those who become teachers, social workers, community development workers etc. Not only are the rewards disproportionate but the debt burden is equally so.

The model is also fixated on young people leaving school. This is totally unrealistic. 50% of students are classified as "mature". Many are at the younger end of the age range but those entering in their 30's or 40's pay back the same despite having significantly fewer years to reap the 'earnings premium'.

On top of which, 40% of the total number of students are part-time and they are discriminated against in that they have to pay their fees up-front. They are currently in a vacuum.

To try to deal with this, the government has a monstrously complex and ever-changing network of income contingent grants, bursaries and discretionary Access funds. Some of these can make a big difference to individuals but they do not deal with the central inequity of the system and their reach can be haphazard.

So the system is administratively expensive, inequitable and complex, but it didn't put a number of people off. As they pat themselves on the back for this magnificent success, perhaps the words 'graduate tax' - simple, equitable and social democratic - might linger in their minds for a few seconds to remind them of their socialist past.

Good arguments

The Normblog profile this week is Brian Micklethwait. It brought back fond memories of a conference in 2001 at Manchester Metropolitan University organised by my then PhD supervisor and friend Steve Davies. I gave a paper with Brian in the audience. The debate started, continued, continued, and went on some more, as libertarian went up against libertarian left. It was one of the best intellectual workouts I have ever had.

Several pints later, over a curry, still arguing, I finally spotted a point on which we could agree – debate is an outlet for competitive people who are crap at sport. He roared with laughter and we argued about football after that.

That was a good couple of days. Nice man and as an argumentative so-and-so, world class!

Eat, drink and be merry

Gillian McKeith has come in for some stick over her "PhD" in a wonderful hatchet job by Ben Goldacre. My real beef with her is her implication that fat and sin are synonymous as she lays into the participants in her show. I'm with the fatties. Stuff your liquidised celery and cucumber juice Gillian, fat is the new thin.

The result; I am fat and she is rich. Hmm…

(I also spent thousands of years doing a real PhD part-time, but at least I can call myself Dr all the time and she now can't.)

The kids are not alright

I am not surprised at the UNESCO report (full pdf here) placing Britain 21st out of 21 for child well-being. We have a real problem with young people. A combination of fear and dislike permeates the tabloids and criminal justice legislation. The Greeks can never understand why I like being childless.

Thanks to this new explanation I can now see that it is based on shock and ignorance and it is all the government's fault.

No sympathy for the devil

I have been reading a broadly respectful press about Norman Mailer's new novel 'The Castle in the Forest'. I haven't read it and almost certainly will not do so but there are things that I have read and heard that make me uneasy.

Mailer has a way with sweeping and alarming statements. His Hobbesian view of Iraq was exposed on a Radio 4 interview with Mark Lawson when he said that democracy could not be imposed by force as Iraqis did not want it. And how about this from an interview with Robert McCrum in the Guardian, 'the real damage Hitler did to the Jews, after killing six million, was to wreck the minds of the survivors. Before Hitler, the Jewish mind was more inquiring and much more elegant.' What on earth does that mean?

The real problem though is the way he describes his novel; it is about Hitler's father and his childhood. In the Guardian article he is quoted as saying that Hitler 'was an order of evil that can't be understood'. The historian in me bristles given the extensive research that is swept away by this seemingly casual remark. However, the Radio 4 interview made it clear that the theme of the book, diabolic intervention, is not a literary device or a metaphor, he is being literal. He appeared to argue that you can only understand Hitler by seeing him as an agent of the Devil. He sacralises Hitler as a satanic force for evil.

In fact, the whole point about anti-totalitarianism is that it recognises that there is a distinct and recognisable political and historical phenomenon, totalitarianism, which is not unique or supernatural. It is human, secular and malignant. It has to be recognised and opposed and it neither started nor ended with Hitler. By refusing to countenance a supernatural explanation, by rendering totalitarianism human, it makes resistance possible and practical. I do not think that Mailer is helping the cause, however fine the novel may be as a work of art.

UPDATE

Follow Will's link for a wonderful review. It describes the book as 'nearly five hundred of the most revolting pages in recent American fiction'.

The conclusion is spot on 'What is most vexing about such diabolical fatalism is that by foisting responsibility for man's evil onto an army of devils, Mailer effectively strips humanity of its moral agency, and thus of its ability ever to inhabit fully the deepest mysteries of the heart. If the last sixty years of meditation on Hitler's character have taught us anything, it is surely that the Nazis were neither gods nor demons, but finally all too human, and that is the most terrifying thing of all'.

Fat and trendy

Harry's Place has a piece on the wearing of the keffiyeh by westerners. I have to confess, there are times I wear one and Harry asks why? Well there are two simple answers. First there is the pretension of looking cool and, even better, hoping that people will ask me where I got it. A reply of, "A little shop at the back of the Ramallah bus station", is a real piece of one-upmanship. The only problem is no-one has ever asked the question because they are freely available in the UK from your local hippy store.

So the other reason is that it is bloody warm in cold weather. At 54 looking cool is not quite as important, or even possible, whereas looking sad is positively easy. I was teaching on the West Bank in the summer of 1981 and brought two back with me. Twenty five years later I am still wearing the first one, it refuses to wear out. The second sits pristinely at the top of the wardrobe awaiting the first one's demise. I think that at this rate my own will come first.

Intruding on private grief

John Kampfner patronises Nick Cohen here if you can be bothered. There is a perfect digested read at the Drink-soaked Trots, which says it all.

The digested read digested:

Kampfner says of Cohen, "He's Not the Messiah. He's a Very Naughty Boy."

More of me

No, I haven't put on yet more weight. I am now also posting over at the Drink-soaked Trots, having been mysteriously renamed "The Big Fat Gadgie". Oh well, the indignity we will put up with for fame.

You can read my first post here

Sorry Oliver

I like Oliver Kamm's blog, I have learnt from it and read it regularly. However, I really disagree with his latest post. He has a bugbear with 'relevance' in art and literature; instead, he stresses the universality of creative expression. There is a good argument in there but in tackling the topic of Shakespeare in schools, he goes wildly off-beam.

This is the passage from a BBC report he takes exception to,

Teachers have steered the Shakespeare curriculum for younger pupils in England away from Othello and Henry IV Part I in favour of lighter texts. After a poll, plays set for 13 and 14-year-olds in England could include Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It. Othello did not make the list because more than half of those questioned said the themes of sexual jealousy and racism were not suitable for that age.

Kamm argues,

Let's accept, for the sake of argument, that adolescents of 13 and 14 haven't experienced sexual jealousy and might be bewildered by Iago's malevolent imagery of "an old black ram ... tupping your white ewe". Ought they not to learn about such common and destructive sentiments before they enter adulthood?

What he is doing is mistaking the ideal with the practical. The teachers who were polled are not a bunch of rabid ideologues fixated with the idea of 'relevance' but enthusiasts and professionals who will be desperate to get their reluctant charges to love Shakespeare. All they are saying is that kids of that age are not intellectually or socially ready to be able to learn from those particular plays and others would be better to fire their imaginations. Most importantly, they know this because they have tried.

School teaching is a formidably difficult job, I would be absolutely terrible at it, and I trust teachers' ability to make a judgement about the best curriculum to follow. I have several exhausted teacher friends. One of them, given the highest praise by OFSTED recently, says the worst thing about teaching is that people who have never done it think that they are experts and pontificate about it to him endlessly. Sorry Oliver, that is what you are doing.

Kamm goes on to base his criticism in a theory of literature and again I can't fully agree with him.

But here I am accepting the utilitarian notions of the "teachers" who responded to the survey: we must teach what is relevant. That is an appalling notion. Literature gains its force not in describing a world we already know, but in illuminating enduring human concerns. Great writers see more and better than the rest of us. We gain experience through their art; we do not (or ought not to) fit the art to match our own experience. Anyone who thinks otherwise ought not to be teaching.

Here I can half agree, but to me great literature is not an instruction book, it does not just prepare us for experience or take us to places we have not seen. Really great literature is subversive. It takes what we think we know, what we thought we have seen and felt, and leads us into looking at the familiar in a completely different way. It challenges us. This literary experience is intimate and once we have read a book that touches us in that way we are not quite the same person afterwards. This is something that comes with maturity. A book you read when young, without experience, learning and your own personal history can be re-read later in life and be startlingly different. This is not fitting art to match experience, but using art to understand it anew. Writers know this; the best are ambiguous and not didactic. Literature is about "enduring human concerns", but they are enduring because we all have to deal with them in our own lives. This is why children's literature and teenage fiction exist after all, to talk to different levels of maturity.

Kamm clearly loves literature and is restlessly ambitious to share this love with others but if I were a teacher, I would not want to meet him on an appointment panel , especially if it was for teaching geography.

More madness

Now British pagans are demanding ancient human remains from museums for re-burial.

The Council of British Druid Orders say "We would like people to reconsider their relationship with the bones, … We view them as living people and therefore they have rights as people".

I'm sorry, I am not medically trained but, as far as I can see, they look very dead to me.

So far, so bonkers. But, here comes the cruncher:

Some in the museum community say it is unfair for scientists to impose their world view on pagans. "We think that there is actually an intellectual argument for pagan claims to be taken seriously," said Prof Bienkowski, "It is a different world view which, actually, like the scientific world view can be neither proved nor disproved. It is actually our responsibility to take those views into account." What right, he asks, do scientists have to speak for the bones either?

So it has come to this. We can't distinguish between science and bollocks eh? Post-modernism, you have so much to answer for.

I laughed out loud at this

When Osama bin Laden died, George Washington met him at the Pearly Gates. He slapped him across the face and yelled, "How dare you try to destroy the nation I helped conceive!"

Patrick Henry approached, punched him on the nose and shouted, "You wanted to end our liberties but you failed!"

James Madison followed, kicked him in the groin and said, "This is why I allowed our government to provide for the common defence!"

Thomas Jefferson was next, beat Osama with a long cane and snarled, "It was evil men like you who inspired me to write the Declaration of Independence."

The beatings and thrashings continued as George Mason, James Monroe and 66 other early Americans unleashed their anger on the terrorist leader.

As Osama lay bleeding and in pain, an Angel appeared. Bin Laden wept and said, "This is not what you promised me."

The Angel replied, "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you in Heaven. What did you think I said?"

(Thanks to Helena)

OK it was only a friendly

And they put out their reserve side so it doesn't really count as the fulfilment of one of my dreams, but it sure felt good.

Swinton 40 Salford 34

A world of one's own

Henry Porter gives a vigorous defence of liberal values. Though he concentrates on Islamism, much of what he says has universal import - particularly,

The thing I fear most is the growth of an alternative account of reality among radicalised youth …

Never mind just worrying about radicalised youth. How about New Age quacks, diet fetishists, conspiracy theorists, Mail readers, Mohammed Al-Fayed and, most of all, large numbers of reviewers of "What's Left"?

Lordy, lordy

With the White Paper on House of Lords' reform due out next week the papers are full of speculation/leaks about the proposals. The one thing no one mentions is the name. Surely, the idea that the nation is divided into two great estates, Nobility and Commoners, is an affront to the very concept of democratic citizenship. A programme of Parliamentary reform should rename both. After all, have New Labour forgotten that they are supposed to be 'modern'?

Has Nick Cohen written another book?

Because Peter Wilby hasn't reviewed the same one I read.

The abuse of history

I read Maleiha Malik's article comparing anti-Muslim racism with the anti-Semitism of the early 20th century. She does little more than state the obvious that racism takes similar forms regardless of whom it is aimed at in any period. She also makes the point that whole groups of people can be affected by the actions of a minority, especially in the midst of a 'moral panic'. So, not very startling. A general unease with the misuse of Islamophobia as a term does not alter the fact that there is widespread and deplorable racism against people of Asian origin, but anti-Semitism has hardly gone away either. There are many contestable views in the article, but at least Malik is consistently anti-racist.

There was one thing that bugged me though. She used a quote to imply that Winston Churchill was an anti-Semite. I couldn't square that with his known Zionism. She wrote the following:

Today the Middle East is the focus of a challenge to American political and economic hegemony, which is being presented as a "civilisational conflict with Islam". Nearly a century ago, the Russian revolution sent shockwaves through western states and financial markets. Anti-semites argued that Jewish involvement in revolutionary politics was part of a conspiracy by "the homeless wandering Jew" to replace European states with their "Hebrew nation". Winston Churchill, as secretary of state for war in 1920, wrote an article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald claiming there were three categories of Jews - good, bad and indifferent - and arguing that they were part of a "worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development".

OK the first sentence is worthy of a bit of fisking but I am an historian and it was the history that was worrying me. Where did her quote come from? This is the joy (?) of the Internet, it didn't take me long to find the article she refers to plastered all over neo-Nazi web sites, including David Irving's publishers Focal Point (and no, I am not going to link to them on principle).

At first, I had my doubts as to its validity due to the far right's typical technique of bolstering credibility by quoting seemingly authoritative academic sources. All the sites carried the same line that the authorship of the article "has been authenticated by one of the world's leading Churchill bibliographers, Richard Heinzkill, of the University of Eugene, Oregon". In fact, he was from the University of Oregon, which is based in Eugene, and it seems that Heinzkill was an ordinary librarian with no connection to the far right. All I could find by him was a 1993 article on the history of Oregon newspapers and a joint 2001 article entitled, The Perception of Image and Status in the Library Profession. He retired in 2000. In the 1984 letter that he wrote to David Irving, published on the site, he describes himself as "not enough of a Churchill scholar to discuss his stand on Zionism" and speculates that it might have been ghost written by Edward Marsh. He quotes his source for the attribution of the authorship to Churchill as Frederick Woods. Woods is in the British Library catalogue as the author of A Bibliography of the Works of Sir Winston Churchill (St Paul's Bibliographies, 1979). I guess that Heinzkill must have just looked it up in the book. Not very impressive, but I suppose that as the article has the by-line, "By the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill", this masterful piece of expert authentication might just be right.

So I looked at the text. Of course, it is hugely misrepresented. Churchill starts by saying,

Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.

Hmm, not quite the words of a racist. What about the quote about the "world wide conspiracy"? It is there, but Churchill was talking about Bolshevism. However, then he does exactly what Malik accuses him of (and the Fascists celebrate) and equate Bolshevism with a malign form of Judaism. He had accepted, hook, line and sinker, the very common right-wing myth of the Jewishness of Communism. To modern eyes, it reads as completely unacceptable and not wholly sane. But where were these "three categories of Jews - good, bad and indifferent". The answer is nowhere really. It is a misreading. Whilst Churchill categorised Jews, he wasn't identifying and praising a group of "Uncle Toms", he was being virulently anti-revolutionary and ardently pro-Zionist. On top of which there were more than three categories. Another group he praised were the "National Jews" in pre-revolutionary Russia:

As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia's economic resources, and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organisations, the Russian Cooperative Societies. In politics their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholders of friendship with France and Great Britain.

Again, hardly the words of an anti-Semite. His stereotypes were the "International" and "Terrorist" Jews who were malign global revolutionaries. However, salvation was at hand, the struggle for the Jewish soul was now one between these and Zionism. And it is Zionism "which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal" that must triumph. This article is a pro-Zionist tract. For Churchill, Zionism is the saviour of the Jews. He is calling for them to reject Bolshevism and embrace Zionism. This, Malik glosses over.

Churchill may have indulged himself in the casual anti-Semitic prejudices of his day, and particularly of his class, concerning the Russian Revolution. However, he writes as a betrayed lover rather than as a convinced racist. His beloved people had fallen in with the wrong crowd; they needed to come back from futile international utopianism to the practical nationalism of building a state of their own in the Promised Land. His Zionism was steadfast from the Balfour Declaration onwards. A real expert on Churchill, Martin Gilbert, has a new book out this summer, Churchill and the Jews. The synopsis makes interesting reading.

Churchill and the Jews covers the whole life of this greatest of Britons -- from his youth, when he was shocked by the anti-Semitism displayed during the Dreyfus Affair, to his last meeting with David Ben-Gurion in 1960, when he gave Ben-Gurion an article he had written about Moses. In the intervening years, during which Churchill cemented his place in history, his affinity with the Jews remained undimmed, even though his championing of Zionist issues and interests was often like a red rag to the bull of the British Establishment. One of those closest to Churchill once confided to the author that "Winston had one fault -- he was too fond of Jews." What does this mean? How did this fondness manifest itself? Exploring all aspects of his life and career, Churchill and the Jews sheds new light on a key figure of the twentieth century and how his attitudes affected not just the prosecution of the Second World War but the establishment of a Jewish state that followed it.

You can't expect good history from those who like to "revise" it but Malik is an academic and both she and the Guardian's editors should be a bit more scrupulous about their research. The false association between the Jews and Bolshevism was widely believed, but using a misconstrued quotation from Churchill as an exemplar is a serious distortion.

Ye Gods!

Readers of this blog will know of my affection for Greece and my respect for the Greek people. There is now another sign that Greece is becoming closer to the European mainstream, something celebrated a few years ago by Stanley Johnson, whose house is not far from mine. The special position of the Greek Church, previously only having been threatened by scandals, now faces a new challenge. Not the onward march of rational secularism but, no doubt to Francis Wheen's horror, mumbo-jumbo. Yes the pagans are back worshipping the Olympian Gods. Ellinais, a pagan group, is reviving the ancient forms of worship. Helena Smith reports,

Enter the Athens headquarters of YSEE, an umbrella organisation of pagans, and the first thing you encounter on feast days are white-clad believers offering libations before a life-size marble kouros symbolising eternal youth. Busts of Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes, Hera and Zeus cast their stony eyes on to an altar replete with burning incense, herbs and flowers. Housed in a decrepit apartment block, between a Kurdish-run cafe and a bathroom utilities store, YSEE has become a meeting point for pagans. Here believers, such as Vlassis Rassias, gather to discuss ancient Greek history and solace-giving gods.

Like pagans the world over, Rassias says he was drawn to polytheism by the religion's focus on humanity, ecology, cosmic connections and reverence for the past.

Oh well, is this how the Enlightenment will end, not in an ideological struggle over fascistic doctrines but in a "mostly harmless" general lunacy? Bring back the Titans, I say.

Hell hath no fury like a leftie scorned

The reaction to "What's Left" mirrors that to the Euston Manifesto, an unreasonable anger about a statement of the obvious.

The most furious is Edward Pearce in an awful piece. "All of this, every death, every amputation, is the fault of the American government". Don't you think that the people actually doing the arbitrary killing might bear some of the responsibility Edward? Then, from Beatrix Campbell, there is the sound of a firmly closed and locked mind refusing to budge even slightly open. There is also a strain of patronising criticism that Cohen has 'failed to understand imperialism', as if complex international issues can be reduced to a single ideological formula. The majority seem to criticise him for saying something that he does not say at all, a position beautifully demolished here by Norman Geras. The other line taken is one of apostasy. Nick Cohen has been described as a Blair apologist (have they read "Pretty Straight Guys"?), a neo-conservative (yawn) and even compared to the climate change denying Melanie Phillips (yikes!). It is only when you go back to the blogosphere that you run into some sanity. I liked Terry Glavin's review. "I think What's Left? is a brave book, a smart book, and damn well-written, in the bargain".

The most remarkable aspect of the apostasy argument is that "What's Left" is the most unambiguously left wing book I have read in yonks. This isn't just because of its commitment to liberal values, international solidarity, anti-racism, female equality, etc. It is for the reason that it is one of the few tracts that have not abandoned the concept of class. Class runs through this book as a central theme. It is the middle classes that have embraced relativism and abandoned universalism. Anti-Blair anger is self-righteously focussed on Iraq, an anger that conveniently leaves the other left issues that might just discomfort them – housing costs, low wage domestic labour, progressive taxation, equality etc – firmly out of the equation. This is best summed up as a tale of two trade unionisms. The UCU, the union for college and university lecturers, solidly middle class with a Trotskyist element amongst its activists, has affiliated to the Stop the War coalition. The TUC started the Aid Iraq Appeal, "raising money for Iraqi trade unionists to rebuild a free and independent trade union movement, and strengthen civil society in Iraq". I know which one I would rather support.

Actually, Cohen's thesis is not new, nor are the phenomena he described. I remember going to a meeting on Palestine in 1981 organised, unbeknown to me, by some strange Trotskyist sect. I had just returned from teaching on the West Bank and was appalled at being faced by a deranged rant about the "Thatcher/Reagan axis dominating the world" whilst watching the discomfort of two intelligent Palestinian guests being unable to get a word in edgeways. The nadir came when the speaker harangued an audience composed partly of Iranian Marxist political exiles about the importance of lending full support to the revolutionary theocracy in Iran. When they politely interrupted him to point out that leftists were being tortured and murdered by the regime, which was why they were in Salford after all, he turned to them sorrowfully and, in a tone of voice that would be used to address a child, explained to them that the Iranian revolution was "objectively" anti-imperialist and therefore served the cause of progress. They walked out making some very un-fraternal gestures.

In addition, some of the themes Cohen discusses were brilliantly dealt with in 1977 by Jean-Francois Revel in his book, "The Totalitarian Temptation", whilst you can find the same attitudes back in the radical movements of the 19th Century. In my research, I discovered nauseating anti-Semitism in the 19th Century Individualist Anarchist Henry Seymour's newspaper, "The Revolutionary Review". The Anarchist terrorism of the 1880's drew numerous apologias blaming society, not the bombers. There were also those who stood against the consensus. In an earlier post I pointed out that Josephine Butler supported the British in the Boer War, her hatred of Boer racism was greater than her colleagues' uncritical "anti-imperialism". Similarly, Peter Kropotkin lost many friends by insisting that German militarism and authoritarianism needed to be defeated in the First World War and thus supported the Allies instead of lapsing into pacifism.

Nothing is new, but every era needs someone to point out that the Emperor has no clothes and that it is not a pretty sight. Thanks Nick.

Groan

Q: Why do anarchists drink herbal tea?

A: Because proper tea is theft.

(Via The Vurtual Stoa)

A quote without a context …

When reading Nick Cohen's book I found this passage on page 76.

Said was a Palestinian and in a small way his viciousness and betrayals of principle were excusable. For the early Zionists to say that Palestine was 'a land without a people for a people without a land' was not so much to look down on Palestinians from a position of colonial superiority, as to look through them and deny their existence.

This is one of the examples in history where a quote can take on a life of its own independent of its intended meaning. It is attributed to Israel Zangwill, the novelist, radical and Zionist, although he was paraphrasing a comment from earlier in the 19th Century by Lord Shaftesbury.

Shaftesbury was the chair of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, more commonly known as the Jew's Society. Founded in 1808, it was a curious mixture of Anglican evangelism and proto-Zionism. Zangwill picked up this quote in a particular context, his breach with mainstream Zionism over the rejection of the offer of Uganda for possible settlement by the British government in 1905. Zangwill was alarmed at the movement's determination to settle in the historic territory of Palestine and nowhere else. He had visited Palestine in 1897 and was struck by the density of its population and felt that there was little chance of peaceful co-existence with the existing population inside a Jewish state.

Zangwill's response was to form the Jewish Territorial Organisation to search for 'a land without a people for a people without a land' elsewhere in the world. Thus, the quote was not meant to be a description of Palestine but of an alternative to Palestine. What has happened is that a statement that was rooted in an affirmation of the existence of the Palestinians is now used to demonstrate their denial.

Without proper research, it is difficult to ascertain how the quote was transmitted. Certainly, it fits neatly into critiques of Zionism as colonialism and racism. Perhaps it absolved the Zionist movement of anything other than a casual ignorance of conditions in Palestine. Probably it was just too good a sound bite to be ignored. However, through constant repetition, not least by myself until I read more widely, it has not only lost its context but become an historical distortion.

Maybe too, the earlier quote was tied up in knowledge of Zangwill's later career. He returned to mainstream Zionism but still faced the reality of the existence of a Palestinian population, only this time he advocated "transfer" of the Arabs from the area of the Jewish State.

The outline of Zangwill's life and ideas is a perfect illustration of the fact that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a localised one between two aspiring nationalism over territorial sovereignty and is not reducible to abstract notions with universal significance as so much of the 'left' seems to think.

Get fat, not fit

Sarfraz Manzoor indulges in some sympathy for those that suffer anti-fat sentiment (Society does not mock skinny people, and in particular skinny men, with the same ferocity it does fat people.) but then spoils it all by using it as an incentive to get fit and thin (actually the two are not necessarily synonymous).

Of course he is failing. My advice is give up and fight for equal rights to esteem and dosh for people of girth. There is solidarity in size; let yourself go Safraz. It is more fun, cheaper and one hell of a lot easier. I guarantee you will succeed. You too can have a body like mine.

Uncomfortable truth

Martin Kettle can't quite bring himself to fully agree with Nick Cohen:

Moreover, those who think like him have explaining to do. This book would have been easier to write four years ago. Cohen saw the Iraq war as a drive to replace tyranny with something approaching justice. That was a reasonable thing to believe once, but it has turned out disastrously wrong - an all too familiar pattern on the left. Iraq does not necessarily invalidate the policies of humanitarian intervention or internationally sanctioned regime change - and it certainly does not negate the power of much of what Cohen writes. But Robert Burns would surely have seen Iraq as a classic foolish notion - or worse - and it sure as hell carries lessons to which the believers have not yet faced up.

This ignores Cohen's main point that there were perfectly honourable reasons for opposing the war in Iraq but that once it has happened all the support of the left should have swung behind the democratic forces in Iraq instead of willing failure in order to bolster their own self-righteousness. This analysis may be uncomfortable but it is true.

It's too easy

But I can't resist. Take this from Neil Clark:

The Radicals, with 28.3% of the vote, could reasonably be expected to form a government with Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica's DSS party and the Serbian Socialist party. Except that this coalition - the best representation of the people's will - has been ruled strictly verboten by the self-appointed apostles of democracy.

Now, let's take these sentiments back to 1933.

The Nazis, with 43.9% of the vote, could reasonably be expected to form a government with the Catholic Centre Party and the DNVP. Except that this coalition - the best representation of the people's will - has been ruled strictly verboten by the self-appointed apostles of democracy.

Don't you think that these "apostles" might just have a point?

And for good measure he continues,

Although the Radicals' leader, Vojislav Seselj, currently on trial for war crimes at the Hague, is an anti-Yugoslavia Serb nationalist with a history of ugly chauvinist rhetoric …

That is one big "although", Neil, one very big "although".

What's Left

Apologies for a lack of recent posts. On Monday Amazon did me the favour of delivering Nick Cohen's new book early. The official publication date is not until next week. All my spare time has been spent reading and re-reading it. I have just finished it and this is simply a highly personal initial reaction. I will probably post more substantial comments later.

It is a magnificent book from a journalist who is an accomplished writer of fine prose. The intellectual clarity and the emotional commitment to universal values are convincing. Even though the arguments are now familiar, they still have the power to shock. Inevitably, I have some minor quibbles. The main one is that he is slightly unfair to some Anarchists and parts of the Green and Global Justice movements as he is less familiar with non-Marxist radical thought. Some, though by no means all, are better than he gives them credit for; others are far madder but arguably more benign than the Galloways of this world.

But this is nothing and I feel bad writing it. Perhaps I need some quibbles just because of the unease of seeing in clear, logical, reasoned and impassioned prose just how wrong I have been in the past. I have taken positions which I would now reject. At least my conscience is assuaged by the doubts that assailed me as I sought desperately to accommodate to orthodox positions. Nick Cohen has taken all my misgivings and explained why I was right to have them and wrong to suppress them. His journalism has helped me on a path on which I have been travelling; I owe him a huge debt of gratitude, as I do to Norman Geras, whose blog has become a central part of my daily routine, and all the other inhabitants of the blogosphere. My research had led me to libertarian ideas and I have now continued to anti-totalitarianism, I am grateful and proud that I discovered both.

I urge everyone to read What's Left. Even in January I can say it is my book of the year.

Education, education, education

More on education now and three things have caught the eye this week.

The headline today is about predictions of sharp rises in University fees. As always the old argument is dragged out.

… the present loans system in effect provided "a huge subsidy to the well-off middle class" because students are benefiting from a generous low-interest loans while pursuing careers that offer salaries well above the national average.

Leaving aside the argument that giving subsidies to the middle class is actually rather effective politics and thus likely to continue, this is only true if working class students are excluded from the system. It is an argument for widening participation, not higher fees.

Arguably, the current loan and fee system is the most regressive of the funding options. The repayment amounts are the same regardless of the benefits, so that a student who qualifies, say, as a company lawyer and earns a fortune, pays back exactly the same as someone who uses their qualification to enter the caring professions, or even non-graduate employment, at a fraction of the earnings. The tiny minority of students who use higher education to get elite jobs are hugely subsidised – the average student debt is a tiny percentage of a City bonus. The majority feel student debt as a colossal burden and obstacle to be surmounted. It is incontestable that the prospect of debt does deter low income students. Of course, part-time students are left to largely pay their own fees up front too, but then they only make up 40% of the total number!

I would have thought that a system that brought benefits to the few at the expense of the many would be inimical to a Labour government. However, political cowardice means that the government has shied away from the two logically consistent models. The first is a fully commercialised system where the risks and costs are met by the student and the cost/benefit analysis about how much to be spent on their education is theirs and theirs alone. I would argue that such a system was likely to entrench, rather than erode elitism and restrict social mobility. The other is a form of universal support, means-tested if necessary, financed through a graduate tax, thereby ensuring that those who benefit the most pay the most and vice versa. The latter is surely the best policy for a social democrat, removing social barriers to education whilst ensuring that those who benefit do pay. What the attraction of the current complex mess is, I do not know.

The second is a one of the rarely reported positive stories from Iraq.

A college in Iraq is trying to steer men away from violence with an approach to further education based on the British model.

The Najaf Technical Institute has begun training programmes aimed at giving skills to unemployed former members of militias, which, it is hoped, will lead them out of trouble into employment.

This is the type of initiative in Iraq the UCU should be promoting, helping and supporting rather than demonstrations calling for the withdrawal of troops.

Finally, the Telegraph reports that another of John Betjeman's lovers has come to light. Margie Geddes met him when he was a teacher at her brother's school. What I liked was the description of his teaching method.

"He climbs through the classroom window, and lies on the floor to teach; he says this is to make sure he's got control."

Don't you think that through the tyrannies of OFSTED and lesson plans we might just have lost something?

Did I read this right?

There are times when I get confused. Richard Gott seems to argue that we should downplay our commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 because a) there was a trade to abolish; b) it took rather a long time; c) there were slave rebellions as well as William Wilberforce; and d) it led to the invasion of Iraq. Curiouser and curiouser.

Headline of the day

From Tuesday's Guardian

"One in five Home Office statistics are unreliable, says department head"

Is he sure?

Depressing and predictable - again

My Union, the UCU, is urging support for the Stop the War Coalition demonstration on Saturday 24 February 2007. UCU has affiliated to the StWC.

So, we have an educational union that can affiliate to a body some of whose leading members have defended an insurgency that murders academics and teachers. Interesting.

Paul Mackney is quoted as saying, "I urge UCU members to promote understanding of these issues in every college and university". In fact, what he is urging is the unconditional acceptance of a line as laid down by a dubious Trotskyist/Islamist alliance, not an "understanding", or a even an open debate. Whatever your own view on the war, there is a nagging question for educationalists. Is this a position that an academic union should be taking?

Depressing - but predictable

According to the Times Educational Supplement the number of places in adult education fell by a massive 675,000 last year. Apparently, the government had been expecting a fall of "only" (!!) 200,000.

If you wish to read about this act of cultural vandalism you can do so here.

Conformism masquerading as profundity

There was a wonderful example of just what Fred Halliday was talking about (see below) in the Guardian last week by Liam Byrne and Bill Rammell. These Blairites wrote to emphasise the importance of "the politics of aspiration" to Labour's electoral strategy.

I have only seen Bill Rammel in operation once, giving a spectacularly inappropriate address to an Adult Learners' Awards event in London and it showed his deep attachment to conventional wisdom. He had just come back from China and had not been appalled by the oppression, the pollution, the corruption or the other aspects of Chinese development that Will Hutton wrote about earlier. Instead, he clearly had "seen the future and it worked". The bewildered award winners were then harangued on the reason for the fact that the funding for their courses was to be cut was so that cash can be concentrated on level 2 skills so that we can compete with China!

This column was in a similar vein. There is an element of truth there. They claim that the next election will be decided by 48 constituencies and that, "Sophisticated research tools mean we know more about these seats than ever - they tell us that in these constituencies, it's the votes of four or five groups that will decide the outcome". They are right. However, rather than questioning a system that renders the interests of 99% of the electorate irrelevant and forces us to bow to the desires of four or five groups in 48 constituencies and thus talk about the need for reform, they embrace the situation and see "aspiration" as the way that New Labour will win again. "The politics of aspiration is quite simply the common denominator of the New Labour coalition".

What on earth is "aspiration", other than another example of New Labour's rhetorical vacuity? At least they accept it isn't a static concept, "aspiration in 2009 will look different to 1997". That aspiration has aged doesn't give anyone much of a clue. Is it less "modern" or more so? We all have aspirations. For some of us it is to retire to Greece and to write. For others it is to see every ball in an Ashes series in Australia. Some look for promotion at work, others try to avoid it. Aspiration is meaningless unless it is defined.

The nearest they get to clarifying what they mean is another generalisation, "an ambition to get on in life". Ah, I suppose they mean careerists. Hang on a second. Haven't I just blogged on that? Isn't careerism Arendt's "banality of evil"? Well I never, New Labour's target voter is Adolph Eichmann.

Robin on Arendt

The London Review of Books has an idiosyncratic review by Corey Robin of works on and by Hannah Arendt. It is worth reading though I do not agree with the import of what he writes, in that he tries to draw a picture of Arendt as someone who would have been a supporter of his particular stance against Paul Berman and others of the anti-totalitarian left. His own position, nicely summarised in his article in The Nation of September 2005, actually seems to engage in the very type of psychological speculation that he accuses Arendt of in her work on Totalitarianism.

For example, his main claim is that liberals are driven by fear.

"… liberals need fear: to justify their principles, to warn us of what happens when liberalism is abandoned. And so they are driven abroad to confront the tyrannies that make life miserable elsewhere, in order to derive confidence in their own, admittedly imperfect but infinitely better, regimes."

This ignores a few simple facts. The collapse of liberalism in Germany gave us Hitler. It is infinitely better to live in Hull than in Harare. The brutal murder and torture of those who carry out the offence of teaching girls is a crime against humanity, that essential liberal concept. Opposition to tyranny abroad is both rational and moral and cannot be traduced as a form of "moral exhilaration". The desire to confront and ameliorate these crimes might just be a better way of explaining the reasons for liberals' engagement with the world.

Whilst he is right that Arendt wrote on Imperialism and Racism as well as Totalitarianism, by dismissing the latter and selectively emphasising elements of the former he is as guilty of distortion of those who simply focus on Totalitarianism to the exclusion of the rest. I am not well versed in Arendt's work and it is a long time since I read any so the review has achieved its primary purpose to make me want to go back and read more.

When he writes on Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" he is much more incisive. The point he makes is that the banality of Eichmann's evil was not submersion in a bureaucracy but relentless self promotion.

"The bureaucrat is a passive instrument, the careerist an architect of his own advance. The first loses himself in paper, the second hoists himself up a ladder. The first was how Eichmann saw himself; the second is how Arendt insisted he be seen."

This emphasis on what he sees as critique of careerism is a real insight, and much more impressive than his attempt to enrol Arendt in the "Stop the War Coalition". Sadly, this is not explored in greater depth before he goes off on another anti-liberal rant.

"In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism."

Hopeless liberal I may be, but as a careerist I have never been a great success. I share his concern about those who promote themselves in organisations at the expense of others but feel that it is a universal of any power structure, something that was noted by Bakunin to Marx's enduring anger. How do we confront it? Corey Robin sadly brings us no closer to an answer.

Down with conventional wisdom!

There is a good New Year's list by Fred Halliday in the current Open Democracy, "A 2007 warning: the world's twelve worst ideas".

As he says, "The world is full of conformism masquerading as profundity". And he goes on to expose the ideas that irritate him the most. It is a game we can all play and I fully approve of his choice of this,

"We have no need for history

In recent decades, large areas of intellectual and academic life - political thought and analysis, economics, philosophy - have jettisoned a concern with history. Yet it remains true that those who ignore history repeat it … "

And

"Religion should again be allowed, when not encouraged, to play a role in political and social life

... the claim about the benefits of religion is one of the great, and all too little challenged, impostures of our time. For centuries, those aspiring to freedom and democracy, be it in Europe or the middle east, fought to push back the influence of religion on public life. Secularism cannot guarantee freedom, but, against the claims of tradition and superstition, and the uses to which religion is put in modern political life, from California to Kuwait, it is an essential bulwark."

This too is one of my bugbears from enthusiasts of modernity (to which I would add many others such as "weightless economies", "knowledge societies", "portfolio careers", & etc.)

"The world is speeding up

This, a favourite trope of globalisation theorists, confuses acceleration in some areas, such as the transmission of knowledge, with the fact that large areas of human life continue to demand the same time as before: to conceive and bear a child, to learn a language, to grow up, to digest a meal, to enjoy a joke, to read a poem. It takes the same time to fly from London to New York as it did forty years ago, ditto to boil an egg or publish a book. Some activities – such as or driving around major western cities, getting through an airport, or dying - may take much longer."

Finally, though I tend to be anti-utopian in my outlook in the sense of opposing grand ideological plans, I still like this,

"In the modern world, we do not need utopias

Dreaming, the aspiration to a better world and the imagination thereof, is a necessary part of the human condition."

It is reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's famous quote from "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisations of Utopias."

Read all twelve here

LRB

I have just had the first instalment of a very welcome Christmas present, a subscription to the London Review of Books.

I had only ever read some of the articles that they release on-line before so it is a real pleasure to read the whole magazine. Amongst the gems was a series of diary entries by Alan Bennett – "My 2006". (Sorry the copyright is reserved so that it is not available from the web site). I particularly liked this entry:

14 August. A year or two ago the National Parks were complaining that their visitors were predominantly white and that the Asian population of Leeds and Bradford, for instance, left them largely unvisited. In this morning's Guardian it's claimed that would-be terrorists learned some of their skills in camps in national parks in the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. So some improvement there.

Hordes of fans and admirers ...

Or one anyway. One of the people who has posted some comments has linked to my blog in a post here. Apart from feeling surprised at having a reader in the US military, I thought he answers those 'blogging is the end of civilisation as we know it' critics beautifully.

I've learned a great amount from blogging … What has been very interesting is how I feel in touch with people I hardly know. Reading someone's blog can draw you in and make you use your brain. ... I want to be challenged in what I feel and think. Yes, if my beliefs can't stand under a little intellectual sparring then what are they made of.

He is right. At its best, blogging is a conversation and a completely free exercise in intellectual liberty. It is not a democracy but an anarchy, in the best sense of the word.

Recovery

Just emerging from the cocoon of the virus and so all I am doing is a token blog to alert readers to a marvellous book review on Harry's Place.

This is how the blurb describes "When the Angels Have Risen" by Andrew Feder:

Jerry Fletcher is a down-on-his luck man from Los Angeles who, after unpleasant clashes with government suits and contemptuous authorities, has become decidedly bitter against the establishment. During a trip to Las Vegas, he is mysteriously transported to an alien spaceship. On board, he meets an otherworldly being named Yoshu’ah, who confides that many of the Judeo-Christian teachings were actually provided by the alien angels. In addition, Fletcher learns that an alien war has been waged for thousands of years for control of Earth. The aliens send him home to explain his new knowledge, and the previously apathetic man assumes the enormous challenge of spreading this important message.

Yes, a classic and Harry quotes from it one of the worst sex scenes I have ever read. It looks mad, unreadable and almost irresistible. I will have the free copy if you don't want it Harry, but I don't think that even I, as a connoisseur of the truly terrible, will buy it – its tempting though.

A touch of the flu

This is what people say they when they have a cold. Flu is not the same as a cold, I now know only too well. I have flu; blogging will resume when my immune system does the business.

Zimbabwe

Normblog draws our attention to a chilling piece on Zimbabwe by R W Johnson.

"A vast human cull is under way in Zimbabwe and the great majority of deaths are a direct result of deliberate government policies. Ignored by the United Nations, it is a genocide perhaps 10 times greater than Darfur’s and more than twice as large as Rwanda’s".

Read it all here.

After reading it, I looked back to an old prospectus from our Centre documenting our work as part of a British Council link programme with the University of Harare a few years ago. I was not involved, but my good friends Gill and Daniel were. Part of what my colleagues did, in partnership with Hull's Developing Our Communities, was to deliver participatory appraisal training courses. One of the groups they worked with were displaced women living in Hatcliffe, a township outside Harare. The women identified the production and sale of hand-made textile goods as a way of beginning an independent micro business and they made two bedspreads which were brought back and raffled for funds to invest in their new business. Despite Gill's attempt to fiddle the raffle by putting my winning ticket back first time, the second ticket was also mine and she gave in to fate. The bedspread sits resplendent in my house in Greece. Then I read this.

I see Trudy Stevenson, an MP for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, who has carried out her own survey of Murambatsvina victims in Harare’s Hatcliffe Extension township, work that earned her a brutal assault by Zanu-PF thugs from which she narrowly escaped with her life. Stevenson estimates the death toll there at around a quarter.

I go out to Hatcliffe and talk to some of the survivors. One of them, Philomena Makoni, tells me that her family had a legal lease for their dwelling but this did not prevent the police from tearing it down.

“They came at night, shouting and yelling, made us get out of the house and just levelled it to the ground. “Then we were carted off into the countryside and dropped there. The president had said that people like us had lost our roots and that we must rediscover them.

“My baby that I was nursing died — I had no food and could give her no milk. We buried her in the bush. My other two children are terribly thin and sick. “We walked all the way back to Hatcliffe, it was many miles, but things are much harder even than before. My husband lost his job through being sent away and we have no income.

“We are only alive because the churches give us some food, but I am very frightened for my children. They are no longer in school and they are now begging at the roadside. I cannot see what will become of us.”

Now, rather than a symbol of hope for the future of a group of poor, but enterprising and positive women, my bedspread has a sense of poignancy, of hope destroyed under an unceasing oppression and institutionalised, systematic violence. Are the women who made it still alive? I don't know. Mugabe most certainly is.

Morality

On the same topic the Iraqi author Haifa Zangana finished her contentious piece with the following statement:

"The resistance to occupation is a basic human right as well as a moral responsibility".

To claim that an historic or political situation evinces an absolute moral responsibility without resting on moral principles is abhorrent. Under this general rule, Nazi resistance to Allied occupation would be moral, as would be the resistance of the Khmer Rouge to the Vietnamese intervention that ended the genocide. According to this argument, anyone who resists, however they choose to do so, in order to re-impose brutality, oppression and genocide are exercising a moral responsibility.

Historical and political circumstances do not confer moral imperatives; only moral principles can do that. This means that motives and actions need to be judged against ethical values and intended goals rather than simply, for example, the American and British presence in Iraq. Much of the murderous insurgency in Iraq would fail that test abysmally.

Saddam

The furore over the Saddam execution is odd. The event sounded grim. I only read about the pictures that were released, they sounded awful and the papers were delighted to flex their hypocrisies by plastering them over their front pages.

However, as I read the editorials and the political and media comments, I am assailed by questions. Why this anger? Whoever thought that executions were nice? Instead of creating a martyr, it might make those who advocate capital punishment face the reality of the death sentence. But Saddam? What respect did the thousands executed under his direct orders get? Why such surprise at his treatment? Was Mussolini a martyr because of the way his corpse was treated? I doubt that there were disapproving editorials about the partisans. Nor can I think of any fury at the worse summary trial and dispatch of the Ceaucescus. Hated tyrants tend not to get respect, but revenge. It isn't pleasant but he never suffered the horrific tortures he visited on others. I oppose the death sentence and did not want him, or anyone, to be executed, but I am not surprised that he was or that the process wasn't a model of clinical efficiency. Remember his crimes, those are what should spur our anger.

Depression

Back in England, I suppose I will get used to it.

The Balkan Trilogy

The Internet is a wonderful source for the discovery of new reading. Norman Geras has sold me Sophie Hannah's poetry which has been a mainstay of this year's Christmas presents. I read James Hawes thanks to Nick Cohen. I agree with both Oliver Kamm and Johan Hari's choice of Why Truth Matters as their neglected book of the year, first recommended on blogs. This time though my holiday reading came from one of those idiosyncratic book lists posted by customers on Amazon. This one was of books about Greece and this was the last entry, even though two thirds of this particular novel is actually set in Rumania. The novel is Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy. Originally published as three separate books, it is really one very long one. The author makes only the most perfunctory attempt re-introduce the characters at the start of each new volume and the plot flows seamlessly between them.

Set at the outbreak of the Second World War there is a strong narrative thread and at first it seemed a little dated and almost too conventional. However, the sparse, precise prose drives the reader through a compelling story and you are quickly hooked. I knew nothing of Manning before but I am distinctly impressed. The themes are both big and small. If anything, the novel is about individuals and the complexity of their relationships, but there are two grand themes running through it as well, the war and liberal individualism's conflict with collectivism.

The focus is on the wife, Harriet, of an outgoing and gregarious English teacher, Guy, who is totally unprepared for marriage. This is especially so as Harriet is politically out of sympathy with Guy's Communism and combines sensitivity with close observation and intelligent judgement. Just as there is a struggle for power in Rumania, so there is in the marriage. What is curious is how passionless their love is. Harriet is deeply passionate about cats, a young Jewish army deserter, and comes close to an affair with an army officer. Marriage is more calculating, more about partnership and solidarity than passion. It is, in an un-didactic way, a feminist novel. Harriet is central, independent, an outsider, an observer and fiercely intelligent. The themes are semi-autobiographical and Harriet is clearly Manning. Whereas Guy is the critic, teacher and producer, Harriet is the writer, the one who sees. Manning, who died in 1980, teases the reader, there are possibilities that are never fulfilled, relationships and personalities are constantly shifting and they are revealed piecemeal, so that there is always a sense of future discovery and intrigue.

The final volume is set in Greece up until the Nazi invasion and the picture of the country that emerges is one that will be familiar to all of us who love this country. It is a warmer and far less uncomfortable one than that of Rumania. I sensed a fellow Greekophile in Manning. Whereas Rumania ended by embracing Fascism, Greece succumbed through invasion alone after fierce, undivided resistance.

I am not sure whether I have read a great novel or merely a very good one, but as I finished it tonight, I contemplated my own far less dramatic departure with a sense of poignancy. Tomorrow the house will be packed up and the day after a long journey will bring me back to Hull. Greece is a hard country to leave and saying goodbye to Pelion is always sad. The Easter return will be eagerly anticipated and I might just get hold of Manning's The Levant Trilogy to accompany me.