Not shot

The estimable Norm Geras comments on why we fought the Iraq War:

Is it any wonder that the New Statesman is in difficulty when it has a former editor of the calibre of Peter Wilby? Wilby's opening move today:

Now it is clear that Saddam Hussein had no WMD, that al-Qaida has become stronger in Iraq, and that liberal democracy has failed to spread through the Middle East, one fallback justification for the Iraq invasion remains: it overthrew a murderous, fascist dictator.

No, it's not a fallback justification. It's central, upfront. But Wilby's special distinction in the purveying of this now tired theme is that he can't even purvey it with a minimum of consistency. So, in the same sentence as he gives out the fallback justification, he also has as one of the presumably non-fallback justifications the spreading-liberal-democracy one. I think that notion might just have been connected with overthrowing 'a murderous, fascist dictator'.

Yet again we come back to the same question: Why do people who presumably think living in a liberal democracy is a good thing, think that spreading liberal democracy and even overthrowing murderous, fascist dictators is a bad thing?

Can it be that they really think that actually we all live under murderous, fascist dictatorships, and are therefore not in a position to judge other countries?

And if they really think that, does it not occur to them to wonder why those who noisily advance ideas of this kind were not taken out and shot years ago?

The new totalitarian left

The imbecilic ramblings of someone called David Edgar have elicited this tour de force from Melanie Phillips:

I am following with no little fascination the controversy over David Edgar’s article in the Guardian last Saturday, which has upset certain left-wing folk by suggesting that writers such as Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Andrew Antony, Martin Bright, David Mamet and Ed Husain are but the latest to have deserted the left and moved to the right. Oh -- and me.

This list is in itself absurd. As Andrew Anthony has pointed out, in renouncing seventh century Islamism, Ed Husain has moved (insofar as these terms still have any meaning) from right to left. As for several of the others, they have merely understood that one cannot be a true progressive and at the same time support the continuation of certain tyrannical regimes that enslave and murder their populations, even if they do belong to the sainted third world. They have shown considerable courage in taking this otherwise obvious position, since it has exposed them to the truly venomous onslaught from their erstwhile comrades. But to say they have therefore moved to the right is absurd. They are all still recognisably men of the left over a whole range of issues; and there are still countries -- notably Israel -- to which some of them still fail to apply the principles they apply to Iraq, America and Islamist tyranny and apply instead the standard knee-jerk left-wing default denunciation.

The reason the article has caused the upset that it has, however, is surely this. For the left, to accuse someone of ‘moving to the right’ is akin to claiming they have put themselves totally beyond the moral pale. Anyone tarred with this dread brush instantly becomes an unperson, to be exiled from civilised society altogether and treated as a pariah. So others on the left who harbour similar feelings of support for overthrowing the tyrant Saddam Hussein or horror at Islamist extremism (which in their innocence they imagine are progressive positions) and who read Edgar’s diatribe wouldn’t think ‘What a berk!’ They would think with a shudder of dread: ‘So would I also be denounced if I were discovered to be thinking this’.

The single most important thing for left-wingers -- what defines them in their own eyes as people of moral worth -- is the fact that they are not ‘right-wing’. For ‘the right’ is a place of unmitigated evil. Only the left is good. So this is how it goes in the left-wing mind...

The reflex reaction of a left-winger, when presented with a set of facts which challenge his or her assumptions about the world, is not to ask ‘Is this true?’ but ‘Will adopting this position make me right-wing?’ It’s not just that to adopt such a heresy would risk social ostracism and worse amongst friends and colleagues. More profoundly, the left-winger really does believe that to be left is good and to be ‘right’ is evil. So adopting even one position which contradicts left-wing thinking (Saddam was a worse tyrant than George W Bush; Israel is the victim not the villain in the Middle East; Islamism is a denial of human rights) risks the total collapse of that left-winger’s entire moral universe. Since that world-view can brook no challenge whatever, the left-winger has to kill off any such challenge stone dead. Which is done by demonising and smearing the challenger. And the bigger the lie that is challenged and the more murderous its consequences, the more savage are the smears and ostracism.

This, of course, is by no stretch of the imagination a progressive attitude. It is instead a totalitarian mindset. As in Edgar’s article, the left claim they are the ‘progressives’ in society -- but the truth is the precise opposite. Nothing new here: the idea that the left were always the heroic opponents of tyranny is merely a self-serving myth invented by the left. From the French Revolution onwards, the left have in fact generally sided with tyrants and oppressors; ever since that time the most ‘progressive’ intellectuals have been fascinated by violence; socialism and national socialism were after all brothers in blood, descending from the same counter-Enlightenment strain of thinking.

All of which is of course, true. And while much of Edgar's article is couched in tortured and tortuous Guardianese, this extract at least is illuminating:

Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s (Aaronovitch was one of Manchester University's notorious University Challenge team, who answered "Marx", "Lenin" or "Trotsky" to every question). Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance - justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism - with the far right.

The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism, represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February 15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. And, as no one is suggesting that the Socialist Workers Party, or its fellow travellers in what Aaronovitch calls "the bruschetta crowd", is using the anti-war alliance to pursue a hidden, anti-feminist, homophobic and theocratic agenda, it initially appears that the dupers are conspiratorial Islamists and the dupees the naively innocent socialists who marched beside them. Just like the "useful idiots" of the 30s, they are giving aid and comfort to Muslim extremists, in the deluded hope (to quote Cohen) that the Islamists will "shake themselves and say, 'fair enough, we realise that now you've addressed our root cause, we don't want a theocratic empire after all'".

This is precisely false. People are suggesting that the socialist Workers Party (but not just the Socialist Workers Party) are adopting an anti-feminist, homophobic, theocratic agenda - because it's the reality. It's not that the SWP et al. are being duped by islamofascists - it's that the totalitarian agenda of theocratic fascism is inherently attractive to the totalitarian mindset of some sections of the left. The old SWP slogan "Left and Right, unite and fight!" has a rather different flavour these days than it did in the 1980s. It is from this species of totalitarian leftism that progressive liberals are increasingly detaching themselves. The scope for a new progressive coalition against the traditional fascism of the right and the less familiar fascism of the totalitarian left is broadening.

The UN's favourite conspiracy theorist

What price a U.N. expert? the United Nations Human Rights Council has appointed a new "investigator" into the conduct of Israel, Professor Richard Falk. However, it seems that the Professor will not need to do much investigating, as he already has a fully formed view: in his estimation, the Israel is comparable with Nazi Germany:

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy. If ever the ethos of ‘a responsibility to protect,’ recently adopted by the UN Security Council as the basis of ‘humanitarian intervention’ is applicable, it would be to act now to start protecting the people of Gaza from further pain and suffering. But it would be unrealistic to expect the UN to do anything in the face of this crisis, given the pattern of US support for Israel and taking into account the extent to which European governments have lent their weight to recent illicit efforts to crush Hamas as a Palestinian political force.

None of this conveys any understanding that Hamas may in fact be the problem, inasmuch as Israel is under constant bombardment from Hamas missiles fired from Gaza, often from within civilian residential areas. But still, however outrageous Falk's demonisation of Israel may be, it is not as unusual as it ought to be these days. Some of Falk's views are stranger by half. Oliver Kamm comments on a piece by Falk in the New York Times of 16th February 1979:

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

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

I need make no comment on this beyond the fact that Falk is an extreme example of (in the literary critic Lionel Trilling's phrase) the adversary culture: a man so bitter about the failings (not all of them imagined) of liberal democracies that he will perceive salvation even in the most reactionary and despotic of movements overseas.

As if this were not enough, the Professor is effectively a card-carrying supporter of one of the barmiest of current conspiracy theories: the "9-11 Truth" lobby:

On March 26, Richard Falk, Milbank professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, was named by unanimous vote to a newly created position to report on human rights in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. While Mr. Falk's specialty is human rights and international law, since the attacks in 2001, he has devoted some of his time to challenging what he calls the "9-11 official version."

On March 24 in an interview with a radio host and former University of Wisconsin instructor, Kevin Barrett, Mr. Falk said, "It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don't think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is there is a lot of grounds for suspicion, there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in and that the failure to do these things is cheating the American people and in some sense the people of the world of a greater confidence in what really happened than they presently possess."

Mr. Barrett, who is the co-founder of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, said in an interview yesterday of Mr. Falk, "I would put him on a list of scholars who are sympathetic to the 9/11 truth movement."

He added, "Unlike most public intellectuals today, he is both honest and very, very knowledgeable in that he understands the probable reality of 9/11. He understands that the evidence that it was a false flag operation is very strong."

The narrative that the attacks from 2001 were a "false flag" operation is a recurring theme in the literature challenging the consensus that 19 Al Qaeda hijackers flew commercial jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. False flag refers to espionage or covert actions taken by one government made to seem like the work of another. The false flag thesis has it that the Bush administration is somehow responsible for the September 11 attacks as a pretext for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Falk yesterday did not return e-mails and phone calls asking for a comment. But in 2004 he wrote the foreword to the book "The New Pearl Harbor," by David Ray Griffin. Mr. Griffin has posited that such an inside job is the likely explanation for the attacks.

In the preface, Mr. Falk writes, "There have been questions raised here and there and allegations of official complicity made almost from the day of the attacks, especially in Europe, but no one until Griffin has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account."

When asked for a comment about the appointment of Mr. Falk, a former American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton said, "This is exactly why we voted against the new human rights council."

This last comment is hardly surprising. What are we to make of a Human Rights Council which appoints a man to a senior role who has allied himself not only with the theocratic fascist regime of the Ayatollah's, but also with the loopy conspiracy-theorists of fringe American politics. David Aaronovitch cites the only reasonable conclusion:

I believe in the UN, but we all must stop regarding it as though it was some kind of moral arbiter, doing right in a world of wrong. Because, unfortunately, the term “UN expert” means neither good nor expert. It can mean warped and stupid.

Indeed it can. The absurd ravings of a left-wing extremist are one thing when the individual is concerned is a private system. The appointment of such an individual to an important U.N. post can only diminish the organisation as a whole, in the eyes of right-thinking people. The problem is that too few right-thinking people are associated with the United Nations. Far from being a friend of democracy and human rights, the U.N. is little more than a mouthpiece for whichever group of nations can gain a majority in the General Assembly at any given time. The United Nations is in no position to claim special moral authority on this or any issue.

What civil liberties?

Poole Borough Council's admission that it used powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000, (effectively anti-terror legislation) to spy on three children in order to establish whether they were the subject of fraudulent school place applications, is a gross misuse of the Act, a scandalous invasion of privacy and a wholly disproportionate response to a relatively trivial situation.

Whilst it is true that schools admissions are a politically sensitive issue these days, a potentially fraudulent school application form is hardly as heinous as, say, international terrorism, organised crime or paedophilia. It is not particularly difficult to establish whether or not a parent has lied about their address for the purpose of gaining admission to a particular school. Full scale cloak-and-dagger operations may be more entertaining for the staff involved, but a quick phone call or knock on the door of a suspect applicant would probably be just as effective, and cheaper.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that Poole Council used these powers simply because they were available. Indeed, the council was hardly shamefaced about owning up to the spying allegations. They were acting within the law, and in any case parents expected them to come down hard on those who try to buck the system, they said. Unfortunately, this is just not good enough. Just because a course of action is within the law does not necessarily mean it is just and proportionate. The Labour governments of the past eleven years have been altogether too keen to push through ill-considered legislation with a potential for abuse - of course no-one would ever dream of using RIPA powers for anything other than the most serious cases. Except of course, that now they have.

The civil rights group Liberty are right to cry 'foul' on this issue. It is unlikely that the government will wish to revise this legislation, so the next best thing is to name and shame those who are acting outside the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. After the negative publicity of the past couple of days, other councils will hopefully think twice before going down this route in future.