Oliver Kamm

Some links on politics and history

I've added two links to the side-bar. These are PoliticsHome, which is a valuable source of political coverage, and Standpoint, a new magazine, edited by Daniel Johnson, that has many good things. On Standpoint's web site, the Cambridge historian Brendan Simms writes illuminatingly about Serbia after the capture of Radovan Karadzic:

[T]here are still demons on the loose in Serbian political life, in the security apparatus, in intellectual circles, and in public opinion. Much of the population had still not quite come to terms with what was done in their name during the 1990s. Belgrade will therefore need help, rhetorical and practical, to make the last leap into Europe by arresting Ratko Mladic. Now is the time for Europe to reach out. Serbia has once more begun to find its soul, and we must make sure that it does not lose it again.

I very much agree. Another angle, and one well worth examining, about the life and times of Karadzic is provided by Rose Shapiro in The Guardian. It is far from being a frivolous point that the man responsible for a campaign of hatred and genocide later adopted a clandestine career as a practitioner of mumbo-jumbo, or "alternative medicine" as it's sometimes know. Ms Shapiro writes:

Just because Karad[z]ic was a war criminal, it doesn't follow that all alternative practitioners are genocidal maniacs, and indeed many practitioners sincerely believe in what they are doing and want to help their clients. But there have surely been enough cases now of blatant recklessness if not outright deceit to confirm that practising alternative medicine is very often the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The next item doesn't belong in history, and it doesn't belong in the noble tradition of the exposure of pseudoscience, but it's a pleasing juxtaposition. The New Statesman carries a review of a book called A People's History of the World by Chris Harman. Harman's entire adult life has been spent in the service of the Leninist sect the Socialist Workers' Party. He has edited the party's newspaper and theoretical journal, and is a longstanding member of the party's Politbureau.

Being a leading member of the SWP is no barrier to writing a good book. Another former editor of the party's journal, Nigel Harris, wrote a book a few years ago on immigration, Thinking the Unthinkable, that I thought was excellent. And I concede that I have not read Harman's book. But I note with complacence that Harman's publisher, Verso, carry on their web page for the book the commendation of the 9/11 conspiracy theorist Howard Zinn, likening Harman's work to his own.

The Statesman's reviewer is not a historian but a blogger called Richard Seymour. Nothing wrong in that - except that Seymour is also a member of the Socialist Workers' Party. That's a singular editorial decision, as a member of the SWP is, by definition, bound by the views of the party's Central Committee. The SWP, being a Leninist organisation, adheres to the principle of "democratic centralism". This bizarre concept was coined by Lenin in 1906 as the guiding organisational principle of the revolutionary party. As one political theorist has usefully summarised it (Joseph Femia, Marxism and Democracy, 1992, p. 136): 'By "democratic", Lenin meant that the elected Party Congress was to be supreme over policy. By "centralism", he meant that once general policy was agreed, the everyday decisions of the central bodies were absolutely binding on all members, who were expected to march in step, whatever their private reservations.'

It's no great surprise, in the circumstances, that Seymour is overwhelmed by the profundity of the book under review, which is 'a dizzying tale of change "from below", with political, economic and cultural narratives interwoven, and occasional pauses to point out intriguing theoretical vistas'. The Statesman has an unfortunate record of not disclosing the interests of its book reviewers, and it's time this policy was tightened up.

Incidentally, it looks to me as if the SWP regards Seymour as a popular exponent of historical issues. A nice instance was an article in Socialist Worker a year ago, in which Seymour discussed the case of the atomic spy Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel ("executed on trumped up charges by the US state"). Seymour explained:

Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that dozens – sometimes he claimed hundreds – of communists were active in the government. Through the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was able to bully and slander hundreds of US citizens.

The exact number of US citizens whom Senator McCarthy was able to bully and slander through the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) was zero. McCarthy was not a member of the Committee. As its name indicates, HUAC was a committee of the House of Representatives; Senator McCarthy, as his title indicates, was a member of the Senate. The House of Representatives and the Senate are not the same thing. If any constitutional theoreticians of the SWP are reading this, I undertake further to explain that the Queen's Speech is not in fact written by the Queen, and that the Lord Privy Seal isn't in charge of locks on the lavatory.

Labour's choices

The BBC reports on Labour's woes: 'Former home secretary David Blunkett told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that unlike the Conservatives, Labour was not a "hatchet job" party which would ditch a leader at the "drop of a hat".'

I do think this is right. Labour does not dispense with leaders as readily as the Tories do. Unlike Blunkett, and writing as a Labour supporter, I do not consider this is anything to be proud of. So extended was the Tory death wish after the 1992 election that it's been easy to overlook the Conservative Party's distinctive historical characteristic. It is an astonishingly efficient vehicle for attaining public office by constant adaptation. This is what's happening now. The most repellent aspects of modern Conservatism - plainly racist rhetoric from MPs; hostility to single parents and homosexuals; distrust of foreigners - have not been eradicated but they have been confronted.

Labour, by contrast, operates by mythology rather than electoral logic. Prime Ministers, Chancellors and Foreign Secretaries who deal with the world as it is - with external threats that need to be deterred, and financial markets whose trust needs to be won - rather than with the world as party activists would like it to be become hate figures. Leaders who are plainly not up to the job but whose hearts are judged to be in the right place are indulged. This no way to run a mollusc franchise, let alone a government.

On Labour's strategy, I recommend today's main leader in The Times (not written by me). There will be a temptation for the Government now to abandon the principles of effective governance, and pursue a populist strategy in the hope of holding on as long as possible. It would be a terrible political legacy for the party and the country if this happened:

It was Harold Wilson's ambition to make Labour the natural party of government. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, this ambition came close to becoming a reality. There was a good reason why it did so. Mr Blair's combination of moderation, free markets, social justice and Atlanticism is electorally potent and a good governing philosophy.

For Gordon Brown, the challenge of staying alive and hoping for the best may tempt him to squander that mandate in acts of politcal expediency. The task of tomorrow's Labour leaders is to protect the competence of the Government. Not just in the interests of the country, but their own.

Incidentally, a measure of how useless the Parliamentary Labour Party is comes from the quoted views of one Glasgow Labour MP, according to the BBC report I've linked to: "Mohammad Sarwar, Labour MP for Glasgow Central, said he was 100% behind the prime minister, and blamed the world economy for the government's unpopularity."

Quite extraordinary.

More on Glasgow East

John Rentoul comments:

This morning's result in Glasgow is the worst possible for Gordon Brown and the best possible for the Labour Party. A margin of 365 votes is so close that it means that, if almost anybody else had been Prime Minister, Labour would have held the seat. The Labour Party may be the nice party, but it is not that nice. Previously I had given Brown up to another 365 days in No 10; this cuts that short.

I wonder if John is overestimating the party's rationality. Historically, Labour does not forgive leaders who are right.

Consider that James Callaghan and his Chancellor, Denis Healey, became figures of genuine hatred within the party in the 1980s. This was due first to the Government's accepting the need to cut public spending, at the behest of the IMF, in the sterling crisis of 1976. Callaghan allowed extensive debate within Cabinet, in which - from different starting points - Tony Benn and Tony Crosland advocated the destructive nonsense of import controls in preference to accepting the IMF's terms. Secondly, Callaghan made a brave and necessary speech in the middle of the 1983 general election campaign in which he condemned Labour's policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

But Labour is highly indulgent with leaders who tell the party what it wishes to hear. What explanation can there be for the reverence in which Michael Foot is held, and how he was treated at the time? It was completely obvious during Foot's leadership that he would take the party to catastrophe. Yet only two MPs, Jeff Rooker and Gerald Kaufman, told him to his face that he should go. Labour is surely the sentimental party; the Tories are the ruthless one.

John also comments, very reasonably, that he predicted that Glasgow East would be a defeat for Labour. Perhaps I might add that I was one of the 13 per cent of the PHI 100 panel that predicted an SNP victory. In fact, I was the one per cent that predicted a comfortable majority for the SNP, so I was uniquely wrong. It seemed to me, and does so even more now, that Labour is beyond any hope of recovery. Gordon Brown (quite unlike Callaghan, incidentally) is neither a capable prime minister nor one who has public respect. He is a huge electoral and political liability. Things can only get worse.

Game over

A few points about Labour's huge by-election defeat in Glasgow East.

It's surprising that political commentators didn't see this coming. The Politics Home Index panel of commentators, for example, overwhelmingly expected Labour to hold on. (I am a member of this panel.) Possibly this reflected the history of the SNP in by-elections. The party has only ever won five of these, and then with high-profile candidates such as Margo MacDonald (Glasgow Govan in 1973) and Jim Sillars (the same seat in 1988). In yesterday's by-election, Labour had the stronger candidate, yet she was unable to withstand the popular hostility towards the Government. The turnout was surprisingly high, at 42 per cent, and anti-Labour feeling coalesced around the candidate best placed to defeat Labour. 

Politics is no science, and parties' fortunes are not pre-determined (other than in Zimbabwe, of course). But when things start unravelling for a Government, its ability to change the terms of political debate is severely limited. Labour will lose the next general election, and lose it big. The Tories, who did well in Glasgow East to beat the Lib Dems, are not a popular brand but they are now a decontaminated one. Note, for example, that the veteran right-wing MP for Macclesfield, Nicholas Winterton, who knowingly broke parliamentary rules on expenses, claims he is being forced out by the party leadership. I hope this is true, and it's at least clear that Winterton's is not the voice of modern Conservatism. (Winterton was, incidentally, a staunch defender of the anti-communist credentials of the apartheid regime in South Africa - which speaks for itself.)

The most destructive elements on the Labour side, meanwhile, are giving unsolicited advice that would be disastrous for the remaining credibility of the Government. Labour remains the only serious vehicle for moderate left-wing politics in Britain. That was demonstrated by the party's eventual recovery from the schism that its then extremist policies caused in the 1980s. Gordon Brown is not up to the job of Prime Minister, but it is open to him to protect the legacy of his predecessor.

Tony Blair's reforms of the party, in organisation and ideology, were inadequate but well-directed. Labour is not a socialist party: it is a party of incremental social improvement that has done useful things in welfare policy, and in creating a framework of rules in economic management. Labour will be in opposition, probably for a long time. The last thing it should do now is abandon the approach of its most successful leader ever, and thereby ensure its consignment to the wilderness.

More on Karadzic's crimes

I pointed yesterday to a long and fine article in The Guardian by Ed Vulliamy on his recollections of the appalling Radovan Karadzic. Martin Bell was another journalist close to this war, and I have learned much from him. He has a long piece today in the Telegraph, which I also recommend.

Martin saw and describes some terrible things, but one sentence in his piece stands out. I hadn't heard it before; it's Karadzic's justification for the destruction of Sarajevo's library. Martin writes:

I knew Karadzic quite well. He was usually affable, but impossible to deal with. He seldom appeared before midday, but would talk all night over a bottle of Ballantine's whisky about the sufferings of the Serbs since 1389. He referred to the Muslims as Turks. He described Sarajevo's magnificent library, which his forces destroyed, as a storehouse of fundamentalist literature.

It is not the worst of Karadzic's crimes. But the man who fancied himself part of a cultural elite was in reality a vandal and a dunce.

I turn, not with great enthusiasm, to one or two charges that have been made in the comments of my post yesterday by readers who are not sympathetic to my thesis. Almost from the outset of this blog, I've had correspondence on Balkan affairs from people who believe Slobodan Milosevic was a maligned (and later murdered) genius. I should therefore have anticipated that the first comment under my post yesterday would be from someone (a Neil Craig, who has often posted inflammatory nonsense here but won't be doing so in future) who repeated a libel made against the ITN reporters who exposed the inhuman conditions at the detention camp at Trnopolje. The comment directly accused Ed Vulliamy (not of ITN, but of The Guardian) of fakery. That's a patently defamatory statement, and I had no hesitation in deleting it and blocking its author from commenting here again. That's just the way it is, I'm afraid.

English libel law as it relates to to the Internet is a mess, and is in urgent need of reform. But as I understand it (going by the precedent of the Mumsnet libel case), Ed would in theory now be entitled to damages from me, as the unwitting publisher of that libel, even though I deleted it as soon as I saw it, and have made clear my view of it.

I'm sorry to see that another comment further down the thread repeats some of the hollow propaganda that has been retailed by apologists for the defamers of honest journalists. The comment states:

I don't know what Neil Craig has written but, ITN won the libel case against Living Marxism because LM were not able to prove that ITN deliberately misrepresented the TV pictures. But in his summing up the judge said "Clearly Ian Williams and Penny Marshall and their television teams were mistaken in thinking they were not enclosed by the old barbed-wire fence, but does it matter?"

On this point, see an outstanding article by David Campbell, in the Journal of Human Rights, March & June 2002. Campbell dissects and then puts in context the the libellous claims made against ITN. Here is what he has to say about the reporting of the judge's conclusions (emphasis added):

Despite their legal loss, LM magazine and like-minded supporters throughout the world have not let the issue rest. [Mick] Hume denounced the court verdict in an unapologetic statement that re-stated his faith in Deichmann's claims, the key element of which he maintained was never seriously challenged in court. Nick Higham, the BBC's media correspondent, who had told various journalists after the publication of Deichmann's article he believed ITN's pictures were misleading, reported the trial’s outcome for the Six O’Clock News on BBC1. In his report, Higham noted that “the judge, Mr Justice Morland, told the jury LM's facts might have been right, but he asked, did that matter?” This summary was subsequently deemed by the Broadcasting Standards Commission to be misleading and thus unfair to ITN and its journalists.

(Mick Hume was editor of LM magazine, which folded as a result of its loss in this case. Thomas Deichmann was the author of the article that libelled ITN's reporters.) I've removed Campbell's footnotes, but this is the one relating to the last sentence I've quoted.

Not surprisingly, Higham's statement was embraced by LM after the verdict; see Mick Hume, "The Only Things this Case has Proved". ITN, Marshall and Williams lodged a formal complaint with the Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC) about Higham’s report. In upholding the ITN complaint, the BSC concluded that “the BBC’s paraphrase of the judge’s summing up could have left viewers with the false impression that ITN had got its facts wrong and won its case on a technicality.” See BSC, “Complaint about unjust or unfair treatment by ITN on its own behalf and on behalf of Ms Penny Marshall and Mr Ian Williams submitted on 25 April 2000 about the Six O’Clock News on BBC1, broadcast on 14 March 2000,” 3 October 2000. The adjudication is summarised in BSC, Bulletin, No36, 26 October 2000, 1.

If you follow Internet discussions on the vexed question of propaganda in the Balkan wars - as you're doing now - it's highly likely you'll come across claims such as the one Campbell debunks here. I recommend being armed with Campbell's treatment of this entire case. Also, see Ed Vulliamy's article in The Guardian immediately after LM's court defeat. Ed writes:

But history - the history of genocide in particular - is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law. And history will record this: that ITN reported the truth when, in August 1992, it revealed the gulag of horrific concentration camps run by the Serbs for their Muslim and Croatian quarry in Bosnia.

Some people who ought to have known better (and also some, such as Noam Chomsky, of very poor judgement indeed) maintained that ITN's libel suit was an attack on the free speech of a small magazine. I have no doubt at all that ITN was justified in taking legal action and in defending the integrity of its journalism.

About Karadzic

Here are some things worth reading about the capture of the man aptly described by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, as the Osama Bin Laden of Europe.

First, I strongly recommend the recollections of Ed Vulliamy in today's Guardian. Ed is an outstanding foreign correspondent (and a close family friend). No journalist did more to reveal to an English-speaking audience the depravities of the the war conducted by Karadzic under the malign influence of Slobodan Milosevic. In his dogged pursuit of truth, Ed was among the first journalists to expose the Serb detention camps. On a visit to London in July 1992, Karadzic - when confronted with allegations of Serb atrocities - had challenged journalists to "come and see for themselves". He was presumably counting on his ability to erect Potemkin villages, or at least clean up the camps before the journalists got there. Ed, along with the ITN reporters Penny Marshall and Ian Williams, famously got there in time to expose the grotesqueries at Omarska.

But that's far from all. In his piece today, Ed writes:

But Karadzic is charged with ordering so much more during those three years between Omarska and Srebrenica - the latter being iconic of so much atrocity in so many places that Srebrenica's notoriety now tends to distract from, rather than draw attention to. Atrocity in places whose names are barely known and soon forgotten in the world outside. Who talks now about Bosnian Serb massacres at Zvornik, Vlasenica, Brcko or Bijeljina? (Or, indeed, sites of Croatian atrocities, such as Ahmici, or the Bosnian Muslim camp at Celebici.)

On this issue - the character of the Bosnian war as a campaign of genocidal aggression, and not an incomprehensible explosion of ancient ethnic conflicts - The Guardian got it right very early. The quality of its reporting from the region remains a great strength. 

I'd also direct your attention to a leader in The Independent today, which makes an essential point:

What this Byzantine saga [the capture of Karadzic] reveals is the influence of the European Union at its deepest level. The lumbering behemoth, for all its superstructure of political controversy, has a profoundly benign influence on the cultural as well as economic polity of the region. The arrest of Karadzic shows how the EU works as a "soft power". The lure of membership leads those who want to join into changes which are social and legal as well as political. A place in the European family depends on embracing European values of justice and human rights.

I agree with this almost evangelically. I'm pro-European not primarily owing to an economic judgement - I think, for example, the economic and financial arguments for the euro are good but not conclusive - but because of the role of the EU in reforming institutions and making conflicts more tractable. Bosnia's prospects are immeasurably better now that Serbia and Croatia have the same end in view, namely membership of the EU.

Finally, let's recall who was pulling the strings. We know, from records of telephone conversations between Milosevic and Karadzic in July 1991, that Belgrade was making clandestine shipments of arms directly to the Bosnian Serbs. This was in preparation for the adoption by the UN Security Council, at the request of Yugoslavia, on 25 September 1991 of Resolution 713 imposing an arms embargo. The resolution thus left the newly independent states helpless against Serb aggression. It was a terrible moment in international diplomacy. The least that Western governments, working through supranational institutions, can do now is ensure that the perpetrators of genocide are brought to justice.

Some links

Here are some things worth reading. Richard Dawkins is interviewed in The Times about a forthcoming television programme he's made about Darwin. He is very good at conveying the scale, excitement and beauty of Darwin's intellectual achievement. I have problems with Dawkins when, like so many public intellectuals, he imagines his political opinions are of such depth that they merit being aired in public (see this article, half-way down, and the problem will immediately be apparent). But as an advocate of science and its methods against irrationalism he is a public resource.

My colleague Bronwen Maddox writes in the Wall Street Journal about European attitudes to America. She says:

The question is whether, in gratitude that the next U.S. president is not George W. Bush, America's critics will forgive him for decisions that are in the U.S.'s interests and not their own, or whether they will be disappointed and angry, expecting a radical transformation that was never going to happen, whichever candidate wins. In the new mood of worry, about the economy, as well as security, I'd bet on the first: that the America-bashing of the past two decades will seem like a luxury best now discarded.

I hope her wager is right, and I suspect it is. Anti-Americanism is not deep-rooted in the European psyche; it's merely a constant recycled piece of fabric in the reactionary and nativist elements of European left and right. It won't be affected by anything the US president does, because for these intellectual currents anything the US president does is, ex hypothesi, wrong.

One of my regular correspondents, the military historian D.M. Giangreco, has an interesting article on History News Network entitled "Was Dwindling US Army Manpower a Factor in the Atom Bombing of Hiroshima?" It's a valuable corrective to the notion, so common among anti-nuclear campaigners though which ought to be irrelevant to their case, that estimates of huge casualties in the event of a conventional invasion of Japan in 1945 were a postwar invention to justify President Truman's A-bomb decision. Dennis concludes:

[F]or many years, various individuals critical of Truman's bomb decision regularly maintained that estimates of massive casualties during an invasion of Japan were a post-war creation, and when the copious documentation that they were wrong began to come to light a decade ago, then switched to the line that the estimates must certainly have been developed and seen only by "lowly subordinates" when, in fact, far from being considered by obscure officers tucked away in the recesses of the Pentagon, this vital--and highly secret--matter was being examined by some of the finest minds this country has produced from Henry Stimson to Michael DeBakey. Moreover, Truman had not simply seen the genuinely huge numbers, but reacted decisively to them by calling the June 18, 1945, White House meeting in which the invasion of Japan was given the go-ahead in spite of their frightful dimensions.

Preparing for "betrayals"

Uncanny. John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday says exactly what I think, before I realised that I think it:

There was a moment last month – it was when Susan Sarandon, the actress, said she might emigrate to Italy or Canada if McCain won – when it seemed essential to the sanity of America that Obama should lose.

 But, no, it is more important that the daydream should be broken. The idea that there is some kind of clean, different, painless, perfect alternative to politics as usual is a distraction from taking difficult, compromised decisions in an imperfect world. If Obama lost, too many people around the world could continue to believe that if only America got out of whatever it is in, everything would be better.

I think McCain is right about Iraq – that the surge has been a success, and that eventual troop withdrawal should depend on that success continuing. But I think it is more important, for America and the world, that Obama should be the one who learns the truth of this the hard way.

In office, he would be forced to use his eloquence and his global popularity to make the case for what is left of the coalition to see its responsibilities to the Iraqis through. Many of his supporters, especially outside the US, would see it as a betrayal. I think it would be a necessary one, by which he could at last heal the suspicion of American power that provides so many around the world with easy excuses.

Obama will receive much adulation on his European trip. It will not be merited, if you consider merely what he has achieved and said. But it will be welcome on two grounds. First, there is the obvious symbolism - which is important and entirely justified - of an articulate black American vying for the leadership of the free world. Secondly, there are few conflicts, crises or social problems in the world that would not benefit from more rather than less American intervention.

The United States performs a unique and essential role in the international order. In the absence of world government, the US provides what the scholar Michael Mandelbaum describes as international public goods. These encompass such diverse goods as a reserve currency; conflict resolution (not an invention of Jimmy Carter, incidentally; it extends at least as far back as President Theodore Roosevelt's mediation to end the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-5, for which he won a Nobel Prize); and collective security through the Nato alliance. It's well past time that we progressive welfarist Europeans acknowledged the point. The pace of candidate Obama's "betrayals" suggests we might have to sooner rather than later, I'm pleased to say.

Chomsky misremembers, as usual

Not everyone will find this item fascinating, but it's worthy of a note for the record. A new interview with Noam Chomsky appears in something called January magazine. As is almost, though not quite, invariable in interviews with the sage of MIT, it is not hard-hitting ("he has provided an ongoing, devastating critique of power, empire and oppression", and so forth). This observation is also typical of Professor Chomsky's adulators: "The opposition Chomsky has engendered ranges from simple vitriol to abject hysteria, including bizarre accusations of Holocaust denial and sympathy for Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge."

See here, comrade. I know of no significant critic of Chomsky's political writings - say, Steven Lukes or Adam Roberts - who who has levelled a charge of Holocaust denial or sympathy for the Khmer Rouge. These accusations are straw men, the construction of which serves to obscure what is genuinely disturbing in Chomsky's political writings. This is that Chomsky does not see what is distinctively heinous in Holocaust denial and the genocidal campaign of the Khmer Rouge.

Chomsky's notorious defence of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in 1981 was far from being an unexceptionable libertarian argument for free speech, as Chomsky liked to present it. On the contrary, Chomsky took issue with the obvious conclusion that Faurisson was an antisemite. Chomsky wrote: "As far as I can determine, [Faurisson] is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort."

Chomsky was at pains to say that he was unfamiliar with Faurisson's writings, but he certainly knew enough about them from secondary sources to be aware of Faurisson's racism and pro-Nazism. Note that in the second of his pieces that I've linked to, Chomsky acknowledges having read an article by the historian and anti-racist campaigner Pierre Vidal-Naquet dissecting Faurisson's writings  ("I was considerably more surprised to read in Esprit (September 1980) that Pierre Vidal-Naquet...."). The article by Vidal-Naquet is this one (in English here); it is not possible for an honest reader of this masterly exposition to dispute that Faurisson is an antisemitic bigot.

But rather than persist with arguing that the Earth is round, I'll make just this observation. Chomsky makes free use of such accusations as racism and complicity in state crimes. In this interview in 1988, for example, he described Thomas Friedman of the New York Times as an "astonishing racist and megalomaniac". Here is Chomsky, in 2001, accusing the political theorist Jeffrey Isaac of "support for state violence". And here he is, in 2006, accusing, well, me of "tacit acquiesence in horrendous crimes".

You see the pattern here? It is one that runs through Chomsky's output. Friedman, Isaac and I are, in varying ways, advocates of liberalism. We are condemned by Chomsky in the terms I've quoted. But when writing of a man who undeniably is a racist, and who really is guilty of acquiscence in horrendous crimes, Chomsky eschews such language. Robert Faurisson's life's work is the denial, by fraudulent polemical techniques, of the greatest crime of our age. He appears to Chomsky, let us recall, a "relatively apolitical liberal of some sort".

All of this is, however, by way of preamble to the only significant point in the interview with Chomsky. It's well worth quoting. The first paragraph is by the interviewer. The second quotes Chomsky directly:

Mainstream media’s superficial reportage on Cambodia cast the lethal Khmer Rouge as arising without cause. Chomsky and colleague Edward Herman’s postulation was that the Khmer Rouge’s rise and eventual reign of terror -- far from appearing, in essence, out of nowhere -- was firmly a product of the American campaign of mass destruction in southeast Asia.

“The story about the Khmer Rouge ... I suspect must be the best, most careful, accurate” chronicle. “Nobody’s found a thing [that’s inaccurate]. If we were to rewrite it now, we’d do it exactly the same way.”

My word: Chomsky would write of the Khmer Rouge today exactly as he wrote of it in the 1970s. Well, this is what he and his collaborator Ed Herman did actually write about the Khmer Rouge at the time, in an article in The Nation in June 1977. (I have discussed here, with I hope the proper measure of incredulity and revulsion, more recent commentaries by Herman on the genocides at Srebrenica and in Rwanda.) They refer pointedly to "alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities" (emphasis added), and take issue with a comparison of Pol Pot's rule to Nazi Germany. They suggest that it is "more nearly correct" to compare Cambodia to "France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war [in Indochina]".

This is so extraordinary that it bears repeating. Chomsky expressed these sentiments in 1977; and, on his own account, he would write exactly the same again today. To invoke a phrase of the master sophist himself: perhaps no more need be said.

That Obama cartoon

There has been a largely synthetic controversy this week about the cover of the New Yorker magazine, which caricatures Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as America-hating terrorists. The unsubtle point is to mock those conservative neanderthals who perceive in the Obama campaign something, well, unAmerican. The Obama campaign has, however, taken umbrage.

My Times colleague Alice Fishburn sought the views of a number of us on the propriety of this cover. This was my comment: It would take an obtuse reader to miss the laboured irony here - complete with portrait of bin Laden and the flag consigned to the fire. Indeed the lack of subtlety is the reason the cartoon fails. The role of Michelle Obama in the campaign and where she stands politically are matters of public interest, as were the equivalent questions directed at the Clintons in the 1990s. Obama's campaign has no ground for complaint; on the contrary, the cartoon unfairly caricatures the opposition to him.

But read Christopher Hitchens in the Mirror. He expresses more witheringly the point I was groping for:

"If reassurance is what was wanted, it would have been nice to hear Barack Obama agreeing with the New Yorker’s people that the cover was (a) a joke and (b) a pro-Obama joke and then adding (c) that he and his wife "got" the said joke. No such luck. A statement of extreme lugubriousness from Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton announced that "most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive – and we agree". So in other words, the Obama team disagrees strongly with those readers who don’t see it as tasteless and inoffensive, as well as those who interpret it as an attempt to draw the sting from a whispering campaign against Obama. Take that, you broad-minded and humorous rabble! Satire can do no more."

I suspect that the Obama campaign sought the mantel of those who are offended, because there is a fashion for according sympathy to those who declare themselves mentally anguished. It would be nice if they were met with less understanding and appreciably more derision.