29 April 2003
JULIUS JACOBSON 1921-2003
I've just heard that Julius Jacobson, longstanding advocate of "third camp" socialism and co-founder (with his wife Phyllis in 1961) and editor of New Politics magazine in the US, died last month just short of his 82nd birthday. He will be missed. Here is the notice form the New Politics website.
BEWARE DICTATORS BEARING GIFTS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, May 2 2003
The fuss seems to have died down a little over the discovery in Baghdad by a Daily Telegraph journalist of documents that appear to show that George Galloway, the maverick Labour MP, received large sums of money from Saddam Hussein. And it’s not surprising that the story has gone quiet. Mr Galloway is promising to sue for libel, and that has made not only the Telegraph but every other newspaper very wary. Recent changes in Britain’s libel law might make it possible for newspapers to mount a succesful defence that falls short of proving that the documents are genuine and that Mr Galloway took the cash, but this is by no means guaranteed. Once the writs start flying, any sensible editor takes cover.
In time, perhaps, we will get to know the truth about this murky business. Mr Galloway says he did not receive funding from Iraq, and it is indeed possible that he is an unwitting victim of some vile scam. Some of the more lurid scenarios that have been advanced by his supporters are, however, rather implausible.
In particular, the idea that the Telegraph forged the documents or published them in the knowledge that they are forgeries almost beggars belief. The Telegraph is certainly politically hostile to Mr Galloway and everything he stands for. But its reporters and editors are not crazy. They know that their reputations would be destroyed if they were discovered to have been complicit in faking evidence of this kind. They simply wouldn’t risk it.
It is slightly more believable that the documents were forged and planted for the Telegraph to discover by some spook or other. As several Galloway supporters have remarked, including the editor of Tribune, there is a history of this sort of thing.
The most notorious example, of course, was the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Purportedly a missive from the head of the Communist International demanding that British communists prepare to subvert Britain’s armed forces, it was published by the Daily Mail in the run-up to the 1924 general election as a means of discrediting Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government, which had negotiated trade treaties with Soviet Russia. In fact, it was almost certainly forged, probably by White Russian emigres with the connivance of British intelligence agents hostile to Labour.
There are also more recent cases of intelligence service dirty tricks to undermine Labour, most notoriously in the 1970s, when various spooks spent an inordinate amount of time and energy attempting to smear Harold Wilson as a Soviet stooge. And who can forget the Sunday Times’s preposterous claims in the early 1990s that Michael Foot was the KGB’s “Agent Boot”?
But is Mr Galloway the victim of this sort of sting? Maybe, but I doubt it. He just isn’t an important enough player to warrant the effort that would be involved in setting it up.
If he didn’t receive the money from Iraq, the most plausible scenario is that the payments were authorised somewhere in the upper echelons of Saddam’s regime — and then siphoned off by someone feathering his or her own nest.
This would fit not only with what we know about the enthusiasm of the Iraqi Ba’ath leadership for self-enrichment but also with its record of paying its supporters and propagandists abroad.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, its chosen vehicle in Britain was the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, the paranoid Trotskyist sect led by the late and unlamented Gerry Healy, which, in return for money to subsidise its daily newspaper News Line and the weekly Labour Herald, informed on Iraqi exiles in London and printed encomiums to Saddam — “a man of firm action in home affairs, insisting on the highest standards of dedication and integrity of Government officials”, as News Line had it in 1980.
Some time after the WRP imploded in the mid-1980s, the Iraqis appear to have decided that the Labour left and the peace movement was a better pond to fish in than the revolutionary Left. I remember as a journalist on Tribune in the late 1980s and early 1990s being offered by an intermediary free trips to Iraq at the regime’s expense, which I turned down. Plenty of others did not.
This is not to impugn their motives: often the only way to visit a totalitarian regime and meet its people is on an official trip. Nor is it to claim that every benefiary of Saddam’s hospitality turned into a propagandist for his vicious rule. But that was what he wanted — and from some people at least, all of whom should have known better, that was what he got.
The fuss seems to have died down a little over the discovery in Baghdad by a Daily Telegraph journalist of documents that appear to show that George Galloway, the maverick Labour MP, received large sums of money from Saddam Hussein. And it’s not surprising that the story has gone quiet. Mr Galloway is promising to sue for libel, and that has made not only the Telegraph but every other newspaper very wary. Recent changes in Britain’s libel law might make it possible for newspapers to mount a succesful defence that falls short of proving that the documents are genuine and that Mr Galloway took the cash, but this is by no means guaranteed. Once the writs start flying, any sensible editor takes cover.
In time, perhaps, we will get to know the truth about this murky business. Mr Galloway says he did not receive funding from Iraq, and it is indeed possible that he is an unwitting victim of some vile scam. Some of the more lurid scenarios that have been advanced by his supporters are, however, rather implausible.
In particular, the idea that the Telegraph forged the documents or published them in the knowledge that they are forgeries almost beggars belief. The Telegraph is certainly politically hostile to Mr Galloway and everything he stands for. But its reporters and editors are not crazy. They know that their reputations would be destroyed if they were discovered to have been complicit in faking evidence of this kind. They simply wouldn’t risk it.
It is slightly more believable that the documents were forged and planted for the Telegraph to discover by some spook or other. As several Galloway supporters have remarked, including the editor of Tribune, there is a history of this sort of thing.
The most notorious example, of course, was the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Purportedly a missive from the head of the Communist International demanding that British communists prepare to subvert Britain’s armed forces, it was published by the Daily Mail in the run-up to the 1924 general election as a means of discrediting Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government, which had negotiated trade treaties with Soviet Russia. In fact, it was almost certainly forged, probably by White Russian emigres with the connivance of British intelligence agents hostile to Labour.
There are also more recent cases of intelligence service dirty tricks to undermine Labour, most notoriously in the 1970s, when various spooks spent an inordinate amount of time and energy attempting to smear Harold Wilson as a Soviet stooge. And who can forget the Sunday Times’s preposterous claims in the early 1990s that Michael Foot was the KGB’s “Agent Boot”?
But is Mr Galloway the victim of this sort of sting? Maybe, but I doubt it. He just isn’t an important enough player to warrant the effort that would be involved in setting it up.
If he didn’t receive the money from Iraq, the most plausible scenario is that the payments were authorised somewhere in the upper echelons of Saddam’s regime — and then siphoned off by someone feathering his or her own nest.
This would fit not only with what we know about the enthusiasm of the Iraqi Ba’ath leadership for self-enrichment but also with its record of paying its supporters and propagandists abroad.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, its chosen vehicle in Britain was the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, the paranoid Trotskyist sect led by the late and unlamented Gerry Healy, which, in return for money to subsidise its daily newspaper News Line and the weekly Labour Herald, informed on Iraqi exiles in London and printed encomiums to Saddam — “a man of firm action in home affairs, insisting on the highest standards of dedication and integrity of Government officials”, as News Line had it in 1980.
Some time after the WRP imploded in the mid-1980s, the Iraqis appear to have decided that the Labour left and the peace movement was a better pond to fish in than the revolutionary Left. I remember as a journalist on Tribune in the late 1980s and early 1990s being offered by an intermediary free trips to Iraq at the regime’s expense, which I turned down. Plenty of others did not.
This is not to impugn their motives: often the only way to visit a totalitarian regime and meet its people is on an official trip. Nor is it to claim that every benefiary of Saddam’s hospitality turned into a propagandist for his vicious rule. But that was what he wanted — and from some people at least, all of whom should have known better, that was what he got.
27 April 2003
EUROPE IS NOW THE KEY FOR BLAIR
Paul Anderson, Chartist column, May-June 2003
If there is one thing that is clear about Britain’s Europe policy today, it is that it is in a right mess.
Most spectacularly, the Blair government’s policy on Iraq – first loudly backing the Bush administration as it prepared for a military strike, then attempting and failing to secure United Nations backing for an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, then playing a major supporting role in the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam – did serious damage to Britain’s relationship with the two most important countries of the European Union, France and Germany, both of which opposed the war.
How lasting that damage will be is another matter, however. The French and German governments were opposed to military action against Iraq for different reasons – the French out of Gaullist hostility to American unilateralism, the Germans out of social democratic respect for international law and a tendency towards pacifism – and neither has any long-term interest in stoking up antipathy to Britain.
Unless George Bush decides to extend the treatment given to Iraq to, say, Syria or North Korea, and unless Tony Blair backs him again, Britain’s relationship with the big hitters in the EU will return to normal. Already, it’s back to business as usual in the Convention on the Future of Europe, where Britain and France are pushing hard (and together) for an intergovernmentalist settlement, against the federalism of Germany and the smaller EU countries.
The unlesses of the UK-US relationship are important, but at present the signs are that the US military will be tied up in Iraq for some time to come (as Martin Woollacott argued in an excellent piece in the Guardian - click here) and that the British government is not keen on more military adventures for a while.
Jack Straw’s denials that any other invasions are planned are of course worth taking with a pinch of salt. But the recent revelations that he and Blair would have resigned if the backbench Labour revolt on Iraq in the Commons in March had been only a little bigger suggests that they might have learned a little in the past few weeks about the extent of opposition to their uncritically pro-American policy. I have a sneaking suspicion that their doubts about joining a madcap neo-con crusade will from now on prove decisive.
But we shall see. The end of the war in Iraq – which was a remarkable military success, whatever its political ramifications – turns the spotlight on other aspects of Britain’s European policy, in particular the euro.
And here the picture is anything but optimistic. Disagreements at the highest level on the euro, most notably between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, appear to have come close to paralysing the government – and as yet there is little sign of any resolution.
In early April, nearly all the broadsheet newspapers carried reports, inspired by briefings from sources close to Brown, that the chancellor would soon declare that his famous five tests for British entry into the single European currency had not been met, thereby effectively (though not explicitly) ruling out a referendum on the euro for the rest of this parliament (see for example the Guardian report here).
At the end of April, however, a seemingly authoritative piece by Will Hutton in the Observer (click here) claimed that Blair had decided to shift Brown from the Treasury to the Foreign Office in order to clear the way for a euro referendum next year.
That would be a massive gamble for Blair. Brown is a big figure in the government, the architect of its overall strategy and for many years the favourite to succeed Blair as Labour leader (and prime minister) if Blair decided to go. It is not implausible to suggest that Brown could send the government into terminal crisis if he decided to resist Blair over-ruling or moving him.
Then again, it is difficult to see how Blair can regain credibility in Europe unless he overcomes Brown’s opposition to joining the euro – and, given the apparent strength of Brown’s opposition, it is hard to see how Brown could remain as chancellor after being forced to eat humble pie.
So Hutton’s interpretation has a certain credibility to it. Nevertheless, there is a simple way out for Brown that has been given scant consideration by the commentators – which is that some time in the next month or so he announces that the five tests have been passed.
Such a scenario is also just about feasible. Although Brown has been quite happy for his political allies to tell journalists that his line on the euro is “not yet”, he has not committed himself publicly to this position. He still has the option of endorsing British membership now. The anti-euro lobby would feel horribly let down – but the political impact would be extraordinary.
Once again, we shall see. But if there is a euro referendum soon, under any circumstances, it will be a tough battle for the government to win.
The pro-euro camp has spent the past few years waiting for the go-ahead from Blair, and is not in good shape: if the referendum isn’t announced soon, Britain in Europe, the umbrella group that will be the basis of any “yes” campaign, will collapse.
To make matters worse, there has been a serious decline in support for the euro among trade unions, which will be one of the crucial elements in any “yes” campaign. Anti-European leftists have won key positions in several major unions in the past couple of years, and John Monks, the most articulate of the pro-euro trade union leaders, is leaving the TUC. Labour movement support for Britain joining the single currency will be in rather shorter supply than five years ago.
Yet joining the euro remains the best bet for a social democratic future for Britain. It is true, as Gordon Brown argues, that the EU’s system of economic management needs to be reformed, particularly when it comes down to the idiotic growth and stability pact, which effectively rules out counter-cyclical state spending. But here we are pushing at an open door: the rest of Europe, social democratic, Christian democratic and neo-liberal alike, realises that the regime of enforced austerity imposed by the Bundesbank and subsequently endorsed by the governments of Europe as the price of monetary union was a big mistake. Faced with low growth and rising unemployment, the governments of Europe recognise that John Maynard Keynes had some bright ideas after all.
If Blair does not go for a euro referendum this parliament, he will have missed the best opportunity any British government has ever had to define Britain’s place as a European social capitalist country. The next few weeks will be absolutely critical.
If there is one thing that is clear about Britain’s Europe policy today, it is that it is in a right mess.
Most spectacularly, the Blair government’s policy on Iraq – first loudly backing the Bush administration as it prepared for a military strike, then attempting and failing to secure United Nations backing for an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, then playing a major supporting role in the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam – did serious damage to Britain’s relationship with the two most important countries of the European Union, France and Germany, both of which opposed the war.
How lasting that damage will be is another matter, however. The French and German governments were opposed to military action against Iraq for different reasons – the French out of Gaullist hostility to American unilateralism, the Germans out of social democratic respect for international law and a tendency towards pacifism – and neither has any long-term interest in stoking up antipathy to Britain.
Unless George Bush decides to extend the treatment given to Iraq to, say, Syria or North Korea, and unless Tony Blair backs him again, Britain’s relationship with the big hitters in the EU will return to normal. Already, it’s back to business as usual in the Convention on the Future of Europe, where Britain and France are pushing hard (and together) for an intergovernmentalist settlement, against the federalism of Germany and the smaller EU countries.
The unlesses of the UK-US relationship are important, but at present the signs are that the US military will be tied up in Iraq for some time to come (as Martin Woollacott argued in an excellent piece in the Guardian - click here) and that the British government is not keen on more military adventures for a while.
Jack Straw’s denials that any other invasions are planned are of course worth taking with a pinch of salt. But the recent revelations that he and Blair would have resigned if the backbench Labour revolt on Iraq in the Commons in March had been only a little bigger suggests that they might have learned a little in the past few weeks about the extent of opposition to their uncritically pro-American policy. I have a sneaking suspicion that their doubts about joining a madcap neo-con crusade will from now on prove decisive.
But we shall see. The end of the war in Iraq – which was a remarkable military success, whatever its political ramifications – turns the spotlight on other aspects of Britain’s European policy, in particular the euro.
And here the picture is anything but optimistic. Disagreements at the highest level on the euro, most notably between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, appear to have come close to paralysing the government – and as yet there is little sign of any resolution.
In early April, nearly all the broadsheet newspapers carried reports, inspired by briefings from sources close to Brown, that the chancellor would soon declare that his famous five tests for British entry into the single European currency had not been met, thereby effectively (though not explicitly) ruling out a referendum on the euro for the rest of this parliament (see for example the Guardian report here).
At the end of April, however, a seemingly authoritative piece by Will Hutton in the Observer (click here) claimed that Blair had decided to shift Brown from the Treasury to the Foreign Office in order to clear the way for a euro referendum next year.
That would be a massive gamble for Blair. Brown is a big figure in the government, the architect of its overall strategy and for many years the favourite to succeed Blair as Labour leader (and prime minister) if Blair decided to go. It is not implausible to suggest that Brown could send the government into terminal crisis if he decided to resist Blair over-ruling or moving him.
Then again, it is difficult to see how Blair can regain credibility in Europe unless he overcomes Brown’s opposition to joining the euro – and, given the apparent strength of Brown’s opposition, it is hard to see how Brown could remain as chancellor after being forced to eat humble pie.
So Hutton’s interpretation has a certain credibility to it. Nevertheless, there is a simple way out for Brown that has been given scant consideration by the commentators – which is that some time in the next month or so he announces that the five tests have been passed.
Such a scenario is also just about feasible. Although Brown has been quite happy for his political allies to tell journalists that his line on the euro is “not yet”, he has not committed himself publicly to this position. He still has the option of endorsing British membership now. The anti-euro lobby would feel horribly let down – but the political impact would be extraordinary.
Once again, we shall see. But if there is a euro referendum soon, under any circumstances, it will be a tough battle for the government to win.
The pro-euro camp has spent the past few years waiting for the go-ahead from Blair, and is not in good shape: if the referendum isn’t announced soon, Britain in Europe, the umbrella group that will be the basis of any “yes” campaign, will collapse.
To make matters worse, there has been a serious decline in support for the euro among trade unions, which will be one of the crucial elements in any “yes” campaign. Anti-European leftists have won key positions in several major unions in the past couple of years, and John Monks, the most articulate of the pro-euro trade union leaders, is leaving the TUC. Labour movement support for Britain joining the single currency will be in rather shorter supply than five years ago.
Yet joining the euro remains the best bet for a social democratic future for Britain. It is true, as Gordon Brown argues, that the EU’s system of economic management needs to be reformed, particularly when it comes down to the idiotic growth and stability pact, which effectively rules out counter-cyclical state spending. But here we are pushing at an open door: the rest of Europe, social democratic, Christian democratic and neo-liberal alike, realises that the regime of enforced austerity imposed by the Bundesbank and subsequently endorsed by the governments of Europe as the price of monetary union was a big mistake. Faced with low growth and rising unemployment, the governments of Europe recognise that John Maynard Keynes had some bright ideas after all.
If Blair does not go for a euro referendum this parliament, he will have missed the best opportunity any British government has ever had to define Britain’s place as a European social capitalist country. The next few weeks will be absolutely critical.
SADDAM'S ADMIRERS ON THE BRITISH LEFT - 1
The story of George Galloway and his relationship with Saddam Hussein looks likely to be with us for some time. If Galloway is serious about suing the Telegraph (click here) and the Christian Science Monitor (click here) over their stories that he was the beneficiary of significant Iraqi funds, the case will not be heard for some months.
Whether or not "Gorgeous George" took Saddam's shilling, it's worth bearing in mind that the Iraqi regime had a policy of buying support in the UK
Back in the 1980s, when Galloway was denouncing Saddam as a tool of US imperialism, Saddam’s chosen vehicle was the Workers Revolutionary Party. The Trotskyist WRP, led by the psychopathic Gerry Healy and supported by Vanessa Redgrave and a bunch of third-rate actors, was desperate for cash to subsidise its daily newspaper, News Line, and various other projects - including Labour Herald, a weekly set up in order to eclipse Tribune as the voice of the Labour left (it failed).
The key figures in the Herald were Ted Knight, an old associate of Healy who was at that point leader of Lambeth council in London, and Ken Livingstone, then leader of the Greater London Council and now mayor of London, who was an old associate of Knight. (Livingstone has long had a strange, some would say exploitative relationship with Trotskyists, although his chosen partner has long since ceased to be the WRP: it’s now Socialist Action, the pro-Cuba bit of the old International Marxist Group, on which see below and this rather ancient piece from the Guardian.)
Libya was a bigger source of WRP funds than Iraq - but the WRP did some vile stuff for Saddam, including informing on Iraqi dissidents in London.
At some point in the late 1980s, after the WRP imploded, the regime in Baghdad appears to have realised that bankrolling a crazy revolutionary sect made no sense. Certainly after 1991 it targeted respectable Labourite leftists as its best hope. I had several offers of freebie trips to Iraq (none mediated by Galloway) in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was a journalist on Tribune. I did not take up the offers: others did.
For Galloway's side of the story, see the Sunday Herald's interview here.
More to come on this
Whether or not "Gorgeous George" took Saddam's shilling, it's worth bearing in mind that the Iraqi regime had a policy of buying support in the UK
Back in the 1980s, when Galloway was denouncing Saddam as a tool of US imperialism, Saddam’s chosen vehicle was the Workers Revolutionary Party. The Trotskyist WRP, led by the psychopathic Gerry Healy and supported by Vanessa Redgrave and a bunch of third-rate actors, was desperate for cash to subsidise its daily newspaper, News Line, and various other projects - including Labour Herald, a weekly set up in order to eclipse Tribune as the voice of the Labour left (it failed).
The key figures in the Herald were Ted Knight, an old associate of Healy who was at that point leader of Lambeth council in London, and Ken Livingstone, then leader of the Greater London Council and now mayor of London, who was an old associate of Knight. (Livingstone has long had a strange, some would say exploitative relationship with Trotskyists, although his chosen partner has long since ceased to be the WRP: it’s now Socialist Action, the pro-Cuba bit of the old International Marxist Group, on which see below and this rather ancient piece from the Guardian.)
Libya was a bigger source of WRP funds than Iraq - but the WRP did some vile stuff for Saddam, including informing on Iraqi dissidents in London.
At some point in the late 1980s, after the WRP imploded, the regime in Baghdad appears to have realised that bankrolling a crazy revolutionary sect made no sense. Certainly after 1991 it targeted respectable Labourite leftists as its best hope. I had several offers of freebie trips to Iraq (none mediated by Galloway) in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was a journalist on Tribune. I did not take up the offers: others did.
For Galloway's side of the story, see the Sunday Herald's interview here.
More to come on this
25 April 2003
CUBA SOLIDARITY - 3
The comrades from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy would like you to sign the following, which seems a good idea. To sign online, click here.
ANTI-WAR, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES OPPOSE REPRESSION IN CUBA
We, the undersigned, strongly protest the current wave of repression in Cuba. We condemn the arrests of scores of opponents of the Cuban government for their nonviolent political activities, and the shockingly long prison sentences some as high as 28 years -- imposed after unfair trials. According to Amnesty International, the arrestees include journalists, owners of private libraries and members of illegal opposition parties. We condemn as well the trial and execution of three alleged hijackers in a week's time, both for the lack of due process and because we oppose capital punishment on principle.
As anti-war, social justice and human rights advocates, we condemned the brutal Saddam Hussein regime, and we oppose the United States occupation of Iraq. We support civil liberties and democratic rights everywhere, regardless of the country’s economic, political or social system. We believe it is imperative to be consistent in opposing repression wherever it takes place, whether in Iraq or Saudi Arabia, Israel or Cuba, Turkey or the United States.
Democratic change in Cuba needs to be achieved by the Cuban people themselves. The Cuban government’s violations of democratic rights do not justify sanctions or any other form of intervention by the United States in Cuba. The government of the United States -- which employs the rhetoric of human rights when doing so promotes its imperial goals, but maintains a discreet silence or makes only token protests when U.S. allies are involved, and which fully supports the barbaric practice of capital punishment, routinely inflicted in the U.S. -- is hardly in a position to preach democracy and human rights.
And we recall too the long, criminal record of U.S. interventions in Latin America. This record has included six decades of exploitation and imperial control of Cuba, followed by an attempted invasion and a campaign of international terrorism and economic warfare, that is by now well-documented. Only a government that repudiated this record, renounced any intention of restoring its economic or political domination over Cuba, either directly or through rightwing Cuban-American proxies, and promised to respect the democratic will of the Cuban people themselves would have the moral legitimacy to call for democratic change in Cuba.
As the Bush administration, further emboldened by its military victory in Iraq, threatens to wage “preemptive” wars around the globe we reaffirm our support for the right of self-determination in Cuba and our strong opposition to the U.S. policy of economic sanctions that has brought such suffering to the Cuban people.
At the same time, we support democracy in Cuba. The imprisonment of people for attempting to exercise their rights of free expression is outrageous and unacceptable. We call on the Castro government to release all political prisoners and let the Cuban people speak, write and organize freely.
15 April 2003
NEO-CONS AND THE LEFT – 1
State Department socialist writes:
There’s a lot of garbage doing the rounds on this. Michael Lind, in a peculiarly daft piece in the New Statesman (click here), got it going in the UK, claiming that the neo-cons of today are, er, their dads.
"They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history."
This is very poor intellectual history. It's true that some of the key neo-con intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s - notably Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol - were Trots in the 1930s or 1940s: see any history of the New York Intellectuals for that. (For what it's worth, my recommended reading list is Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals, Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals and Hugh Wilford's The New York Intellectuals.) It's true that some of the neo-cons of that period - notably Kristol - are still alive. It's even true that Wiliam Kristol is the son of Irving - a "product" maybe.
But the idea that most of the neo-cons of the 1970s and 1980s were former Trotskyists is bunkum, and the idea that the current Dubya adviser mob was schooled in Trotskyism in the 1950s is bollocks. A couple of them might have been youthful adherents of Max Shatchtman at some point late in his career - and very early in theirs. So what. Rather more of the current neo-con intellectual crew used to be Stalinists of the old school, third worldist New Leftists, cold war liberals or never associated with any current that could be considered remotely on the left.
More to come on this
There’s a lot of garbage doing the rounds on this. Michael Lind, in a peculiarly daft piece in the New Statesman (click here), got it going in the UK, claiming that the neo-cons of today are, er, their dads.
"They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history."
This is very poor intellectual history. It's true that some of the key neo-con intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s - notably Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol - were Trots in the 1930s or 1940s: see any history of the New York Intellectuals for that. (For what it's worth, my recommended reading list is Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals, Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals and Hugh Wilford's The New York Intellectuals.) It's true that some of the neo-cons of that period - notably Kristol - are still alive. It's even true that Wiliam Kristol is the son of Irving - a "product" maybe.
But the idea that most of the neo-cons of the 1970s and 1980s were former Trotskyists is bunkum, and the idea that the current Dubya adviser mob was schooled in Trotskyism in the 1950s is bollocks. A couple of them might have been youthful adherents of Max Shatchtman at some point late in his career - and very early in theirs. So what. Rather more of the current neo-con intellectual crew used to be Stalinists of the old school, third worldist New Leftists, cold war liberals or never associated with any current that could be considered remotely on the left.
More to come on this
9 April 2003
UBA SOLIDARITY - 2
This comes from AP: again more to come on this:
Anita Snow, Associated Press writer
HAVANA - Human rights groups and the U.S. government condemned Cuba for sentencing critics of the regime to long prison terms in a crackdown that showed communist leaders were more worried about internal control than international contempt.
Fidel Castro's government on Monday sentenced activists, journalists and an economist to up to 27 years in prison for allegedly collaborating with U.S. diplomats to undermine the socialist state.
"We are witnessing the harshest political trials of the past decade," said veteran human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez, one of the few leading opponents of the regime not arrested last month.
U.S. officials also criticized the sentences.
"The Castro government is persecuting journalists for acting like journalists," State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said. "They're persecuting economists for acting like economists, and peaceful activists for seeking a solution to Cuba's growing political and economic crisis."
Sanchez's non-governmental Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation said prosecutors originally sought life sentences for a dozen of the dissidents, among 80 facing closed trials that began Thursday.
It was unclear how many dissidents have been sentenced so far, but Sanchez said he and other activists have been unable to confirm any life sentences. The shortest was 15 years.
The longest sentence confirmed as of late Monday was 27 years for independent journalist Omar Rodriguez Saludes. With his camera hanging from a strap around his neck, Rodriguez Saludes arrived on his bicycle to cover former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's meeting with dissidents during his visit to Cuba last May.
Opposition political party leader Hector Palacios, among those originally recommended for a life sentence, received 25 years, said his wife, Gisela Delgado.
Palacios is a leading organizer of the Varela Project, which gathered more than 11,000 signatures supporting a referendum on new laws to guarantee civil liberties such as freedom of speech and private business ownership. The island's parliament shelved the request.
Palacios was among dissidents who met with Carter, who used a live speech to the Cuban people to bluntly describe the country as undemocratic and to publicize the Varela project.
"This is an injustice," Delgado said after learning her husband's sentence Monday morning. "We are as Cuban as members of the Communist Party."
The communist government accuses the dissidents of being on Washington's payroll and collaborating with U.S. diplomats to harm Cuba and its economy. Jose Miguel Vivanco, of Human Rights Watch, urged the United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva to condemn Cuba the sentences.
In Stockholm, Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh warned that the crackdown could Cuba's prospects for increased cooperation with members of the European Union.
"I view the developments in Cuba with great concern," Lindh said. "The mass arrests of dissidents that have taken place lately are one more example of the human rights violations being committed in Cuba."
The crackdown, which ended several years of relative tolerance, began when Cuban officials criticized the head of the American mission in Havana, James Cason, for actively supporting the island's opposition.
"This is an attempt for them to squash down and put the policemen back in the person's head that many of the Cubans were getting out of their head," Cason said Monday in a speech at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
Cason said journalists were being punished for having such books as "Who Moved My Cheese?" by Spencer Johnson, and others written by Groucho Marx and Stephen King.
Cason denied accusations that the U.S. mission had local dissidents on its payroll, saying the mission operates no differently than embassies in other countries.
"Change will come to Cuba. In fact, it is already under way," Cason said. "Cubans will decide how the Cuba of tomorrow takes shape, and more importantly, the role that each and every Cuban will have in it."
The last trials reportedly wrapped up Monday, with all sentences expected by week's end.
Among those tried Monday was Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a physician jailed since he was arrested during a December protest. Prosecutors reportedly sought a 25-year sentence.
Biscet in October completed three years in prison for displaying national flags upside down in an act of civil disobedience.
Also sentenced Monday was independent journalist Raul Rivero, who received the full 20 years prosecutors sought, said his wife, Blanca Reyes. "This is a crime for a man who has only written the truth," Reyes said.
Dissident economist Marta Beatriz Roque and independent journalist Oscar Espinosa Chepe each received 20-year sentences, their relatives said.
8 April 2003
CUBA SOLIDARITY - 1
While the world is looking elsewhere, Comrade Fidel's idyllic socialist utopia has gaoled the core of its critical democratic intelligentsia. Here's Reuters' report today: there's more to come on this.
Cuba sentences dissidents to 15 to 25 years
By Anthony Boadle
HAVANA, April 7 (Reuters) - Communist Cuba sentenced seven dissidents charged with opposing President Fidel Castro to 15 to 25 years in prison in the toughest political crackdown in decades.
In a clear message to the Bush administration that Cuba will not tolerate its efforts to build up a dissident movement on the island, a court convicted seven people of "working with a foreign power to undermined the government" and gave them prison sentences that ranged from 15 to 25 years.
Seventy-one other people are also charged but their trials are not yet complete.
Despite the tough sentences, the Havana Province Tribunal rejected prosecutors' requests for life sentences for leading dissident Hector Palacios and Ricardo Gonzalez, editor of Cuba's only dissident magazine, their wives said. Palacios was sentenced to 25 years and Gonzalez to 20 years.
Cuba's best known opposition writer, poet and journalist, 57-year-old Raul Rivero, was sentenced to 20 years in jail.
"This is so arbitrary for a man whose only crime is to write what he thinks," his wife Blanca Reyes told reporters after the sentence was given behind closed doors. "What they found on him was a tape recorder, not a grenade."
In other sentences on Monday, economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe got 20 years,Hector Maseda 20 years, Osvaldo Alfonso 18 years and Marcelo Lopez 15 years.
The crackdown began on March 18 with arrests and house searches. That was followed last week by one-day trials in court rooms filled with Communist Party members and security agents while only three close relatives of the prisoners could attend, the wives said.
Government informants who had infiltrated dissident groups testified against the prisoners.
"The trial was unfair. He met his lawyer five minutes before it started and had no time to study the charges," said Claudia Marquez, wife of Osvaldo Alfonso. She said the court reduced Alfonso's sentence from a life term sought by prosecutors because he accepted the charges and said in court that he had been manipulated by U.S. diplomats.
The wives have three days to appeal, but said they were not hopeful the sentences could be shortened.
"These terms were dictated by President Castro. In Cuba there is only one voice," said Reyes.
WORLD CRITICISM OF TRIALS
Western diplomats and foreign journalists were barred from the trials, which were criticized in Europe. The U.S. State Department said the dissidents were being tried in "kangaroo courts."
International human rights organizations accused Castro of trying to knock out his political opponents while world attention was focused on Baghdad.
Half of the 78 dissidents on trial had organized a signature drive to petition for reforms to Cuba's one-party socialist state. The effort was known as the Varela Project, which united Cuba's small, divided dissident movement into the first major internal challenge to Castro's rule in four decades.
The Bush administration stepped up active support for the dissidents, who would meet in the residence of the top U.S. diplomat in Havana, James Cason.
Castro, in power since a 1959 revolution, denounced Cason last month for turning the American mission into an "incubator of counterrevolution" and threatened to close the U.S. Interests Section. Havana and Washington do not have formal diplomatic relations.
U.S. diplomats were surprised to learn that Manuel David Orrio, who had led a meeting of opposition journalists at Cason's house last month, testified against Rivero and said in court testimony that he was a state security agent.
Prosecutors have asked for life sentences for dissident economist Martha Beatriz Roque; opposition labor activist Pedro Pablo Alvarez; and civil disobedience advocate Oscar Elias Biscet. Those sentences are expected on Tuesday.
The trials went virtually unnoticed in Cuba. There was no mention in Cuba's state-run media and few Cubans were aware of the dissident round-up.
"The social and economic decay in Cuba is so great and the government knows there is widespread discontent," said Miriam Leiva, a former diplomat who lost her job and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1992 for not divorcing her dissident husband Espinosa Chepe.
"That is why the sentences are so harsh, to repress people calling for change and intimidate others," she said.
5 April 2003
UNITED FOR PEACE - 4
The British Socialist Workers' Party has come out this week as revolutionary defeatist: yes, they really want Saddam Hussein to win the war. Click here for the party line in a Socialist Worker leader and here for a signed piece by Socialist Worker editor Chris Harman. Meanwhile, the chair of the Stop the War Coalition, Andrew Murray, has been forced to defend his politics in the Daily Telegraph (click here) by a letter from Julian Lewis (click here: funny how the same old names keep cropping up); and Nick Cohen has taken up the role of the Lenininists in the anti-war movement in a piece in the New Statesman (click here: unfortunately you have to pay to read the whole thing).
1 April 2003
MIKE KIDRON 1931-2003
Michael Kidron, the most prominent of the many leading lights of the British International Socialists who left them in the few years before they became the Socialist Workers' Party, has died at the age of 72. Click here for Richard Kuper's obituary in the Guardian. Kidron was the brains behind the IS, the editor of International Socialism for many years and the author of several of the key texts that marked the group's break from orthodox Trotskyism, in particular from the idea that capitalism had entered a phase of terminal crisis.
From the early 1960s, Kidron emphasised how spending by the advanced western capitalist economies on arms had created a level of bouyant demand that postponed crisis perhaps indefinitely - the "permanent arms economy", as he called it - and as such was one of the first British Marxists to recognise just how far Keynesian economics had transformed the prospects of capitalism. IS and Kidron never went a far as Cornelius Castoriadis and Socialisme ou Barbarie in France in challenging the tenets of left orthodoxy (for which see here), but they played an honourable part in creating a vibrant British libertarian Marxism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kidron played a key role in Pluto Press, the radical publisher that was for a dozen or more years the jewel in the British intellectual left's crown. He is best known for putting together The State of the World Atlas, a pioneering reference work that (together with various spin-offs) has been a massively important reference work for several generations of students, researchers and journalists.
A few of Kidron’s key articles from his IS and immediately post-IS days are online. Click here for "Imperialism - highest stage but one" (1962), here for "A permanent arms economy" (1967) and here for "Two insights don't make a theory" (1977).
From the early 1960s, Kidron emphasised how spending by the advanced western capitalist economies on arms had created a level of bouyant demand that postponed crisis perhaps indefinitely - the "permanent arms economy", as he called it - and as such was one of the first British Marxists to recognise just how far Keynesian economics had transformed the prospects of capitalism. IS and Kidron never went a far as Cornelius Castoriadis and Socialisme ou Barbarie in France in challenging the tenets of left orthodoxy (for which see here), but they played an honourable part in creating a vibrant British libertarian Marxism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kidron played a key role in Pluto Press, the radical publisher that was for a dozen or more years the jewel in the British intellectual left's crown. He is best known for putting together The State of the World Atlas, a pioneering reference work that (together with various spin-offs) has been a massively important reference work for several generations of students, researchers and journalists.
A few of Kidron’s key articles from his IS and immediately post-IS days are online. Click here for "Imperialism - highest stage but one" (1962), here for "A permanent arms economy" (1967) and here for "Two insights don't make a theory" (1977).
25 March 2003
EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE WAR - 1
The following interview with German foreign minister Joschka Fischer on Sunday March 23 by Der Spiegel was not reported in the UK press. So here are the key quotes, courtesy of Reuters:
A similar position has been taken by the Swedish Social Democrats. Click here for prime minister Goran Persson's reaction to the outbreak of war and here for the official Swedish government statement.
BERLIN, March 23 (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer criticised the United States on Sunday for starting a war framed by its national interests and said the same standards should apply for all nations regardless of their size or might.
"A world order will not work if the national interests of the most powerful nation define the criteria for the use of the military potency of this country," Fischer said in an interview with Der Spiegel news magazine.
"At the end of the day the same rules have to apply for the big, medium-sized and small countries," said Fischer, whose government has long opposed the U.S.-led military buildup in the Gulf and war against Iraq.
"The United States was always the strongest when it linked its might to the power of forming coalitions and international rules that were accepted by everyone."
Fischer also said he could not accept a vision, as he said was sketched out to him in late September 2001 by U.S. deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in which the United States would use force to eliminate "terrorist governments" in a number of countries.
"I cannot and will not accept the idea we are on the verge of a series of disarmament wars," he said. "It's not acceptable that we are faced with the alternative: either to allow a terrible danger to exist or be forced into a disarmament war."
He said the United Nations should be the place to resolve conflicts.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was the first Western leader to speak out against war in Iraq, saying last year Germany would not participate in any "military adventure" in Iraq, even though Berlin is one of the biggest contributors to the US-led "Enduring Freedom" anti-terror campaign with close to 9,000 troops in Afghanistan, Kuwait and the Horn of Africa.
"There is nothing cowardly if you pursue the aim of resolving conflicts peacefully," Fischer said. Addressing US criticism of Germany, he said being able to accept that an ally had a different view was "a sign of maturity in a democracy".
A similar position has been taken by the Swedish Social Democrats. Click here for prime minister Goran Persson's reaction to the outbreak of war and here for the official Swedish government statement.
24 March 2003
VICTOR ALBA 1916-2003
22 March 2003
UNITED FOR PEACE - 3
Henry Worthington's piece on the 1990-91 movement against the Gulf war in Britain (see below) does, as he says, make some still salient points. The current anti-war coalition - at least at the level of the formal national organisation - is if anything even more reliant on various Leninist parties, micro-parties and sects, and it's even more tolerant of pro-Saddam and revolutionary defeatist opinion. The Stop the War Coalition has a member of the executive committee of the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, Andrew Murray, as its chair, and the quasi-Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party (home page here) is today playing pretty much the role that Socialist Action did in 1990-91, though it is of course a much bigger outfit.
But there are big differences as well. In 1990-91, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, although much reduced in membership from the height of the campaign against deployment of cruise missiles during the 1980s, was the most important ingredient in the brew. It was still a real mass organisation, with some 65,000 members: it even had a monthly magazine available in WH Smith throughout the country, Sanity, edited by the late Ben Webb.
In line with this, CND was also engaged with the political mainstream, although again it was a pale shadow of itself in the mid-1980s, when its reach embraced most of the Labour Party and the Liberal Party. CND's national organisation in 1990-91 was run by a coalition of Labour leftists (mostly soft rather than hard left), Liberal Democrats, Greens, feminists, non-aligned activists and anarcho-pacifists.
It's worth noting that the Labour hard left - with the exception of Labour CND, run by the Trots from Socialist Action, and the ageing diehard Stalinists and pacifists in Labour Action for Peace - never really bothered itself with CND after the mid-1980s and had very little influence on CND nationally. And the Communist Party presence in the organisation, significant until only a couple of years before, had dwindled with the collapse of the CP in internal feuding in the late 1980s.
Nevertheless, one old CP stalwart, Gary Lefley, an enthusiast (like today's Stop the War Coalition chair Andrew Murray) for the CP's tiny hardline pro-Soviet Straight Left faction, had somehow been appointed CND's general secretary. (Lefley's politics were gleefully exposed at the time by Julian Lewis, now Tory MP for New Forest East but then a Conservative central office appartchik after several years of running the anti-CND Coalition for Peace Through Security, in an article for Freedom Today - for which click here.)
Apart from Lefley - who was treated as an embarassment by most of his colleagues - Leninists were notable by their absence at CND's core until the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf got off the ground. That they got a foothold was down at least in part to the flaky political judgment of Marjorie Thompson, the chair of CND.
Whatever, CND's failure to deal with the Trot manipulation Worthington describes was notable because it was surprising, though in retrospect it did show how far it had lost the plot. Today, CND (home page here) is nothing like the force it was in 1990-91. It's still there - but its membership has withered and it is utterly marginalised when it comes to mainstream politics. It's not entirely CND's fault: the collapse of the democratic left in the Labour Party and more widely in the recent past has rather a lot to do with it. But in the national organisation of the current anti-war movement, CND carries less weight than the SWP.
Another big difference from 1990-91 is the role of political Islam in the current movement. The big London demos against the current war - unlike those in 1990-91 - have been notable for the turnout by (mainly young) Islamists, who have been embraced by the SWP and the rest of the Leninist left. An unsavoury alliance if ever there was one, in my view.
But there are big differences as well. In 1990-91, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, although much reduced in membership from the height of the campaign against deployment of cruise missiles during the 1980s, was the most important ingredient in the brew. It was still a real mass organisation, with some 65,000 members: it even had a monthly magazine available in WH Smith throughout the country, Sanity, edited by the late Ben Webb.
In line with this, CND was also engaged with the political mainstream, although again it was a pale shadow of itself in the mid-1980s, when its reach embraced most of the Labour Party and the Liberal Party. CND's national organisation in 1990-91 was run by a coalition of Labour leftists (mostly soft rather than hard left), Liberal Democrats, Greens, feminists, non-aligned activists and anarcho-pacifists.
It's worth noting that the Labour hard left - with the exception of Labour CND, run by the Trots from Socialist Action, and the ageing diehard Stalinists and pacifists in Labour Action for Peace - never really bothered itself with CND after the mid-1980s and had very little influence on CND nationally. And the Communist Party presence in the organisation, significant until only a couple of years before, had dwindled with the collapse of the CP in internal feuding in the late 1980s.
Nevertheless, one old CP stalwart, Gary Lefley, an enthusiast (like today's Stop the War Coalition chair Andrew Murray) for the CP's tiny hardline pro-Soviet Straight Left faction, had somehow been appointed CND's general secretary. (Lefley's politics were gleefully exposed at the time by Julian Lewis, now Tory MP for New Forest East but then a Conservative central office appartchik after several years of running the anti-CND Coalition for Peace Through Security, in an article for Freedom Today - for which click here.)
Apart from Lefley - who was treated as an embarassment by most of his colleagues - Leninists were notable by their absence at CND's core until the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf got off the ground. That they got a foothold was down at least in part to the flaky political judgment of Marjorie Thompson, the chair of CND.
Whatever, CND's failure to deal with the Trot manipulation Worthington describes was notable because it was surprising, though in retrospect it did show how far it had lost the plot. Today, CND (home page here) is nothing like the force it was in 1990-91. It's still there - but its membership has withered and it is utterly marginalised when it comes to mainstream politics. It's not entirely CND's fault: the collapse of the democratic left in the Labour Party and more widely in the recent past has rather a lot to do with it. But in the national organisation of the current anti-war movement, CND carries less weight than the SWP.
Another big difference from 1990-91 is the role of political Islam in the current movement. The big London demos against the current war - unlike those in 1990-91 - have been notable for the turnout by (mainly young) Islamists, who have been embraced by the SWP and the rest of the Leninist left. An unsavoury alliance if ever there was one, in my view.
18 March 2003
UNITED FOR PEACE - 2
Henry Worthington writes:
The politics of the current movement against war is reminiscent of that during the 1990-91 war in the Gulf. Here's a piece I did for the long-defunct libertarian socialist magazine Solidarity looking back on the anti-war campaign in the UK for its autumn 1991 issue, which I think makes some still salient points.
The politics of the current movement against war is reminiscent of that during the 1990-91 war in the Gulf. Here's a piece I did for the long-defunct libertarian socialist magazine Solidarity looking back on the anti-war campaign in the UK for its autumn 1991 issue, which I think makes some still salient points.
Henry Worthington: Ruthless cuckoos in the dovecot
From Solidarity, autumn 1991
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2 last year, the British left was as surprised as everyone else. Kuwait was a faraway country of which the left knew little, the invasion a spectacular interruption to the holiday season. To be sure, the crisis in the Gulf provoked a vague unease, but after the first few days, when it seemed that Saddam might sweep south into Saudi Arabia, the prospects of all-out war seemed to recede. Once the American forces were in place in Saudi Arabia and the United Nations had imposed sanctions on Iraq, the most likely scenario seemed a lengthy process of economic attrition which Saddam could not win. It did not seem too much of a priority to set up an anti-war organisation.
Not everyone was quite so complacent. For Socialist Action, a small Trotskyist group, the time was ripe for seizing. By acting fast it could set the agenda for an antiwar movement. In mid-August, taking advantage of the inactivity of the rest of the left, it took the lead in setting up an anti-war coalition, the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf, doing its best to ensure that it was effectively under its control but did not appear so.
Socialist Action is a remnant of one of the pro-Cuba factions in the erstwhile International Marxist Group and is no more than fifty strong. It is nevertheless well entrenched in the Labour hard left with significant influence in the part of it that is sceptical about the idea of eventually setting up a "pure" socialist party to Labour's left. Indeed, among Trot groups it is notable for the depth of its commitment to the Labour Party and its horror of appearing "ultra-left": it works more with non-Trots than with other Trots, whom it despises for raising "maximalist" demands.
The group is influential in the Labour Left Liaison umbrella group, which includes the Labour Women's Action Committee, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and Labour CND, and it has a major input into Campaign Group News, the organ of the Campaign Group of hard-Left Labour MPs. Unsurprisingly, the platform on which the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf was set up was a minimalist one - "Stop war!" - and hard-left MPs and the groups in Labour Left Liaison were among the first affiliates.
National CND, for the most part innocent of Socialist Action's existence, let alone its methods, was bounced into joining the committee by Labour CND, whose secretary, Carol Turner, a Socialist Action veteran, was also secretary of the committee; the Green Party, whose international committee at the time was under the influence of another Trot faction, the tiny Pabloite group Socialists for Self-Management, was brought in at the same time. The Eurocommunist Communist Party of Great Britain and the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, both desperate for credibility, saw a bandwagon and jumped on board, and by early September the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf looked like an impressive coalition of anti-war groups.
The reality was rather different. Socialist Action made sure that it controlled the key positions on the committee (Turner remained secretary of the committee throughout its existence), and it blocked attempts by CND and the Greens to get the committee to endorse sanctions against Iraq, on the grounds that such a move would be divisive — even though the only groups that would have been excluded by such a move were "revolutionary defeatists" committed to backing Saddam if fighting broke out. (The idea behind this position, first formulated by Lenin during the first world war, is that in an imperialist war revolutionaries should work for the defeat of their own side, with the intention of turning it into revolutionary civil war).
For a few weeks, such people didn't bother with the committee, seeing it as far too reformist: the Socialist Workers Party and other Trot groups put their efforts into setting up a rival to the committee, the Campaign Against War in the Gulf, on a troops out position. But the CAW soon floundered, and the SWP and the rest of the revolutionary defeatists drifted into the committee. The result was predictable. The committee's meetings turned into interminable political wrangling.
Not surprisingly, as the Gulf crisis dragged on through the autumn, the committee proved incapable of exercising any purchase on public opinion or on the political mainstream. Just about the only thing it seemed to know how to do was call a demonstration in London - and even then it didn't have the resources to provide stewards or the wit to present interesting speakers.
The committee's efforts at the Labour Party conference in early October were particularly disastrous. Faced with a conference opposed to war but not prepared to undermine the leadership (which was anyway rather less than bloodthirsty at this point), the committee made the extraordinary decision to put up a conference-floor fight on an anti-war resolution it knew would be badly defeated. In result, opposition to the war became identified in the Labour Party with the hard left, a kiss of death for any cause these days. With a few days hard work, the committee managed to throw away any possibility of ever having influence over the mainstream of the Labour Party.
Its attempts to woo Liberal Democrats and Tories were virtually non-existent. To the media the committee, despite constant damage-limitation by CND, came across as a bunch of unfriendly, paranoid, hectoring and above all incompetent extremists. Whereas elsewhere in Europe large swathes of centre and even right opinion opposed war before it started, in Britain the anti-war movement got stuck at an early stage in the left ghetto. By mid-November, it was quite apparent to the British government that it would face only token domestic opposition if it backed George Bush's plans to evict Saddam from Kuwait by force.
By the end of the year, it was clear even to its own supporters that the anti-war movement had failed, and that the only thing that could stop war was a climbdown by Saddam. The committee stepped up its activity when the air war began in January (and in February at last threw out the revolutionary defeatists, who had by now become a serious embarrassment), but the number of demonstrators on marches dwindled rapidly as a sense of total impotence set in. By the time the land war started, the anti-war movement was on the slide. Perhaps, as the committee leaders tastelessly put it, support would have grown again if the body-bags had started coming home; luckily we shall never know.
The point of all this is not that the war should not have been opposed. Despite the small number of allied casualties, the war was a human and environmental disaster. But the peace movement, such as it is, should not now be sitting back and saying that it was right all along: there are lessons it has to learn from the Gulf war.
In particular, it should be absolutely clear to everyone who had anything to do with the national movement against war in the Gulf that not wanting a particular crisis to turn into war is no basis on which to organise a credible opposition: it is essential that the movement from the start excludes those who, in the event of war, will support either side. In the run-up to the Gulf war Leninist advocates of revolutionary defeatism did immense harm to the cause of those opposed to slaughter on humanitarian grounds, and the peace movement should have had no truck with them.
It should also be extremely wary of allowing itself to be manipulated by small groups with their own hidden political priorities. Without CND, with its 65,000 members, the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf would have been a mere husk; outside the committee, CND could have used its resources and skills to promote its clear position of using sanctions to get Saddam out of Kuwait rather than wasting its time and energy on a coalition that could not even agree to condemn Saddam's invasion. If there is a next time, it would be unfortunate to make the same mistakes.
ROBIN COOK FOR PRIME MINISTER?
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, March 21 2003
Robin Cook's resignation from the government was hardly unexpected - but it was dramatic all the same. He is the only Labour figure of top rank to have quit on grounds of principle since Tony Blair became prime minister nearly six years ago: indeed, you have to go back to 1951, when Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman left Clement Attlee's government, for a Labour resignation with anything like the impact.
Although Cook's resignation statement to the House of Commons on Monday evening was eclipsed as news by George Bush's blunt 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, it was quite the most sensational parliamentary event in this government's lifetime. In calm, measured tones, Cook eloquently demolished the case for an immediate assault on Iraq. The contrast with Jack Straw's bumbling performance at the despatch box minutes earlier could not have been more stark.
As things now stand, Cook is finished as a government politician - that much is clear. But it would be foolish to write him off. At very least, as a backbench MP he could provide the left in the Parliamentary Labour Party with the intellectual sophistication and political clout that has been so obviously missing in recent years. Then there's the possibility of a comeback in Scottish politics. He could even be the best hope the beleagured Scottish Labour Party has of staving off major losses in the forthcoming elections to the Scottish Parliament.
But what's really intriguing is Cook's position if the war against Iraq were to go so horribly wrong that Blair lost the confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
This scenario has been chewed over in recent months by just about every Labour Party member I know at every level - and most of them reckon that if Blair were forced out in such circumstances, Gordon Brown would be a shoo-in as his replacement.
Until this week, I thought the same, not least because all the other names being touted as possible successors to Blair would not be credible challengers to the Chancellor. Straw? Too compromised by his role in the Iraq policy. David Blunkett? Unpopular with those Labour Party and trade union members least likely to be prejudiced about his being blind. Charles Clarke, Peter Hain and Alan Milburn haven't held high office for long enough. And John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Cook are all - how to put it politely - big figures whose career trajectories are not on an upward curve.
But Cook's resignation has made me think again - at least about him.
Like many others on what used to be called the soft left, I was disappointed when Cook decided not to challenge for the Labour leadership after John Smith died in 1994, and I still think he would have made an infinitely better Prime Minister than Blair. Unlike Blair, he is an egalitarian, an environmentalist and a committed constitutional reformer. From 1997 to 2001, he was a very good Foreign Secretary - particularly in repairing British relations with the rest of the European Union and in pressing for intervention in Kosovo and Sierra Leone - and as Leader of the House of Commons he made a valiant attempt (scuppered by Blair) to introduce a democratic second chamber. Like everyone else I know, however, I thought his time at the top was coming to an end. Now I'm not so sure. If - and it's a big if - Blair is forced out by a military disaster, it's not just wishful thinking to suggest that Cook would be in a very strong position to replace him.
Which is not to say that I am hoping for a military disaster to force Blair out. As I write, 48 hours have not passed since Bush's speech. But Saddam has rejected Bush's demand that he and his sons go into exile. It almost certain that by the time you read this we will be at war.
This is not what should have happened: other means of dealing with Saddam should have been given more time. Blair's strategy of hanging on to Bush’s coat tails and hoping to restrain him has proved a humiliating failure, alienating domestic public opinion and wrecking Britain's relations with France and Germany, the two most important members of the European Union. War will inevitably result in the deaths of Iraqi civilians and conscript soldiers - and there is a danger that the death toll will be massive. In the worst case, the attack on Iraq could turn into a conflict involving the use of chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons that engulfs the whole Middle East. Bush and Blair have taken an extraordinary risk this week. They should not have done so.
Nevertheless, I see no credible option for democratic socialists once the military action begins other than hoping that it works - and that it works quickly, consigning Saddam and his vile regime to the proverbial dustbin of history with minimal casualties on either side. Sorry, folks, but I think I'll be giving the next anti-war demo a miss.
Robin Cook's resignation from the government was hardly unexpected - but it was dramatic all the same. He is the only Labour figure of top rank to have quit on grounds of principle since Tony Blair became prime minister nearly six years ago: indeed, you have to go back to 1951, when Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman left Clement Attlee's government, for a Labour resignation with anything like the impact.
Although Cook's resignation statement to the House of Commons on Monday evening was eclipsed as news by George Bush's blunt 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, it was quite the most sensational parliamentary event in this government's lifetime. In calm, measured tones, Cook eloquently demolished the case for an immediate assault on Iraq. The contrast with Jack Straw's bumbling performance at the despatch box minutes earlier could not have been more stark.
As things now stand, Cook is finished as a government politician - that much is clear. But it would be foolish to write him off. At very least, as a backbench MP he could provide the left in the Parliamentary Labour Party with the intellectual sophistication and political clout that has been so obviously missing in recent years. Then there's the possibility of a comeback in Scottish politics. He could even be the best hope the beleagured Scottish Labour Party has of staving off major losses in the forthcoming elections to the Scottish Parliament.
But what's really intriguing is Cook's position if the war against Iraq were to go so horribly wrong that Blair lost the confidence of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
This scenario has been chewed over in recent months by just about every Labour Party member I know at every level - and most of them reckon that if Blair were forced out in such circumstances, Gordon Brown would be a shoo-in as his replacement.
Until this week, I thought the same, not least because all the other names being touted as possible successors to Blair would not be credible challengers to the Chancellor. Straw? Too compromised by his role in the Iraq policy. David Blunkett? Unpopular with those Labour Party and trade union members least likely to be prejudiced about his being blind. Charles Clarke, Peter Hain and Alan Milburn haven't held high office for long enough. And John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Cook are all - how to put it politely - big figures whose career trajectories are not on an upward curve.
But Cook's resignation has made me think again - at least about him.
Like many others on what used to be called the soft left, I was disappointed when Cook decided not to challenge for the Labour leadership after John Smith died in 1994, and I still think he would have made an infinitely better Prime Minister than Blair. Unlike Blair, he is an egalitarian, an environmentalist and a committed constitutional reformer. From 1997 to 2001, he was a very good Foreign Secretary - particularly in repairing British relations with the rest of the European Union and in pressing for intervention in Kosovo and Sierra Leone - and as Leader of the House of Commons he made a valiant attempt (scuppered by Blair) to introduce a democratic second chamber. Like everyone else I know, however, I thought his time at the top was coming to an end. Now I'm not so sure. If - and it's a big if - Blair is forced out by a military disaster, it's not just wishful thinking to suggest that Cook would be in a very strong position to replace him.
Which is not to say that I am hoping for a military disaster to force Blair out. As I write, 48 hours have not passed since Bush's speech. But Saddam has rejected Bush's demand that he and his sons go into exile. It almost certain that by the time you read this we will be at war.
This is not what should have happened: other means of dealing with Saddam should have been given more time. Blair's strategy of hanging on to Bush’s coat tails and hoping to restrain him has proved a humiliating failure, alienating domestic public opinion and wrecking Britain's relations with France and Germany, the two most important members of the European Union. War will inevitably result in the deaths of Iraqi civilians and conscript soldiers - and there is a danger that the death toll will be massive. In the worst case, the attack on Iraq could turn into a conflict involving the use of chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons that engulfs the whole Middle East. Bush and Blair have taken an extraordinary risk this week. They should not have done so.
Nevertheless, I see no credible option for democratic socialists once the military action begins other than hoping that it works - and that it works quickly, consigning Saddam and his vile regime to the proverbial dustbin of history with minimal casualties on either side. Sorry, folks, but I think I'll be giving the next anti-war demo a miss.
9 March 2003
WAS CHRISTOPHER HILL A SOVIET AGENT? - 2
Nick Cohen of the Observer has beaten me to it on this one in his column today (click here) in which he draws attention to George Orwell's New Statesman review of The English Revolution 1640, edited by Hill and containing Hill's essay of the same title, which I didn't have to hand when I wrote my original post. Cohen eloquently makes the crucial point: "Real moles hide everything. The last thing they would do is send out Communist tracts to be reviewed in the New Statesman by hostile critics who would point out their Communism as a matter of course." Still, people might like to read the Orwell review (one of his rare pieces for the Statesman) in full, so here it is:
George Orwell: Review of The English Revolution: 1640, edited by Christopher Hill
From the New Statesman and Nation, August 24 1940
The imprint of Messrs Lawrence and Wishart upon a book on the English Civil War tells one in advance what its interpretation of the war is likely to be, and the main interest of reading it is to discover how crudely or how subtly the "materialistic" method is applied.
Obviously a Marxist version of the Civil War must represent it as a struggle between a rising capitalism and an obstructive feudalism, which in fact it was. But men will not die for things called capitalism or feudalism, and will die for things called liberty or loyalty, and to ignore one set of motives is as misleading as to ignore the others. This, however, is what the authors of this book do their best to do. Early in the first essay the familiar note is struck:
The fact that men spoke and wrote in religious language should not prevent us realising that there is a social content behind what are apparently purely theological ideas. Each class created and sought to impose the religious outlook best suited to its own needs and interests. But the real clash is between these class interests.In the light of the first paragraph, it is not so easy to see what is meant by "religious struggle" in the last sentence. But in that cocksure paragraph one can see the main weakness of Marxism, its failure to interpret human motives. Religion, morality, patriotism and so forth are invariably written off as "superstructure," a sort of hypocritical cover-up for the pursuit of economic interests. If that were so, one might well ask why it is that the "super-structure" has to exist. If no man is ever motivated by anything except class interests, why does every man constantly pretend that he is motivated by something else? Apparently because human beings can only put forth their full powers when they believe that they are not acting for economic ends. But this in itself is enough to suggest that "super-structural" motives should be taken seriously. They may be causes as well as effects.
It is not, then, denied that the "Puritan Revolution" was a religious as well as a political struggle; but it was more than that.
As it is, a "Marxist analysis" of any historical event tends to be a hurried snap-judgment based on the principle of cui bono? something rather like the "realism" of the saloon-bar cynic who always assumes that the bishop is keeping a mistress and the trade-union leader is in the pay of the boss. Along these lines it is impossible to have an intuitive understanding of men's motives, and therefore impossible to predict their actions. It is easy now to debunk the English Civil War, but it must be admitted that during the past twenty years the predictions of the Marxists have usually been not only wrong but, so to speak, more sensationally wrong than those of much simpler people. The outstanding case was their failure to see in advance the danger of Fascism. Long after Hitler came to power official Marxism was declaring that Hitler was of no importance and could achieve nothing. On the other hand, people who had hardly heard of Marx but who knew the power of faith had seen Hitler coming years earlier.
The third essay in the book, by Mr. Edgell Rickword, is on Milton, who figures as "the revolutionary intellectual". This involves treating Milton as primarily a pamphleteer, and in an essay of 31 pages Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained only get between them a hurried mention of half a sentence. The most interesting essay of the three, by Miss Margaret James, is on the materialist interpretations of society which were already current in the mid-seventeenth century. The English Revolution, like some later ones, had its unsuccessful left-wing, men who were ahead of their time and were cast aside when they had helped the new ruling class into power. It is a pity that Miss James fails to make a comparison between the seventeenth-century situation and the one we are now in. A parallel undoubtedly exists, although from the official Marxist point of view the latter-day equivalents of the Diggers and Levellers happen to be unmentionable.
8 March 2003
UNITED FOR PEACE - 1
By all accounts, the US movement against war to topple Saddam Hussein has got big problems - and although the biggest is the hostility of public opinion, not far behind is the role that a particularly bizarre Leninist sect, the Workers’ World Party, has played in organising the anti-war demonstrations of the past few months.
The WWP is something that could only exist in the US. Its origins are in a faction of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party - the main Trot organisation in the US and very different from the Brit SWP - that broke with it to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 (for an explanation of sorts, click here). It subsequently dropped Trotskyism, embraced Maoism and became the most hyper-activist of a plethora of small organisations of a Third Worldist Stalinist bent that played a significant role in the US left until way into the 1980s. (The American SWP followed the WWP into Third Worldist Stalinism over Cuba, but that's a different story.) The WWP is now hysterically pro-North Korean (if you doubt this, visit its home page).
Its current prominence stems from its role in setting up and running a front organisation, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), which has organised the major anti-war demos in Washington and elsewhere. The neo-con right has had a field day (see, for example the former leftist David Horovitz's poisonous but endlessly entertaining website Frontpage) - and the WWP's role has been taken up by the mainstream press (click here for Michael Kelly in the Washington Post and here for David Corn in LA Weekly). But it has also given the serious left pause for thought (click here for the social democratic journal Dissent's symposium on Iraq). Needless to say, the role of the WWP has also been played down by people who ought to know better, including Alexander Cockburn, once of the New Statesman and once a WWP critic (click here for amusing documentation).
Remember, kids - even the best cause can be destroyed by the attentions of Leninists (and I'm not sure this is the best cause . . .).
The WWP is something that could only exist in the US. Its origins are in a faction of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party - the main Trot organisation in the US and very different from the Brit SWP - that broke with it to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 (for an explanation of sorts, click here). It subsequently dropped Trotskyism, embraced Maoism and became the most hyper-activist of a plethora of small organisations of a Third Worldist Stalinist bent that played a significant role in the US left until way into the 1980s. (The American SWP followed the WWP into Third Worldist Stalinism over Cuba, but that's a different story.) The WWP is now hysterically pro-North Korean (if you doubt this, visit its home page).
Its current prominence stems from its role in setting up and running a front organisation, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), which has organised the major anti-war demos in Washington and elsewhere. The neo-con right has had a field day (see, for example the former leftist David Horovitz's poisonous but endlessly entertaining website Frontpage) - and the WWP's role has been taken up by the mainstream press (click here for Michael Kelly in the Washington Post and here for David Corn in LA Weekly). But it has also given the serious left pause for thought (click here for the social democratic journal Dissent's symposium on Iraq). Needless to say, the role of the WWP has also been played down by people who ought to know better, including Alexander Cockburn, once of the New Statesman and once a WWP critic (click here for amusing documentation).
Remember, kids - even the best cause can be destroyed by the attentions of Leninists (and I'm not sure this is the best cause . . .).
7 March 2003
THE STALIN MYTH IS STILL ALIVE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, March 7 2003
Fifty years ago this week – at 9.50am Moscow time on March 5 1953, to be precise – Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin, breathed his last.
His death was a squalid affair, entirely befitting his regime. The Soviet dictator, probably by this point clinically paranoid, had suffered a brain haemorrhage on March 2 – but medical help was delayed by Lavrenti Beria, his scheming secret police chief, who hoped to succeed him. For more than two days, Stalin lay in bed motionless, surrounded by his family and the leading figures of the Soviet Politburo, many of them drunk and all of them terrified for their futures. No one admitted that his condition could be terminal. On one occasion Beria famously demanded of the as-good-as-dead Stalin in a loud voice: "Comrade Stalin, all the members of the Politburo are here! Say something to us!"
It would be comforting to relate that Stalin's death was greeted by a universal sense of relief, but it was not. The man who turned the already-extant Bolshevik police-state into a ruthless totalitarian dictatorship, killing millions in the forced collectivisation of agriculture and committing hundreds of thousands more to slave labour, was mourned in the Soviet Union as the heroic war leader who saved the world from Nazi Germany. (Never mind that the business was done by the poor bloody infantry.) Abroad, he was given a send-off that was at least respectful and at worst obsequious – particularly on the left.
No one was more gushing than Rajani Palme Dutt, the chief ideologist of the Communist Party of Great Britain, writing in Labour Monthly: "The genius and will of Stalin, the architect of the rising world of free humanity, lives on forever in the imperishable monument of his creation – the soaring triumph of socialist and communist construction; the invincible array of states and peoples who have thrown off the bonds of the exploiters and are marching forward in the light of the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin."
In similar vein, the CPGB’s leader, Harry Pollitt – whose apologists say was sceptical about Stalinism – paid tribute to Stalin as someone whose "miracles of communist construction are of a character that even Marx would never have dared to believe possible".
Tribune, to its credit, was more sceptical. In a piece headlined "Now let's bury the Stalin myth", Michael Foot wrote: "The Nazi-Soviet pact and the frightened sycophancy towards Hitler which Stalin displayed in the two subsequent years still stand out as probably the most grievous and colossal blunder of the century . . . He sent to their deaths almost all the leaders of the revolution. He distorted the socialist aim in a manner which would have horrified both Lenin and Marx. He then falsified the history of the revolution itself."
The deflation of Stalin's reputation was not long in coming. The Berlin workers' uprising of June 1953, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and Nikita Khruschev's "secret speech" the same year to the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which he (selectively) denounced Stalin's crimes, all saw to that. And within 15 years of his death there was a substantial scholarly literature available – at least in the affluent western democracies – that gave chapter and verse on collectivisation, the Great Terror and just about every other aspect of his years of despotic misrule.
But the Stalin myth was never entirely buried. The Soviet tyrant remains an official hero in communist China to this day – and his memory is still revered by Russian nationalists and many leftists in the Third World. Tribune readers might take with a pinch of salt recent reports that Saddam Hussein has a library of books on Stalin and sees him as his role model: but the similarities between the two go further than their moustaches.
And even in Britain it's remarkable how Stalinism persists – albeit in a small way. The Communist Party of Britain is a pale shadow of the CPGB even of the early 1950s, but it is still able – just – to sustain a daily newspaper, the Morning Star, that retains the respect of a large swathe of the left in spite of its unthinking Stalinism. As the Independent on Sunday reminded us last weekend, Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers and Socialist Labour Party remains an unabashed admirer of Stalin, as does Andrew Murray, the chair of the Stop the War Coalition (whom I remember in the 1980s working for the official Soviet news agency Novosti, buying full page ads in left newspapers to publish dull speeches by Konstantin Chernenko).
Which is not to claim that contemporary Stalinism poses a massive threat to civilisation as we know it: far from it. The Stalinists of 2003 are, at least in Britain, a sick joke. I just can't work out why so many on the left tolerate them. Can anyone enlighten me?
Respond to Tribune
Fifty years ago this week – at 9.50am Moscow time on March 5 1953, to be precise – Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin, breathed his last.
His death was a squalid affair, entirely befitting his regime. The Soviet dictator, probably by this point clinically paranoid, had suffered a brain haemorrhage on March 2 – but medical help was delayed by Lavrenti Beria, his scheming secret police chief, who hoped to succeed him. For more than two days, Stalin lay in bed motionless, surrounded by his family and the leading figures of the Soviet Politburo, many of them drunk and all of them terrified for their futures. No one admitted that his condition could be terminal. On one occasion Beria famously demanded of the as-good-as-dead Stalin in a loud voice: "Comrade Stalin, all the members of the Politburo are here! Say something to us!"
It would be comforting to relate that Stalin's death was greeted by a universal sense of relief, but it was not. The man who turned the already-extant Bolshevik police-state into a ruthless totalitarian dictatorship, killing millions in the forced collectivisation of agriculture and committing hundreds of thousands more to slave labour, was mourned in the Soviet Union as the heroic war leader who saved the world from Nazi Germany. (Never mind that the business was done by the poor bloody infantry.) Abroad, he was given a send-off that was at least respectful and at worst obsequious – particularly on the left.
No one was more gushing than Rajani Palme Dutt, the chief ideologist of the Communist Party of Great Britain, writing in Labour Monthly: "The genius and will of Stalin, the architect of the rising world of free humanity, lives on forever in the imperishable monument of his creation – the soaring triumph of socialist and communist construction; the invincible array of states and peoples who have thrown off the bonds of the exploiters and are marching forward in the light of the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin."
In similar vein, the CPGB’s leader, Harry Pollitt – whose apologists say was sceptical about Stalinism – paid tribute to Stalin as someone whose "miracles of communist construction are of a character that even Marx would never have dared to believe possible".
Tribune, to its credit, was more sceptical. In a piece headlined "Now let's bury the Stalin myth", Michael Foot wrote: "The Nazi-Soviet pact and the frightened sycophancy towards Hitler which Stalin displayed in the two subsequent years still stand out as probably the most grievous and colossal blunder of the century . . . He sent to their deaths almost all the leaders of the revolution. He distorted the socialist aim in a manner which would have horrified both Lenin and Marx. He then falsified the history of the revolution itself."
The deflation of Stalin's reputation was not long in coming. The Berlin workers' uprising of June 1953, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and Nikita Khruschev's "secret speech" the same year to the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which he (selectively) denounced Stalin's crimes, all saw to that. And within 15 years of his death there was a substantial scholarly literature available – at least in the affluent western democracies – that gave chapter and verse on collectivisation, the Great Terror and just about every other aspect of his years of despotic misrule.
But the Stalin myth was never entirely buried. The Soviet tyrant remains an official hero in communist China to this day – and his memory is still revered by Russian nationalists and many leftists in the Third World. Tribune readers might take with a pinch of salt recent reports that Saddam Hussein has a library of books on Stalin and sees him as his role model: but the similarities between the two go further than their moustaches.
And even in Britain it's remarkable how Stalinism persists – albeit in a small way. The Communist Party of Britain is a pale shadow of the CPGB even of the early 1950s, but it is still able – just – to sustain a daily newspaper, the Morning Star, that retains the respect of a large swathe of the left in spite of its unthinking Stalinism. As the Independent on Sunday reminded us last weekend, Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers and Socialist Labour Party remains an unabashed admirer of Stalin, as does Andrew Murray, the chair of the Stop the War Coalition (whom I remember in the 1980s working for the official Soviet news agency Novosti, buying full page ads in left newspapers to publish dull speeches by Konstantin Chernenko).
Which is not to claim that contemporary Stalinism poses a massive threat to civilisation as we know it: far from it. The Stalinists of 2003 are, at least in Britain, a sick joke. I just can't work out why so many on the left tolerate them. Can anyone enlighten me?
Respond to Tribune
WAS CHRISTOPHER HILL A SOVIET AGENT? – 1
An official historian with access to 1940s wartime files, Anthony Glees of Brunel University, says that Hill, who died last month at the age of 91, was an "agent of influence" for Stalin's Russia in the 1940s. Glees claims that Hill, the foremost British historian of the 17th century and Master of Balliol College, Oxford, during the 1960s and 1970s, was a Soviet agent when he worked for the Foreign Office on its Russia desk during the war. Inter alia, he recommended that White (anti-Bolshevik) Russian emigres teaching at British universities should be fired as a gesture of goodwill to Stalin; he was also a friend and contact of the Soviet spy Peter Smollett, who worked at the Ministry of Information (click here for news item in The Times on Glees's allegations, here for Martin Kettle's obituary of Hill in the Guardian and here for Donald Pennington's obituary in the Independent).
That Hill pushed a pro-Soviet line is undeniable. At the time — and for some time afterwards — he was an admirer of the Soviet Union, which he had visited for 10 months in 1935, and a member of the Communist Party. (The Soviet Union was also, lest we forget, a wartime ally of Britain from 1941.) But was Hill a secret CP member, as Glees contends? Rather unlikely. Glees's evidence for his assertion is that Hill had not admitted his CP membership when applying for a job with military intelligence in 1940 (he joined the FO three years later). But Hill appears to have made no attempt before this to conceal his CP membership – indeed, he was already a minor star in the CP’s intellectual firmament because of his essay "The English Revolution 1640", published in 1940 in a book of the same title (edited by Hill) by Lawrence and Wishart, the CP's publishing house. And he certainly did not try to hide his views or his party membership in later life. His book Lenin and the Russian Revolution, first published in 1947 and reprinted many times, was accurately described by A L Rowse, who commissioned it, as “a work of stone-walling Stalinist orthodoxy”; and Hill himself described his writings of the late 1940s and early 1950s as “more or less hack party stuff”. (The nadir was a gushing obituary of Stalin, a “very great and penetrating thinker”.) Hill also played a public role in the controversies inside the CP that followed the Hungarian revolution of 1956, though by then he was a critic of CP orthodoxy (he left the following year). For the rest of his life, Hill was an unashamed independent Marxist and democratic socialist: in retirement in the 1980s, he was a regular reviewer for Tribune. His historical work will live on as the testament of an extraordinary radical intellectual.
That Hill pushed a pro-Soviet line is undeniable. At the time — and for some time afterwards — he was an admirer of the Soviet Union, which he had visited for 10 months in 1935, and a member of the Communist Party. (The Soviet Union was also, lest we forget, a wartime ally of Britain from 1941.) But was Hill a secret CP member, as Glees contends? Rather unlikely. Glees's evidence for his assertion is that Hill had not admitted his CP membership when applying for a job with military intelligence in 1940 (he joined the FO three years later). But Hill appears to have made no attempt before this to conceal his CP membership – indeed, he was already a minor star in the CP’s intellectual firmament because of his essay "The English Revolution 1640", published in 1940 in a book of the same title (edited by Hill) by Lawrence and Wishart, the CP's publishing house. And he certainly did not try to hide his views or his party membership in later life. His book Lenin and the Russian Revolution, first published in 1947 and reprinted many times, was accurately described by A L Rowse, who commissioned it, as “a work of stone-walling Stalinist orthodoxy”; and Hill himself described his writings of the late 1940s and early 1950s as “more or less hack party stuff”. (The nadir was a gushing obituary of Stalin, a “very great and penetrating thinker”.) Hill also played a public role in the controversies inside the CP that followed the Hungarian revolution of 1956, though by then he was a critic of CP orthodoxy (he left the following year). For the rest of his life, Hill was an unashamed independent Marxist and democratic socialist: in retirement in the 1980s, he was a regular reviewer for Tribune. His historical work will live on as the testament of an extraordinary radical intellectual.
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