28 September 2013

IT'S SELLING LIKE LUKEWARM BUNS!

Here's the Amazon sales ranking for Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey. Buy it now!

NICK COHEN says:

'Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey is a fine little book you can read in a day – 168 pages for just £3.50 on Kindle. Anderson and Davey have taken advantage of the vast amount of research into communism since the end of the Cold War. They wear it lightly, and refreshingly, are open about their political position. As members of the democratic left, they believe that communism was a disaster for left wing politics. It tied the left to tyranny and the lies and disillusion that went with it.'

26 September 2013

THE COMRADES STRIKE BACK

Ian Bone, late of Class War, gives a plug to Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left on his blog. It didn't go down well. The first comment, from "EUSTONED? aint we all" reads:

'Nick Cohen says: "A fine little book that reveals Stalin’s deathbed plans to subvert the decent British left for the next 60 years. Chapter five suggests that 'Owen Jones' is really Olga Jonovitch, the crazed Islamo-fascist creation of the KGB’s secret mind labs, programmed to murder Ed Miliband and establish a Victor Serge-Billy Braggist 'volk' dictatorship and the mass-production of bright red three-wheel Lada cars. I call on every decent left liberal opinion-former to read this book, subscribe to Tribune, bomb Iraq and inform on your mates. If you have any. AND ask yourself: 'What would Orwell do? And his animals?'"

Marvellous!

25 September 2013

PEOPLE SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK


NICK COHEN says:

'Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey is a fine little book you can read in a day – 168 pages for just £3.50 on Kindle. Anderson and Davey have taken advantage of the vast amount of research into communism since the end of the Cold War. They wear it lightly, and refreshingly, are open about their political position. As members of the democratic left, they believe that communism was a disaster for left wing politics. It tied the left to tyranny and the lies and disillusion that went with it.'

7 September 2013

AV IS NOT PR ...

I know this is hardly the question of the moment in the UK, but the way the Australian general election is panning out does show how the alternative vote – preferential voting in single-member constituencies – can lead to landslides even more unproportional than those that often happen under first past the post. The exit polls suggest a right-left percentage share of the vote of 53-47 but a right-left percentage share of seats of roughly 66-33.

OBITUARY: GEOFFREY GOODMAN

I'm sad to hear of the death of Geoffrey Goodman, the left-wing journalist who was one of the greatest supporters of and contributors to Tribune, at the age of 91. I never knew him well, but he did reviews for me at Tribune and we met over lunch at the Gay Hussar many times in the company of others. He was a legend – a veteran of the Communist Party (which he left in 1951 over Tito, I think, though others have it as 1956 over Hungary), the Bevanite movement, the News Chronicle of the 1950s, the Daily Herald and Odhams' Sun in the 1960s, the Daily Mirror in its 1970s "golden age", one of the labour correspondents that were must-reads when trade unions mattered a lot – and he was a fantastic writer and very kind. There's an obituary in the Guardian by Mike Molloy here, with an appreciation by Ian Aitken here. Dennis Kavanagh's warm obituary in the Independent, here, includes a howler that Goodman would have picked up with glee (note to Independent subs: it was the Daily Mail that took over the News Chronicle). Here is the Mirror's tribute. RIP.

5 September 2013

PROPER IMPERIALISM IS NOT ON THE AGENDA

Tribune column, 6 September 2013

The fall-out from last Thursday’s House of Commons defeat for David Cameron over military intervention in Syria has been spectacular. The newspapers and current affairs broadcasters have had a week of field days as the various political protagonists have laid into one another and pundits have tried to grasp the significance of the vote. Is Cameron finished? Is Ed Miliband an opportunist toe-rag? Is this the end of the special relationship?

Largely sidelined by the furore, however, has been any serious concern for the substantive issue supposedly at stake – what if anything the rest of the world should do about the civil war in Syria, in which some 100,000 people have died, 2 million have fled the country as refugees and 4 million have become displaced persons within its borders.

Of course, that’s not an easy question to answer. Although the internet is awash with images of atrocities, it is by no means clear exactly what is happening in Syria except that it’s bloody and unpleasant. There are conflicting reports about the strength and nature of the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s regime: some say it’s still largely composed of moderate Sunnis who would be quite happy to live in harmony with everyone else, others that it is now dominated by murderous jihadists with strong al-Qa’ida connections. It’s not obvious how far Assad is now reliant on support from Iran and its Lebanese surrogate Hezbollah – rather more important regional players than his friends in Moscow, who have been grandstanding for all they are worth as well as supplying him with arms – and we don’t know how far the opposition is serving the interests of Riyadh, Doha and Ankara. As I write, it’s not even beyond question that it was the regime and not agents provocateurs that unleashed the nerve gas massacre that brought about last week’s call to action from Cameron (and I’ve not succumbed to conspiracy theory, honest).

It’s possible that the intelligence agencies of the world know a lot about the situation on the ground of which journalists are wholly unaware, but even if they do that’s not the end of the problem. The strong opposition of Russia and China to any sort of international intervention against Assad might well be more a matter of cynical self-interest than a statement of anti-imperialist principle, but it rules out the possibility of United Nations endorsement of even the most minimal “shots across the bow”. Israel is a wild card, utterly unpredictable because driven by hostility both to Assad and his enemies. Egypt is more-or-less under martial law after the coup against the Muslim Brotherhood; Iraq is out of the headlines but seething with sectarian tensions. And public opinion in the US and the UK is sceptical about the claims of the political class that intervention will work: memories are fresh of Afghanistan and Iraq, where successful regime-changing assaults were followed by years of bloody counter-insurgency operations. An invasion of Syria that learnt the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq – Germany 1945-style, with regime-change, forcible disarmament of the population, an occupation involving hundreds of thousands of troops, the securing of borders and all the rest – would probably do the business, but “boots on the ground” are the last thing any western politician could now sell to an electorate. Proper imperialism is not on the agenda.

Which means that the people of Syria will continue to suffer in agony as humanitarians and liberals in the west wring their hands. The most that Barack Obama will sanction, as things stand, is a no-fly zone, and that’s assuming Congress gives him its backing. It won’t work, and will lead to lots more innocent people being killed.

Last week in the House of Commons, MPs refused to back something even more minimal. I can understand why, though I have no sympathy with the Tory and Liberal isolationists who can’t be bothered with quarrels in faraway countries between people of whom they know nothing. And it matters, because it creates a crisis of authority for the British government and marks a change in Britain’s perception of its role in world affairs. It makes very little difference, however, to what happens in Syria. If I were a Syrian, I think I would probably have a lot to say about that.