Crisis? What Crisis?

There is, it is alleged, a crisis on the modern left. We have, apparently, gone from being defenders of truth and justice to apologists for fascism, religious obscurantism and terrorism. No-one ever specifies in context at this point what the left exactly means. Something like sixteen million people voted for either the Labour Party or the Lib Dems at the last election. It is difficult to verify anecdotal experience, but based on the conversations I've had with various people in the last few years I am struggling to imagine that sixteen million people are fans of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Respect scored something like sixty nine thousand which may, perhaps be alarming but I imagine that most of those were in Bethnal Green where a predominantly Muslim electorate wanted to give a bloody nose to Oona King for her support for the Iraq war.

The two authors who have published books denouncing the left in these terms are Nick Cohen and Anthony Andrews. I confess to having read neither. I did have a go at Cohen's book but after the claims that a) priests hijacked the Iranian revolution and b) that conservatives have supported fascism because they mistakenly supposed it supported the democratic ideas they shared, then, like Paolo and Francesca I could read no more. Still, we all know the charge sheet which has been set forth repeatedly in the last few years. In the next few posts I will have a look at some of the issues that have been raised. Next up: Is the Left a supporter of fascism in its modern guise?

A Good Egg

Needless to say David Lepper is already on the case, being involved in the case of an individual constituent. He is in touch with the Home Secretary and has promised to get back in touch when he hears more.

X-Files: Continuity Glitch

Not quite a case for Mulder and Scully, but it made me chuckle. Richard Dawkins in the Sunday Times on August 5 2007:

Obviously not a great television viewer, he also performed the minor miracle of altogether missing The X Files, although he approved of setting the sceptical Agent Scully against the paranormal proselytiser Mulder.

From 'Unweaving the Rainbow' in 1998 (page 28):

"But isn't it just a harmless fiction then? No, I think the defence rings hollow. Imagine a television series in which two police officers solve a crime each week. Every week there is one black suspect and one white suspect. One of the two detectives is always biased towards the black suspect, the other biased towards the white. And, week after week, the black suspect turns out to have done it. So, what's wrong with that? After all it's only fiction. Shocking as it is, I believe the analogy to be a completely fair one. I am not saying that supernaturalist propaganda is as dangerous or as unpleasant as racist propaganda. But the X-Files systematically portrays an anti-rational view of the world, which by virtue of its recurrent persistence is insidious.

Don't tell me that the old boy is mellowing!

The Title Deeds To Western Europe

Having recently had to re-familiarise myself with all things medieval, I came across this again. There are two crude forgeries which have shaped the destiny of Europe. One is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the other is the Donation of Constantine. The Donation purports to be an edict by the Emperor Constantine. According to legend Constantine was afflicted by leprosy and was advised to bathe in the blood of murdered infants. Constantine was struck with a bout of squeamishness, whereupon St. Peter took pity on him and directed him to Pope Silvester who promptly cured him. Constantine, in gratitude handed over the Western Empire. Of course, this is nonsense. The miraculous elements aside Constantine divvied up the Empire between his sons after his death and neglected to tell them that the Pope had dibs on the West. The pagan Emperor Julian the Apostate, whom one would have expected to repeal such an edict, is silent about it. Furthermore the edict refers to the Emperor's satraps when satraps were a Persian and not a Roman official. These points were all made in 1440 by Lorenzo Valla. The Donation was almost certainly written between 750 and 850 AD. As recently as the early 1300s Dante, who objected strongly to the claims of the Papacy to temporal power accepted the authenticity of the document, arguing in De Monarchia that Constantine didn't have the authority to sign over half the Empire and lamenting the Donation in the Inferno.

How such a forgery imposed on European opinion for over half a millenium is an interesting question. Part of the answer relates to the widespread rate of illiteracy during the period. The literate tended to be clergy who, therefore, were disinclined to question the Donation. Part of the answer relates to the absence of a sense of the past. Great rulers would, for various reasons, donate huge tracts of land to the Church. The Donation was only a contemporary magnates endowment of an abbey or church writ large. Part of the answer was, I think, an inabillity to question the assumptions that dominated society. Valla's sterling work notwithstanding, the decline of High Papalism was brought about when Boniface VIII over reached himself. Philip IV of France sent a royal official, Guillame de Nogaret (who was later instrumental in the condemnation of the Templars), to kidnap Boniface who died of a stroke shortly afterwards. For the next century the Papacy would be based at Avignon. It would still be important but it would no longer presume to depose kings. By the time Valla exposed the Donation as a fake it was a dead letter. There was no rear guard action, no attempts to silence or condemn Valla.

Doubtless we are all a bit more sophisticated than people in the Middle Ages. But it does make one wonder. Dante, after all, was not stupid or incurious or unlearned. What unquestioned assumptions of our society will future generations regard with bewilderment?

Anti-climax

Having done my bit and written to my MP about the plight of the Iraq employees of the British Army who look likely to be abandoned when British forces leave, I was delighted to receive a letter from my MP. Gosh, I thought, a good deed in a naughty worl!. A small contribution to one's country doing the decent thing! Participation in a great campaign orchestrated by the blogosphere. My heart swelled...

Until I read:

David has asked me to write. Thank you for your communication. We shall be in touch again as soon as possible.

I e-mailed him last Thursday, so I shall give him the benefit of the doubt for another twenty four hours whilst I consider appropriate re-phrasings of the expression "get yer arse in gear". On the other hand David Lepper is generally regarded as a decent bloke round these parts so I have little fear of him not doing the right thing.

Meanwhile, Dan Hardie has asked me to encourage my readers to support the campaign. It is touchingly sweet of Dan to assume that I actually have any, but if you were looking for Little Green Footballs and fetched up here by mistake can I draw your attention to the following links.

Talking points for a letter to MPs

Help with researching your MP is here

Tim Ireland has a campaign video here

Justin McKeating is keeping tabs on MP's responses here

As I said, a good deed in a naughty world. So if you haven't written to your MP yet, get on with it.

Comment is Free

They get a fair number of people from the green ink brigade posting in the comments boxes. Now they've broken out onto the main page.

For balance, here's a link to the admirable Dan Hardie.

Ignatieff: Ideology, Intelligence, Inspiration

It's a bit late in the day, but as I've taken my blog title from David Rees' post I thought I'd say a few words of my own on Ignatieff's Mea Culpa. Lots of people have pointed out that his essay is pretentious and self-serving. I think that it is also worth pointing out that whenever Ignatieff attempts to exonerate himself or point to mitigating factors he invariably shows up the shallowness of his judgement. So:

We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

So, Ignatieff concedes, I was wrong, but so in a sense were many of those who opposed the war because they did so for the wrong reasons. Quite apart from the gracelessness of this objection - they were, after all right and Ignatieff was wrong, this is devastatingly hypocritical. Ignatieff indulged in ideology as much as the Socialist Worker's Party did. The ideology in question was one of liberal interventionism, born out of the failure of the west in Bosnia and Rwanda, a dream in which democracy, human rights and the free market would be defended and extended by western power. 'Empire Lite' to cite the title of one of Ignatieff's books. It all seems rather remote now, but that was the oft trumpted claim and how hollow it now sounds.

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

If one is going to invade and occupy a country shouldn't one take steps to acquire this knowledge? It was hardly a well guarded secret that there were both Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq and that these two groups don't exactly see eye to eye on stuff. Nor did one have to be Talleyrand to work out that the claims about Massive Weapons of Destruction were bogus. It's well known that for various complicated reasons the Middle East is not a part of the world one naturally associates with democracy. All one really needed was not to get caught up in the euphoria of the moment.

I made some of these mistakes and then a few of my own. The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions.

One would have to have a heart of stone not to sympathise with Iraqi exiles, but it is well known that exiles are hardly the surest guide as to what is going on in the mother country. Kanan Makiya is said to have told an audience that if there was a one in ten chance of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a democracy it should be taken. One in ten. Effectively Makiya was claiming that the west had a moral duty of going to war even if the chances of failure were ninety percent. This is risible. One can hardly blame Makiya for desperation. It is difficult to imagine what it must be like to have ones country ruled by a murderous sadist. But, desperate though things were one really needs decent odds of achieving ones aims before going to war.

No amount of sprinkling quotations around, no special pleading about how others were only right because of ideology, no whinging about being misled by Iraqi exiles, or lack of information about the country can really obscure the fact that Ignatieff got the question of the Iraq war horribly wrong. Through vanity and naivety his 'exercising judgement' counted for less than the 'ideology' of an undergraduate with a set of vulgar Marxist prejudices and the editorials of Socialist Worker as a guide.

Planet Zinfandel

I was stuck for a name for this blog when I came across David Rees' devastating attack on Michael Ignatieff. The following paragraph amused me hugely:

Right off the bat, he's saying: "It was right for me to support the Iraq war when I was an academic, because academics live in outer space on Planet Zinfandel, and play with ideas all day. But now, as a politician in a country that opposed the war, I'll admit I screwed up, because politicians must deign to harness the wild mares of whimsy to the ox-cart of cold, calculated reality." So, although his judgments were objectively wrong, they were contextually appropriate. Sweet! You've been totally 0wn3d by Michael Ignatieff! And so have all those dead Iraqis.

The whole thing is fantastic, but anyway, as I'm currently doing a Ph.D and do the occasional bit of teaching I can consider myself one of the minor inhabitants of 'Planet Zinfandel'. Et voila, one title for a blog. Thank you David Rees.