Crooked Timber

The merchant banker Oliver Kamm has a vicious little post today attacking the memory of the late Ralph Miliband for a paper he published in 1980. Miliband, the father of the current British foreign secretary, was, of course, a Marxist theoretician and a member of the British new left for much of his life. As a member of that left, he authored many papers for journals like the New Left Review and Socialist Register. And again, as a member of that new left, he had an ambivalent relationship to the Soviet bloc. On the one hand he lamented the lack of democracy in those countries; on the other he thought they had achieved various social gains. Well he was (largely) wrong about the latter, but 1980 is a long time ago, and, back then he wasn’t alone in that false belief. In fact, he shared it with people for whom Kamm now declares his admiration and support and who then wrote for those same journals. The difference is, of course, that they are alive and he is dead. Miliband cannot reconsider.

Kamm’s post attacks Miliband’s paper “Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism” (Socialist Register, 1980 ) on the grounds that he doesn’t think the crimes of Pol Pot were sufficient to justify the Vietnamese invasion. Reading the paper today, it has an odd and stilted feel: Miliband is wrestling with a set of issues and problems that seem deeply alien today. I think Miliband was wrong about that case, and badly so. But I presume (and hope) that he didn’t appreciate how horrific the Pol Pot regime had been, or didn’t believe all the reports. What the casual reader wouldn’t glean from reading Kamm’s nasty little post, though, is that the substance of Miliband’s article was an attack on the idea that the socialist ideal should be advanced by “socialist” states invading other countries. In other words, it was principally an attack on the idea that socialists should support the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Miliband argues, correctly, that all that resulted from such interventions was alienation from the socialist cause, and the installation of weak puppet regimes without popular legitimacy. You’d never gather that from reading Kamm’s blog, though. He presents Miliband’s attack on Soviet tankism as an apologia for massacre. That wasn’t how it would have been read at the time. In fact, it isn’t how a fair-minded person would read it now.

It’s not that surprising to read that former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad has called for an international tribunal to try Western leaders with war crimes over the war in Iraq, nominating Bush, Blair and Howard in particular. Mahathir is well-known as a provocateur, with a fondness for extreme statements, which have included anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros and others. So it’s unlikely that anyone will pay much attention to him.

Still, his views on Iraq as a war crime are widely shared. It scarcely seems beyond the bounds of possibility that someone like Baltasar Garzon might find a legal way to file criminal charges (Wikipedia says he’s already threatened a civil suit).

Such charges would have enough factual and legal support to make the outcome unpredictable if they ever came before a tribunal. Apart from the general question of the legality of the war itself, the US in particular has openly denied the applicability of the Geneva Conventions and has engaged in many actions (torture of prisoners, bombing of occupied civilian areas, reprisal attacks of various kinds) that at least arguably violate the Conventions.

On the other hand, the prospect of Bush, or any US official, for that matter, actually standing trial, let alone being convicted or punished, seems unthinkable. The only consistent inference that I can draw from this is that, if charges are ever laid in any jurisdiction, the governments concerned will find a way to abort the process without allowing the substantive issues to come before a court. Since most of the doctrines that might be used to achieve such an outcome (sovereign immunity, non-interference in internal affairs and so on) have already been repudiated, it seems as if such an outcome could only be justified in terms of a bald claim of “reasons of state”.

Are there any legal experts who can help me out here? I have two main questions:

1. Where, if at all, might charges be brought against Bush and others?
2. How would the hearing of these charges be prevented?

During this week’s guest stint I’ve managed to touch on Palestine-Israel, the New Deal, and Michel Foucault. Steering clear of the real killer tripwires—i.e., sex roles, the Democratic primaries, or emacs/vi—that leaves a final frontier of Internet mischief….

On this day in 1945, only three days after the occupation of their city by French troops, the remaining full professors of the University of Freiburg assembled to elect new officers and to restore the customs under which they had operated before 1933, when their faculty, racially purged by the Nazis, elected as rector the philosopher Martin Heidegger. (All details here come from Hugo Ott; see more at the footnote.)¹

This is not a parable or an analogy. It is a story of one episode in which civil authorities and academic governing bodies reckoned with a disastrous crossover between scholarship and politics.

One of the first orders of business for the reassembled professors was the question of what to do about Nazis among their colleagues. They chartered an internal review committee for the purpose, and tried to keep jurisdiction over this process, without success. City authorities were conducting their own reviews, and they designated Heidegger’s house, among others, as a “Party residence” to be requisitioned for use. The university protested, based on the opinion of legal scholar Franz Böhm (an anti-Nazi dismissed from his post during Hitler’s regime) that for “establishing political guilt” one needed “a proper court of law.”
Continue reading “Godwin this.”

Over at our joint I’ve been doing a fair bit of “this day seventy-five years ago” because of the anniversary of Roosevelt’s hundred days and, well, because. This one may hold some interest for an international readership:

On this day in 1933, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald delivered an address from the National Press Club in Washington, DC, discussing the common problems of the US and UK: “In America at this moment and in Great Britain there are millions of men who want work and can’t get it…. Governments cannot be indifferent to a state of things like that.”

MacDonald looked forward to “wise international government action,” to be established at the upcoming international economic conference. He hoped it would revive “a freely flowing international exchange,” i.e., trade—“Self-sufficiency in the economic field on the part of nations ultimately ends in the poverty of their own people.”

He was mindful of the apparent irony in Britain’s having taken the nationalist, defensive action of going off the gold standard: “Can you imagine that in the early days of that crisis we said gayly and light-heartedly, ‘Let it rip. Let it rip. We will go off gold. There are benefits in being off gold, and we will reap them.’” Obviously he meant the answer to be “no.”—“And so on this currency question, agreement is the only protection.”¹
Continue reading ““Let it rip.””

Anyone reading blogs over the last few years know how obsessive the wingnut element can get over faked, altered and “faked” photographs. Sometimes there’s a case to answer; sometimes there’s a picture that contradicts their narrative and they’re shrilly convinced that “it isn’t trooo!” We saw instances of both in the recent Lebanon war. Now the great-granddaddy of such controversies looks set for reinvestigation : did Robert Capa stage his most famous picture, the “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War? The International Center of Photography in New York has acquired a suitcase discovered in Mexico last year containing Capa negatives abandoned when he fled from Paris in 1939.

I have a post up at the Guardian blog noting that with no activity on its weblog on the last six weeks, the manifesto itself closed to new signatures and nobody so much as remarking its second anniversary, the Euston Manifesto appears to have gone the way of all flesh and most leftwing political tendencies. I suggest, perhaps a little uncharitably, that the cause of death (which I suppose I might be premature in announcing, but really, it doesn’t seem to have much life in it) was the Manifesto Group’s consistent refusal to ever move on from their platforms and slogans to having any concrete program at all[1] (and that this was in its turn probably due to the need to keep together a coalition which, in as much as it extended beyond a very small clique of pro-war ex-Trots, had very little to hold it together other than a personal dislike of George Galloway). If I had the piece to write again, I suspect I might have given more airtime to the other big psychological impetus behind the Paul Berman/Euston/”Decent” tendency, which was genuine trauma at the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks. But I certainly wouldn’t walk away from my assessment of the central motivation – a desire on the part of people who had been wrong for decades during the Cold War to be on the right side of history for once.

In terms of their contribution to British political debate, my epitaph for the Euston Manifesto is basically Byron’s on Castlereagh. For whatever reasons, as a political movement it was never able to get over the personality issues involved, and chose to promote its views by the same tactics of condemnation, excommunication and inflated rhetoric which had served it so badly during its past on the left[2]. But the current of political thought that Euston represented in the UK was not entirely bad or even entirely wrong. What would their legacy be?
Continue reading “It was a good grouplet as they go, and as grouplets go, it went”

Jeremy Waldron has a great piece in the latest LRB reviewing a recent book by Cass Sunstein. He has a nice discussion of the Cheney doctrine that even a one-percent probability of a catastrophic event should be treated as a certainty for policy purposes, where the class of catastrophic events is limited to those with a military, security or terrorist dimension. Reasoning like this interacts neatly with “ticking-bomb” scenarios: now a 1 per cent chance that the there’s a ticking bomb the terrorist knows about is sufficient in to justify waterboarding or worse. Of course other potentially catastrophic developments—such as climate change—haven’t generated a “treat as if certain” policy response from the US government, even thought even the most determined denialists must evaluate the probability that anthropogenic global warming is happening at greater than one in a hundred.

Waldron is also pretty acid about Sunstein’s treatment of global warming and distributive justice, noting some of the shortcomings of the idea that poor people’s lives should be valued according to what they’re prepared to pay to avoid the risk of death. But read the whole thing, as they say.

Brad DeLong writes:

My first reaction is that I should write to Professor William Drummond, Chair of the Berkeley Division of the University of California Senate, stating that in my opinion it is time for him to convene a committee to examine whether John Yoo’s appointment to the University of California faculty should be revoked for moral turpitude.

But I find myself frozen, unable to decide whether I should or should not write to William Drummond. I find myself frozen because I am confronted by the ghost of medieval scholar Ernst Kantorowicz. Ernst Kantorowicz—right-wing authoritarian anti-Democratic anti-communist German nationalist—was asked as a condition of his appointment to the University of California faculty to swear this oath:

My assessment of the battle for Basra has changed significantly. I still think that, in the subjunctive conditional tense, it was a reasonable piece of analysis – al-Maliki needed to do something[1] to start to establish his monopoly on violence within Iraq and I put material weight on his own seeming subjective assessment that he was politically and militarily strong enough to pull it off. But in the actual present tense, things are going the other way. (A disclaimer should certainly be appended at this point that this is all rather toward the punditry end of the spectrum rather than analysis so if that winds you up then skip it, but having picked that ball up I’m sort of committed to running with it).
Continue reading “Bad news from Basra”

From the armchair general department … Back when the surge began, I suggested that one of the ways in which things could go wrong (and of course, there are loads of ways things can go wrong and only one way they can go right) would be:

d) Al-Sadr demonstrates his political nous once more, and calms down his operations, carrying out only enough hit-and-run attacks on US troops to keep his popularity up. Then he forms a nationalist bloc with one or more of the Sunni parties. Political collapse of the Maliki government.

Which was looking rather awfully close to how things were shaping up; while the level of violence was falling, the Maliki government was going nowhere fast politically and the anti-government forces were gathering strength. Furthermore, nobody seemed to really be doing much about this, apart from sitting round congratulating themselves that “the surge is working”.

Now, (and I would be very glad to be proved wrong on this one, as I have very little personal credibility at stake having been right on nearly every other important point about Iraq, and contrary to supposition I would very much like to see a world in which far fewer innocent people were in danger of horrible death on a daily basis), it’s all kicking off, apparently (via Chicken Yoghurt).

Continue reading “Big battle for Basra?”

I have a post up at the Guardian blog on the general subject of it not being terribly practical to assume that if we all shout hard enough at the Chinese government, they will wave their Chinese magic wand and the Darfur crisis will go away. In the post, I unaccountably forgot to link to Alex Harrowell at Fistful of Euros, who inspired the post by reminding me that I held this view. I’m now correcting this (frankly the CT referral stream is probably a little less, shall we say, problematic[1] than the Comment is Free one). So let the circle-jerk be unbroken, etc. Sorry Alex.

In general, though, and I didn’t explore this enough because it would have looked like rambling, a lot of people seem to think that the Olympic Games is the most important thing in the world to China. How much do we think they really care about it going well? I mean, seriously, we are going to be hosting this thing in London soon, and if it really is true that major world governments regularly make massive shifts of geopolitical influence in order to avoid a few slightly embarrassing scenes at their opening ceremony, then I am rather worried about what the rest of the world might have planned for us.

[1] No, let’s say “insane”

Apparently I am on “mea culpa watch” from Tyler Cowen, Picture me at present pursing my lips and flapping my wrist in the international signal for “ooh! Get her!”. I have looked at the NEJM study, had a look at some of the online discussion of it, and I think that few of my friends and few of my enemies will be disappointed to learn that my response is not so much “mea culpa” as “pogue mahone”. In particular, see below the fold for a list of apologies not forthcoming, additional castigation, and new heretics who need to be squelched.
Continue reading “Mea culpa! Mea maxima ahhhstickitupyerjacksie …”