"More valuable as history than as polemic"

You will guess forever before identifying the subject of this post from its title. The New Statesman carries a review of a book called The Liberal Defence of Murder by Richard Seymour, a blogger and a member of the Socialist Workers' Party. The reviewer, Owen Hatherley, says that the book "is probably more valuable as history than as polemic. It delves into areas that are usually politely ignored, carefully uncovering liberalism and reformism's own shameful record of collaboration with mass murder."

The publicist for Verso Books, Seymour's publisher, has kindly sent me a review copy of the book with the message that she "thought the title might be of particular interest to you and I hope you find much good in what Richard Seymour has produced here". I'm glad to have struck up a relationship with Verso, having welcomed one of its recent publications, The Thin Blue Line by Conor Foley, and taken part in a cordial debate with its author.

The press release that accompanies The Liberal Defence of Murder carries an encomium by Guardian columnist Gary Younge, who praises the way Seymour "expertly traces their descent from humanitarian intervention to blatant Islamophobia". The "they" in question are, as Younge puts it "the useful idiots who gave the [Iraq] war intellectual cover and attempted to lend it liberal imprimatur". That pretty much tells you what you need to know, with the bonus of the joke-phrase "useful idiots" (widely attributed to Lenin by people who haven't read him) and the meaningless term "Islamophobia".

If you want to know the book's value as history, then consider Seymour's observation that: "The current mainstream of scholarship on the dropping of the uranium bomb on Hiroshima and the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki concludes that it was an exercise in what Gar Alperovitz calls 'atomic diplomacy'." You get an unmistakable sense, here and elsewhere, of the quality and extent of Seymour's research. His judgement would, for example, be a matter of wide-eyed stupefaction to my correspondent Michael Kort of Boston University, author of The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb, 2007, who notes there (p. 10):

"Alperovitz's overall 'atomic diplomacy' thesis, which debuted to considerable fanfare, retains only marginal support. From the start it was sharply criticised by by numerous orthodox historians, some of whom, notably Robert James Maddox, demonstrated Alperovitz's misleading use of sources. Even many staunchly revisionist historians shied away from Alperovitz's conspiratorial thesis regarding the use of the atomic bomb against Japan."

The discipline of researching his book has at least had the benefit that Seymour no longer repeats his assertion that Senator Joseph McCarthy sat on the House Committee on Un-American Activities. (The US Senate and the US House of Representatives may together comprise the bourgeois superstructure of the repressive capitalist state, but they are not the same thing.) But the name "McCarthy" evidently retains its capacity to throw Seymour into conceptual chaos: he is under the impression (p. 151), for example, that the Democratic nominee for President in 1972 was someone called Eugene McGovern.

At least Eugene and McGovern are real names, even if they belong to different Democratic politicians. French names are an altogether more formidable challenge for Seymour. The heroic historian who exposed the use of torture by French forces in Algeria was Pierre Vidal-Naquet, not (p. 276) Vidal-Nacquet, a name that presumably rhymes with tennis racquet. The French President from 1981 to 1995 was not (p. 70) called François Mitterand.

Seymour quotes (p. 163) the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan on US policy in East Timor, but it's clear he hasn't read the primary source, Moynihan's memoir Dangerous Place. Fantastically, Seymour's source is Noam Chomsky, whose misrepresentation of Moynihan - not least by running together separate passages as if they were sequential - I've noted before.

This sort of thing is merely inept and unscholarly. What is not a matter for levity is the source Seymour relies upon (p. 203) for his account of Bosniak deaths at the hands of Serb forces in the early 1990s. It is the research - I use the term in its generic rather than any descriptive sense - of a couple of Srebrenica deniers. These are Ed Herman and a blogger called David Peterson. Herman is a former collaborator of Noam Chomsky, and I've written of his work here. Not only does Herman deny that 8,000 Bosniaks were massacred at Srebrenica; he also puts the word genocide in inverted commas when writing about Rwanda.

If Seymour's effort is more valuable as history than as polemic, then imagine what it's like as polemic. I have an instinctive aversion to throwing books away, so if any reader wants my copy and is prepared to collect it from The Times's offices in Wapping, then by all means shoot me an email and I'll leave it downstairs for you.

UPDATE: My copy of the book has now been claimed.

Comments

[Thrasymachus]

Oliver, it's worth adding that the reviewer, Owen Hatherley, is a friend of Seymour's. This ought to have given the NS's literary editor pause, though he has form here: he recently commissioned Seymour himself to review -or, rather, to slobber uncritically over- a book by Chris Harman, ideological commissar of none other than the Socialist Workers' Party.

[ortega]

giving the book away?
are you sure all table legs in the times are ok?

[Tony Francis]

The excellent BBC series "The World At War", now available on DVD for a modest price has an hour devoted to the atomic bomb and Japan. The segments were copyrighted in 1974, although they appear to have been filmed in 1972. Many of the surviving participants were interviewed. My impression is that the Japanese warlords had not given up on the war, even though the B-29s had destroyed virtually every city. Truman was no diplomat. He used the first bomb on Hiroshima expecting Japanese capitulation. When none was in the offing, he used the second on Nagasaki. It was a bluff, since the US had no more. But the Japanese did not know this. There was also the specter that the US would invade, expecting a million US casualties, and many more Japanese. The Russians were waiting to come into the war per the agreements at Yalta and Potsdam. After the Allied experience in Europe, Truman did not want the Russians in Japan. Finally, as is pointed out in the documentary, every day an army and navy of several million men is in the field on a war status, casualties are accruing. After the US atomic bombing, the Japanese warlords came to call the Americans "barbarians", even though the B-29s using conventional weapons had caused much greater damage. But the bomb broke their will to fight and saved a communist North Japan and capitalist south Japan, as occurred in Vietnam and Korea.

The Japanese were secretly trying to get the Russians to sue for peace for them with the Americans. Uncle Joe stabbed them in the back, wanting an opportunity to invade Japan. The atomic bomb ended that.

[simon]

While on the subject of book reviews, this week's Times Literary Supplement carries a review by Geoffrey Best of A History of Political Trials: From Charles I to Saddam Hussein by John Laughland. According to Best: 'Laughland has exacting standards and principles. In matters of law he is an old-fashioned purist .. As to matters of politics and personal conduct, he is a stern moralist .. This richly documented, very readable and strikingly indignant book shows how a well-meant global development of our times has gone off the rails.'

Oliver, I wonder if you would care to comment on John Laughland's exacting standards of scholarship?

[Owen Hatherley]

Just for the record, I have spoken to Seymour three times in my life. Seems nice enough a chap, but 'friends' would be pushing it. I also have friends who signed the Euston Manifesto, yet I would not hesitate to say in print that their 'send in the marines!' approach to humanitarianism was a tad superficial.

Still, gotta love the idea that the New Statesman, publisher of said Euston Manifesto, is a hotbed of Trotskyite entryism. Still, at least I assume they aren't responding to Thrasymachus' pitches.

[nelson]

"The World at War" was produced by Thames Television in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum.

[Michael]

"Oliver, it's worth adding that the reviewer, Owen Hatherley, is a friend of Seymour's. This ought to have given the NS's literary editor pause, though he has form here: he recently commissioned Seymour himself to review -or, rather, to slobber uncritically over- a book by Chris Harman, ideological commissar of none other than the Socialist Workers' Party."

My own rule when reviewing books by friends of mine (an occupational hazard when one researches niche subjects: the key researchers all tend to know each other, often very well, and therefore the best qualified reviewers of the resulting books tend to come from that same pool) is to be tougher on their work than might be the case if the author was previously unknown to me.

In fact, in one case I even sent a pre-emptive apology to the author prior to publication of the review, lest he interpreted a couple of negative criticisms as a sign that we'd fallen out.

[Barry Larking]

In many areas of thought and opinion ideology 'trumps' mere facts. For many no weight of evidence will shift their views when those views are formed and nurtured before the evidence arrives.

Why is the use of the atomic bomb against Japan still such a topic of contemporary discussion, not simply between students taking issue over the minute details or sifting through the official records for hints of confirmation or contradiction? Is it not the case that all history is contemporary history? Today the claim is "The USA is wicked" and here is the proof of that wickedness revealed. The question has been decided and any lengthy (i.e. scholarly) examination of the evidence is 'time wasting'. But then as we all know, facts are in any case "bourgeois".

[spike]

Oliver's pedantry re spelling and his utter lack of engagement with the thrust of Semour's book is well-documented on Seymour's blog.

[F Worthers]

Presumably the reviewer is worried that Seymour's book is gong to drag down his portfolio.

[Spectralis]

It's a shame that Kamm doesn't review the book and instead attacks typo's and misspelt names. Perhaps he was afraid that if he did review the book properly his reactionary pro-war propaganda would confirm Seymour's argument.

[Chris Read]

I was looking forward to this review - hoping it would be a real intellectual confrontation between pro-war and anti-war theorists. Instead all Kamm does here is pick up on 3 tiny spelling mistakes, the use of the word 'mainstream' and sources for Bosnian deaths (interestingly the source, Herman, causes offense, not his figures).

Where is the enagement with Seymour's basic premise? Where does Kamm justify his own support for the wars and explain that he is not merely a 'useful idiot'? Why is Kamm scared to actually talk about the content and it's argument? Anyone reading this would suspect that Kamm has something to hide. Methinks we should be told...

[JOHN CHUCKMAN, TORONTO]

'That pretty much tells you what you need to know, with the bonus of the joke-phrase "useful idiots" (widely attributed to Lenin by people who haven't read him) and the meaningless term "Islamophobia". '

That's a sad sentence, Mr. Kamm.

I am no admirer of Gary Younge's writing, having several times dissected him in the Guardian for foolish words.

Still, the sense of aloof superiority in your sentence is quite unpleasant.

Younge happens to be right with both these expressions.

"Islamophobia" is not the kind of language I like, but as a phenomenon it exists, thrust in our faces almost daily, and it is something making our world a less decent and fair place

You simply need a short-hand term for such things.

Of course you would object to the term "useful idiots" representing as it does those "who gave the [Iraq] war intellectual cover...."

Are you not part of that company?

As I wrote in my piece a while back, "Hiroshima Mon Amour," that destructive enterprise was at least the equivalent - the hundreds of thousands of deaths, the maiming, the destruction of a world cultural heritage, and the flattening of the most advanced economy in the Arab world for a generation - to having used a thermonuclear weapon on a people.

What would call it if someone today used a hydrogen bomb on a people with whom it disagreed? Surely idiocy is not inappropriate?

[Ken W]

Dear Cheshire Kamm.

As we might expect, the substance of your review disappears as one reads...

[Oliver Kamm]

Media Lens is evidently on my case.

[JOHN CHUCKMAN, TORONTO]

The war crime of America's atomic bombing is more steeped in lies and illusions than perhaps any act of the 20th century.

Many people who comment on these matters are too uninformed to offer meaningful information.

It is a fact that the Japanese government put out many serious diplomatic feelers about surrender before the attack.

They knew they had lost the war, and the only key demand they made was that they be allowed to keep their emperor (something later the U.S. allowed anyway).

The U.S. simply ignored them all. It insisted on unconditional surrender.

There was no logic to this American insistence, it was fed by a vicious drive to totally (unnecessarily) humiliate the Japanese.

There can be no question that there was racism involved here. There was also the matter of America's wanting to dominate the Pacific, something that played a role leading up to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

The atomic bombing was completely gratuitous from almost every point of view.

Gen Curtis LeMay, the psychopath who was in charge of the conventional bombing, actually frightened some Americans with the intensity and viciousness of his waves of attacks.

By the time of Hiroshima, there was not one primary target left standing in Japan. There was not even any secondary targets left standing.

Those selecting targets for the Air Force had a hard time finding anything to which it was worth sending the endless waves of bombers.

Hiroshima was entirely a civilian site.

LeMay had fire-bombed and blown-up everything in the country worth destroying.

Another key aspect of the decision to use the bomb was as a threat to Stalin. The Soviets had defeated the Germans at the cost of 27 million lives, and their armed forces were huge and battle-hardened. The U.S. saw them as a possible threat to its dominance in the Pacific.

The U.S. cynically used the availability of the bomb to send Stalin a ferocious message. America's government viewed the secrets of the bomb as key to its ability to exercise hegemony over much of the world's affairs.

The Americans did not realize that Stalin was well along on the bomb himself.

The horror of America's actually using the bomb twice on civilians plus the Cold War siege mentality that set in very quickly, had a lot to do with the many spies – British and American - who contributed to Stalin's getting the bomb too.

Few people alive today appreciate the vicious depths of McCarthyism at the time. It frightened many intelligent people then, even those in countries allied to the U.S.

The same Gen. LeMay who showed not an ounce of compassion in bombing Japan to cinders became a big advocate inside the American government of using atomic weapons on Russia preemptively in the 1950s. There were actually plans for doing this.

Of course, at the time of the Korean conflict, MacArthur too wanted to use atomic weapons on the Chinese.

If you view old newsreels, you will see American politicians of the time – some known as fairly reasonable people decades later, Lloyd Bentsen comes to mind – smilingly talking about using atomic bombs as though they were just bigger bombs. The atmosphere became poisonous.

[Ken W]

Mr Kamm:

Medialens need not bother.

It's perfectly clear from the above that you have no case.

[Tony Francis]

I fail to see what role "racism" played in World War II. Of course the US hated the Japanese. So what? The warlords were convinced they could hold out, knowing their trump card was that the US would have to invade Japan. They had made Okinawa an example: "if you want to win this war, you will pay a terrible price." As has been stated, the goal of the warlords was to keep Japan functioning as a society at a 14th century level. The "humiliation" of the Japanese destroyed this notion forever, and propelled them into a modern society. The specter of a Communist North Japan run by the USSR was intolerable to Truman (although FDR seems not to have objected to it.) I think we can imagine how that might have looked. It is true that many military men wanted to use nuclear weapons at various times. It is also true that civilians stopped them. Had MacArthur bombed Manchuria, we might not have a nuclear North Korea, run by a crackpot regime today. We might not have a nuclear Red China. Of course, that is speculation. There is evidence many in the US were willing to "share" nuclear technology after the war:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Plan
The Russians wanted nothing of it, since they had access to US nuclear secrets via their spy network.

Concerning modern equivalency to Islam: there is no equivalency. There is no "total war" mentality and no political will for it. What are you going to do? Nuke a billion people? They are completely different problems.

[Colin Ferguson]

I admire your formidable reviewing technique, Mr. Kamm. After committing to memory your devistating critique of the then barely-cold Mr. Stockhausen, in which you thoroughly dismantled his reputation by pointing out, with great insight and originality, that his music sounds like a horrible bloody racket and finding a thirty-five year old quote from some hitherto unknown self-professed Maoist calling him an imperialist, I resolve to further bolster my own intellectual armoury by always remembering that the way to fundamentally and fatally undermine any ideological opponent's argument is point out all the minor typographical errors in their texts. That'll sure teach 'em good.

[Jack]

"They knew they had lost the war, and the only key demand they made was that they be allowed to keep their emperor (something later the U.S. allowed anyway). The U.S. simply ignored them all. It insisted on unconditional surrender."

This is utterly untrue. The Japanese also refused to accept any occupation of their homeland - they wanted peace without surrender. Furthermore, the terms of Japan's surrender were agreed by the allies in the Potsdam declaration, which specified that any occupation of Japan would be a temporary one to establish democratic institutions. As it was.

[Jack]

Why on earth should Oliver seriously review a book written by a member of a totalitarian political party with minuscule support?

[Jim Holstun]

Some may find that focusing on a handful of misspellings and factual errors in a 344-page book bespeaks a petty mind, if not the harrumphing bigotry of an overtaxed reviewer unable to rise to an actual critique of the book's argument. But sloppy writing of this sort indicates a sloppy mind, if not something worse, so thank you, Oliver, for warning us! Take care of the pennies, by God, and the pounds will take care of themselves.

But turning back to Kamm's review, well mercy, me oh my, what do I spy with my little eye? Bad typing, that's what!: "From the start it was sharply criticised BY BY numerous orthodox historians, some of whom, notably Robert James Maddox, demonstrated Alperovitz's misleading use of sources."

It's precisely this sort of stuttering lapse that let down the team and lost Britain the Empire! I'll never trust you again.

Bye-bye,
Jim

[Sim1]

"Why on earth should Oliver seriously review a book written by a member of a totalitarian political party with minuscule support?" - Jack

Because that is what he says he sets out to do in the first paragraph of the post. To do otherwise smacks of poor scholarly standards, something I'm sure Oliver would never want to be accused of.

[ortega]

Spectralis,

his reactionary pro-war propaganda would confirm Seymour's argument.

If anything, the prowar position of M. Kamm (I asume you mean Iraq and Afghanistan) is a totally progresive one, in the same way that the arguments oposing them are mainly reactionary. At least, in the sense that this words have had the last 200 years.
Of course, that doesn't make any position better or worse, but it is better not to confuse the words.
Maybe you consider 'reactionary' to be an insult that denigrates any concept it is attached to. But it is no so.

[Oliver Kamm]

Sim1, nowhere in the first paragraph do I declare or imply an intention of reviewing the book. As my vistors from Media Lens have also expressed their dismay at the uncouthness of this post, perhaps I should emphasise that my intention was not to explicate the author's thesis but to demonstrate his ignorance and incompetence, an unexacting task that I modestly claim to have accomplished.