Nick Cohen: Writing from London

Running a ‘spoiler’ is the most joyous pleasures the rat like editor can experience. He knows that a rival paper has a great story coming, so he works out what he can about it and publishes another paper’s exclusive as his own.

The Mail on Sunday seems to have done just that with its pre-emptive strike on my Observer colleague’s Andrew Rawnsley’s forthcoming book which is due out in a month.

Sensational claims that Gordon Brown has physically attacked his staff in a series of outbursts in Downing Street – and once in America – have rocked the Government.
Well-placed sources say the Prime Minister has been accused of hitting a senior adviser, pulling a secretary out of her chair and hurling foul-mouthed abuse at aides while distraught over an alleged snub by President Barack Obama. The claims, which are fiercely denied by Mr Brown’s allies, are linked to a new book about Mr Brown by respected political journalist Andrew Rawnsley.

Indeed they are being denied. Patrick Hennessy of the Telegraph, who is, shall we say, always welcome in Downing Street duly popped up.
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Anyone who loves the beautiful Argyll coast south of Tayvallich will know that the Edinburgh estate agents Rettie & Co were not exaggerating when they described the peninsula’s Keills Estate as “a rural idyll”. With Loch Sween on one side and the sea on the other, with views from its beaches to Islay and Jura, with deer-stalking and fishing rights open to negotiation, Rettie confidently expected a wealthy buyer to snap up the property.

They were not disappointed. Iain Coucher already had a company flat in central London and a comfortable house in the Midlands, but he couldn’t resist adding to his property portfolio. For just under £1m, he bought three-quarters of the estate, including a solid home, complete with boathouse, jetty and 173 acres of surrounding land, and two little islands.

No surprise there. Ever since the Clearances, the nouveaux riches have aped the aristocracy and paid to play the highland gentleman. Coucher stood out from his predecessors, however. The new laird of Keills, the monarch of his very own glen, was, to all outward appearances, an undistinguished civil servant on a second-rate railway board.
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A Democrat president does not lose Massachusetts without so dispiriting liberals they can longer be bothered to turn out for him. Inattentive foreigners have been slow to spot the demoralisation because their relief at Obama’s inauguration has stopped them realising that his failure to tackle unemployment and his unconscionable delay in punishing the bankers have induced despair among his natural supporters. As has the vacuity of his foreign policy.

I accept that readers may find this a hard sentence to swallow, but when it comes to promoting democracy, the emancipation of women and the liberation of the oppressed, Barack Obama has been the most reactionary American president since Richard Nixon.

Take the undeservedly neglected case of Nyi Nyi Aung. The reason you have never heard of the Burmese-American is that his arrest is an embarrassment to an Obama administration that wants to “engage” with Burma’s military regime. The junta is holding the democracy activist in solitary confinement. If he is receiving the same treatment as its previous inmates, the guards will be forcing him to crawl on all fours, bark instead of talk and eat from a dog bowl. American senators wrote to Hillary Clinton demanding that she intervene and received no concrete commitments. Nyi Nyi’s disgusted American fiancee says that the message America sends the generals is that they can do what they want.
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A FEW days ago, Guernica magazine accused me of not citing sources when I criticised Noam Chomsky. I responded by posting a source-ridden chapter from my What’s Left (you can read the book here and the extract on Chomsky here) which detailed at length the shifty way in which Chomsky and all those who imitate him excuse crimes against humanity they cannot blame on the West.

The extract detailed at length Chomsky’s role in boosting deniers of the holocaust, Pol Pot’s genocide and the Serb massacres of the Bosnian Muslims. I am a charitable man, so I have to assume that Guernica’s Joel Whitney is either very dim or extremely busy. For he says, ‘after reading Cohen’s response, I wondered if he proved Chomsky’s point for him. The problem was that Cohen’s response only weighed in on the very general question of Chomsky’s “influence”.’

Er, no it did not. Read it yourself and you will see a discussion not of general influences but of specifics; for instance, of how the apologists for Serbia constructed a conspiracy theory to explain away the massacres of Bosnia’s Muslims. Perhaps Whitney did read it, but lacked the mental ability to understand it. Perhaps he was in such a hurry to get on with whatever journalists at Guernica get on with that his distracted mind just flicked over the page and did not take in the words. (He mentions using a search engine rather than his own eyes, so I suspect that may be the case.)

Carry on reading………

Consider the response of liberal Europeans to the last 40 years of Iraqi history. From 1968, an authentically fascist state confronted them, complete with the supreme leader, the unremitting reign of terror, the gassing of ethnic minorities and the unprovoked wars of conquest. America and Britain had, to their shame, been complicit in the oppression, but in 2003 they overthrew the tyrant thinking that he still possessed the weapons he used against the Kurds and the Iranians. He didn’t and the occupation turned into a disaster as the followers of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Ruhollah Khomeini began a campaign of mass sectarian killing.

Anyone who believed what Europeans said about their determination to make amends for Nazism and communism would have expected a principled response. However much they loathed Bush and Blair, surely they would have offered unreserved support for Arabs and Kurds struggling to escape totalitarianism. The British bore a heavy responsibility, as our army was effectively defeated in Basra. With too few troops to fight, it allowed clerical death squads to take over the city. British commanders had to suffer the humiliation of seeing the American and reconstituted Iraqi forces charge in to stop the violence they could not control.

And yet mainstream public opinion has never been interested in offering solidarity to the victims of Ba’athism and Islamism…

Carry on reading

The rumours from the comrades are of one last coup attempt against Gordon Brown in March. The Cabinet will tell him to go and install Alan Johnson. Whether this is likely to happen is open to doubt, given ministers’ gutlessness over the past 18 months, but readers may also wonder after all the non-plots and empty speculation they have lived through, why Labour should bother going through the pain of changing its leader. At present we seem to be heading for a small Tory majority or hung parliament, not a bad result from a Labour perspective. Labour will be able to harass an inexperienced Cameron government struggling to cope with a horrendous deficit, and under constant threat of defeat at the hands of its backbench climate deniers and Euro-sceptics, and bounce back in 2014.

But you can make an argument that Ministers need to act because there is at least a possibility that Cameron will be all-commanding because Brown is leading Labour to a landslide defeat that will take 10, maybe 15 years to recover from.

Here is my version of it

In her indispensable Watching the English, the Oxford anthropologist Kate Fox explores the connection between the extreme reserve and gross vulgarity which characterise our national life by talking to foreign women about their experience of English men. They were unimpressed, to put it mildly. “Ideally, the English male would rather not issue any definite invitation at all, sexual or social, preferring to achieve his goal though a series of subtle hints and oblique manoeuvres, often so understated as to be almost undetectable,” Fox concluded with a shudder. Her interviewees could not tell if men were flirting with them for form’s sake or trying to seduce them and complained about “protean behaviour they attribute to shyness, arrogance or repressed homosexuality depending on their degree of exasperation”.

They did not realise that they were running into the ramparts of ironic detachment which guard the English from commitment as surely as prison walls. The fear of exposing ourselves to rejection, with its concomitant hurt and ridicule, would have led to the extinction of the tribe long ago if booze had not provided a release. No serious person who looks around them believes the media orthodoxy that we have shrugged off our traditional awkwardness and become an “emotionally literate” people. We wouldn’t snigger so about sex if we were.

Nor would we find that drink offers the only escape from an emotional constipation that prevents us honestly engaging with others. To be English is to experience routine frigidity leavened by binges of debauchery. Or, as Fox says: “The role of alcohol in the passing on of the English DNA should not be underestimated.”

Carry on reading

Fear and Filth at Brown’s Number 10 Reposted from May 2009 Standpoint

New Labour’s 12th anniversary in power was marked on 2 May 2009. Steep has been the decline of the high hopes that greeted its victory. A movement that was committed to the democratic modernisation of Britain has imposed a Prime Minister who has not won a mandate at a general election nor secured for himself the smaller but still significant legitimacy that comes from fighting a contested leadership election within his own party. The supposed economic miracle Gordon Brown thought would allow the newly rich to provide the tax revenues for public works and wealth redistribution has crashed into a thousand pieces. Most sinisterly, what we once called “spin”, and a more plain-speaking age would have called “propaganda”, has degenerated from the manipulation of the press that all governments practise into character assassination and career destruction.

Keep the crisis of legitimacy and the inability to manage the country’s finances in mind when you think about what I suppose I can get away with calling the Downing Street filth machine. The political and the economic failures are bound up with the scandalous lies Brown’s trusted hitman Damian McBride concocted at the taxpayers’ expense.

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In <Guernica magazine, Professor Noam Chomsky not only accuses me of being a maniac, an insult I can live with, but a maniac who does not check his sources, which I find uncalled for.
During a remarkably soft interview, the magazine’s editor rises from his knees only once to deliver what by his standards is a tough question,
‘Here’s one critic of your work, Nick Cohen in the Guardian: “The lesson of 11 September is that no constraints of morality or conscience would stop al-Qaeda exploding a nuclear weapon. If however, it is all our fault, as Chomsky says, perhaps we can avert catastrophe by being nicer and better people. Perhaps we can, but Chomsky is as reluctant to admit that al Qaeda is an autonomous movement as he is to admit the existence of the democratic and socialist opposition to Saddam Hussein’.”

Noam Chomsky: They’re mentioning somebody with my name. But it doesn’t relate at all to anything I’ve ever said or believe. Who did you say you’re quoting?

Guernica: Nick Cohen in the Guardian.

Noam Chomsky: Oh, Nick Cohen’s a maniac. If you’ll notice, he never cites anything. Does he cite anything? That already gives you the answer. Go back and check. He doesn’t cite anything. These are just diatribes, tantrums. I’m not interested in them.

A small point is that I work for the Observer not the Guardian. A larger one is that I am disgusted to say that I can cite vast amounts of detail on the malign influence of Chomsky and his kind on the wider left. Below is an extract from my What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way.

I hope it explains why I believe that it is a disaster that the ideas that Chomsky and the postmodernists pioneered in the late 20th century have come to dominate left-wing thinking in the 21st; and where their characteristic failure to stand by comrades and concomitant willingness to make excuses for any maniac, as long as he is anti-American, lead.

It follows on from a discussion of how John Major’s Tories stood back while the Serbs massacred the Bosnian Muslims even after had revealed that concentration camps were back in Europe for the first time since the age of the dictators.

You will note that there are citations aplenty.
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