Dedicated Follower Of Fashion by Les May

I STARTED reading the then Manchester Guardian in 1960 when I started work and for the first time had the money to buy it. For forty or so years, during which it changed dropped the Manchester bit, I was a loyal reader, but somewhere around 2000 I finally tired of its increasingly uncritical feminism and stopped buying it.

The final straw was an article about a couple of women who claimed to have ‘taken on’ the builders. It turned out that one was an academic and the other a student and they had worked on a site for all of a fortnight in the middle of summer. In other words not exactly a lifetime working outside in the middle of winter. More like a fortnight in the sun and then back to a nice warm office or lecture theatre for the cold wet weather.

Though Suzanne Moore, with her ever so predictable man bashing columns, has never been one of my favourite journalists, but I certainly warmed to her comments; ‘the cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies’ and ‘lately it has been hard to define what the Left consists of beyond smug affirmation’ in a piece entitled Why I had to leave The Guardian.

Moore had written an article which, as well as being in her usual man bashing style, complete with references to ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘who the real enemies are’ (a.k.a. Men), included the comment that some women ‘were uncomfortable with people being able to self-declare as a man or a woman – whatever their biological sex – for all sorts of reasons.’. It also referred to the ‘disinviting’ of Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford, who was due to give a polite two-minute speech of thanks at an event at Exeter College, on the grounds that she had addressed a meeting of the group Woman’s Place UK, which was formed in 2017 after proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act.

This was too much for the sensitive souls at The Guardian and 338 of them took exception to it in a letter to the editor.

So long as the fashion amongst those who like to call themselves ‘of the Left’ was that women, however privileged, were to be seen as the most oppressed creatures in the world, Moore was never short of a market for her wares. But then being ‘trans’ knocked women off the top spot and suddenly Moore found some of her views were unfashionable. Hence the letter.

A friend recently suggested that Labour’s poor showing in the recent election might be because working people had no time for the world of identity politics which has become the go-to issue for many would be activists on the Left. Is it just coincidence that when they were Labour leadership candidates Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey signed up to a pledge put together by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights? Perhaps working people just have different priorities.

You can find Moore’s original article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2020/mar/02/women-must-have-the-right-to-organise-we-will-not-be-silenced

And her version of the spat at The Guardian here:

https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-i-had-to-leave-the-guardian

For a quite different take on The Guardian look here;

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/05/05/the-ugly-truth-about-the-guardian/

NV can no longer embed links in the text of articles. To use these links copy the full text of the link into your browser (Startpage, DuckDuckGo or Google) and search in the usual way.

The Guardian Of Truth? by Les May

YESTERDAY, 2 May, the Filipino journalist Maria Ressa was presented with the World Press Freedom Prize by UNESCO in recognition of her fight for free speech in the Philippines where she has been the target of online attacks and judicial processes in which the law and law enforcement have been turned against journalists, human rights activists, and ordinary citizens under President Rodrigo Duterte.

In her acceptance speech she said "Equally dangerous and insidious (is the) virus of lies unleashed in our information ecosystem, infecting real people, who become impervious to facts… It changes the way they look at the world. They become angrier, more isolated. They distrust everything. In this environment, the dictator wins, crumbling our democracies from within."

This is an apocalyptic scenario of our political future: a world where as she puts it ‘power and money rule’. But it’s not just in the political sphere that people are susceptible to becoming impervious to facts as they navigate the information ecosystem. For some people the problem is ‘big tech’, platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the rest of social media, and the answer is for governments to regulate it. This view ignores the experience in the Philippines that it is the government that is using the law to determine what is acceptable as ‘facts’.

Nor is it just with social media that the problems reside. Mainstream outlets have exploited the knowledge that most people do not check what is fact and what is opinion. Pointing out that just because someone says something is true does not make it so, is unwelcome news both to some people in the media and to many readers and viewers. Facts become just what someone wants to believe and woe betide anyone who disagrees. I don’t take at face value what Meghan Markle had to say in her televised interview. I don’t matter, but Piers Morgan paid the price for his dissent.

The Guardian, once a byword for rectitude and fairness, has no qualms about printing a story about the actor Noel Clarke knowing that the likely outcome will be that he will never be able to clear his name and will probably never be able to work as an actor again. I have no idea about whether whether the allegations made are true or false, and importantly, nor does the person who wrote it or the editor who chose to include it in the paper. The editor could, and in my view should, have declined to publish any allegations which had not been reported to the police by the complainants.

By last Saturday The Independent, another supposedly quality paper, was running a story by Victoria Richards which began ‘I have never met Noel Clarke, but I have met men who have behaved in the way Clarke is accused of behaving’. Again, if what she says in this piece is true, why did she not report it to the police? Why should I believe her just because she says it?

A few days ago the Victims Commissioner said ‘Far too few rape cases are resulting in a charge and hundreds of complainants annually are being denied justice.’ But where is the justice for anyone, accuser or accused, in the Noel Clarke story? Where in the response of ITV and Sky is the presumption of innocence until proven guilty? The question ceases to be whether the accused will get a fair trial, it becomes whether s/he will get a trial at all.

Maria Ressa spoke of a ‘virus of lies’; so how do we vaccinate ourselves against it? The first thing is to recognise that it is not just a problem of ‘Big Tech’. Supposedly more respectable, media outlets try to shape our perception of events by what they decide is a story and how they slant it.

The second thing is to recognise that it is a problem we have to solve for ourselves and our families, rather than relying on a government imposed solution, which itself may become dangerous to free thought and expression. As Maria Ressa put it "fight and win your individual battle for integrity". Don’t buy your teenage daughter an expensive smartphone and then complain when something bad happens to her.

Scepticism about the truth of what you see, what you read and what you are told if you venture into what Ressa calls the ‘information ecosystem’ has to be the order of the day. There is a lot of space between distrusting everything and watching the dictators win because you no longer know what is true and what is false, and filtering out (some of) the lies and manipulation by questioning everything.

We can ask: Who is saying this? How reliable have they been in the past? Is there any way of independently verifying their account? Who gains from this version of events? Are they trying to pass off assertions as facts? These things require some effort on our part. If we are not prepared to make it there is one thing we can all do; don’t pass on stories unless you are certain they are true. Better still; don’t gossip!

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Rochdale's Reputation for Cover-ups

ON Wed 18 Mar 2015 a former editor of Rochdale's Alternative Paper (RAP), John Walker, wrote a piece in The Guardian entitled 'Our Cyril Smith story came out in 1979. What followed was a 36-year cover-up':

'Finally the hunt is on to nail those responsible for aborting police inquiries into the child sex abuse allegations against the late Liberal MP Cyril Smith and other – as yet unnamed – establishment figures from the 1970s and 1980s. But his abuses have been covered up and ignored for over 35 years. Why should the victims feel that anything much has changed in recent days'...

'I write as co-editor of the Rochdale Alternative Paper, which in May 1979 published a 2,000 word article, quoting in graphic detail from the testimonies of boys Smith had sexually abused a decade and a half earlier. The article was cleared legally by three prominent lawyers, on a pro-bono basis. They went through every word with a view to potential libel pitfalls. On legal advice we sought Smith’s comments prior to publication. We received none directly: only a bungled “gagging” writ, which failed to prevent publication...

'Rochdale council made Smith a freeman of the borough, named a room in the town hall after him and, in a ceremony attended by the current MP Simon Danczuk, put up a blue plaque in his honour – now taken down, apparently to prevent vandalism. More rubbing the noses of many victims in their misery, on their home patch.'

The conclusion John Walker came to in 2015 was:

'Smith had got away with it. He increased his parliamentary majority and, emboldened by his escape from justice, possibly continued his abuse of pubescent boys for two decades. Action in 1979 could have stopped him in his tracks, and prevented abuse and misery for future victims. Files on Smith’s child abuse were passed around police forces and the security services in the 1970s and 1980s – with no prosecutions. More covering up and inaction, instead of an end to his abuse.'

On that occasion following the emergence of the first Jimmy Savile revelations in 2012, Northern Voices and Paul Waugn then of the Politics Home site (now of the Huff Post) interviewed several of Smith's victims ultimately resulting in Channel 4’s Dispatches programme running an episode on Smith. Which Walker says 'did justice to the subject, but was allotted a ludicrous graveyard airing slot'.

Editorial Observation:

In recent times the case of the self-confessed electoral fraud Cllr. Faisal Rana and his surprising rise to power on Rochdale Council, has followed a pattern parelling the cover-ups involving Cyril Smith. A former CID officer told me that a report on Smith had been sent to the then Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) but had come back as 'Not in the Public Interest'. Similarly complaints have been ongoing about Cllr. Faisal Rana and it seems that the Rochdale police may have toned-down their report to the CPP and have failed to emphasis that it may have involved postal vote fraud which would require a prison sentence.

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The Managerial Revolution & Trump's evolution

Editorial Comment:

EIGHTY YEARS AGO James Burnham published his book The Managerial Revolution, which in 1941 caused a stir both in the USA and in this country. It recently occured to me as I struggled to make sense of what was going on now, that what was happening in the United States with Trump had something to do with the phenomena of managerialism. In this book Burnham took the view that capitalism was on the way out, but that Socialism was not replacing it, and that what was emerging was a kind of planned, centralized society which would be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.

In such a society what may be called the new boss class was arising, and was to be composed of, in Burnham's view; business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers, lumped together as 'managers'. What it gave us in 1945 with in the UK, under the Labour government, was nationalisation and the NHS, and the New Deal in the USA.

Below is an account by Timothy Shenk on what lies behind the developments which have led to what has now come to be called 'Trumpism'.

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The Dark History Behind Donald Trump

'The Republican intellectual establishment (in the USA) is united against Trump – but his message of cultural and racial resentment has deep roots in the American right' so wrote Timothy Shenk, in an article in The Guardian (Tue 16 Aug 2016) entitled 'The dark history of Donald Trump's rightwing revolt'.

And he added: 'Trump is a unique character, but the principles he defends and the passions he inflames have been part of the modern American right since its formation in the aftermath of the second world war. Most conservative thinkers have forgotten or repressed this part of their history, which is why they are undergoing a collective nervous breakdown today. Like addicts the morning after a bender, they are baffled at the face they see in the mirror.'

Conservatives tend to portray their cause as the child of a revolt against the liberal status quo that began in the aftermath of the second world war, gained momentum in the 1950s when a cohort of intellectuals supplied the right with its philosophical underpinning, attained political consciousness in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and won vindication with Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House. Ideas have consequences, they proclaimed. Just look at us.

But there is another way of interpreting the history of the American right, one that puts less emphasis on the power of ideas and more on power itself – a history of white voters fighting to defend their place in the social hierarchy, politicians appealing to the prejudices of their constituents so they can satisfy the wishes of their donors, and the industry that has turned conservatism into a billion-dollar business.

This is the explanation preferred by leftwing critics, who typically regard the Republican party as a coalition fuelled by white nationalism and funded by billionaires. But this line of attack also has a long history on the right, where a dissenting minority has been waging a guerrilla war against the conservative establishment for three decades. Now the unlikely figure of Donald Trump has brought in a wave of reinforcements – over 13 million in the primaries alone. Their target is the managerial elite, and their history begins in the run-up to the second world war, when a forgotten founder of modern American conservatism became a public sensation with a book that announced the dawning of a civilisation ruled by experts.

'The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World' was the most unlikely bestseller of 1941. The author, James Burnham, was a philosophy professor at New York University who until the previous year had been one of Leon Trotsky’s most trusted counsellors in the US. Time called Burnham’s work a grim outline of “the totalitarian world soon to come” that was “as morbidly fascinating as a textbook vivisection”.

The son of a wealthy railway executive, Burnham graduated near the top of his class in Princeton in 1927 before studying at Oxford and then securing his post at NYU. But the Great Depression radicalised him, and he began a double life, lecturing on Aquinas by day and polemicising against capital by night. By 1940, Burnham had lost his faith in the revolution of the proletariat. While Trotsky denounced his erstwhile disciple as an “educated witch doctor”, Burnham started work on the book that would justify his apostasy.

According to Burnham, Marxists were right to anticipate capitalism’s imminent demise but wrong about what would come next. Around the turn of the 20th century, he claimed, the scale of life had changed. Population growth surged, immense corporations gobbled up smaller rivals, and government officials struggled to expand their powers to match the growing size of the challenges they faced.

These structural changes fundamentally altered the distribution of power in society. In the 18th century, authority had rested with aristocrats; in the 19th century with capitalists; in the 20th century it had passed on to the managers, whose authority derived from their unique ability to operate the complex institutions that now dominated mass society.

Technocrats had become the new ruling class. According to Burnham, fascism, Stalinism and Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal were all products of this transformation, and there was no use struggling against the world that was coming into being – a world where state ownership of the means of production had become the norm, where sovereignty had shifted to a bureaucratic elite, and where the globe was divided into rival superstates.

Burnham was not the first to foresee a society run by managers, but the arguments he borrowed from others took on a different meaning when brought together in this form. His sweep was global, his narrative reached back centuries, and he almost seemed to welcome a totalitarian future. For Burnham, the only sensible response to the managerial revolution was to recognise that it had occurred and accept there was no point in trying to bring back a world that was already lost. This bleak forecast captured the public imagination. Fortune called it “the most debated book published so far this year” and it went on to sell more than 200,000 copies.

But Burnham quickly moved on to new territory. His true subject, he concluded, was power, and to understand power he needed a theory of politics. Marx had been his guiding influence in The Managerial Revolution; now he turned to Machiavelli, constructing the genealogy of a political theory that began with the author of The Prince and continued into the present.

For a Machiavellian, Burnham wrote, politics was an unending war for dominance: democracy was a myth, and all ideologies were thinly veiled rationalisations for self-interest. The great mass of humanity, in Burnham’s dark vision, would never have any control over their own lives. They could only hope that clashes between rival elites might weaken the power of the ruling class and open up small spaces of freedom.

Burnham’s new found zeal for defending freedom led him, in 1955, to a conservative magazine called National Review, and to the magazine’s charismatic young founder, William F Buckley Jr. Buckley’s goal was to turn a scattered collection of reactionaries into the seeds of a movement. His journal set out to make the right intellectually respectable, stripping it of the associations with kooks and cranks that allowed liberals to depict it as a politics for cave-dwellers who had not reconciled themselves to modernity. Burnham was there at the start, one of five senior editors on the masthead of the first issue.

Soon Burnham was Buckley’s ranking deputy. But in an editorial staff riven by abstract debates between ardent libertarians and devout Christians, Burnham was the pragmatist who urged his colleagues not to ask politicians for more than the electorate would accept. For the right to win over working-class voters, Burnham argued, the movement had to embrace a more populist economic policy – contrary to the wishes of his anti-statist colleagues and their corporate backers, who wanted to lower taxes on the rich and roll back the welfare state. “Much of conservative doctrine,” Burnham wrote in 1972, “is, if not quite bankrupt, more and more obviously obsolescent.” Less than a decade later, Ronald Reagan was president, and it was Burnham who seemed like a relic of the past.

For a long time, the only major study of Burnham’s work was a slim volume published in 1984 by a minor academic press under the title Power and History. The book’s author, Samuel Francis, seemed a typical product of the insurgent conservative movement Burnham had helped to create – though by the late 1990s, when Francis published an updated version of Power and History, it made more sense to speak of a new conservative establishment. Outsiders who arrived at the White House with Reagan had become senior executives in Conservatism Inc. With the end of the cold war, the right had lost the glue that had bound its coalition, but there were still battles to be waged, and the money was better than ever.

Francis was never going to become a star in the emerging rightwing infotainment complex. Shy and overweight, with teeth stained from smoking, he had difficulty making it through cocktail parties. After completing a PhD in British history at the University of North Carolina, Francis left academia for Washington – first working at a rightwing thinktank, then serving as an aide to a Republican senator, and finally joining the editorial staff of the capital’s influential conservative daily newspaper, the Washington Times.

Francis retained his academic interests while he ascended into the ranks of the conservative establishment. He published six books in his lifetime, but he worked in private on one massive volume that he hoped would bring together all the disparate strands of his thought. Finished in 1995 but not discovered until after his death a decade later, the result was published earlier this year under the title Leviathan and Its Enemies. It is a sprawling text, more than 700 pages long, digressive, repetitive and in desperate need of an editor.

It is also one of the most impressive books to come out of the American right in a generation – and the most frightening. It is a searching diagnosis of managerial society, written by an author looking for a strategy that could break it apart.

Like much of Francis’s writing, Leviathan and Its Enemies began with Burnham – in this case, quite literally. “This book,” Francis announced in the first sentence, “is an effort to revise and reformulate the theory of the managerial revolution as advanced by James Burnham in 1941.”

Francis agreed that society had been taken over by managers, but he believed the new ruling class was far more vulnerable than Burnham had realised. Not everyone had benefited from the rise of the experts – and Francis saw this unequal distribution of rewards as the managerial regime’s greatest weakness.

For reasons he never quite explained, he insisted that the cosmopolitan elite threatened the traditional values cherished by most Americans: “morality and religion, family, nation, local community, and at times racial integrity and identity”. These were sacred principles for members of a new “post-bourgeois proletariat” drawn from the working class and the lower ranks of the middle class. Lacking the skills prized by technocrats, but not far enough down the social ladder to win the attention of reformers, these white voters considered themselves victims of a coalition between the top and bottom against the middle.

According to Francis, this cohort had supplied the animating spirit of rightwing politics since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. They had supported Goldwater – but Francis regarded Goldwater’s programme, like the “movement conservatism” of the National Review, as a “quaintly bourgeois” throwback to the oligarchic politics of the 19th century, with nothing to offer the modern working man. Their tribune was not Goldwater but George Wallace, the notorious segregationist and Democratic governor of Alabama – who won five southern states as an anti-civil rights third-party candidate in the 1968 presidential election. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had appealed to this group, too, but neglected their interests after taking office. Despite having elected multiple presidents, the post-bourgeois proletariat had yet to find a voice.

But not all of the right’s intellectuals have been so blind. While keepers of the conservative flame in Washington and New York repeatedly proclaimed that Trump could never win the Republican nomination, in February a small group of anonymous writers from inside the conservative movement launched a blog that championed “Trumpism” – and attacked their former allies on the right, who were determined to halt its ascent. In recognition of the man who inspired it, they called their site the Journal of American Greatness.

Yet Francis had difficulty explaining why managerial society would generate so much opposition in the first place. In Leviathan and Its Enemies, he argued that resistance to the cosmopolitan elite would be driven by “immutable elements of human nature” that “necessitate attachment to the concrete and historical roots of moral values and meaning”.

He was more candid in a speech he gave while working on the book. “What we as whites must do,” he declared, “is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” Where mainstream conservatives depicted the US as a nation whose diverse population was linked by devotion to its founding principles, Francis viewed it as a racial project inextricably bound up with white rule. The managerial revolution jeopardised this racial hierarchy, and so it must be overthrown.

Francis delivered his remarks on racial consciousness at a conference organised by American Renaissance, an obscure journal devoted to promoting white nationalism. Years earlier, Francis had struck up a friendship with Jared Taylor, who went on to found the magazine with Francis’s encouragement. From their first encounter, Taylor recalled, he and Francis “understood each other immediately”.

Francis’s employers at the Washington Times were not as sympathetic. The paper fired him after his comments were released, a move that was part of his larger expulsion from the respectable right. Buckley himself dismissed Francis as “spokesman” for a group that had “earned their exclusion from thoughtful conservative ranks”.

Yet Francis would not be so easily purged. For years he had cultivated a relationship with Pat Buchanan, a one-time Nixon protege who had become one of the country’s most recognisable conservatives thanks to his role as co-host of CNN’s popular debating programme Crossfire. In 1992, Buchanan launched a long-shot campaign against incumbent president George HW Bush that, against all expectations, garnered almost 3m votes in the primaries. While all this was going on, Buchanan was growing closer to Francis, whom he later called “perhaps the brightest and best thinker on the right”.

Francis and Buchanan were linked by their association with a breakaway faction on the right known as paleoconservatism. While mainstream conservatives had taken advantage of cushy gigs in New York and Washington, paleocons depicted themselves as spokesmen for the forgotten residents of flyover country. Francis urged Buchanan to make another run for the White House in 1996, this time as the candidate of the post-bourgeois resistance. That campaign would be based on three issues: protectionism, opposition to immigration and an “America First” foreign policy that repudiated global commitments and foreign interventions in order to focus on defending the national interest.

Buchanan listened, and he went on to a surprise win in New Hampshire’s pivotal early primary, convincing Francis that the managerial elite was more vulnerable than at any point in his lifetime. While mainstream Republicans and Democrats celebrated forecasts that the US population was on track to become less than 50% white as a sign of America’s capacity to adapt and grow, Francis believed that the members of his post-bourgeois proletariat regarded these shifting demographics as another reminder of their dwindling power.

Buchanan’s campaign fizzled after New Hampshire, but Francis had a ready explanation for the collapse: Buchanan was too loyal to the Republican party to seize the opportunity he had been granted. “Don’t even use the word ‘conservative,’” Francis told Buchanan. “It doesn’t mean anything any more.” The managerial class had absorbed Buckley and his followers. They, too, were the enemy.

After Buchanan’s defeat and his own exile from mainstream conservatism, Francis devoted himself to what he called “racialpolitik”. He was a regular contributor to outlets promoting white racial consciousness – becoming, in Jared Taylor’s words, “the intellectual leader of a small but growing movement”. Francis denied that he was a white supremacist, but he condemned interracial sex, warned of “incipient race war” and drafted a manifesto for a white nationalist group arguing: “The American people and government should remain European in their composition and character.”

When he looked ahead, Francis was especially concerned with the threat that one rising political star posed to his vision of the future. Barack Obama, he remarked in 2004, was “the model of what the New American is supposed to be”. Ivy League-educated, effortlessly cosmopolitan, promising to transcend barriers of race – Obama was the embodiment of the managerial elite. He represented everything Francis loathed about the contemporary United States.

The fact that Obama, Francis’s symbol for American decadence, became one of the most popular figures in the country brought the great contradiction of his thought into relief. The 19th century belonged to the bourgeoisie and the 20th century to the managers, he argued, because these rising classes had performed necessary social functions. His post-bourgeois proletariat, by contrast, were on the decline.

So was Francis. The supposed realist who cast hunger for power as the driving force of world history spent most of his time writing for journals with subscribers in the low five figures. In his last years, he was a lonely man. Before his sudden death from a cardiac aneurism in 2005, he had begun a study of conservatism and race. His masterpiece, Leviathan and Its Enemies, was still tucked away in a box of floppy disks; when it was published 11 years later, it would be under the auspices of a white-nationalist press. The right-leaning Washington Examiner ran one of his few obituaries. “Sam Francis,” it said, “was merely a racist and doesn’t deserve to be remembered as anything less.” It seemed just as likely that Francis would not be remembered at all.

"You want you to really listen to this,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in January this year. The king of rightwing talk radio was lecturing his audience, which averages around 13 million people a week, on Samuel Francis. Prompted by a magazine article casting Francis as the prophet of Trumpism, Limbaugh read aloud from one of Francis’s post-mortems on the Buchanan campaign. “What’s interesting,” Limbaugh said, “is how right on it is in foretelling Trump.” Before abandoning the subject, he added one point. Francis, Limbaugh noted, “later in life suffered the – acquired the – reputation of being a white supremacist”, a reputation Limbaugh insisted was undeserved.

The white nationalists who rallied to Francis in the last decade of his life disagree on that point, but they also see Trump as a vindication of their longtime inspiration. “Sam would have said that Trump is doing exactly what he advised Patrick Buchanan to do,” maintains Jared Taylor, who made news in the primary season when it was revealed that he had recorded automated phone messages endorsing Trump. (“White Supremacist Robocall Heartily Urges Iowa Voters to Support Trump,” reported a headline in the conservative Daily Caller.) According to Taylor’s American Renaissance, “Francis would be very pleased to see the GOP and conservative establishments mocked and destroyed.”

Even liberal commentators are looking back at Francis – whose prediction of a white working-class backlash against a globalist ruling elite seems to be coming true not just in the US but across Europe. “If you just drop the white nationalism a lot of Francis makes sense,” says Michael Lind, who once worked as an assistant to Buckley but now describes himself as a “radical centrist”. According to Lind, conservatives have been “spurning their natural constituency – the mostly white working class”, creating space for the rise of Trump.

Francis was also an inspiration for the team at the Journal of American Greatness, who called him “the closest thing to what could be described as the source of Trumpian thought” in their very first post. They admitted that Francis’s writing “overtly indulges various Southern nostalgias”, but insisted that his “deservedly criticised statements on race” could be separated from the core of his analysis. The managerial class was still the enemy, and only Trump seemed even dimly aware of what it would take to mount an effective challenge.

Trump the candidate, they admitted, was at best an imperfect messenger. But it was the message that counted: “The American regime – like nearly all its cousins in the west – has devolved into an oligarchy.” JAG was not just arguing that Trump’s campaign had a coherent agenda – a controversial assertion, given that many on both the left and right have dismissed Trump as an unhinged demagogue jabbing randomly at pressure points in the electorate. It was arguing that Trump succeeded because of his platform. Without those ideas, he would have been just another novelty candidate. Armed with them, any of Trump’s more disciplined rivals might have stolen the nomination from him – but instead they opted for recycled bromides from the Reagan era.

The site could be fiery in its defence of Trump, but the best moments came when its targets were the grandees of the right. There are plenty of scathing articles about rightwing thinktanks written from the left, but none of their authors could write a sentence such as “Seeing conservatives court billionaires – which I have had occasion to do dozens, if not hundreds, of times – is like watching dorks tell cheerleaders how pretty they are.”

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Cambridge University dumps proposal it be 'respectful' of all views

THE GUARDIAN Ben Quinn @BenQuinn75

Wed 9 Dec 2020 19.26 GMT

Proposals requiring Cambridge University staff and students to be “respectful” of differing views under a freedom of speech policy have been overwhelmingly rejected in a vote by its governing body.

The policy will instead emphasise “tolerance” of differing views after an amendment put forward by those concerned about the impact on academic freedom was carried by a landslide majority (86.9%).

Cambridge alumni including Stephen Fry had been among those who had opposed elements of the new policy, which the actor and writer had described as “muddled”.

Visitors to the university would also have been asked to be “respectful” of the views and “diverse identities” of others.

It was subject to a ballot in recent weeks among members of the institution’s Regent House, its official governing body, which is largely comprised of academic and senior administrative staff.

There are also implications for the issue of “no platforming” as a result of the support for three amendments, elements of which stress that those invited to speak at the university “must not be stopped from doing so” as long as they remain within the law.

The vote was welcomed by Cambridge’s vice-chancellor, Prof Stephen Toope, as “an emphatic reaffirmation of free speech in our university”.

He added: “Freedom of speech is a right that sits at the heart of the university. This statement is a robust defence of that right.

“The university will always be a place where anyone can express new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions, and where those views can be robustly challenged. The statement also makes it clear that it is unacceptable to censor, or disinvite, speakers whose views are lawful but may be seen as controversial.

“Rigorous debate is fundamental to the pursuit of academic excellence and the University of Cambridge will always be a place where freedom of speech is not only protected, but strongly encouraged.”

The new policy reads: “In exercising their right to freedom of expression, the university expects its staff, students and visitors to be tolerant of the differing opinions of others, in line with the university’s core value of freedom of expression.

“The university also expects its staff, students and visitors to be tolerant of the diverse identities of others, in line with the university’s core value of freedom from discrimination.”

However, other academics at the university have expressed concern about the changes to the original policy statement, while the Cambridge branch of the Universities and Colleges Union has said that it and the amendments are not “fit for purpose”.

Prof Priyamvada Gopal, an academic at the university, tweeted: “There is no ‘free speech row’ at Cambridge. There is the university scrambling to follow government orders based on false moral panic, there are the poor students trying to make it less draconian, & there are the Freeze Peach brigade trying to stop the right to protest.”

The controversy has played out against the backdrop of increasingly fraught debates on campuses and elsewhere about the limits of freedom of speech.

Students at Cambridge University called earlier this year for a porter at Clare College to be suspended from his job after he resigned from his role on the city council in protest over a motion in support of transgender rights.

Opposition to the original freedom of speech policy proposal was spearheaded by a number of people at the university including Dr Arif Ahmed, who is a reader in philosophy there.

He told The Times last week: “A lot of people feel as if they’re living in an atmosphere where there are witch-hunts going on, a sort of academic version of Salem in the 17th century or the McCarthyite era.”

• This article was amended on 10 December 2020 to add Gopal’s title as a professor, to give Dr Ahmed his correct honorific and to describe him as a reader in philosophy rather than a philosophy professor.

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David Graeber (1961-2020): ethnographer, anthropologist and the study of everyday life

David Graeber (February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020

David Graeber, anthropologist and anarchist author of bestselling books on bureaucracy and economics including Bullshit Jobs: A Theory and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, has died aged 59.

On Thursday Graeber’s wife, the artist and writer Nika Dubrovsky, announced on Twitter that Graeber had died in hospital in Venice the previous day. The cause of death is not yet known.

Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death. His final book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, will be published in autumn 2021.

THE GUARDIAN

Sian Cain

Thu 3 Sep 2020 16.18 BST

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AS an ethnomethodologist I immediately recognise the anthropological approach of David Graeber. For example in an essay he asks:

'If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?'

IN the 1990s, members of our Ethnography group John Lee and a colleague at Manchester University did some research work on queuing in France and found that although people didn't queue in a line at metro stations in Paris etc. there was none the less a pattern with rules that could be applied without any formal enforcement. I notice that in Spain that people didn't form lines at stalls in the market place but when approaching a stall simply asked the question 'Quien es el ultimo?'. Once that was known it was not necessary to stand in a rigid line and one could freely chat and wait one's turn.*

In the UK there are regional differences and Northerners will, I think, notice a difference between people using the Underground in London and between folk waiting for the No.11 bus in say Chelsea. The Underground will seem a rougher experience for the first time user I think.

The Spanish experience will also vary according to where you are and what context: villages and small shops have slightly different customs. In Morocco, I noticed that people sleep in the bus stations over night before catching an early morning bus. Tickets were often not on sale in advance of the bus ariving because touts would buy them up and offer them for resale at a premium. And when the bus arrived at Rabat bus station a wrestling match would break out as to who could get to the front. When this happen once to me and I was forced to wait flexing my muscles I ostentatiously took off my jacket and handed it to my wife; whereupon an observant man selling the tickets quickly arranged that we got a seat on the next bus.

TIM HARFORD the 'Undercover Economist on the FT' has examined the problem of queuing thus:

Mathematicians reckon the odds are against you. If you choose a queue at random, there will be a line on either side of you, and thus a two-thirds chance that one will be faster.

Economists take a more sophisticated view. David Friedman, for instance, argues that the relevant discipline is financial market theory. Choosing the right queue is like picking the right portfolio of shares: if it were obvious which shares were good value, they wouldn’t be good value any more. If it were obvious which queue would be quickest, everyone would join it. Naive attempts to “beat the market” will fail.

Then there is “efficient market” theory – you can’t out-perform a random choice of shares because public information is immediately incorporated into share prices. In truth, most markets are not efficient and thus it is possible for an informed decision-maker to beat them. Even if supermarket queues were efficient, no queue would be a superior bet, because expert supermarket customers would quickly join any queue that was likely to be quicker.

More likely, queues are not efficient because few have much to gain from becoming expert queuers. Some have other considerations, such as minimising the distance walked, while others shop rarely, so the calculations are more trouble than they are worth.

And unlike the stock market, which a financial wizard can make more efficient by outweighing the foolish decisions of small traders, in the supermarket a single expert queuer has a limited effect on the distribution of queuing times.

I can advise you to steer clear of elderly ladies with vouchers, but more advice would be self-defeating. Too many of your rivals would read it.

First published at ft.com.

Many on the left, including some anarchists, would regard this focus on queuing as trivial. Yet the queue is central to most people's lives. In some cases in some countries it has led to riots.

Yet, Davd Graeber, the anarchist, has written: 'The truth is we probably can’t even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to create a democratic society; still, we’re confident that, human ingenuity being what it is, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic principles — which are, in the final analysis, simply the principles of fundamental human decency.'

* How NOT to Queue in Spain

If there was one thing that would set aside a Brit from say a Spaniard more than anything else it would probably be their attitude to queuing.

Whether a Brit examining the etiquette of queuing in Spain, or - worse still - a Brit berating a foreigner´s lack of understanding of queuing etiquette in the UK one thing is clear : Queuing etiquette is - or lack of it - is quite possibly the one thing that will drive a mild mannered granny into in a raving psychotic.

I was having a conversation on this subject with my intercambio language exchange partner the other day : What exactly is the etiquette with regards to queuing in Spain, and ditto with the UK ?

Juanjo explained to me that there wasn´t any etiquette when it came to queuing in general in Spain. In smaller Towns and Villages it may be considered polite to let the elder generation go first in certain circumstance, however, in shops it was usual practice to simply ask "¿ Quien es la Ultima ?" - which means " Who is last one [in the queue]? ".

It seem that this is time honoured tradition that has served generations of Spaniards perfectly well for generations, ensuring that the last person to enter a shop knows who the customer to be served in front of them is. That way everybody knows there place and is free to wander off or chat with friends etc...

The system only becomes problematic when in wanders clueless Guiri and either jumps his place, or fails to inform the person entering the shop behind him, where his place in the queuing system is.

As far as said Guiri is concerned, the fact that there is not a linear column of people stretching neatly away from the counter, means that there is in fact no queue.

And because said Guiri is both unaware of the existence of the etiquette he alone is responsible for the total collapse of law and order in the local Panaderia, and quite often leaves the shop frustrated at the "bunfight" that he has just caused (see what I did ? that Grammar school education wasn´t for nothing ...) and convinced that the very concept of queuing in Spain does not exist.

Juanjo conceded that as far as getting served in a bar, restaurant or market stall was concerned then queuing, as us Brits would know it, didn´t exist, and he just laughed when I asked about the etiquette of queuing for public transport.

(Have you ever wondered why you never see bus loads of Spaniards at Alton Towers ?)

On the subject of Public transport, Juanjo told me he was almost lynched once whilst on a business trip to the UK when he saw his bus approaching whilst walking with colleagues towards the Bus stop. Worried that the Bus wasn´t going to hang about longer than was necessary to let the passengers get off he sprinted down the pavement and leapt onto the Bus - seemingly ignoring the column of passengers waiting in the rain. His British colleagues did the decent thing and let him do so, casually joining the end of the queue, and letting each of the passengers shoot him their best icy glare in turn whilst waiting their turn in the queue.

I explained that I wouldn´t have been at all surprised to hear that there would have been queues of British women waiting quietly in a queue to take their place for a lifeboat on the deck of the Titanic.

Even when waiting in the Casualty department of A&E you still see some people at the triage station smiling sheepishly as the duty nurse decides that the 9" nail that they have embedded through their eyeball warrants them jumping further along the queue than the guy who just stubbed his toe.

It´s a disease we Brits are born with and will more than likely never be cured.

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Unpalatable Truths About The Slave Trade

by Les May

WHATEVER the courts finally decide, to many people the slow death of George Floyd under the knee of a policeman was murder and we should not lose sight of this as different groups compete with each other to use his death to foster their own agenda.

A few evenings ago a news programme carried an item in which the interviewee complained that although Tony Blair had expressed his regret about the transatlantic slave trade he had not ‘apologised’.  Now it has never occurred to me to ask Queen Elizabeth to apologise on behalf of her family for presiding over a system which kept my people in serfdom for some 400 years, nor that I should demand the stained glass windows which depict these monarchs in Rochdale Town Hall should be taken down, but I’ll let that pass.  The interviewee blamed this on Blair’s ‘white privilege’ seemingly blind to the fact that he is enjoying the privilege of living in a First World country with all the benefits that brings.

But there was more to this than an exercise in gesture politics.  What the interviewee seemed to be trying to do was resolve the question of what we should do with the statues of slave traders and the like, by capturing the narrative and presenting what is in effect a sanitised version of the transatlantic slave trade suited to modern prejudices.

This was a business enterprise and the transport of 12 million Africans across the Atlantic into slavery was just one part of it.  As it came to full development in the 18^th century it worked like this.  Metal goods made in Birmingham and cloth made in Lancashire were taken to Africa and traded for slaves. Slaves were transported across the Atlantic and traded for sugar in the Caribbean.   In turn this was transported back across the Atlantic to ports like Bristol and Liverpool which grew wealthy on the proceeds.  Then of course the cycle started up all over again.

So where did the 12 million slaves come from? Europeans had only a tiny foothold around the coasts of Africa and relied upon local rulers to provide the slaves, which they were more than happy to do in exchange for the manufactured goods they desired.  There was also a trans Saharan trade which supplied black slaves to North African countries.  The fact that African’s themselves were participants in enslaving fellow Africans is one of the unpalatable things we need to understand, and perhaps remind people of, when thinking about how we should respond to the demands that statues should be removed from our towns.   It should certainly be a part of the narrative surrounding the trans Atlantic slave trade in which Britain played a part.

What is not part of the agenda for these competing groups who seem so eager to rake over the coals of the past is the fact and the reality of modern day slavery. The estimates of the number of people in some form of slavery now are some two to three times higher than the 12 million or so Africans transported across the Atlantic over a period of about 120-150 years.

Anyone looking at the maps of modern day slavery will immediately become aware of the fact that it is not confined to countries inhabited by Europeans or by people of European descent.  The top ten countries for slavery are, China, DRC, India, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Philippines and Russia. But that does not mean it is absent from First World countries.   It has been suggested that more than 10,000 people are enslaved in the UK today.

Like the trans Atlantic slave trade of the late 17^th to mid 19^th century modern slavery is a business.  A Guardian article suggests it generates more than £100 billion in profits each year.  What should disturb us all is that in many cases the products produced by modern slaves are bought by us.  The supply chains which produce our clothes and our high tech goods are unlikely to be free of the taint of slavery. Which of course means that many of the people tipping statues into the nearest dock will, like you and I, be beneficiaries of modern day slavery.

The unpalatable truths are that fellow Africans were quite happy to supply captives to European slave traders during the period of the trans Atlantic slave trade and that slavery has not gone away, it is still with us.  But we have a choice; we can obsess about the past or we can work to eliminate it in the present.  The first of these will give us a warm glow of self satisfaction; the second will be a hard slog and require us all to examine our consciences about why we are able to buy some imported goods so cheaply.

If you care to follow the link to what has been called the ‘Arab Slave Trade’, you may wonder as I do, whether the term BAME, which is frequently used to imply some community of interest amongst the groups included in the acronym owes a great deal to wishful thinking.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-trafficking-persons-one-in-200

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/opinion/modern-slavery-grows.html

https://www.syracuse.com/news/2011/04 vendor_abused_mexican_workers.html

https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-north-korea-forced-labor-20161006-snap-story.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade

Typing the search terms ‘economist modern slavery’ will lead to a wealth of detail about global supply chains and their links to slavery.

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Pride & Prejudiced against Shrewsbury Pickets

Ricky Tomlinson’s criminal convictions to be re-examined

Appeal court to look again at case of Royle Family actor after claims he may have been unjustly jailed

Rob Evans

@robevansgdn

Tue 26 May 2020 16.19 BST

THIS WEEK, the Guardian reported that:
Documents discovered in the national archives have shown that a covert Whitehall unit had a “discreet but considerable hand” in the programme by supplying its makers with a large dossier about allegedly leftwing trade unionists.

The criminal convictions of actor Ricky Tomlinson, who starred in the TV comedy the Royle Family, are to be re-examined by appeal court judges after an official body suggested he may have been unjustly jailed.

Tomlinson and other trade unionists have been campaigning for years to clear their names after they were jailed during a strike in the 1970s.  On Tuesday, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the public body that scrutinises alleged miscarriages of justice, announced it had asked the court of appeal to review the cases of Tomlinson and others.

Tomlinson, 80, said it was “good news” and an opportunity to prove that he and 23 other men – known as the Shrewsbury 24 – were prosecuted in what amounted to a politically motivated attack on the trade union movement by the government, police and managers.  He worked as a plasterer in the construction industry before becoming well-known as as an actor in films such as Raining Stones and Riff-Raff.Tomlinson, was jailed in 1973 for two years during a strike after he was convicted of conspiring to intimidate and affray.  He had taken part in the first national building workers’ strike in 1972 to improve wages and safety regimes on sites.  Months after the strike ended, 24 trade unionists were arrested and prosecuted for offences including unlawful assembly, conspiracy to intimidate, affray and threatening behaviour while picketing.  After a series of three trials at Shrewsbury crown court in Shropshire, they were convicted of sentences ranging from three years 'to three months’ imprisonment suspended for two years.  For years, campaigners under the banner of the Shrewsbury 24 Campaign have been gathering evidence seeking to clear the names of those convicted, who believed that they were persecuted in an attempt to suppress trade unionists at a time of increasing workers’ militancy.  The review body’s new decision means that it has to date asked the appeal court to re-examine the cases of 14 of those convicted, having investigated their claims: along with the six referred on Tuesday, eight had been referred in March.

Why can't we know the truth about a strike that happened 40 years ago? | Ricky Tomlinson

 

The CCRC initially refused to send the cases to the court of appeal but changed its decision after a legal challenge by some of the trade unionists.  Helen Pitcher, the CCRC’s chairman, acknowledged: ”Some will think this has not been the commission’s finest hour. ”  The CCRC said its decision was based on fresh evidence arising from a 1973 note that showed that some original statements had been destroyed.  The commission said this had not been shown to the lawyers defending the men at their original trial.  The CCRC also highlighted a television documentary, Red under the Bed, about leftwing trade unionists, which was broadcast during the first trial in 1972.  Lawyers for defendants had unsuccessfully argued at the trial that the documentary had unfairly influenced the jury.Documents discovered in the national archives have shown that a covert Whitehall unit had a “discreet but considerable hand” in the programme by supplying its makers with a large dossier about allegedly leftwing trade unionists.A Whitehall official noted what he called “a good effort” by the Information Research Department, the Foreign Office unit that had been set up during the cold war to produce anti-communist propaganda abroad.After Tomlinson was convicted, he was blacklisted and struggled to land work. He became an actor and got his break in the 1980s when he played Bobby Grant in the Channel 4 drama Brookside.• This article was amended on 28 May 2020 to include a breakdown of the 14 cases so far referred to the CCRC, and to explain the role of the Shrewsbury 24 Campaign in gathering evidence.

Appeal

The Criminal Case Review Commission (CCRC) has ruled that the Court of Appeal should re-examine the criminal convictions imposed on several of the striking workers, including Tomlinson, who took part in the picket.  That decision by the CCRC was based on new evidence that indicated crucial statements had been destroyed, and of the “way in which the airing of the documentary was handled by the trial judge”.

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The Johnson Cummings Love-In

by Les May

WHEN the Tory party handed the keys of 10 Downing Street to Boris Johnson his first instinct was to avoid the scrutiny of Parliament by proroguing it.  This behaviour eventually found its way into the courts and Johnson was judged to have been a very naughty boy.

When the story emerged that an unelected ‘special adviser’ had driven someone suffering from Covid19 some 400km to another part of the country, when such actions were expressly forbidden by a law passed by his own government, Johnson’s first instinct was to behave in a way that would make it very difficult for any police force to investigate this matter, determine whether it was ‘reasonable travel’ and if necessary issue fines to both the driver and his passenger.  It is not for Johnson to decide whether Dominic Cummings’ actions fell within the definition of ‘reasonable travel’.

My understanding is that the Daily Mirror and the Guardian newspapers had approached Downing Street for comment before the story was published. The pair of them had plenty of time to ‘get their stories straight’.  First Johnson sought to exonerate Cummings by standing in front of the television cameras and saying that he ‘did not mark him down’.*   

Meanwhile Cummings was given to opportunity to get into ‘post facto rationalisation’ mode and prepare a long statement which he was then allowed to present to the assembled media over a 70 minute period in the Rose Garden of Number 10 Downing Street.  Take your pick of the excuses he gave for moving his Covid19 infected wife across the country; he was just being a good husband and father, he and his infected wife were likely to be ‘harassed’ if they quarantined themselves at their home address, it was all a ‘media plot’ anyhow.

What we are seeing here is Johnson using his power to subtly influence how the law operates. It will take a very strong minded senior police officer to insist on asking Dominic Cummings some pointed questions.  Fortunately they still exist. Johnson is not alone in this endeavour, Michael Gove tried to tell us that at the time the law was different from what the rest of us understood it to be.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/26/durham-police-open-investigation-into-dominic-cummings

The media have decided to concentrate on the ‘human story’ side of all this with accounts of spouses and children unable to be beside the bedside of a relative who died.   If the political parties take this line Johnson’s subtle abuse of power will go unnoticed and unchecked. Johnson and Cummings are well matched.  Spot the video clip where Cummings is using his thick black notebook to waft away the gaggle of reporters who are trying to ask him questions.   It rather reminded me of Hastings Banda and his fly whisk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastings_Banda

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Malcolm Muggeridge Interview on the Holodomor

 Holodomor

“Deliberate,” “diabolical” starvation. Malcolm Muggeridge on Stalin’s famine

By Marco Carynnyk

THE [UKRAINIAN] harvest of 1932 had been a fair one, no worse than the average during the previous decade, when life had seemed a bit easier again after three years of world war and five years of revolution and famine.  But then, as the Ukrainian peasants were bringing in their wheat and rye, an army of men advanced like locusts into every barn and shed, and swept away all the grain.  The few stores that the peasants managed to put away were soon gone, and they began eating leaves, bark, corn husks, dogs, cats and rodents.
When that food was gone and the people had puffed up with watery edema, they shuffled off to the cities, begging for bits of bread and dying like flies in the streets. In the spring of 1933, when the previous year’s supplies were gone and before the new vegetation brought some relief, the peasants were dying at the rate of 25,000 a day, or 1,000 an hour, or 17 a minute. (In World War II, by comparison, about 6,000 people were killed every day.)  Corpses could be seen in every country lane and city street, and mass graves were hastily dug in remote areas. By the time the famine tapered off in the autumn of 1933, some 6 million men, women and children had starved to death.

Malcolm Muggeridge was there that terrible winter and spring. As a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Moscow, he was one of the few Western journalists who circumvented Soviet restrictions and visited the famine regions – and then honestly reported what he had seen.
Shortly before Mr. Muggeridge’s articles appeared in the Guardian, the Soviet authorities declared Ukraine out of bounds to reporters and set about concealing the destruction they had wreaked. Prominent statesmen, writers and journalists – among them French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty of The New York Times – were enlisted in the campaign of misinformation.
The conspiracy of silence was largely successful. For years to come Stalinists and anti-Stalinists argued whether a famine had occurred and, if so, whether it was not the fault of the Ukrainian peasants themselves. Today, as Ukrainians throughout the world (except in the Soviet Union, of course, where the subject cannot even be mentioned) commemorate the 50th anniversary of the famine, the events of 1933 are still largely unknown.
Mr. Muggeridge and I talked at his cottage in Sussex, England. I was particularly anxious to know why he, unlike other foreign correspondents in Moscow in 1933, took the trouble to investigate the famine.

* * *

Q: Why did you decide to write about the famine?
A: It was the big story in all our talks in Moscow, everybody knew about it. There was no question about that. Anyone you were talking to knew that there was a terrible famine going on. Even in the Soviets’ own pieces there were somewhat disguised acknowledgements of great difficulties there: the attacks on the kulaks, the admission that the people were eating the seed grain and cattle.
You didn’t have to be very bright to ask why they were eating them. Because they were very hungry, otherwise they wouldn’t. So there was no possible doubt. I realized that that was the big story. I could also see that all the correspondents in Moscow were distorting it.
Without making any kind of plans or asking for permission I just went and got a ticket for Kiev and then went on to Rostov. The Soviet security is not as good as people think it is. If you once duck it, you can go quite a long way. At least you could in those days. Having all those rubles, I could afford to travel in the Pullman train. They had these old-fashioned international trains – very comfortable, with endless glasses of hot tea and so on. It was quite pleasant.
But even going through the countryside by train one could sense the state of affairs. Ukraine was starving, and you only had to venture out to smaller places to see derelict fields and abandoned villages.
On one occasion, I was changing trains, and I went wandering around, and in one of the trains in the station, the kulaks were being loaded onto the train, and there were military men all along the platform. They soon pushed me off. Fortunately, they didn’t do more. They could have easily hauled me in and asked, “What the hell are you doing here?” But they didn’t. I just cleared off. But I got the sense of what it was like.
I’ll tell you another thing that’s more difficult to convey, but it impressed me enormously. It was on a Sunday in Kiev, and I went into the church there for the Orthodox mass. I could understand very little of it, but there was some spirit in it that I have never come across before or after. Human beings at the end of their tether were saying to God: “We come to You, we’re in trouble, nobody but You can help us.”
Their faces were quite radiant because of this tremendous sense they had.  As no man would help them, no government, there was nowhere that they could turn. And they turned to their Creator. Wherever I went it was the same thing.
Then when I got to Rostov I went on to the North Caucasus.  The person who had advised me to go there was the Norwegian minister in Moscow, a very nice man, very well-informed, who said, “You’ll find that this German agricultural concession is still working there. Go and see them, because they know more about it than anybody, and it’ll be an interesting experience.”  So I went there. It was called the Drusag concession.

Q: What difference did you see between Drusag and the collective farms in Ukraine and the North Caucasus?
A: The difference was simply that the agriculture in the concession was enormously flourishing, extremely efficient.  You didn’t have to be an agronome, which God knows I’m not, to see that there the crops, the cattle, everything, was completely different from the surrounding countryside.
Moreover, there were hordes of people, literally hordes of people trying to get in, because there was food there, which gave a more poignant sense to the thing than anything except that service in the church.  The German agronomes themselves were telling me about it.  They’d been absolutely bombarded with people trying to come there to work, do anything if they could get in, because there was food there.

Q: I have read in a British Foreign Office dispatch that Drusag employed five people simply to pick up bodies of peasants who had come in and died of hunger.
A: Yes, that’s what I’d heard too, if not more. The peasants staggered in and dropped dead.

Q: Were the Germans able to do anything for the peasants?
A: They could help them with a little food – they were quite charitable in their attitude – but of course they couldn’t do more than that flea-bit.

Q: What were you thinking and, more importantly perhaps, what were you feeling when you saw those scenes of starvation and privation in Ukraine? How does one respond in such a situation?
A: First of all, one feels a deep, deep, deep sympathy with and pity for the sufferers. Human beings look very tragic when they are starving. And remember that I wasn’t unaware of what things were like because in India, for instance, I’ve been in a village during a cholera epidemic and seen people similarly placed. So it wasn’t a complete novelty.
The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was not the result of some catastrophe like a drought or an epidemic. It was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind which demanded the collectivization of agriculture, immediately, as a purely theoretical proposition, without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering.
That was what I found so terrifying. Think of a man in an office who has been ordered to collectivize agriculture and get rid of the kulaks without any clear notion or definition of what a kulak is, and who has in what was then the GPU and is now the KGB the instrument for doing this, and who then announces it in the slavish press as one of the great triumphs of the regime.
And even when the horrors of it have become fully apparent, modifying it only on the ground that they’re dizzy with success, that this has been such a wonderful success, these starving people, that they must hold themselves in a bit because otherwise they’d go mad with excitement over their stupendous success. That’s a macabre story.

Q: There were kulaks throughout the Soviet Union, and they were “liquidated” as an entire class. Collectivization also took place throughout the Soviet Union. And yet the famine occurred at the point when collectivization had been completed, and it occurred not throughout the Soviet Union, but largely in Ukraine and the North Caucasus. How do you explain that?
A: Those were the worst places. They were also the richest agricultural areas, so that the dropping of productivity would show more dramatically there. But they were also places, as you as a Ukrainian know better than I, of maximum dissent. The Ukrainians hated the Russians. And they do now. Therefore, insofar as people could have any heart in working in a collective farm, that would be least likely to occur in Ukraine and the North Caucasus.

Q: Given the deliberate nature of the famine in Ukraine, the decision on Stalin’s part to proceed with collectivization and to eliminate resistance at any cost and to get rid of the kulak, vaguely defined as that category was, and given the fact that food continued to be stockpiled and exported even as people dropped dead on the streets, is it accurate to talk about this as a famine? Is it perhaps something else? How does one describe an event of such magnitude?
A: Perhaps you do need another word. I don’t know what it would be. The word “famine” means people have nothing whatsoever to eat and consume things that are not normally consumed. Of course there were stories of cannibalism there. I don’t know whether they were true, but they were very widely believed.
Certainly the eating of cattle and the consequent complete destruction of whatever economy the farms still had was true.
I remember someone telling me how all manners and finesse disappeared. When you’re in the grip of a thing like this and you know that someone’s got food, you go and steal it. You’ll even murder to get it. That’s all part of the horror.

Q: How does one rank the famine of 1933 with other great catastrophes?
A: I think it’s very difficult to make a table of comparison. What I would say with complete truth and sincerity is that as a journalist over the last half century I have seen some pretty awful things, including Berlin when it was completely flat and the people were living in little huts they’d made of the rubble and the exchange was cigarettes and Spam.
But the famine is the most terrible thing I have ever seen, precisely because of the deliberation with which it was done and the total absence of any sympathy with the people. To mention it or to sympathize with the people would mean to go to the gulag, because then you were criticizing the great Stalin’s project and indicating that you thought it a failure, when allegedly it was a stupendous success and enormously strengthened the Soviet Union.

Q: What sort of response did you encounter when you came back from the Soviet Union and published your findings, particularly from people close to you, like the Webbs?
A: The Webbs were furious about it. Mrs. Webb in her diary puts in a sentence which gives the whole show away. She says, “Malcolm has come back with stories about a terrible famine in the USSR. I have been to see Mr. Maisky [the Soviet ambassador in Britain] about it, and I realize that he’s got it absolutely wrong. “Who would suppose that Mr. Maisky would say, “No, no, of course he’s right”?

Q: This is precisely the attitude that the British government was taking at that time. L.B. Golden, the secretary of the Save the Children Fund, which had been very active during the famine of 1921-22 in Russia and Ukraine, approached the Foreign Office in August 1933. He’d received disturbing information about famine in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, but the first secretary of the Soviet embassy had assured him that the harvest was a bumper one, and so Golden asked the Foreign Office whether a public appeal should be put out. The Foreign Office told him not to do anything, and he did not. The Soviet authorities were not admitting to a famine, and therefore it was agreed that nothing should be said.
A: Absolutely true. The other day I had occasion to meet Lord March, the representative of the laity on the World Council of Churches. “Why is it that you’re always putting out your World Council complaints about South Africa or Chile?” I asked. “I never hear a word about anything to do with what’s going on in the gulag or with the invasion of Afghanistan. Why is that?”
He said, “Whenever we frame any resolution of that sort, it’s always made clear to us that if we bring in that resolution, then the Russian Orthodox Church and all the satellite countries will withdraw from the World Council of Churches.”
“Then do you not pursue the matter?” I asked. And he said, “Oh yes, we don’t pursue it because of that.” I was amazed that the man could say that. But there it was, and it’s exactly true of the Foreign Office.

Q: You published “Winter in Moscow” when you got back from the Soviet Union, and you were attacked in the press for your views.
A: Very strongly. And I couldn’t get a job.

Q: Why was that? Because people found your reports hard to believe?
A: No, the press was not overtly pro-Soviet, but it was, as it is now, essentially sympathetic with that side and distrustful of any serious attack on it.

Q: How do you explain this sympathy?
A: It’s something I’ve written and thought about a great deal, and I think that the liberal mind is attracted by this sort of regime. My wife’s aunt was Beatrice Webb, and she and Sidney Webb wrote the classic pro-Soviet book. “Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.” And so, one saw close at hand the degree to which they all knew about the regime, knew all about the Cheka [the secret police] and everything, but they liked it.
I think that those people believe in power. It was put to me very succinctly when we were taken down to Kharkiv for the opening of the Dnieper dam. There was an American colonel who was running it, building the dam in effect. “How do you like it here?” I asked him, thinking that I’d get a wonderful blast of him saying how he absolutely hated it. “I think it’s wonderful,” he said. “You never get any labor trouble.”
This will be one of the great puzzles of posterity in looking back on this age, to understand why the liberal mind, the Manchester Guardian mind, the New Republic mind, should feel such enormous sympathy with this authoritarian regime.

Q: You are implying that the liberal intelligentsia did not simply overlook the regime’s brutality, but actually admired and liked it.
A: Yes, I’m saying that, although they wouldn’t have admitted it, perhaps not even to themselves. I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person, an early member of the Fabian Society and so on, saying to me, “Yes, it’s true, people disappear in Russia.” She said it with such great satisfaction that I couldn’t help thinking that there were a lot of people in England whose disappearance she would have liked to organize.
No, it’s an everlasting mystery to me how one after the other, the intelligentsia of the Western world, the Americans, the Germans, even the French, fell for this thing to such an extraordinary degree.

Q: One man who didn’t fall for it was George Orwell. Did you discuss your experiences in the Soviet Union with him? I ask because Orwell mentioned the famine in his essay “Notes on Nationalism.” “Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people,” he wrote, “have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English Russophiles.”
A: We discussed the whole question. George had gone to the Spanish Civil War as an ardent champion of the Republican side. In Catalonia he could not but realize what a disgraceful double-faced game the Communists were playing there. He was in a thing called POUM [Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista, the United Marxist Workers’ Party], which was allegedly Trotskyist. Those people were not being knocked off by the Franco armies, they were being knocked off by the Communists. And he was deeply disillusioned. He then wrote what I think is one of his best books, “Homage to Catalonia.”
And so what brought us together was that we were in the same dilemma. People assumed that because he had attacked the Communists, he must be on the Franco side. Just as people thought that because I’d attacked the Communist side, I must be an ardent member of the right wing of the Conservatives. And so we had that in common, and we became friends. He had a feeling that I also had strongly, that the Western world is sleepwalking into becoming a collectivist, authoritarian society. And that’s really what “1984” is about.

Q: Where do you think that Orwell got the idea for “Animal Farm”? His fable of the revolution betrayed is so accurate that it even portrays the famine. Food falls short, and the animals have only chaff and mangels to eat. Napoleon (Stalin) conceals the facts and orders the hens to surrender their eggs so that he can procure grain to keep the farm going. The hens rebel and Napoleon orders their rations to be stopped, decreeing that “any animal giving so much as a grain of corn to a hen shall he punished by death.”
A: It’s his masterpiece. It is one of the few books written in the 20th century that I would say will always be read. It’s a beautiful piece of writing. If you show it to children, they love it and don’t understand the other part of it. I think that he had a deep hatred of intellectuals as people. He felt that they were fortunate, and in “Animal Farm” he was illustrating how a revolution can be twisted into its opposite. It is a superb allegory of the whole thing.
But it’s difficult to explain. He wasn’t a man who discussed political theories. He had an instinct that these intellectuals were somehow double-faced, and he never tired of railing against them. If you had asked him about the Soviet Union, he would have just said, “It’s a dictatorship, and they behaved disgracefully in Spain.” So he’d write the whole thing off in that way. He still called himself a socialist.

Q: To the very end.
A: To the very end of his life. He actually went canvassing for Anuerin Bevin, and I’ve always wondered what particular line of talk he would have fallen into. He wasn’t a person with whom you could exchange ideas as such. He was kind of impressionistic in his mind.

Q: Absorbed things without actually analyzing them.
A: That’s right. And in “1984,” all that business about Newspeak and doublethink is beautifully done. And it is the kernel of the whole thing. And the terrorism and the fact that you drift into a situation in which people are in power with no program except to remain in power, which is very much the state of affairs that’s come to pass. The people in the Kremlin at this moment are not in power because they’ve got plans to do this or the other thing. All they want is a policy which will enable them to stay in power.

Q: All that you’ve said about the image of the world that liberals have and about reporting, in this case from the Soviet Union, leads to a rather large and difficult question about the reliability of the image of the world that we are given.
A: Yes, indeed. I believe that this is how posterity will see it. We are a generation of men who have become completely captivated and caught up in false images. Television and all these things are splendid instruments for keeping them going. Splendid. And I would say that the collapse of Western civilization will be much more due to that than to anything else.

Q: False images?
A: False images. And it’s enormously difficult to correct them. Children who grow up now have been looking at television and hearing the voice of the consensus, and they know nothing else. So I can’t myself believe that there’s any escape from this, except that the whole show will blow up sometime or other. But I think that Orwell’s position was rather different. He looked back on the past with nostalgia, which is peculiar in a man of his attitude of mind and temperament.

Q: He was very conservative and very English in many ways.
A: Deeply conservative. The most conservative mind I’ve ever encountered. But let’s take this much more sinister thing we were talking about now, this complete imprisonment of people at all levels into images which are fantasy, bringing about in them a kind of unanimity, a consensus, which is very dangerous and which is really the party line. For instance, I know a great many people in the BBC. I would have the greatest difficulty in finding any people there, more than a handful, who would have other than the consensus views on things like abortion, euthanasia or overpopulation. There’s a consensus, and the consensus seems to be true, and the images over which people spend a high proportion of their lives shape, color and dominate all their thoughts.

Q: What is your way to overcome these images?
A: As a Christian, I believe that you can, if you want to, find reality, which is what people call God. You can relate yourself to that reality, and as a person belonging to what’s called Western civilization you can find in the drama of the Incarnation everything that’s come therefrom, you can recover contact with reality. That is in fact the only way. The ordinary man gets up and spends four, five or six hours of his day looking into these pictures and being subjected to his fantasy view. I often think that like Caliban’s island, full of sounds and sweet airs, when we wake, we cry to sleep again. But if people ever do wake, and I don’t believe they wake much anymore, they cry to sleep again. And crying to sleep again is turning on the apparatus.

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Marco Carynnyk has published poetry and criticism as well as edited and translated nine books, of which two recent ones are Leonid Plyushch’s “History’s Carnival” (1979) and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” (1981).

He is a visiting fellow at the Kennan Institute in Washington and is writing two books and filming a documentary about the famine of 1933. Clips from this interview with Mr. Muggeridge have been shown on programs about the famine prepared by CKCF in Montreal, Radio Quebec and the CBC.