That old zeitgeist made new again

18 May 1935

In an earlier post I looked at some recent opinion polls that suggested opposition amongst the British public to military intervention in Syria was grounded less in Leftist anti-imperialism and more in nationalistic isolationism tinged with xenophobia.

A Telegraph article by Tom Mludzinski of Ipsos MORI presents more details on changing public views regarding military action. He contrasts the lack of support for Syria action with levels of support for earlier interventions, from the 1991 Gulf War to Libya in 2011.

An interesting aspect is the apparent decline in influence of a UN mandate. Only 6% support action in Syria without UN backing, and even if it were to get UN backing only 34% say they would approve. Intervention in Libya, backed by a UN Security Council resolution, had 63% support.

One factor in influencing public opinion may be which way the balance of fear tips. 40% are concerned that doing nothing is worse than taking action, and 48% think that by not taking action we might be encouraging other countries to use chemical weapons, but  nearly eight in ten believe that intervening in Syria will encourage attacks on Britain and the West.

How many base their opinion on the likely impact of any intervention on Syrians? Not too many:

Perhaps most telling is the way the British public view the role of our armed forces, with very few wanting Britain to be the “world’s policeman” or the “guardian of liberty”. Ten years after the beginning of the War in Iraq, three in ten (31pc) Britons now say British armed forces should intervene abroad when other people’s rights and freedom are threatened. Most are more isolationist with 44pc saying we should only intervene when British interests are directly threatened and a further 21pc believe British armed forces should only be used to defend British territory.

Read the rest at The Telegraph.

8 May 1937

Exercising the Colonel

Above, one of David Low’s Colonel Blimp cartoons from the lead up to the Second World War. You can see and read more of the Colonel in this blog’s most popular post by far, from a few years back.

I would love to look back at Low’s satires of muddled thinking and be able to say how out of date they seem, but that’s far from being the case. David Low’s Blimp character was primarily a satire on right-wing little Englander pro-appeasement attitudes, but Low also took aim at similar views on the Left via his Pmilb character: Blimp backwards. Today’s Pmilbs and Blimps continue to muddle ideas of radical left and reactionary right, of liberalism and of bigotry.

A couple of prime examples from the past pages of this blog are Simon Jenkins, a modern-day little Englander who has found a comfortable berth at the supposedly liberal Guardian, and Judith Butler, a leading academic in feminist and gender theory who contrived to describe Hamas and Hezbollah, two violent, sectarian, antisemitic and misogyninist organisations, as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

Several more examples have been on parade in recent days, with a series of supposedly Left commentators eager not to distance their own beliefs from those of religiously bigoted anti-democratic fanatical murderers, but rather to point to how close in agreement they are, and to claim justification of motive (though not of course of action) for bloody public murder on a London street.

Take Rachel Shabi’s comments on the Woolwich murder, beginning with this tweet:

Just told Sky news #Woolwich a collective problem, we should not single out Muslims; need to look into Brit foreign policy element
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 24, 2013

There is nothing that controversial here in my eyes. Radicalisation is a problem for the whole of society to deal with. To charge one group with responsibility for solving it in isolation would seem likely to be counterproductive. And UK foreign policy? What about it? That aspect could be taken in a number of directions.

But then she clarified that her preferred response to the murder was “eliminating bad foreign policy as a recruitment device”.

.@nicholasblincoe it's not that madness can be cured. more about eliminating bad foreign policy as a recruitment device
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 24, 2013

So here Rachel Shabi sees UK foreign policy as bad and believes that as murderers of today and potential murderers of tomorrow agree with her, that policy should change. However when pressed by Rob Marchant on the question “Should foreign policy change as a result of these attacks,” she tries to split hairs:

@rob_marchant @tomsp @tomharrismp UK foreign policy in Mid East should change cos it is hypocritical, counterproductive NOT cos of attacks
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 25, 2013

Rachel Shabi insists that “understanding is not justifying,” but though she doesn’t justify the act she does justify the motive, making clear that she sees anger over UK foreign policy, the only motive to which she gives any consideration, as “justifiable anger,” and again “justified anger”.

Incredibly, having concluded that this anger over actions like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan leads to radicalisation and acts of terror, she then does her little bit to encourage such anger with a wholly one-sided representation of today’s news story on prisoners held by the British Army in Afghanistan:

This is how UK 'liberates' #Afghanistan: with unlawful detentions in secret prison ind.pn/112ek85
— rachel shabi(@rachshabi) May 29, 2013

It’s an interesting story, though not so simple as Rachel Shabi would have you believe.

If I found that any of my views were shared by such cutthroats I think I might want to consider whether I was somehow in error, but Rachel Shabi is not alone in finding affirmation in such an alignment. There are more happy to declare their, at least partial, agreement with the murderers...

Ian Leslie points to the stupidity of ex-mayor Ken Livingstone blaming the attack on the invasion of Iraq.

Our friend in Canada, Terry Glavin, adds Michael Moore and Glenn Greenwald (in the Guardian) to his list of moral illiterates weighing in on Woolwich. He writes:

Do note that it isn’t some imam in some dingy mosque carrying on like that, although now and then there will be one of those, too. Note as well that the overwhelming majority of Afghans, and the overwhelming majority of Afghan-Canadians, supported NATO’s intervention, and most of these people are, as it happens, Muslims.

Note well that these idiocies about blowback and retaliation do not generally come from the mosques at all. It’s the sort of rubbish that comes from out of the mouths of moral illiterates.

It should stop.

Norman Geras finds Greenwald’s failure of logic replicated in a Guardian article by Terry Eagleton, and lays out the mechanism to display its faults.

Jonathan Freedland doesn’t forget the Stop The War Coalition, who naturally take their own alignment with the declared motives of murderers as absolute vindication.

Nick Cohen, like Terry Glavin above, takes the time to point out some people most likely not in agreement with the murderers, namely victims of Islamist violence, mostly Muslim, not just in Afghanistan but also Pakistan, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia. The list is far from exhaustive.

Bizarrely Rachel Shabi refers to Nick Cohen’s article as “a cluster bomb of muscular liberal lunacy.” Whatever about lunacy, I think her metaphor of an indiscriminate weapon of mass slaughter to describe the article is perhaps an example of what they refer to in the mental health business as projection. (A more complex analysis here by blogger Unrepentant Jacobin.)

Funnier still is that after Livingstone, Moore, Greenwald, Eagleton and the Stop The War Coalition have all had their say, Rachel Shabi writes 950 words on how debate is being stifled, closed, sealed shut even. And all of her words are published by the Guardian.

Blimp and the City

From The Complete Colonel Blimp, a collection of David Low’s cartoons edited by Mark Bryant and published by Bellew Publishing 1991. More of Low’s Blimp in this earlier post.

See also Francis Sedgemore on David Cameron’s recent EU performance, From Chamberlain to Churchill to Blimp. My apologies to Francis for being so slow in finding the appropriate illustration.

While we’re on that fortnight-old subject, I found the following worthwhile reading: Joe Lynam, business correspondent for BBC News, asking Is the City worse off after David Cameron’s EU veto? Chris Dillow asking Why defend the City? And Peter Ryley’s summing up:

Cameron has upset everybody by vetoing a treaty imposing the wrong remedy on the basis of a wrong diagnosis even though he agrees with the diagnosis and is busy applying the same wrong remedy to the British economy.

Cartoon copyright © Low Estate/Solo Syndication.

Sequence 69, Exterior: Somewhere in Flanders

CLIVE: Murdoch! do you know what this means?

MURDOCH: I do, sir. Peace. We can go home. Everybody can go home!

CLIVE: For me, Murdoch, it means more than that. It means that Right is Might after all. The Germans have shelled hospitals, bombed open towns, sunk neutral ships, used poison-gas - and we won! Clean fighting, honest soldiering have won! God bless you, Murdoch!

From the 1942 script for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. More on this troublesome and complex film here, and more on the Colonel here. Did I mention troublesome?

Below is a fragment from Kevin Macdonald’s book, Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, on the consequences of the war’s end for Imre Pressburger in his home town of Temesvar (Timişoara) in the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Someone somewhere had decreed that he was to be Romanian or Serbian and he would have to accept it passively. For almost two years Temesvar was occupied by the Serbs, but ultimately, along with the rest of Transylvania, it was assigned to Romania at the infamous Trianon Treaty of 1920, when the allies, led by Britain, distributed about two-thirds of Hungary’s land mass and half its population to clamouring neighbours. It is said that Hungary’s Deputy Foreign Minister fainted when he saw the recoloured map.

Imre was now a Romanian - a foreigner in his own country. The pattern of his life as an eternal alien had begun. Without having to budge an inch from home, he had set out on the circuitous journey that would eventually lead him to England.

Finally a relevant Blimp clip via Bob.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp script copyright © The Estates of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1994.

Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of a Screenwriter copyright © Kevin Macdonald 1994.

Added: George Szirtes on changing maps and remembrance.

‘Realists’ go home

At Harry’s Place: An Acceptable Dictator. Packing bags time. Pack the ambassador in the diplomatic bag, I mean.

It’s also in The Times. UPDATE: Francis Sedgemore also has something to say. UPDATE 2: Terry Glavin thinks it’s just those obscure London journals making trouble again. But then this happens.

In this information war, some on the UK side are getting quite practiced at friendly fire. How do they expect the population in Afghanistan to align with the government and the UN and NATO mission if UK diplomats and military officers actively undermine confidence? And why would the Taleban change their minds and negotiate in response to signs of weakness? This looks like a repeat of Basra. British troops deserve better leadership. Afghanistan deserves steadfast friends.

Follow up posts: The language of victory, Punchline, and Loose lips.

Illustration: realists in history by Low, a repeat appearance from this post, and found in The Complete Colonel Blimp, edited by Mark Bryant, and copyright © Low estate/Solo Syndication.

After the USSR

I’m not a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan. I’ve dipped in at times in the past, but with little consistency. In the last few days however he’s really got my attention, and for all the wrong reasons.

On the 12th he wrote “The US has no rational basis to be as committed to Georgia as Russia is; and has very little moral standing to protest an invasion of a sovereign country.”

This would be in the first part an argument for accepting the notion of spheres of influence, of saying faraway fellow humans are less our fellows than our near neighbours, a Saul Steinbergian view of the world, a condemnation of faraway small nations to live as serfs in a system of international feudalism. 

The second part is an argument that was familiar to the cartoonist David Low when he satirised the appeasers of the 1930s. It’s an argument which in this case also implies a grotesque distortion of fact, but I’ll come back to that distortion, as Andrew Sullivan did.

A few hours later Andrew Sullivan clarified with “I was a little too mad at Bush to express adequate sympathy for the plight of the Georgians at first,” and went on to elaborate on his reasons for seeing Russia’s invasion of Georgia through the lens of Iraq. Specifically he saw it in a context of US abuse of prisoners in Iraq, the question of justification for the invasion of Iraq, and the question of UN authority for the invasion of Iraq. He concluded:

We can argue over the analogies. Yes, Iraq was a wicked dictatorship, and Georgia is a nascent democracy. Yes, the US is not Russia in terms of democratic norms. But actions and context are important. Iraq is thousands of miles away from the US; Georgia is on Russia's doorstep. The US invaded without the critical second UN resolution, putting the US outside the kind of international legitimacy in a way not totally unlike Russia. There is no American population in Iraq; there is a sizable Russian population in Georgia. Russia is recovering from one of the most precipitous declines in power in world history; the US stood athwart the globe in 2003 with no serious competitors. The Russian intervention has not toppled the Georgian government and has been halted after a few days. The American intervention in Iraq is now in its fifth year, with the administration doing all it can to stay longer.

The point here is not that the invasions are obviously morally equivalent. The point is that the line between American actions in the world and Russia's are no longer as stark as they once were. Once you trash the international system, declare yourself above the law and even the most basic of international conventions against war crimes, you have forfeited the kind of moral authority that the US once had. Bush and his cronies speak as if none of this has happened. Their rigid, absolutist denial even of the bleeding obvious allows them to preach to the world about international norms that, when they would have constrained American actions, were derided as quaint and irrelevant. You really cannot have it both ways.

Americans - and Georgians - are now living with the consequences. And I'm angry about it.

On prisoner abuses, to argue that Georgia should be denied solidarity because of crimes by US personnel at Abu Ghraib (or even because of White House sanctioned crimes by CIA personnel elsewhere) is a twisted piece of political narcissism. How are human rights in Iraq served by the denial of human rights in Georgia?

On comparing justifications for invasion, his own words above on the differences between pre-invasion Iraq and today’s Georgia show this to be a grotesque distraction.

On the issue of UN authority, Saddam Hussein was in breach of a very long series of UN resolutions. This is not the case with Georgia. While the word ‘illegal’ is synonymous in many people’s minds with the invasion of Iraq, just saying it over and over again doesn’t make it so. 

Of course one of the key obstacles to the US and UK getting a second resolution before invading Iraq, the necessity or otherwise of which is the centre of all arguments about legality, one of those key obstacles was Putin. Another important obstacle was Germany’s then leader Gerhard Schröder, who on leaving office went straight on to Gazprom... pipelines again. When it comes to the workings of the UN Security Council, international law looks like the law of the jungle.

On the part in the excerpt above about the relative strength of the US compared to Russia, how is this a factor in judging Russia’s actions? Surely Mr Sullivan is not one of those immature thinkers who equate weakness with virtue?

As for the part about Russian action being “halted after a few days”, it’s now four days since Andrew Sullivan wrote those words, four days of Russian troops continuing to expand their operations in areas of Georgia beyond the enclaves, days of looting, pillaging, and broken promises. And they’re still not leaving.

If Andrew Sullivan wants to make a proper comparison of the actions of Bush with the actions of Putin, he should compare Iraq to Chechnya. Compare the way those wars were fought. Compare the degree of legal accountability. Compare the outcome. And then consider what is at stake for Georgia.

On the 13th Andrew Sullivan wrote “Russia is no longer the Soviet Union. You'd think conservatives would understand this distinction. There is a difference between totalitarian states seeking world expansion and authoritarian petro-states in demographic collapse bullying neighboring states because of perceived humiliations,” and on the 14th he wrote “Russia is not a global expansionist power any more...”

How is what Russia is doing in Georgia not expansionist? And how big does a power have to be to be called global? And since when is ‘global’ a test of whether a country can present a serious threat? Certainly, Russia is no longer the Soviet Union, but it is built with the remains of the former Soviet Union, and led by people who are proud of their Soviet past.

Here’s the BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall on Soviet Roots to Georgian Conflict.

Here is an excellent BBC World Service documentary from earlier in the year, After the KGB, and an accompanying article.

On the 15th Andrew Sullivan linked approvingly to a piece by Matthew Yglesias, Overhyping Georgia:

The reality is that Russia has no actual ability to move from Tblisi to Kiev. Georgia is tiny, poor, and geographically located so as to make it difficult for the West to provide it with any practical support. Ukraine has 10 times Georgia's population, 20 times its economic output, and extensive land borders with countries firmly in the Western orbit. The practical impossibility of conquering Ukraine, not American threats, is what will keep the Russians out of Kiev.

This Andrew Sullivan characterised as ‘sanity’. It ignores that Russia’s primary interest in Ukraine is, according to Putin himself, the Crimea, not the entirety of Ukraine. Though there might be other ways than invasion of playing for that too. But don’t worry, Andrew thinks it won’t happen, Andrew who thought the Russians were done in Georgia four days ago.

Enough is too much. I’m in severe need of a break from the wisdom of Mr Sullivan.

UPDATE 17 AUGUST: When is a withdrawal not a withdrawal? When Russia replaces soldiers with ‘peacekeepers’.

ALSO: Ukraine’s President Yushchenko doesn’t share Andrew’s confidence:

He said the situation was unprecedented and showed that his country could only ensure its national sovereignty through collective security. Only that, he said, “could prevent any actions like those which occurred on 7-8 August at first in South Ossetia, and then in other regions of Georgia”.

Of course having been subjected to dioxin poisoning by his enemies might be affecting his judgement, making it hard for him to fully appreciate the wisdom of Sullivan.

AND FINALLY: Matthew Yglesias, the man Andrew turns to for ‘sanity’ on Ukraine, doesn’t even seem to know what country the Crimea is in, though Putin would no doubt agree with this post which says “Russian soil”. Typing error or thinking error? The post in full:

Farley on NATO
Robert Farley makes a lot of sense on the past and future of NATO expansion. As he says, we have no reason to apologize for past NATO expansion, but simply because past expansions have been beneficial doesn’t mean that “NATO expansion” as such is a good thing that needs to be pressed forward. A point I would add is that there’s a difference between extending security guarantees so as to protect countries from Russian coercion and extending security guarantees in order to encourage countries to engage in risky anti-Russian behaviors. There was no sign that Hungary or the Czech Republic ever had any desire to actually pick a fight with Russia the way Georgia did (and has) or that Ukraine with its messy situation including actual Russian military bases on Russian soil plausibly might in the future.

That’s right, Matthew Yglesias thinks Georgia desired this fight. And he thinks Ukraine might desire a fight with Russia in the future. Hopeless.

Another post on Yglesias here.

While the sun shines

Yesterday was a day off, after three or more seven-day weeks of work in a row. A late breakfast was followed by a visit to the Political Cartoon Gallery in Bloomsbury to see an exhibition of David Low drawings.

After so long indoors at my painting table, the sun's warmth, the crowds milling about, all felt overwhelming. For days my view of the outside world had been through news reports from over the horizon, of war, and war, and arguments about war. Here in central London the people in the streets felt happy and busy, energising and reassuring, but still in my mind brutal events beyond the visible insisted on their equal reality, and here too the potential for brutality was asserted in newspaper front pages about the knife murder in Oxford Street the previous afternoon.

On to the gallery and David Low, best known now as the creator of Colonel Blimp. The combination of precision and energy in his drawing, particularly in the work from the '30s, is startling. Even his earliest work betrays no doubt or insecurity.

While I was there I picked up a secondhand copy of Avisens Håndskrift (The Newspaper's Handwriting) by Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen, a look at the work of members of Danske Bladtegnere, the Danish newspaper illustrators' society, on the occasion of the society's fiftieth anniversary in 1983. As I'd just been looking at Low, I was curious to see what the book would include from the occupation period. Not much was the answer. There were a couple of anti-Nazi cartoons from before the war, and a couple more from afterwards. The only images from the period of occupation were a couple of pleasant drawings, one of women on a beach, another of birds singing.

Absence makes the mind more curious. What did political cartoonists do during the occupation? Did they all turn to pretty pictures? Did any professional cartoonists also work for resistance papers?

So off I went to search—

Here's one anti-Nazi cartoon by Viggo Rohde from an underground book published in 1943 marking the second anniversary of war between Nazi Germany and the USSR. It's part of an online exhibit of underground wartime publications on the Danish Royal Library website.

1943 i tekst og tegninger, (1943 in words and pictures,) was a book from the Communist Land og Folk< underground press with cartoons by Herluf Bidstrup and Thorkild Holst. Images here and here and here and here. At least one of those same cartoonists seems to be responsible for the cartoons here and here in another Danish Communist Party publication, Ugens Nyt, (The Week's News,) again from 1943. Here and here are postcards by Herluf Bidstrup. According to Avisens Håndskrift, Bidstrup stayed with the Land og Folk paper after the war, and his work remained very much in line with party policy.

This cartoon, Leaders of the New Order is by Anton Hansen, who assumed a change in drawing style to hide his identity. His work had appeared before the war in Arbeiderbladet in Norway, Simplicissimus and Das Panoptikon in Germany, as well as Ekstrabladet in Denmark. After the war he worked for Information, a daily that had begun life as an underground news agency. This drawing however was published in Danske Tidene, an underground newspaper begun under the editorship of Nicolai Blædel, who as foreign editor of Berlingske Tidene prior to the invasion had been strongly critical of the Nazis, and was one of the first writers to be banned from publishing under the occupation.

Here's a poster published by Morgenbladet, an underground daily newspaper launched in November 1944 by the Dansk Samlings party, and here's a report on the poster in the paper - I was surprised by the scale of it! From the same press came a humour magazine Muldvarpen, (The Mole,) with a mix of Danish cartoons and material supplied by the allies, including this Donald Duck strip.

Altogether the volume of material published by various parts of the Danish resistance seems to have been enormous. Morgenbladet for example published 142 issues under occupation, with a circulation reaching 7,000 in the last months of the war. As you can see in the Danish Royal Library exhibition, most underground material was typewritten or very simply typeset, but a surprising amount was also illustrated to a high standard.

Illustrations:

The top four drawings are by David Low, all from The Complete Colonel Blimp, edited by Mark Bryant, and are copyright © Low estate/Solo Syndication.

Blimp in the '30s was portrayed as a conservative appeaser of fascism. The character in the fourth drawing, Pmilb, the inverse of Blimp, was his leftist mirror image, an equally wrongheaded appeaser.

I've written a little on the Colonel Blimp film here, and more on Denmark under occupation here.

The bottom three drawings are by Hans Bendix, all from Avisens Håndskrift, Dansk bladtegning gennem et halvt århundrede, by Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen, copyright © Dansk Bladtegnere.

Bendix's Hitler caricature, titled Dollfuss in Memoriam, was published in Tegning af tiden in 1935. The Port Jefferson beach drawing was for the cover of Hjemmets Søndag, a colour supplement to the paper Social-Demokraten, published in 1941.