I ask as one whose next book is to be dedicated to the memory of Paul Foot, Alan Watkins, Auberon Waugh and Michael Wharton.
Oliver Kamm embodies, and very aggressively promotes, the undeniably coherent whole that is everything to which that venerable organ is rightly opposed: globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, demutualisation, the worship of big business in general and of high finance in particular, militant atheism, unrestrained social liberalism, European federalism, constitutional vandalism, Rupert Murdoch, Greater Israel, obeisance to America, Israeli and American interference in British affairs, the denaturalisation (and then what?) of the Arabs and of the ultra-Orthodox Jews within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, neoconservative warmongering, the erosion of civil liberties, the idolisation of Tony Blair, and the destruction of all things old, small, local, provincial or rural.
Kamm and his cult engage in vicious campaigns against anyone who offers coherent critiques of that position, including John Milbank, Neil Clark, Maurice Glasman, Phillip Blond, and me. Neil, in particular, has now been subjected to a decade of online criminal harassment for having dared to give a critical review to Kamm’s absurdly bad book on neoconservatism, a book as incompetent or deceitful as his friend Douglas Murray’s, which failed to mention either Trotskyism or Max Shachtman despite purporting to be the definitive British work on the subject. Why has Neil’s persecution by Kamm and the Kammites, which has long been in the public domain and which has been known to cause the police to be called, never appeared in Private Eye?
And why is the Eye taking the side of a man who holds such views and who has such a record, the side of some hedge fund trader and neocon activist who landed a job writing for Murdoch? John Milbank is one of the world’s most distinguished and influential theologians, one of the greatest living definers and defenders of the traditionalist critique of capitalism, and the greatest (or, at the very least, the most cerebral) living definer and defender of High Anglicanism. What is Private Eye coming to, that it prefers Oliver Kamm to him?
Blame Wheen, the Euston Manifesto cuckoo in that nest and previously responsible for its mumbo-jumbo about Yugoslavia.
ReplyDeleteThere are definitely aspects of all four of your worthy dedicatees in your own work.
How about something regular featuring all of Kamm's victims: Milbank, Clark, Glasman, Blond and you?
Kamm et al lied this country into war, so anything they say on any subject must be a lie.
ReplyDeleteIf Wheen had any principles, he would have resigned from the anti-war Eye on signing up to Euston.
Kamm's mother translated Asterix. What would have been his name as an Asterix character and why?
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a question from the weirdest ever ediition of Blind Date: "My mother translated Asterix. If you were an Asterix character, what would be your name, and why?"
ReplyDeleteIf I were given to encouraging off-topic comments, then I might ask for other questions that Kamm might have posed from in front of the screen. But I am not.
Auberon Waugh, in his memoirs Will This Do?, defended contraception. Auberon Waugh, in his journalism, applied to Solzhenitsyn the phrase "nasty old fleabag". Auberon Waugh, as a consequence, has no claim whatsoever upon the moral allegiance of anyone who calls himself a Catholic conservative. Perhaps Mr Lindsay is confusing Auberon with Auberon's genius father.
ReplyDeleteIt's not a matter of agreeing with everything that he ever wrote. Paul Foot?
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't call myself "a conservative Catholic". Nor should you.
At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, the case of Paul Foot is not even remotely comparable to the case of Waugh The Lesser. Foot, as far as I know, was no kind of religious believer. Certainly he never pretended to be a Catholic, let alone a traditional Catholic. Waugh The Lesser pretended to be both these things.
ReplyDelete(Oh yes, and Humanae Vitae's prohibition of all artificial contraception is protected by the charism of papal infallibility, in case that fact had failed to register. Waugh The Lesser knew as much. His invocation of Catholic membership was therefore an open and deliberate fraud. And if he lied on that subject, why should he be believed on any other?)
I have no qualms about being thought of as a "Catholic conservative" (Mr Lindsay cannot even get my word order right when alluding to it). Nor can I understand why anybody else would find the description objectionable, except insofar as it might be considered tautologous.
That use of "conservative" (and "liberal") is exactly the sort of imported Americanism against which Waugh railed.
ReplyDeleteThe American Church, especially, is riven between "conservatives" who accept the Church's Teaching on bioethical and sexual matters while pretending not to know that the economic and foreign policies that they excoriate are in fact the Church's Teaching on justice and peace, and "liberals" who accept the Church's Teaching on justice and peace while excoriating that on most bioethical and most or all sexual matters.
Neither is any more orthodox than the other, and both echo the Americanist heresy. Since there are no new heresies, that was a manifestation of the same error that has presented itself at Byzantium in the eleventh century, in England in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, in France and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, in German-speaking Europe and the Hapsburg lands in the eighteenth century, and among the Croats of Croatia and of Bosnia-Herzegovina from the 1990s onwards.
The influence of each of these can still be felt, while there were and are several further examples. Both sides of neo-Americanism belong in that category. This seems to be fairly well-understood among American Catholics, in that even those who are registered Republicans do not vote for Rick Santorum.
On the infallibility of everything taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church by virtue of its promulgation by an action of the whole Episcopal College in union with and including the Roman Pontiff, see my Essays Radical and Orthodox.
I suppose Im sort of on the same side politically as milbank, but as a member of the same department Ive watched his 'radical' 'orthodoxy' movememnt (which is neither radical nor orthodox) gradually politicize and secularize the work of the church. He (and blond) have been making terrible fools of themselves (as Andrew Louth said to me in Lambeth Palace a few years ago).
ReplyDeleteCourse he did, luv.
ReplyDeleteThe American spellings, I could just about believe. But "movememnt". Nottingham is better than that.
My apologies for the spelling. Written after a fight in the street. Love, xx
ReplyDelete