I Shall See Them In Hell

If you never hear from me again, then blame Vincent McAviney (look out for that name in future), Oliver Kamm and Damian Thompson, thanks to whose libel, malicious falsehood, criminal harassment, and restraint of trade, in at least one of their cases to a point inconsistent with sanity (several times per day every day, and I really do mean every day, for two and a half years and counting), my life is not worth living.

It isn't really about me at all. It is the original material in my books that matters. If that cannot get any sort of hearing, and the lengths to which that trio has gone in order to ensure that it is denied anything like the attention that it deserves (unlike them, actually read my books if you don't believe me), then my life has no purpose whatever. It is beyond me what I have ever done to any of them.

Every comment except mine on the webpages of Essays Radical and Orthodox and Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory is by one of those three or someone closely associated with them, usually McAviney. I cannot bear to see years and years of my work subjected to this torrent of abuse. Least of all from people who have certainly never read my books.

How does a theological book with a fulsome preface by John Milbank fail to find a publisher, or fail to be reviewed even if it has had to be self-published? If Damian Thompson says so, that's how. Not bad for the man who illegitimately occupies the position of arbiter of Catholic orthodoxy, whom you might have thought was the Pope but not in the British media, despite his positions on everything from economics, to sexual morality, to wars, being decidedly wide of the Magisterial mark.

The Social Affairs Unit, which previously published Kamm's only book, sat for two years on Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, regarded by highly distinguished people as a major piece of work. Eventually, it sent me the wrong galleys and refused to correct them, so that I had to publish the book myself because it was losing currency so rapidly. Cue McAviney, Kamm's little helper, in full psychotic mode. Every comment on that book's page, except by me, is by him.

Is this why I have gone through four major operations, two of them in absolute emergencies, and a pulmonary embolism? Is this why I take a double dose of Tramadol four times every day? But I cannot not do this. I cannot live without my work, as collected in what I had thought were the first two books, but which look increasingly like being the last. Remember those names: Vincent McAviney, Oliver Kamm and Damian Thompson. I shall see them in Hell.

Hitchens’s Rule of Outrage

Peter Hitchens writes:

I did not know Marie Colvin, though I have certainly seen her across crowded rooms, usually at award ceremonies (I try as hard as I can to avoid war zones) and couldn’t possibly have been unaware of her extraordinary bravery and persistence. There’s no doubt she lived an admirable life, and demonstrated real courage. I think I disagree with her view of the world in general, but I also think her decision to stay behind with a group of potential massacre victims in East Timor was so powerfully selfless that it deserves an actual monument.

I have known other reporters – in more than one notable case also women – who have a similar disregard for physical danger, and in some cases (let this not be denied) an actual joy in venturing into high, hard remote places where danger and discomfort are certain. There are some, often photographers, who are exhilarated greatly by the noise and fear of battle. I rather envy them. I have enough imagination to know why they enjoy it and why they yearn for the summons to the war zone. But I have too much imagination, and too much fondness for my own skin, to follow them.

I’ve mentioned before that in a long newspaper career I have, almost inevitably, blundered into one or two war zones. I never meant to. Once, a prosaic trip to record the slow takeover of East Germany by the West led, by a series of wholly unpredictable but unavoidable steps, to going from East Berlin to Budapest, from Budapest to Szeged, and then to my crossing into Romania just before Christmas 1989. I think my then office just took the view that as I was already half-way there, I might as well keep going as it was cheaper. I swallowed hard and duly kept going. The best part of it was the leaving - I did what I had for many years longed to do, went down to the station and got on the first train out, not caring where it went as long as it was somewhere else.There were no tickets. As it happened, it took me (in the company of the highly civilsied and hospitable members of a Russian orchestra) through the lovely mountains of Bulgaria to Sofia, which seemed like Paris after Bucharest.

Most of what I saw in Romania now seems farcical – Romanians were given to exaggeration and weeping hysteria. But luckily I didn’t believe the tales of horror I was told in the border town of Arad, about what lay ahead on the road to Bucharest (actually I took the train, which ran to time and which I reckoned would be safer by far than a car if the reports, delivered with much wailing and gesticulation, of Secret Police helicopters strafing the roads were in fact true).

I am not at all ashamed to admit that I (literally) hid under my bed when shooting broke out just outside my Bucharest Hotel. I was in the middle of a long-awaited phone call to my home when it started, so I couldn’t pretend to my wife that all was calm. But under the bed was the place to be. I could see through the uncurtained windows the tracer streaking about the place, and I’d read enough accounts of lives ended by stray bullets to conclude that this was the only sensible thing to do. I’d do it again, too. As it turned out, the shooting was meaningless, done for show and not a battle at all, but I didn’t learn that till later.

But the following day I went to visit one of the Bucharest hospitals, and there saw quite a lot of people, in dirty beds, swathed in stained bandages, horribly pale, who had been hit by bullets, stray or otherwise. I imagined myself as one of them, and inwardly swore to do all in my power to avoid it for as long as I lived.

So imagine my feelings a bit more than a year later when, in Vilnius to report on Lithuania’s peaceful secession from the USSR, I was attending a dull and worthy press conference and a shouting person rushed into say that the Soviet Army had begun shooting people. So they had (my account of this miserable episode is to be found in ‘The Cameron Delusion’) . I can’t say I hurried with any enthusiasm to the scene. The same was true of my unintended landing in Somalia, just before Christmas 1992 (these things always seem to happen in the very dead of winter) which I describe in ‘The Rage Against God’. I also got into some bad trouble in the Congo a few years ago, the only one of these occasions when I have had a pretty strong sense that I might actually be about to die (though I had a more concentrated terrifying moment while riding my bicycle through Peckham and nearly being trapped between a lorry and its trailer, when I really *did* think that I was about to die and felt strong physical terror).

So it’s not for me. Is that why I also tend to resist the reporter’s justification for doing these things - that we must bear witness, and expose the misdeeds of tyrants. Why must we? In what way is a reporter qualified to decide the rights and wrongs of what he or she, for a few days or hours, witnesses as an outsider who often doesn’t even know the local alphabet, and needs an interpreter to tell him which is the gents and which the ladies? On this basis he can conclude that the rebels are right, and the government is wrong? Well, hardly, yet this is what is increasingly allowed, and encouraged to happen.

In a way I wouldn’t mind if it were sustained. But the pattern is always the same – a great deal of coverage designed to encourage international pressure and/or intervention. Plentiful coverage of the intervention or ‘revolution’ up to its ‘success’ . Then silence. I can remember when BBC News bulletins were dominated every night by South Africa. Yet how often do we now hear a word about what is going on there? Iraq is barely covered. After the wild euphoria of Tahrir Square, detailed coverage of what has followed in Egypt has been comparatively sketchy and infrequent. As for Libya, the failure by most media organisations to record the scandalous outcome of Western intervention is an active disgrace. Libya is fast becoming a failed state, with criminal gangs roaming unchecked and racially-bigoted arbitrary arrests and mass torture worryingly frequent and unrestrained. This is what we helped to bring about with our ill-informed enthusiasms. Shouldn’t we at least be more interested?

There’s another sort of selectivity as well. Pro-Israel journalists such as me have known for years about the Syrian government’s tendency to murder its citizens, particularly the great 1982 Hama massacre under Hafez Assad, since when the ‘West’ has several times attempted to make Syria into its ally. But the mass of the press corps seldom if ever mentioned these things concentrating as they were on the villainies of Israel next door. And then of course there’s Bahrain, where the furious repression of Shia protestors has by and large been forgotten, and doesn’t seem to worry William Hague half as much as similar action in Syria.

Hitchens’s Rule of Outrage for Foreign Ministries and Journalists states ‘Where outrage is selective, it’s not genuine. It may therefore have a purpose which has little to do with compassion, and much to do with politics and diplomacy’.

This of course does not mean that brave journalists shouldn’t do their jobs, or that their courage should be demeaned. But those who read what they write, or watch their reports on TV, should always ask why this particular crisis, this particular country, has attracted attention and coverage, while others, similar if not worse, go ignored. It costs a lot of money to send a reporter to a war zone. Someone has to decide when it is worth it, and when it is not. How and why are these decisions taken?

To Accommodate That Preference

Daniel Larison writes:

Matthew Feeney writes:

It should worry Americans that Russia, straddling both Europe and Asia, will be able to dictate the pace of the twenty first century more and more. It looks like Russia’s influence will continue to be exerted under corrupt and illegitimate governments with a demonstrable disregard for civil liberties and expansionist mindset. Whoever is the President this time next year (probably Obama) should make more of an effort to establish good economic and diplomatic relations with countries still under Russia’s shadow, especially countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, in order to limit the amount of damage an presidency like Putin’s can inflict.

It seems unlikely that Russia “will be able to dictate the pace of the twenty first century more and more.” Russian demographic decline is one reason why Russia will be relatively less influential as the century wears on, but it will continue to exert influence among its neighbors through the energy it supplies to them and the rest of Europe. That influence shouldn’t particularly worry Americans. As things stand now, the U.S. has reasonably good relations with almost all of Russia’s neighbors (except Belarus), and almost all of Russia’s neighbors currently have reasonably good relations with Russia (except Georgia). One good way to wreck the latter is to cultivate relationships with Russia’s neighbors as part of a deliberate policy of containing Russian influence. The Russian government is already prone to characterize U.S. moves in the region as anti-Russian, so the worst thing the U.S. could do would be to lend substance to those fears. This is what the U.S. did for the better part of the last decade, and the unfortunate results speak for themselves.

A recent article in The American Interest by Samuel Charap and Mikhail Troitskiy discussed how U.S. and Russian policies toward ex-Soviet republics have been trapped in patterns of bad habits established during the last twenty years. Charap and Troitskiy argue that “the goal of bolstering post-Soviet Eurasian sovereignties somehow became conflated with the need to counter all forms of Russian influence there.” I would argue that the two have become so thoroughly conflated that many Americans tend to see any increase of Russian influence as a compromise of the sovereignty of its neighbors, and these same people seem to regard the negation of Russian influence as more important than the effects this may have on Russia’s neighbors.

The authors go on to say that the U.S. approach is outdated and ignores contemporary political realities:

U.S. advocates of geopolitical tit-for-tat tend to overlook the fact that over the course of the past twenty years the former-Soviet republics (with several prominent exceptions involving separatist disputes) have fully consolidated their sovereignty and nation-building projects. They have also developed a decent record of withstanding pressure from both Washington and Moscow when they deem it necessary.

They also make a number of interesting recommendations for changing the bad habits of both U.S. and Russian policy, and conclude with the following:

These steps—transparency, consultation and appropriate rhetoric—can erase the muscle memory of past policies and put an end to pointless tug-of-war games rendered obsolete by more than twenty years of post-Soviet history. While great-power bargaining conducted “behind the backs” of the post-Soviet Eurasian states is definitely not a policy option in the 21st century, zero-sum games in the region do not serve their interests either—nor those of the United States and Russia.

As the U.S. discovered in at least two ex-Soviet states in the last decade, when the U.S. forces Russia’s neighbors to choose between them and us, pluralities or majorities in these countries will typically favor Russia for economic, political, and cultural reasons. A significant percentage of the population in all ex-Soviet republics would prefer to have good relations with both the U.S. and Russia, and it is in the American interest to accommodate that preference. There is not much of a constituency in any of these countries for a policy that favors the U.S. at the expense of good relations with Russia. If U.S. policy treats the region as a zero-sum competition, the U.S. will end up losing influence in most of these states.

Setting Before It Has Risen

The Sun on Sunday is to feature a column by Toby Young. It doesn't bode well that they obviously couldn't afford Julie Burchill.

The only thing that I ever read in the News of the World was Fraser Nelson. Looks as if there will be nothing at all worth reading in The Sun on Sunday.

Madness

You read it here first. Sex-selective abortion is perfectly legal.

Just so long as the mother produces a note, at least from a psychiatrist, probably from her GP, saying that having a child of the sex in question would drive her round the bend. And she will have done.

I have been active in the pro-life movement for 20 years, and it was common knowledge 20 years ago that this was standard practice.

Syria: Don't Be Bounced

Was Marie Colvin even a British Citizen?

In any event, she had placed herself in a position where a fate such as this was an occupational hazard, and there is no suggestion that she was the target in the Syrian Army's action against the Islamist insurgency to which she had effectively attached herself.

If this death has any particular message, then it is the importance of staying out of these things.

Fox Off

Liam Fox had to resign as Secretary of State for, of all things, Defence because the Israeli Far Right and its nominally American fellow-travellers had, treasonably, been running a parallel foreign policy out of his office and through its subsidiary fake charity, now deregistered.

Making a comeback? Why is he not in prison? And is this really the best that the Conservative "Right" can manage? There is obviously not a Tory among them.