PAUL ANDERSON

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 23 November 2001

Er, sorry, folks — but I’m afraid last week’s Tribune was just a little disappointing. In the week before it went to press, nearly everything the paper had said in the previous month about the war in Afghanistan had been rendered obsolete by the turn of events. I know the difficulties of producing a weekly with limited resources. But surely the collapse of the Taliban warranted more than a news piece and a leader?

I’m not crowing about being proved right about the American military intervention. The defeat of the Taliban is a good thing in itself — the scenes of celebration in Kabul speak for themselves — but what happens next is uncertain and might be dreadful. I have no intention of following The Sun, Christopher Hitchens, Polly Toynbee, Anne McElvoy, David Aaronovitch et al in demanding grovelling apologies from opponents of the war as tribute for wobbles and misinterpretations . There is a long way to go yet; success is not guaranteed. It’s not wimpish to worry about the consequences of B-52 bombing raids. And it is still possible that Afghanistan will collapse into bloody factional feuding amid mass starvation.

Nevertheless, those who have lampooned the opponents of the war do have a point. Let’s leave aside for a moment the Trots and Stalinists, the small band of conservative peaceniks and the Muslims. The mainstream peace movement has come, predictably, from the democratic left: the Labour anti-war lobby, Tribune, the New Statesman, the Greens, CND. And that democratic left milieu has been wrong both in its analysis of what has been going on and in its prescriptions for what should happen next.

Contrary to widespread predictions, the US has not been embroiled in a “quagmire”, let alone a “new Vietnam”. The Taliban did not prove invincible warriors: they scarpered. The bombing did not result in giant civilian casualties. There have been verified massacres by the Northern Alliance, but so far nothing to compare with what hapened in 1992, let alone with the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Far from preventing aid getting through to starving civilians, the military action has made it possible to feed thousands who would otherwise have been unreachable.

Of course, inadequate understanding of rapidly changing circumstances in faraway countries is nothing new. Imperfect foresight is inevitable. No one guessed that the Soviet Union would implode until it actually did. I still sometimes lie awake at night at the memory of declaring in these pages, back in 1989, that we would not see German reunification in our lifetime. Ahem, whoops, well, it happens to us all, doesn’t it?

But there is more to the peace movement’s failure than making bad predictions in good faith. As during the Gulf war in 1991, the Bosnian war of the mid-1990s and the Kosovo war in 1999, it is remarkable how far its errors of judgment have been driven by fatalism, a pessimism of the intellect uncompensated for by even a glimmer of the optimism of the will. Time and again over the past month, I have come away from meetings adressed by Labour left and CND opponents of the war with a gloomy sense that they not only thought the US military action would not work — they actually wanted it to fail.

In line with this, just as over the Gulf, Bosnia and Kosovo, the mainstream peace movement has had no qualms, in pursuit of the largest possible anti-war mobilisation, about giving new life to some of the most unpleasant parasites in the leftist pond: the Leninist advocates of “anti-imperialist” revolutionary defeatism who believe that any enemy of capitalism is a friend of the workers.

In case you missed it, the Socialist Workers’ Party refused to condemn the September 11 attacks. The committee that has organised the demos against the war is dominated by the SWP and loaded with representatives of every other Stalinist and Trotskyist sect — 57 varieties, all unfit for human consumption, as the old libertarian slogan had it. Each one of these believes in its heart of hearts that the best outcome of the war is defeat for America and its allies — in other words, victory for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. I could only cringe at the spectacle of decent democratic socialists and Greens and liberals standing shoulder-to-shoulder with these charlatans at last Sunday’s anti-war demonstration.

So what, you think. Occasionally it is necessary to ally oneself with bad people to defeat a greater evil. That is what happened between 1941 and 1945, when Britain embraced Stalin in order to defeat Hitler. (It is also what the US has done in Afghanistan, supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, but let that pass.)

When you don’t need to play that game, however, there’s no sense in doing so. And if the peace movement continues to ally itself with the revolutionary defeatists, it will lose all credibility — as it did over the Gulf, Bosnia and Kosovo. That doesn’t bother me insofar as I am a supporter of this war. But I also worry about the survival of a credible left in Britain. And on that one, right now, the optimism of the will is being sorely tested.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 9 November 2001

The most important thing about the war in Afghanistan is that, nearly five weeks in, we still don’t have much of a clue about what is really going on.

We know that things haven’t gone the way the Americans expected at the very beginning. The initial bombardment of military installations with cruise missiles and “smart” bombs did not lead to the collapse of the Taliban regime. Nor did it make possible the introduction of special forces on the ground: the first attempt to do so, apparently staged at least in part to provide uplifting TV news pictures, appears to have come close to disaster.

We also know that, since that fiasco, the US has shifted strategy to bombing the Taliban’s front lines and supporting the offensive of the Northern Alliance. We can be sure that there have been some civilian casualties, that the refugee crisis has become even worse, and that many people who at first supported the US action — most importantly various governments in the Islamic world — are now extremely apprehensive, despite the efforts of the Americans and their foremost ally, Tony Blair, to shore up support. And it is obvious that winter is now upon Afghanistan, and that this will make both military action and the supply of relief to the starving civilian Afghan population much more difficult.

But beyond this, all we have to go on is hunch. Have there been many civilian casualties from the American bombing raids? Well, there’s nobody credible who knows and is in a position to tell.

The Taliban say there have been, but their claims are suspect for obvious reasons; and so far their guided tours for foreign journalists of claimed atrocity sites have not yielded conclusive evidence of anything other than a few tragic targeting errors.

On the other hand, the US says there haven’t been many civilian casualties, but its claims are suspect too — not least because its only means of assessing the body count is satellite photography.

Does the Northern Alliance have any hope of inflicting a decisive military defeat on the Taliban? Again, there’s no trustworthy source of information. There are journalists with the Northern Alliance. But most are miles from any military action and can do nothing but relay rumours and write colour pieces. Some of their reportage is very good — but the more honest of them recognise that all they can do is provide mood music.

What about the military strength of the Taliban and morale among their troops? All we have to go on is American satellite photographs and the word of refugees and a handful of deserters. There are conflicting claims about the number of Afghan civilians facing starvation and about the ability of the aid effort to feed them. As for the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden, his vulnerability or his plans, well, no one has the faintest idea.

All of which means that — unless you believe either that there was never any justification for American military action against the Taliban or that any military action against the Taliban is justified — it is extremely difficult to come to an informed opinion about what should be done next.

So far, contrary to the claims of some prophets of doom, there is no reason to conclude from the available evidence that the American intervention has been an unmitigated disaster, with thousands of civilian casualties and no prospect of success.

It remains possible that the bombing of Taliban lines will pave the way for successful action on the ground, which in turn will lead to the collapse of the Taliban regime and perhaps even the capture of Bin Laden and destruction of his Al Qa’ida forces. It remains possible too that the relief of famine will not be unduly hampered by the military action.

But there are also no grounds for unalloyed optimism. In particular, the danger that the military action will undermine any chance of averting mass starvation is horribly real. And even though it is unrealistic to expect instant success in the military campaign, the longer the bombing goes on without significant action on the ground, the more it will appear that the US has no idea of how even a first victory in the war against terrorism will be achieved.

On balance, given that the military action still has a reasonable chance of success — and that the alternative, a victory for Bin Laden and the Taliban, would be a disaster for the whole world — the US and its allies continue to deserve the support of the left.

But that support should not be unconditional. If the campaign grinds on with no sign of a military breakthrough while making impossible the provision of aid to the starving, it should be halted, at least temporarily, and a new strategy drawn up. We are not at that point yet, we might never get to it. But it could be with us very soon.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 26 October 2001

Call me obsessed with the arguments of past if you like, but I’ve been struck over the past few days by the number of otherwise sensible people on the left who absolve the former Soviet Union from any blame for the rise of psychotic Islamist fundamentalism in Afghanistan.

The spark was a piece by Julie Burchill – who is, of course, far from sensible – in last Saturday’s Guardian. In it she declared that she felt vindicated at last for pleading in the 1980s for western support for the Soviets in Afghanistan, “the forces of civilisation against the forces of barbarism”, to “stop the Islamofascists in their tracks as surely as the democracies could have stopped the forces of fascism proper in Spain if only they hadn’t looked the other way”.

How preposterous, I thought – and said so that evening in the pub to a bunch of leftie mates, none of whom I’d previously suspected of harbouring lingering admiration for the Red Army’s murderous exploits in the Hindu Kush.

Oh no, they all said. She’s right. At least the communists let women go out without the veil. At least girls could go to school. At least they made a start on land reform …

Somewhat surprised by this response, I asked other liberal and left-wing friends what they thought – and with a couple of exceptions they were of much the same opinion.

The Soviet intervention might have been crude, their argument went, but the real villains of the piece were the fundamentalist mujahedin, who would have got nowhere without the material backing of the west. Which shows that La Burchill strikes a chord with my generation even now – but also that few on the left in Britain paid very much attention to Afghanistan when it last dominated the news.

Because the truth is that the Soviets intervened in 1979 not to defend a decent moderate secular modernising socialist regime but to topple a bunch of wannabe Pol Pots whose dictatorship had alienated most of the country’s population and now faced imminent collapse in the face of popular insurgency. The Kremlin engineered a coup and sent in the troops to avert the end of Soviet hegemony in a territory it wanted as part of its bloc.

The regime installed by the Russians, though certainly a little more reasonable in its administration of everyday life than what had gone immediately before, had no popular support outside Kabul and a few big towns. It was utterly intolerant of dissent and completely dependent on Soviet backing. And the Soviet occupation force soon distinguished itself by launching a bloody counter-insurgency war, indiscriminately targeting civilians, that makes the current American assault on the Taliban look a model of restraint.

Unsurprisingly, this had the effect of recruiting thousands to the ranks of the mujahedin, who at this point were neither particularly fundamentalist – during the early 1980s the Afghan resistance was predominantly on the moderate end of Islamism and by no means committed to international jihad without end – nor, before 1981, the beneficiaries of significant western material support.

They weren’t particularly effective either, though they did enough to keep the Red Army busy, and by the 1983-84 there were signs that they were tiring and prepared to parley. Had Moscow and Kabul then offered them a peace deal and a government of national reconcilliation, it is unlikely that most of them would have refused. Instead, the Soviets stuck pig-headedly to the pursuit of the unwinnable counter-insurgency war until well into 1986, and the die was cast for disaster.

This is not to exonerate the west for its despicable role in what subsequently ensued. America decided to bankroll and arm the most fanatical diehard mujahedin faction from 1981-82; and after the Soviets withdrew, humiliated, from Afghanistan in 1989, it ensured there was no peace agreement between the more moderate mujahedin and the beleaguered regime the Russians left behind in Kabul. During the protracted civil war that raged through Afghanistan in the 1990s, the west looked the other way.

The root cause of the Afghan catastrophe was, however, Soviet imperialism. Had Moscow resisted the temptation to intervene in 1979 or opened talks with the mujahedin in 1984, the “Islamofascists” would indeed have been stopped in their tracks.

Which is perhaps not much help to anyone looking for guidance as to what to do today. But it’s always a good thing to get your facts right.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 12 October 2001

So the phoney war is over. As I write, American forces have launched bombing and missile attacks on targets in Afghanistan for two nights running, backed by the British on day one. For better or worse, what appears to be a major battle has begun — and, for better or worse, the British left has to decide where it stands.

During the phoney war, it was relatively easy. As I said in my last column, apart from a few morons who rushed into print to tell the world that America had it coming on September 11, the left was united both by its horror at the outrages in New York and Washington and in urging the US not to do anything stupid in response.

That, however, kept open all sorts of possibilities — at least in the imagination — that are now closed for ever. As soon as the raids started, “Hang on for a moment” stopped being a tenable position, however credible it might have been a week or even a day before. The options now, to put it brutally, are “Victory to the heroic Islamic anti-imperialist fighters”, “Stop this madness at once” or “Let’s hope it works”.

The first of these options is easy enough to dismiss, although I’m afraid there are a few Leninists still loyal enough to the memory of old Vladimir Ilyich (and stupid enough) to embrace it. A victory for the Taliban and Bin Laden — and for Bin Laden it would be victory simply to evade death or capture or for his organisation to survive to commit further outrages — would be a disaster for everyone else.

“Revolutionary defeatism”, the Leninist injunction to work for the defeat of one’s own side in “imperialist” war and then turn defeat into insurgency against one’s own ruling class, was never other than a mendacious recipe for terror, bloodshed and dictatorship. Its “successful” application in current circumstances would mean civil war raging through the Arab and Muslim worlds with Islamist fascist terror running rampant.

Not least because this is a plausible worst-case scenario, many on the left argue for the hostilities to cease at once. The evidence against Bin Laden and the Taliban is inconclusive, they say. And if the objectives of the attacks on Afghanistan are to capture or kill Bin Laden or to topple the Taliban regime, there are grounds to be sceptical about the likelihood of success, particularly with winter only a month away. Moreover, continuing with the assault means that thousands of innocent civilians might die (in part because it makes impossible the relief of the famine that was gripping the country long before September 11).

Even if civilian casualties are minimal, the attacks have already provoked a wave of anger throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, and it is not difficult to imagine what this might portend: a surge of Islamist militancy, the collapse of this or that regime, a bloody showdown in the Occupied Territories. Surely it makes sense for the US and its allies to think again and stop the military action right now?

Well, in our dreams perhaps. In reality, we have to face the fact that they are not going to do it, at least in part for good reason. Now the US has opted for military action, its withdrawal would be celebrated by Bin Laden and the Taliban as a stunning victory. And the consequences of that are — see above — too dire to contemplate.

It is because of this that I find myself reluctantly in the “Let’s hope it works” camp. I am not an enthusiast for raining bombs and missiles on poor defenceless civilians or for subjecting them to slow death by starvation. Nor do I believe the United States — or the developed west as a whole — has the right to impose its will as it chooses throughout the world.

I share the anti-war lobby’s doubts about the unintended consequences of the attacks. But I am persuaded of the guilt of Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network for September 11 and of the Taliban regime’s reliance upon and support for him. And now limited military action against both Bin Laden and the Taliban has begun, there is no credible alternative to continuing with it.

It needs, however, to be accompanied by a radical recasting of western, particularly US, policy towards the Arab and Muslim worlds if it is to have a chance of success. It will not be enough merely to destroy the Taliban and capture or kill Bin Laden— difficult as either may prove.

The US and its allies will also have to ensure the establishment of a decent democratic Afghan regime and provide it with the means of rebuilding after more than two decades of civil war. They will have to make it clear that the age-old policy of propping up corrupt oligarchies in most Arab states is at an end. And, most important of all, they will have to show the world that they are serious about forcing Israel to give up the Occupied Territories to a Palestinian state.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 21 September 2001

The ramifications of the vile outrages in New York and Washington are immense: on that everyone agrees. But what will happen next is anything but obvious. As I write, the United States and its allies are preparing for action, but what exactly it will comprise is unclear. It seems most likely that we will see an armed attack on targets associated with Osama bin Laden, along with a determined effort to overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that has given him sanctuary.

But an all-out assault on Iraq, apparently given serious consideration by the Bush administration last week, cannot be entirely ruled out. Then there are the possibilities of a social explosion in Pakistan or the Occupied Territories, or the use of weapons of mass destruction. And what if there are further terrorist atrocities in the US – or France, or Germany, or Russia, or Britain?

In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the left throughout the west has been jittery. The mainstream left response to the September 11 attacks, in Britain as elsewhere, was one of horror at the inhumanity of the terrorists and sympathy for the victims. A handful of cretino-Leninists and anti-globalisation activists – and, to its eternal shame, the New Statesman – celebrated imperialist pig Amerika getting its comeuppance at the hands of the oppressed, but these were marginal voices, as they deserve to remain.

In the fortnight and more since those shocking, spectacular pictures appeared on the world’s television screens, their full impact has sunk in. The rhetoric of the politicians, for a change, articulates a mood among the whole population. This was an attack on our very civilisation, in that it targeted and destroyed the sense of safety that we took for granted most of the time in most of the developed world. Now, we dream nightly of dying in terrorist outrages – or of our children or our friends or our parents dying – and our feelings of disgust and empathy have been edged by doubt and fear.

The biggest worry is that America will do something stupid that makes matters even worse – which on past experience is far from unlikely. Over the past 100 years, the period in which the US has been the world’s greatest power, America has on occasion been the shining beacon to the world evoked by the leader-writers of the Times and the Telegraph – most importantly in the 1940s, when it played a key role both in defeating Hitler and in containing Stalin in Europe, but also more recently in the Balkans, where without its intervention Slobodan Milosevic and his vile cronies would now have established an ethnically cleansed Greater Serbia.

The US has also, however, been a cynical villain, supporting at different times a plethora of vicious right-wing regimes, anti-democratic coups d’etat and terrorists. And even when it has acted on the international stage with the best of intentions, its efforts have often had effects radically different from those it desired. Its support for Israel’s right to exist, for Afghanistan’s right to national self-determination or for the containment of Saddam Hussein since the Gulf war – to take just the three examples most relevant to the current crisis – cannot be dismissed simply as imperialist power-projection. All were, and remain, worthy causes.

But the means used by the US in their pursuit – backing Israel uncritically, arming the most fanatical mujahedin, imposing sanctions that hit the Iraqi people rather than the regime – have had massive unintended consequences: the growth of Hamas in the Occupied Territories, the rise of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, the consolidation of Saddam’s position in Iraq.

It is by no means inevitable that the “war on terrorism” declared by George Bush and subsequently joined by Britain and dozens of other countries will rebound so terribly. As long as military action by the coalition is precisely directed at Bin Laden and other perpetrators of terrorism – in other words, as long as civilian casualties are minimal – it is entirely possible that there will be few if any bad unintended consequences. On the other hand, it is all too easy to imagine a scenario in which the terrorists are unharmed and indiscriminate killing of civilians provokes a wave of anti-western indignation throughout the Islamic world, recruiting thousands to the fanatics’ ranks who unleash a wave of terror that makes September 11 seem puny.

At least some members of the US administration are aware of the dangers – notably Colin Powell, the secretary of state – as indeed are Tony Blair and the other European leaders that have rallied to America’s side.

So far, thankfully, it seems that their pressure for restraint has been successful. How long it will remain so is, however, unclear. We live in nerve-racking times.

Review of Victor Serge: the Course is Set on Hope by Susan Weisssman (Verso £20), Tribune, 14 September 2001

The life of the revolutionary, journalist and author Victor Serge was truly extraordinary. Born Victor Kilbalchich in Belgium in 1890 to exiled Russian revolutionary parents, he first achieved notoriety in his early twenties as a member of a gang of individualist anarchist bankrobbers in France, for whose exploits he was jailed in 1913. On his release in 1917, he went to Barcelona and participated in an unsuccessful anarcho-syndicalist uprising, then returned to France and was arrested and jailed again. Released once more in 1919, by now disillusioned with anarchism, he made his way to Russia, joined the Bolsheviks and became a leading figure in the Communist International, playing a key role as a propagandist in its doomed attempt to foment revolution in Germany in the mid-1920s.

Back in Russia in 1926, he joined Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which was engaged in a bitter struggle with Stalin inside the Soviet Communist Party. After its defeat, as Stalin consolidated his grip on power, he stayed in Russia, under constant threat of arrest, writing a history of the Bolshevik revolution and three novels based on his experiences as a young man. Eventually, in 1933, he was arrested and exiled to a remote village. An international outcry followed, and in 1936 he was expelled from the Soviet Union (without the manuscripts of four books completed during his incarceration, which were seized by the authorities), eventually finding his way back to France.

In Paris, he collaborated with the exiled Trotsky – and fell out with him – and wrote three more novels and three other books offering coruscating left-wing critiques of the Stalinist regime. He escaped from Paris under German fire in 1940 and left France for Mexico in 1941 where he continued to write prolifically until his death in 1947.

Most remarkable of all, the literary products of this extraordinary life were not mere hack work: they include some of the masterpieces of the 20th century. Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary is one of the most compelling autobiographies ever written, and the best of his novels – Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, Conquered City, The Case of Comrade Tulayev – have deservedly acquired a reputation as classics of political fiction.

Susan Weissman, an American academic, writes about Serge as an unashamed enthusiast. Her new biography concentrates on the development of Serge’s relationship to the Soviet Union: there is little here on him before he arrived in Russia in 1919, on his personal life or on his literary oeuvre as such. Weissman’s emphasis is legitimate – the Soviet Union was Serge’s main preoccupation for his last 30 years, and he was a pioneer of critical Left analysis of Soviet society – and her research is thorough. She is particularly good on the deadly intrigues of Stalin’s secret agents against the Trotskyists and their allies in the 1930s and on Serge’s bust-up with Trotsky at the same time.

If there is one let-down, it is that the book plods. It is not simply that Weissman’s account lacks the panache of Serge’s own writing. A bigger problem is her penchant for labouring points of Marxist doctrine. She takes it as axiomatic that the Bolsheviks were right about just about everything as long as Lenin was alive, and she spends an inordinate amount of effort defending Serge against accusations that he deviated from this or that article of Leninist faith.

Unfortunately, the effect is to undermine her claim that he remains more relevant than ever today. To show that Serge in the 1940s resisted the heretical temptations of anarchism – or, heaven forbid, “Right Menshevism” – might be the way to effect his rehabilitation among card-carrying Trotskyists. But it is hardly the strategy to adopt if you’re trying to convince the rest of the world. The Bolshevik revolution is a dead duck. Serge is worth reading despite, not because of, his (by the end wavering) faith in it.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 31 August 2001

So Melita Norwood, the south-east London granny who was revealed a couple of years ago to have spent 40 years spying for the Soviet Union, is to publish her memoirs. The news needs to be taken with just a pinch of salt. It appeared, after all, on the front page of the Sunday Times, which has made a habit of getting it wrong in this line of business. Most notoriously, six years ago after it falsely claimed that Michael Foot had been KGB Agent Boot it was forced to issue a grovelling apology and pay him substantial damages (some of which he gave to Tribune).

But let’s assume that the Sunday Times has got its facts right this time. What will Norwood, formerly Agent Hola, say? Well, to be honest, I haven’t a clue. I’ve never spoken to her, and I don’t know the identity of 88-year-old Melita’s “socialist” friend who is apparently co-writing her book. All I know is that her friends say precisely the same as the papers did when she was first unmasked as a spy: she’s a lovely old dear who just happens to be an unapologetic hardcore Stalinist – OK, I agree the two don’t sit easily together – and she regrets nothing.

Of course, it’s possible that her book will be a sensational exposé of Soviet espionage during the cold war, revealing the names of dozens of agents, detailing hundreds of spectacular operations and showing that the Communist Party of Great Britain, of which Norwood was a member, played a crucial role in doing the covert dirty work of the totalitarian regime in Russia.

But I have a sneaking suspicion it won’t be anything of the sort. For a start, I’m prepared to bet that Norwood is writing not so much to set the historical record straight as to explain the nobility of her motives in passing military secrets to a vicious police state – the usual communist mendacity about the late and unlamented Soviet Union being a force for peace and progress that deserved any help it could get. If she does know about anything other than her own spying operation, which is unlikely, I don’t think she’ll spill the beans.

More important, though, it’s a moot point whether there are many more beans to spill. On the available evidence, it would be a big surprise if the CP did much more for Moscow in the line of espionage than we already know about (except possibly in Spain in the 1930s and in the 1980s peace movement). The CP was certainly a subsidised servant of the Soviet Union for most of its life – but its role was above all propagandist, and propagandist organisations by their very nature do not provide good cover for spying. It would be less surprising to discover hitherto-unknown Soviet intelligence operations or hitherto-unmasked agents. But there is little reason to believe either that Britain was crawling with Soviet spies during the cold war or that those that were here did much that is not already familiar.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Norwood affair, however, is the nonchalant way in which nearly everyone has treated “the spy who came in from the garden”, as one paper dubbed her. Apart from a couple of right-wing Tory MPs and a handful of columnists of the same bent, no one called for her immediate arrest and trial when she was first exposed. The general consensus is that Norwood’s spying happened a long time ago in different political circumstances, and that it’s not really fair to subject an old lady to the full force of the law. Although there is little sign that the British appetite for tales of Soviet espionage has disappeared, it seems that most Brits think it was all a bit of a joke.

This attitude is a far cry from that prevailing in the United States, where the issue is as contentious as it ever was – largely because of the release in recent years of hitherto secret materials, both in the US and in Russia, that cast light on some of the most controversial spying cases of the Cold War, notably those of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss.

The Rosenbergs were members of the Communist Party of the USA who were executed in 1953 after being found guilty of passing American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union; Hiss, a senior figure in the Roosevelt administration, was jailed in 1950 for perjury after denying claims that he was a secret communist and spy. Both the Rosenbergs and Hiss strongly protested their innocence at the time, and they became left-wing causes celebres as the most prominent victims of the anti-communist hysteria whipped up by Senator Joe McCarthy and others.

The material released in the past few years, however, shows that both the Rosenbergs and Hiss were guilty as charged. Or at least that’s the view of one group of polemicists, mainly but not all on the Right, including the onetime left-wing journalist David Horowitz and the ex-communist historian Ron Radosh, whose sour memoir of the CPUSA, Commies, has just been published. Their critics, mainly on the left, argue with equal force that their evidence is inadequate, if not on the Rosenbergs at least on Hiss – a point put brilliantly in the left-wing weekly The Nation last month by its former editor, Victor Navasky, a veteran anti-McCarthyite.

There is something unsettling about the vehemence with which the American argument is being conducted, and the attempt of by some on the Right to use it as a means of rehabilitating McCarthy is shocking. But the seriousness of the American debate is salutary. The KGB and its predecessors were not at all funny. I don’t think Norwood should be prosecuted or that she can be held personally responsible for all the KGB’s crimes – but we should not forget that she was a member of an organisation that killed thousands of people and ruined millions of lives.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 August 2001

I wasn’t planning to have another go at our dearly beloved Foreign Secretary this week – but no one else has written the response that his last piece in these pages demanded (When-oh-when are you dozy Tribune-reading klutzes going to wake up to the fact that Britain’s relationships with the United States and Europe are a little more important than whether you vote Liberal Democrat in Tory seats in the south-west of England? I just ask.)

In case you missed it, Jack Straw’s most recent column in Tribune (July 27) was an impassioned defence of “Son of Star Wars”, George W Bush’s hare-brained plan for a ballistic missile defence (BMD) system to protect the United States against, well, no one we can identify with certainty at present, but it might at some point include Iraq, Libya and North Korea.

So much is wrong with Straw’s case that it’s difficult to know where to start. When I first read his piece, I was gob-smacked by his phoney faux naif tone: it’s amazing that no one seems ever to have told him that a man in his position claiming to be a clueless chump comes across as a clueless chump.

But what really sticks in the craw is his crass dismissal of anyone who thinks there is a better means of organising defence policy than either missile defence or nuclear deterrence, the threat of “mutually assured destruction” that has kept the world in a state of neurotic terror for S3 years. “Who opposed MAD in the cold war and prefers it now to missile defence?” he asks rhetorically. ‘The answer is some of those who say we should have nothing to do with missile defence. It’s not a very convincing answer.”

This is, of course, a dig at his predecessor as Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who was sceptical about Bush’s plans and was once, in his European Nuclear Disarmament days in the 1980s, an eloquent critic of deterrence.

But this is about more than settling scores in the Cabinet. The truth is that, regardless of what you think of deterrence, ballistic missile defence is a dangerous project. Not only will it cost an incredible amount of money that could be better spent. It will undermine the whole arms-control regime established over the past 35-odd years. Deploying a BMD system would be a unilateral abrogation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, one of the key international arms agreements of the cold war, setting off a BMD-related arms race and inviting all and sundry to wreck every other arms control agreement ever signed.

The existing arms control set-up is not perfect. But, contrary to the Bush and his friends on the US right, it needs to be reinforced rather than swept away. Arms control treaties show that political means can be used to keep military technology in check. We need more of them, with greater scope. If some existing agreements are not working, we need not to ditch them but to make them effective by any means necessary, from intensive diplomacy to rigorous sanctions.

That is the line of every other social democratic government in Europe. Straw’s position is a pathetically craven attempt to win favour from the Bush administration.

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Meanwhile, out of the public eye, a big change is afoot in the small world of the New Politics Network, the tiny outfit – 285 members – that inherited the mantle and riches of Straw’s old buddies when he was a student leader, the Communist Party of Great Britain. Last month, I spent a weird Saturday morning at the avowedly post-Leninist network’s AGM (held, oddly, in the Marx Memorial Library in London, with a bust of old Vladimir Ilyich looking on) at which the ex-comrades decided, pending a vote of members, to turn over the assets of the organisation to a trust.

So what, you might think. Except that the assets (mostly real estate inherited from the CPGB, originally purchased directly with subventions from Moscow) are worth around £4 million. Putting them into a trust means that NPN members will cede control of the kitty to unelected trustees – former-CP bigwigs and usual-suspect great-and-gooders – who will dish out largesse to their favoured respectable “progressive” causes in perpetuity. It’s a patronage scam of the worst kind, and as a member of the NPN – never a CPer, I joined because I really am a post-Marxist democratic pluralist and mistakenly took the ex-commies on face value – I argued at the AGM for retention of the organisation’s constituional status quo, whereby members can decide democratically where the assets go when, as seems inevitable, the whole show is wound up. Given the decrepitude of the organsiation, I said, it would be better to hand over the cash to people who are genuinely doing something worthwhile (the NPN has spent £250,000 in the past 18 months on bugger-all) and fade away peacefully.

We liquidationists were not organised, and we were beaten 19-9 in the AGM vote by a popular front of mugwumps and pensioner leadership loyalists. I reckon we’ll lose the vote of the membership too. But, as the old left cliché goes, the struggle goes on.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 27 July 2001

One of the most consistently frustrating features of politics in the age of soundbites and focus groups is the almost pathological reluctance of most professional politicians to make any case in public that is remotely controversial.

Of course, politicians have always avoided arguments when they think they are on to a loser. I remember with a shudder the asinine debate on British membership of the Common Market in the run-up to the 1975 referendum, when most of the politicians on both sides preferred to talk about the price of a large white sliced loaf and a quarter-pound of tea rather than the real issues at stake.

But the scale of evasion has grown massively over the past 15-20 years as spin doctors and marketing consultants have become ever more pervasive in politics.
The received wisdom these days is that nothing turns off the punters more than an argument, and that the main result of engaging an opponent or a critic in rational debate is to give legitimacy to his or her point of view. Far better to ignore your opponents and critics, dismiss them as extreme, eccentric or old-fashioned, or silence them by fair means or foul — and simply press ahead with your controversial measure until it acquires the status of fait accompli.

That makes you look strong, which is certainly much better than appearing wise or rational and might even be the perfect state of being in modern politics. As long as you are careful in your handling of the media — all questions agreed beforehand, answers learnt by heart, no interviews with “hostile” journalists et cetera — you should be able to get away with anything short of a poll tax, a devaluation or the provision of passports to dodgy businessmen.

I first came up against this phenomenon in Labour circles when, in the aftermath of the 1987 general election, the Labour leadership decided to drop the policy of ditching Britain’s “independent nuclear deterrent” and removing American nuclear weapons from British soil. The change was pushed through Labour’s policy review process without a single senior Labour politician ever offering a sustained argument for it in public. Afterwards, the best anyone managed to come up with by way of justification was a cynical declaration that times had changed. Because the Russians were more open to disarmament initiatives, we no longer had to be.

The trend became more marked in the Labour Party with the rise to the shadow chancellorship of Gordon Brown, a man who will do anything to avoid explaining his position in public if there is the remotest chance that someone might disagree with him. He refused to justify his silence on the over-valuation of the pound during the sterling crisis that led up to Black Wednesday. He declined to be drawn into defending his enthusiasm for the Maastricht treaty. And he dodged all debate on pensions policy, public spending or taxation.

But it was after Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994 that the refusal to engage or justify really became endemic. “New” Labour didn’t argue the case for sucking up to big business and the yellow press – it just did it, utterly shamelessly. It was the same with adopting the Tories’ spending plans and promising a referendum on joining the euro.

Since 1997, shirking discussion has been the Government’s norm. No one ever explained why we needed the Dome, or postponement of British entry into the single European currency, or single-parent benefit cuts, or undemocratic reform of the House of Lords, or toothless freedom of information legislation, or the scrapping of student grants — we just got them. And, amazingly, hardly anyone bothered to complain or demand that the government account for its actions.

In the past few weeks, however, something has changed. True to form, no one in government has bothered to justify the two most controversial measures of the second term announced so far — the apparently only half-formulated plans to hand over delivery of more public services to the private sector and Gordon Brown’s refusal to compromise with Ken Livingstone over London’s underground.

But the response, from MPs, press, unions and public alike, has been unlike anything “New” Labour has had to face before. People simply cannot understand why the government thinks the private sector offers a solution to chronic understaffing and poor management in the public services — or why Brown believes the tube could be improved by being split up and run by private companies in the same way as the railways.

Through their unwillingness to account for their actions, Blair, Brown and their minions have managed the considerable feat of appearing at once cowardly and arrogant. And for the first time it seems that their pig-headedness in pursuing unpopular policies could land them with their own poll tax. Which raises the crucial question of who will be the Michael Heseltine and John Major of the Labour Party . . .