"The generality of Seymour's conclusion, the broad sweep of his argument and the passion of his attack are overstated, dissipating their force. More nuance and context could have made this potentially important book compelling. It is a shame, as buried in these pages and their footnotes is a great deal of damning material on the apologists of recent illegalities."

I find little to complain about here - not because I agree with Sands, but because I can't object to someone with his views reaching the conclusions that he does. In general, Sands would like more "nuance" and less generality. In specific, he would have liked to see some discussion of international law and its centrality to justifying war. I don't see this as being particularly damaging to my case, since the book is about the ideas, rather than the legal institutions, that have helped justify imperialism - apparently a word that is absent from Sands' lexicon. Perhaps, however, it would have been worth stating a position on international law, however briefly, if only to outline the view that law is an expression of force and will, not morality. Thus, while Sands contends in several lucid and highly readable dispatches that that the problem with the Bush administration is its subversion of international law, I maintain that the rule of law in international affairs is itself barbaric. The post hoc legalisation of the occupation of Iraq is a condign example, both of law being the product of violence and of the barbarism in its application. Still, I realise that this is a controversial position, that Sands would not be receptive to such an argument and that, in fact, he wishes I had written a different book.

Otherwise, Sands would have preferred to have some acknowledgement that some "use of force", sometimes, can be justified. This is what I take the plea for "nuance" to mean. As he puts it, "it seems all force is wrong, so that any liberal support may be treated as liberal justification for murder". I do not, for the record, say that "all force is wrong". Sands seems to have confused anti-imperialism with pacifism. I do, however, go to some lengths to detail several interventions, over several centuries, that were strenuously moralised on humanitarian terms, from the Boer War to Operation Allied Force, and I do find the humanitarian case wanting. Clearly, such a gauche lack of subtlety on my part does not merit any particular leniency. However, as the critique does not address the substance of the argument, it is at best a missed opportunity.

Sands says that Liberal Defence "glosses over vastly important issues" such as: "Was the post-second world war human rights project intended to create new conditions of colonial domination? Has it contributed to circumstances in which there will be more oppression and misery, rather than less? Have the economic rules promoting globalisation engendered war?" It is easy to concede the point, but equally difficult to see its relevance. Again, he seems to have wanted a book about something else. Similarly, when he says that "the real critique of those who supported the latest Iraq war is that they killed off any hope, for now at least, of garnering support to use force where massive violations of fundamental human rights are taking place", I have a feeling that he and I have a different outlook on life entirely. The "real critique" is that they helped facilitate the very "massive violations of fundamental human rights" that Sands opposes, with the outstanding result of perhaps over a million excess deaths. Therefore, if one side-effect of the slaughter we have seen for the last five or six years is that people are less willing to exhort the United States to deploy its awesome machinery of violence, this ought to be welcomed. I do, in the conclusion, engage with those who see US imperialism as a potential guarantor of human rights and last resort terminator of genocide, but if Sands has read this, he shows no sign of having done so.

There is one part of the review that seems entirely out of place, jarring to the point of inducing nausea. Sands says: "those who are on the receiving end of what Seymour perceives as US excess have, through the acts of their own governments, or their failure to object, contributed to their own oppression." I confess I don't understand what this means - or, perhaps, I would rather not understand what this means. Perhaps it is best to leave this one to the readers' judgement.

Update: I've had a rather interesting exchange with Philippe Sands, and - just to set the record straight on the last paragraph of this post - I am, with his permission, reproducing his comment clarifying his remarks:

"The only point I was making is that a number of the conflicts you refer to were supported by Security Council action (even unanimous in some cases). To my mind, that takes the sting out of your critique, in the sense that not all the blame can be laid at the feet of the US or those on the left who may have supported the actions. In various cases many governments and many peoples supported a conflict, whether directly or indirectly. That raises issue of their own responsibilities, although it cannot in any way justify the illegalities and excesses once the conflict is underway, or the terrible suffering of innocents caught up in broader geopolitical nightmares."

Hoare begins by accusing me of a tautology: "Seymour is unable to provide any evidence that any of his liberal targets did, indeed, support ‘murder’" in the cases of Croatia and Bosnia, there being no notable instances of "bloodcurdling war cries", "unless simply being in favour of Western military intervention automatically makes one a supporter of ‘murder’". In fact, the argument in the book is that in misconstruing the situation in Yugoslavia, and by calling for intervention, pro-war liberals helped to justify political and military interventions that did indeed contribute to ‘murder’, and prepared the ideological ground for supporting future wars. I do not characterise everyone who (to my mind mistakenly) bought the 'humanitarian intervention' argument as a defender of 'murder'. And at no point do I argue that liberal imperialism is simply characterised by "bloodcurdling war-cries". The whole point of liberal imperialism as an ideology is that it doesn’t work that way. The accusation of "tautology" rebounds on the reviewer: it is his tautology, not mine.

I do not argue against military intervention on the grounds that "the Croatians and Bosnians were not worthy of being defended by Western military intervention, because their governments were just as bad as Milosevic’s - possibly worse - and were guilty of the same atrocities." I argue that liberals and leftists misconstrued the facts of the matter, demonised the Serbs and paid little or no attention to comparable crimes by Croatian and Bosnian forces. I do not argue that anyone is "not worthy" of "being defended". The reviewer just assumes that military intervention would, in fact, constitute 'defence'. In outlining the grotesque disinformation in the coverage of the conflict, he further assumes, I mean to imply that Croats and Bosnians were unworthy of a form of 'solidarity' that I might extend to others, suggesting that he has not read/understood the rest of the book. Nor do I say, or imply, that Croatian and Bosnian governments were "possibly worse" than "Milosevic's". This a tautology followed by a non-sequitur, crowned by an invention.

I do not argue that the proper response "to news and images of Serb ethnic-cleansing and atrocities (which Seymour does not deny took place) is not to demand action in defence of the victims, but to ensure that the perpetrators of this ethnic cleansing and these atrocities get a fair coverage and are not condemned in too strong terms". I argue that "action in defence of the victims" of any atrocity is not identical to calling for states to engage in military aggression, and that humanitarian solidarity is not to be confused with hysterical propaganda. It is because Hoare doesn't notice such distinctions that he is able to conclude that "what Seymour has written is a defence of the Milosevic regime and Serb ethnic-cleansing from their liberal critics". (Emphasis in original). If only I were as litigious as the Hoares. It would be far more realistic to say that much of Hoare's output constitutes a defence of the Tudjman regime and Croatian ethnic cleansing.

I would prefer to leave aside the matter of Hoare's taking umbrage on behalf of his mother, but Hoare's misrepresentations make it impossible. Firstly, interviewing former friends of those one wants to evaluate, even if in passing, is not the disreputable technique that he appears to think it is - it is normal practise. Secondly, Hoare claims that Branka Magas only supported Croatian secessionism in the same sense that Socialist Worker did. Magas supported secession, Socialist Worker supported the right to secede - a distinction that made all the difference when Magas denied the ‘systematic persecution’ of the Krajina Serbs, and husband Quentin Hoare defended Tudjman from claims that he was an antisemite and Holocaust-denier.

I reject the evocations of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust with reference to the Serbian government. This is not because the Serbian government lacked for authoritarianism or because it was not interested in expanding its power – with brute violence when all else failed. It is because that system of allusions was the basis for propaganda that denied the atrocities of other powers and legitimised the highly destructive interventionism of the United States, including its diplomatic sabotage and its subcontracting of reactionary Wahabbi fighters. Serb camps were compared to Belsen, in a sense, so that one didn't have to mention camps run by the HDZ and BiH. In that context, I ironised about Finkielkraut’s deployment of the Nazi-Jew homology in the context of the Croatian war by pointing out that Tudjman was more apt to vocalise pro-Nazi sentiments than Slobodan Milosevic. It is true that I didn’t mention that a number of Bosnian Serb paramilitaries embraced the symbols of the far right, but that was because it not germane to an argument about the Croatian war. I will spare Hoare’s blushes by not meditating too long on the topic of the BNP’s Nazi proclivities, which he denies exist. I will merely say that if it was possible not to see the antisemite in Franjo Tudjman, it is possible to miss the Nazi in Nick Griffin.

Hoare is scandalised that I impute "political motives" to the International Court of Justice: the problem is that I don't. He is referring to page 204, which explicitly references the ICTY, a wholly different (and highly politicised) body. Hoare is also vexed by my claim that "Izetbegovic’s Bosnian regime was the party favoured by ‘Western imperialism’". My claim is actually that US imperialism backed Bosnia. I note that the French government of Mitterrand, for example, was sympathetic to the Serbian side. The reason for this distortion on Hoare's part is that he wants to establish a 'gotcha'. Thus, citing alleged 'false flag' operations by the Bosnian side in Markale, I note that the accusations originate from UN personnel. According to Hoare, this means that the "representatives of Western imperialism" were maligning Bosnians, blaming them for "their own suffering". Even if those UN witnesses were in an uncomplicated way the imperialist delegates that Hoare takes them to be, the point would be one of 'evidence against interest': if those UN witnesses were representatives of US power, they were undermining the narrative industriously promoted by their bosses. Further, the point about 'false flag' operations is precisely that those responsible for them are not the victims. The implication of such an operation would be that the Bosnian government was using the populace as a bargaining tool in its negotiations. Only by assuming that the Bosnian government was the bearer of the volksgeist, in a way that is congruent with his support for Croatian nationalism, could Hoare fail to understand this point.

What seems to annoy Hoare more than anything else is my habit of citing left-wing dissidents, especially those who are either sympathetic to Slobodan Milosevic or sceptical of the claims surrounding the Srebrenica massacre. I make no apology for doing so where they have something interesting to say, and they are more than outnumbered by the usual texbooks, scholarly articles, news reports and so on. But Hoare's undignified indignation leads him to yet another pratfall. Thus, belabouring me for citing Diana Johnstone on Izetbegovic’s deathbed confession, as related by Bernard Kouchner, he complains: "Kouchner’s French government was aiding and abetting Milosevic’s destruction of Bosnia, and maintaining an arms embargo against the Bosnians". And so, he wonders, why should we take his word at face value? Had he read the 22 pages he focuses on properly, he would have been aware that Kouchner was not a supporter of that policy, and worked to get it overturned (see p 199). This would be one more case of 'evidence against interest'.

Those extensive mis-readings and gaffes to one side, there are a number of criticisms where I think Hoare has a point. And it would be grossly unfair, given how much effort he put into his review, to ignore them, so I conclude with those. I cite a quotation from Tudjman that was reproduced in Michael Parenti's To Kill a Nation in which genocide is described as "permitted", and even "recommended". Hoare, who has read the original text from which the quote has been extruded, says that it is taken out of context. I am quite prepared to take his word for it barring better advice, and correct it in the paperback edition. Accusing me of mis-stating casualty figures, Hoare notes my claim that in the run up to the Srebrenica massacre, "a wave of terror, including rape, by Bosnian Muslim forces in surrounding areas had killed thousands of Serbs.’" This was based on a number of neglected news reports from the time, found on LexisNexis. His rejoinder is that statistics from the Research and Documentation Centre, whom I cite elsewhere, put the number of Serb civilians killed in the surrounding area at 879. I did say "Serbs" and not "Serb civilians", and the total number of Serbs killed in that area, according to Hoare's source, is 5573. He might have been more attentive to what he was reading. Still, let us concede that it would have been better to measure those news reports against the RDC’s stats and to make a clear distinction between the killing of military men and civilians in the UN-protected enclave and surrounding areas. There would have been no damage to the substantive point that forces loyal to General Naser Oric were using their numerical strength over the Serbs to harrass, rape, and kill locals, and that little attention was paid to these and other atrocities by Bosniak forces. And I will also give Hoare the point that having opposed the use of inflated figures for civilian casualties, my use of Kate Hudson’s maximal figure for the number of Serbs expelled during Operation Storm (which may well be the total number displaced during the whole of the war from 1991 to 1995) does not sit well – and at any rate wasn’t essential to the point that what Hoare refers to as "the liberation of Krajina" was a bloody and repressive operation.

All the rest, I am afraid, is just futile bluster on Hoare’s part.

For the notaries of humanist imperialism there is nothing as perplexing, and no outrage as great, as a politically astute and historically literate attack on their whole tradition by a playwright. Of all the bruschetta-munchers in all the world, a playwright. If you thought that David Edgar's essay would pass without some effort to put the little quill driver back in his place, you haven't been paying attention. Among the piqued responses I have seen is this frightful tribute to affronted vanity (entitled 'Six Straw Men and One Pat On My Back'). Another is the riposte by a promoted food critic with a mordacious journalistic manner. The latter's plaidoyer, true to style, opens with an interrogation which I want to interrogate in turn:

Conveniently early in his essay on "defection literature", David Edgar gives the game away:

"Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with fascism as totalitarianism) so, now, influential writers seek to redraw the political map of our time."

Do we get the idea that describing the Soviet model, with its vast network of gulags and millions of state murders and total party control, as "totalitarian" was a historical error? Certainly, that's the suggestion left hanging like a two-pig-owning kulak.

As unlettered as this evidently is, as much as it discloses the hasty prosecutorial zeal of the polemical dilettante, there is an education of sorts lurking here. A sentimental education whose syllabus, originating in Fifties America, has been relentlessly globalised. It is apt that those who disposed of marbles, scruples or both in the post-9/11 reflux should so unreflectively reproduce the precepts of anti-communism, and Andrew Anthony does not make an exception of himself.

There are three points to call attention to here. The first is that of course there is a legitimate controversy over whether 'totalitarianism' is a worthwhile concept, and another for those who accept it as to what it's reach should be. The second is that Andrew Anthony would, on this evidence, have no basis for making such discernments. For him, it is a moral failing not to accept the schema of 'totalitarianism' because for him it is just a word one uses to refer to a state that is not merely very bad, but wicked, egregious, evil. The third is that while Edgar speaks of communism, Anthony speaks of a single regime that purported to embody communism. A whole series of distinctions is being lost here: between different kinds of communist ideology; between different kinds of regime; between different kinds of movement; and between ideology, movement and regime. It is a catechism of anti-communist ideology that such distinctions do not matter, of course. The roots of Stalinist repression are in the organicist conceptions of its ideological forebears, (conceptions they shared with their apparent ideological opposites), and that exhausts all wisdom on the subject. I am not saying that this is what Andrew Anthony thinks, because that would imply that some thought had gone into his excursus, and nowhere is this in evidence. But these are the ideological co-ordinates that structure the sentiment before it is inculcated. (This propaganda film offers a concise account of the ideology, despite its now archaic feel). The political map of the twentieth century can thus be arranged in a simple binary:



Obviously, I left out apartheid and other colonial relics, not to mention indigenous genocide and most of the authoritarian states that might in some views qualify as 'totalitarian lite', 'diet totalitarian' or 'I Can't Believe It's Not Totalitarian'. Totalitarianism versus democracy, the simple all-purpose political struggle. Today, the reinvention of 'anti-totalitarianism' relies on the celebrity of the stateless criminal enterprise of 'Al Qaeda', so 'totalitarianism' is no longer posed primarily as a question of the state versus the individual. Rather, it is refurbished with Victorian cant, its dichotomies revolving around the liberal versus the illiberal, the civilized versus the uncivilized, the progressive versus the barbaric. These work, as they always have, as structures of feeling and intuition rather than as analytical frameworks. In the era of the Cold War, liberals acquiesced in crimes sometimes tantamount to genocide while their idealism and wisdom was being extolled in official propaganda and while they were assured that their ideals were defended by the Pentagon and the CIA. In era of the 'war on terror', some liberals are complicit in grave crimes just as they are encouraged to believe that their always nebulous 'values' are at stake. This is a sentimental education whose output is an unattractive and strident assertiveness about 'Western values', which is as defensive as it is obtuse. This is why its sophisters cannot help but see their critics as in some sense treasonous, for the 'other side'. This is why they cannot help but inculpate, and why they are so drawn to the accusatory style even where all they expose is their own ignorance and lack of thought. It is no laughing matter: Anthony is stuck with his Pavlovian reactions, as are his co-partisans. David Edgar just rang the right bells.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair:


Verso are publishing my first book, The Liberal Defense of Murder, this Summer. As the blurb explains:

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of prominent thinkers on the Left found themselves increasingly aligned with their ideological opposites. Over the last decade, many of these thinkers have become close to Washington; forceful supporters of the War on Terror, they help frame arguments for policymakers and provide the moral and intellectual justification for Western military intervention across the globe. From Kanan Makiya, one of the chief architects of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, to Bernard Henri-Levy’s advocacy of “humanitarian” intervention, The Liberal Defense of Murder traces the journey of these figures from left to right and explores their critical role in the creation of the new American empire. With wide-ranging testimony from many key figures on the left, this is a crucial account of the emergence of the “pro-war left,” and its shaping of our post-9/11 world.

The provisional publication date is 1st July. You can, of course, pre-order the book from Verso or Bookmarks. In fact, I order you to do so. This instant.