This will be formally launched in July, but the hard copies are out there.  They include a brand new Afterword approximately 16,000 words in length, which takes us up to the Middle East revolutions and the Libyan war.  I have also made various corrections - including some responding to the more bilious critics, recalling the old saw about stopped clocks.  And they have a swell looking new cover with lots of press recommendations.  You know the deal: if you want to fight the warmongers, you need this book.

Don't forget if you're in Oxford today that I will be speaking at the Oxford Radical Forum from 16.45, alongside Peter Hallward, on Haiti and 'humanitarian intervention'. Come along, why not? I will also be speaking at the Housmans bookshop on Liberal Defence as well as an upcoming book of mine (you'll just have to wait, won't you?) on 26th May. Housmans, like Bookmarks, is a solidly left-wing bookshop that provides an online service for those who wish to avoid buying from Amazon, so check it out. And Americans should come to the Left Forum, where I'll be speaking on Saturday 20th March.

"Seymour's analysis has truly impressive breadth and depth. He ranges from Alexis de Tocqueville's support for colonialism and US treatment of the native population through to Gladstone's annexation of Egypt, the high point of nineteenth-century liberal imperialism in which liberals justified the exercise by 'construct[ing] the colonial subjects ... as passive victims needful of tutelage, capable of self-government only after a spell of European supremacy' ... Seymour performs a vital service by charting the impact of white supremacy on the left in this period as well as their more pragmatic considerations regarding the impact of decolonization on domestic industries and the exigencies of electoralism and coalition-building. In some cases, such as the French left and Algeria, there was also the threat of repression from the state if leftist parties took radical (i.e. negative) positions on colonial possessions. As a result, Seymour argues, the European left identified too closely with the priorities of their respective states, which meant that it ‘‘sleepwalked into the twin propellers of fascism and war’’. Here Seymour provides a new European perspective – and a warning – on the left’s pragmatic and ultimately shortsighted support for imperialist adventures..." (Maria Ryan, 'Intellectuals and the ‘‘War on Terror’’', Journal of American Studies, 44 (2010), 1, 203–209)

So, if we can summarise. Haiti is a country which is subject to "progress-resistant cultural influences", such as:

the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

This (rather than this), says neoconservative David Brooks, explains why Haiti is so poor. The appropriate response is imperial disdain for Haitian culture, and paternalistic intervention. Such a culturalist reading of social institutions and political economies is not exclusive to neoconservatives, but it is their preferred variant of the liberal defence of murder. As you would expect ftom the savages described by Brooks, though, they have responded to the disaster of the quake by looting and building roadblocks from the dead. The security situation (a phrase worth unpacking) is... what, you tell me - 'deteriorating'? 'Testing'? 'Tricky'? 'Challenging'? What is the bromide of choice these days? At any rate, the state of affairs arising from said "progress-resistant cultural influences" is so baleful that it is compelling the US to use its military power to obstruct the delivery of aid, because delivering aid will - so Obama's defence secretary tells us - lead to riots.

Brooks is not alone in hoping that American power can be used to discipline the hapless natives. As Obama sends in the marines and the 82nd Airborne, precisely to deal with the above-mentioned "security situation", the American Enterprise Institute insists that such forces are used to "ensure that Haiti’s gangs—particularly those loyal to ousted President Jean‐Bertrand Aristide—are suppressed." The worry about the prospect of a return of the elected president, Aristide, which "can only create further mischief". The AEI, I would confidently wager, has no reason to fret over this particular exercise in humanitarian intervention. Obama is committed to maintaining the coup government, the sweatshop oligarchy and the phoney elections. The troops are there because the Haitian population is seen not merely as pathetic supplicants but as a threat. The very sophisticated networks of community and solidarity that have been developed in Haiti under dictatorship and terror, and which are best placed to deliver assistance to those in need of it, are precisely the problem as far as the US government is concerned. It is they, the 'gangs' who refuse to assimilate to America's benevolent programme of racial uplift, whom successive US governments have attempted to destroy, whether through the IMF or the Tonton Macoutes. It cannot be long before the marines find themselves gunning down some restless ingrates, and there is certainly no prospect that the Obama administration will allow Aristide to return to his country.

Just as well, then, that we have been apprised of all these horror stories about bodies doubling as road-blocks (as if people in need of aid would actually try to block the roads), machete wielding 'looters', security breakdowns, gang violence, etc. Otherwise we might have been inclined to misunderstand the situation, and wonder whether in sending trained killers into a disaster area the Obama administration isn't hijacking a catastrophe according to a premeditated plan, a pre-conceived set of priorities, and a prefabricated story.

Not to be divisive or anything, but I think it is important to at least notice that the ideological (I hesitate to say 'intellectual') motifs that the far right are currently utilising have been prepared over the last eight years by pro-war apologia. I say the far right have utilised these mythemes because it would be grossly misleading to imply that fascists and the belligerati share the same agenda, the same tactics, or the same ideology. Still, having written about the lib imps for some years now, the overlapping strategies for justifying racism cannot but be obvious to me and to many of you - so apologies to those who are already familiar with the material I am about to cite. And given the rise of fascism across Europe, now would surely be an excellent time for some of those who bought this Islamophobic scaremongering to consider how it has galvanised these barbaric political forces. For example, I see that the English Defence League's strategy of arguing about Islam comes straight from the 'war on terror' playbook. It starts with hostility to 'extremism' - we are not against Muslims as such, but 'Islamic extremism'. It proceeds to conjecture that Islam itself is 'extreme', and that there is no such thing as a 'moderate' Muslim believer. The next step is to denounce 'Islamic imperialism', worry about the Muslim birth rate, and tacitly disclose that one is, after all, against Muslims as such. This was necessary because warmongers had to deny that Muslims had any legitimate grievances against Euro-American states that might lead them to be hostile to, say, an American-led conquest of Afghanistan or Iraq.

The most ebullient of these Islam-baiters was initially Christopher Hitchens, who began by diagnosing an ancient psychic malady inherent in Islam, a "triumvirate of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred". No policy could alleviate this, since "the gates of Vienna would have had to fall to the Ottoman jihad before any balm could begin to be applied to these psychic wounds". In other words, the grievance was that Islam had not conquered the world. Later, Hitchens complained bitterly of those apparently 'moderate' Muslims who were in fact "mainstreaming" what he called - in language borrowed directly from the Israeli right - "Islamic imperialism". This "Islamic imperialism" was deeply connected with the immigration of Muslims to Europe, resulting in 'Islamified' geographical spaces - hence, Hitchens' deployment of the term "Londonistan", a twin of Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" and a not-very-distant descendant of "Jew York". He later concurred with the neoconservative author Mark Steyn that the Muslim birth rate in Europe was potentially disastrous.

But this trajectory was much more widespread than one contrarian author. Sam Harris, the respected atheist writer, commented that "‘Muslim extremism’ is not extreme among Muslims". He averred that the basic thrust of Islam was to "convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world", and that those "who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists." Again, starting from hostility to something called 'extremism', there is a rapid progression to denouncing Islam as such, to regarding it as an inherently imperialist ideology, and to then seeing it as a threat to Europe. Similarly, Martin Amis, beginning with an attack on Islamism as a "creedal wave that calls for our own elimination", went on to draw broad conclusions about Islam (citing Hitchens, Berman, Naipaul and others). He would later froth about his urge to make the whole "Muslim community" suffer: "What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people." If he later disavowed the practical recommendations as merely a confession of a temporary sentiment, he did not stop believing that Islam itself was a threat. Influenced by Mark Steyn's neoconservative polemic, he wondered if "feminism" had "cost us Europe" by permitting the European birth-rate to slow. The complaint was that women, by using contraceptives and having abortions, were not playing their part in the survival of the race - a very Old European idea, it must be stressed.

The belief that Islam itself contained the institutions and energies that produced 'extremism' was repeated by the social democratic columnist Will Hutton, who asserted that "many Muslims want to build mosques, schools, and adhere to Islamic dress codes with ever more energy. But that energy also derives from the same culture and accompanying institutions that produced British-born suicide bombers. The space in which to argue that Islam is an essentially benign religion seems to narrow with every passing day." I cite these examples, being intimately familiar with them, but am conscious of having been exposed to hundreds more like it - often in shrill polemics by American authors. Even oppressed groups themselves were not immune to this hysteria. Writing in the magazine of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, the organisation's secretary George Broadhead wrote: "What does a moderate Muslim do, other than excuse the real nutters by adhering to this barmy doctrine?" This was not, to be fair, tied to any expostulations about what should be 'done' to Muslims, or any programme demanding that Muslims be repressed in any way. But it did identify Muslims as a particularly threatening and dangerous out-group, and thus as an appropriate target for abuse and stigma.

This tendency is not marked by support for fascism. Indeed, its most volubly self-proclaimed attribute is its hostility to fascism - that is, its tendency to anathematise a bewildering variety of ideologies and movements as 'fascist'. Yet it has been deeply complacent about the impact of war not only on its immediate victims but on the societies whose governments are waging it. It has also been insensible as to the racist nature of its statements on Islam, and about the ways in which these helped normalise what have proven to be toxic ideas. That complacency might once have been comprehensible, if not defensible, but is now at the point of being culpable. If people don't break decisively with this Islamophobic rubbish, they make themselves alibis - witting or witless - of barbarism in Europe. As if having supported the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't already bad enough.

Afghanistan's elections will not be the 'turnaround' that policy planners are looking for - neither on the battlefield, nor on the 'home front'. The recent spate of insurgent attacks on US troops and occupation facilities, we are told, signals a desperate effort by a hated gang to disrupt the 'democratic process' by frightening potential voters. It is also an attempt to 'weaken the will' of the 'international community'. Leaving aside the shrill rhetorical pitch of such claims, and the thought-killing cliches that they are typically expressed with, what lesson can be extracted here? As Jason Burke has pointed out, it is unlikely that the insurgents are as interested in the polling booths as the warmongers' agitprop would have us believe. In fact, the best thing going for the Taliban-led resistance is that the current government will remain in power, alongside its warlord allies. But there is clearly an attempt to prepare public opinion here. If the Taliban are seen as anxious to stop people from voting, then a reasonable turnout can be presented as a triumph - I hesitate to say 'of the will', but certainly of the tremendous, earth-pounding military force currently in use. If so, it is a rather desperate PR gambit. There can be no 'purple-finger' chicanery in these elections, and even moderate optimism - forget the contrived jubilance of February 2005 - would be a tough sell even if the elections weren't the sideshow they manifestly are.

The trouble for the war's publicity agents is that they are running out of options. Neither homecoming funerals nor electoral theatre can shift opinion. The sense of weary dissipation in the public appeals of ministers, with their paltry tributes to the troops and affirmations of pot-pourri patriotism, is very palpable. Consider the thoughts of Bob Ainsworth, the void currently known as the secretary of defence. He opens with a gently narcotising series of impressions from a recent visit to Afghanistan. He sees, or rather hallucinates, brave and compassionate troops throwing their lives in harm's way to ensure that the starving children of Afghanistan can be free, and London's public transport systems unmolested. In contrast, he depicts antiwar opinion as detached and vaguely amoral. I realise that some people find Ainsworth particularly grating, but I just find this yawn-inducing. Given that the aim of Ainsworth's piece is to persuade an audience - a relatively left-wing and antiwar audience at that - it has to be considered a crashing failure. But such guilt-tripping would be no more convincing on Question Time or Newsnight. Why is a government minister reduced to such transparent, belligerent posturing? The last time I saw politicians look this pathetic, clapped out and condescending was in the last years of the Major administration. Yet, I don't think it is just to do with the enervation of the Brown government. What has collapsed is the sustaining meta-narrative of the 'war on terror'.

The lexical armoury of the warmongers has been deprived of its most emotive props, these being in order: 1) the idea that the present war is literally a war against fascism comparable to WWII; 2) the idea that the war is part of a broader struggle not only against 'clerical fascism' or 'Islamofascism' or cognate terms, but also against 'totalitarianism', a fight to the finish in the defence of 'civilization' or 'Western values', and; 3) the idea that military conquest is an appropriate means to accomplish putative humanitarian ends. I don't mean to say that these ideas are disappearing. Far from it. The latter in particular will continue to be revisited both intellectually, in the guise of an aggressively marketed 'R2P' doctrine, and rhetorically as various 'failed states' come under the spotlight of the Obama-Biden administration. But they do not inform the idiom of empire in the way that they had for approximately seven years. The reason for this is, in part, that they didn't really work. Certain key constituencies, well-to-do liberals among them, can be mobilised by such appeals. But for most people, I think, it was just not intuitively correct to invoke the spectre of totalitarianism or fascism in relation to the various putative threats so designated. Similarly, however distorted one's impression of 'Al Qaeda' was, the idea that it was a realistic long-term challenger to liberal democracy could only ever have temporary and partial appeal. The humanitarian justification for war had the weakness that it was laced with sometimes bloodcurdling demands for, and promises of, violent revenge. Again, for a sizeable minority of people such murderous humanitarianism was a powerful motivational force, and a good reason for some to get out of bed in the morning. But the fact is that it was the sinister augury of imminent nuclear holocaust - not heartstring-plucking over the Kurds - that did the most to gain support for, or acquiescence in, the invasion of Iraq.

This conceptual overstretch has been played out, and the current managers of the American state know it, as do their coat-tailers in Downing Street. All that remains is an anaemic line about 'stability' and 'fight-them-over-there-not-here', which no one really believes. Even the imperial bunting that bedecks the Sun's pages, and the Andy McNab 'thought for the day' pieces, seem awfully wan and desultory these days. Given that this war is a long-term commitment that will consume troops and resources in abundance, the absence of a workable patter is a serious problem for war planners. They need recruits, they need cheerleaders, and they need an atmosphere conducive to such expenditure of blood and treasure. This is why they now find themselves straining for effect, in a desperate attempt to badger the public, revive some antiquated idea of civic duty, or lure the kids with fantasies of adventure on the frontline.

Every now and again, I hear about a new website offering free e-books. You will forgive me for the fact that, without fail, I first scour the site anxiously to see if someone has uploaded my book. This is pure vanity on my part. No one would waste their time, and if they did I should likely have the person flayed and generously doused in salt and vinegar before forcing them to appear on Britain's Got Talent. Well, I'd probably meditate on that image before telling myself to get a grip. In fact, I should be flattered, not pathetically worried about whatever marginal (and probably non-existent) loss of sales resulted. But this thought arises because of the growing profile of devices like 'Kindle' and other pda-like e-book-reading technology. We are told, somewhat pontifically, that the age of the printed book is over. That soon a great portion of our current consumption of wood-producing florae will be finished, resolved and absolved, by a technological fix. I look forward to any innovation that will reduce the clutter about my house, never kind the carbon footprint. But I remain sceptical nonetheless.

Here's the explanandum and explanans. I find myself buying a copy of a book that I know I can read for free as an e-book on, say, Gutenberg or any number of less august websites. This despite the fact that I have decent computer, and a pda device as well. I can re-format the text if I like, add pictures at a stretch, save it as a word document or convert it to pdf. There's a vast array of free open-source software that will enable me, provided I will invest a small amount of time and effort, to do more or less what I like with a document. Yet, I still go and get the Penguin classics edition of Pride and Prejudice rather than take a few moments to download, perfectly legally, a text file of the whole work. Why? John Sutherland has pointed out that the printed novel or book has some technological advantage that e-books and equivalents can't emulate (as yet). Just for example, you can use your opposible thumb to flick back and forth between pages. You can write notes in pencil where you feel like it, underline if you want to, fold page corners to mark a place - all in a very easy, manageable and physically satisfying way. Now, I know you're going to say that these functions can be replicated or simulated in the e-book reader format - true, but far more burdensomely. With a printed book, you can insert yourself anywhere in the text in a split second. You can dip in and out, use the index, find a page number in very speedy systems of reference that actually don't work very well with reader technologies. The tactile aspects of reading which we take for granted just don't seem to be assimilable to the current in-your-face interfaces.

There is also a sense in which the e-book reader profanes what was holy. Once, however much a book was mass produced, and was as commodified as a packet of biscuits or a VHS cassette, all one had to do to bless it with the seal of the author's pure presence and authenticity was to get him to sign it. (I have repeated this operation a few times, and you'd be surprised by how many people are called 'eBay', 'Seventeenpoundsisabitsteep' and 'Justfuckingsignityoutwat' - all Tibetan names, apparently.) Now, I suppose, they'll simply superimpose a scan of the author's signature on a limited range of the downloadable e-books and punt them for 2% more. If that happens, I'm just going to call it a day, loves. Without that occasion for intercourse with the Ordinary People, I'm lost, and so are they. Anyway, the point is, that isn't going to happen, because e-books are mostly crap.

The timetable for this year's Marxism festival is out, although still being updated. For anyone who wants to know, I will be speaking alongside playwright David Edgar on the topic of Left-Right defectors on Monday 6th July, 10am at the main hall in the Friends Meeting House. Now, I need 900 or so of you to buy tickets and show up that morning. And if you feel like 'spontaneously' delivering a standing ovation at the end, I won't be offended. Aside from that, there is a good line up to dissect every vital issue of the day. David Harvey will be introducing you to Capital, Tariq Ali will speak on the American Empire, and Gary Younge will explain the rise of Obama. John Bellamy Foster will talk about Marx and ecology, and there will be a speaker from France's Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste to talk about the exciting new party and its prospects. The excellent Paul Gilroy has a meeting on 'the state of black Britain', and Graham Turner will talk about the credit crunch. History enthusiasts would do well to drop in on Neil Faulkner discussing the Roman Empire, (you might see if he has any thoughts on Bryan Ward-Perkins' findings which would seem to challenge his thesis). On the culture front, Michael Rosen and Lowkey will celebrate the life and works of Adrian Mitchell, there will be a tribute to Harold Pinter, Nick Broomfield will introduce one of his documentaries, and there will be the now regular Cultures of Resistance gig. Oh, and there will be endless frivolity and frolicking on the grass around Bloomsbury.