Truth to Power
Oliver Kamm casts an eye over diarist and anti-war campaigner Tony Benn.
According to Benn, there are “five questions we should ask any powerful person: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?’”
This is what he in fact asked Saddam Hussein, a powerful person whom he interviewed shortly before the Iraq War:
“I have 10 grandchildren and in my family there is English, Scottish, American, French, Irish, Jewish, Indian, Muslim blood, and for me politics is about their future, their survival. And I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?”
The five questions didn’t come up. Presumably Saddam was too powerful to be troubled with them.
More.
From Benn’s diaries, 1996 –
“Had a long talk to the Chinese First Secretary at the embassy – a very charming man called Liao Dong – and said how much I admired Mao Tse tung or Zedong, the greatest man of the twentieth century.”
Truth to power!
Yes, it’s odd how “speaking truth to power” often entails fawning over some of the most obscene figures in history.
Benn was asked a five question for him. He simply answered in his way. By this we can easily understand that he is “speaking truth to power”. This type of person who speaks odd n but they dies for their country…………….
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johnson
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Er…
I’m guessing that one broke up on re-entry.
“Yes, it’s odd how “speaking truth to power” often entails fawning over some of the most obscene figures in history. ”
I wonder if the famous box of Quality Streets came out…?
Meh! Link no work – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4016803.stm
Julia,
If nothing else, Galloway at least had the awareness to deny what he’d said, despite all evidence to the contrary. Benn didn’t, which suggests he’s an outright fantasist rather than just an opportunist demagogue.
Great guys, I think you’ll agree.
Ah good. We’ve got on to Tony Benn. Tee hee. Where to start?
Actually Julia, while there are many similarities between Galloway and Benn at least the former is now seen by all but his few supporters for what he is – a ludicrous and thuggish man. Unfortunately Benn is still a much-loved figure. In particular the BBC adores him and gives him a great deal more air-time than his frankly mediocre poitical career should merit. I can’t think of any other political failures (with the possible exception of Clare Short) who are so valued for their wisdom and insight.
Again we find ourselves – as in David’s post about Mr Ayers – asking ourselves whether there are right wing equivalents of Tony Benn. Supposing he has said “We had a nice talk about Adolf Hitler, the greatest man of the 20th Century”. Or what would we have thought had he fawned over Pinochet instead of Saddam?
There’s not much more to be said about Benn, really. He is one of the most degenerate and despicable men in England. I only hope that before he dies the country wakes up to what he is truly like and he gets just a taste of the kind of mass contempt that he deserves.
There.
It is weird how often Benn has been wheeled out – say, on Radio 4 – as some benign, avuncular figure and sympathetic by default. It’s as if his repeated idiocy and evasion is somehow charming, even when the most appalling distortions and equivalences fall from his mouth.
It must be the pipe.
It must, indeed, be the pipe. If only Hitler had smoked a pipe, instead of all that manic hand-waving and yelling at Nuremburg.
A thought has just struck me – is he (Benn, not Hitler) the ONLY acceptable image of smoking allowed by the BBC these days? Could even his pipe soon become verboten under our new “Strength through Joy” anti-smoking laws? If so, we’ll be left only with the lies, evasions, lunatic ideology and fawning over socialist mass-murderers and despots.
“A thought has just struck me – is he (Benn, not Hitler) the ONLY acceptable image of smoking allowed by the BBC these days?”
You know, I hadn’t even noticed that! But I think you must be right…
I’d like to think that, now there is a smoking ban in place, Benn will be giving one of those cosy little public chats (benign, as David said, and avuncular), sans pipe, and his nicotine craving will get the better of him. The sweet old man routine will suddenly vanish and the world will see him for the petulant, prattling, Milosevich-loving buffoon he is.
It will be a transformation rather like that in the Incredible Hulk, except that this will be the Incredible … erm … erm … the Incredible Stalinist Tosspot. That’ll do.
“…the Incredible Stalinist Tosspot.”
Someone call Marvel Comics.
Episode One
Evil Radio Caroline has been broadcasting the poison of American “Rock ‘n’ Roll” music to the innocent people of England. Watch and thrill as the Incredible Stalinist Toss-pot sends Caroline down to Davy Jones’s Locker with the full magnificent force of his statist intervention. K’pow.
Speaking of idiots…
“We’ve got to get over thinking we have the moral high ground because I just don’t think we do. I’ve read too much about our bloody cynical history, you know, and let it not be forgotten that we sold opium, which we took from India through Hong Kong and, like, disabled vast tracts of China for 80 years… or something like that.”
http://www.newcultureforum.org.uk/home/?q=node/351
Ah, the keen moral insights of Mr Damon Albarn. We’ll just skip over that Mao business, then, along with the infliction of mass beggary and the millions of lifeless bodies. What matters is saying, cleverly, that we mustn’t judge because whatever it is it’s probably our fault. “Or something like that.” It’s easy to mock – and we should go on doing so – but it seems to me the real long-term danger to any civilisation comes from within, from idiots of this kind. Not least when a generation or two has learned to habitually diminish the values and achievements of its own culture and to instinctively label that culture as the default villain in almost any scenario.
This seems relevant:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article3285615.ece
As does this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1558057/Binman%27s-St-George-bandana-%27is-racist%27.html
And this:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2008/02/territory.html
I think it’s called “cultural cringe,” and all children must learn it. It seems Mr Albarn has.
So a free society can’t judge a totalitarian one because 100 years ago we sold opium? That Albarn boy needs a good slap.
Anna,
I think that’s the gist of his, er, thinking. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on the guy. He is, after all, just another product of a self-loathing culture. Almost every week the Guardian informs its readers that “we” are responsible for something unpleasant, whether its poverty in Zimbabwe, Islamist riots in Denmark or homophobia among Jamaican reggae musicians. For some impressionable readers, sophistication is measured by the degree to which one’s own society is publicly disdained, irrespective of the facts.
We have an educational system teeming with ideological lefties who seem to feel this way and – purely coincidentally – large numbers of children are led to believe that national pride is a very bad thing, probably racist, and that slavery and colonialism are primarily, if not entirely, the vices of white, Western imperialists. (The slave trade of the Islamic world, for instance – which lasted centuries longer and involved vastly greater numbers – is practically unheard of. And the efforts of the British Empire to abolish slavery overseas are at best a footnote, if indeed they’re taught at all.) And ours is a culture in which Ken Livingstone, London’s former mayor, can publicly claim that the Cold War was “our fault” (and nothing at all to do with Stalin, Communist expansion and the invasion of large parts of Europe by the USSR). That such ahistorical idiocy isn’t immediately met with howls of laughter and derision is, I think, quite telling.
And hence the penetrating insights of Mr Albarn.
But – but – he’s being so edgy!
Yes, it’s quite likely Mr Albarn does imagine himself to be hip and edgy when mouthing this kind of bollocks. He and countless others, who are also hip and edgy in exactly the same conformist way.
I find the discussion above to be very interesting, and I hope it’s not too late to join :-). A few thoughts that crossed my mind when I read the article and the comments:
1) Truth to power: “Presumably Saddam was too powerful to be troubled with them (the 5 questions)”. No, in the leftist mind the opposite is true Saddam was not *powerful enough* to be troubled with them, because he is part of the “oppressed other”. Never mind that he’s a dictator – he’s not part of Western culture therefore he must be a victim. Then again, maybe Benn was just afraid for his life…
2) Hitler vs. Mao, Stalin etc.: Hitler and his horrors have become a carte blanche for leftists to dismiss any horror committed by non-Western rulers. This is achieved by the automatic moral equivalence of “Well, the West produced Hitler, didn’t it”?
3) Multiculturalism: The left treats non-Western cultures as an “other” which we must not judge. After all, if a non-Western culture has a tyrannical autocratic regime, then this must be an integral part of their civilization which we mustn’t criticize. But I think that this “otherness” is fast becoming “alienness”. The left is starting to think that non-Westerns are some kind of aliens that do not share respect for human life, rights etc. This is a kind of reverse, patronizing racism, of which leftists are complete unaware or deny.
4) Patriotism: The basis for a functioning society is basic solidarity between its members. This is what patriotism in it’s good form establishes. But patriotism, read as respect for one’s own culture, can also lead to respect of other cultures. By this I mean a healthy respect, not the prostration of Multiculturalism. This is just an extension of the principle that respecting others starts by respecting yourself.
Liam
David,
Thanks for the link to Kamm’s blog. I discovered his refreshingly Liberal take back in 2004. His Liberal Englander’s expressed support for Operation Iraqi Freedom soothed my soul.
Early on I bookmarked him under “English Teacher” because, in addition to his accessible reasoning, his posts provide examples of clean, probing, written English. Few Americans ever read or hear the Queen’s English – smothered as we are in crass Pop-Americanisms uttered unthinkingly by our roguish press-organs determined to corral us in terminological cages. Boring!
If verbs are a bark and nouns a black-tipped tail, then Kamm’s posts use both to illuminate issues expertly, just like a well-heeled beagle points a fox in a hedge-row.
Whenever I want a reminder of what good, determined English reads like, I spend an hour reading Kamm.
-Steve
I’ve read Benn’s diaries up to some point in John Major’s premiership. I don’t have them to hand, but I’m fairly sure Benn first utters his five questions when addressing them to some senior figures in the EEC/EU – unelected, yet imposing policies on Britain which British voters are powerless to change. Whether most people who follow David’s blog are Europhiles or Europhobes, I feel that Benn’s point is spot on, certainly in the European context where he first makes it.
The fact that the UK finally had a retrospective referendum on its EU membership in 1975 was purely because of Benn’s persistence. The political class wanted the public excluded from the decision. They may have won that particular referendum, but the precedent Benn set has made it harder for them to refuse future referenda when major constitutional changes are involved.
Since other posters bring up Benn’s comments about Mao and China, please remember the attitude of that old wet Tory, Sir Edward Heath. Probably the most surreal TV confrontation I have ever seen was one Newsnight pitting Sir Edward against Hong Kong democracy activist Martin Lau. Sir Edward kept telling Lau that he was Chinese, that democracy was no part of Lau’s Chinese culture, and therefore Lau couldn’t really want it. Benn at his most asinine would never have said that. Unlike Benn, Heath appears to have benefitted financially from his support for the Chinese regime.
Obviously for Kamm the advocate of an interventionist foreign policy, the main issue is Benn’s opposition to the Iraq war. Benn behaved crassly over it, and Kamm is right to call him on it. In reality, Benn is a “little Englander”, of the type championed by A.J.P. Taylor in “The troublemakers: dissent over British foreign policy 1792-1939”. That tradition, which believes foreign interventions are usually disastrous, has a long lineage; from Dr Johnson to Charles James Fox to William Cobbett to Richard Cobden to John Bright to Taylor to Benn to Matthew Parris etc. Since the war that Kamm supports so enthusiastically hasn’t exactly gone wonderfully well, I’d like to read him tackle the anti-interventionist argument at its most coherent and thoughtful – in, for instance, the columns of Matthew Parris.
Georges,
“I feel that Benn’s point is spot on, certainly in the European context where he first makes it.”
The five questions are certainly valid and well worth asking. That’s not in doubt. It’s the bizarre selectiveness of *who* gets asked them, and who doesn’t, and why. This is, I think, symbolic of a much broader attitude among large parts of the left, where “speaking truth to power” takes some rather peculiar, almost comedic, forms.
Well, of the five questions Benn should have asked Saddam, the key question is the last one; “how do we get rid of you?”
There is a legitimate debate to be had about the rightness of the methods used to get rid of Saddam; their rightness in International Law; their rightness in terms of US & UK governments honesty to their electorates; the cost of the occupation, both human and economic etc.
Bush’s father – who regularly used to refer to Cheney and co as “the loonies” – felt that the cost of getting rid of Saddam was too high. I honestly don’t know who’s right on this yet.
Georges,
I think Benn’s selectivity – and the broader outlook it represents – is in the long run a much greater moral issue than the clumsy ousting of a despot and what might have been done better. What interests me are people whose “anti-imperialist” credentials lead them to denounce “Bush-Hitler” as some personification of evil and to denounce “AmeriKKKa” as a nascent police state and symbol of “imperialist oppression”. And who do all this while excusing, even defending, actual evil being enacted in broad daylight.
Such an inversion of reality is, it seems to me, a much trickier problem to solve.
From that article about the leftist education group (surely there’s a redundancy in that phrase?):
“History and citizenship lessons should stick to the bare facts”.
Is this the first time in history that a leftist group has insisted that an education should stick to “bare facts”? Where’s the empathy, the understanding? I’m shocked.
Regarding Benn and the EU – did he join the rest of the Left in their long journey from reflexive opposition to the EU in the seventies and early eighties to reflexive support for the EU in the late nineties and today? Or has he retained his scepticism of this undemocratic and unaccountable body?
The bovine Left took decades to realise the EU was the perfect vehicle for introducing Socialism into Britain. Socialism would never win at a General Election, so why not introduce it salami-style and by stealth via the EU?
Every great power has to choose its battles carefully. Even America is not powerful enough to remove every non-democratic government in the world. Bringing democracy to China, for instance, would probably mean a nuclear World War Three.
The Iraq War is not over yet, and it could still have an outcome that’s not totally disastrous. But the widespread opposition to the Iraq invasion goes way, way further than just a coterie of knee-jerk America haters. Most British people oppose the war and want us out of it. They are not mostly Bennites. Most believe we were lied to. This is because we were lied to.
Brian Eno, of all people, recently pointed out that it was completely rational for the government of Iran to want to acquire nuclear weapons. While I find it hard to put the words “Ahmadinejad” and “rational” in the same sentence, I think Eno’s point is, unfortunately correct. Every government unloved by the US government is probably concluding they need nukes in order to deter an American invasion – even as America’s will to contemplate such future invasions is probably waning. Such a potential for nuclear escalation was always built in to the interventionist policies Kamm advocates.
Many thoughtful commentators have drawn parallels between America’s Iraq War and Britain’s Boer War. Even though Britain technically won the Boer War it fatally exposed the weaknesses of the superpower of a hundred years ago. The war’s brutality lost Britain much international goodwill. Future enemies, such as Michael Collins, learned much from Boer techniques of resistance.
Kamm is picking on Benn as a kind of personal denial. The policies Kamm so vigorously advocates are now felt to have been disastrous by a broad swathe of public opinion, many of whom will probably vote for David Cameron at the next election. It is these people Kamm needs to address, not Tony Benn.
Georges,
“Most British people oppose the war and want us out of it.”
Really? I’m not at all sure what “most British people” feel in this regard. “Most people” didn’t protest against the war prior to it beginning, and most of the people I know don’t “oppose” it now, whatever their feelings about how well or badly it’s been conducted or what should happen next. I have, however, noted how quite a few of those who do oppose the war claim that everyone else feels much as they do.
But I don’t want to get entangled in a lengthy debate about the pros and cons of the Iraq war. There are plenty of sites covering that subject at length. What caught my attention is the mindset that Benn’s selectivity illustrates – and by “mindset” I mean pathology, or something very close. It’s not just Benn, of course, and he’s not the worst example. There are dozens more in the archives here and it’s the broader phenomenon that interests me. So, what kind of person talks of “speaking truth to power” yet avoids such obvious candidates? Why does “speaking truth to power” so often entail a defence of, and deference towards, totalitarianism and despotic fantasists? When large numbers of people declare discomfort at even the thought that their own society could be a force for good, and be vastly preferable to most others, we’re in very strange waters indeed.
David,
“Most British people oppose the war and want us out of it.”
Here are two polls I found from a quick google search:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/20/iraq.iraq
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/view/15868
I think these are about as damning as polls ever are on any policy in a democracy. The Angus Reid poll tells us that 61% of the UK population opposed the invasion from the start; and, as of May 2007, 77% thought Blair handled it badly. The Guardian poll has broadly similar results. To quote the Guardian:
“Asked whether, “given their experiences of the war in Iraq”, they would trust a British government that said it needed to take military action because a country posed a direct threat to national security, 51% said they would not, with 32% saying they would.” You can’t blame Tony Benn for this public perception of government mendacity.
It’s Oliver Kamm who introduced Iraq into the discussion, not me. And I’m calling him on it.
Georges,
Well, I wonder if similar polls conducted today or two months from now, as opposed to last year, would yield different results. (These things aren’t static and polls conducted immediately after the Bali atrocity, for instance, showed a large surge in support, and the Guardian’s own quoted polls have shown sizeable majorities in favour of the war at other times, before and since. Hence, your point is hardly as “damning” as you claim.) But as I said I’m not interested in discussing the Iraq war. That’s not what this thread is about. And your apparent dislike of Oliver Kamm is irrelevant. Perhaps you’d like to address the topic of the thread, which is a much more general malaise and not dependent on events in Iraq?
I’ve had several conversations with people who recoiled indignantly from any suggestion that Western capitalist democracies are demonstrably preferable to the alternatives and are pre-eminent with good cause. There seemed to be an ideological objection to this idea, as if it were “unfair” – as if the West’s pre-eminence – say, in terms of freedom, wealth and the ability to defend itself – must always be a bad thing and won at the expense of more deserving candidates. (And some of those I’ve talked with were simultaneously enthusiastic about a nuclear-armed Iran.)
A taste of one such encounter can be found here:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/the_perils_of_m.html
See also:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/phantom_guilt_s.html
And if large numbers of people prioritise highly selective oppositional role-play over evidence and moral realism, and rewrite history in the most fanciful of ways, and think doing so is fine, then this is no small problem. When large numbers of people redefine racism as an exclusively and inherently Caucasian vice and see “oppression” where none exists, and equate weakness and poverty with virtue irrespective of how that weakness and poverty came about or why it persists, I think that’s a problem too. And when large numbers of people seek to outlaw as “hate speech” legitimate questions and inconvenient facts, that’s not a good sign.
These are the things that erode moral probity.
Benn was a self-hating thug-loving freak way before Iraq.
Exactly. The cultural self-loathing I’ve described predates the alleged “mendacity” of Bush, Blair, etc, by decades. What we’re seeing is hardly new. It’s just gotten worse and spread more widely.
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/07/rebellion.html
Benn’s history of pro-totalitarian sympathy, like that of Seumas Milne or Eric Hobsbawm, isn’t simply a reaction to recent events in Iraq, just as Peter Tatchell’s youthful defence of Maoism requires some other explanation. The Iraq war may offer an opportunity around which such moral dementia can congeal, but it isn’t the cause of the general outlook, which has a history and dynamic of its own. The Stop the War Coalition was formed by the convergence of pre-existing useful idiots, and we’re not just talking about a few fringe malcontents such as the SWC. Sadly, the cultural cringe has spread much wider. And many, if not most, of the more incorrigible self-loathers are, or once were, well-heeled middle-class students who obviously benefit from the values they disdain.