On Tony Judt

Tony Judt died on August 6th 2010. One of the most impressive of contemporary historians, he had a piece in the Guardian published posthumously in which he wrote,

In Politics and the English Language, Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don't feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously ("It's only my opinion …"). Rather than suffering from the onset of "newspeak", we risk the rise of "nospeak".

Judt was accurate here to criticise the cult of the soundbite and the retreat of "public thinkers" in to the rhetoric of "think tanks" in which language and intellect are perverted to churning out texts to fit in with the prescriptions of the orthodox line at the expense of independent thought expressed in clear language.

In Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents, Judt lambasted "think tanks" and the reduction of our existence to crass utilitarian cost benefit analysis: indeed the very word "think tank" is rather Orwellian but simply accepted as a normal feature of what passes for public debate.

Increasingly people have retreated into letting the phrases do the thinking for them and few have shown enough independence of mind to challenge the way that words like "enemy combatant", "war on terror", "extraordinary rendition" conceal a hideous reality.

In The Guardian we see continual efforts at mendacious propaganda by those like Denis MacShane who elevate lying into an art form by the use of the language they use. The task of all sceptics who want to hold power to account is to interrogate the language forensically.

Judt challenged many of the complacent assumptions rationalised into mindless buzzwords used to extol a mindless upbeat boosterism, a fetish for the benefits of "growth" as if this was automatically a great good without drawbacks.

Judt was correct to look to the words. This came out superbly when he demolished the assumptions behind the bellicose liberal interventionists who were fervent in their blind faith in the merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars in his seminal essay The Silence of the Lambs ( 2006 ),

"For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance.

They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism.

Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’."

"In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us."

Such brilliant political writing made Judt one of the few worthy winners of the Orwell Prize in 2009. The rest were more Orwellian instead of having Orwell's moral clarity. Those like Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens et al all tried the "decent left" act and failed pathetically and miserably.

It is a pity that The Guardian and Observer could not have published more of Judt whilst he was alive. It is annoying that people seemed to be unanimous in praising his Postwar and his eminence as a historian whilst condemning his Ill Fares the Land as "a book that should never have been written".

When the propagandist Denis MacShane writes that, not least because he castigated Adam Michnik-MacShane's Solidarity hero- for his support for the Iraq War in 2003, it is clear that functionaries of an increasingly authoritarian Britain have much to fear in those who speak truth to power.

We stand in need of intellectuals like Judt to write polemics like Ill Fares the Land to open up political debate in Britain and, ineed, the rest of Europe and the USA, to speak truth to power as well as castigate the way Orwell has been traduced to be some kind of posthumous guru and oracle for a "decent left".

With Afghanistan and Iraq it was necessary and still remains the case that those like Hitchens projected their fantasies of global liberation on to a superpower, the USA, which was on the side of liberty and so made it irrelevant to look in detail at what was really at stake in Iraq.

Judt hit the nail on the head when trying to explain the support so many supposed "public intellectuals" for Iraq, not least why former dissidents had lost their critical faculties in supporting Iraq blindly, thinking it was in the vein of some kind of Spanish Civil War moment or lazily seeing it as a rerun of World War Two.

As Judt put it , in discussing the reason why those like Michnik and Havel cravenly supported Iraq,

"In the European case this trend is an unfortunate by-product of the intellectual revolution of the 1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when ‘human rights’ displaced conventional political allegiances as the basis for collective action.

The gains wrought by this transformation in the rhetoric of oppositional politics were considerable. But a price was paid all the same. A commitment to the abstract universalism of ‘rights’ – and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their name – can lead all too readily to the habit of casting every political choice in binary moral terms.

In this light Bush’s War against Terror, Evil and Islamo-fascism appears seductive and even familiar: self-deluding foreigners readily mistake the US president’s myopic rigidity for their own moral rectitude"

In Postwar Judt also commented that intellectuals like Michnik and Glucksmann supported Washington's Iraq policy because they,

" argued by extension from their own earlier writings on Communism that a policy of 'liberal interventionism' in defence of human rights everywhere was justified on general principles and that America was now, as before, in the vanguard of the struggle against political evil and moral relativism everywhere. Having thus convinced themselves that the American President was conducting his foreign policy for their reasons they were genuinely surprised to find themselves isolated and ignored by their traditional audiences".

(Postwar page 786 )

This has the ring of truth as one only needs to look at the drivel Michnik wrote in his feeble article We the Traitors in October 2003 which offered a shallow rationalisation for the Iraq War,

I remember my nation's experience with totalitarian dictatorship. This is why I was able to draw the right conclusions from Sept. 11, 2001. Just as the murder of Giacomo Matteotti [leader of Italy's United Socialist Party] revealed the nature of Italian fascism and Mussolini's regime; just as the great Moscow trials showed the world the essence of the Stalinist system; just as 'Kristallnacht' exposed the hidden truth of Hitler's Nazism, watching the collapsing World Trade Center towers made me realize that the world was facing a new totalitarian challenge. Violence, fanaticism, and lies were challenging democratic values.

This is not the place to analyze the ideology that, while disfiguring the religion of Islam, creates a crusade against the democratic world. Saddam Hussein takes part in this just as Hitler and Stalin did before him. He asserts that in the holy war with the 'godless West' all methods are permitted. Waiting for this sort of regime to obtain weapons of mass destruction would be plain recklessness.

In fact, Michnik shows himself not as a "dissident" nor even as a critical thinker but as a crude propagandist. Why on earth was the invasion of Iraq not the place to analyse the ideology in which Al Qaida was conflated with Saddam Hussein, not least as Baathist Iraq was a secular dictatorship ?

Moreover, Michnik was parroting the WMD claim as an article of blind faith and there was no connection between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein. On the contrary, the reason Bin Laden hated the USA was precisely because he was prohibited from leading a crusade against Saddam in the First Gulf War.

The fitting of the facts to the prescriptions of the propaganda creed was an abnegation of the responsibility that Michnik took upon himself to speak truth to power, as opposed to shilling for it in the worst an most uncritical manner as a messianic crusade, a form of delusional wish thinking.