Tuesday Night Bloggers: Is this where it started?

This month's theme is murder and education - schools, colleges, academics and other animals. Bev Hankins is collecting them on her blog and I hope that my late (as usual) essay will be accepted. Honestly, the cat sat on it and I could not do any work.

What is it about academics and detective stories? The question has been asked on numerous occasions and noted sourly or with amusement even more often. At the end of Edmund Crispin's Love Lies Bleeding, which takes place in a school (well, two schools, really) rather than a college, Professor Gervase Fen (one of my favourite sleuths but more of that in the next posting) wants to tell his friend Horatio Stanford, the Headmaster of Castrevenford School, about his idea for a rather exciting detective story (not like those insipid ones written by Edmund Crispin) but Dr Stanford is not persuaded:

"Oh Gervase," he said, "if you must write a detective story - and far too many dons write them as it is - why not use the events of this week-end?"

This, naturally, is dismissed by Fen as being piffle. He wants to write about a girl in the Catskill Mountains. So far as we know, he never does, which is just as well. His friend puts his finger on something important: far too many dons write detective stories.

That is still true though with the various reforms in higher education has taken away a good deal of their spare time. You cannot write too many detective stories if you have to fill in forms and deal with administrative matters. But back in the good old days ....

As far as I can tell the first person to note the link between academia and detective stories was Marjorie Nicolson, the first woman President of Phi Beta Kappa among other achievements. She it was, who in April 1929 published a sharp-eyed essay in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled The Professor and the Detective. In it she dealt with the dual question of why academics like reading and writing detective stories so much, insisting that it was not about escape from life. Au contraire.

Yes, the detecitve story does constitute escape, but it is escape not from life, but from literature. We grant willingly that we find in it release. Our 'revolt' - so mysteriously explained by the psychologists - is simple enough: we have revolted from an excessive subjectivity to welcome objewctivity; from long-drawn-out dissections of emotion to straightforward appeal to intellect; from reiterated emphasis upon men and women as victims either of circumstances or of their glands to a suggestion that men and women may consciously plot and consciously plan; from the 'stream of consciousness' which threatends to engulf us in it Lethean montony to analystes of purpose, controlled and directed by a thinking mind; from formlessness to form; from the sophomoric to the mature; most of all from a smart and easy pessimist which interprets men and the universe in terms of unmoral purposelessness to a rebelief in a universe governed by cause and effect. All this we find in the detective story.

So, no, it is not simply an expression of the basic futile nastiness that envelops academic life.

Marjorie Nicolson also adds that the new form is being turned into art, which may produce classics, and among them are

... Oxford and Cambride gons, a distinguished economist, a supposedly distinguished aesthetician (we have only his pseudonymous rod for his identity), an historian, and a scientist...

I assume the economist is G. D. H. Cole, who had already started writing his detective stories as well as his works of economics but the others are a little vague, though later on she might have listed J. C. Masterman as one of the distinguished Oxford dons, author of An Oxford Tragedy, published in 1933 and of the slightly odd The Case of the Four Friends, published in 1957. Masterman was also immensely influential in the world of intelligence but that is another story.

So far as I can make out An Oxford Tragedy is the first detective story that takes place actually inside an Oxford college, St Thomas's in this case. Julian Symons certainly dismissed Michael Innes's claims to have invented the sub-genre in Death at the President's Lodging, by pointing to Masterman's novel. Indeed, the first Appleby story in which he comes back to Oxford to investigate the rather convoluted murder of the President of St Anthony's College, was not published till 1936. (I think we can dismiss that charming pretence that the events of the novel take place in some weird place, called the University of Bletchley, the one created by undergraduates escaping from Oxford, who did not get as far as Cambridge. Nobody who has ever spent any time in Oxford can fail to recognize the place in Innes's first novel.)

To use Symons's classification, Appleby is a farceur. The novels about him tend to be complicated, full of ridiculous converstaions and even more ridiculous characters. Death at the President's Lodging is no exception. Appleby refers several times to the strange and subtle working of the most brilliant minds that have collected in St Anthony's College but as one deciphers their actual thinking and behaviour, one cannot help being struck by the sheer foolishness of these highly regarded dons.

Not so with An Oxford Tragedy. For one thing, it is written from inside, by the Senior Tutor and Vice President, a more or less contented man who has clearly not made much of a mark, academically speaking. It is notable that Masterman was an Oxford don when he wrote the novel whereas Innes (or J. I. M. Stewart, to give him his real name) was an academic in various universities, not returning to Oxford till 1949. His convoluted farcical situation was produced from outside and his detective, Inspector Appleby, is also an outsider though he had studied in one of the colleges. Masterman, on the other hand, sees the tragedy that might be inherent in the somewhat closed life led by dons in a college.

Masterman's narrator is an insider but his detective is far more of an outsider than Appleby is: Dr Ernst Brendel, a Viennese lawyer and criminologist, who sometimes acts as an amateur detective. He speaks English very well but many of his attitudes and approaches are hopeless Continental, which is what enables him to solve the slightly ridiculous puzzle very quickly. Left to themselves, one feels the dons and the police would have gone on floundering.

It is in the two endings that the books differ most considerably. The crime has been solved, despite the various obstructions, the murderer has duly committed suicide and the colleges try to pick up the pieces. St Anthony's, Michael Innes's college, will do so without the slightest difficulty and, indeed, we are due to meet one of the characters, Gott, clearly a rather amusing self-portrait, in the second novel, Hamlet, Revenge. Masterman's picture of a devastated college and tragically displaced lives is far more affecting - not really a farce, at all.

They are both academic books, to be read, savoured and cherished.

How much expertise did we have in the past?

The latest report from the House of Lords European Union Committee, The EU and Russia: before and beyond the crisis in Ukraine, has, quite justifiably, had a great deal of media attention. I wish more of those reports did - they tend to be very well researched and clearly argued. This one caught the media's attention because it was dealing with political events that are unfolding in an urgent manner and because it, again justifiably, criticized very strongly, indeed, the government, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Foreign Ministries of other EU member states and the EU itself, particularly the European External Action Service (EEAS). The immediate response from the FCO, which bleatingly tried to explain that nobody could have predicted anything merely proved that the report was accurate in its assessment of that institution.

There are various aspects to the report, which will need to be analyzed but, to start with, I should like to focus on something that has been repeated many times in the last few years as Russia morphed from a relatively friendly power (that was a long time ago) to an unfriendly and, more recently, completely hostile one: and that is that we, Britain as well as other EU member states no longer have the analytical capacity to understand what is going on there and to predict possible actions on that country's part.

In fact, Paragraph 62 states:

Sir Tony Brenton believed that UK diplomacy was "pretty good", but that it had "suffered because of a loss of language skills, particularly in the Foreign Office." This had had a direct effect on the capacity of the FCO to respond to recent events. There was "quite lot of complaint in Whitehall after the annexation of Crimea that the Foreign Office had not been able to give the sort of advice that was needed at the time."

Speaking as someone who used to teach Russian at the FCO I find that particularly shocking. Does he really mean that there are no longer people in that hallowed institution who can speak and read Russian and/or Ukrainian?

Sir Tony Brenton KCMG is, incidentally,former British Ambassador to Russia and Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and Mr John Lough, Associate Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House, and I should dearly love to know how good his Russian is or was but I may be biased as I do not think I ever taught him.

There is a deal of truth in the assumption that knowledge has disappeared but not totally. There have been many non-government institutions in the last few years whose analysts have produced useful papers, articles and even the odd book, which predicted various scenarios not too dissimilar from the one we are watching now. Why exactly were these papers etc not read by our boffins in the FCO or the EEAS?

We know that the BBC Russian Service has been eviscerated and that has deprived the country of much knowledge but also of the capacity to respond to Russian propaganda. Certainly, attention both in the FCO and the various security services veered away from Russia as another threat seemed more urgent though how anyone could think since the 2008 war in Georgia that Russia was not a problem on the international scene is beyond my capacity to understand.

What I want to look at is the myth because that is what it is, in my opinion, that in the past we had this astonishing network of people in academia, in the foreign and diplomatic service, in the media who really understood what was going on in the Soviet Union and the Communist countries, could predict certain scenarios and plan for them.

Sadly, this is not my recollection and when I point this out to those who complain about the present state of affairs, they often agree with me. What I remember is academics who, with very few exceptions, asserted that the difference between the Soviet system and a western-style democracy was one of degree rather than anything more fundamental. How many times did I read or hear the comment that people do turn up for various meetings and take part in them and that proves that there is a democratic process of a kind going on. These were people who held and continued to hold academic posts.

The FCO and its minions as well as the well paid academics failed to predict many things, starting with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (my father was one of the very few who insisted that the Soviet Union could not and would not allow the so-called Communism with a human face to survive) all the way to the collapse of the Soviet Union, though it was becoming ever more probable as things disintegrated under Gorbachev's attempts to reinvigorate the system.

I am pleased to say that a highly regarded witness would probably agree with me, as is clear from Paragraph 57, which then goes on to suggest that things have got worse:

Mr Klaus recalled that there had been a historic asymmetry, whereby former communist countries "knew the West much more than you knew the East", and that this asymmetry remained. His Excellency Dr Revaz Gachechiladze, Georgian Ambassador to the UK, also noted that there was "not a good understanding of Russia in the West". Turning to recent events, Mr Lukyanov recalled that on the day of the Crimean referendum, when the question had already been announced, he continued to receive disbelieving calls from European diplomats saying: "'It cannot happen. It is just a bluff'." He warned us that with "this level of analysis, I am afraid that more surprises are to come, and not only from Russia." Dr Casier agreed that there was a "huge need for more knowledge about the local situation both in Russia and in the Eastern Partnership countries." This was where "we have to build much stronger analytical capacity." Dr Casier pointed out that President Yanukovych's decision not to sign the Association Agreement (AA) "had been the subject of speculation in the Ukrainian press long before he announced his decision, but took the EU by total surprise."

While I am not sure about that asymmetry former President Klaus talks about (the Communist countries got many things wrong as well) I certainly recall the willful blindness of the West.

Randomly, I recall arguments with young ambitious academics who insisted that the way forward was to make friends with various Soviet representatives here, listen to them in a friendly fashion and use their statements as material. Some of these had been students of the great Professor Leonard Schapiro and were openly exultant in the fact that they took a very different stance and attitude from his. (The fact that he knew what he was talking about did not bother them - the man was a back number and his students, who took that very different route, were taking over.)

I recall a very public spat (in the columns of the Times Literary Supplement, no less) with a very eminent Oxford academic whose name, for the moment and with gritted teeth, I am going to keep quiet who was arguing that the Communist system under Gorbachev was evolving  into something resembling an open, democratic society. One of my several arguments against that was that the Soviet Union was the only one of the more or less developed countries that refused to allow hostile critics into the country. Not so, argued my opponent, they do sometimes refuse entry to people who might have family connections in the present or the past but otherwise they are very open.

Of course, people with family connections may well speak the language well and can find their way around the place and the system without any official help, which may be the reason why they were not allowed in, a problem that did not bother the eminent academic in the slightest. Nor did he seem perturbed by the fact that he could research and study only carefully vetted material.

One more recollection. During my time of teaching Russian in the FCO one of my tasks was to help people who had been seconded to the Cabinet Office but were about to be sent to the USSR to revive their knowledge of the language. Although this was taking place in 1990 - 1991 there was no suggestion that anyone in the FCO was thinking about the possibility that the Soviet Union would not last.

In February 1991, as some readers will recall, John Major visited the Soviet Union and had meetings with President Gorbachev, Lithuania President Landsbergis but not Yeltsin who had, by this time "elected chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), in spite of the fact that Gorbachev personally pleaded with the Russian deputies not to select Yeltsin". In effect he was the President of Russia and as the Soviet Union was on its last legs, he was going to head the largest and most important of the successor states.

Why, I asked one of my students, fresh from his stint with the Cabinet Office, in our Russian discussion of politics and related matters, did Mr Major not meet Boris Yeltsin? I was told that there had been a great deal of heart searching in the FCO and it was decided by all those highly intelligent and knowledgeable experts that it would be better if there was no official meeting between the two.

As I wrote in my obituary of President Yeltsin on my erstwhile blogging home:

In March 1989 Yeltsin was elected to the Soviet Parliament and in 1990 he became Chairman of the Russian Parliament, the Republic’s effective President, the first one to be elected.

You would think that by this stage it would have become clear to the experts in the West that the Soviet Union was probably doomed. Not so but far from it. While many of us, interested in the country, realized this, the solid cohort of Foreign Office experts and academic sovietologists continued to extol Gorbachev as the country’s hope. Yeltsin was apparently dismissed from too many calculations even though he obviously represented the future with Gorbachev unable to keep up with him.

I rest my case.

The report is correct in that the situation is now probably worse than it was during the Cold War as, it would appear, that the skills the FCO and other institutions look for have little to do with knowledge, learning or analytical skills. It is also true that for years, far longer than was justified, there has been an official view that Russia was not really a problem and even if it was not quite as friendly as we thought it would be, it was not really all that unfriendly though the evidence was mounting. What I find hard to accept is the view of some wonderful past situation when this was all completely different.

What is the matter with academics?

Not all academics, of course, but a very large proportion of them. The problem I am going to write about seems to be prevalent in universities of long standing and high reputation as much as in those that are too new to have any reputation at all. And extraordinarily large number of academics with good positions and published works to their names seem unable to write books or articles that express their views and their opinions. All they can do is to quote various other academics and, occasionally, writers outside that world, thus ensuring that nobody but other academics will be interested in even the slightest degree in what they have to say. And why should anyone be interested in a book that is merely a compilation of previous pronouncements, in themselves, one suspects compilations of even older ones. Somewhere at some time there must have been an original thought, idea, thesis or book but it would take too long to find it.

As I said above, I do not consider all academics to be of such intellectually pusillanimous variety and can think of several historians who happily say what they think even if it brings down on them the wrath of their colleagues, of the glitterati, of the serious reviewers (though, one hopes, less so) and of the academic world in general. But these hardy souls are becoming few and far between and that is not a happy state of affairs.

Part of the problem must be the insistence on "peer review" in subjects when such a thing cannot really exist. Peer review in sciences can, as we know in such subjects as climate research, be used to silence current "heresies" but, on the whole, is necessary. Peer review in arts and social sciences is not - it is the reviewers and the reading public that will judge what is acceptable by way of theory and, after all, it is always possible and, indeed, necessary to publish arguments against a certain thesis and to have an academic dispute.

That, apparently, is no longer acceptable. Instead, publishers, as I know from my own and other people's experience, send manuscripts out for peer review, said process being little more than one of ensuring that the author does not step out of line or beyond the currently accepted boundaries.

Some years back I contributed an essay to a collection of counterfactuals in history and the editors insisted that every essay in it should be reviewed by other contributors. My own essay looked at 1938 and asked "what if Czechoslovakia had fought and defended the Sudetenland". I looked at what happened in that momentous year from the British, French, German, Soviet and, finally, Czechoslovak point of view, coming to some tentative conclusions as to what might have happened. The essay was sent off to a couple of my colleagues and came back with comments that dealt exclusively with the section on Britain and France, rehashing the old arguments about the Munich Agreement in which I did not chastise Chamberlain strongly enough. I accepted a couple of corrections, argued a couple of others and carried my point (to be fair) and tried to explain that the point of the essay was something quite different. It was published in full so I have nothing to complain about but the whole process did make me wonder about the exercise of peer review.

In a slightly more serious case, which also ended well, I am glad to say, a friend has recently published a well researched and well reviewed book about Islam in Britain, which had been held up, criticized and nearly destroyed by academics to whom it went for peer review as it had not fitted into the parameters that had been drawn up in academia and which were more important to these people that original research and conclusions drawn from it, with which they could have argued, had they wanted to after publication.

So what do we get when academics publish books? By and large, as I said at the beginning of this rant, a string of quotations that places the burden on those who said those things previously and who, if themselves present day academics, probably did the same.

For another blog I have been asked to review a book whose topic is of great interest. The title is A State of Play and the subtitle, British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It. The author is Steven Fielding, is Professor of Political History in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham and the Director of the Centre for British Politics as well as an author of several other volumes on subjects political and of a website. Not, you would think, a man who should be worried about expressing his opinion.

Mind you, I have my doubts about somebody who writes about British democracy and its development in the twentieth century without once mentioning membership of the European Union and its effect on legislation and the democratic process, but that is by the by. (I shall eventually do that review and link to it.)

In fact, I have done a certain amount of complaining about this book already.

Setting that aside, why cannot Professor Fielding just say what he thinks about writers and writing of novels and plays and their relationship with their audience or readership. Why does he have to quote on one page Anthony Trollope, T. S. Eliot, the historians Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, the playwright David Edgar and the novelist Maurice Edelman not as people whose ideas need discussing but as the origins of those ideas that are part of Professor Fielding's argument.

Why is it that such an unexceptional and uncontroversial, even banal statement as "[a] work and its reception are entirely different things" can be inserted only as a quote from the playwright David Hare?

I could go on at length but it would only prove the same point, which is unnecessary. Many other academic publications suffer from the same problems. Who apart from other academics, many of whom will simply want to name-check themselves will want to read such books?

Apparently the internet and the blogosphere still count for nothing.

For another blog I received a review copy of Steven Fielding's A State of Play - British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It. An interesting subject and one that I have toyed with myself in my mind not least because of my perplexity why there should be so few good political novels these days.

It is very much an academic book, aimed at other academics, an attitude that has unfortunate effects on the book's style, not to mention the fact that the Introduction consists of a long list of references to and quotations from other academic studies without which no academic book can exist these days.

In between those references, though, there are some interesting nuggets. I was not fully aware, for instance, how many programmes for young children and teenagers have as their message that parliamentary democracy is a bad and corrupt system. This will have to be followed up for surely some of that subliminal propaganda stays with people though having met a number of people who have grown up with Dr Who, I would say that programme's opposition to Margaret Thatcher has not taken much hold among the fans.

Professor Fielding gives a very brief history of British parliamentary democracy, explaining as he does why it has never quite lived up to its promises though not really explaining what those were. In the process he does not mention that a number of political and social institutions existed prior to their submission to central authority, which might be Parliament or it might the the civil service or, and this is a singular omission since he lays some emphasis on the electorate's disillusionment, the role of the European Union and various other quangos in present-day governance. (He does, however, mention that in the 1970s Dr Who supported Britain's entry into the EEC. Really, I seem to have missed out on rather a lot by not watching that programme.)

The theme of the book is the image of politics as it is perceived by the general populace and the sources of that perception, a theme well worth analyzing and discussing.

The public is certainly conscious of the role played by the news media. When asked in 2004 what influenced their opinions about politics, the top two sources people mentioned were television news (eighty-two per cent) and newspapers and magazines (sixty-three per cent). So far as we can tell, nobody mentioned even one work of fiction. If its power is more subtle and harder to quantify than that of newspaper or television news, fiction does, however, play a role in shaping views of politics. Qualitative research suggests fiction can inform how people think about themselves politically and influences how they understand political issues. As fewer people read newspapers or watch television news it is likely fiction will become an even more important source of information about politics. Most students of British politics nevertheless continue to favour focusing on official forms and processes: for them, these are what really matter in a democracy. But as a result they only have a one-sided and superficial view of the subject, such that, as one expert conceded, political scientists do not yet know 'what politics means to citizens'.

You see what I mean about the style? Mind you, I have read worse.

First about people not mentioning fiction either on the page or on TV as a source of information. It is quite likely that they are not aware of it and do not want to be aware of it. Nobody really wants to admit that they get their notion of how MPs behave from some TV comedy show; nor do they want to start analyzing what might be reasonably accurate and what is not. (For example, I know enough about political processes to maintain that Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are completely accurate and in this I have the backing of people who have worked in the Cabinet Office. Other series I am not so sure of, entertaining though they might be.)

It is also possible that people do not always know the difference between news programmes and fiction. I am not sure I can blame them for that mistake.

What is so interesting in that paragraph is the complete absence of any mention of the internet or the blogosphere, both of which were already important in 2004. Nor is there any mention of the social media, especially Twitter, a great source of information, correct or otherwise. Does that mean people do not think about those sources or that they prefer not to mention them or, and this is rather a worrying thought, political scientists have not quite worked out their importance? As they used to say in examination papers: discuss.

Corruption of the mind

There can be little doubt in anybody’s mind that motivates politicians is love of power, which is even more of a corrupting influence than power itself. It is, after all, the love of money that is the root of all evil not money itself. The same goes for regulators of various stripes who are really politicians that do not ever need to face the electorate.

The declaration by the Environmental Protection Agency that CO2 (a naturally occurring substance and a necessity for plants) to be a danger to human health may sound like a stupid joke. In fact, it is a huge power grab by an unelected agency and the Executive because Congress is refusing to play ball (well, Senate is) on the Cap and Trade Bill. The legislative is being by-passed and the greenie hysteria is being used for something not envisaged by the Founding Fathers. Iain Murray explains it all in detail.

This is the latest example in the United States of such a development but we see this everywhere – from the UN to our own government, backed, in this case by that bunch of sheeple, our Parliament.

In a way that is not the interesting part of the story. Politicians of whatever variety use any excuse to grab power is a story in the sense of dog bites man or supermodel takes drugs is a story.

It is the scientists who knowingly produced inaccurate (at best) information, refused to answer questions, destroyed raw data and generally falsified the evidence that underpinned this debate, then hysterically refused to discuss matters or answer questions even when they came from other scientists that are of interest.

After all, the overwhelming majority of scientists do not start their careers with the thought of falsifying information, not even in order to keep a highly paid job or scholarship. Those considerations will go a long way but how did we get to the position that scientific establishments became promoters of propaganda in order to feed governments’ and regulators’ desire to control the population and scientists (for the most part) went along with that? We do not live in the Soviet Union where disagreement with the party line on science meant imprisonment, torture, labour camps or a bullet in the back of one's head.

Pondering over this and coming to no obvious conclusions I recalled one of the most impressive films I saw this year: Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn. The subject matter is obvious: this is about the monstrous crime carried out by the Soviet Union and its security forces against Polish officers, whom they imprisoned seventy years ago and murdered in their thousands in the spring of 1940.

It is also about other things: survival in terrible circumstances, the fate of a country and its people caught between two totalitarian regimes, and individual reaction to those regimes. About one third of the film takes place in the immediate post-war months in Poland and we follow several characters as they deal with the fact that once again Poland is occupied and the truth about what happened to the officers Katyn is being suppressed.

How is one to react? Some refuse to knuckle under and defy the authorities with the truth. Others decide to keep quiet in order to rebuild their lives. The conflict appears most clearly with two sisters, whose brother had been one of the victims of Katyn. One, a girl who has survived the Warsaw uprising and its brutal suppression, announcing that she is on the side of the murdered not the murderers, goes to a great deal of trouble to set up a memorial stone for her brother with the truth of his death inscribed on it. We last see her being pushed into an underground cell; the memorial is now a broken slab with the information obliterated.

Her sister takes a different view. She knows the truth but thinks that as Poland will never be free again, it is best to keep quiet, and try to rebuild the country. She encourages (in vain, as it turns out) a talented young man to re-write slightly his CV by omitting the words about his father, “murdered by the Soviets”, because she considers it to be more important for the young man to study, to create, to help build a new society than to insist on shouting the truth from the rooftops.

Much to be said for that point of view, one cannot help thinking, as one watches the destruction of all those who know and speak the truth. But then a thought occurs: yes, this seems a very small compromise with a probable good result. Yet how many more compromises will this young woman, the director of the art college, have to make in the future? Will she have to betray people? Almost certainly she will find herself having to reject those whose parentage is unsatisfactory in the new socialist republic unless she encourages them to tell even bigger lies. How far can one go before one is completely enmeshed in mental corruption?

At what point would a scientist, who, let us say, genuinely believes in man-made global warming, decide that a little bit of fiddling with the evidence in a good cause makes perfect sense? And having done that little bit of fiddling does he find himself having to cover up for it and for the fact that man-made global warming has become a “scientific fact” on the basis of his ever so slightly fiddled evidence? When do they find that there is now no drawing back without losing a great deal of face and creating a great deal of trouble for everyone concerned? How far can one go before one is completely enmeshed in mental corruption?

An explanation of sorts

One of the great mysteries of modern history is the difference between the ways Nazism and Communism are viewed in the West (not in Eastern Europe where they have suffered from both) not only in terms of their record in issues of human rights but also as enemies of western democracy. People who denounced Nazi spies and supporters are applauded as heroes; those who denounced Communist spies and agents are seen as rather difficult, distasteful and treacherous towards their friends.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the ever present issue of “McCarthyism” and its progenitor the crucial Hiss case. In The Conservative Turn Michael Kimmage traces the growth of modern conservatism in the United States through the careers of Whittaker Chambers, who deliberately set out to create anti-Communist conservatism, and Lionel Trilling, who tried to lead liberalism away from supporting Communism. Of the two, I’d say, Chambers was more successful.

As he launches into his discussion of the Hiss case, Professor Kimmage writes (pp. 204 – 205):

Chambers won the Hiss case in court. His adversary, Alger Hiss, was convicted of perjury, sent to jail, and then to a kind of professional purgatory. The Ware circle that Chambers had helped to assemble in Washington, D.C. was devastated by the Hiss case. After World War II, American communism broke up for good, not just as a party but as a political movement.

A strenuous anti-communism advanced in tandem with the careers of senators Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, both of whom Chambers knew personally. The Hiss case lent domestic or internal immediacy to the Cold War, distinguishing it from World War II, which could easily be construed in nationalist terms, as us versus them, whether “they” were the Germans or the Japanese.

The Hiss case revolved around the figure of Alger Hiss, who was not simply an American citizen accused of treason but a prince of the American meritocracy. The list of those who believed in his innocence was awesome: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and many other luminaries. Even as resolute an anti-communist as Richard Nixon was, according to his own description, inclined to believe Hiss because he knew so many people who were friends with both Hiss and Hiss’s brother Donald.

Chambers was a wilfully marginal figure with his low voice, his potentially foreign accent, his suits – invariably described as rumpled – and his memorably bad teeth. To Triumph in the Hiss case, Chambers had to upend the established symbolism of success and failure, insider and outsider. To banish Hiss from political life, which the Hiss case effectively did, was potentially to banish anyone from public life.

Unfortunately, this is only partially true. Hiss may have been banished from political life and a few other people disappeared as well but “public opinion”, that is the media and academia as well as political hangers on has refused to accept the upending of the established symbolism. Hiss is still seen as a martyr, Chambers as a psychopath and McCarthyism the greatest evil in the world. All of that despite the overwhelming evidence we now have that even McCarthy’s accusations were largely correct, though his scattershot attacks did him or his cause no favours.

Chambers told the truth as did Elizabeth Bentley but that cannot be accepted by those who prefer to see the social structure the right way up. That is what we are still fighting against.

Freedom is as freedom does

Next time somebody tells you about the glories of academic research, academic thinking and academic publishing, tell them about this. Hot Air quotes the New York Times article, which informs the sadly unsurprised world that

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí…

So, we have a book about the Danish cartoons that will not be illustrated by those cartoons. Brilliant. Just the sort of fearless enquiry one wants to see.

Furthermore, Yale (both Press and Universiy) are happy to go along by non-publication with the notion that Mohammed has never been depicted before and certainly not in the Muslim world. After all, they will not publish an Ottoman print either.

At least, as AllahPundit on Hot Air says, there is no equivocation of why they are censoring their own publication: naked fear of reprisals. But you know, they can't get all of us. Not even the New York Times, whose account of what happened after the cartoons were published is somewhat economical with the truth as Gateway Pundit details.

PS Michael Moynihan echoes my sadness that it should be Yale University Press that has shown itself to be "yellow" as James Cagney's Rocky Sullivan says in "Angels with Dirty Faces". They had taken on the so-called liberal, pro-Communist establishment, after all. Their Annals of Communism series has changed for ever the way that evil system is viewed and has made it possible to write more clearly about Communist infiltration in the United States. And now this.

UPDATE: Roger Kimball stays with the story and points out that, contrary to what the NYT said, the advice to remove the illustrations from a serious book about the Danish cartoons was not unanimous. Indeed, there were many good reasons advanced by those asked why they should be kept in. Nor does it seem likely that it was the threat of violence that really underlay the decision. Well, what else could it be? Money? Surely not.

How far can one stretch liberalism?

Among other anniversaries 2009 is the 100th one of the birth Sir Isaiah Berlin, writer, historian, philosopher, raconteur, memoirist and Oxford personality. He is highly regarded by many (and rightly so) as one of the definers of true liberty and true liberalism. There were, however, many other aspects to his activity.

On Sunday I went to a memorial meeting in Pushkin House, which is a sort of centre of Russian cultural activity in London. The talks, discussions and reminiscences centred on Berlin’s links with Russia and Russian culture, particularly his well-known meeting with the great poet Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1946 when Berlin was at the British embassy in Moscow.

Other reminiscences went along the lines of “And then Berlin asked me what’s the news from Russia and I said not a great deal but we now have lots of leaders to quote whereas before we had only one”. Less than fascinating to anyone who is not a complete groupie.

The Akhmatova meetings have been well analyzed by memoirists and scholars both in Russia and the West. Their own memories are not entirely reliable but the poetry that Akhamatova spun out of the meetings, the references in “Poem without a Hero” to the “guest from the future” and the third dedication, which is clearly to Berlin, though in 1956 she could hardly admit to this, are all the stuff of legends, as is Akhmatova’s rather strange conviction that the Cold War was triggered off by those meetings.

However, one thing was triggered off: a renewed and more ferocious persecution of the poet that included public attacks by the Culture Commissar Andrei Zhdanov, a yet another arrest of her son Lev and the eventual arrest of her second (but that time ex-) husband, the well-known art historian, Nikolai Punin. Lev Gumilyov survived all his arrests, Punin did not, dying in camp in 1953.

Nobody has ever managed to discern whether Berlin understood the damage he had done to Akhmatova as his versions of the tale changed with every telling.

The only reference to Sir Isaiah’s non-Russian activity was by Professor Alexander Pyatigorsky, whose fascinating biography was matched by an eccentric mode of delivery.

Enunciating every syllable in a slightly melodramatic way, Professor Pyatigorsky told us that Sir Isaiah was the last of the REAL li-be-rals and added with a capital L though, I suspect he meant with a small l. He compared Berlin to Professor Leonard Schapiro. Both of them, he said were open to all points of view, accepted all opinions.

In this, I think, Professor Pyatigorsky was unfair to Professor Schapiro, who was a real liberal in that he believed in liberalism, freedom and the rule of law. He also understood that those concepts had to be defended, sometimes ferociously. Not for him the notion that all opinions were equally valid.

Sir Isaiah Berlin was of a very different mentality. His liberalism frequently slid into a moral paralysis. One rather amusing story was told at the meeting by Valentina Polukhina, professor of Russian Literature at Keele and expert on Joseph Brodsky’s life and works.

It seems that for Brodsky’s fiftieth birthday she arranged a series of interviews about him, one of them being with Isaiah Berlin. To her grief and astonishment the great man talked in harsh and critical terms about the poet. Polukhina realized that he must have been influenced by another Russian poet, Anatoly Naiman, Brodsky’s great rival. The interview was published but Polukhina then arranged for another one and this time Berlin spoke of Brodsky with love and admiration.

Polukhina explained this by a somewhat child-like attitude to life, which meant that “Isaiah” would be influenced by the last person he spoke to. Some of us would describe it more harshly.

Some years ago, Isaiah Berlin’s name came up in a conversation I had with a right-wing academic, one of those who had been under severe attacks in the late sixties and early seventies from left-wing student leaders and New Left academics while spineless university authorities helplessly and metaphorically wrung their hands.

Many of them were surprised and disappointed by the fact that the doyen of liberal thinking, the man who had defined the notions of liberty, Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, would not defend them or speak up on their side, preferring to see everybody’s point of view and, on occasion, prevaricating.

My response was that I did not think this was simply a matter of moral cowardice but a real inability to understand the difference between those who speak up for freedom and those who speak up against it. Berlin, in my opinion, could not see that a true liberal has to take sides.

I came to this conclusion a long time ago when, as an undergraduate, I read Sir Isaiah’s essays on Russian radical thinkers, first published in the magazine Encounter and collected into one volume in 1978. These studies were immensely influential: they introduced generations of scholars to Russian political philosophy, created new courses in universities and, most importantly, influenced Sir Tom Stoppard to write his magnificent trilogy “The Coast of Utopia”. (I saw it in the National Theatre and it is magnificent though much disliked by the leftish theatre critics.)

There were two problems with those essays and their influence. One was that Berlin confirmed and, possibly, enforced the view that the only thinking in Russia was on the left, ranging from the liberal Alexander Herzen and Ivan Turgenev to the more radical and totalitarian Mikhail Bakunin or Petr Tkachev. This is a view with which the eminent historian Richard Pipes has been battling with for some time.

That may be described as a sin of omission. There was, however, one of commission as well. Sir Isaiah Berlin, the doyen of liberal thought and the man who defined the two kinds of liberty, saw no real moral or political difference between the various strands of thought. He did not like the Bolsheviks but his view of his Russian subjects, be it Herzen, who was largely liberal in his views, though leaning to socialism, or Tkachev who was a radical totalitarian, was usually benign. They were all fighting against tsarism and, naturally enough, some of them were a little carried away but, his “liberalism” suggested, one must accept all those points of view.

It is this view that has influenced the study of Russian nineteenth century thought in British universities. (I am not sure about American ones and would welcome information.) Alternative points of view have been frowned upon and often discarded. It is not surprising that a man whose idea of liberalism stretched into political relativism in theory should have prevaricated in practice.

Amazing, Americans are human

Well, in a manner of speaking. They are not that different from Europeans, whoever Europeans might be. Actually, this article in Prospect by Peter Baldwin, professor of history at University College of California, Los Angeles, is considerably better than so many on the subject.

Professor Baldwin seems to acknowledge that Europe is actually quite varied, though he appears to be a little surprised by that and he does not go too closely into how those divisions have appeared in history or appear now.

Nor does he bother too much with divisions in America. How does that high infant mortality pan out? Do we know? Nothing is more infuriating than being told a fact that is supposed to be important but is actually meaningless. Oh, and I assume he is being ironic when he lists President Bush's "sins".

But the piece is worth reading. It seems Americans are actually human. And well-read. This is my favourite paragraph because it confirms something many of us have noticed about America and has a go at that super-intellectual ditzhead, Simone de Beauvoir:

Simone de Beauvoir was convinced that Americans do not need to read because they do not think. Thinking is hard to quantify; reading less so. And Americans, it turns out, do read. The percentage of illiterate Americans is average by European standards. There are more newspapers per head in the US than anywhere in Europe outside Scandinavia, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The long tradition of well-funded public libraries in the US means that the average American reader is better supplied with library books than his peers in Germany, Britain, France, Holland, Austria and all the Mediterranean nations. They also make better use of these public library books than most Europeans. The average American borrowed more library books in 2001 than their peers in Germany, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Luxembourg, France and throughout the Mediterranean. Not content with borrowing, Americans also buy more books per head than any Europeans for whom we have numbers. And they write more books per capita than most Europeans too.

I must stop making assumptions about Californian academics.