Johann Hari

The United States has a startling ability to take its most angry, edgy radicals and turn them into cuddly eunuchs. The process begins the moment they die. Mark Twain is remembered as a quipster forever floating down the Mississippi River at sunset, while his polemics against the violent birth of the American empire lie unread and unremembered. Martin Luther King is remembered for his prose-poetry about children holding hands on a hill in Alabama, but few recall that he said the U.S. government was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

But perhaps the greatest act of historical castration is of Jack London. This man was the most-read revolutionary Socialist in American history, agitating for violent overthrow of the government and the assassination of political leaders—and he is remembered now for writing a cute story about a dog. It's as if the Black Panthers were remembered, a century from now, for adding a pink tint to their afros.

If Jack London is chased forever from our historical memory by the dog he invented, then we will lose one of the most intriguing, bizarre figures in American history, at once inspiring and repulsive. In his 40 years of life, he was a "bastard" child of a slum-dwelling suicidal spiritualist, a child laborer, a pirate, a tramp, a revolutionary Socialist, a racist pining for genocide, a gold-digger, a war correspondent, a millionaire, a suicidal depressive, and for a time the most popular writer in America.

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Noam Chomsky is one of the most hysterically abused figures in the world today. Even his critics have to concede that his work inventing the field of linguistics -- and so beginning to decode the structure of how language is formed in the human brain -- makes him one of the most important intellectuals alive. But when he applies the same rigorous scientific method to figuring out the structure of how power -- especially the American government's - works, he is pepper-sprayed with smears. He is a self-hating Holocaust denier, a jihad-loving traitor, a Pol Pot-licking communist, and on and on.

If all you know of his work is the smears, then his new book Hopes and Prospects will be a revelation. In his rather dry understated way, he excavates the reality behind the babbling Babel of 24/7 corporate news, and places long-buried truths on the table for us to examine. Every one is sourced to the leading academic journals, the best experts, the sharpest medical advice -- yet each one is a shock if you rely on news brought to you by corporations and corrupt right-wing billionaires.

So, for example, he uncovers the story of why Haiti is so poor, and could be shaken to pieces by an earthquake that would have killed only a handful in California. It's a story of man-made earthquakes, one after another. The country was the first to rebel against slavery and to successful cast off the whip-hand -- and so it was brutally punished by the French Empire. Every time it has begun to rise onto its feet, it has been kicked back down, with the American Empire taking over to topple its elected leaders (the last was put on a plane at gunpoint in 2008) and stifle any moves towards development.

But who knows? Who has heard about it? Who ties to hold our leaders accountable for it? Chomsky is trying to rescue crimes from the memory-hole, so we can remember them. He explains that Ronald Reagan -- the great hero of the American right -- was a great champion of jihadism. It was Reagan who encouraged Pakistan to simultaneously become viciously fundamentalist, and acquire nuclear weapons. Chomsky coolly condemns "the global jihad launched by Zia and Reagan," launched for geopolitical reasons, with no concern for the after-effects.

But Reagan remains unstained. Chomsky quotes the great American historian Francis Jennings, who noted of early twentieth century leaders: "In history, the man in the ruffled shirt and gold-coated waistcoat levitates above the blood he has ordered to be spilled by dirty-handed underlings." Instead, Chomsky says, history is too often ruled by the maxim spelled out by Thucydidies: "The strong do as they wish, while the poor suffer as they must."

But it doesn't have to be this way. This is a book weaved through with hope and awe at all the people who have managed to slip beyond imperial control and establish real democracy. Chomsky's strongest model -- and the world's -- is Bolivia's experiment with radical democracy. After thirty years of having neoliberalism forced on them by the West, including the cost of water being pushed beyond their grasp, the Bolivian people rose up and elected the first indigenous leader since the European conquests. Since then, it has had the fastest fall in poverty and the most rapid growth in Latin America.

In his cool blizzard of facts and academic sources, the hot air of his critics seems to melt away. To pluck one example, the leftist-turned-neoconservative journalist Nick Cohen has accused Chomsky of being soft on jihadism (as well as of "not being bothered" by "the crimes of Adolf Hitler"). Yet Chomsky points out that an analysis of official data for the government-supported RAND corporation found that the invasion of Iraq caused a "seven-fold increase in jihadism." If you really hate jihadism, you have to figure out what actually reduces it, rather than engage in bluster. Chomsky supported the path that produces fewer jihadis, while Cohen supports the path that produces more.

Chomsky presents all this plainly, and with -- and this is often overlooked -- a sly sense of humour. Describing the growing rebellions in Afghanistan, he notes: "People have the odd characteristic of objecting to the slaughter of family members and friends." He picks through the Wonderland of U.S. propaganda-speak for the most comical examples. To pluck just one: Kennedy courtier Hans Morgenthau said that the "reality" of U.S. foreign policy lies in its "transcendent ideals", and when the historical record suggested the U.S. had fallen short of it, this was merely "an abuse of reality." He sternly warned that we must not "confound the abuse of reality with reality itself."

When I was shamefully wrong about the war in Iraq myself, it was an email exchange with Noam Chomsky -- where he laid bare the best evidence about what was motivating the U.S. government -- that helped me figure out where I had gone so badly wrong. Hopes and Prospects is a book that can do the same for many more people - a treasure-trove of truths that shouldn't be left buried in our over-flowing sandpit of propaganda and lies.

John Lennon urged us: "Imagine there's no heaven/ It's easy if you try/ No hell below us/ Above us only sky ..." Yet Americans aren't turning to Lennonism any faster than Leninism. Today, 81 percent say they believe in heaven—an increase of 10 percent since a decade ago. Of those, 71 percent say it is "an actual place." Indeed, 43 percent believe their pets—cats, rats, and snakes—are headed into the hereafter with them to be stroked for eternity. America's branch of heaven is crammed full, even as the European and Asian wings are long since dissolved by the brisk winds of reason and skepticism.

So why can't Americans get over the Pearly Gates? Newsweek's religion correspondent, Lisa Miller, has written a fascinating millenniums-long history of the idea of heaven, spliced with some surprisingly mediocre reporting on present-day believers. At its core is a (very politely administered) slap to the American consensus. The heaven you think you're headed to—a reunion with your lost relatives in the light—is a very recent invention, only a little older than Goldman Sachs. Most of the believers in heaven across most of history would find it unrecognizable.

Heaven is constantly shifting shape because it is a history of subconscious human longings. Show me your heaven, and I'll show you what's lacking in your life. The desert-dwellers who wrote the Bible and the Quran lived in thirst—so their heavens were forever running with rivers and fountains and springs. African-American slaves believed they were headed for a heaven where "the first would be last, and the last would be first"—so they would be the free men dominating white slaves. Today's Islamist suicide-bombers live in a society starved of sex, so their heaven is a 72-virgin gang-bang. Emily Dickinson wrote: " 'Heaven'—is what I cannot Reach!/ The Apple on the Tree—/ Provided it do hopeless—hang—/ That—"Heaven" is—to Me!"

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To read my latest piece for Slate in France, click here.

...discussing the fascinating new biography of Arthur Koestler with its author, Michael Scammell. To buy tickets, click here

I started reading James Hansen's new book, Storms of My Grandchildren, at the edge of a vanishing Arctic. I sat on a bare brown Greenland hillside listening to the ferocious crack and crash of the dying glaciers in the distance. As I watched the corpse of the ice sheet float by, broken into a thousand icebergs, it seemed the right place to begin the leading NASA scientist's explanation for what I was seeing. Since the year I was born, 1979, 40 percent of the Arctic sea ice has vanished. If we don't change our behavior fast, Hansen says I will live to see the day when it is all gone, and the North Pole is a point in the open ocean, reachable by boat. He stresses these are only the starting symptoms of a planetary fever that will remake the map of the world—and the capacity of human beings to survive on it. I finished reading the book at the Copenhagen climate summit, where the world's leaders gathered to offer a giant shrug.

Professor Hansen has been driven into a strange situation, and produced a strange book. For one-third of a century now, this cantankerous scientist has been more accurate in his predictions about global warming than anyone else alive. He saw these disastrous changes coming long before others did, and the U.S. government has tried to censor or sack him for his prescience. Now he has written a whistle-blower's account while still at the top: a story of how our political system is so wilfully, deliberately blind to environmental realities that we have no choice now but for American citizens to take direct physical action against the polluters. It's hardly what you expect to hear from the upper echelons of NASA: not a call to the stars, but a call to the streets. Toss a thousand scientific papers into a blender along with All the President's Men and Mahatma Gandhi, and you've got this riveting, disorienting book.

How did such an implausible American story come to pass?

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History is a brutal sieve. Arthur Koestler is remembered now—if at all—for writing Darkness at Noon a hand grenade of a novel tossed at Joseph Stalin's Kremlin. Those 200 pages are all we retain of an intellectual nomad who stormed across the 20^th century. He seems to have been everywhere, like an angry, book-spewing Zelig. Even a thumbnail summary makes me feel exhausted (deep breath): He grew up in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, witnessing revolutions and counter-revolutions. He was one of the first Zionist settlers in Palestine. He became a star in the Berlin of Sally Bowles' cabarets and a rising Adolf Hitler. He was jailed and nearly shot by Gen. Franco. He fled the Nazis through Casablanca, Morocco. He gave Albert Camus a black eye, George Orwell a holiday home, and Soviet communism an enema. He had sex with supermodel twins, took magic mushrooms with Timothy Leary*, and helped create Intelligent Design. Oh—and he was a rapist.

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"We have preserved the massacre site. We have preserved the death," the young Rwandan man said to me with a bewildering smile. He was leading me briskly through a school where a decade earlier, hundreds of men, women, and children had been hacked to death. Pools of dried blood made the floor sticky. In one corridor, old bits of skull and bone made it crunchy. And then we came to the bodies.

The dead were covered in some kind of greenish preservative and laid out in long rows on the floor. A child—frozen forever at 4 or 5—had her skull split open in one clear blow. A woman's stomach had been hacked, and the contents must have spilled out somewhere: She was empty now. I would like to be able to say the faces of the hundreds of bodies I marched past had an accusatory stare that asked: How could you let this happen to us? But, in reality, they were glassy-eyed and gone.

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The porn of the Western world is saturated with the belief that Eastern women are more sexy and sultry and slutty. The most googled brand in the porn world is "Asian Babes." The very phrase evokes legions of solitary sweaty teenage boys in basements across America and Europe. But this stereotype did not emerge with the World Wide Web. It originated with worldwide empires. Suppressed beneath these casual flicks of the wrist, there are five centuries of colonial exploitation screaming to be heard.

In his strange new book about how two different sexual worlds met—and transformed each other in ways that continue to this day—veteran journalist Richard Bernstein distills decades' worth of research into succinct stories. But only a hundred or so pages in, the scent of testosterone and spent semen soaked into its pages becomes bewildering.

The story is fascinating. In the 16th century, Portuguese seamen began leaving a Christian fundamentalist Europe to sail the seas in search of resources and spices to pillage. But as soon as they arrived in Goa, Malacca, Sumatra, and Japan, they also discovered an alternative sexual world where all their repressed longing could roam free. "On one side," Bernstein writes, "was Christian monogamy in which sex was shrouded in religious meaning and prohibition, and regarded as sinful when enjoyed out of marriage. On the other side was an Eastern culture wherein sex was strictly organized, especially when it came to women, but where it was disassociated from both sin and love."

Where the West tied sex to the marriage bed and felt ashamed when it broke free, the East unleashed its libido in the harem, the brothel, and a smorgasbord of sexual options. "In the East," as Bernstein puts it in gushing terms, "it was taken for granted there would always be a certain reserve of women, often supreme models of beauty, cultivation and charm, whose assigned role in life was to provide sexual pleasure for men." The Asian babe as dream-object was born. Rudyard Kipling wrote one of the first rhapsodies to her: "I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!/ On the road to Mandalay."

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Are we living in the final days of American dominance? The Newsweek honcho Fareed Zakaria opens his latest work with some slap-in-the-face facts: “The world’s tallest building is now in Taipei, and it will soon be overtaken by one being built in Dubai. The world’s richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese. The world’s biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is under construction in India, and its largest factories are all in China.” But this is not a Rome-style collapse, with the amphitheatres of America regressing to scrub. America is standing still, or only moderately declining. What we are witnessing is “the rise of the rest.”

Zakaria argues there have been three tectonic power-shifts in the past half-millennium. In the fifteenth century, the West began to spurt ahead. In the late nineteenth century, the US zoomed ahead within the West. Today, we are living through the catch-up of the rest of the world. In China alone, the average income has multiplied sevenfold in the lifetime of a 30 year old. So what will the planet look like as America becomes only one strong power-player among many?

In some ways, Zakaria is one of the least irritating of market fundamentalist commentators. A super-smart Indian immigrant to the US, his reading, travelling and learning are wide – even if they are then squeezed into through a tiny ideological window. A certain amount of reality percolates into his writing – which is an accolade on the American right.

So at periodic intervals in ‘The Post-American World’, he punctures some of the most feverish National Review-style fantasies about what a post-American world will be like. For example, he deflates the idea that Europe is about to become a shariah-law-enforcing ‘Eurabia’ with a few brusque statistics: “The best estimates, from US intelligence agencies, indicate that Muslims constitute about three percent of Europe’s population now, and will rise to between 5 and 8 percent by 2025, after which they will probably plateau.” He says panic about Chinese military capacity or the small numbers of foul jihadis is overblown. He gawks at Dick Cheney lamenting he can’t be as “tough” as the tyrannical Soviet Union, and laughs out loud at Cheney’s advisor Bernard Lewis claiming confidently “that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh planned to mark an auspicious date on the Islamic calendar (August 22, 2006) by ending the world. (Yes, he actually wrote that.)”

But in his sober analytical style, he offers some ideological assertions that are just as shocking and counter-factual. Zakaria asserts – quoting Margaret Thatcher – that “There Is No Alternative” about which direction all countries must travel in if they are to continue rising: small states and pure markets. Only a limp, passive state that lets corporations run where they will can ensure progress and a fall in poverty. So all the ‘post-American’ countries must as an urgent matter demolish the active state (whatever their people want) and become Thatcho-Reaganites – only more so. He mocks the “unreconstructed left” who beg to differ.

Yet this book comes as the market fundamentalist bubble is bursting. Zakaria says with admiration that “London’s financial system was overhauled in 2001, with a single entity replacing a confusing mish-mash of regulators, [and this is] one reason that London’s financial sector now beats out New York’s.” Not long after this work went to press, that very act of deregulation-mania caused the first British bank run in over a century. As hundreds of thousands of savers rushed to withdraw their savings, the British state had to step in with a $45bn bank-saving guarantee – a potential expenditure larger than the country’s entire schools budget.

The prescription Zakaria is pushing has been disastrous time after time. To give just one more example, he lauds the lifting of capital controls in the 1970s and 1980s in developing countries as a quasi-divine act of wisdom, providing a “celestial mechanism for discipline”. He doesn’t acknowledge it produced significantly lower growth in the developing world than in the “bad old days” – just 1.7 percent annually, compared to 3 percent before. Worse, he doesn’t even note it led directly to the catastrophic collapse of Argentina from a middle-class country to a beggared one almost overnight. For him, it is as if this didn’t happen, and the vision must push on regardless.

Indeed, Zakaria’s claim that “There Is No Alternative” is demolished by a piece of evidence he himself offers, in a few skimmed sentences he doesn’t spot the significance of. He brags that the US has the most competitive economy in the world – “slipping sometimes in recent years to small northern European countries like Sweden, Denmark and Finland.” But – wait. Is this the Sweden that takes 51 percent of GDP in taxes, and spends it on the most lavish welfare state in the world – producing the most content population according to international studies? And it’s more competitive than America? So it turns out There Is An Alternative course for the post-American world to pursue – an extraordinarily impressive one – but Zakaria just doesn’t want to acknowledge it, because he would have to rethink some of his dogmas. When a poor country like Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela tries to imitate this social democratic vision rather than Zakaria’s, he abuses them as “trouble makers” prone to “insane rants.”

To prop up this ideological vision, he has to go even further and draw a false version of history. He says that “for almost three centuries, the world has been undergirded by the presence of a large liberal hegemon – first Britain, then the United States” who “kept their own markets open” and “travelled around the world pushing countries to… free up their politics.”

This is startling in its ignorance. Far from keeping its markets open, the United States developed by protecting its industries behind huge tariff walls. By 1820, the average US tariff was 40 per cent; Abraham Lincoln then pushed them higher, and they stayed there until the First World War – the very period Zakaria identifies as era when the US spurted ahead. Yet this is the very route Zakaria wants to deny to developing countries today; he derides anybody in the poor world who wants Lincoln-style subsidy and protections. The only criticism he has of the IMF and World Bank – who push this brutal vision on the world’s poor – is that they are always headed by a European and an American respectively. He would apparently like to place a brown-skinned corporate logo at their head instead to pursue the same path. As for the idea that the US pushed countries to “free up their politics”… what can we say? This will be interesting news to the peoples of Chile, Iran, Congo, Indonesia and Nicaragua, who saw their democrats murdered with US support.

But Zakaria clings so fervently to his flailing ideology that he has a chilling contempt for any democratic resistance to it. He wants the post-American world to be a market fundamentalist one where counter-balancing state action occurs only if businesses demand it to make themselves work more smoothly. To achieve this, he repeatedly lauds the Chinese dictatorship for being able to impose this vision on their people, unlike those scrappy, messy democracies.

With fawning admiration, he quotes a Chinese official saying: “We have to let markets work. They draw people off the land and into industry, out of farms and into cities.” Then Zakaria notes sadly that when he discusses this same subject with Indian or Latin American official, “they launch into complicated explanations of the need for rural welfare, subsidies for poor farmers, and other such programs, all designed to slow down market forces and retard the historical process of market-driven industrialization.” He says with regret: “Politicians need votes in the short term. China can take the long view…. [The Chinese way] would be impossible in democratic India, where vast resources are spent on short-term subsidies to satisfy voters.”

Never mind that the Indians and Latin Americans are reacting to the will of their peoples, and those “short term” subsidies keep people alive during economic transitions. The peoples are wrong, and any concessions to them is “populism” – the ultimate market fundamentalist swear-word. Zakaria has a teleological world-view: the world will inevitably go in one direction, so we might as well speed it up. Messy human will mustn’t be allowed to get in the way; don’t they know There Is No Alternative? So thousands of Indian farmers commit suicide if their subsidies are stripped away and they can’t move to the cities; that’s History. It had to happen. Teleology is always dangerous, whether Marxist or market fundamentalist, because it renders actual living people as irrelevant, disposable extras in the inexorable March of History.

This becomes most clear in a sinister anecdote he offers, apparently as praise. He writes: “One American CEO recalled how Chinese officials took him to a site they proposed for his new (and very large) facility. It was central, well located, and met almost all his criteria – except that it was filled with existing buildings and people, making up a small township. The CEO pointed that out to his host. The official smiled and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, they won’t be here in eighteen months.’ And they weren’t.” He then notes, apparently with sadness, “India does not have a government that can or will move people for the sake of foreign investors.”

Note how he sees the world entirely from the perspective of a CEO. He doesn’t ask: how did the ordinary Chinese people who lived in this town feel about being driven out of their homes by the secret police acting on behalf of a foreign corporation? They don’t even seem to cross his mind; it is the CEO’s convenience and the onward march of markets that are everything. Later, he quotes a senior banker saying: “I’ve dealt with governments all over the world, and the Chinese are probably the most impressive.” The fact that an investment banker prefers dictatorship is, for Zakaria, evidence that we all should.

Zakaria’s book is badly timed; it is restating dogmas as they lie on their death-bed. Talking about the resilience of the global economy to disruption, he argues “the front page of the newspaper seems unconnected to the business section.” This standard Tom Friedman-fodder might have seemed true a decade ago – but it lies moribund on the page today when oil and food prices are sky-rocketing (and economies wilting) due to a cocktail of war, competition and global warming.

Indeed, it is here – in the destabilisation of the planet’s climate with greenhouse gases – that we find the biggest hole in Zakaria’s vision. He talks at length about how the new multipolar powers will interact, without seriously considering that – unless we change course rapidly – this will take place on a planet where the climate is thrown into chaos, and resource-competition becomes ever-more vicious. He isn’t a global warming denier; he even notes: “If water sources dry up in the future, tens of millions of people will be forced to start moving.” But he offers it a few fleeting paragraphs. He doesn’t seem to see that global warming will determine the stage on which this power-play will be acted out. It’s as if he thinks the planet’s climate and ecosystems can dramatically shift and the consequences on global order will be incidental.

For example, the great rivers of China and India all originate in the Himalayan glaciers. Water falls as snow in winter, and melts off in summer – becoming the Ganges, the Yellow River, and more. Those glaciers are melting rapidly, and on course to disappear – endangering the water supply of a billion people. Won’t that affect the pacific development of India and China that Zakaria envisions? Won’t it make conflict far more likely? Indeed, another throwaway sentence reveals a cavernous hole in his Weltanschaung. He says with a flick of the wrist: “Over the past decade, many predictions about the effect of climate change have proven to be underestimates because global growth has exceeded all projections.” But if growth ineluctably causes global warming, doesn’t this suggest – as the environmentalist George Monbiot has suggested – that an economic model built on perpetual economic growth is untenable? Shouldn’t we be trying to develop different models urgently?

This, in turn, shapes Zakaria’s vision of America in a post-American world. He believes the US should accept the rise of the rest, and try to maintain its position by being an “honest broker” between them all. Like Bismarck’s Germany, it should be “better friends” with every country “than they are with each other.” This is an improvement on the neoconservative belief outlined by the Project for a New American Century – apparently endorsed by John McCain – that the US needs to retain “full spectrum dominance,” crippling rivals before they emerge as a “threat”. But if the US remains by far the largest per capita contributor to unleashing Weather of Mass Destruction, how can they be regarded as a reasonable umpire?

And this is only one reason why this America-as-referee vision is flawed. Zakaria can acknowledge that the rest of the world has grievances against America – but they are always minor “mistakes”, or safely located in the distant past. So for example, he notes that “Russians have long chafed at the standard narrative about World War Two,” which is presented as a US-British victory – when actually the Eastern Front was where the Nazis suffered 70 percent of their casualties. Similarly, he can acknowledge that India is uncomfortable with this narrative, quoting one Indian who says: “London told us to die for an idea of freedom that it was at that very moment brutally denying to us.”

But when it comes to the present, he says Americans “are right” to believe criticism of them is “irrational, and that the country is unfairly turned into a punching bag.” Spearheading global warming, invading Iraq and killing at least 600,000 people, forcing market fundamentalism on the world through the IMF… if you complain about this, you are “irrational.” You should shut up and accept the US as your best friend and “honest broker.” Zakaria acknowledges that at home, the US government has been “captured by money.” He says “those who advocate sensible solutions” will “lose funds from special interest groups.” But he seems to think this Big Money discreetly drives around the State Department. If he acknowledged that special interests can drive foreign policy too – pushing for attacks on Iraq or coups in Venezuela, for example – he might have to understand why the idea of the US as an honest broker seems untenable to much of the world.

‘The Post-American World’ is a fascinating book, but not for the reasons its author intended. It is a character-study of a highly intelligent man who believes himself to be rational and humane and impartially sifting the evidence – but actually pushes a vicious vision antithetical to both democracy and environmental sanity.

Every day, you handle the deadliest substance on earth. It is a Weapon of Mass Destruction sloshing beneath your feet and festering beneath your fingernails. In the past ten years, it has killed more people than all the wars since Adolf Hitler rolled into one; in the next four hours, it will kill the equivalent of two jumbo jets full of kids. It is not anthrax, or plutonium, or uranium. Its name is shit – and we are in the middle of a shit-storm. In the West, our ways of discreetly whisking this weapon away are in danger of breaking down – and a quarter of humanity hasn’t ever stepped into a functioning toilet yet.

The story of civilisation has been the story of separating you from your waste. The British investigative journalist Rose George’s stunning – and nauseating – new book opens by explaining that a single gram of faeces can contain “ten million viruses, one million bacteria, one thousand parasite cysts, and one hundred worm eggs.” Accidentally ingesting this cocktail causes eighty percent of all the sickness on earth.

I had a small taste of how they feel once. One morning a few years ago, I was trudging up a hill in Caracas, Venezuela – through a vast barrio cobbled together from tin and mud and left-over plastic – when I saw a plastic bag filled with feces hurtling towards me. It splattered all over my chest – and into my mouth. This wasn’t an attack on a gringo-intruder. In many of the slums that scar South America, there are no sewers – so the only way to dispose of your excrement is to squat over a bag, and throw. It’s called the “helicopter toilet”.

Today, 2.6 billion people live like this: “Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket or box. Nothing,” George explains. “Four in ten people live in situations where they are surrounded by excrement.” Since it squats in every crevice and is even flung through the air, on average they ingest ten grams a day – and so millions of them watch their children die of pointless, preventable diseases. In an epic work of reportage – taking her from the shores of Africa to the bowels of China to the sewers of London – George investigates the slow road away from this shit-smeared existence, and why it is at risk of slamming us all into a dead end.

Her journey opens by tramping down at midnight into the place where it all began – the sewers of London, England. This city beneath the city can be deadly: clouds of hydrogen sulphide – the ‘sewer gas’ that forms when sewage decomposes – will suffocate you if you get caught in its stinking clouds. When rain falls, a trickle can become a torrent and drown you. Your path can be blocked by huge stalagmites of congealed fat and grease, poured down drains by restaurants. These fat-barriers are often so sturdy they can only be broken by road drills; one fat blockage below Leicester Square took three months to be demolished. This underground labyrinth is so vast nobody knows how big it really is. But it is manned by just 39 men (no women) who lead her through its filth and its myths.

Before these tunnels were built, London had “on-site sanitation”. This is a polite way of saying people shat in a covered-up set-aside space, and their feces was collected and sold to farmers as manure. But in the early nineteenth century London’s population rapidly doubled, and the city’s build-up of excrement became unsustainable. The cost for having your private cesspool emptied spiked to a shilling, twice the average workers’ daily wage. So people took to emptying their cesspools into the Thames, which soon ran brown. By 1848 cholera outbreaks were killing 14,000 people – and then came the “Great Stink” of 1858. London reeked so badly people were vomiting in the streets. The drapes of the House of Commons were soaked with chloride in a (failed) attempt to disguise the stench.

At last, the order came to find a better way – and one of Rose George’s heroes entered history. Joseph Bazalgette was the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, and along with Hamburg’s municipality, he pioneered the great life-saving urban sewers of our time. “His sewers have saved more lives than any other public works,” George notes with pride.

But there is a catch. Much as we want to flush and forget, the excrement does not disappear. No: ninety percent of the world’s sewage ends up untreated in oceans, rivers, and lakes. George writes: “Sanitation in the Western world is built on pipes and on presumption… Even the richest best-equipped humans still don’t know what to do with sewage except move it somewhere else and hope no one notices when it’s poured untreated into drinking water. And they don’t.” The costs of Joseph Bazaglette’s invention – the other end of the pipe – is now becoming inescapable.

Much of our sewage is pumped barely-treated into the oceans – where vast dead zones are emerging, killed by our germs. The rest is kept even closer to home. For example, in 1993, an outbreak of shit-borne cryptosporidium in Milwaukee killed 400 and made 400,000 people sick. It turned out the city was pumping its ‘treated’ sewage – actually only treated for some toxins, not others – into Lake Michigan, and then slurping its drinking water out the other end.

The bridge collapse in Minneapolis has come to be seen as the iconic symbol of the neglect of US infrastructure in the age of Bushonomics, but the country’s faltering sewers are actually more dangerous still. The Environmental Protection Agency in 2000 estimated that a quarter of the nations’ sewer pipes were in “poor or very poor” condition – and by 2020, it will be half of all the pipes. When the people of San Francisco successfully got onto the ballot a proposal to name a large sewer after Bush, they were actually giving him more credit than he deserves.

So as the oceans, lakes and rivers choke on our swill, what can we safely do with our feces? In her search for answers George lyrically dives into the toilet bowl, sloshing about like Gene Kelly singin’ in the rain. “Of all the people of the world, the Chinese are probably most at home with their excrement,” she explains. They defecate openly, chatting away with their friends in toilets with no dividers and no shame. Perhaps for this reason, the Chinese have been more creative than anyone else with their crap. Since the 1930s, they have been turning it into electricity.

Over 15 million rural Chinese homes have been provided with ‘biogas’: a large oxygen-less digester into which they empty their toilet-pans. The organic matter ferments there – and belches out a gas which then fuels electricity. You can defecate then cook with the resulting gases. It may make us retch, but it saves Chinese women from the back-breaking labour of cutting down firewood, and they love it. Is this our future? Alas, its potential spread is limited: if you don’t add ample animal feces too, the machines don’t run for long.

Is there a way to safely use it as fertilizer instead? Some US firms thought so when they began to market “biosolids” – the gunk that is left over after sewage has been treated. It is being smeared over farmland across America today. But George travels to meet people who mysteriously went blind after the sludge was used next to their homes; several deaths have been linked to it. In 1975 the chief of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Technology Board of the Hazardous Waste Division reached a horror-film conclusion. Transforming waste into fertilizer is “the most efficient means – short of eating the sludge – of injecting toxic substances directly into the human body.” There has been a dearth of scientific research into its safety – but the early pointers look bad. Almost all European countries have now banned it.

So we have no answers to where to put the sewage – just as the question becomes even more urgent. Our Western system of sanitation uses vast amounts of water and energy, at the hinge-point in history when they are becoming more precious and pricey. George tells us: “Water is a fixed commodity. At any time in history, the planet will contain about 332 cubic miles of it… We are using the same water the dinosaurs drank, and this same water has to make ice creams in Pasadena and the morning frost in Paris. It is limited, and it is being wasted.” It has become a flat-footed cliché to say the wars of the future will be fought over water – but it is probably true. More people than ever are vying for limited supplies that are ever-harder to access due to global warming.

When water is scarce and costly, will our Western model of washing away our waste remain feasible? George summarizes our current methods tartly: “You take clean drinking water, throw filth into it, and then spend millions to clean it again.” One cubic meter of wastewater can pollute ten cubic metres of water – and on a warming world battling for water supplies, that will soon become a ratio we can’t afford. It is strikingly energy-intensive too: a sewage works uses up to 11.5 watts of energy per head, requiring an entire coal-fired power station to run just four sewage treatment plants.

So we need a safe alternative to plopping and peeing into water – but where is it? George talks to environmentalists who “see a future where instead of controlling pollution after it happens, we prevent it in the first place, by some sort of source separation.” This eco-sewage has two prongs. Firstly, we have to change our toilets – and our sewers – so they have two streams: one for urine, and another for excrement. Although it’s counter-intuitive, urine actually contaminates sewer-water much more severely than feces. “Though it only makes up five percent of the flow, urine contains 80 percent of the nitrogen and 45 percent of the phosphate that has to be removed at treatment works,” George explains. If it ran into a separate system, we would slash water use by an extraordinary 80 percent.

The second prong is harder to imagine. As in pre-sewer London, we would defecate into a tank, and it would sit there waiting for collection. We wouldn’t put it into water and then expensively take it out any more. Imagine “a cleaner new world where people put out their trashcans full of compost to be collected on a Monday, like they do with garbage.” This would be a buttock-clenchingly uncomfortable shift – yet on a finite planet with finite resources, it may be necessary.

But if we are going to deal with the coming shit-crises – or solve the one killing kids in the developing world today – we need to overcome our psychological barrier to discussing it. An aversion to feces is hard-wired into us by our evolution. The ancient primates who were not disgusted by excrement got sick and didn’t live to become our ancestors. We are the descendants of the smart shit-screamers, who got as far away from it as they could. But while this aversion was an evolutionary advantage then, it may be imbuing our species with a terrible disadvantage now.

Feces takes a strange and irrational physical journey – we just want it taken away, so we never have to think about it again – because it takes a strange and irrational journey through our minds. Our fear of feces can make us behave in ways that are cruel or crazy. In a village in rural Gujarat, George meets a middle-aged woman who every morning “walks to her owner’s house, and there she picks up his excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket [and] puts the basket on her head… She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance, if at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardia, brain fever. She does this because a 3000 year old social hierarchy says she has to.” If she tries to quit, nobody else in her region would employ her.

In Hindu eschatology, below even the lowest order on the caste rung, there are the Dalits, or Untouchables – the people who take shit away, and so are considered to be shit. Although Untouchability has been technically outlawed since 1949, there are still between 400,000 and 1.2 million manual scavengers in India whose job is to collect feces from people they call their “owners,” and in turn be abused. George gives a random smattering of recent headlines on the subject: “‘Dalit leader abused to for daring to sit on a chair.’ ‘Dalit lynched while gathering grain.’ ‘Dalit beaten for entering temple.’ ‘Dalit girl resists rape, loses arm as a result.’ ‘Dalit tries to fetch water, beaten to death.’”

If our revulsion at excrement is so strong it can sustain this mad form of apartheid for three thousand years, can we hope to ever deal with it rationally? Are the problems George describes doomed to be forever obscured by our evolutionary retch? Perhaps – but the most encouraging aspect of her book is the revelation that even the aspects of defecating that seem eternal and unchangeable are actually recent innovations. In Japan, sixty years ago everybody squatted communally over a dry pit. Today, nobody does: in private, they use techno-toilets that wash and dry your anus while simultaneously playing music and heating the seat. (Think of it as the i-Toilet, or Toilet 3.0.)

Toilet culture can change, and fast; what seems impossible to one generation can seem essential to the next. Neither of my parents had a toilet in the house when they were children, and thought the idea was vaguely disgusting. (Defecating? Next to the kitchen?). Another toilet-tide shift may happen in my lifetime. Will the drying up of water supplies – and a sewage system with nowhere left to spew its waste – force us to regress to earlier, dirtier worlds? Or will we begin a transition to greener options before the system breaks down and begins to spew our filth back at us?

It’s a sign of how superb George’s book is that I am now excitedly bubbling with these questions about the future of feces. ‘The Big Necessity’ belongs in a rare handful of studies that take a subject that seems fixed and familiar and taboo and makes us understand it is historically contingent and dazzlingly intriguing. Jessica Mitford did it with her classic study ‘The American Way of Death’; Michel Foucault did it with ‘Madness and Civilisation.’ Rose George has produced their equal: a gleaming Toilet Manifesto for Humankind. It could end with an oddly rousing cry, borrowed from another manifesto long ago: Shitters of the world, unite! You have nothing but your diarrhoea and your cholera and your dying oceans to lose. You have new toilet chains to win!

Imagine a remake of ‘The Odd Couple’, where Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau happen to rule the world. That’s the premise for this compelling, contrary and flawed new history by Pulitzer-nominated professor David Fromkin. He claims to have uncovered a “secret partnership” between a cowboy-President and a playboy-King who rose to power on opposite sides of the Atlantic in 1901 – and set aside their clashing personalities to put in place the alliances that shaped the twentieth century.

At first glance, King Edward VII and President Theodore Roosevelt had only one thing in common: their sudden ascension to power caused panic. They were both thrown there by accidents – of DNA and assassination, respectively – and considered to be grotesquely unsuited for their new positions. The King’s relative Princess May of Teck summarised the public mood in Britain when she howled: “God help us all!” Mark Twain similarly set the tone in America when he muttered: “The President is insane.”

Why the worry? Before his Coronation, Edward VII – known universally as ‘Bertie’ – was an alcohol-glugging, actress-devouring Prince. His most notable achievement in life was to design a “love-chair” that made it easier to have sex with two women simultaneously.

This is not how he was meant to turn out. His mother, Queen Victoria, was Britain’s longest-serving and sternest monarch. With her husband Albert, she planned out a Puritanical training for her heir: he was not allowed to play with children his own age, or to indulge in “pleasures”. Bertie rebelled immediately, with wild school-room-smashing rages. When he was taken to Paris as an adolescent, he begged the country’s rulers to adopt him so he could stay.

An ocean away, Theodore Roosevelt was living a very different life. Born into a wealthy New York family, he viewed pre-marital sex with priggish disdain. He sought to establish his manhood elsewhere: in battle, political and military. Fromkin says Roosevelt saw life as a Western, a “showdown between good and evil.” He warred through New York politics and the Navy all the way to the Vice-Presidency, where he agitated for the US to take on the Spanish Empire. He was “in favour of war – any war,” Fromkin says, because “to be a real man, a male human being must risk his life in armed combat.” As soon as the battle was launched, he assembled his own volunteer regiment and charged merrily across the hills of Cuba to echoing gunfire.

What could these two men – the drunkard-King, and the President drunk on war – share? Only one thing: a vision of the world. By 1901, the world’s great-power alliances were dissolving. Britain’s long conflicts with the US and France were withering away – in the face of a new foe. Bertie’s half-mad nephew William II was turning Germany into a rival imperial power determined to subjugate Europe. Roosevelt and the King believed there was only one way to counter this: an English-speaking empire bestriding the earth. It would rule according to liberal constitutions at home, and by brute force in the colonies. (Fromkin doesn’t talk much about the latter – but it was at its core.) Bertie and Teddy exchanged a slew of secret letters and telegrams, arranging to manoeuvre Russia and France to their side against Germany. The “special relationship” was born.

That is how Fromkin presents his story. It is thrilling and unexpected. And yet… it is only in the final pages of the book that you realise there are some startling holes in this picture-frame. The King and the Cowboy’ has an odd structure: there are 100 pages dedicated to Bertie’s life, then 50 dedicated to Roosevelt’s, and only in the remaining 50 pages do their stories begin to cross. Why? Because the overlap is strikingly thin.

The two men never actually met: this “friendship” was conducted entirely by emissaries. Bertie didn’t have the power to “arrange” anything: by 1901, almost all power over foreign policy had shifted to parliament. He was reduced to trying to wrangle his friends into positions as civil servants in the Foreign Office. And the UK and US were tectonically drifting in this direction before this “friendship”: as Teddy himself admitted, it was based on the raw geopolitics of control and expansion, not personal chemistry or a shared morality. Fromkin admits he is trying to revive the Great Man theory of history – but he has actually shown how cramped and partial it remains.

As his earlier histories show, David Fromkin has real and hefty historical skills. His writing is concise; his reading is wide; his pacing is superb. All three can be admired here. But it is hard to shake off the sensation that this time, he has lavished his abilities on an oversold account of a friendship that never really was.

On the rare occasions when I find myself in a warzone or some abandoned scrap of misery far from home, I try to live by one rule: what would Ann Leslie do? Should I drive towards the fighting? Ann Leslie would. Should I bluff my way into the camp and try to interview the rebel leader, even though he is a mass murderer? Ann Leslie would. Should I run away now? Ann Leslie would never – never – do that.

Along with Robert Fisk and John Pilger, Ann Leslie is the iconic foreign correspondent of her time. A story early in her autobiography distils her public persona into one perfect image. She is on the trail of heroin traffickers in the Mexican badlands, and writes: “As I trudged up the hill, a band of moustachioed trafficantes leapt into view from behind the cactuses, aiming their ancient Lee-Enfield rifles at me. Then they suddenly stopped in astonishment: nobody, absolutely nobody, had ever come trudging up there gun-bristled hill wearing white gloves, a white-and-yellow Horricks frock, and carrying a white handbag.”

That’s the Ann Leslie of legend: Middle England woman in a warzone. Hyacinth Bucket finagling her way into the company of mass murderers. But beneath this impossible construct, there is a darker, more dazzling figure: a daughter of the Raj all-but-abandoned by her mother, who fought through a tide of misogyny to the top of Fleet Street.

Almost all journalistic memoirs amount to nothing more than the stodgy dough of old anecdotes and old office politics. The exceptions are rare: Claud Cockburn’s ‘In Time of Trouble’, Max Hastings’ ‘Editor’, and Andrew Marr’s ‘My Trade’. Leslie’s book leaps into this list – because it teases out the woman beneath the bravery and the bravado.

Ann Leslie was born in Rawal Pindi – then in India – in 1941 to an oilman father, and spent her early childhood skipping through Basra and the Raj. Her mother was living proof of the need for feminism: an extremely intelligent woman “considered a beauty and a wit”, who was barred pursuing a career simple by her gender. She slowly curdled with boredom, and seems to have resented her children. She sent Ann away to boarding school at the extraordinary age of four, where she became pickled in loneliness and boredom.

The only person who seems to have given her a sense of love or stability was the family’s chief servant, Yah Mohammed, who she adored. The first boy she fell in love with – a Karachi teenager called Sohail – committed suicide soon after. She ended up in a “Talibanic” convent school, a “ghastly, cold, damp mausoleum in the Peak District.” She made it to Oxford – and tripped into journalism by accident when it was the only job offering her a decent wage during the end-of-year “milk round.”

She was swiftly plunged into the icy pond of the Manchester Express – a place where she was deemed to be “depriving a good man of a job.” She was sent on absurd missions: to seek out a local dwarf who claimed to have gone to school with Carey Grant, for example. “Modern feminism hadn’t really been invented then, but I was innately feminist enough to know that I wouldn’t be driven out of a job just because of the genital arrangements I had been born with,” she explains.

So she fought – all the way into the macho world of foreign reporting. The story of how this happened is studded with the best pound-for-pound anecdotes you’ll find anywhere. She tells how Salvador Dali flashed at her and the Manson Family nearly poisoned her; she recounts the time she slugged Mohammed Ali in the chin and danced on the Berlin Wall as it crumbled; she takes us from the killing fields of Bosnia to the nation-sized gulag of North Korea. But the book never descends into the drizzle of old news – because it is underpinned by a blunt exploration of her psyche. What made her do it? Why did she tramp through the guerrilla-camps of Rhodesia, holding her machine gun over her pregnancy-bump? What drove her on?

I disagree with many of Leslie’s political views – but she is more liberal than her stereotype suggests: scornful about religion, soft on drugs, disgusted by homophobia. It is impossible not to respect the fact that she has managed for decades to smuggle these views – and world-class journalism – into the Daily Mail, a newspaper that usually pulps all good prose or original insights into a dull Pravda-style paste.

‘Killing My Own Snakes clears away the haze of nostalgia that surrounds the old Fleet Street – it sounds like a haven of alcoholic misogynists – but it is a lament nonetheless. At a time when journalists are ever-more pressured to see the world through Google, Leslie’s career is a testament to the narcotic of running towards the fire and seeing the story for yourself. “For me no emotional hit, not even a sexual one, can compare with ‘smelling’ a new place, a new situation, for the first time,” she writes, and the pages bristle with the adrenaline. If you want your teenage daughter to spend her life in the world’s war-zones, just buy her this book and sit back.

Even somebody like me who vociferously opposes the honours system can look at Ann Leslie and say: now, that’s a Dame.

Picture two toddlers sitting in their pushchairs on the bus to Clapham. They are called Emily and Callum. Emily’s family is comfortably-wealthy, while Callum’s family is poor. For this reason alone, Callum is three times more likely to die in an accident, and twice as likely to become mentally ill. Even if Callum is naturally clever and Emily is naturally thick, by the age of ten they will be level-pegging at school – and then Emily will race ahead. Callum will, in the end, enjoy twelve years less of life. Polly Toynbee writes: “At Clapham Junction, the two pushchairs bump down the step onto the pavement together and head in opposite directions. Almost certainly forever.”

Emily and Callum’s story is our national story now. In twenty-first Britain, inequality that has become an unbridgeable chasm. The journalist Polly Toynbee has long been a lightning conductor for the right, because she has been the most consistent – and correct – critic of this polarisation. Where they offer blithe assertions of classlessness, she points to the hard sociological evidence showing “birth is now destiny… Parental income predicts who will run the investment banks and who will clean their floors.”

‘Unjust Rewards’ has been written “as an optical aid, to sharpen ways of seeing society’s misshapenness,” Toynbee and her co-author David Walker explain They look at the opposing ends of the inequality-canyon: the richest ten percent now own 54 percent of all personal wealth, while the bottom ten percent own less than 1 percent.

What does Britain look like from the stratosphere? They assemble a focus group of City bankers and lawyers in the top 0.1 percent of earnings and present them with the facts. The bankers gasp to discover that 90 percent of British people live on less than £40,000 a year – and flatly refuse to believe it. One of them thought he was on average income at £200,000. Asked what constituted poverty, they suggested £22,000 a year – which would mean a majority of British people are in poverty. “I have no idea how they survive on the incomes they have,” one banker says. But when it is suggested they pay taxes to start putting this right, they dismiss the proposals as “all kinds of bullshit crap.”

What about the opposite end of the telescope? For all the vile Vicky Pollard living-in-luxury caricatures, they find a statistically typical single mum in Birmingham: Alison Murray, a 32 year old single whose husband left her. “I never have new clothes, [it’s] all charity shop for me and [her sons], but I don’t mind that much. It’s the things you can’t do for them… They never go swimming. They never go to the cinema. They never take a train. They never have a day’s holiday.” Yes, this poverty is relative, not absolute – but it still hurts. And the chances of her kids moving up and out in Thatcherized Britain are smaller now than for a generation.

But one of Toynbee’s great strengths as a journalist has always been that she doesn’t just describe problems with a whine; she offers solutions. “We can change social destiny, if there is the political will and popular assent for the tax to fund it,” she explains. It’s not sci-fi: Norway has abolished child poverty in 2003. Toynbee and Walker report movingly on the government programmes that have made a difference – like SureStart, or one-on-one reading teaching for the poorest kids – and call for them to be super-charged.

And, crucially, they demand action at the top. A High Pay Commission should name-and-shame the most egregiously undeserved bonuses, and recommend a reasonable national average. Of course the super-rich will scream, but Toynbee and Walker show how hollow their threats are. The entire finance sector – including the City, insurance and high street banks – makes up just 8 percent of our GDP. It’s less than half of manufacturing, or property services. The number from this small industry who would actually leave rather than pay their fair share is smaller still: only 14 percent of FTSE chief execs are from abroad, and even McKinsey admits the chances of them packing up are “limited.”

No doubt Toynbee will be showered with right-wing abuse for this book. But since it is a brilliant blend of moving human stories, cast-iron statistics, and real-world solutions to our great national scandal, those certainly will be unjust rewards.

Cassie Wright lies on a bed in front of a camera, waiting to have sex with six hundred men. Consecutively. In one day. It is going to be sold as “the biggest gang-bang in history” – and Cassie wants it to end with her death, live on camera. Among the Viagra-guzzling men queuing excitedly at the door, there is the man who first introduced her to porn – by drugging and raping her. Oh, and a boy who fervently believes he is the son she gave up for adoption nineteen years ago. Welcome to Chuck Palahniuk’s imagination.

Palahniuk (pronounced Paula-nik) writes wild amphetamine-novels. You swallow them whole and experience a strange and delirious high. But then you hit the last page, come down, and wonder who the hell you have been hugging.

A few years ago Palahniuk – still most famous for writing ‘Fight Club’ – revealed he is gay, so it might seem odd for him to swiftly produce a book about straight pornography. But gay men can view the ballooning world of straight porn with a cool eye – and somebody has to. Palahniuk’s premise is taken from a real event: a rape victim called Annabel Chong, who agreed to be ‘gang-banged’ by 251 men in one go, and it is now regarded as a “porn classic.” In all of human history, sexual images have never been more mainstream than in our wired-up, porn-again culture. The fact that a seemingly-infinite number of women lie splayed only a click away is subtly changing men, and women, and sex. But how?

The story is told through three of the men queuing to be “The Dick That Killed Cassie Wright”, known only by their numbers, and her female personal assistant. But throughout the novel they spray theories and facts – many of which turn out to be true – which turn the book into a spurting discussion of porn.

Pornography is, Palahniuk hints, eternal and ineradicable. One character observes: “According to British anthropologist Catherine Blackledge, the human fetus [sic] begins to masturbate in the womb a month before birth. At thirty-two weeks, that ripple, that twitching within the utereus, isn’t the baby twitching. The nasty little thing starts jerking off in the third trimester and never, ever stops.”

According to another character, masturbation is one of the great engines of human history, driving us forward. He explains that wankers “killed the Sony Betamax. Decided VHS over Beta technology. Brought the expensive first generation of the Internet into their homes. Made the whole web possible. It’s their lonesome money [that] paid for the servers.”

In the early chapters, it seems like Cassie Wright is going to be a reincarnation of Nicola Six, the misogynist wet-dream at the centre of Martin Amis’ ‘London Fields’. The porn queen wants to be “fucked to death”, for reasons that gradually become clear.
But Palahniuk goes where Amis couldn’t: he peers into Cassie’s mind. She has gone through the standard porn-and-prostitution training ground of rape, like most of the women in these ‘industries’. In this novel, the star of ‘The Da Vinci Load’, ‘To Drill A Mockingbird’ and ‘Chitty Chitty Gang Bang’ is no joke. Her desire to die is a moment of despair – and of a strange twisted hope, as you will see – not the orgasmic delirium of Nicola Six.

In order to be the Queen of Pornutopia, Cassie has to transform herself into a dehumanised, deranged ideal. She looks like the perfect little inflatable sex doll – and Palahniuk’s characters explain “Adolf Hitler invented the blow-up sex doll.” When he was a runner in the First World War, the wannabe-Fuhrer was disgusted to see German soldiers having sex with local prostitutes and spreading VD. “So he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle,” the characters explain. “Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blonde hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could go into wide distribution.” This is partially true – and strangely fitting.

Another character explains the first living, breathing sex-doll – Marilyn Monroe – had to bring herself close to death to fit the mould. Her lifetime of pneumonia and bronchitis was, the novel tells us, “most likely caused by her habit of burying herself in a bathtub of crushed ice before any appearance in film or public. Lying naked, drugged to escape the pain, buried in ice for hours, gave Monroe the stand-up tits and ass she wanted for the day’s work.” Palahniuk seems to be asking: does it tell us something about male sexuality that to be Sexy, you have to be Sick? Why has the pure market forces-whirr of a billion mouse-clicks created Frankenstein-beauties with blank eyes and abusive pasts pretending they love it?

In case I am now making the novel sound earnest, did I mention that Cassie’s long-lost son is still queuing up to have sex with her? Like all of Palahniuk’s novels, ‘Snuff’ is a Chernobyl of taboos, with incest and necrophilia sucked into this particular roaring implosion. This is how he faces down the challenge of any writer wading into this subject: how do you write about porn without becoming porn? Writers as good as Terry Southern and Dennis Potter have floundered there – but Palahniuk does it by being so super-depraved, so off-the-scale sick, so utterly foul, that only a major-league pervert could get off on ‘Snuff.’

A queue of six hundred men waiting to screw a Barbie-woman to death seems like a bleak metaphor for porn. If you knew getting your quick orgasm would harm a woman, would you carry on? In Palahniuk’s vision, they do, with barely a disinterested shrug; it’s not surprising he name-checks Andrea Dworkin on the way.

And Cassie’s “son” waiting in the queue seems like another metaphor still. He is a “porn baby”, conceived on camera, thrown away like a used condom. He discovered who his mother was when his adopted parents caught him masturbating over images of Cassie and howled “That’s your birth-mother!” He bought the sex-toys modelled on her breast and vagina and carried them around like “religious totems of the mother [he’ll] spend the rest of [his life] trying to find.” The first generation of porn babies – those who have grown up with the most extreme porn on their bedroom screens – are now teenagers. Palahniuk forces us to peer at them, and to ask what this industry is doing to us, and its ‘performers’.

Is ‘Snuff’ brilliantly repulsive, or just repulsive? Sure, it’s a thin plot, padded out with psychosis. Yes, all the characters sound the same. But Palahniuk investigates his novels for months before he begins to write, so it they always have a journalistic reek of authenticity and immediacy: he is like Tom Wolfe on acid, and poppers, and speed. Think of it as The Bonfire of the Inanities. Once you have come down and mopped up the vomit, you will be glad you snorted this particular ‘Snuff’.

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There are two gorgeous and terrifying and inspiring new non-fiction paperbacks I would cram into any holiday luggage: George Monbiot's Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice (Atlantic Books, £11.99) and Clive James's Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (Picador, £14.99). Both are collections of essays, dense with learning but light to read, that dramatically raise your horizons. From the Gulag to global warming, James tangoes you through the 20th century and Monbiot wills you to transform the 21st. With them, you may be lying on the beach, but you will be looking at the stars.

For fiction, I adored Catherine O'Flynn's first novel, What Was Lost (Tindal Street Press, £8.99) - a story of a vast, anonymous Birmingham shopping centre and a little girl who vanishes there in the 1980s, only to reappear on its security cameras decades later. It captures the reality of sprawling, neon, exurban Britain - of what it is like to live and work and die there - better than any novelist except J G Ballard.

It is impossible to imagine George W. Bush eating cucumber sandwiches on a rainy English lawn, discussing the latest cricket scores. Yet the President with the fewest affectations from the Old Country has nonetheless triggered a rampant return to Anglophilia among American foreign policy experts. With his unashamedly ‘civilising’ mission in the Middle East, and his deployment of gunboats as a tool of diplomacy, he has sent intellectuals dashing back to their accounts of the British Empire to find meaningful historical parallels.

Walter Russell Mead is the latest to approvingly trace the connecting fibres between George III and George W. The distinguished fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations argues that America – a country founded in a rebellion against the British Empire – has, in fact, simply picked up the British imperial baton, with Bush merely the latest (and least competent) runner. So cram yourself on that double-decker bus to Empire: America is more British than you ever knew.

Russell Mead believes that every age needs a ‘liberal empire’ that will control the world’s seas and make free trade possible. Only if you rule the waves do you get to rule the global trading system, determining its shape and character. This was discovered by the Dutch Protestants in the United Provinces of the Netherlands four centuries ago, then by the United Kingdom – and now by the United States. This is the watery lens through which world history must be viewed. Indeed, “The last four hundred years of world history can be summed up in six letters… the story of world power goes U.P. to U.K. to U.S.”

Each of these ‘liberal’ maritime empires saw off towering, glowering rivals. From the Spanish Armada to the Soviet tanks, they prevailed for one reason: they adhered to a code Russell Mead dubs “the Protocols of the Elders of Greenwich.” These unwritten rules are simple to explain. Build an open society at home, where dissent and discussion are possible. Channel its dynamism outwards, towards the global economy. Use the powers of the state to control the oceans, protect commerce, and defeat illiberal wannabes abroad. Open the global system to others, even your enemies, if they agree to abide by the rules. Then the world’s waters – and markets – will be yours.

Russell Mead believes that England and her runaway son, America, are uniquely suited to following these Protocols. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the supremacy of Parliament was established over the Crown, gave birth to pluralism and created spaces for dissent and disagreement. Then the rise of Protestantism shucked off the old fear of cultural change that characterised Catholicism, and created “a new kind of religious equilibrium” where “embracing and even furthering and accelerating change… [is seen as a fulfilment of your] religious destiny.” This Protestant ethic is now stamped on Anglo-Americans of all religious hues. As he puts it, we are all Wasps now.

It’s an elegant thesis, drawing on a lush, literate kaleidoscope of sources, from John Milton to Karl Popper to Lewis Carol. To find a foreign policy expert so soaked in eighteenth century poetry is undoubtedly charming. But is his argument true?

Russell Mead presents these empires as essentially benevolent confections, offering a model of rule so seductive that “people choose freely to belong”. To this end, he says that by 1851, it looked like “the Peaceable Kingdom had arrived; British power, progress, prosperity, and liberty were ushering in the universal rule of peace.” Really? Is that how it looked in, say, India? When Clive of India arrived in Calcutta, he described it – as all visitors did – as “extensive, populous and as rich as the city of London.” It was a place of such “richness and abundance [that] neither war, pestilence nor oppression could destroy [it].” But within a century of British occupation, the population fell from 150,000 to 30,000 as its industries were wrecked in the interests of the Mother Country. By the time the British left, it was one of the poorest places in the world. Is this really the baton Russell Mead wants the US to pick up?

‘God and Gold’ offers a sunny, shimmering vision of the British Empire that almost no British historians would now support. True, he does offer up one paragraph listing various imperial atrocities – but even here, his descriptions are strangely anodyne. For example, he concedes that “the American Indians were not treated well” by the British settlers, which is a rather sterile way to describe a genocide. He insists that anybody who says these – or other, more recent atrocities – were “coldly calculated, deliberate crimes,” rather than “excesses, blunders, or regrettable misjudgements by young soldiers in the heat of action” is a “Waspophobe” rivven with irrational prejudice. He glosses over what his call for an empire that defends business interests with force really means: the people of Guatemala and Chile, who have had their elected governments toppled by the CIA in living memory, know only too well.

And then comes the most surprising omission. A book written today, calling for the United States to become a self-conscious and unabashed Empire, surely has to reckon with the on-going haemorrhaging of US imperial power in Iraq. Yet the reader of this book waits – and waits. Iraq is first mentioned on page 272, in a half-sentence aside. It does not appear again until page 362, when Russell Mead dedicates his only full sentence to it, noting that the war has brought “untold grief to innocent victims.” Iraq does not, it seems, have any strategic implications worth discussing; the US should continue to attempt to rule the world regardless of its current inability to rule one collapsing dirt-poor county.

Perhaps sensing these tensions, Russell Mead ends with a call for a rehabilitation of the thought of the late theologian Reinhold Neibhur. The uber-Protestant sought to place the idea of original sin at the centre of politics. All men are fallen, all are capable of sowing disaster – so politics needs to be constantly self-interrogating and doubtful. But how does this fit with Russell Mead’s demand for an American empire? Imperialism is by its nature bombastic; it has to internally suppress the memory of the violence it must commit to perpetuate its power. A humble imperialism is a contradiction in terms.

Russell Mead offers the most eloquent possible defence of the swarm of Wasps that has shaped the world for so long – but ultimately his God and his Gold do not glitter.

You can read my other book reviews here.

In the mid-1970s, a group of men who were untrained in economics – and, as it happens, borderline-insane – emerged in Washington DC and invented a whole new approach to economics. In the past, it had been thought that if you wanted to cut taxes, you had to ploddingly pay for it by either cutting spending or increasing borrowing. No more. This new group preached something called “supply-side economics”, which claimed that you could cut taxes, and increase public spending, and hold down borrowing and inflation, all at the same time. It’s easy, they said: if you cut taxes, the economy will grow even faster – and make up the difference!

The story of the supply-siders’ strange rise begins when three grey-suited men met in a swish Washington hotel in the gloomy aftermath of Watergate to turn this untested idea into a governing philosophy. They were: the economic consultant Arthur Laffer, the journalist Jude Wanniski, and Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff – a man called Dick Cheney. At the time, Laffer was merely a disgraced former advisor to the Nixon administration. He had lost his job after he made a series of wild and incorrect predictions that the economy would boom, and an investigation showed he had been using only four variables – compared to the thousands used by other economists. But getting his predictions hideously wrong did not put Laffer off. No – he decided he had uncovered the secret key to economic growth, one that had eluded all economists since the dawn of capitalism.

Trying to explain this idea to an eager Cheney, “Laffer pulled out a cocktail napkin and drew a parabola-shaped curve on it,” writes the liberal New Republic journalist Jonathan Chait. “The premise of the curve was simple. If the government sets a tax rate of zero, it will receive no revenue. And if the government sets a tax rate of 100 percent, the government will also receive zero tax revenue, since nobody will have any reason to earn any income. Between these two, Laffer’s curve drew an arc. The arc suggested that at higher levels of taxation, reducing the tax rate would produce more revenue for the government.”

The Laffer Curve became the supply-siders’ Sermon on the Mount, the core of their faith. For Cheney, it was “a revelation, for it presented in a simple, easily digestible form the messianic power of tax cuts,” Chait notes. “In that sloping parabola was the magical promise of that elusive politician’s nirvana, a cost-free path to prosperity: lower taxes, higher revenues.” He had discovered his “totalistic ideology. The core principle is that economic performance hinges almost entirely on how much incentive investors and entrepreneurs have to attain more wealth, and this incentive in turn hinges almost entirely on their tax rate.” It was an economic recipe for tax cuts for the rich.

Almost everyone else saw the idea as preposterous. George Bush Snr. dismissed it as “voodoo economics.” But a string of eccentrics, with no serious knowledge of economics, began to preach the gospel – and they were swiftly employed by Ronald Reagan’s burgeoning Presidential campaign. Most of these men were, it turned out, mad. The writer George Gilder – known only for a string of vehemently anti-feminist polemics – wrote a book called ‘Wealth and Poverty’, that was handed out like sweets by Reagan to staffers and friends. Nobody seemed to notice that at the same time that Gilder was co-inventing supply-side economics, he was also bragging about being a master of Extra-Sensory Perception. He explained he could receive messages from strangers without using any of his senses, bragging he had “hundreds of experiences” with psychics. “The trick,” he explained, “is that you have to have faith.” He applied the same evidence-free approach to his economic writing.

Similarly, the journalist Wanniski was hired as an economic advisor to Ronald Reagan, despite having no economic training or credibility. He was also fond of defending Saddam Hussein (who never gassed anyone, he insists to this day), Slobodan Milosevic, and the conspiracist Lyndon LaRouche, who says the Fabian Society is a secret drug-and-arms-smuggling gang. Nobody on Reagan’s team seemed to notice that supply-side economics was just as fevered a fantasy.

All academic economists warned them their vision was absurd. They pointed out that a passing glance at the evidence showed the falsity of claims that marginal tax rates are the sole or primary determinant of economic growth. From 1947 to 1973, the US economy grew by 4 percent a year – while the richest Americans paid a 91 percent top rate of tax.

As soon as it was put into practice, the predictions of supply side economics were shown, predictably, to be false. They insisted tax cuts for the rich would create more economic growth, and therefore pay for themselves. But straight after Reagan began to try it, deficits started to shoot up, past $100bn, then $200bn, as a vast hole was left in the nation’s balance sheet. Then, when Bill Clinton tentatively tried to reverse some of this horrifying damage by increasing the top income tax rate from 31 to 39 percent, the supply-siders made another set of predictions. It would destroy the economy, bringing on a recession, they insisted. Instead, the economy boomed.

And so it continued. When George W. Bush followed their advice and slashed taxes for the rich, the supply-siders insisted yet again that tax revenues would actually increase as the economy was super-charged by these new incentives, so there would be no need for spending cuts or increased borrowing. In fact, income tax payments fell to their lowest level as a proportion of the US economy since 1942, and the deficit soared to unprecedented trillions – a legacy that will poison American politics for generations. “It is impossible to think of how events could have turned out worse for them,” Chait notes, “short of God appearing on earth to denounce the Laffer Curve as an abomination.”

But something strange happened. Despite being proven flat-out wrong, supply-side economics did not disappear. Instead, it became the received wisdom of the Republican Party. It is now preached by every major Presidential candidate for the Grand Old Party. As Chait says: “The[se ideas] have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda.”

How? How did the preachings of these economic illiterates become the “common sense” of Bush and his successors? Chait gives a simple, compelling reason: “The lesson for cranks everywhere is that your theory stands a stronger chance of success if it directly benefits a rich and powerful bloc, and there’s no bloc richer and more powerful than the rich and powerful.”

Supply-side economics provided the ideological icing – a sweet-sounding rationale – for a straightforwardly corrupt programme whereby the super-rich bought the Republican Party, and in turn were handed vast tax cuts and lavish subsidies by them. As Chait argues, “The supply-siders taught the rich that economic growth hinges above all else on satisfying the desire of the affluent to grow even more affluent.” So the rich funded their think tanks and threw money at politicians who preached their message. The failure of all their predictions and policies didn’t matter, because from the perspective of the super-rich, it did work – they got their tax cuts.

Of course, the supply-siders claimed publicly that everyone benefited from their programme, not just their paymasters. Yet a memo wielded by Chait perfectly captures the insincerity of this. In March 2001, a coalition of business lobbyists arranged a march in Washington to support Bush’s massive supply-side tax cuts for the rich. They secretly circulated instructions explaining: “The theme involves working Americans. Visually, this will need a lot of hard-hats… the Speaker’s office was very clear in saying we do not need people in suits. If people want to participate, they must be DRESSED DOWN, appear to be REAL WORKER types, etc.” Hard hats were provided for the millionaire lobbyists to wear on the day, to give the impression they were ordinary Joes.

This shift to supply-side goodies for the super-rich has not been supported at any point by the ordinary Americans they were so carefully posing as. A Pew research poll following Bush’s election asked the American public what the budget surplus left behind by Clinton should be used for. The vast majority wanted to use it for Social Security or Medicare; only 17 percent picked tax cuts. Crucially, the Republicans know this too. In 2002, Bush’s political team privately instructed the Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill: “The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes. It’s crucial that your remarks make clear there is no trade-off here.” This is a pure statement of supply-side economics, pretending there are no hard choices – you can cut and spend and laugh all the way to the Magic Bank.

Jonathan Chait has managed to do something extraordinary: he has written a book about economic theory that is both gut-bustingly funny and as compelling as a horror-story. ‘The Big Con’ has a dark relevance for British readers too. John Redwood, the man appointed by David Cameron to run his business and competitiveness strategy, tosses hardline supply-side myths around like confetti, and shadow chancellor George Osborne has declared: “We have a lot to learn from George Bush’s compassionate conservatism.” There is a chance the British people could yet be forced to surf the Laffer curve to economic disaster.

You can comment on this article, and read other people's comments, here.

You can read my other book reviews here.

The Britain of 1945 seems like an unknowably foreign country now. It is a place where every theatrical performance begins with the audience standing in silence for ‘God Save the Queen’. It is a country living on near-starvation level rations, with a tiny weekly smattering of butter and cheese and meat for a family of four. It is a country populated by people who almost universally frown on sex before marriage. In ‘State of the Nation’ Michael Billington – the Guardian’s theatre critic for more than three decades – traces how we got from that chilly, poor, isolated island to here, through the plays that portrayed it.

Those in the theatre world who rage at Billington’s writings have always complained that he fetishises a particular kind of theatre – one that is time-pegged and timed-out. His baby is the Shavian state of the nation drama, a genre that his critics sniff is no more than a newspaper column pushed onto the stage and made to prance. But like Billington, I love those plays. Unlike the essentially private worlds of the novel, the television and even the cinema, a work of theatre is a public space. Billington’s belief that it should be used as a place where we re-think the things that affect us all is as old as Aristophanes, and it’s daft to think it dissolved some time in the seventies.

But can you really trace the changing social grooves of a country by looking only at its theatre – a marginal art-form? Billington does it, offering strange and compelling political rereadings of playwrights who have usually been seen as apolitical purveyors of theatrical confectionary. For example, he argues that Noel Coward “always hid behind the excuse of being a pure entertainer blessed simply with ‘a talent to amuse’. In fact, he was a deeply political writer with a fixed agenda.” He believes he was “a sentimental reactionary petrified of change” – and shows it with a close reading of the rarely-revived plays.

In the hideous ‘Peace In Our Time’, Coward implies that Britain would have been “better [with] a brief period of Nazi rule than a descent into post-war socialism.” The all-knowing character who is plainly Coward’s avatar within the play – the butler Creswell – summarises Coward’s view at the end: “I drink to her Ladyship and his Lordship, groaning beneath the weight of privilege but managing to keep their peckers up all the same. Above all, I drink to the final inglorious disintegration of the most unlikely dream that ever troubled the foolish heart of man – Social Equality.” This is a voice of unashamed reaction that has always been part of British life, but hadn’t then learned to hide behind the polite buzz-words of faux-meritocracy. It’s an intriguing historical moment, and worth hauling from some Shaftsbury Avenue archive.

Theatre became more self-consciously political after Coward, because the nature of political changed. Billington quotes the critic Harold Hobson’s belief that in the age of the atom bomb, a purely private theatre was no longer possible. Jane Austen’s heroes could conduct their love affairs without really noticing the Napoleonic Wars. No pair of lovers in the 1960s could. “A slight miscalculation in places as widely separated and as far from us as Cuba, Berlin or Laos could at any moment result in our own personal annihilation,” he wrote. “Therefore we cannot divorce our attention from world affairs. The continuance of our existence depends on them.”

Yet the two ‘political’ writers Billington picks out as most interesting have – at best – incoherent politics. I have never understood why John Osborne was considered political at all. How political is it to shriek ‘fuck you all’ fifty times over? Jimmy Porter, his most famous creation, raves that there are no decent causes left in the late 1950s – a time when the final fights against the British Empire were being fought, when a quarter of humanity was enslaved by the Soviet Union or Maoist China, and when the US was crushing democratic governments from Iran to Guatemala. No, this is anti-politics – a glib self-pitying misanthropy.

Harold Pinter – whose late political works Billington loves – is even more politically problematic. This is a man who skipped from supporting Margaret Thatcher to Michael Foot to Slobodan Milosevic. (Yes, he actually joined The Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic). His most complex political message is Torture is Bad. Thanks, Harold.

Does it tell us something about successful political playwrights that their politics are usually a mess? Theatre can, it turns out, frame a political conflict in new and interesting ways – but it can never resolve it. Theatre offers impressions, not programmes; questions, not answers. (David Hare’s plays die when the moment when the characters begin to intone The Message.) That’s partly why a great political playwright can actually be one whose politics you profoundly disagree with. My favourite is Tom Stoppard, a man whose pessimistic conservatism is almost the diametrical opposite of my own beliefs. His questions are glorious. At times, Billington seems to miss this. He praises writers whose moderate Socialism he agrees with, like J. B. Priestley, and tends to sniff at those on the other side of the theatrical House, no matter how brilliant.

Billington has written an impressive work of polemic nonetheless, vehemently defending his vision of theatre. He is less good at the other side of theatre criticism: reporting. Even though he has seen more than 8000 plays, it is rare that he gives us a sense of what it was like to witness a specific production, in the way that, say, Kenneth Tynan’s criticism does. He doesn’t make a play come alive again with language. He occasionally even seems to poke any evocative power away with the deadening clichés of critic-ese. As A.A. Gill recently asked – who ever describes plays as “memorably revived” or “incomparable” in everyday speech? Theatre critics so often say a play left them “breathless” that I have begun to wonder if maybe they are all just asthmatic.

But Billington has defended political theatre with an astonishing bank of knowledge, and with right on his (strictly leftish) side. Somewhere, Aristophanes is smiling on this book.

How can Naomi Klein top ‘No Logo’, the most influential political polemic of the past twenty years? Her first book forensically studied the bloodstains that have splashed from the developing world’s factories and ‘export processing zones’ onto our cheap designer lives – and it spurred the creation of the anti-globalisation movement. Today, she has produced something even bolder: a major revisionist history of the world that Milton Friedman and the market fundamentalists have built. She takes the central myth of the right – that since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have marched skipped hand in hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history – and shown that it is, simply, a lie.

In fact, human beings consistently and everywhere vote for mixed economies. They want the wealth markets generate, but they also want them to be counterbalanced by strong government action to make life in a market economy liveable. (Even Thatcher and Reagan were not permitted by their electorates to tinker with anything but the outer fringes of social regulation and the welfare state). The right has been unable to accept this reality, and unable to defeat it in democratic elections. So in order to achieve their vision of “pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions,” they have waited for massive crises – when the population is left reeling and unable to object – to impose their vision.

Klein’s story begins with the market fundamentalists’ show-room: Chile. Milton Friedman, the apostle of pure unfettered capitalism, sent many of his finest students to Chile for years to spread the message that markets must be allowed to work their pristine logic unhindered by governments. They persuaded virtually nobody. Their parties were thumpingly defeated, and the democratic socialist Salvador Allende was elected instead. So the CIA backed an anti-democratic coup by the fascist general Augusto Pinochet – and Friedman swiftly stepped in to design “the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere,” as Klein puts it.

All subsidies for the poor were scrubbed away, prices were sent soaring, and unemployment reached unprecedented levels. Friedman told Pinochet to go further and cut harder. The wishes of the people could be safely ignored, because “the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks,” she notes. “Attacks on union leaders were often carried out in close coordination with the owners of the workplaces.” Even Margaret Thatcher tacitly admitted this vision could never be tried in a democracy. She wrote to Friedrich Hayek that much as she longed to create a similar economic outcome in Britain, “I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable.”

So the right-wing vision of total markets – slice away all social protections and let the corporations rule – was born with the iron fist of state violence as its conjoined twin. In most of the places it has been tried, they have been there, inextricably stuck together. Klein tracks them across continents: in post-Soviet Russia, for example, Boris Yeltsin could only impose this extreme vision by blowing up the Parliament (with most of the elected representatives trapped inside), shredding the country’s young democracy, and starting a vast distraction-war in Chechnya that killed 100,000 people. In post-Tiananmen China, the Communist party could only turn their country into a vast export credit zone with massacres and mass imprisonment that made ordinary Chinese workers too terrified to ask for even the most meagre rights. Indeed, across the planet, “some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era… were in fact committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public to prepare the ground for the introduction of free-market reforms.”

Where this uber-corporate vision has not been imposed by force, it has been imposed by blackmail at a time of crisis. One of the ugliest examples Klein exposes is the use of the tsunami – a quasi-Biblical wave that washed away 250,000 people – as a pretext to impose a Friedmanite vision. In Sri Lanka, mega-corporations had long been desperate to clear the old beach-dwelling communities of fishermen away and open up the coastline to much-more-profitable foreign tourism. But the people liked their homes, and their careers, and did not want to hand their beaches over. So these proposals prompted a wave of militant strikes and mass protests. They were then put to the Sri Lankan people in an election – and defeated by a landslide.

But then a wave washed it all away, and “underneath the rubble and carnage was what the tourism industry had been angling for all along – a pristine beach, scrubbed clean of all the messy signs of people working, a vacation Eden.” The Sri Lankan government was told that it would only receive the vast reconstruction loans they needed from the World Bank and IMF if they agreed to a “restructuring” programme – which consisted of everything the Sri Lankan people had just rejected at the polls. Reeling from the shock, the Sri Lankan government agreed. They banned people from returning to their beachfront homes, declaring a “buffer zone” for indigenous people – but not for the hotel trade, who were free to do as they please. So money donated nominally to help tsunami victims was actually used to inflict a “second tsunami” on them, handing over their land to foreign corporations and ending their historic lifestyles forever.

Similar programmes of extortion have been inflicted on other peoples reeling in shock. As the people of South Africa were fighting the last battles against Apartheid, the successor ANC was forced to haggle with the IMF and World Bank for their loans. The conditions? Ditch all the social protections included in your Freedom Charter, and leave the economic structures of Apartheid in place. As the people of Poland emerged blinking from the horror of Soviet Communism, the Solidarity government was forced to gut their social democratic vision and impose a bitter dose of ‘shock therapy’ that cut the country even further to the bone. In both countries, the will of the people was explicitly ignored.

Klein’s account of this “disaster capitalism” is written with a perfectly distilled anger, channelled through hard fact. There are only a few flaws with her masterpiece. At times, Klein becomes casual with her terminology, and sounds like she is attacking capitalism per se, rather than its extreme, deranged and undemocratic variant. The vision she seeks to spread – of a mixed economy – is, after all, partly capitalist, and rightly so. But at times she leaves herself vulnerable to glib right-wing criticism when she appears to be throwing the baby of markets out with the market fundamentalist bathwater.

It’s also hard not to wish that Klein had given us more glimpses of the victims of these vicious policies. In Sri Lanka, she stumbles through the tsunami-wreckage and meets a young mother call Renuka who saved her kids and gave birth two days after the great wave. ‘The Shock Doctrine’ would be given an extra texture if, along with the hard politics, she included more personal accounts: of the pensioners in Siberia whose corpses were found frozen to the floor after their pensions were slashed by Yeltsin, or of the slum-dwellers in Soweto betrayed by the economics forced on the ANC. But these are only quibbles. Naomi Klein has indeed topped ‘No Logo’. Today, this brilliant book should stir a tsunami of shame – and of political action by us to finally stop the shock ‘therapy’.

POSTSCRIPT: A reader e-mailed to make a point I hear quite often, which is that today Chile is economically thriving, showing that Pinochet’s “harsh medicine” was “worth it.” In fact, Klein answers this point very well in her book. After following Friedman’s advice for nearly a decade, the Chilean economy crashed in 1982. Debt exploded, hyperinflation ravaged the economy, and unemployment hit 30 percent. The country was only saved from total collapse by one thing: Pinochet had ignored the stern advice of Friedman that he must privatize Codeco, the state copper mine company that had been nationalised by Allende. Even Pinochet then drastically changed course, adopting a much less market fundamentalist approach, and Chile began to recover. So far from being an advert for Freidmanomics, Chile is a bleak and terrible warning of what happens when they are applied.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: You can check out my other book reviewshere, and my other articles arguing against forcing market fundamentalism down people's throats here.

What happens when a twenty-nine year old black Jewish girl from Camden Town, raised by a skint single mum, suddenly becomes a Member of Parliament? ‘House Music’ is the surreal, scintillating and – in the end – sad answer to this question.

The great political diarists of the past have written wry observations from the side of the Chamber, like Alan Clark or Chips Channon, or blunt accounts from the inside of government, like Tony Benn or Barbra Castle. Oona King offers something new: the political diary as chick lit confessional, taking you on a tour of the diarist’s ovaries, anxieties and marriage crises as she runs from one constituency surgery to another. Talk of Private Members’ Bills alternates with talk of her own unpaid phone bills; discussion of the IMF follows discussion of her IVF.

It all begins with a judder of optimism. During her first week, she walks into the empty chamber of the House of Commons in wonder. She explains: “Three male Tories walk in, such a bizarre species with their relentlessly upper-class accents and public-school striped ties. They eye me suspiciously. They’re in two minds about calling security. And then they catch sight of my Member’s pass. They look at me like I’ve gatecrashed their private member’s club.”

But she picks through the archaic absurdities of Westminster with a wry smile. In 1997, she notes: “One new MP was impressed to find that each MP’s coat hanger had a pink ribbon attached – presumably to highlight AIDS or breast cancer awareness – only to discover that these ribbons were for us to hang our swords on.” She finds some compensations. She fights for a Private Member’s Bill to help contract cleaners. She wades through the misery of her East End constituency, the poorest in Britain, where she finds people piled as many as twenty-to-a-flat, and finds she can help some of them. (Full disclosure: as a constituent, I met and became friendly with her at this time). She sets up an Anti-Genocide Select Committee, and becomes one of the few politicians to yell and shout about the horrific slaughter unfolding in Congo – the deadliest war since Hitler marched across Europe.

She begins to learn that for a politician, speaking plainly and honestly can mean career-death. One day, she is waiting in the queue at the supermarket, wearing a crop-top and a belly-button ring. A woman behind her recognises her, and asks if she is allowed to dress like that as an MP. “Oh, well I’m just going out dancing,” she explains. “Obviously when I go to the mosque tomorrow, and then for meetings in Whitehall, I dress differently.” Two days later, the deadline in a national newspaper reads: “MP Oona’s secret double life,” with details about how she “mocks” her Muslim constituents.

But it is King’s refusal to shut down her conscience that means she is frozen out by New Labour. She is called in by Alistair Campbell and ordered to write a piece attacking Ken Livingstone. When she refuses, he tells her with a smile that her career is over for five years – and it is. Although she supports much of the government programme, her cavils about how the war the war in Afghanistan was fought, detention without trial, and the abuse of asylum seekers mean she is seen as “unreliable.”

While all this unfolds, her marriage – to a tall, lean Italian hunk – begins to fall apart. She is forced to spend all her time at Westminster, trapped in “a posh boarding school with crap food”. She details how her marriage fissures and fails with a biting honesty, even detailing how her husband snaps at her one night: “You’re a politician. I don’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth.” They try to have a baby, only to deliver a “pregnancy sac”, “like an egg without a yoke”, she notes tearfully. She begins to wonder if she should resign.

And then comes the career-killer. King asks: “I went into parliament a human rights activist and trade unionist, and came out labelled a warmonger and murderer. Where did I go wrong?” She voted against bombing Iraq in 1998, but then she saw hundreds of Iraqis slump through her constituency surgeries as asylum seekers, and began to wonder: “Just because George Bush got away with murder, why should Saddam Hussein get away with genocide?” So she voted for the invasion – and signed her political death warrant.

Today, she says that if she had anticipated the “incompetence, corruption, ignorance and sheer stupidity” of George Bush’s occupation, “I would never have voted to invade Iraq.” But it was too late. George Galloway sharked into the constituency, declaring that King “wants to wage war on Muslims at home and abroad.” His campaign distributed pictures of her in a low-cut top to conservative Muslim areas, and Galloway announced on the radio that “Oona King is in the papers every day with stories of affairs.” On the street, people began to yell, “Go home, Jewish bitch.” Her seat – and an unborn baby – slipped away from her.

And yet King writes now, “My second biggest fear was of losing my seat at the general election. My biggest fear was of winning it.” Away from Westminster, she regains her life, her sanity and her marriage. She realises that the hours and lifestyle we demand from our politicians have a disastrous effect on the country itself. It means we are governed by freaks, who never see their families or friends.

If our political system cannot accommodate an Oona King – a plain-speaking young politician who ordinary people feel they can speak to – without sending her into a resignation-spiral of despair, then it is broken. The only comfort to be sucked from this story is that, at the end of it all, we got one of the most fresh and authentic political books in years.

You can buy 'House Music' here, and you can read my report on the Oona/Galloway battle in the East End here.

Nick Cohen has responded to my review of his book here.

This is my reply:

Nick Cohen's response is perplexing, since it is characterised by daft hyperbole (I'm Maoist now?), denial of his own statements, and arguments that he knows I agree with and have done rather more to advance than him.

It's disappointing he doesn't try to defend his positions or engage with any of my arguments, despite the fact I tried hard to fairly summarise his case. For example, he simply repeats his claim that the Iraq war marked a radical break with Henry Kissinger's influence on US foreign policy - and, to sustain this, he ignores the lengthy part of my review pointing out that Kissinger is now, according to Bob Woodward, "the most senior foreign policy advisor to [Bush] outside the administration." This information doesn't fit into his Manichean polemics so, rather than defend his case, he simply pretends it isn't so.

He asks: "What kind of left is it that shrugs as Iraqi trade unionists are butchered or Iranian feminists are persecuted?" But as Nick knows, I have been asking this very question longer and more persistently than he has. While he was opposing the war to depose the Taliban, I was travelling to the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and later Iraq, where I have supported persecuted feminists and backed underground gay groups. I received a slew of Islamist death-threats after I worked undercover at Britain's most extreme mosque and then appeared on the Islam Channel to expose and challenge the anti-Semitism, homophobia and totalitarianism of jihadists. So it is deeply strange for him to write: "Every now and again Hari manages to shake himself out of his world of make-believe and acknowledge that we’re up against a fascist enemy." Unlike Cohen, I have taken considerable risks that demonstrate my opposition to this enemy.

As anybody who read my review is aware, my criticisms of his book do not consist of a denial that jihadis are a fascistic enemy who must be defeated: we both agree that Islamists are a monstrous foe who would kill us both given the chance. (I am gay; Cohen is ethnically Jewish). Where we disagree is on how to defeat them. Cohen's preferred tactic - enthusiastically supporting the Bush strategy - has actually enlarged and spread jihadism, as every major study of the phenomenon shows. One of my Iraqi friends is now living in a Basra neighbourhood where Taliban-style militias beat women who walk onto the street without a veil and stone adulteresses. This is the consequence of the war Cohen still claims was necessary and worthwhile in his columns. The caveats he quotes in his response constitute literally a few hundred words out of tens of thousands backing Bush enthusiastically, as anybody who reads his book will see.

I am puzzled that Cohen will not defend his own writing, instead denying much of it exists. For example, he denies ever arguing that the West was right to back Saddam in the 1980s. Here are his words from his recent book 'Pretty Straight Guys, P127: "The world had little choice but to support Saddam's unprovoked war on Iran. A victory for the Ayatollahs would have left the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi oilfields at Iran's mercy." If he wants to renounce this argument, that is welcome; but he cannot claim I invented it.

Each of his claims about my "deception" have a similar clear quote disproving them. To give another example, he denies he has shown support for the more propagandistic claims of the neoconservatives. Yet he wrote in the Observer in January 2005:"In the long-run the only solution is for the global move towards democracy to get moving again. In these strange times, the only person who believes that this is possible or desirable is George W Bush... [and he is] feared and hated by right-thinking people the world over for saying so." And, again in the Obsever: "Neoconservatives... [are] hated because of their espousal of causes the liberal-left had once owned but no longer had the moral self-confidence to defend". And - in a fawning account of meeting Paul Wolfowitz in the same newspaper - : “I was clearly in the presence of real power...I was in the presence of a politician committed to extending human freedom.” Yes, this is indeed "blind faith".

The list of odd misrepresentations goes on. Cohen writes: "For the record, I have written many pieces about civil liberties." He is clearly implying to readers that he has written in support of civil liberties. Yet if readers go to - for example - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1939959,00.html they will find Cohen arguing that the British state should be deporting terror suspects to countries where they will almost certainly be tortured, because human rights are less important than "national interests".

Then he sadly obfuscates further by building a straw man about George Orwell. In conversations with me, Cohen has explicitly cited Orwell as a long-term inspiration since childhood. Here is a review in which he clearly claims Orwell as a major influence influence, and here is an interview that Cohen linked to from his website that describes Orwell as his "intellectual hero and forerunner." I cannot understand why he now denies it; I assumed this was an uncontroversial point.

In light of the horrific evidence about how the Iraq War has increased jihadism and the already-vast misery of Iraqis, I prefer to develop strategies that actually defeat fascists, rather than handing millions of recruits and the control of entire cities to them. (This has involved painful rethinking of my own previous position, as I made clear in the very first paragraph of my review; Cohen must have been blinking very hard to miss it.) I would like to have an intelligent conversation with Nick Cohen about how to do this - but, alas, it seems he prefers to engage in name-calling and a baffling denial of his own words.

POSTSCRIPT: Oliver Kamm has another response here. Bizarrely, he thinks that placing the quote from Nick - that the West had to support Saddam - in the wider context negates it. It doesn't. Read the rest of the passage, which he helpfully provides. Nick isn't paraphrasing somebody else's view; he isn't talking hypothetically; he is speaking as himself, describing the world as he sees it. And that is a world where "the world had little choice but to support Saddam's unprovoked war on Iran. A victory for the Ayatollahs would have left the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi oilfields at Iran's mercy." The words mean what they say, and no amount of wriggling can change that. He goes on to say the West should have cavilled at the use of chemical weapons in Halabja and the later invasion of Kuwait - both more than five years after the war began. They are the sole qualifiers. This does not change the fact he says there was "no choice" but to support Saddam's attack on Iran, when, of course, it was a very real and quite obscene choice.

In private conversation with me - in the company of quite a few other witnesses, including Andrew Sullivan - Nick made this point much more forcefully, saying the West had to back Ba'athism at that point. Nick is indeed clear, and anyone can see what he's saying. I can't understand why Nick won't just defend what he has written and said, or retract it. I've said stupid things in the past, as everyone sometimes does. I don't deny saying them, and slur anyone who repeats them as liars; I own up and say I was wrong.

Nick and Oliver's tactic seems to be to throw a great deal of aggressive invective, but not to actually engage with any of the points I made in the review. This morning I got a call from a friend in Baghdad, who I profiled in the Independent a few years ago; her cousin was killed by an American soldier three weeks ago as he approached a checkpoint. It put the unreal, arid debate with them into a horrible sort of context. Even if every single person on the left had taken the position Nick recommends and donated money to the Iraqi trade unions - as I recommend too: www.iraqitradeunions.org - her cousin would still have been shot. To blame "the left", and implying that it is liberal op-ed columnists who are driving the Iraqi insurgencies, for this situation is delusional.

(To be fair to Oliver, at least he admits he is an outright defender of neoconservatism, even if he glosses over the real actions of the neoconservatives and even if he surreally cites Eliot Abrahms - who helped unleash the fascist Contras on Nicaragua - as a witness for his defence. Nick won't even admit to his own fawning descriptions of neconservatism and George Bush, instead posing as some sort of critic of them. )

Oliver talks about the fracture-lines within the American right over what should drive US foreign policy, and suggests I am ignorant of them. I can assure him I'm not: I have interviewed some of the leading figures in these debates, and read extensively about them. (I must admit I find it a bit tedious that he argues as if almost everyone who disagrees with him is ignorant.) He says I don't offer evidence that the US is acting in Iraq primarily because of oil. In 1977, Paul Wolfowitz - as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Regional Programs - wrote: "We... have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf Region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israel conflict." In 1990, Dick Cheney - then Defence Secretary - said of Iraq and Kuwait: "We're there because the fact of the matter is, that part of the world controls the world supply of oil." When does Oliver think this stopped being the driver of US foreign policy? How does the presence of Eliot Abrams change it?

(There's another response to Oliver at the blog AaronovitchWatch here.)

POSTSCRIPT: On a final note, here is Oliver Kamm's latest comment, in which he claims his book - subtitled "The left-wing case for a neoconservative foreign policy" - is not an outright defence of neoconservatism. When you reach this level of silliness, it's time to check out of the debate...

Amazingly, though, Kamm simply passes over in silence the fact that I have totally debunked his claim that I distorted Nick's support for Western backing of Ba'athism in the 1980s. He then proceeds to ignores the Dick Cheney quote, pretending it's not there so he can question a conclusion I draw from it. Instead of dealing with what I say, he has gone on to making more transparently incorrect allegations, presumably in the hope that one of them sticks. It's a bit depressing to see somebody argue in this unsequential and specious way, really.

I think it's sadly revealing that while I have linked to everything Nick has to say on this, along with many other critics of my position, Nick has not linked to this reply, in the list of comments on this article. He hasn't even informed his readers it exists.

There are some further comments (one compaing me to a chipmunk, an frequent accusation which, as my mother once told me "is awffy harsh on the fuckin' chipmunks") here, here, and here. There's also another critique of Nick's book here which Nick will now almost certainly accuse of being fictitious, untrue, made-up etc etc. He has responded to everyone who has criticised the book so far in this way, to my knowledge. If literally everyone has 'misunderstood' your book, Nick, maybe there's a problem with the book, not the reviewers.

(At last! A way to resolve this, advertised here. I'm up for it if Nick is...)

POST-POSTSCRIPT: There are yet more comments by Oliver Kamm here, and a post debunking his latest claims here.

(Unfortunately Oliver still doesn't engage with the fact that he has not debunked my quote about Nick supporting Ba'athism in the 1980s; indeed, I have shown his attempted debunking is nonsense. He hasn't honestly engaged with any of my responses to Nick's false claims. I should add, however, that Oliver was very nice to me when a nutcase set up a website calling for me to be killed, and e-mailed blogspot to complain about it. Despite our plain and big disagreement on this issue, where we both think the other is arguing dishonourably, I like him personally, and I'm grateful to him for the way he acted then.)

I also see Nick is now linking to ludicrous and discredited accusations that were made about me by a British scandal sheet four years ago, shortly after I criticised its former editor for his rancid homophobia, and its current editor for other reasons. Nick, would you be prepared to defend a single one of those accusations? Or are you just tossing any old mud you can find because you don't have answers to my arguments?

It's also sadly hypocritical for Nick to complain that I am not prepared to see libellous comments about myself on websites I've been associated with in the past. Nick closed down his own comments section on his website because he was worried about libel, and derogratory and defamatory remarks about him are routinely (and quite rightly) removed from the Guardian/Observer website. Will he tell the Guardian Online to keep up all the slurs against him from now on because he will never sue? Will he reopen the comments section on his own site? If not, he has no right to condemn me.

Thanks to everyone who has e-mailed in support about this row. Sorry I haven't responded to you all but I'm working my way through a pile of commissions at the moment...

Anyway, enough of this: my article about France's secret war in Africa follows soon...

Very last comment here. This is a typical e-mail from a reader, called Anna Powell:

"I was very interested to read the diagreement between you and Nick Cohen, which I found through a link from the Harry's Place blog. Your review was thorough and very critical, but it was not nasty or personally abusive. So I was surprised that Nick Cohen, who I have admired for many years ever since he wrote for the Independent, reacted by being so abusive about you. It is bonkers to call anyone who criticises their former position Maoist, especially since Cohen himself is advocating a position that is 180 degrees opposite to what he was saying three years ago. I thought Cohen would have some interesting responses.

As you say, he doesn't deal with any of your arguments. He seems to have latched onto one fairly trivial line of the review, about his parents supporting Orwell, and inflated into into a big issue. The links you provide show that he does indeed claim Orwell's mantle. The Times interview you link to shows that he actually suggests meeting interviewers in the pub where Orwell used to live, and points this out. You could mention this on your website. I could not understand Oliver Kamm's argument about the passage where Cohen supports supporting Saddam. As you say, the lines surrounding it do not contradict what Cohen says in that passage. If anything, I thought they made it look worse.

I thought the nub of your review was when you say "When you are more inclined to blame liberal op-ed writers for the Iraq disaster than Donald Rumsfeld, something has horribly gone wrong with your explanatory framework." This put together a feeling I have had about Cohen's writing for some time. He has asked in a recent interview "why can't you talk and chew gum at the same time?" He was presumably meaning why can't you on the left condemn Islamism and neoconservatism. But Cohen very rarely criticises neoconservatism, and more often apologises for it, as the quote you give about Wolfowitz shows. In his own terms, he can walk but he can't chew gum.

This argument inspired me to go out and buy Cohen's book, which I have read this weekend but not quite finished. I have to say I think your representation of it was very fair. Your review highlights the strengths of the book but also why everyone I know who has read it has had an uneasy feeling. You said you were "bemused" by Cohen's response. I am not "bemused" but appalled."

There have been lots of responses to my Nick Cohen review, and as I'm in parts of Africa where the internet is barely known, never mind broadband, I don't have much time to read and respond at the moment. I know Nick has written a really strange response for Dissent (in which he surreally accuses me of being "Maoist" and denies many of his plain, documented statements) which will appear online soon, and I'll write a response to that when I get back.

In the meantime, here's some links. Oliver Kamm responds here and here. I'll write a proper response soon, but let me give just one example of why he's wrong. He accuses me of deliberately distorting Nick's views, and cites as a prime example my claim that Nick says the West was right to back Saddam in the 1980s. Well, here's what Nick writes in his book 'Pretty Straight Guys' on page 127: "The world had little choice but to support Saddam's unprovoked war on Iran. A victory for the Ayatollahs would have left the Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi oilfields at Iran's mercy." Every claim of "distortion" he makes is easily refuted with a quote like this.

I'm happy to disagree and discuss, but let's do it without fabricating claims of fabrication...

There's a critique of Oliver's position here. Lenin's Tomb responds disingenuously here, the depraved pro-Milosevic writer Neil Clark totally misunderstands me here, Norman Geras responds here (marking the first and only time anyone has ever accused me of being "religious"), Harry's Place reacts here, and (let's end on a high note!) the excellent Matthew Ygelesias responds here.

Right, I'm off to find out more about France's secret war in Africa... back in Britain tomorrow.

The pro-invasion left was always a small battallion, comprised almost entirely of journalists and intellectuals who believed toppling the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was a good idea - even if the only President available to lead the charge was George Bush. Yet almost since the first statue of Saddam was smashed to the ground, it has been losing troops - to the anti-war side, or to a sullen AWOL silence, or to despair. So far there have been recantations from Peter Beinart, Norman Geras, David Aaronovitch and more; only a few lone fighters seem to remain, like Japanese troops hiding in the forest, unaware their war has been lost. Now, with 'What's Left?', the most substantial work by a pro-war left intellectual has been published, and we can ask: did this strange niche in Anglo-American politics - of which I was a part, for a time - produce any enduring insights?

The British columnist Nick Cohen was always one of the most gifted - and unexpected - of pro-war polemicists. In 2003 he was renowned as the most prominent left-wing critic of Tony Blair in the British press, poaching and filletting his New Labour love-in with corporations and the super-rich every week from the impeccably liberal pages of the Observer and the New Statesman. His initial reaction to the September 11th massacres was, he writes now, "that they were a nuisance that got in the way of more pressing concerns. Throughout the Nineties, I had been writing about the overweening power of big business... Attacking Tony Blair was what I liked doing." So - as anybody who knew him would have predicted - he opposed the invasion of Aghanistan, warning that it could trigger famine and mass death.

But then, an old left-wing value stirred unexpectedly in his conscience. Cohen was raised to believe the moral core of the left lies in its consistent anti-fascism, an absolute opposition to the far-right in all places and at all times. As a child, his mother was so scupulous about never buying oranges from either General Franco's Spain or Apartheid South Africa that he quips if Franco had held on for a few more years he would have developed scurvy. He was raised to see Orwell in Catalonia as his moral archetype - the socialist bearing a pack and going abroad to fight fascists. If the pro-war left had any central spine to its thought, it was the unexpected question - what would Orwell do? Could it be, Cohen pondered as the left rallied against the war, that the Taliban and Saddam were also faces of fascism, and if so, did that not place an obligation on the left to support its victims?

Cohen began to pore through the works of Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, leftw-ingers he had long admired in the September 10th world. They argued there was a jolt of racism in the failure of many on the left to realise that, as Cohen puts it, "people with brown skins were as capable as people with white skins of forming a fascistic movement and murdering and oppressing others." Didn't al- Qaeda seek "a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals"? Didn't Saddam slaughter trade unionists, socialists and gays? Wasn't this antithetical to everything the left believed? Bad though Bush is, isn't he preferable to this?

Cohen seems to have undergone an epiphany: "Seeing fascism for what it is means shaking yourself out of old habits and looking at the world afresh." So he cast off his former alliances - although not, he insists, his principles - and supported George Bush's invasion of Iraq. 'What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way' is Cohen's four-years-on manifesto, a polemic against the left-wingers and liberals who failed to taked the same stance and have ended up, he argues, as "apologists" for "the far right."

To understand the pro-war left position, you have to break it down into four quite distinct readings. Its arguments was based on a reading of Islamism, a reading of Baathism, a reading of the purposes of the post-socialist left, and a reading of neoconservatism.

Reading One: Islamism. The pro-war left argumed that Islamism (as opposed to Islam) is a variant on an old enemy of the left - fascism. Paul Berman, in his book 'Terror and Liberalism', carefully teased out the intellectual origins of Islamic fundamentalism, looking primarily as Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of al Qaeda. It was not hard to find the links: Qutb was explicitly and openly influenced by European fascism. Not was this a merely intellectual influence: when his ideas eventually became a state-ideology - in Taliban Afghanistan - it looked hideously familiar to historians of fascism, with its fanatical Jew-hatred, homophobia, misogyny, the banning of all dissent (and even of music), and the supression of all liberal freedoms. Jihadists even inherited the most eccentric lacunae of fascist conspiracy-thought: on 9th March 2004, a meeting of Freemasons in an Istanbul restaurant was blown up by Islamist suicide-murderers.

Ah, the minimisers of Islamism said, but these are the poor, the wretched of the earth! In fact, the pro-war left pointed out, Islamists activists are overwhelimgly wealthy - Bin Laden is the son of a billionaire - and they are oppressing the real wretched of the earth, not least women. Besides, to refuse to see that people living in poor or oppressive countries can become fascists is to fall for what Bertrand Russell called "The Fallacy of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed."

Those who see al Qaeda as simply a negative protest movement against the United States, one which would be sated by America's collapse, are willfully neglecting its rancid positive intentions towards its fellow Muslims and people everywhere. In his "Address to the American People" in October 2002, Bin Laden asked rhetorically, "What do we want from you?" He told US citizens: "The first thing we are calling you to is Islam... The second thing we call you to is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you," of which the prime examples are "fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling and usury." Removing women from the workplace and, presumably, imprisoning them in the home as under the Taliban, is his next big demand. When listing "the worst kind of event" committed by America, he names not a foreign policy atrocity - of which there are many - but "your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval Office" with Monica Lewinsky.

If you study the biographies of leading jihadis, it becomes clear that their hatred of sexual freedom and feminism is at least as intense as their hatred of US foreign policy. Qutb was scandalised by the drinking, sex-mixing and free women he met even in 1950s America. In 'The Looming Tower', Lawrence Wright notes that as a teenager, Osama Bin Laden "was rarely angry except when sexual matters came up." In his last will and testament, the lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta focused not on his hatred of US foreign policy but on his insistence that "no woman should ask forgiveness of me", and nobody should touch his genitals after death.

This identification of Islamism as a mutation of the old European fascisms - often with the same core texts, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - was the most enduring insight of the pro-war left. But their reading of Islamism contained a second, much more feeble element. Cohen is enraged by people who simplistically ascribe jihadism to the "root cause" of the Israel/Palestine conflict, which he says is "to make a very large assumption about a very small war." That's true enough: getting justice for the Palestinians is morally essential, but the idea it will stem jihadism other than in Palestine itself was always fanciful. However, Cohen then extends this argument - in a bizarre leap - to claim that jihadism has no root causes at all, and that anybody who suggests it does is "appeasing fascists".

"I am very sceptical," he says, "of people who think irrational movements have rational causes." So if you talk, as virtually all serious scholars of jihadism do, about the role the US played in smelting jihadism through supporting torture in Egypt and a Wahabbi clerical establishment in Saudi Arabia, you are in Cohen's eyes an apologist. Jihadism is in his account a spontaneous theological psychosis sprouting in the void, with social and economic factors playing no role at all. Its irrationality means it cannot be explained or discussed; it can only be defeated.

If this were true, we would live a world bifurcated into The Rational, which has rational explanations, and The Irrational, which has irrational explanations, and never the twain shall meet. It's not hard, however, to think of obvious examples where we rationally explain the irrational all the time. We know that paranoid scizophrenia - the height of irrationality - can be caused by using certain drugs, for example. The obvious example from political history is Nazism. There is a near-total consensus among historians that the Versailles Treaty helped to create the trough of national humiliation and greivance in which the fungus of Nazism could grow. Yet - incredibly - Cohen rubbishes this view as appeasers' logic. J.M. Keynes, the great economist who first identified the disastrous effects of Versailles, merely, he writes, "provided a 'root cause' to justify appeasement".

(He is puzzled as to why, then, Keynes supported the war against the Nazis as early as 1936. He cannot see that although identifying root causes can sometimes be a glib way of avoiding the question, it is more oftenthe best way to rationally understand the question and find an answer. Keynes opposed Versailles precisely because he foresaw how horrendous a nationalist counter-revolution would be, not because he wanted to "excuse" or "dismiss" it.)

In an attempt to dismiss a facile explanation for Islamism - "it's all about Israel!" - Cohen ends up offering a more facile case still - "it has no causes except its own crazy ideas!". His dismissal of any precondition or cause for jihadism - no matter how thoroughly documented - as "appeasement" and "making excuses" is profoundly disabling, leaving him unable to understand or account for the movement he so desperately wants to suppress. This scars his entire analysis.

Reading Two: Ba'athism. The view that Saddam represented a strain of fascism is less controversial, because his track record - of genocide, unprovoked invasions, mass terror - is so beyond dispute. Only a depraved fringe of the left, most notably the British member of Parliament George Galloway, disputed this, and Cohen spills oceans of ink taking them very seriously indeed. Galloway is an old-style Stalinist carbuncle who, as Christopher Hitchens once put it, "trawls the world looking for a tyrannical homeland." A fawner over Fidel Castro and Bashar al-Assad, his most notorious act of political fellatio on a tyrant came when he saluted Saddam Hussein in 1994. He described Saddam's genocide of the Kurds as a "civil war", and when asked in 2006 if ordinary Iraqis hated Saddam, Galloway said, "Not at all; not at all... He wasn't hated by the ordinary Iraqi - no, not at all". Foul though this is, Cohen pays Galloway an unnecessary compliment by presenting him as a mainstream figure on the British left. The vast majority of the million-and-a-half people who attended the anti-war demonstrations in London had no idea who he was, and still don't. He is the despised and discredited member of a far-left party.

Reading Three: The proper role of the left itself. Cohen says that it is "hard to know what it means to be on the left today", after the old state socialisms have died. But - after some cursory praise for European social democracy - he says he believes the core of the left lies in the impulse "to feel solidarity with suffering strangers in [your] bones." To be left-wing, he reasons, is to wish for all mankind the same securities and rights we wish for the people we love.

But the pro-war left also looked to a left-wing tradition that had fallen dormant: they argued for a self-consciously 1930s Victor Lazlo left rather than a 1960s flower-power one. Quoting Orwell, they called for a left that is aware there are enemies that may need to be fought rather than hugged into submission. What had caused this wing of the left to wither? Cohen argues it has been dissolved by three acids. The first is the collapse of the international socialist movement, which has put the left in "the absurd position of being socialists without comrades." Outside a few heroic straggling survivors in the trade union movement, the left has no organisational links with left-wingers in the Middle East any more. With no obvious point of identification with people like them, Cohen argues they have ended up supporting - or at least politely excusing - people whose views they would find abhorrent in a white-skinned American. Cohen argues they have clutched at any force in non-Western societies who seem to have the same enemy and supported them.

The second acid - that of multiculturalism - provided a righteous ideological sheen for this betrayal. Rather than emphasising how similar suffering strangers are to us, multiculturalism has suggested they are irredemably different, and that practices that look like oppression to us might actually be enjoyed by their victims. The third acid - postmodernism - then provides the final corrosion, suggesting that there is one culture that must legitimately be destroyed. The liberal values of the Enlightenment, rather than being the solution, are the real source of tyranny in the world.

There are indeed some examples of people on the left who match Cohen's description. For example, Madeleine Bunting is a columnist for the Guardian newspaper who campaigns for women's and homosexual's rights in Britain. But when she met with an Egyptian defender of wife-beating and gay-killing, Sheikh Yusuf al-Quaradawi, and wrote a fawning account of his life, she demanded to know why protesting left-wingers like Cohen were making "a shibolleth" out of women's and gay rights. It's hard to see this as anything other than a form of soft racism: while she finds misogyny repellent in London, it becomes a trivial matter in Damascus. She is happy to wave away the rights of 55 percent of non-Westerners as a "shibboleth".

One of the most popular left-wing blogs in Britain, Lenin's Tomb, goes further, viciously scorning Muslims who fight back against Islamic fundamentalism. Even though it is written by an atheist writer who enjoys alcohol, female company and free speech, it has ridiculed Muslim women who attend freedom of speech rallies as "Uncle Toms", and condemned Muslims who have "comfortable upper-middle class" lives because they aren't "interested in subjecting [themselves] to the ascetic demands of religion." Cohen's thesis applies with laser-accuracy to these parts of the left, and it is here that his critique is most powerful: they have indeed become reflexive defenders of the far right. Against this, Cohen quotes the Iranian author Azar Nafisi: "I very much resent it when people - maybe with good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, 'It's their culture'... It's like saying the culture of Massachucets is burning witches." Again, he exaggerates the extent to which these thoughts are part of the mainstream left. But this error is as nothing to the pro-war left's final and most disastrous reading of all.

Reading Four: Neoconservatism. Cohen very rarely explictly states what he thinks of neoconservatism; his view emerges only in asides, where he condemns the left for not supporting it. But when this reading does slip out, it becomes clear Cohen takes the Bush administration's most idealistic rhetoric at face value. For example, in one column he writes: "In the long-run the only solution is for the global move towards democracy to get moving again. In these strange times, the only person who believes that this is possible or desirable is George W Bush... [and he] was feared and hated by right-thinking people the world over for saying so." He later goes further, saying "neoconservatives... [are] hated because of their espousal of causes the liberal-left had once owned but no longer had the moral self-confidence to defend." Under their leadership, the the United States army has become the armed wing of Amnesty International, and the 51st Airborne Division of the United States army is the moral equivalent of the International Brigades. He even approvingly quotes Iraqi dissident Kenan Makiya's claim that "the neoconservatives were fighting the Left's battles for them."

It's painfully conspicuous that Cohen's statements about neoconservatism consist solely of assertions, primarily about the personal niceness of Paul Wolfowitz. The overwhelming contrary evidence is simply ignored. A policy of systematic torture? The immediate imposition of mass privatisations, causing mass unemployment and sectarian unrest? The barricading of civilian men aged between 18 and 60 in Fallujah, a city the size of Baltimore, before attacking it with chemical weapons? Cohen does not say how these neoconservative tactics have been "fighting the Left's battles for them".

Indeed, Cohen has never engaged with the situation in Iraq after March 2003, other than a grudging two-line concession that "the American and British governments sold the invasions to their publics with a fale bill of goods and its aftermath was a bloody catastrophe" - and a mockery of the Lancet report showing that 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died. Cohen is frozen in the anti-war demonstrations of that spring, arguing against George Galloway alone.

That's why his thinking on neoconservativism quickly becomes slippery, and relies on the same evasions he so skillfully condemns in others. The most obvious question Cohen and others on the pro-war left have to answer is: when, in their view, did US foreign policy change, and why? This is important because Cohen was a consistent critic of crimes committed by the US state during the Cold War and after, and believes - rightly, in my view - that Henry Kissinger should be on trial in the Hague for Crimes Against Humanity. He has not gone through a David Horowitz-style transformation on these events; he repeats a list of them here. Cohen approvingly quotes Makiya's statement that "US foreign policy towards the Middle East had rested for 50 years on support of autocratic regimes (like Saudi Arabia, like Saddam in the 1980s, like Mubarak's Egypt) in the interests of securing oil supplies."

Yet his working hypothesis seems to be that, the geopolitical and corporate interests driving US policy towards the Middle East for fifty years suddenly died in the rubble of the World Trade Centre, and pure Wilsonian idealism (in neoconservative garb) took its place. If he tried to state this outright, its naivety and inherent implausibility would become clear - so he expresses this view only in jibes at the left. Again, any counterveiling evidence passes in the night. If the US became a Wilsonian force committed to spreading democracy everywhere in 2001, why did it support the anti-democratic coup against Hugo Chavez in oil-rich Venezuela in 2002? Could it be that the old oil interests that he concedes were so essential until a few years ago still hold great sway? This would inject a shade of gray into Cohen's Manichean rage - so he ignores it.

Christoper Hitchens, a strong influence on Cohen, has tried harder to answer these core questions about neoconservatism. He has argued - with characteristic lucidity and elegance - that Wolfowitzian neoconservatism represents "a radical break with Kissinger's realpolitik and war crimes." In his recent short biographies of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, Hitchens returns to the roots of the American revolution in order to find succour for his view that this revolution is still ready for export on neoconservative bayonets.

Hitchens shows how Thomas Paine - the great unacknowledged founding father of the American republic - conceived the US as "the conscious first stage of a world revolution.... Paine always hoped this would be a superpower for liberty and democracy." This, Hitchens hints, is what the neoconservatives have turned the US into. Just as Paine dedicated 'The Rights of Man' to George Washington, Hitchens dedicates his biography of Paine to Jalal Talabani, the new Iraqi President, describing him as a "sworn foe of fascism and theocracy; leader of a national revolution and a people's army. In the hope that his long struggle will be successful, and inspire emulation."

Hitchens' vision of a Paineite United States opposed to tyranny everywhere is a glorious one, and it's not hard to see why it seduces Cohen. But it is not the Bush administration's vision, or that of any administration conceivable without drastic internal and democratising change within the US itself.

It is this disastrous misreading that has discredited the other valuable insights of the pro-war left. It can only be conjured into existence with a shallow and ahistorical reading of neoconservativism. The notion that neoconservatism is a vehicle for a global democratic revolution is a 1990s rhetorical creation. On the contrary, for most of its short intellectual life neoconservatism has been a force defending autocracy.

The most famous and influential neoconservative essay is Jeanne Kirkpatrick's terse essay 'Dictatorships and Double Standards'. In it, she draws a distinction between "authoritarian" regimes and "totalitarian" regimes, and said that the US should foster and fuel the authoritarians. For from being a democracy-hungry human rights activist, she attacked Jimmy Carter for pushing too hard for rights in places "not yet suited" to them. She later added, "There is no mystical American 'mission' or purposes" that should compel the US to spread democracy. Neoconservatives only start talking about spreading democracy in the 1990s as the sugar-coating on their demand that the US achieve "global hegemony", and hobble any potential strategic competitor that gets in the way.

There is a more resonant parallel between Thomas Paine and the pro-war left that Hitchens mentions only briefly. For a brief period, Paine supported Napoleon and his acts of aggression, believing they were expressions of revolutionary Enlightenment values when, in reality, they were squalid expressions of realpolitik. Hitchens notes wistfully that Paine "had fallen victim to a gigantic counter-revolution in revolutionary guise, which had succeeded in entrenching rather than undermining his original foes."

It is a moment of horrible clarity. Hitchens himself believed, for the best motives, that the Bush administration's actions were expressions of revolutionary Enlightenment values when they too were in reality squalid expressions of realpolitik. Just as Paine's support for Napoleon ended up strengthening everything he loathed, so Cohen and Hitchens' support for Bush has strengthened everything they loathe. Much of Iraq, for example, has now been turned over to Islamist control. George Packer, an Iraq-based journalist who supported the invasion on liberal grounds, says that power has been effectively ceded to fascist militias who “take over schools and hospitals, intimidate the staffs, assaulted unveiled women, set up kangaroo sharia courts that issue death sentences, repeatedly try to seize control of the holy shrines, run criminal gangs, firebomb liquor stores, and are often drunk themselves. Their tactics are those of fascist bullies.” The US National Intelligence Estimate recently suggested the forces of jihadism had been significantly bolstered by the Iraq war.

It is increasingly clear that the invasion of Iraq was motivated not by Enlightenment values, but by a desire to achieve US control over the Middle East's oil supplies. After September 11th, especially since it was now plain that the House of Saud's vast oil fields were vulnerable to an Iran-style internal Islamist revolution - and Iraq's were the most appealing alternative. As long ago as 1991 - back when the only thing George W Bush tortured was the English language - Dick Cheney said about Iraq,: "We're there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil." Yet the only times Cohen mentions oil is to mock the madness of the left for bringing it up. Is his explanation - that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were suddenly gripped by Wilsonian idealism - more plausible?

The Hitchens-Cohen thesis that the Iraq war marked a radical neoconservative break with Kissingerism has, however, been subject to an even great blow than this alternative explanation. Henry Kissinger is back in the Oval Office, at the heart of foreign policy planning once again. As Bob Woodward puts it in his book 'State of Denial': "Kissinger has a powerful, largely invisible influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration" and has become "the most regular and frequent outside advisor to Bush on foreign affairs. Bush, according to Cheney, was 'a big fan' of Kissinger." Kissinger supported the Iraq war, he has said, "because Aghanistan wasn't enough. And we need to humiliate them."

The old, revolting arguments, back again. Kissinger has been merrily recycling the Vietnam arguments that appalled Cohen and Hitchens when they applied to jungles, not deserts. As Woodward notes: "For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out... [He] claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of weakened resolve... Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create a mometumn for a withdrawal that was less than victory."

Cohen, perhaps sensing these flaws in his implict defence of neoconservatism, tries to jump free of them by making his largest - and most glaring - leap of logic. He writes apropos Iraq: "You have to choose which side you are on, and those who don't usually end up as the biggest villains of all."

The obvious response is - why? Why do you have to pick a side between two forces that repel you? There are plenty of conflicts where no sensible person would pick a side: the Crusades, for example. Indeed, Cohen himself did not "pick a side" in the Cold War. He sensibly opposed both the US-led assaults on democrats in Iran, Guatemala, and Congo, and the Soviet-led assaults on democrats in Hungary, Czecholslovakia and Afghanistan.

This injuction to "pick a side" is Cohen's way of ironing out the cognitive dissonance that comes from being aware of crimes by the Bush adminstration, but supporting them anyway. As for the idea that people who do not pick one of two forces are "the biggest villains of all", using this logic, the greatest villains in the Cold War were India - a rather eccentric judgement.

Indeed, once Cohen's blind faith in neoconservatism becomes clear, many of the accusations he makes against the left begin to look like acts of psychological projection rather than serious political arguments. He accuses the left of siding with the far right - while he lines up with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. He accuses the left of being blind to the use of torture and chemical weapons by their allies - while he is conspicuously silent about the use of torture and chemical weapons by his allies. He accuses liberals of emptying the left of all positive content - while ditchign class as an analytical tool and defending Paul Wolfowitz's World Bank. He accuses the left of supporting Saddam Hussein - and then, in his most shocking claim, says the US was right to support Saddam in the 1980s anyway because it was the only way to stop the "Islamic revolution".

Indeed, the only extended passage in which he engages with the disaster in Iraq is where he blames it, bizarrely, on the left: "The liberals gave aid and comfort [the definition of treason in the US Constitution] to the Islamists and the Baathists. The 'insurgents' were able to use the liberals' slogans - 'It's all about oil!' 'It's illegal!' - and to taunt their opponents with the indisputauble fact that even their supposed liberal allies in New York, London, Berlin and Paris didn't support them."

Cohen seems, by the time he writes passages like this, to have lost touch with reality. The idea that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was eagerly reading up on Molly Ivins and Paul Krugman is as laughable as Cohen's notion that it would not have occurred to Iraqis that the invasion was largely about oil if Western liberals hadn't raised the topic. (When you are more inclined to blame liberal op-ed writers for the Iraq disaster than Donald Rumsfeld, something has horribly gone wrong with your explanatory framework.)

Just as Cohen blames Keynes for the problems stemming from Versailles, when all he did was accurately predict its effects, so he blames liberals and left-wingers for accurately predicting how the war would pan out. They did not hate Bush because he was for democracy; they hated Bush because they knew that it would not be the outcome of this war. Cohen presents the Iraq war repeatedly as a choice between democracy and tyranny, and damns the left for picking the wrong side. But the liberal-left opponents of the war said this was, in reality, a choice between tyranny and more-bloodshed-then-another-tyranny. Those of us who made a mistake in supporting the war should be honest enough to admit they were right. Real democracy in Iraq - and elsewhere - would require us to build a world where the choices are far better than that between George Bush and Saddam Hussein.

But this is a slow, reformist argument. Cohen and Hitchens were both revolutionaries at formative points in their intellectual development, and in 2003 they still clearly pined impatiently for what Hitchens called "a revolution-from-above", led by the US - a vast purging act of violence that would extirpate evil and make the world anew. The incremental work of transforming US power from within, to make it more friendly to democrats without, is less sexy, but far more real.

This book appears to have been written as Cohen hit a personal tipping-point. At times, he presents himself as the last true left-winger, but at other moments, he appears to be abandoning the left in disgust. A passage where he complains that the benefits system "provides a perverse incentive for single motherhood", says that "the liberal professionals of the welfare state were aggravating the poverty and racism they said they opposed", and rants about "the two-faced civil liberties lawyer", sounds like Norman Podhoretz circa 1968, and an admission that Cohen is sliding into full-blown neoconservatism.

After this, there are even worse moments, when his views disintegrate into a drizzle of dismaying right-wing talking points. He describes the Spanish people's democratic decision to elect a Socialist government after the Madrid train bombings as a victory for al Queda. So the Spanish people should have voted for a right-wing government to prove they were left-wing? That's the ludicrous and contorted position Cohen has ended up in. Out of nowhere, he accuses Edward Said - a man who took Palestinian teenagers to Auschwitz to educate them about the horrors of Jew-hatred - of anti-Semitism and "pardoning" the 9/11 hijackers. In one column, he has suggested that the British government should be sanguine about sending suspected Islamists to countries where they will be tortured, because the sole criterion should be Britain's "national interests." This is an abandonment of the universalist language of the left for a parochial conservative agenda.

Cohen has even declared that - although it may make his ancestors churn in their graves - he will vote for the Conservative candidate for mayor in the next London elections, because Ken Livingstone is providing cheap fuel for poor Londoners provided by the twice-elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Most of those on the pro-war left who have not recanted appear to be following this dismal trajectory.

In its confusions and contradictions, 'What's Left?' distills what has become of the pro-war left. The nuggets of important insight we had - into Islamism, tyranny, multiculturalism, and the misguided reactions of the left to them - have been cluster-bombed and suicide-massacred to death in the killing fields of Mesopotamia. The few who have not recanted are tied in painful knots, and every tug cuts off a little more circulation to the brain. To rally the left to solidarity with the victims of Ba'athism and Islamism is an honourable cause; to do it with the weapon of neoconservatism was a disastrous misjudgement.

Cohen, ostentatious claimer of George Orwell's mantle, has forgotten the quality that made Orwell great - the power to face inconvenient truths. He simply averts his gaze from the burning vistas of Iraq that contradict his thesis, turning towards George Galloway to give him another well-deserved - but increasingly irrelevant - spit in the face.

POSTSCRIPT: There's a small error in this piece. It was in fact Lyndsay German, the Stop the War committee member, who referred to gay rights and feminism as "a shibboleth", not Madeleine Bunting. Bunting has expressed that sentiment but not used those exact words.

There have been lots of responses to this article, including from Nick Cohen. You can read them with links, here and here.

One morning in 2001, the Downing Street switchboard called Alistair Campbell, asking cheerily how he was. "Both homicidal and suicidal," he replied flatly. That distills the 794 pages of his diaries - the ones that have dominated Westminster conversations for a week now - into a neat soundbite. Campbell does not just rage; his book shakes with a pure volcanic fury that you fear will singe your hands. Every single day as Tony Blair's Press Secretary, Campbell woke up in a mood to hammer a hack. And as the book progresses, it's not hard to see why.

The vast majority of Campbell's time (and this book's endless words) focus on mind-numbing trivia that he was forced to talk about by "the babble industry" - the Westminster lobby. It's a refresher course in all the most pointless non-scandals of the 1990s: Derry Irvine's wallpaper, Jo Moore's e-mail, Peter Mandelson's mortgage, Robin Cook's penis, Ron Davies' penis, David Blunkett's penis, all amounting to nothing at all. A paradigmatic sentence is: "Virtually the whole day was taken up dealing with [the media row over] Humphrey the Downing Street cat." Or this: "The lobby worked themselves into a mini-frenzy re: a story in the Times that Prince Philip had opposed the Order of the Garter for the Emperor of Japan."

This endless sludge culminates in the grand non-story nonsense of Cheriegate. But these mind-rotting distractions from actually running the country consume Campbell's every hour. He complains - unconsciously echoing Harold Wilson - that he is "swimming through shit", and the reader begins to feel the same, wandering through one piece of forgotten trivia to another. Campbell is trapped, simultaneously feeding this cretinization of our politics and lamenting it. There is a blackly revealing moment when he goes to a focus group in Watford: "A woman called Georgina said she didn't like [Blair's] smile, and they spent 20 minutes talking about whether they liked his smile or not." He leaves in despair at the "ignorance", but goes on to fuel it, believing there is no other way.

But the diaries begin in the wrong place to understand how Campbell became like this. His fury at the press was born with the media massacre of his close friend and hero Neil Kinnock in the 1980s and early 1990s, when he concluded that the British press consisted of little more than poisoned propaganda. His flaws were born there, fighting their flaws. He became the mirror-image of their distortions and lies, in order to serve his team: Labour. But as Freidrich Nietzsche warned: "Take care when you fight with monsters, lest you become a monster yourself. And remember - when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

Fighting against what he accurately calls the "evil" of the Daily Mail, Campbell begins to replicate their lax attitude to truth and raw tribalism. And spending all day dealing with presentation, the mask begins to devour the face, with Campbell coming to believe that presentation is more important than reality. He approvingly quotes Bill Clinton: "Achievement is less important than definition in the information age." Really? Only Gordon Brown pops up to query this, insiting that "policy is the answer."

But then - in the middle of all this obsession with artifice - looms The Real World, in its most hellish form. Like the shark-fin in Jaws, Saddam's Iraq first surfaces in 1998, when Blair first declares "nobody should underestimate Saddam's determination to develop Weapons of Mass Destruction." The diaries stir only when they reveal Blair's internal motivations, on Iraq and everything else - and they are almost unfailingly depressing when they do. Blair's rage is invariably directed against the left, and most notably trade unionists. They "just aren't serious people", he declares. When the Low Pay Commission suggests a minimum wage of £3.50 - a fairly low level by international comparisons - Blair goes "off on one, ranting that they were all going native and not understanding the bigger picture and have they thought of the effect on business? He said just because we have some superhumanly mad people running the unions doesn't mean we are obliged to meet them halfway in their madness." It's superhumanly mad to want a minimum wage you might actually be able to live on? Campbell himself bcomes depressed about this, complaining "it was all geared to a right-wing prism."

In contrast, Blair fawns on the right. As Thatcher passes by, he says in awe, "God, she is so strong." Rupert Murdoch periodically descends down into Downing Street from the clouds above to be praised unquestioningly and to offer his benedictions. Revealingly, Blair frets about the degree of Muroch's vast undemocratic influence being revealed: "[Blair] said he didn't fear [the press] coming at him about me, but about the relationship with Murdoch. He didn't fancy a sustained set of questions about whether Murdoch lobbied him." Campbell cavils: "It was faintly obscene that we even had to worry what [he] thought", and Blair gets "really irritated" at Murdoch's more antedulluvian right-wingery - but they never even consider challenging it. His power is taken as supreme.

And so is that of the United States. While Blair is clearly motivated in part by disgust at Saddam's regime, he is also determined to side with the US on virtually everything. When Jack Straw raises the prospect of not going with the US into Iraq, Blair says "it would be the biggest shift in foreign policy in 50 years." What? This is bizarrely ignorant: Wilson didn't send troops to Vietnam. But Blair "said he believed it would be folly for Britain to go against the US on a fundamental policy, and he really believed in getting rid of bad people like Saddam." It is revealing he placed them in that order.

Once the war is launched and the WMD turn out to be non-existent, Campbell embarks on a vast act of displacement. He begins to harry and hound the BBC to correct a minor error, while all around him the rationale for the war - and his life's work - collapse. It is like a soldier in a trench on the Somme obsessing about a missing button on his uniform.

And yet, for all the inherent drama of this situation, the diaries are strangely flat. The entries are full of exposition - who said what where - but there is very little description or introspection. Potentially great vignettes are thrown away in a few terse sentences. At a dinner for all the former Prime Ministers, Campbell notes that "Ted [Heath] could barely bring himself to look at Thatcher but she teased him a bit, tried to make him laugh, without any apparent success." How did she tease him? What did she say? Campbell doesn't say. Can you imagine a great political diarist - a Chips Channon or an Alan Clark - letting this gold-dust go?

But 'The Blair Years' helps to illustrate why the great political diarists are almost always peripheral figures, like backbenchers or junior ministers. They have time to stand back and notice the small, telling details. Trapped in the ceaseless breathless one-thousand-miles-an-hour torrent of events, Campbell can't - so his diary reads like a Reuters summary of the Blair years, with a few backstage quotes tossed in. It's an disappointingly dull diary to find vomitted out at the end of Campbell's rollercoaster of rage.

Let's be open-minded. Let's be ready to laugh. According to the press release accompanying this cut-and-pasting of Richard Littlejohn's recent rants in the Sun and Daily Mail, he is a descendant of James Gillray, Daniel Defoe and the great English satirists, "the real, talented deal".

People who have only ever heard him on the radio, where his satire consists of witticisms such as calling for gay rights activists to be killed with flame-throwers (which drew a rare reprimand from the Radio Authority, now part of Ofcom), may be perplexed by this description.

But I carefully sewed up my sides, opened the book, and found Littlejohn's first gag. He told a pre-power Tony Blair, when asked for political advice, that he should "take on Liverpool". He should "put tanks on the East Lancs Road, submarines in the River Mersey and then surround the place with barbed wire. Then you send in the bombers and turn the place into a car park. When the dust settles, you invite the Hong Kong Chinese to take over. Job done."

Cherie Blair - a Liverpudlian - found this tedious and walked off, thus giving birth to Littlejohn's barrage of "satire" against her. He dubbed her "the Wicked Witch" with "saddlebag hips", "legs like Popeye's trousers" and "fat ankles".

I tried. I tried really hard to find the satire. I pored over every page. There are, after all, far right-wingers who are capable of being funny: Ann Coulter; Kelvin MacKenzie; even Jean-Marie Le Pen can raise a chuckle as he calls for monstrosities. But as you browse through this random collection, the stale air is almost choking. Littlejohn is dependent on the same catchphrases he created 20 years ago ("You couldn't make it up!" "Mind how you go!").

Here's a typical example of his comedy. He imagines Kimberly Quinn - David Blunkett's former lover - singing: "I haven't slept all night/I haven't slept all night/I don't know what to do./ I know I'm looking rough,/That's cos I'm up the duff./The baby's father's you." His observations about politicians (for example, saying that Gordon Brown has a "kiddie-fiddler grin") aren't satire; they are primary school playground abuse.

There is, however, a core to Littlejohn's humour, to which he returns on almost every page: homosexuality. He obsessively talks about cottaging, lubricants, 69ers - every tiny detail of gay sex is smeared across the pages. He quotes long exchanges from Gaydar involving the MP Chris Bryant ("I could do with a good f***"), and says Peter Mandelson lives on "the Rue Des Jeunes Hommes" (because gays like young boys - geddit?). I think about gay sex much less than Richard Littlejohn - and I am gay.

Every problem circles back to sodomy in his mind, as he panics: "Soon we'll have gay men going door to door, like Jehovah's Witnesses, trying to convince us to convert." This isn't bigotry. It's a psychiatric disorder. Yet he claims that "the fascist left" are "smearing" him as a bigot. His technique is to make an unambiguously bigoted statement, and then say it has "nothing to do" with bigotry. For instance, he says that in Britain, under "the Blair Terror", "Entire neighbourhoods have been ethnically cleansed - and it's the English who are getting out of town." Then he says - without missing a beat - "But as I keep stressing, this is not about race." I see . . . it's "ethnic cleansing", but it's "not about race". Perhaps somebody should send Littlejohn a dictionary.

If Littlejohn's work has little value as satire, how does it stand up as political commentary? Its main flaw is that every single fact he cites is wrong. To give just one example (I could fill an entire issue of the NS with them), he declares that asylum-seekers get cash benefits "starting at £180 a week". In reality, when the article containing this claim was written, in 2000, asylum-seekers received cash benefits of nothing as they were all given in vouchers. Today they receive £43, less than a quarter of the sum Littlejohn invented.

His arguments crumble even before the sentences end. He claims that two million people leave Britain every year because they are appalled by "mass immigration". So people are so appalled at being forced to live among foreigners that they are . . . going to live among foreigners.

Littlejohn's Britain doesn't exist. Literally. He spends much of the year writing from a gated mansion in Florida, and admitted in a recent column that, when he is in Britain, he rarely leaves the house. He is describing a country he sees only through the pages of the right-wing press and his self-reinforcing mailbag. The cumulative effect of poring through more than 300 pages of this isn't to make the reader feel angry, or indignant, or offended. It is to feel pity for a sad, lonely little man, howling at a world that exists only in his own pornographic imagination.

You couldn't make it up? Richard Littlejohn does - every time he writes.

You can read an article about the time I appeared on Littlejohn's TV show here.

You can comment on this article at here.

Out of all Clive James' dazzling and seemingly infinite volumes of autobiography, 'Cultural Amnesia' - the one that pretends not to be an autobiography at all - may be the best.

James has condensed into 876 pages the thinkers, thugs and prophets from the long twentieth century who he believes need to be rescued from the vacuum-pull of the memory hole and planted into the minds of the young before they vanish.

Each of his choices - from Jorge Luis Borges to Duke Ellington to Pol Pot - is given a brief biographical sketch, before James selects a resonant quote from them and riffs on it for ten pages or so. These riffs can lead almost anywhere: the section on romantic poet Heinrich Heine lead to a meditation on whether to sign autographs; the section on German satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg leads to a rumination on pornography.

This, then, is the autobiography of James' intellect and yes, it is self-indulgent - but what a self to indulge. He speaks nine languages (it feels as though the entire Tower of Babel has been shrunk to fit into his skull) and can unpretentiously cross-reference Argentinian poetry, early Hollywood and his dinners with Margaret Thatcher. Reading 'Cultural Amnesia' is like taking a long, warm bath in Clive James' brain-juices.

But this is not a random collection of observations. It has a driving purpose: to make the case for doubtful, democratic liberal humanism, by looking at the greatest products of the creative impulse - and the people who happily tossed them onto the fire. Swirling through the book there are perfect little distillations of people: Sigmund Freud "was the victim of his own poetry, which was so vivid that he took it to be a map of reality." Adolf Hitler was "mad enough to think himself sane." Under Mao, "information rarely travelled further than a scream could be heard."

There are certain milieux that James keeps returning to throughout the book, obsessed and depressed: the vibrant Jewish coffee houses of 1920s Vienna, and their photographic negative - the cowed, compromised coffee-houses of Occupied Paris. His hero is Egon Friedell, who alternated between being the great cabaret artist of his time and being "the polymath's polymath", burying into a vast private library and writing 'The Cultural History of the Modern Age' - the model for this book.

There are certain villains who stalk the book too, and are given long-deserved, long-neglected kickings. Jean-Paul Sartre is, James writes, "a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil, because the advocate was smarter." He describes a scene where Sartre was just a few feet away from a room of innocent, terrorised Russian prisoners - lecturing on the wonders of the Soviet system.

James articulates his humanist values with such infectious learning and tender conviction that it is startling - and dismaying - when suddenly, in the middle of the book, they lapse.

During a rumination on the documentary maker Chris Marker, James segues into the Tampa boat incident, one of the hellish scars on recent Australian history. In 2001, a boat packed with refugees fleeing the Taliban approached the coast of Australia. The hard-right government of John Howard refused to allow it to dock, and invented the shocking lie that the refugees were deliberately drowning their own children in order to gain sympathy. The refugees were diverted to island prison camps, where many were so distressed their sewed up their own lips in protest. James instinctively and clearly takes the side of the Australian government, even saying their slander was "quite plausible".

In the spirit of James at his best, it seems appropriate to respond with a generous quote. Like Walt Whitman, he is large; he contains multitudes. He holds within himself a shimmering defence of liberal humanism and a nasty conservative pessimism about humanity, and so does his book.

The only other flaw here is with the book's central metaphor. James is not really battling against cultural amnesia. No: he is fighting against cultural diabetes, the sickness that afflicts a culture when our diet consists of nothing but the sugar-stimulants of television and video games and lads' mags. He is showing his readers that there are far richer rewards in the slower work of "the life of the mind", and he offers one of the best shots of insulin available.

You can read an interview I did with Clive James when I was still a student (and where he began to bleed in the middle of the interview) here.

You can read other book reviews I've written here.

During the Cold War, every person on earth knew what the worst end-game would look like: the three-minute warning, the futile scrambling under desks, and universal incineration. With the just-as-real, just-as-dangerous threat of global warming, there is a vague sense of doom, but no clear mental picture of what meltdown would look like – until now.

Mark Lynas is, along with George Monbiot and Bill McKibben, the best writer about global warming working today. In Six Degrees, he does something so obvious and so necessary it is hard to believe nobody has done it before. He pores through the peer-reviewed scientific literature and describes, calmly and plainly, what scientists say will happen on earth as each degree of global warming occurs.

One of the last jeers of the dwindling band of climate change “sceptics” is that a world that is six degrees warmer sounds rather nice, thank you very much. John Redwood, a leading figure in David Cameron’s fake-green New Tories, wheeled this canard out only last month. At, at first glance, they’re right: 1-6 degrees Celcius – the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions – doesn’t sound like much.

It is. Lynas talks us through the six degrees of separation between us and a planet we do not recognize and cannot survive on. Some 18,000 years ago, the world was six degrees cooler. It was an ice age. Most of England was a freezing polar desert with winter temperatures of –40 degrees Celsius. There were almost no animals, and the only plants were a few species of lichen and mosses. It was possible to walk to France across a dried channel. No agriculture was possible, because the climate fluctuated wildly. So what happens as we move in the opposite direction, up to six degrees warmer?

With just one degree of warming, here’s what happens (deep breath): the Great Barrier Reef bleaches and dies, the Greenland ice sheet melts, the Maldives and many islands in the South Pacific disappear beneath the waves, rockfalls from the Alps multiply as the mountains melt, the seasonal rainfalls in sub-Saharan Africa change leaving millions at risk of drought and famine, and hurricanes start to hit Brazil for the first time in millennia. One degree.

At three degrees, the Amazon rainforest – the planet’s lungs - will die. Lynas explains: “The trees in the Amazon are used to constant humidity, and have no resistance to fire.” Once the humidity dries out, so does the forest. They will burn and turn to ash. The destruction of whole countries accelerates. Most people who are wised up to global warming know about the drowning of Bangladesh and the islands of the South Pacific – but how many know about, say, Botswana? With three degrees of warming, Lynas explains, “little else will remain on the Kalahari but violently blowing sand. With soaring temperatures and howling winds, colossal storms will shift immense quantities of sand and dust across the region… The entire country is covered by ‘active’ dunes after 2070. Botswana as we know it will drown – not under water, but sand.”

And at six degrees – the IPCC’s higher-end predictions for this century - humanity enters its endgame. “An entirely new planet comes into being – one unrecognisable from the Earth we know today,” Lynas writes. The rainforests are gone, the world’s ice supplies are only a memory, the seas are encroaching, and inland cities see temperatures 10 degrees higher than today. In the world’s major crop-growing areas – India, Australia, the inland United States – most crops are dying, and mass starvation is a perennial risk.

It becomes likely that the vast stores of methane lodged on sub sea ocean shelves will bubble to the surface. Since methane is highly flammable, these could quickly be sparked – by lightning, or human ignition - into vast fireballs tearing across the sky. The chemical engineer Gregory Ryskin calculates that this methane “could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely,” with a major oceanic methane eruption having a force 10,000 times greater than the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

The planet has been here before. Geologists have discovered that at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago, the world warmed rapidly by six degrees. It was the worst crisis ever endured by life on earth, “the closest this planet has come to losing its wonderful living biosphere entirely and ending up a dead and desolate rock in space.” The earth was racked by “hypercanes”- hurricanes so strong they even left their mark on the ocean floor. Oxygen levels in the atmosphere plunged to fifteen percent – low enough to leave any fast-moving animal gasping for breath. The only survivors were a few shelled creatures in the oceans, and a pig-like creature that had the land to itself for millions of years. (Whoever thought geological findings could give you nightmares?)

Of course, it’s easy to hear the sceptics’ howls. This is alarmism! They will cry. But remember: every claim Lynas makes is backed with footnotes to respected, solid scientific papers, something conspicuously lacking from the denier’s accounts. (I have a vision of Melanie Phillips, Nigel Lawson and the other global warming deniers sitting in the charred wreckage of a methane fireball, demanding to know as the flesh falls from their bones why everyone is so “alarmist” about global warming). ‘Six Degrees’ punctures the claims of Bjorn Lomborg and Spiked Online that “we’ll adapt” to global warming. How precisely do we adapt to global crop failure and methane fireballs? You might as well say there’s no problem with a nuclear war because “we’ll adapt” to a nuclear winter.

‘Six degrees’ will make some readers want to sink into survivalism, but Lynas wisely warns: “Getting depressed about the situation now is like sitting inert in your living room and watching the kitchen catch fire, and then getting more and more miserable as the fire spreads throughout the house – rather than grabbing an extinguisher and dousing the flames.” Buy this book for everyone you know: if it makes them fight to stop the seemingly inexorable rise to six degrees of warming and mass death, it might just save their lives.

POSTSCRIPT: You can buy this book at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Six-Degrees-Future-Hotter-Planet/dp/0007209045/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/202-2540432-5295033?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175218002&sr=8-1

You can send letters for publication in the New Statesman on this article to letters@newstatesman.co.uk or just for me to johann@johannhari.com

'America Alone' is a guidebook to a continent called Eurabia in the year 2020. Its old European shell looks familiar; "most of" the old Cathedrals and boulevards "still stand" in Rome and London and Paris. But the Islamic National Republican Coalition has just won the French elections - only the latest nation-sized domino to fall to the Islamists. Alcohol is already banned in the Netherlands and Denmark. The continent's women are veiled. The gay clubs are long since shut and shuttered, "relocated to San Francisco."

The "mass evacuations" of white people began five years ago, as the "supposedly Greater France" began "remorselessly evolving month by month into Greater Bosnia." As they flee, the last Europeans curse the memory of mass immigration and multiculturalism. They now realise that 7/7 and France's 2006 car-burning banlieues were merely "the first stage of the Eurabian civil war." The continent that defined modernity is condemned to "societal collapse, fascist revivalism" and a descent into "the long Eurabian night." America is left alone, the last country to resist being "reprimitivized".

This is not presented as satirical sci-fi, nor as fanatical fodder for a party political broadcast fronted by Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is the straight-faced prediction of a book that has slithered onto the New York Times best-seller list and captured the imagination of the American right. Mark Steyn - an uneducated former Disk Jockey turned pundit - is today being greeted as a sage by Dick Cheney and Joe "I'm-a-Democrat-honest" Lieberman, and as a seer by the National Review. Even former Democratic candidate for Vice-President, Joe Lieberman, is touting its "wisdom".

Steyn's story is - very loosely - based on demographics. His argument is simple. Europe's "white" population (a label he initially shies away from, but later embraces) is having fewer and fewer children. So to keep their social democratic economies spinning, these Europeans are importing Muslim immigrants - who are breeding rapidly. Although he offers no statistics on the European Muslim birthrate, he warns ominously that the most popular baby's name in Rotterdam is now Mohammed. This generation of young Muslims will represent "a literal baby boom". He asks sceptically, "Can the developed world get more Muslim in its demographic character without becoming more Muslim in its political character?" No. Because the "European races too self-absorbed to breed," they are unwittingly catalysing the "the recolonization of Europe by Islam."

From this reading of the demography - "it doesn't explain everything, but it accounts for a good 90 percent" - the rest of the narrative flows. An unassimilated, culturally confident Muslim mass will slowly become the majority, and demand the demoralised multicultural "natives" integrate with them. At times, Steyn implies this shift is the result of a conscious political conspiracy. Orianna Fallacci - whose "bravery" he praises - said that Muslims "have been told to come here and breed like rats." Steyn skirts close to his, warning: "Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman... There are three strategies Islam deploys against a dying West: first, demography; second, conversion; and third, the murky 'intertwining' of modern technology and ancient hatreds."

All Steyn's major tropes are there in this short snippet: 'Islam', acting as one homogenous sharia-seeking bloc, is consciously and deliberately taking over. He scrambles to find a Muslim who has leaked the conspiracy, finally stumbling across that famous demographer Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who has said: "There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe - without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe [sic] will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades."

For the remainder of the book, Steyn weaves everything else he loathes about Europe - primarily its social democracy and its distaste for religion - into a mesh of blame. How is social democracy preparing the way for an Islamic takeover? "The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood - healthcare, childcare, care of the elderly - the point that it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct." How is secularism to blame for Islamism? "The continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one."

Steyn's prose has a jangling musicality that may, for his less discerning Talk Radio-addicted readers, gloss over the outright distortions in his work. He is genuinely funny, at one point noting he would consel his readers to run for the hills "except they're full of terrorist training camps." Every delusional statement is sweetened with such a screwball one-liner; like Ann Coulter, Steyn writes in a demonic demotic that makes you chuckle even as you retch.

But this cannot hide the gaping holes of logic and fact in his argument. To fulfil his headline predictions, Steyn needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 200 million European Muslims - in just 13 years. Only Fallacci's rats could reproduce so rapidly. Steyn even admits that the history of demographic predictions is hysterically inept, noting that "most twenty-year projections... are laughably speculative, and thus most doomsday scenarios are too" - before offering his own.

Europe's real demographics are described in a similar book by a slightly more scupulous author. Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of the Washington Times and DC grande dame, last year wrote 'The West's Last Chance' predicting an enfeebled Europe would collapse before the Muslim hoardes. But after studying the figures, he admitted: “For almost every Western European country, their populations do not even begin to decline until at least 2025... In fact, for the next few decades, they continue to go up, even without any new immigration… The numbers only begin to move decidedly down about fifty years from now.” So for Steyn's predictions to hold true, the current Muslim birthrate needs to hold steady through five decades of life in the West, all Muslims have to become communitarian Islamists bent on sharia law, and there must be no natalist policies from European governments in the meanwhile.

Perhaps sensing this groaning crack in the foundation of his argument, Steyn adds hastily: "It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the eighth century, the 'Islamic world' stretched from Spain to India yet its population was only minority Muslim." But they were - a fairly obvious difference - not electoral democracies, where any group has to command a majority to rule.

When the figures fail him, Steyn falls back on urban mythology. After the 9/11 massacres, in his Daily Telegraph column he repeated as fact preposterous claims that Muslim children all over New York had warned their favourite teachers not to go to the World Trade Centre that day. Here, he says, "On the night of September 11th Muslim youths in northern England rampaged through the streets cheering Islam's glorious victory over the Great Satan. They pounded on the hoods of the cars, hammered the doors and demanded the drivers join them in the chants of 'Osama Bin Laden is a great man.'" There is no record of these events on Lexis-Nexis; Steyn has not replied to a request for the source. He says variously that "the old flag" of St George is now "unflyable" in England, and - with shades of Enoch Powell's untraceable "grinning picanninies" - claims he knows "an English lady" who wears a headscarf every time she steps outside to stop Muslims harrassing her. As somebody who lives in a Muslim area, everybody I know who lives here finds this preposterous. But this is Steyn's way with evidence: the extremely atypical is presented as universal, and the urban myth is presented as damning fact.

So Steyn's current predictions will prove as powerful as... well, Steyn's previous predictions. Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently summarised them in the Guardian: "Apart from predicting that George Bush would win the 2000 presidential election in a landslide, Steyn said at regular intervals that Osama bin Laden "will remain dead". Weeks after the invasion of Iraq he assured his readers that there would be "no widespread resentment at or resistance of the western military presence"; in December 2003 he wrote that "another six weeks of insurgency sounds about right, after which it will peter out"; and the following March he insisted that: "I don't think it's possible for anyone who looks at Iraq honestly to see it as anything other than a success story."

But number-crunching and mockery are not a sufficient response; it is hard to comment on Steyn's work without noting its raw racism. Throughout his work he uses openly racialized language, albeit with a post-ironic smirk. He talks about "the Yellow Peril" and "gooks". He notes nostalgically that "in the old days, the white man settled the Indian [sic] territory" whereas now the savages are settling us. He describes as "correct" a friend who talks about "beturbanned prophet-monkeys." Of course, Steyn denies this is connected to race, writing, "To agitate about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's not about race; it's about culture."

Yet it quickly becomes clear that for him, culture is merely a thinly veiled homologue for race - and then the mask slips entirely. He writes: "Those who pooh-pooh the the United States' comparatively robust demographics say they reflect nothing more than the fecundity of Hispanic immigration... In fact, white women in America still breed at a greater rate - 1.85 or so - than white women in Europe or Canda." So after saying it is "grotesque" to count out "white" babies, he does just that. "White" is not a culture; it is a skin colour, and there Steyn is, relieved that more babies have his pigmentation than the brown and black varieties. Indeed, if Steyn's 'warnings' have a historical precedent, it is the hysteria among even liberal Americans like Jack London in the early twentieth century that anticipated Chinese immigrants would outbreed white Americans and take over the US. London's solution was extremination; what is Steyn's?

The real problems within European Islam get lost in the endless rhetorical inflation, racism and fictionalizing of Steyn's work. Islamism (distinct from Islam) is indeed a fascistic menace, and it is horrifying that a significant minority of European Muslims adhere to its dictates. Some 37 percent of young British Muslims, for example, view British Jews are "a legitimate target", according to a Populus poll for the Times, and 7 percent believe suicide-murder can be justified within their own country. This gay-hating, women-enslaving far-right fanaticism must be honestly described, and steadily dissolved.

Steyn is right to say that multiculturalism is an obstacle to doing this. "At the core of multiculturalism is an assumption that a non-Western culture is somehow primal and immutable, but that an advanced nation is no more than the sum of its constituent parts," he notes, and it is correct to say that European elites have spent too long "being sensitive to the insensitive, tolerant of the intolerant, and impeccably multicultural about the avowedly unicultural." A multicultural state finds it hard to offer long-term integration to its new subjects, since it feels squeamish about articulating any over-arching identity: "You can't assimilate with a nullity... The modern multiculturalism state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of inmigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship."

But Steyn offers a masterclass in how not to fight against that strange twin-set of the Islamists and the multiculturalists who treat them as the authentic spokespeople for "their" communities. By far the best way to unpick Islamism is to hold open the institutions of a free society - rather than lock them down in the name of a bogus 'respect' - so moderate Muslims, and especially Muslim women, can rise. No ideology built upon the savage oppression of half of 55 percent of its adherents (let's throw in the gays) can survive in a society where it can be debated and disputed without fear of violence. Islam in the open air will not be fundamentalist for long; indeed, European Islam can offer a starting-point for the Islamic Enlightenment.

In his final chapter Steyn pays lip-service to some of these sentiments, but he has spent the book undercutting his ability to make these claims. He calls for Muslim moderation - after concluding that Muslim moderation is a contradiction in terms. He warns early in the book that "the religion [of Islam] itself is a political project - and in fact an imperial project," a species of superstition wholly different to Catholicism, Judaism or anything else. Islam is imperialism, he reckons, and its irreducible core is to seek shariah law. So the best we can hope for, it seems, is a moderate Muslim imperialism - not something Steyn, surely, could happily co-exist with (nor any sincere democrat). Indeed, at one point he says moderate Islam functions as a "good cop" in the "good cop/bad cop" routine squeezing democracies.

The problem is that Steyn is himself a religious follower, so he cannot see a basic atheist truth: in reality, superstition is elastic. There is no divine essence underpinning it all and providing thematic coherence. There are indeed parts of the Koran that mandate savage imperialism, just as there are parts of the Torah and Bible where 'God' commits and demands genocide. Most Christians and Jews have managed to relativise away these passages, and in time most Muslims will too. But he has already declared Islam incompatible with democracy - so any moderate Muslim must be, by definition, a false Muslim. This argument is not just false. It is a weapon in the jihadists' hands.

'America Alone' becomes even more problematic when Steyn tries half-heartedly to call for Muslim women's rights. He is intelligent enough to realise the surest way to reduce the disharmony between Muslim birth-rates and those of other communities - if this was judged to be a problem requiring a solution - would be to spread Islamic feminism. Throw money at Muslim women's refuges, introduce positive discrimination at universities and in the workplace, crack down ferociously on fathers who try to keep their daughters effectively imprisoned in their homes. Very few women want to have seven children, given a free choice, proper education and access to a menu of contraceptives and, yes, abortion.

But Steyn cannot promote this, because he opposes these freedoms for Western women. Indeed, he has spent the book chiding white women for failing to breed and for aborting ("killing") a generation of white children. Worse, he seems to actively agree with the Islamist critique of women's sexual freedom, claiming in passing that Islam provides women with "a refuge from the slatternly image of post-feminist Western womanhood." He does not really believe the solution is to roll out feminism to Muslims; he thinks it is to gut feminism among those women who already enjoy it - an impossibility as well as an abhorrence. So his solution simply sits limply like a deflated souffle, with his dark hints that if this fails "unthinkable solutions" will become necessary and "neonationalist strongmen" will rise.

This is only one of several places where Steyn's proposed solutions would make the 'problems' he wants to solve even worse. He argues for dissolving Europe's welfare state which, in some strange alchemical sense, will reawaken the continent's "survival instinct" and rejuvenate its "civilisational will." (There is a lot of cod-Nietzschean talk about "will" here). But which country in Europe has the healthiest demographics? Sweden, with 1.64 births per woman. Why? Because it offers the most generous childcare provision in Europe, making it less stressful and less expensive to have kids than for their British or Greek cousins. Steyn would abolish this overnight - and bring his beloved birthrates crashing down.

Steyn's wider response to Islamism is to make democratic societies more like the one the Islamists want to build. He sees democratic debate and concern for human rights as unforgivable signs of weakness, mocking those who oppose torture and saying the war in Iraq has been fought "with kid gloves". He has suggested debate about the war should be confined to a war cabinet of five people, and that anybody who disputed their decisions would be "disgusting". "The Muslim critique of the West - that we're decadent vulgar narcissist fornicating sodomites - is not without more than a grain of truth," he writes, saying that the destruction of Europe's feminist and gay rights advances wouldn't especially bother him. He agrees that secular Europe is spiritually barren, decadent, depraved. At times, it's hard to see why he opposes Islamism at all, except because of a Schmittian hatred of the Absolute Enemy and a distaste for Islamist symbols.

Europe cannot defeat the far-right poison of Islamic fundamentalism by turning to a parallel far-right mythology of its own. Once before we logged the race of babies. Once before we invented conspiracies like the Protocols of the Elders of Mohammed peddled by Steyn. It is a startling indictment of the intellectual standards of the American right that they have welcomed this Eurabian fiction with anything other than cheap, repulsed laughter.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the New Statesman to letters@newstatesman.co.uk or just for me to johann@johannhari.com

Some pro-Steyn e-mailers have picked up on the 'uneducated' comment, saying I am being condescending. I replied: "There's nothing inherently wrong with being uneducated; both my parents left school at 15, I'm obviously not jeering at people like them. There are plenty of people (like my mother) who leave school but become self-educated. Steyn clearly hasn't done that. Steyn's lack of a rigorous education - either at a university, or in his own home - shows in the book, and leads him into serious errors. He doesn't know how to use statistics, for example, and chronically misuses them throughout the book."

Reader John Hille makes a good point: "I spied just one minor error in your article. Sweden does not have Europe's highest fertility rate: Iceland has, at 1.99, followed by Norway at 1.84 and Denmark at 1.80. Of course these examples only confirm the point about social democracies being supportive of childbearing. I informed Steyn that all of these countries also belong to the most irreligious on Earth - with regular church attendance rates of about 2 % - that they all have liberal abortion laws and that they were the first to recognize gay civil unions. All things he apparently suspects of discouraging childbearing.

Since Steyn made a big point of fertility rates in exceptional countries such as Niger (around 6) I also pointed out that all but one of the five most populous Muslim countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey) have rates of around 3 or below, and that they are falling rapidly in all five, with Iran (at 2.1) about to drop below replacement rate and to be overtaken by Iceland.

I have yet publish the sequel to Steyn's book, "Niger alone", set in 2120, when the mosques of Isfahan and Istanbul are still standing, but the countries have otherwise been overrun by us heathen Vikings from Scandinavia."

Another reader writes: A letter to the journal Science pointed out in mid-2003 that humanity, without noticing it, had just quietly passed a very important milestone: for the first time, more than half the human race lives in countries where the birthrate is below the replacement rate. Paul Ehrlich's dreaded Population Bomb is definitely being defused, thanks to the fact that poor Third Worlders are tremendously more willing to use birth control voluntarily than he assumed they would be -- although, given our remaining resource-shortage problems, it's still a race against time. The only reason that the human population as a whole is still increasing moderately fast is that a majority of the other part of humanity lives in two regions where the birth rate is still appallingly high because women are denied access to contraception: sub-Saharan Africa, and the more unenlightened sector of the Moslem world, running roughly from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia (but skipping Iran). The Moslem countries of Saharan Africa seem to do a lot better, and at the time of the letter Tunisia and Lebanon had also dropped below the replacement rate."

There's more analysis of Steyn's junk statistics at http://thecrossedpond.com/?p=139

If you want a taster of the mentality of Steyn's fan-base, here's a typical pro-Steyn e-mail from sfkdpdp@metrocast.net :

"The only appeal you have in the US is to the left wing crazies. But that is the plan right? The self-important un-washed doped up eliteist (that means you and your ilk) will be the first to lose your heads if the Jihadist you coddle get thier way. Dont you know that YOU are the INFIDEL so hated. MORON!! TERRORIST!!! A HOLE!!"

Over at the New Statesman website - http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120047#reader-comments - Steyn's followers are defending him from charges of racism by writing things like this:

"Oh and while I'm at it...to say there are no 'White' cultures is utterly absurd.

White itself may not 'be' a culture...But Europe is basically made up of totally White cultures with a White history.

To say White has nothing to do with culture is laughable. As in Europe we live in cultures with a White bedrock.

It may not be trendy to say that the hated White Westerner has any culture (after all it seems the trend to spit on and ultimately try to destroy as much of those WhiteWestern cultures as possible , while all along the Asian, Arab andf Black cultures are there to be cherished, respected and whereever possible expanded), but that does not mean there aren't any.

---Islamism (distinct from Islam)----

Distinct from? How?

Quite frankly any Muslim who is not an Islamist is practicing a watered down verison of Islam.

Impure Islam.

Tainted by evolution Islam.

But seeing as PURE radical islam is increasing so much I don't hold out much hope for the future of this watered down evolved version.

In fact given the Islamic love of butchering it's own followers I expect it will be even more dangerous than it is already to even practice such diluted forms of Islam. Even in the UK."

Oh, and this piece is also being attacked from another direction. The disgusting website 'Islamophobia Watch' - which has told gay people to stop making such a fuss about sharia law, since it's hard to gather the necessary four witnesses required to execute us - is complaining. You can read their bleat at http://www.islamophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/2007/3/12/johann-hari-reviews-mark-steyn.html

[This is a review of several books:

‘While Europe Slept’ by Bruce Bawer
‘The West’s Last Chance’ by Tony Blankley,
The Force of Reason’ by Oriana Fallaci
Eurabia – the Euro-Arab Axis’ by Bat Ye’or
‘Breaking the Silence’ by Fadela Amara with Sylvia Zappi, translated by Helen Harden Chenut
‘The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam’ by Ayaan Hirsi Ali]

Every few months, flecks of blood splash out from European Islam and stain the global news agenda. The world has watched jihadist assassinations on the streets of Amsterdam, civilian-slaughter in Madrid and on the London Underground, France’s bonfire of the car-and-vanities, and Denmark’s uprising against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. For ordinary Europeans who pride ourselves on our multiculturalism and tolerance, the continent seems stranger and sadder. The windows of my apartment in London stare out towards the scene of a recent suicide-murder, and when they are open on a summer morning, the low wailing of a muezzin can be heard clearing the air. On the streets and in the mosques outside, jihadi young men distributing ‘death to democracy’ leaflets clash with young Muslim feminists calling for an open, liberal Islam. Kaffiyas and headscarves clash with make-up and wonderbras in a bewildering Islamic cacophony.

At last, a slew of books has appeared to try to fit these changed streets, scattered battles and stray bombs into a broader intellectual context. They fall, broadly, into two schools. The first presents Europe’s fight as a Huntingtonian ‘Clash of Civilisations’, a war between democratic Europe and the 15 million indigestible Muslims it has, they believe, foolishly imported from undemocratic countries. Some even predict – as former Reagan staffer Tony Blankley puts it – that “as hyper-tolerant, or even self-loathing, Europeans are confronted by intelligent, hyper-aggressive Muslims, a Darwinian life-or-death struggle will result in the death of European culture.”

The second school believes this conservative analysis is a betrayal of democratic Muslims immigrants, a rebuke to the millions who have become great Europeans and cannot be casually counted as in the camp of jihad. They believe this is a civil war within[ital] the Muslim world, between Islamic fundamentalists and the Muslim moderates who despise them. The most optimistic of us even believe that hosting this fight is an extraordinary opportunity for Europe, because – if we manage it right – we can decisively tip Islam away from jihadism and trigger the long-awaited, long-delayed Islamic Enlightenment.

Most of the events that have ravaged and savaged Europe lately can be understood, at least superficially, through either prism. Look at the near-beheading of Theo Van Gough, the film-maker and controversialist, by crazed fundamentalist Mohammed Bouyeri as he begged – in classic Dutch fashion – “Don’t so it! Surely we can talk about this!” Was Van Gough murdered because he was an “infidel” who had dared defame Islam? Or was he killed because he had sided with moderate Muslims by making a film about the epidemic of domestic violence against immigrant women?

The American writer Bruce Bawer’s book ‘While Europe Slept’ is an interesting entry-point to this debate, since he veers – almost at random – between the two schools of thought as he tries to understand Europe’s new and febrile situation. He arrived in Europe just as jihadi smoke was beginning to hang over our streets: “I first travelled to the Netherlands in 1997 and thought I’d found the closest thing to heaven on earth. What sentient being, I wondered, wouldn’t want to live there?” He had, he believed, finally escaped the Protestant fundamentalism of his homeland, and ambled into a secular society where he could marry his gay partner and walk hand-in-hand down the canal lanes. But “Europe, I eventually saw, was falling prey to an even more alarming fundamentalism”.

It began to hit him – literally – when he and his boyfriend were beaten up by a Muslim hate-mob one sunny afternoon. Islamic fundamentalists were, he discovered, attacking Amsterdam’s gay men with such frequency that this pro-gay Shangri-La was unravelling: gay men could no longer hold hands or kiss in public. When he studied what some mullahs were preaching in the Muslim ghettoes scattered across Europe, Bawer found something worse than the Falwellian fanaticism he had fled. “Falwell was an unsavoury creep, but he didn’t issue fatwas,” he writes. “James Dobson’s parenting advice was appalling, but it didn’t tell people to murder their daughters. American liberals had been fighting the religious right for decades. Western Europeans had yet to acknowledge they had a religious right… Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me gay marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall on me.”

Bawer had belly-flopped into the continent’s paradox: Europe’s warm and capacious tolerance was being extended to some of the most fanatically intolerant people on earth. The continent had inhaled immigrants from our former colonies to skivvy and scrub for us, and the most hassle-free approach seemed to be multiculturalism: let them do their own thing. But in practice, it evolved into something even worse: immigrants were encouraged to retain their original culture – no matter how reactionary – as a matter of state policy. By the time Bawer touched down in Amsterdam, this has thrown up perverse alliances across the continent, with European liberals fostering and feeding some of the anti-liberal, misogynist and homophobic parts of immigrant communities. Britain-based feminist Germaine Greer defended the widespread butchery of young Muslim girls’ genitals – the removal of the labia and clitoris to destroy the possibility of sexual pleasure – as a legitimate cultural practice. Eva Kjer Hansern, the Denmark’s minister for gender equality, responded to a fundamentalist imam who said women were asking to be raped if they showed too much flesh by calling for an “open debate”. As Bawer demands - about what? Is it okay to rape a woman if her dress is below the knee, but not above?

These criticisms, offered in a fizzing firecracker polemic, fit into an intriguing pattern, whereby some of the most vociferous critics of the swelling jihadism in Europe – from Pim Fortuyn to Peter Tatchell – have been gay men, unusually well-attuned to the rise of fanatical faith for obvious reasons. But as his book progresses, Bawer’s polemic shifts from being a carefully reasoned work in the civil-war school into a sloppy, shrill work in the clash-of-civilisations school. He begins to doubt that there are any moderate Muslims at all, except a few shimmering exceptions, saying, “if that silent majority existed at all, it had to be one of the most silent majorities ever.” He begins to present Europe’s Muslims as a homogenous sharia-seeking hoarde slowly trying to conquer the continent. With spine-chilling incidental music, he reveals the fact that most popular name for baby boys in Amsterdam is no long Jan but Mohammed.

Indeed, he shunts aside the examples of heroic moderate Muslims he had listed and proceeds to present the growth of the Muslim population – moderate or jihadist, who cares? – as a problem in itself. He writes – as so much of the American literature on this subject does – of a demographic time-bomb sitting underneath Europe: “Today, in Western Europe, the Muslim share of the population is somewhere between 2 and 10 percent. In France, it’s 12 percent. In Switzerland, it’s an astonishing 20 percent. A glance at the relative rates of reproduction suggests this percentage will rise precipitously over the coming generation. Among native Western Europeans, the fertility ranges from 1.2 to 1.8 percent – well blow the “replacement rate” of 2.1. This means the native populations will decline considerably over the next generation… and the number of Muslims will increase dramatically, partly through controlled immigration and partly through reproduction (the fertility rate of Muslims is considerably higher).”

But it is only by making some pretty wild extrapolations that Bawer can sustain his idea Europe will have a Muslim majority – and perhaps sharia law, beheadings and all – fairly soon. But even Tony Blankley – the former Reagan staffer whose flimsy book ‘The West’s Last Chance’ is built on the same premise – admits that “the phrase ‘if current trends continue’ is one of the most misleading guides to the future.” Remember Paul Ehrich’s ubiquitous ‘The Population Bomb’, which predicted that rising populations and dwindling food supplies would guarantee five millions Americans have withered and starved by 1985? “For almost every Western European country, their populations do not even begin to decline until at least 2025,” Blankley confesses. “In fact, for the next few decades, they continue to go up, even without any new immigration… The numbers only begin to move decidedly down about fifty years from now.”

But an entire shelf-full of literature has been built on the plainly hyperbolic premises that demographic trends will remain exactly the same for the next fifty years, and that all European Muslims will by then be jihadists clamouring for sharia. Sitting here at the apex of the Clash of Civilisations thesis is the scholar Bat Ye’or, a Jew ethnically cleansed from Egypt in 1956 and condemned to life as a European exile. She not only believes that Europe will very soon be conquered by a Muslim majority and turned into ‘Eurabia’, a continent where Christians and Jews are reduced to ‘dhimmis’ – second class citizens forced to walk in the gutter. She believes this is the result of a deliberate “war of political and cultural subversion, undertaken by [Europe’s] own politicians, media and intellectuals.”

In her latest book, ‘Eurabia – the Euro-Arab Axis’, Ye’or argues that since 1962 France has been plotting “the creation of a common culture encompassing the North and South shores of the Mediterranean” and the “secret schadenfreude fulfilment of an interrupted Holocaust.” These European politicians clandestinely “see Islam as liberation from unbelief, superior as a religion and a civilisation to Christianity and to all other infidel creeds.” These are such fantastical claims – suggesting a conscious conspiracy unprecedented in human history – that one imagines Ye’or must have uncovered some pretty astonishing evidence to have her research endorsed by so many senior figures on the American right. So… where is it?

She says this massive plot is being driven by an obscure group of minor politicians called the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), whose “occult machinery” (yes, she really does say ‘occult’) is everywhere, “engineer[ing] Europe’s irreversible transformation through hidden channels.” But the only ‘proof’ Ye’or offers are a few slices of boilerplate rhetoric issued at inter-governmental conferences about the contribution Islam has made to European culture and the desire for co-operation in the future. But remarkably similar statements have come from George Bush. Ye’or can only maintain her argument by repeatedly resorting to rhetorical inflation. So because “Eurabian notables – whether Chirac, Solana, Prodi, de Villepin, Mary Robinson or others – have continuously stressed the centrality of the Palestinian cause for world peace,” she says they believe “Israel’s very existence… is a threat to peace” – a clear distortion. So because some European politicians have offered rote-praise for how Muslims and Christians lived together in medieval Andalusia, she says they have “the firm belief that Andalusia provides an exemplary model for the construction of Eurabia in the twenty-first century.” [P147] So because millions of Europeans marched against the invasion of Iraq, she says there were “mass demonstrations in European streets in favour of Saddam Hussein,” part of the “coordinated Euro-Arab policy.”

But Ye’or’s insistence that there is only one Islam – a jihad-and-sharia-seeking mania – is more than just a historical error: it is actually a weapon in the jihadists’ hands. A good example can be found when Ye’or lambasts a Muslim biomedical engineering student at Harvard University who gave a speech redefining jihad as “the determination to do right, to do justice even against your own interest.” She savages this as “wishful thinking,” a sugar-coating for the savage reality of Islam. She is saying to a moderate Muslim – exactly the people who must be encouraged– your understanding of your faith is wrong. Only Osama Bin Laden’s is correct – and his will inevitably prevail.

To understand how wrong this is, we must turn to the dissident strains of Islam that are sprouting across Europe. Fadela Amara’s raw, vivid book ‘Breaking the Silence’ is the story of how an ordinary Muslim girl from the banlieues – the concrete blocks of Muslim poverty that ring France’s cities – started a movement to reform Islam. One of ten children born to her Algerian immigrant parents, she grew up chafing at the constraints of Islamic fundamentalism. She could not see why she was forced to do housework while her brothers lazed, or reduced to begging her father for weeks for the smallest of freedoms like the right to see a movie. But she always knew she was living in a free, democratic society where she challenge these stifling norms. She writes, “My own France – a view shared by a great number of people from immigrant families – is the France of the Enlightenment, the France of the republic, the France of Marianne, of the supporters of Alfred Dreyfuss, of the Paris Commune, of the Resistance. In short, the France of liberty, equality and fraternity.”

As she grew, she realised it was not enough to challenge jihadists in her own home. In 2002 an 18 year-old girl from the banlieues called Sohan Benziane was burned to death by fundamentalists for being ‘loose’ and refusing to bow her head to their misogynist norms, and Fadela knew she had to act – in the name of Islam. With her friends, she launched a group called ‘Ni Putains, Ni Soumises’ (Neither Whores Nor Doormats). They began to carefully articulate a feminist Islam compatible with Enlightenment values. Within five months, they had 30,000 people marching in the streets of Paris, demanding change.

Their “feminist Islam” is the fiercest enemy of what Amara dubs “basement Islam” – a fanaticism of the shadows and backrooms that “offered young men a theoretical framework and tools with which to oppress young women.” She believed “its influence is much more important than is recognized. From the moment imams settled into the projects, some of the young men began to apply radical codes of behaviour to young women, in particular by forcing them back into their homes.” Fadela and the tens of thousands of Muslim women who support her loathe the fundamentalists’ vision of “fascist-like society that has nothing to do with democracy” – and unlike many ‘Clash of Civilisations’ blowhards, she fights against it on the ground, every day. Some of their fights are small everyday acts of defiance: “Make-up has become war paint, a sign of resistance.” But many are larger: they reject the headscarf as “nothing more than a means of oppression emanating from a patriarchal society.”

Here is an authentic Islamic Enlightenment occurring on the streets of Europe. Here is the development of a strain of Islam fiercely committed to democratic values. Yet those who suggest the birth of every new European Muslim is a problem – another tick from the time-bomb – treat Amara as akin to Osama. This mindset is (at best) a distraction from the real fight: across the continent, groups of Muslim women are rebelling in the same way against the literalist, quasi-fascist interpretation of the Koran popularised by the Mullahs. Tired of being its first victims, they are creating their own liberal lived Islams as an alternative – and if this rebellion is completed, European jihadism will be left literally unable to reproduce itself. Ayaan Hirsi Ali – the brave Somalian refugee to the Netherlands who has become a dissident against jihadism – astutely argues, “If the West wants to help modernize Islam, it should invest in women because they educate the children.”

So how do we guarantee there are a dozen Fadelas in every mosque? A string of creative solutions spring from the literature. Some are fairly painless – for example, across Europe, Muslim women who become too fond of democratic values are often ‘disciplined’ by their families by the importing of a stern spouse from the traditional homeland. As Bawer puts it, “The disease of integration is prevented by injecting into the European branch of the family a powerful booster shot of “traditional values”.” To prevent this attack on moderate Muslims, Denmark has banned any citizen from importing a spouse until he or she is 24 years old. “The assumption behind the rule,” Bawer writes, “is that by the time a young person reaches 24, he or she is more capable of resisting parental pressure – and more likely to have met and fallen in love with someone in Denmark.”

Liberal Muslims are also hobbled across Europe by the fact that the continent’s mosques are almost all funded by foreign fundamentalist powers - mostly Saudi Arabia, Libya and Pakistan. A third of French imams cannot speak any French at all, and barely a third are fluent in the language. Ye’or – before she launches on yet more exaggeration – is right to ask why are we importing proselytisers for Wahhabbism and literalism. The French government has tired to develop imam training programmes to supply home-grown preachers, and the Dutch government now requires all imams to undergo an assimilation programme. Why aren’t all European states following them?

Some solutions will come from the conventional anti-racist approach of the past thirty years, outlawing discrimination. In July 2004, the BBC conducted an experiment: they sent out nearly identical job applications to over fifty British employers. The applicants with Anglo-Saxon names were twice as likely to be asked to interview as those with Muslim names. Similar results have been found in France. By far the most frequent demand about European Muslims is for an employment law banning discrimination on religious grounds – hardly a separatist jihadi agenda. There is often a similar exclusion from politics, because huge chunks of Europe’s Muslims are disenfranchised – literally. Around half of Denmark’s Muslim population cannot vote because they are “long-term non-national residents” – second-class citizens. In Italy, less than 10 percent of Muslims are eligible, and in Germany only 500,000 of the 3.2 million resident Muslims can vote. If Muslims cannot engage in the economy or politics, they will be far more likely to go underground (or Underground).

But the trickier solutions will require Europeans to unpick a central plank of our conventional anti-racist approach: multiculturalism. The Ni Poutains, Ni Soumises manifesto calls for “no more justifications of our oppression in the name of the right to difference and of respect for those who force us to bow our heads.” Multiculturalism has worked on the assumption that there is one ‘pure’ Islam, represented by elderly Mullahs. Now Islam is splitting into liberal and literalist wings, this approach actually places European states closer to the reactionaries that the feminists and liberals. We will have to ensure there are no more state-funded Muslim-only schools and youth clubs, no more privileged status for reactionary clerics. “It must,” Bawer notes, “become impossible for children growing up in Western Europe to be raised to see their religious affiliation as the be-all and end-all of their identity.”

To successfully host an Islamic civil war – one where the liberals win – Europeans need to junk both the conservative pining for an Apocalyptic clash and the liberal fixation on multiculturalism. The potential prize is extraordinary. In the thirteenth century, Muslims stopped using the principle of ijtihad – the application of reason and reinterpretation to pull their religious texts into a modern context – when reading the Koran. This led in a clear black line to the literalism and psychosis of Bin Ladenism. If the gates of ijtihad open once again, it will be in Europe. It is a long, slow process, but it has already begun. Amidst the sound of suicide-murders and screaming on European streets, it is possible to hear the slow creaking of those gates – and the low rumble of the Islamic Enlightenment.

[This review was written before Fallacci died and Hirsi Ali was forced to leave the Netherlands]