More lies and intellectual dishonesty

Professor John Newsinger is senior lecturer in history at Bath Spa University. He has written a book review for a supposedly serious academic journal, Race & Class. It is subscription-only, but the review starts thus:

Studies of the Labour party have overwhelmingly focused on its domestic successes and failures, in particular on its contribution to the development of the welfare state. This has been very much at the expense of its colonial, defence and foreign policies. Such a focus was always a mistake, but, today, it is surely completely untenable. Even the most parochial of commentators, whether academic or otherwise, is hard-pressed to continue this neglect of Labour’s sorry international record. Blair’s wars changed everything. The uncomfortable fact that the Labour party’s longest-serving prime minister is widely regarded as a war criminal, as a man drenched in blood, who nevertheless succeeded in becoming a multimillionaire on the back of his crimes, has made such neglect intellectually dishonest, to say the least.

From such a parochial and intellectually dishonest start, his conclusion is depressingly predictable, and the author of the book nominally in question, The Labour Party and the World, Vol. 2: Labour’s foreign policy since 1951, Rhiannon Vickers, provides a convenient “useful idiot”:

Vickers even argues that Blair’s support for the war derived from his ‘missionary zeal to make the world a better place’. Great powers do not go to war for such reasons. They sometimes say they do, but this is to appease domestic public opinion, and they are lying.

The reality is that Labour governments have consistently aligned themselves with, and subordinated themselves to, the US, sacrificing each and every principle in the process. Most recently, Labour support for the US war on terror even involved complicity in torture. Once again, this is not to say that Vickers ignores the real world, but, rather, that her account does not have any explanatory power as far as the real motives informing Labour’s foreign policy are concerned. Subordination to the US is a policy that British governments follow with grim determination because this is perceived to be in the best interests of British capital.

I don’t suppose that the book reviews are peer-reviewed, but someone must have thought that this was worth publishing and charging money for.

Professor Newsinger has form. A few years ago he wrote this, also in a “book review” for Race & Class:

The starting point for any serious consideration of terrorism as a global phenomenon is recognition that the most dangerous terrorist organisation at work in the post-1945 period has been the Central Intelligence Agency.

He went on to argue, as Michael Ezra pointed out, that the CIA is a “multi-billion dollar criminal conspiracy” that is “in the service of the US empire”.

I am all for academic freedom, but it is worrying that such feeble-minded punk Marxism is allowed out during the day.

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• Pacificweather

  And have you similarly revised your thinking about Patrice Lumumber?

• Pacificweather

  Professor John Newsinger clearly is a charlatan. Blair is “widely regarded as a war criminal” he says when we all know that he is the most loved and respected man since Horatio Nelson. Of course, the punk Marxists would like to see him burn in hell with GWB and the CIA if only they believed in hell. We all know that trying to poison Fidelity Castro was just a joke. OK, so the CIA have a thing about men with beards, everyone has their foibles. Does that make them terrorists?

  Then to say that the Labour party has slavishly followed America when Harold Wilson kept Britain out of the Vietnam war. Well, the man does not have a shred of credibility left.

• Pacificweather

  The irony is that Harold Wilson probably created Bath Spa university like he created the Open University. Oh, and if you know he didn’t keep it to yourself. Never let the truth spoil a good story. JR was kind enough to leave the most glaring error for you to publish whilst he kept strictly within the bounds of his obsessions. The Bath Spa final politics exam had the question, “Harold Wilson was the greatest post war Prime Minister – discuss”

• Pacificweather

  I thought, John, you might have approved of the professor’s appraisal of Vickers’ work in saying that great powers do not go to war for missionary zeal. Was it the lying word that deterred you or do you approve of Mr. Blair’s missionary zeal too much to mention it outside of the bedroom.

• takeoman

  So after your sweeping dismissal of Chile, perhaps you can provide the Blairite historical rewrite for the following CIA adventures, Guatamala 1951, Iran 1953, Laos 1957, Haiti 1959,Ecuador 1961, Dominican Republic 1963, Ecuador(again) 1963, Brazil 1964, Indonesia 1965, Zaire(Congo) 1965, Greece 1967, Cambodia 1970, Bolivia 1971.,

• http://twitter.com/RF_McCarthy Roger McCarthy

  Race and Class is no more a serious academic journal than the SWP’s International Socialism or Socialist Review – both of which have published Newsinger’s musings.

  That it has various academic rankings is just a function of the RAE system which magically transformed multiple such obscure left wing magazines into ‘peer reviewed journals’ as points make prizes and academics like Prof Newsinger are desperate to get those points for everything they write…

  The whole industry – which according to Thomson Reuters now includes 10,667 journals in 232 disciplines – is just a gigantic global scam through which academics are driven by the idiotic targets and league tables so beloved of St Tony and his government to feed the insatiable greed of academic publishers at the ultimate expense of students and taxpayers whose fees and grants actually pay the extortionate institutional subscriptions for these superfluous journals.