The Politics of Dancing

On yesterdays mornings news I heard that an al - Qaeda affiliated group has 'claimed responsibility' for the bombings that killed more than 155 people in Baghdad at the weekend. These groups are amongst those lauded by Mr Galloway as 'the resistance,' comparing them to the French Marquis in the last war! I also checked out the website of the misnamed 'Stop The War Coalition' to read their condemnation of this atrocity. There was of course nothing. One can barely imagine the outrage that would pour forth if any British or American action resulted in the death of over 155 innocent civilians. This of course only reflects the moral bankruptcy, phony radicalism and shallow mindset that passes for left wing thinking these days but there is also a stronger stench coming from this website, it is the stench of decay, the death of a long, noble, sometimes misguided tradition of opposition to war and violence. In place of this noble tradition of pacifism and non violen...

There used to be, possibly still are, a standard question for history undergraduates which posits that ‘all history is contemporary history, discuss.’ Far from the static collection of what the German historian Ranke called ‘the facts,’ history has always been seen through the prism of the present. Nobody writing of the Russian Revolution today, for example, would write in the same vein as say sixty, or even thirty years ago. Hindsight always provides a distorted perspective. We forget that what is now the past was once the future. The dangers inherent in this are obvious, leading to an ahistorical approach to the past. As AJP Taylor once reflected “History is not another name for the past, as many people imply, it is the name for stories about the past.” To further complicate things the requirements of ideology and ‘national prestige’ are constantly shaping and reshaping the historical ‘record.’ Moreover, as Orwell reflects in 1984 ‘he who controls the present controls the past,...

I think the furore over Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time has been wholly disproportionate and indeed for those seeking to oppose his appearance by shouting slogans and waving placards outside Television Centre, counterproductive. The left has a long tradition of seeking to shut people up. I am old enough to remember when it was nigh on impossible for a conservative speaker to gain a fair hearing on British University campuses, speakers usually being greeted with a variety of zoo noises and the odd rotten egg or bag of flour. I witnessed Keith Joseph receive just such treatment during the mid 1970’s. No fan of the somewhat bewildered and extraordinarily other worldly Mr Joseph, I remember though feeling uneasy at the time, for was it not better to engage in debate? However what increasingly became clear is that many on the left were less interested in engaging with ideas than in silencing ideas that they found inconvenient or repugnant. The standard formula being ‘no platform...