Should Croatia apologise for the Bleiburg massacre ?

This article was published today in BCS translation by Al Jazeera Balkans

The Bleiburg massacre is the term used to refer to the mass murder of tens of thousands of prisoners of war and civilian prisoners from the ranks of pro-Nazi quislings and collaborators, by the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisans at the end of World War II. Named after the Austrian town of Bleiburg near the Yugoslav border, where the repatriation of these prisoners began, the killing process involved the forced march of the prisoners and their mass execution at multiple sites. The largest component of those killed were Croats who had served the Nazi-puppet ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (NDH) and its Croat-fascist (Ustasha) leadership, but they included also Slovenes, Serbs and others.

The massacre became a cause celebre for the anti-Communist Yugoslav emigration after World War II. It implicated the British forces in Austria, who had either refused to accept the surrender of the prisoners and insisted they surrender to the Partisans, or had actually repatriated them to Yugoslavia and their deaths. The legacy of the massacre remained controversial after the war, because on the one hand the Yugoslav Communists and their supporters refused to accept any wrongdoing, while on the other, its commemoration was often bound up with expressions of support for the Ustasha regime. For anti-Communist Croats, including but not limited to Ustasha sympathisers, the massacre served as a foundation myth for their self-identification as victims of the Yugoslav Communist regime, which they identified as anti-Croat. Whereas this regime, liberal and left-wing Croats and the anti-fascist world generally have focused on the genocidal crimes of the Ustashas against Serbs, Jews and others, in particular at the notorious death-camp Jasenovac, anti-Communist Croats have commemorated the Bleiburg massacre. The choice of commemoration – Jasenovac or Bleiburg – depended upon political orientation and family background. Croats remain divided over this to this day, reflecting the nation’s division since World War 2 between pro-Partisan and anti-Communist camps.

Of course, the crimes of Jasenovac and Bleiburg were not equivalent: Jasenovac involved actual genocide against whole groups targeted purely on the basis of their ethnicity, while Bleiburg was a case of the victors in a civil war massacring the losers. The Partisans were not attempting to destroy or exterminate the Croat nation, as the Ustashas were the Serbs and Jews. Nevertheless, Bleiburg was undoubtedly a war crime: many civilians were murdered, as were many conscript soldiers who were not guilty of any crimes. And though many of those killed in the Bleiburg massacre were indeed Ustasha war-criminals, these too should have been given fair trials, not extra-judicial executions. The Croatian parliament supports the commemoration of Bleiburg, and Croatia’s Social Democratic president Zoran Milanovic has said he will lay a wreath at one of the massacre sites this year, but the commemoration has not received acceptance from liberal Croatia or from the wider liberal-democratic world. This is in part because of its association with pro-Ustasha revisionism, but also out of simple unwillingness to acknowledge Partisan or Allied war-crimes against Axis or pro-Axis victims. Nobody has ever been punished for Bleiburg. There is no doubt that many people from non-Communist families whose relatives were murdered or persecuted by the Communist remain hurt and bitter about this. Hence, the issue remains a wound that divides Croats.

Liberal principles would suggest that war-crimes by all sides should be acknowledged and repudiated if post-war reconciliation is to be achieved. This is the principle followed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) which has sought to bring to justice war-criminals from all sides in the 1990s wars: Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians and Macedonians alike. The same principle would suggest that an acknowledgement and apology are due for Bleiburg too. But this raises the question: who should give them ?

In fact, Bleiburg was a crime in which Croats were perpetrators as well as victims, and for which the state of Croatia was as responsible as any other. The armed forces that carried out the massacres were Yugoslav and Partisan. Croatia was a founding member of the Yugoslav federation, and had, until comparatively late in the war, contributed more Partisans than any other Yugoslav land. Tito himself was a Croat from Croatia. The contemporary Republic of Croatia is legally one of the successor states of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. The post-Communist Croatian constitution since 1990 has explicitly included among its ‘historical foundations’ the ‘establishment of the foundations of state sovereignty during the course of the Second World War, as expressed in the decision of the Territorial Antifascist Council of the National Liberation of Croatia (1943) in opposition to the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia (1941), and then in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Croatia (1947) and in all subsequent constitutions of the Socialist Republic of Croatia (1963-1990)’. In other words, the contemporary Croatian state formally affirms the Partisan legacy against the NDH legacy.

Furthermore, the Croatian struggle for independence in the 1990s was led by former Partisans, most notably Franjo Tudjman as president, Janko Bobetko as chief of general staff of the Croatian Army and Martin Spegelj as defence minister and founder of the Croatian Army, as well as Josip Manolic as prime minister and Josip Boljkovac as interior minister. The paradox for the Croatian right is that they commemorate Bleiburg while celebrating a Croatian independence that was achieved by former members of the army responsible for Bleiburg, and revere Tudjman, who rose to the rank of general in that army. Indeed, Tudjman until the very end of his life, continued to praise Tito for his services to the Croat nation, even suggesting that he may not have given the orders for the Bleiburg massacres. While Tudjman lived, a prominent square in central Zagreb continued to bear the name ‘Marshal Tito Square’. While there is a perception among conservative Croats that it is specifically the Croatian left that needs to recognise and apologise for Bleiburg, the reality is that the main Croatian centre-right party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) – founded by Tudjman and including many former Communists among its ranks – is just as bound up in the legacy of the Communist regime, including Bleiburg, as the left’s Social Democratic Party. Bleiburg was a crime of the Croatian state, not just of the Croatian left.

Paradoxically, the crime of Jasenovac is more readily associated with Croatian guilt than Bleiburg, even though Jasenovac was the work of a Croat-fascist puppet state that was destroyed and repudiated by the Partisans who founded the current Croatian state, which is not the legal successor of the NDH and is not legally culpable for its crimes. Croatian President Ivo Josipovic in 2010 nevertheless expressed regret for Jasenovac and other Ustasha crimes, which was the correct thing to do, given that members of his nation had perpetrated them.

There is a case for saying that the Croatian president should apologise for the Bleiburg massacre on behalf of the Croatian state. This could help to bring closure to the relatives of the victims. It could mean contemporary mainstream, liberal, anti-fascist Croatia acknowledging and taking responsibility for the crimes carried out by its predecessors. It would shatter both the right-wing narrative, that treats Croatia purely as a victim of, rather than a participant in, the actions of the Communists and Partisans, and the left-wing narrative of Partisan purity. It would affirm the fact that the contemporary Croatian state was founded on an anti-fascist basis, without glorifying or whitewashing the Communists and Partisans, instead by owning their negative side as well as their positive side. It could help to heal the rift between the two Croatias.

For all these reasons, it is doubtful that such an apology will ever happen. The left is unwilling to dwell on Partisan crimes, while the right is unwilling to acknowledge them as their own. The left is attached to a sanitised view of the Partisans, while the right is attached to a narrative of Croatia as innocent victim of Communism. There is too much bound up with these competing myths for any Croatian politician to take such a politically risky step of challenging them. Croatia will remain divided over Bleiburg, so long as its politicians want it to be.

The second edition of my book ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina: Genocide, justice and denial’, published by the Centar za napredne studije, is out ! PDF available here…

PDF: Marko Attila Bosnia – TEXT 2. izdanje (PRINT) 21.12.2017.

The second edition of the selection of articles from my blog, Greater Surbiton, has been published in book format by the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sarajevo. The following is the foreword to the book:

The articles in this volume were published on my blog, Greater Surbiton, since its launch in November 2007. Although Greater Surbiton was devoted to a number of different themes – including the southern and eastern Balkans, Turkey and Cyprus, Russia and the Caucasus, the meaning of progressive politics and the fight against Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of chauvinism – Bosnia-Hercegovina and the former Yugoslavia were at all times central to it. Twelve years after Dayton, when the blog was launched, the war over the former Yugoslavia was being waged as fiercely as ever – not on the battlefield, but in the realm of politics and ideas, both in the region and in the West. Genocide deniers and propagandists who sought to downplay or excuse the crimes of the Milosevic and Karadzic regimes of the 1990s – people like Diana Johnstone, Michael Parenti, David N. Gibbs, Nebojsa Malic, John Schindler and Carl Savich – continued their ugly work. Yet the ongoing struggle to counter their falsehoods was just one front in the wider war.

The period since 2007 has witnessed the rise of Milorad Dodik’s separatist challenge to the precarious Bosnian-Hercegovinian unity established at Dayton, and the consequent degeneration of the post-Dayton political order in the country; the declaration of Kosovo’s independence and Belgrade’s efforts to derail it; the struggle in Serbia between reformist and nationalist currents; the increasingly aggressive challenge of Russia’s Vladimir Putin to the West, manifested most starkly in the attacks on Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, but also in support for Belgrade over Kosovo and for Dodik in Bosnia-Hercegovina; the increasingly apparent failure of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to punish adequately the war-criminals of the 1990s, despite the spectacular arrests of Radovan Karadzic in 2008 and Ratko Mladic in 2011; and the increasingly stark failure of Western leaders to confront murderous tyrants like Putin, Sudan’s Omar Hassan al-Bashir and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad – reminiscent of their failure in the 1990s over Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Today, the truth about the war in the former Yugoslavia is more widely known and understood than ever. The battle for the recognition of the Srebrenica genocide worldwide has largely been won; the remains of most victims of the massacre have been identified and reburied. The deniers and their narrative have been largely discredited. Yet the Bosnian question is further from a happy resolution than ever, while the West – the US, EU and their allies – look less likely to lead positive change in the region than they did a decade ago. Kosovo’s full international recognition is still being blocked by Serbia and Russia; Macedonia, kept out of the EU and NATO by Greek nationalist intransigence, is in crisis; not a single official of Serbia has yet been found guilty by the ICTY for war-crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, or is likely to be in the future; and leading former-Yugoslav war-criminals such as Biljana Plavsic and Momcilo Krajisnik have been released after serving short prison-terms in comfortable conditions.

The outcomes of the struggles tracked by my blog have therefore been far from unambiguously happy. Yet the politics and recent history of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the rest of the former Yugoslavia are much better understood than they were a decade ago; new generations of scholars, analysts and activists are discovering and explaining more all the time. I hope that the articles contained in this volume have made a contribution to this process of discovery.

On ‘Anti-Zionists’ Damian James Read (@CockneyActivist), Jason Schumann (@debatingculture), Alison Chabloz and Charles Frith

Last autumn, a group of ‘anti-Zionists’ launched a harassment campaign against me. Charles Frith, a notorious Holocaust denier and particularly vicious Jew-hater, who had over 32,000 Twitter followers until Twitter suspended his account, telephoned my employers, Kingston University, posing as a job-seeker. After finding out the name of my immediate manager from an unsuspecting colleague, he sent a series of abusive and defamatory emails to me and my senior colleagues, accusing me, among other things, of ‘Zionism’, and turning Kingston into a centre for ‘child abuse’. Frith is someone who refers to the ‘fake 6m Holohoax figures’. He has tweeted that ‘the Auschwitz chambers were delousing stations in Germany and France’; that ‘Israel’s Mossad did 9/11’; that ‘Jewish Al-Sisi Runs Egypt; Now an Israeli-Occupied Territory’. He has blogged that the figure of six million Holocaust dead was fabricated before World War II, and that the real figure is ‘somewhere in between half a million to a million’. He has referred to David Cameron as a ‘Rothschild-Zionist tea boy’ and accused a senior British Jewish journalist of ‘milk(ing) the Holocaust gravy train like a 6 million lottery payout’. His last email to my university colleagues contained a disgusting war-porn picture, apparently of a graphically mutilated child, which he claimed was ‘Zionism in action’.

Pic.: Holocaust denier Damian James Read aka @CockneyActivist

Frith had been set on me by his political fellow-travellers. One of these was Damian James Read, who Tweets under the name ‘@CockneyActivist’. Read is a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and apparently a Labour Party member, and he likes posting pictures of himself online, dressed in Palestinian flags. When David Cameron tweeted in remembrance of the ‘millions murdered in the holocaust’, Read tweeted back that ‘I think you mean 300,000. An horrific event I agree. But not 6 million is it’.

Continue reading at Engage

Update: We have finally got round to posting a selection of screenshots from the Twitter accounts of Read and of Jason Schumann (@debatingculture) demonstrating their anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

Links to…

Pic.: Holocaust denier Jason Schumann

Holocaust denial and campus censorship: The case of Charles Frith

Charles Frith is a Holocaust denier and minor celebrity in the anti-Semitic Twitter-community with over 32,000 followers, at least some of them real. He appeared in the news recently after an SNP MP, Sandra White, had to apologise after retweeting one of his anti-Semitic tweets. I am an academic staff member at Kingston University. Last week, Frith phoned my office posing as a job-seeker in order to obtain information about me. He then sent me a threatening email: ‘I’m now asking you formally to remove all your anonymous Storify posts about me before I take more serious measures.’ The email was cc’d to one of my university managers and another colleague. The ‘serious measures’ were not specified, but the trouble for me was that I had never written any Storify posts about Frith, or even heard of him until a day or two previously. He had convinced himself that I was a certain pseudonymous blogger called Soupy One who has spent years cataloguing and exposing the activities of online anti-Semites, but who has – perhaps understandably given the sort of people he deals with – chosen to keep his real identity concealed. Needless to say, I am not ‘Soupy One’; I have taken pride in blogging under my real name for years. Never mind; Frith’s gang of online nutters has been aggressively bombarding the Kingston University twitter account. They have been circulating on Twitter a photo of my face with the caption ‘Is Marko Atilla [sic] Hoare the notorious Anti Semite [sic] @inthesoupagain’ (Frith assures people of his ‘Semitic Heritage [sic]’ in order to label his critics anti-Semites).

Pic.: Holocaust denier, conspiracy-theorist, egomaniac and nonentity Charles Edward Frith

It is difficult to do justice to just what a raving anti-Semitic crackpot Frith is. His tweets, of which Soupy One has compiled an illustrative selection, speak for themselves:

Germans were the losers of WWII. Most Germans don’t have the guts to look into the fake 6M holohoax figures @rajaaJT

— Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) August 1, 2014

 

Still glugging on 6 million lies huh? @beislhur Go ahead. Take a drink. http://t.co/Z1BUMGMWuM pic.twitter.com/inA82WBi3l — Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) August 19, 2014

Actually not. Jewish Bolsheviks were behind the 25-60 million genocide in Russia. @earthexperience

— Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) August 7, 2014

Is it anti Semitic to say Jewish intellectuals behind Bolshevism, Marxism, Communism, Neoconservatism and Zionism? pic.twitter.com/vD9tEmHK56 — Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) May 11, 2015

— Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) May 12, 2015

English declared war on Germany 1914 & 1939 on flimsiest of pretexts to generate wealth for very rich industrialists. pic.twitter.com/lJUUf1dst2 — Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) May 7, 2015

JFK: THE ZIONIST MANIFOLD COVER-UP – My Catbird Seat http://t.co/dJdvjPNANo — Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) October 26, 2014

David Irving churned out meticulously researched historical bestsellers until the Zionists destroyed his career http://t.co/hTHHMMFBpu — Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) August 19, 2014

Israel’s Mossad Did 9/11 – YouTube http://t.co/ixkOgqGUXc — Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) November 3, 2014

Jewish Al-Sisi Runs Egypt; Now an Israeli-Occupied Territory http://t.co/ui7jm1ixDX

— Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) November 25, 2014

That’s not accurate. Nathan Rothschild took control of the British economy after Waterloo @Thingumbobesq http://t.co/mEruIcNVxR — Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) May 23, 2014

Some of his deleted tweets endorsed the view that ‘the Auschwitz chambers were delousing stations in Germany and France’; that ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was responsible for ’20 million dead’; and that the Apollo moon landings were a hoax. He has blogged that the figure of six million Holocaust dead was fabricated before World War II, and that the real figure is ‘somewhere in between half a million to a million’.

Another of those prominent in the Twitter campaign to ‘out’ me has been Alison Chabloz (aka ‘Autumn’s Here’, @AJCTmusic), whose anti-Semitic antics (performing the quenelle; publishing Holocaust-revisionist material; questioning the reality of the gas chambers) made the press last summer during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at which she performed. She is on record as tweeting that most Auschwitz victims died of typhus and that Anne Frank’s diary is a fabrication.

@p5yc40naut @ScottHNearing There’s scientific evidence showing that human gassings as described at Nuremberg are physically impossible.

— Autumn’s Here (@AJCTmusic) December 3, 2015

 

@p5yc40naut @ScottHNearing Höss changed his witness statement to include holes in roof of Auschwitz ‘gas chamber’, a post-war reconstruction

— Autumn’s Here (@AJCTmusic) December 3, 2015

 

@p5yc40naut @ScottHNearing In 70 years, no forensic study has proven existence of homicidal gas chambers. See #Leuchter, #Rudolf, #Fröhlich.

— Autumn’s Here (@AJCTmusic) December 3, 2015

 

@p5yc40naut @ScottHNearing Zyklon B used for live-saving disinfection purposes. Narrative evolved since this photo > pic.twitter.com/vffoDvjT9E

— Autumn’s Here (@AJCTmusic) December 3, 2015

As a genocide scholar, it is part of my job to upset people like Frith and Chabloz. I specialise in Bosnia and teach the history of the Holocaust and genocide. This year, I appeared in the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s annual commemorative programme, screened in Westminster and broadcast on BBC2, and wrote a post for its blog on the 20^th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. However, the intensity of the poisonous current that surrounds Frith can only be explained by reference to something else: Palestine. Frith is a committed ‘anti-Zionist’, and much of his tweeting and many of his followers are above all anti-Israel and ‘pro-Palestinian’ in nature, though most of them have about as much in common with genuine, committed friends of the Palestinians as a bag of Turkey Twizzlers have with actual live, flapping farmyard birds. They are radical left/right-wing fanatics inhabiting a bizarre world in which conspiracies involving Jews and capitalists are omnipresent. The immediate reason that Frith and his mob fixated on me was because Soupy One had published an article in which my name was tagged, and a none-too-bright Frith groupie – a teenager or not much older, with a Palestine-themed profile picture – mistook the tag for the name of the article author. And if you’re the sort of person who thinks the Rothschilds rule the world and Mossad did 9/11, then that counts as hard evidence for you. The groupie consequently launched a blog to ‘out’ me, and has apparently been trying to contact Kingston University to present it with the evidence.

This affair highlights the toxic subculture that has grown up around the movement for ‘Palestine solidarity’, in which the principled, genuine pro-Palestinian activists and the honourable cause of Palestinian independence itself have been increasingly swamped by crazies for whom the whole cause is simply a way of fighting imperialism, global capitalism and the (Jewish) rulers of the universe. For people who inhabit their dystopian fantasy world, launching witch-hunts against random bystanders is unproblematic. Yet their behaviour is also symptomatic of an activist culture in and around universities in which ‘offensive’ or politically incorrect views of all types are to be censored or screamed down, and rigorous debate and criticism stifled. In the US, Nicholas Christakis, master at Silliman College, Yale University, was screamed at by one of his students and told to resign after he defended the right of other students to wear ‘offensive’ Halloween costumes. Here in the UK, students at Cardiff University petitioned for eminent feminist Germaine Greer to be banned from giving a talk there, and the student officer at University College London banned anti-ISIS fighter Macer Gifford from giving a talk hosted by the UCLU Kurdish Society.

Frith is not the first person who has tried to censor my views by attacking my university. David N. Gibbs of the University of Arizona, author of a book on the former Yugoslavia that attributes the break up to an imperialist conspiracy and denies the Srebrenica genocide, sent a threatening, bogus complaint to my university after I published an extended review of his book, in which I thoroughly exposed its worthlessness as a piece of scholarship. Gibbs’s bogus complaint was a desperate effort to suppress my review, and bore some similarities with Frith’s – including even a gratuitous reference to his own Jewish background. Naturally, Kingston University dismissed Gibbs’s ‘complaint’, exonerated me of any wrongdoing and confirmed my academic conduct had been impeccable, and I subsequently refuted his arguments comprehensively on my blog, since which Gibbs has responded with hysterical published attacks on KU and threats to its senior management. Gibbs’s rejected, refuted complaint was republished by the youthful Frith groupie who has been harassing me.

However, the roots of Frith’s attempt to censor me do not lie wholly in the realm of the anti-establishment counter-culture. Soupy One, by his own admission, has no connection whatever to Kingston University, and the false rumour that he does originated with the right-wing, anti-Muslim pundit Douglas Murray. Murray was upset about Soupy One’s references to his less than condemnatory views of the English Defence League. Instead of attempting to refute by rational argument, Murray tweeted threats – he identified Soupy One as a KU staff member, and offered to inform on him to the university:

@InTheSoupAgain Do your employers at Kingston Uni know you spend your days trolling people anonymously? — Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) February 25, 2015

@KingstonUni Do you know you have an employee who spends his time on Twitter anonymously libelling strangers? Happy to help @InTheSoupAgain

— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) February 26, 2015

These tweets were then picked up by the Frith groupie, who reproduced them prominently. Murray has now been asked several times on Twitter to explain his claim that Soupy One was an employee of Kingston University, but has failed to do so. He has in the past come under strong criticism from at least two KU staff members – myself and the well known left-wing journalist Sunny Hundal. Murray is on record as stating: ‘mass immigration has altered our country completely. It has become a radically different place, and London has become a foreign country. In 23 of London’s 33 boroughs “white Britons” are now in a minority.’ He presumably views Kingston University, with one of the most ethnically diverse student bodies of any university in the UK, as part of that foreign country.

Murray may seem a strange source for anti-Zionists such as Frith and his circle to base their opinion on. As a hard-line supporter of Israel, he has compared Palestinian statehood to ISIS and made blanket accusations of anti-Semitism against anti-Israel protesters. Nevertheless, Murray is a fully paid-up member of the campus censorship league, if not its honorary president. He welcomed Southampton University’s decision earlier this year to cancel, in the face of protests, a conference questioning Israel’s right to exist, even calling for universities that host such conferences to lose their government funding. He has lamented the failure of the University of Cambridge to sack Muslim scholar Abdul Hakim Murad for holding homophobic views, and the failure of the University of Oxford to take action against scholar Tom Paulin, who apparently compared Israeli settlers to Nazis.

There is a lesson to be learned here: the intolerant fanatics of radical campus politics and the Palestine solidarity movement do not behave as they do in opposition to the establishment; rather, their sense of victimhood and entitlement feeds off mainstream establishment culture. In attempting to silence me via my employers, Frith and his circle of ‘rebels’ were simply following the example set by a tenured US professor (Gibbs) and a Spectator columnist (Murray). Frith even cc’d both Gibbs and Murray in his threatening email to me; I doubt either of them is in any way connected to him, but he presumably sought validation from them. Irrespective of their political views or status, these people all apparently share the belief that university administrations, far from acting as the guardians of the right to free speech of their staff and students, should rather be policing their staff members’ exercise of this right, and restraining them at the request of aggrieved outsiders.

If we are to preserve our universities as vibrant centres of intellectual life, we academics must stand and speak our minds, and refuse to be bullied by those who would prefer us to sit down and shut up. Because the more we pander to the bullies, the more we invite further attacks on our already endangered freedom of speech. And if we bow to bullies from the ranks of the ‘respectable’, it is only a matter of time before every Holocaust-denying fruitcake starts thinking they can dictate what we can or cannot say.

Update: It turns out that the basis for Charles Frith’s claim to be ‘Semitic’ is that he is half-Maltese, and that Malta is ‘a Semitic country’. The nonentity and egomaniac has written this post about himself, explaining this. I intend to publish below further examples of his vicious Jew-hatred as and when I come across them, in order to expose him in the eyes of the credulous pro-Palestinian activists who retweet him:

: Israel To Coordinate With Google, YouTube, To Censor Palestinian Videos Of Conflict pic.twitter.com/0d9xGODDRz

— Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) November 27, 2015

 

Rothschild-Zionist tea boy pic.twitter.com/hwDwCyUJ4E

— Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) December 2, 2015

 

It’s obnoxious observing @dannythefink milk the holocaust gravy train like a 6 million lottery payout pic.twitter.com/GusECBNzKx

— Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) January 26, 2016

 

Why Israel wants Britain to stay firmly inside the EU | The Jewish Chronicle https://t.co/GewkhwRBxr pic.twitter.com/kdfO8WqTPI

— Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) March 4, 2016

 

The case for arming Syrian rebels

“I’d prefer Assad to win.” Not his actual words, but that is the only conclusion to be derived from the suggestion of Boris Johnson, the London mayor, that arming the Syrian opposition would lead to British weapons in the hands of “al-Qaida-affiliated thugs”. With 93,000 of Syria’s citizens dead, a kill rate in the country higher than in post-invasion Iraq, and one of the world’s most murderous and tyrannical regimes poised to win a historic victory thanks to western inaction, Johnson can only fret about hypothetical dangers.

In fact, it is the west’s failure militarily to support the Syrian National Coalition and its principal military counterpart, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), that is strengthening the hand of al-Qaida in Syria.

Continue reading at The Guardian, where this article was published on 18 June.

If Miliband continues to dither on Syria, he may go down in history as Labour’s John Major

According to the dictum attributed to Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Yet evil will triumph even more easily if good men help the evil-doers. In the Syrian civil war, with more than 80,000 dead and no end in sight, that is what the European Union has been doing, by upholding an arms embargo on the supply of weapons to all sides.

This in practice assists Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship; freezing in place its military superiority over the poorly armed Free Syrian Army, and enabling the dictatorship better to massacre its own citizens. FSA soldiers, demoralized by their shortage of arms, have been responding by defecting to the relatively well-equipped Islamist militia Jabhat al-Nusra, whose leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani had pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, Iran systematically violates the arms embargo by sending arms to its Syrian ally.

Continue reading at Left Foot Forward

Labour’s shameful links with the anti-immigration right

The right-wing pundit Douglas Murray recently wrote:

‘To study the results of the latest census is to stare at one unalterable conclusion: mass immigration has altered our country completely. It has become a radically different place, and London has become a foreign country. In 23 of London’s 33 boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority…

We long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons can do is to remain silent about the change in their country. Ignored for a generation, they are expected to get on, silently but happily, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and respecting the loss of their country. “Get over it. It’s nothing new. You’re terrible. You’re nothing”.

For what it is worth, it seems to me that the vindictiveness with which the concerns of white British people, and the white working and middle class in particular, have been met by politicians and pundits alike is a phenomenon in need of serious and swift attention.’

Such words, one might expect, should place their author beyond the pale of respectable political opinion, in the sole company of UKIP and the rest of the fringe anti-immigration right.

Continue reading at Left Foot Forward

Montenegrins, Serbs and anti-fascists

Review of Bato Tomasevic, Life and Death in the Balkans: A family saga in a century of conflict, Hurst and Company, London, 2008

The former Yugoslav lands have produced an extraordinarily rich body of autobiographical and eyewitness literature. So much so, that this has even somewhat squeezed out the academic literature. Rather too many readers seeking an introduction to the region have begun with Rebecca West’s dreadful, rambling travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Rather too many English-language authors writing about Yugoslavia in World War II have relied too heavily on a small number of memoirs and diaries, so well worn from repeated use that they have virtually dissolved into general knowledge: in particular, the memoirs of Milovan Djilas and the war diaries of Vladimir Dedijer. Journalistic accounts still largely dominate the literature on the 1990s Bosnian war. For all that, memoirs can provide an accessible and vivid introduction to the region – provided they are taken with a pinch of salt. The English-language reader is, in fact, limited to the tip of the iceberg; the vast body of memoir literature available only in the former-Yugoslav languages comprises a goldmine for the historian.

Bato Tomasevich’s autobiography and family saga, Life and death in the Balkans, is rather special, in that the Montenegrin author was just old enough to remember the 1930s (his earliest memory is of the assassination of Yugoslavia’s King Aleksandar in 1934), fought and was wounded as a Partisan in World War II, was a relatively well-connected member of the Yugoslav establishment in the Communist era, played a minor, though not wholly negligible role in the drama of Yugoslavia’s break-up, and was an observer of the wars of the 1990s – all the way up to the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Tomasevic does not provide much in the way of grand analysis, or give the reader any greater insight into any of these episodes at the all-Yugoslav level. But in telling the story of a Montenegrin individual and his family, the author throws much light on the Montenegrin identity, relationship to Serbia and experience within Yugoslavia – particularly as regards the period up to 1945.

Nebojsa ‘Bato’ Tomasevic’s father Petar was raised on the heroic tales of his Montenegrin forebears’ battles with the Ottomans. A veteran of the First Balkan and First World Wars, he supported Montenegro’s union with Serbia in 1918. After that, fired by romantic Serb-nationalist ideals, he settled in newly reconquered Kosovo as a colonist, where he became a police officer. Despite this, Petar strove to build good relations with the local Albanians, even learning some Albanian and becoming blood-brother to an Albanian village headman. This policy was not well received by other members of Yugoslav officialdom in Kosovo, which sanctioned oppressive and discriminatory treatment of the Albanian population – which Bato describes.

Bato attributes his father’s exile from Kosovo to his friendly policy toward Albanians, as well as to his readiness to welcome into his home the relatives of a Communist killed by the Belgrade police. The book provides an insight into the nature of the early Communist movement; the Communists in interwar Yugoslavia were often the children of members of the national or local elite. Thus, the author recounts how his father, as a deputy police chief in the historic Montenegrin capital of Cetinje, where he had been relocated, confronted with his officers a Communist-led student demonstration, among whose leaders was his own daughter, the author’s older sister Stana: ‘The police were carrying truncheons, the students their schoolbags. When the two advancing columns met, Father raised his truncheon and struck his daughter. This was the signal for the rest of the police to lay into the students.’ (p. 116).

Nevertheless, as Bato tells the story, Petar and Stana ended up on the same side following the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia in April 1941 – of those who rejected collaboration with the occupier. A considerable portion of the book is devoted to Bato’s memoirs of World War II, providing the reader with an insight into the oft-neglected history of Axis-occupied Montenegro. Although Petar had been a supporter of Montenegro’s unification with Serbia in 1918, his opposition to collaboration marked him out from the Chetniks – the principal Serb-nationalist armed movement in occupied Yugoslavia. The author describes in some detail Chetnik collaboration with the occupiers: ‘In all parts of Montenegro, including Cetinje, units of Chetniks were formed as part of Draza Mihajlovic’s [sic] movement. These were armed by the Italians and sent to fight the Partisans.’ (p. 177)

Bato’s family supported the Partisans; his brother Dusko survived their legendary battle with the Germans at Drvar in May 1944, only to be subsequently killed by the Chetniks. Stana was a prominent Communist, and Bato describes how he joined the Partisans by accident, when he tried to visit her on Partisan territory and was wrongly assumed to have come to volunteer – a misunderstanding he was too embarrassed to correct. Bato nevertheless entered the movement enthusiastically, but his memoirs are far from whitewashing the Partisans’ record, and he describes their execution of the Communists’ political opponents, not to mention the atrocities of their Soviet allies. As he recalls one fellow Partisan telling him: ‘Russians are good comrades, and when it comes to fighting no worse than Montenegrins, but they’ll drink anything that’s not water. Groups of them wander around at night and go into houses, especially out-of-the-way farms, looking for wine and brandy, and raping any woman in sight. Nothing is sacred to them. They don’t seem to care we’re allies. The peasants have started keeping guard and shooting any Russians that try to enter their houses. You can imagine what problems this causes !’ (pp. 341-342)

Even under the post-war Communist regime, the ties of kinship and locality counted for much. Bato recalls how he secured a coveted place to study English at the Philosophy Faculty in Belgrade, solely because he bumped into an old Montenegrin friend who worked as a clerk at that institution, and who pushed his application to the top of the pile. Bato eventually secured an enviable job in the Yugoslav diplomatic service in the UK. His standing with the regime benefited from the fact that his sister Stana was a high-ranking functionary upon whom Tito himself looked favourably. He claims Stana was made Ambassador to Norway on Tito’s personal initiative, and that when she created a stir by marrying a Norwegian man, Tito invited the couple to be his personal guests at his Adriatic retreat at Brioni, thereby ensuring her status and career did not suffer.

Bato himself, however, was not so influential that he could get away with marrying a foreigner; his marriage to an Englishwoman called Madge Phillips resulted in the swift termination of his diplomatic career. But he remained a well connected individual in the Communist regime, which ensured that he continued to play a significant role in Yugoslav affairs. Thanks both to his connections and standing and to sheer luck, he came into personal contact with various interesting historical figures, and not just Yugoslavs. They included the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha, British envoy to Tito’s headquarters Fitzroy Maclean, former Yugoslav Crown Prince Djordje Karadjordjevic and British Labour politicians Denis Healey and Hugh Gaitskell. He was a passenger on the plane that crashed at Munich in February 1958, carrying home Bobby Charlton and other members of the Manchester United football team following a European Cup match in Belgrade. But perhaps the most curious personal encounter of the book was Bato’s witnessing of the death by suicide of Milan Nedic, the former leader of the Serbian Nazi-puppet regime.

In the final section of the book, Bato recounts his experiences during the break-up of Yugoslavia and Wars of Yugoslav Succession. Following the publication of sections of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in September 1986, he recalls the heated arguments he would have with old Serbian friends: ‘Instead of a modern Yugoslavia, many of them now wanted a Greater Serbia.’ (p. 452) He is forthright in describing the role of the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic in destroying Yugoslavia and promoting Serbian nationalistic hatred, though he has harsh words too for the Croatian regime of Franjo Tudjman. Appointed in 1990 director of the Federal TV station Yutel at the initiative of Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante Markovic, Bato attempted to promote Markovic’s vision of a united Yugoslavia, but was ultimately forced to flee Belgrade to escape prosecution by the Milosevic regime: ‘Serbian nationalists, it seemed, wanted to get rid of all those who in any way, however slight, obstructed the creation of their “Greater Serbia”.’ (p. 468)

Bato’s judgement on the War of Yugoslav Succession was that ‘The Partisans had now withdrawn before the onslaught of nationalism, and the resurrected Chetniks and Ustashas wanted to renew the war and, if possible, win the battles they had lost when fighting on the side of Hitler. They thought it was still not too late to achieve their goals of a greater Serbia and greater Croatia by means of violence and plunder, ethnic cleansing and concentration camps.’ (p. 483). He has no hesitation in identifying the policy waged by the Serb and Croat forces against the Bosnian Muslims as one of ‘genocide’ (p. 486).

Bato Tomasevic was raised on stories of his family’s and country’s battles with the Turks; his father was a Serb nationalist. Yet his family’s story, as he tells it, is one in which the politics of national chauvinism are consistently rejected: from the anti-Albanian racism of the interwar Yugoslav administration, through the Chetnik movement of World War II, up to the Memorandum of SANU, the regimes of Milosevic and Tudjman and the genocide of the Bosniaks. When so many choose to obfuscate the Yugoslav story, having it presented so straightforwardly by an eyewitness from such a background is a breath of fresh air.

Harry’s Place at the crossroads: Anti-elitism and the ‘white working class’

A rather incoherent and highly abusive personal attack against me has been posted by Graham Lloyd (‘Graham’) on Harry’s Place. Lloyd claims – without providing any evidence and solely on the basis of conjecture – that my issues with him and with Harry’s Place amount to a personal vendetta. This is not true. I hope anyone reading the post below will understand the real issues involved.

A great struggle is brewing all over Europe and beyond. On the one side stands the liberal order and its defenders, representing the values of secularism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, pluralism and respect for human rights. On the other stands the forces of reaction, which itself is composed of two rival but essentially similar wings. Extremist Muslims (an unrepresentative minority among the Muslim communities of the democratic West) and certain fellow travellers on the extreme Left represent one wing of the anti-liberal reaction, and assault the liberal order under the banner of anti-Semitism (or ‘anti-Zionism’), anti-Westernism, anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism.

But it is the other wing that is the Western liberal order’s more dangerous enemy – if only because non-Muslims vastly outnumber Muslims, so there is a much larger constituency for this current of reaction to draw from. This current represents the white nativist reaction against the liberal order: anti-cosmopolitan, anti-EU, often anti-secular, but above all extremely nationalist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant. It is on the basis of hostility to Islam and to immigration that the new far-right is mounting its assault on liberal values and the Western liberal world.

The new far-right is populist; it employs the language of the gutter and upholds the morality of the mob. Anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant prejudice are merely the means by which it seeks to attack the liberal order, but the real target is the liberal order itself. Borrowing from the lexicon of the radical left, it speaks in the name of the ‘people’ and the ‘working class’ – or more revealingly, of the ‘white working class’, whose values it claims to be defending from a decadent liberal elite. It presents anti-racism, religious tolerance and political correctness as elitist values, against which it asserts its own form of moral relativism: it champions racism and Islamophobia among the native white majority – sometimes termed euphemistically the ‘white working class’ – as expressions of a healthy aversion to liberal elites that allegedly are soft on Muslims and allegedly favour immigrants over natives. It repackages the far-right parties’ vulgar, racist voters as noble rebels against multiculturalism.

Into this equation we now bring the Eustonite or ‘Decent’ Left. This political current of leftists and liberals arose in opposition to the left-liberal mainstream’s betrayal of liberal values – a betrayal manifested variously in apologias for Islamist terrorism, sympathy for dictators and ethnic-cleansers and flirtation with anti-Semitism. There is a superficial confluence between the Decent Left and the new far right, in that both arose as critiques of the Western liberal mainstream. But these two critiques are opposites, for whereas the Decent Left criticises the liberal mainstream because it doesn’t uphold liberal values properly, the new far right attacks the liberal mainstream because it does uphold liberal values. The Decent Left wants a better, tougher liberalism; the new far right opposes liberalism altogether.

Nevertheless, the blog Harry’s Place provides a forum that brings the two currents of opposition to the left-liberal mainstream together. Harry’s Place bloggers are Eustonite or ‘Decent’ left-wingers, and focus in particular on exposing and opposing radical Islam and human rights abuses in the Islamic world (and elsewhere), and their Western left-wing apologists. However, the comments boxes of this blog attract members of both groups opposing the liberal mainstream: the Decent Left and the new far right. And although the two groups are in principle antithetical, there is a very real danger that this will be forgotten and that a synthesis will be formed, in which case Harry’s Place will have acted as incubator for a monster.

Apart from their common hostility to the liberal mainstream and to Islamists (or to Muslims in general, as the case may be), the Decent Left and the new far right have one other uniting factor: some members of both currents sometimes speak in the language of class, or champion the ‘working class’. But unlike for the traditional left, in this case the language of class is used not to uphold social justice, but on the contrary, to justify ignorance, vulgarity, racism and xenophobia among the white majority, now repackaged as the ‘white working class’. In a new manifestation of moral relativism, any objection to white racism or Islamophobia can be portrayed as elitist anti-working-class snobbery. Just as some will condemn as ‘Islamophobic’ any criticism of Muslim anti-Semitism or misogyny, so others will condemn as ‘elitist’ any criticism of white-working-class racism.

Harry’s Place is a blog in which comments have been posted and left undeleted by the moderators, calling for ships carrying illegal immigrants to Britain to be torpedoed, or equating ordinary Muslims with Nazis, or calling for all Palestinians to be expelled from the West Bank. Leaving such comments undeleted may be justified on the grounds of freedom of speech, but I have come reluctantly to believe that one or two of the HP bloggers are somewhat unwilling to fall out with the far-right commenters who frequent the blog – and by ‘far right’ I don’t mean the actual BNP, but the Muslim-hating, immigrant-hating bigots who are one step away from it.

I used to write guest posts for Harry’s Place, and I frequently tried to tackle the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant bigots who frequent its comments boxes, but I found myself repeatedly undermined by some of the regular HP groupies, and by one or two of the bloggers themselves. In the debate on a splendid guest post by Andrew Murphy concerning Greek neo-Nazis and their hostility to Muslims and immigrants, the greater number of comments were expressing sympathy for the neo-Nazis on an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant basis. I struck out at the Nazi sympathisers, and in doing so earned my very own far-right stalker, in the form of a certain ‘Mettaculture’. This individual believes that immigrants add nothing to British culture; that they are in fact destroying British culture and working-class communities; and that bigotry is a proud part of our national heritage. In an earlier attack on me, he said that as someone called ‘Attila’, I should go back to Mongolia. He also objected to my use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ and to my talk of moderate Muslims. Apparently affronted by my vocal support for immigration and my assault on the anti-immigrant bigots on the thread about Greek neo-Nazis, he then proceeded to attack me whenever I appeared at Harry’s Place, posting increasingly vicious and vulgar strings of personal abuse about me – attacking my skin colour, class background, name, etc. – descending at times to threats of violence, libel action and contacting my employers.

The reason for this particular thug’s obsession with attacking me was, I believe, that I was trying to steer Harry’s Place away from the influence of the nativist-populist, ethno-chauvinist, anti-elitist champions of the ‘white working class’ – such as himself – and to break the embryonic alliance between elements of the Decent Left and the anti-immigration far right (Mettaculture himself is a product of this synthesis – a self-declared ‘socialist’ and ‘communitarian’ who doesn’t like immigration or Muslims).

However, the problem for me was not so much that I had attracted this particular stalker – I’ve had others, and it’s something you have to put up with if you tackle controversial subjects on the internet. The real problem was that certain HP bloggers, above all Graham Lloyd (‘Graham’), but also Andrew Ward (‘Wardytron’) would step in against me each and every time I tried to defend myself against him. Though Graham would never challenge any of Mettaculture’s threats and abuse, he would invariably present my efforts at self-defence as constituting an offence equivalent to the threats and abuse themselves – though I had never once initiated any of the exchanges with Mettaculture; never been the first to use strong language; never threatened him.

The final straw for me was when Harry’s Place deleted my response to one of Graham’s snide remarks, but left Graham’s remark standing. It was completely clear to me then that any further cooperation with Harry’s Place was impossible, as I was simply being prevented from commenting freely, or from defending myself.

Wardytron is someone who believes people who vote BNP are not racist, but merely expressing a righteous and justified opposition to political correctness, and that the solution to the BNP problem is to reduce immigration. Graham, meanwhile, is someone who regularly uses ‘middle class’ as a term of abuse to bully into submission anyone who disagrees with him (while claiming himself to be ‘working class’); he uses terms like ‘rancid little middle class dickheads’. He also has a particularly nasty line in personal abuse, and has called Richard ‘Lenin’ Seymour ‘fat’ and Daniel Davies of Aaronovitch Watch ‘ginger’. When Laurie Penny was called a ‘silly cow’ on an HP thread, and complained at this use of sexist language, another HP poster claimed that using terms like ‘silly cow’ was simply the way some working-class people spoke, and that Penny’s objection to the term was an expression of her middle-class inability to understand the English working-class. Graham agrees; he described her as a ‘silly little girl’ and a ‘rather stupid spoilt little girl’ (and as plenty more besides – see update), and has more recently claimed that ‘I don’t care about someone being called a silly cow – that was rather the argument – that it wasn’t any big insult in a working-class area but cultural imperialists wanted it to be one everywhere.’ So, another moral-relativist defence of the use of sexist language, on the grounds that it’s ‘working class’, and that to say otherwise is an expression of ‘cultural imperialism’ ! Some may find Graham’s new incarnation as an anti-imperialist rather amusing.

I recently called Graham to account for his frequent resort to personal abuse; he responds by claiming my ‘prime motivation is to defend the rights of the already privileged in society’. We can expect more of this kind of non sequitur in the future, from him and others like him. Any attempt to speak out in defence of immigrants and Muslims; to condemn racism and sexism among the white majority; or to uphold civilised values generally against the ethics of the lynch mob and the language of the gutter, will invariably be painted as an expression of elitism. We had better prepare ourselves.

Update: I have managed to locate the texts of the two HP comments threads about Penny (‘Penny Shares’ and ‘Penny Dreadful’), and it appears that Graham is right on one point: he did not call Penny a ‘silly cow’. These are some of the things he did say about her:

‘Oh well looks like a silly little girl demanded the right not to be called a silly little girl, stamped her feet a bit and ended up looking more like a silly little girl than ever.’

‘I’d be less disposed to sneer not at someone’s class but rather at the idiots that turned up in vast numbers to defend this rather stupid spoilt little girl when they realised how ridiculous her article was…’

‘Speaking personally, I would never call Judy or Amie a “silly cow” (however silly they may get) because they have both earned my respect. I feel no such problem with calling someone that I have never seen before such a name.’

[In response to the following comment: ‘As is Marcus, the sole basis of whose argument seems to be “it’s alright to call people silly cows round my way, so quit complaining”. It’s the pub misogynist line. We’re close to “only having a laugh love” and then on to “stuck up bitch”.’]

‘This is all a bit silly but even to get the analogy to hold water you would have to concede that “the pub misogynist” would only be behaving that way because a silly little middle class girl flounced into the bar and called him a racist.’

‘This Penny is also an absolute out and out racist.’

‘Couldn’t she have asked daddy to buy her a newspaper to edit ?’

‘Spoilt little girl seems to me to be a simple description which does exactly what it says on the tin.’

‘I will criticise this spoilt little girl in any way I want.’

So, yes, Graham, I stand corrected: I concede your point that you did not call Penny a ‘silly cow’, and apologise for suggesting that you did and for any hurt and distress that my unwarranted accusation may have caused you (though I can’t help noticing that you didn’t exactly volunteer to make clear what you did say about her; if you had done so, the misunderstanding might have been cleared up a bit sooner).

HP has rather hastily closed the comments on Graham’s post, so I cannot say any of this there.

The text of my original post has been updated accordingly.

 

The man who wasn’t really all that left-wing

I love crime fiction, am very interested in the Nordic world and have a background in far-left politics, so I have rather naturally recently finished reading the now-legendary Millenium Trilogy by the tragically deceased Swedish author Stieg Larsson. These books have been admirably reviewed many times, including by comrades such as Nick Cohen, Max Dunbar and Christopher Hitchens, so you probably know the basic facts about them already. Their heroes are the maverick investigative journalist Mikael ‘Kalle’ Blomkvist (Larsson’s alter ego) and the emotionally damaged computer wizard Lisbeth Salander, whose flawed but interesting character accounts for much of the books’ appeal.

Larsson had been a supporter of the Socialist Party, formerly the Communist Workers League – the Swedish section of the Trotskyist Fourth International – and an editor of its journal Fjärde internationalen. As several of his reviewers have pointed out, his passionate political activism informed his fiction. Interesting then, that the political flavour of the novels should be liberal or social democratic rather than radical socialist. The villains – rapists, paedophiles, sex traffickers and corrupt secret-policemen and businessmen – are ones liberals will have no trouble booing, while the heroes enjoy the support of many honourable members of the establishment.

Violent misogynists feature prominently in all three books. Swedish fascists – against whom Larsson spent a large part of his life crusading – feature prominently in the first book, ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. Another of the principal villains of this book is the capitalist Hans-Erik Wennerstroem, but he is evil because he is corrupt and involved in criminal activities; other capitalists and members of the bourgeoisie are sympathetically portrayed. In the second book, ‘The Girl who Played with Fire’, the principal villains are sex traffickers plus members of the establishment who use their services, while in the third, ‘The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ nest’, they are rogue elements within the Swedish intelligence services.

In all three books, the emphasis is on corrupt elements within the existing order – such as businessmen and policemen who abuse sex-slaves, or secret policemen whose Cold Warrior fanaticism leads them to stray outside the law – rather than on any inherent evil on the part of the existing order itself. Meanwhile, these corrupt elements are more than balanced by the good elements that represent the norm. Indeed, whereas the first two novels are gripping thrillers, the third is a somewhat dull, plodding affair – in large part because there are so many noble, principled policemen and secret agents who join Blomkvist’s and Salander’s struggle against their corrupt colleagues that it never really seems like a fair fight. The villains are old, tired, outnumbered, incompetent, self-doubting and internally divided. The heroes, on the other hand, are not only brave, principled, intelligent and altogether brilliant, but seem to have on their side the cream of the Swedish security establishment and eventually even the Swedish prime-minister and defence minister themselves.

‘The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest’ is, in fact, very much in the Hollywood liberal mould: there are corrupt elements within the system, but they are unrepresentative of the system as a whole which is fundamentally good; once it learns of their activities, the good majority ultimately defeats the rogue elements, so the system polices itself. Of course the good policemen need the help of intrepid independent investigators, but this partnership has been a staple of crime fiction since Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. So over-determined is the ultimate victory of good over evil; so much is the reader spared any genuine suspense, uncertainty as to the outcome or trauma on behalf of the heroes; that ‘The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest’ achieves a truly Hollywood level of nauseating goody-goodiness.

Meanwhile, there is next to nothing in the Millenium books about the class struggle or the fight to emancipate the proletariat or the poor. I don’t mean this as a criticism – it is no doubt a reflection of the fact that such issues are simply not very important in egalitarian Sweden today. Larsson’s work is politically sympathetic because, despite his passion and his Trotskyist background, he is no dogmatist. Instead of bothering with irrelevant old Marxist shibboleths, he focuses on issues that really are of central importance for progressive politics in Western Europe today. Above all, on the issue of misogyny.

The most interesting feature of the books is the character of Salander, an innocent woman who manages to inspire pathological hostility in a whole string of nasty men. She does so because she manages to hit so many male chauvinist buttons. She is physically small and apparently weak and vulnerable, yet colourful and exotic; she is socially awkward and aloof, but refuses to be polite or deferential to those more senior than herself; she is far from being classically beautiful, but is weirdly and disturbingly sexually attractive; and, of course, she is sexually promiscuous and bisexual, but does not roll over for many of the men who desire her. Unsurprising, therefore, that so many men hate her; Larsson has brilliantly captured the way in which a certain type of woman jars and unsettles a certain type of man.

If the books are a bit saccharine in some other respects, their portrayal of the pathology of woman-hatred is genuinely disturbing. Larsson has written a study in misogyny that has reached an audience whose size most Trotskyist pamphleteers could only dream of – his books have sold 27 million copies, according to The Economist. He may have died prematurely at the age of only fifty, but if only a portion of his readers understand his message, his life as an activist will not have been in vain.