In Agatha Christie’s classic crime novel the ABC Murders, the detective Hercule Poirot comes up with the following formulation: “When do you notice a pin least? When it is in a pin cushion. When do you notice a murder least? When it is one of a series of related murders.” I would like to extend Poirot’s thinking to “When do you notice an extremely pernicious and dangerous conspiracy theory least? When it is set in a two hour film amongst many other conspiracy theories.”

Over the last year or so a number of people have told me that I should watch the film Zeitgeist: The Movie. All of these people have been lefties or liberals, and each tells me that the film supplies a good exposé of power in the modern world. These people have been from a wide range of backgrounds and ages, some of them environmentalists, some of them unionists, some of them socialists, some British, some American. The film has achieved massive viewing figures globally, with over 3,000,000 people having watched it on Youtube, and many more on DVD or Google Video. And of all of these people who have recommended the film to me, none has noticed its reliance on the old myth of the “world Jewish conspiracy”.

In this article I hope to expose the film’s relationship to older anti-Semitic texts and myths, and look more closely at how these theories are made to look left-wing or liberal. I wish to explain why this film has become so attractive to people who otherwise are engaged in good struggles against capitalism, against war, and to save the environment. I am particularly interested in the relationship between the film and a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with its use of other anti-Semitic tropes that have existed throughout modernity.

Zeitgeist: The Movie is split into three parts: The first focuses on the relationship between astrological symbology and the story of Jesus; the second on “the truth about 9/11″; and the third is about international finance. In all honesty the first part is neither here nor there. The argument is that Christianity is not original in its particular form of mythology, and instead is a reconfiguration of older myths focusing on sun gods. Whether or not we take this argument to be true has very little impact on how we understand modern society. The second section of the film expounds a theory that 9/11 was an inside job, committed by the American state. Many people do believe this, and much of the information is inaccessible, but the argument that I would like to make is that these two conspiracy theories are in many ways inconsequential to the overall meaning of the film. Rather they are used as a smoke screen to justify the dissemination of anti-Semitic material in the final section of the film.

What is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
The Protocols is a book first published by around the turn of the last century in Russia. It is a fraudulent and fictional document made to read as if written by Jews intent on ruling the world. It suggests that the Jewish people plan on world domination through a process of controlling governments, controlling the media, controlling banks, and swindling the populace at large. The claim is that Jews wish to enslave the world by creating a “one world government.” Of course the text is deeply anti-Semitic, and has been shown numerous times to be a forgery, but has been used consistently throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to justify atrocities committed against Jews. Furthermore it remains popular in parts of the world, and amongst certain right-wing and fascist organisations.

The relationship between two texts
It is easy enough to say that there is a large cross-over of content between Zeitgeist and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by plucking a few choice quotes. For example, where Zeitgeist says, “International bankers now have a streamlined machine to expand their personal ambitions”, The Protocols says “the wheels of the machine of all the states are moved by the force of the engine, which is in our [the Jews'] hands, and the engine of the machinery of our states is Gold .” But I would suggest that this sort of critique does not go far enough, rather I would like to show that the entire argument of the third section of the film has been lifted from The Protocols. It is the same argument, often in slightly altered language, and as such is just as anti-Semitic. I will focus on five particular aspects: The one world government; the use of war; manipulation of the populace; the focus on gold and money; and the idea of an all-powerful secret cabal.

The One World Government
One of the great fears of the conspiracy theorists is a one world government. This point is made explicitly towards the end of Zeitgeist in a discussion of a North American Union, an Asian Union, the European Union, and an African Union. And finally, they say “when the time is right they will merge together forming the final stages of a plan these men have been working on for over 60 years: a one world government… One bank, one army, one centre of power.” This argument is particularly related to he opening of Protocol 3 in which we read, “Today I may tell you that our [the Jews'] goal is now only a few steps off. There remains but a small space to cross of the long path we have trodden before the cycle of the Symbolic Snake, by which we symbolise our people, will be completed. When this ring closes, all the States of Europe will be locked into its coil as in a powerful vice.” The Protocols go on in Protocol 5, “by all these means we shall so wear down the goyim (non-Jews) that they will be compelled to offer us international power of a nature that will enable us to absorb all the State forces of the world and to form a Super-Government.”

The use of war
There is a section in the film in which it is claimed that the justifications for America going into a number of world wars were orchestrated by “men behind the government.” We are told that the sinking of the Lusitania was planned, that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident never happened, that Pearl Harbour was known about well in advance, and of course that 9/11 was an inside job. We are told that both sides of conflicts have been funded by the same “international bankers.” This section of the film is lifted directly from Protocol 7, which reads, “Throughout all of Europe, and by means of relations in Europe, in other continents also, we must create ferments, discords, and hostility. Therein we gain a double advantage. In the first place we keep in check all countries, for they well know that we have the power whenever we like to create disorders and to restore order… We must be in a position to respond to every act of opposition by war with the neighbours of that country which dares to oppose us: but if these neighbours should also venture to stand collectively against us, then we must offer resistance by universal war.”

I am not going to say here that wars haven’t been entered into cynically, because of course they have, and I am also not saying that many wars should not be opposed, because again in many cases they should. The point though, is that the structure of this particular argument about war is based on the idea of Jews running the world, and should thus be thrown out.

Manipulating the populace
There are two branches to classic Jewish conspiracy theory thought about how the people are made stupid and swindled. The first, and in fact the one that has been most significant in the history of Jewish conspiracy theories, is the idea of Jews being in charge of the media. The second, which has become less widely used but still exists in Zeitgeist: The Movie is the idea of Jewish control of the education system to make it ineffective. The issue of Jewish control of the media is covered in Protocol 12 in which it is written, “Not a single announcement will reach the public without our control. Even now this is being attained by us inasmuch as all news items are received by a few agencies in whose offices they are focused from all parts of the world. These agencies will then be already entirely ours (the Jews’) and will give publicity only to what we dictate to them.” And in Protocol 13, “We further distract them [the non-Jews] with amusements, games, pastimes, passions, people’s palaces… Soon we shall begin through the press to propose competitions in art, in sport of all kinds. These interests will finally distract their minds from questions in which we should find ourselves compelled to oppose them.” In Zeitgeist identical issues are covered throughout but in particular there is discussion of a “culture entirely saturated by mass media entertainments.” We are told that the same people behind the planned takeover of society are “behind the mainstream media.”

In both Zeitgeist and The Protocols we see some discussion of the education system. In Zeitgeist we are told about the “downward slide of the US education system” and that “They [the government] do not want your children to be educated.” Completely unsurprisingly the same argument is made in Protocol 16: “When we are in power we shall remove every kind of disturbing subject from the course of education and shall make out of the youth obedient children of authority.” The narrator of Zeitgeist says, “the last thing the men behind the curtain want is a conscious, informed public”, echoing the sentiment from Protocol 5 that “there is nothing more dangerous to us (the Jews) than personal initiative.”

The focus on gold or money: the federal reserve, and Jewish usury
Both The Protocols (particularly Protocols 21 and 22) and Zeitgeist focus heavily on issues regarding money or gold. Both offer the theory that the problems of society are caused by money and systems of money being controlled by a small group of people of questionable morals. What is important here is the focus is on money rather than on capital or production. Instead of offering critical perspectives on the structures within society that cause oppression and poverty, the general view is society as it stands is benevolent and this benevolence is subverted by problems in the sphere of circulation.

Over the centuries, going back as far as the expulsion of the Jews from Britain in 1290, the charge of usury has been levelled against the Jews for anti-Semitic purposes. Zeitgeist says of the federal income tax, “roughly 25% of the average worker’s income is taken via this tax, and guess where that money goes? It goes to pay the interest on the currency being produced by the Federal Reserve Bank. The money you make working for almost three months out of the years goes almost literally into the pockets of the international bankers.” Again, for the sake of trying not to appear as racist as they really are, the word Jew is replaced with “international bankers.” This is once again a restatement of an anti-Semitic myth. Just as in all of these examples, the arguments here are lifted from older anti-Semitic theories. They are not offering an explanation of world or national political economic systems, rather they exist solely to foster an attitude of hatred to a certain pre-defined section of society.

A secretive cabal?
Ultimately, the argument that is being made throughout Zeitgeist is that the world is being controlled by a small secret society of individuals, and in the context of the history of conspiracy theories, they are talking about the Jews. When we are told by the film about meetings of these “international bankers” that are “secretive and concealed from public view”, discussions about “an accelerated agenda by the ruthless elite”, or “people behind the government” they are breathing new life into an old racist myth that we must try to do away with.

There is an insistence throughout conspiracy theories that someone or some group of people are personally responsible for all of the ills of the world, and this is very much related to anti-Semitism throughout modernity. For hundreds of years, Jews have been the officially sanctioned scapegoat of capitalism. Where systems of production have impoverished people, the Jews have been blamed; where people have felt taxes are unfair, the Jews have been blamed; where people have felt alienated by the structures of society, they have been told that they are in fact alienated because they are not part of secret meetings of Jews. Ultimately these theories lead us away from a critique of capitalism. Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek makes exactly this point with reference to Wagner’s anti-Semitism when he writes “He needs a Jew: so that, first, modernity – this abstract impersonal process – is given a human face, is identified with a concrete, palpable feature; then, in a second move, by rejecting the Jew which gives full body to all that is disintegrated in modernity, we can retain its advantages. In short, anti-Semitism does not stand for anti-modernism as such, but an attempt at combining modernity with social corporatism which is characteristic of conservative revolutionaries.”

Who was Senator Louis McFadden?
Louis McFadden, who is quoted at length in Zeitgeist, was a senator in the US in the first part of the twentieth century. He also happened to be a serious anti-Semite, and came out with lines such as, “in the United States today, the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money.” He is quoted twice in the film saying the following: “A world banking system was being set up here… a superstate controlled by international bankers acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure…” and “It was a carefully contrived occurrence. International bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair so they might emerge rulers of us all.” Within the context of McFadden’s world view, he is using “international bankers” as an epithet for Jews. What is notable is that the makers of Zeitgeist seem keen to omit this context, to suggest that McFadden is simply offering a critique of capitalism. The fact is that within conspiracy theories the labelling of Jews as “international bankers” and “international finance capital” is a common trope. These quotes would have been understood at the time, and is still understood by many now, to be anti-Semitic gestures.

The Case of Jeremiah Duggan, and the truth about Lyndon LaRouche
Another rather shady character who appears in Zeitgeist is American political activist Lyndon LaRouche. I felt I should include the following story as anecdotal evidence of quite how dangerous these people can be:

Jeremiah Duggan was a British Student at the Sorbonne who died in 2003 in extremely suspicious circumstances. In the months leading up to his death, Duggan had become involved in what he believed to be an anti-war organisation. In fact he had become entangled with a set of political organisations headed up by American political activist Lyndon LaRouche. In March that year, Duggan attended a conference of these organisations at the Schiller Institute (a site owned by LaRouche’s movement) in Wiesbaden, Germany. During the course of meetings Duggan revealed himself to be Jewish, and yet in such meetings of LaRouche’s movement, Jews are blamed for starting the war, reanimating the old conspiracy myths about the Jews encouraging wars as they aid social control. He said in his keynote address to the conference, “This plot to launch a new world war has been intellectually influenced by people who, like Hitler, admire Nietzsche, but “being Jewish, they couldn’t qualify for Nazi Party leadership, even though their fascism was absolutely pure! As extreme as Hitler! They sent them to the United States.[…] Who’s behind it? . . . The independent central-banking-system crowd, the slime-mold. The financier interests.”

At around 5am, after Duggan had revealed his Jewish identity at the conference, he phoned his mother. He said, “Mum, I’m in … big trouble … You know this Nouvelle Solidarité? ..” He said, “I can’t do this” … I want out.” And at that point the phone was cut. And then it rang back again almost immediately. … And then the first thing that he said that time was, “Mum, I’m frightened.” She realized he was in such danger that she said to him, “I love you.” And then he said, “I want to see you now.” She said, “well, where are you, Jerry?” And he said, “Wiesbaden.” And she said, “How do you spell it?” And he said, “W I E S.” And then the phone was cut.

The next day, Jeremiah was found dead, with members of LaRouche’s movement claiming that he had committed suicide. Inquests are still ongoing to determine what happened that night. In the last few weeks a second inquiry into his death has been announced.

LaRouche has been known as a Jewish conspiracy theorist for more than 30 years now. His organisation is cultish and dangerous (one of the reasons I choose to write this anonymously), and the content of much of what he says can be traced back to the sort of allegations put forward by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. What, then, is a man like this doing in a film that purports to be a lefty-liberal critique of society?

Zeitgeist and the Left
What is in many ways most unsettling about this film is the fact that it purports to be left-wing or liberal. As the film ends we see images of three men faded in and out: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther-King, and John Lennon. Throughout the film we have quotations from left wing comedian Bill Hicks and a section is given to New Labour politician Michael Meacher. It is asserted once again that the aim of this film is the affirmation of the unity of humanity, of doing away with difference, whether it be class, race, or sex. We are made to think that the film is offering a radical left critique of power. Instead it is indulging in the sort of theories that are more at home with right-wing libertarians. I do not know entirely why the Zeitgeist group are particularly targeting the left. It is perhaps a divisive measure, but also possibly just an arena where they feel they can convert people to their way of thinking. What is clear, though, is that the suggestion that the ideas expressed are left-wing or liberal, and the deployment of quotations from well known lefties and liberals, is utterly cynical.

The positivist problem
There is one reason in particular that these conspiracies may seem compatible with left wing modes of thought, and that is to do with the philosophical problem of positivism. Stated in its simplest form, this is that ideas about transforming a society cannot be straightforwardly expressed in the language or accepted modes of thought of the society that they wish to transform. And this issue is common to all transformative theories of society. Probably the most influential branch of this type of thinking stemmed from Hegel to Marx, and then into Marxists of the 20th and 21st century. The solution for them is to talk in terms of a dialectic, that is, by comparing the consciousness of a society to the material reality. The significant conclusion of this type of thought is that one’s consciousness of society, up to a certain point is always false.

The conspiracy theorists take on this question in another way. They say that if our consciousness of society is always false, it is made to be false by a small number of powerful who make it false. They believe that we are consistently duped by an all-knowing cabal who control every aspect of our lives. And the solutions differ too. For the Marxists and socialists the problem is that society produces a consciousness that doesn’t allow us to fully understand our immiseration in work, in unemployment, or in powerlessness, and the solution is the radical transformation of society to a fairer, less exploitative world. For the conspiracy theorists the answer is the elimination of this so-called small powerful elite. They do not believe that society needs any more transformation than this.

This is difficult philosophical ground to tread. We run a huge risk if we are to criticise the conspiracy theorists for not being positivists, not working within accepted modes of thought. Instead, what we must say is that their particular critical mode of thought does not propose a correct solution for solving society’s problems, and furthermore is reliant not on unity but on division. We must show that inequality in society is structural rather than being based on the wishes of a small group of Jews.

What is to be done?
Zeitgeist: The Movie is ever growing in popularity, and furthermore they are building a movement. More and more people are being influenced by what the film has to say, without realising quite where it is coming from. It is important that as widely as possible we can expose the anti-Semitic subtext to this film. We must expose the film as being cynically positioned to influence liberals and lefties. In targeting the ideas presented by Zeitgeist it is not enough to just quibble over details, rather we must be trying to understand the politics that this film overall is trying to portray. We need to read through the many layers of conspiracy theories here, and understand that there is one in particular that they want us to believe, and that this one is, of course, the most dangerous and pernicious.

It is important to understand that the type of critique of society offered by the Zeitgeist movement cannot be separated from the Jewish conspiracy theory. One cannot take classic anti-Semitic texts, replace the word “Jew” with “international bankers”, or “international finance capital” and then believe that your theory is no longer anti-Semitic. Of course there are very good arguments that capitalism and indeed imperialism are extremely dangerous. There are very good arguments from a left or liberal perspective to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should never have been fought. And it is here that we must recognise that ends do not justify means. We cannot afford to support any cause that is simply anti-capitalist, or any cause that is simply anti-war, otherwise we run the risk of getting into bed with fascists. Rather, our positions on capitalism and of war must arise from thoroughgoing critique, rather than a rehashing and rebranding of old anti-Semitic narratives.

In order to spread this message as widely as possible I encourage you to republish this piece on your own websites, to send it to friends and comrades, to show it to anyone who tells you about “this fabulous new film you just have to watch.” One of the easiest ways is, if you are on twitter, to just click the tweet button at thee top of this post. If possible, do track back to us here at The Third Estate so we can monitor how widely this material is being disseminated. In coming weeks I will be recreating this article as a voice-over video, much in the style of Zeitgeist: The Movie in order that we can spread these views to even more people who may be influenced by this abhorrent film.

Marking 30 years of the London Review of Books, The Third Estate talks to Senior Editor Paul Myerscough and attempts to condense three decades into three thousand words

On Friday the London Review of Books will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a bumper length edition and the launch of the magazine’s online archive comprising no less than 30 million words in 12,000 essays by more than 2,000 contributors.

I started reading the LRB the year after I left university, while working in Hong Kong as a secondary school teacher. With no marking to do, few lessons to teach and no extra-curricula activities to oversee, my timetable might have been gratifyingly blank but for the school’s draconian (at least as it seemed to me at the time) working culture. Teachers, when not in the classroom, were forbidden from leaving their desks in the staffroom, much less the school, during working hours. It was bad form to turn off your computer or to use it to play videos or computer games (though such programmes were far beyond the capabilities of my laptop which wheezed whenever asked to load so much as a picture or the bright, gurning dragon school logo on the screensaver). ‘You have to appear to work at all times’ an experienced TEFL teacher had counselled me, ‘which is why I choose a desk at the back of the room. They can’t see the screen that way.’

But I couldn’t get my desk moved and with the Head of English seated behind me I had to be careful what I looked at. Too long surfing the BBC Sport’s website inevitably led to the questions like, ‘Hey what you doing?’ or ‘Hey, Lazy, you want do some marking?’

Mercifully at some point I stumbled upon the LRB’s website. It remains one of the best presented and easy to use sites on the net and, wondrously, it had no slow to load, easy to condemn, pictures. Reading the LRB I looked like I was working. Sometimes I even felt like I was, but not too often. Plus I learned stuff, stopped reading my father’s Spectator, made ill advised friendships with people like Salman and took my first steps towards apparently continuous, unemployability…

To mark 30 years of LRB, I spoke to Senior Editor, Paul Myerscough, about where the magazine stands politically, how significant political essays can be, whether he’d noticed any changes to government policy following articles written in the magazine, the sensitive issue of ‘snark’ and whatever happened to Christopher Hitchens.

The Third Estate: So how are you marking the 30th Anniversary?

Paul Myerscough: It’s an occasion when you roll out the people who are seen as your key contributors. We have pieces by Hilary Mantel, Andrew O’Hagan, John Lanchester, a huge piece by Jacqueline Rose on honour killing, Jeremy Harding and so on. It’s an occasion to show the kind of writing resources we have available.

Early next year there will be a series of lectures at the British Museum by Neil McGregor, Frank Kermode and Rory Stewart. We are about to launch the archive, the whole 30 years online. Next year we’ll have the anniversary of our independence from the New York Review Books. We started out as an insert and became independent after six months.

The Third Estate: The archive must have been very time consuming and expensive to organise so why have you chosen to put it up now?

Paul Myerscough: In a way all magazines of any status seem to be doing this, and quite right too. Technology and culture have brought us to a point where I’m not sure that any magazine or periodical can be excused for not doing it. I think you need to be able to trace the history of a publication―not least as a matter of pleasure: it’s such a lovely thing to go back through the history of a magazine to see how it’s contributors have changed, how its thinking might have changed―if a magazine can be said to have a consistent line of thought―and to build a cross reference, in so many ways: across personalities, across historical periods, across places to tease out a paper’s identity. If you can do this with the Economist, or the TLS or the Guardian, or the London Review of Books, then an archive seems to be indispensible. Magazines no longer live in the present moment. They live in the past too. We want them to do that, especially during an age in which information is processed incredibly quickly. Magazines now seem to be engaged in curation.

The Third Estate: That idea reminds slightly of Jonathan Franzen’s essay on the social novel, where he suggested the novel was incapable of keeping up with the contemporary world. There’s seems to be more reportage in the LRB nowadays and I wondered whether it sees itself as filling a gap which novels about contemporary events might have covered but aren’t able to any longer―or whether it may be facing the same problem as the social novel, that it can’t keep up with the 24 hour news cycle?

Paul Myerscough: It’s certainly true we have more reportage than we used to. We have more long essays on political and cultural subjects. We do think of ourselves as responding to an absence elsewhere―but the absence is not of coverage so much as simply of depth. It’s the length of the LRB articles that make things possible. Some of the broadsheets do a very good job of commentary alongside news, but they always have to compress it into spaces of no more than a thousand words. And that necessarily forces them into certain modes of speaking, certain ways of presenting an argument. What the LRB and some other magazines do is give their writers space to breathe. This makes certain kinds of argument possible. To take one example it makes historical argument possible, so when Ross McKibbin writes for us on politics he’ll very often set Labour thinking in the context of Labour thinking over the past ten, twenty, thirty years― sometimes fifty or a hundred years. It’s very difficult to do that except in a gestural way at a shorter length. What I think we’re doing is making available an old journalistic mode; the long 19th century essay. So your reference to the social novel may not be a coincidence. There’s something about the length that makes it possible to examine the social in a way that we tend to identify with the 19th century essay or novel, and that doesn’t fit very well into the other sources from which we get our news.

The Third Estate: It seems to be having more of an impact―I noticed Rory Stewart’s article got picked up recently and I wonder how much you consciously try to influence the news agenda.

Paul Myerscough: OK, where did you see it picked up?

The Third Estate: BBC Newsnight, and I’m fairly sure the Daily Mail ran a long extract.

Paul Myerscough: Possibly, possibly. I have thought about this… getting picked up: where you can expect to get picked up? I don’t think any of us imagine, do we, that Barack Obama after an eighteen hour day at work goes to the West Wing and reads the New York Review of Books? We don’t imagine either that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown do, even though both have written for the LRB in the past. Are their advisors reading magazines? I’m not sure how far down the chain you have to go before you get people, young people probably, in lower levels of government, who are reading everything. But that process of filtration begins at that lower level and gets honed and honed until at a senior level you really can’t expect to be having an impact in that sense. So you have to rely, as you say, on other media sources. It’s in those places you hope to make an impact. Even then it’s initially disappointing. When you’ve being doing this for a while, you just have to be sanguine about it. It just doesn’t happen very often. It happens with Rory. Rory is a prospective Tory MP, already a very significant figure in his own right, one of the few authoritative voices on Afganistan we have in this country and so it’s not surprising when he makes a statement in the LRB that it will get picked up by other sources. It would get picked up wherever it was. But what happens when Gareth Peirce writes about the al-Megrahi case for us? She publishes her essay and you think my God, this surely has to be answered at some level―and nothing happens . The Independent reprinted it in entirety, but it just doesn’t make the same sort of impact. You want to cry that it doesn’t, because in a sense the case she’s presenting is so extraordinary that it can’t be addressed in a culture in which there’s consensus: every time al-Megrahi is referred to he is the Lockerbie Bomber―and that’s in news sources. So what happens when you have piece that says he didn’t do it, actually it was someone else? You can’t really expect that to be picked up at―except that it’s Gareth Piece, the most respected defence solicitor on miscarriages of justice this country has. So I think you have grounds to influence whoever by publishing it. All you can really do is put these things into the public sphere and hope that they get picked up. Very often it doesn’t happen.

The Third Estate: It seems to fall on one side of the mass civilization, minority culture side of the debate. Does it consciously pitch itself there or is that an inevitable consequence of the way it’s written?

Paul Myerscough: No, it’s not done consciously. You have a magazine which if you set out to publish long reviews and essays on a full variety of subjects you do so hoping to bring―not a seriousness, though often that―but a depth, an angle, an originality and a style―and you’re doing that with 70,000 words per issue―then you really can’t expect very many people to engage with that. It’s a real demand, a demand which we don’t expect a lot of people, younger people in particular, to meet any more. Which, again, is why the archive has been made available online, why, also the blog. You have to find new ways of presenting the mode of thinking in technologically more accessible forms. The paper will always be there for people who want to read. We’ve always made quite a lot content available for free and that’s helped our traffic and helped us put our major intervention pieces up there in a way that helps them circulate

The Third Estate: Perry Anderson wrote in the introduction to one of the LRB’s anthologies that ‘the style of the writer comes before the importance of a subject or the affinity of a position’ is that true?

Paul Myerscough: Did he say that so concisely? That’s interesting. I’m glad we got Perry to do that knowing that Perry will not bend himself… It’s an accusation that’s been made of us. But it’s not true of course. Yes, we try to publish writers who are as stylish as possible in the field they write about. But the point of the style is not as some sort of decorative accessory and if the style is obfuscatory, that is a disaster. The point of being a stylish writer, of being a good writer is to bring alive the subject you’re writing about, the idea you’re trying to convey, in such a way that the reader is carried along with them. When you’ve got an essay of three or four thousand words, you’re hoping the reader will find their way to the end of a piece. Most people are going to give up on a piece that long unless it is well written. Style is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Style has to be in service of content. Maybe we used to publish articles like that, not anymore.

The Third Estate: Has that changed since 2001, since 9/11?

Paul Myerscough: In a way you’re speaking to the wrong person. I joined the paper the week after and was interviewed here the day after 9/11. You can imagine what the interview was like, essentially an editorial meeting on how the event was going to be covered… I don’t think it was a watershed for the paper in terms of its political thinking, because you’re able to go back to the beginning of the paper, certainly back to the Falklands and the Miners strike, and see very engaged political coverage of the news events of the day. Of course it had already been involved with Israel, Palestine so in terms of its thinking, coverage and way of doing things―no 9/11 was not a watershed. But it was in the kind of attention given to the paper, turning people’s eyes towards it, both in terms of people newly admiring and also newly suspicious.

The Third Estate: I think at this point I’m going to ask about Christopher Hitchens. He hasn’t written for the LRB since 9/11 and his last two books weren’t reviewed particularly favourably.

Paul Myerscough: At the level of reviews that’s not by design, we almost go in the other direction. I’ll come back to Hitchens I don’t want to avoid that. The Believer, a magazine in the States, launched a good few years ago with a manifesto against ‘snark’, which said they would avoid ‘snark’ and as one of their examples of ‘snark’, they chose a particular review published in this magazine by James Wood, of a Zadie Smith novel. Now we just don’t commission people to write that kind of review. That kind of review very rarely appears. Of course occasionally someone will write a piece that is deeply negative because, when they get the book, they feel that way about it. But we really don’t set people up. So if Hitchens has had negative reviews from our contributors it’s absolutely not because we’ve decided to give Hitchens a kicking. And we absolutely don’t want to because there’s actually quite a lot of love for Hitchens here. He wrote many wonderful pieces for this magazine. On certain subjects we wish we could still have him but over the question of 9/11 and American foreign policy, in relations to Iraq and attitudes towards Islam, I think at that time, it became more difficult for us to carry his articles. They wouldn’t have sat very well in the London Review’s pages.

The Third Estate: With the editors or the readers?

Paul Myerscough: Well, I suppose people will always want to ask about the relationship between the magazine and its editors. Contrary to what many people think this is not the kind of office where it’s understood what kind of line the magazine will take before we do anything, there is no consensus on many things. None the less, in the way that any magazine has a more or less defined political identity, the LRB is not the Spectator. Clearly it is left-of-centre. Clearly it is more interested in talking about certain issues in one way rather than another. We actually crave finding people who disagree with us, who present their arguments cogently and coolly, in the same kind of prose we hope our writers consider political issues. We often don’t find that our opponents do that. It’s quite hard to find rightwing thinkers who write in a way we feel we can publish, when we do we will publish them; Edward Luttwack for example and Ian Gilmour. A lot of our writers simply wouldn’t identify themselves as coming from the left. I’m not even sure some of our writers on British Politics would identify themselves as being from the left. But, Hitchens, it wasn’t so much his position (although I doubt it was one anyone here would have agreed with) but it was also the case his writing seemed to us rhetorically enflamed in a way that offered―more heat than light.

The Third Estate: Are there any personal favourites coming out in the archive?

Paul Myerscough: Quite a lot of pleasure will just be clicking on a name and seeing what they did. One of the pleasures for me will be going back to particular events. So, go to 1984 and see what the LRB had to say about the Miners Strike, go to 1982 and look at the Falklands War, go to important moments in the recent history of Israel and Palestine and see what Edward Said had to say about them. Or to take an example that leaps to mind, look at an article that by someone few people have heard of, Norman Dombey, about the state of the Iraqi arsenal before the Iraq war and find out just how many things he said came to be true in the light of events. But there’s so much it would be quite an obsessive job to get a grip on the whole 30 years.

The Third Estate: I have a not entirely formulated question on how the LRB sees itself as promoting more sophisticated literary fiction. Do you worry that its message is getting trampled out by things like the Tesco Top 40 or Richard and Judy’s book club?

Paul Myerscough: No, I think we’d always sit on one side of that. Part of the point of opening a bookshop was to give a spatial possibility for people to curate their reading in a different way. What the supermarkets and Richard and Judy do in terms of selecting and producing a kind of hierarchy of books has little to do with what we do. These days we don’t publish negative long reviews. We publish at most two novel reviews an issue, fifty in a year. We get sent fifty novels in a week sometimes. So there isn’t much point reviewing novels which you don’t think deserve the reader’s attention. You try to pick the ones that have a chance of being good and send those out to get reviews. It’s hard, you’d actually like to be reviewing literature in translation more, you’d hopefully be making your novel coverage more abstruse, not less. Making it less tailored to the British publishing market. It is still interesting to have reviews of the latest novels of major figures writing. Even so we aren’t going to review every novel by AS Byatt or Martin Amis. You go back to these writers every so often, to see whether there’s a good revisionary account to be made. In the end you hope to be able to say you have given some attention to most of the writers who people might want to read. But it’s hard finding as much space as you would like, never mind finding the writers you want to write about them.

The Third Estate: Was it a good year for the Booker Prize? Does the prize have too much influence?

Paul Myerscough: It was a good year for us in the sense that Hilary Mantel won. Hilary has been writing for us for a long time. Just because of that prejudice it was easy to think they’d made the right choice. There are all sorts of prizes which are given disproportionate amounts of attention in different fields. The Turner Prize would be one for example. But again it’s a similar situation to supermarkets. The Booker Prize is a matter of the logic of publicity and sales. Its impact is massive in that area. Look at the statistics about the sort of difference it makes to be on the shortlist on the one hand and to win on the other. It makes thousands of percent difference. We used to carry ‘Shortcuts’ in my early time here. James Francken would read all the Booker Prize shortlist novels and write a short article going through them. We haven’t done that in recent years. We’ll pay attention to the individual works but we don’t prioritize. You have to exist on one side of the prize culture and the mainstream. You either have to give an original take on the things everyone else is paying attention to or you have to pay attention to texts no one else is paying attention to. We try to do both.

JW Arble’s pick of the LRB archive

“…how can you be so short-sighted to look never further than this week or next week, to have no impossible dream?”

- Che Guevara in Evita

September 11th. It’s a date that conjures up memories and few of them good. It was, after all, the historic day that Salvador Allende fell to the 1973 CIA backed coup that kicked off Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. Not to mention the little known event of 2001 that concluded the brief period beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in which many in the West could quite easily have deceived themselves into thinking that history had all but ended and that Pax Americana would relegate global conflicts to periphery schisms. Such fanciful thoughts in the post-9/11 world seem the stuff of naïve hopes and dreams. But there’s another day of note in this most infamous of months. September 21st is the UN’s annual day of global ceasefire and non-violence. And it all began with one man, one telephone and a few naïve hopes and dreams.

That man is British filmmaker Jeremy Gilley who, in 1999, began a campaign with a title as simple as its vision. The Peace One Day campaign sought to fix in the international calendar an annual day of ceasefire and non-violence on September 21st. One day in which the world would put down its weapons and, like the British and German soldiers kicking a football across no man’s land on Christmas Eve 1914, attempt to reach a common understanding.

Doing what comes naturally to a filmmaker, Gilley documented his journey from its humble beginnings amongst students and activists, though its peaks and pitfalls, its missteps and its forward steps to its emergence on the global stage. Recording his meetings with world leaders, politicians, religious authorities, activists, Nobel Peace Laureates and, dare I say, the odd celebrity here and there, he used his film to promote his cause amongst the world’s most influential people. And on September 7th 2001, when the 192 member states of the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution to establish September 21st as the official annual day of global ceasefire, it seemed Gilley had won his case.

Four days later, the twin towers fell and one month to the day after the resolution was passed, the bombing of Afghanistan began. It was a crushing blow to Gilley. Suddenly, the periphery schisms had become conflicts of the core and the possibility of peace appeared more elusive than ever before. History, it seemed, was far from over. But like history, the story of Gilley’s campaign, the story of peace on Earth, is one without an ending. For two years Peace One Day had campaigned tirelessly to establish one day of peace and that was the easy part. With the resolution passed and the world at war, the most monumental task still remained. To let the world know.

I first heard about Peace One Day when I watched Gilley’s film on September 21st 2004. And although it has always seemed to me an improbable cause, perhaps even an impossible dream, I continue to believe that one more person aware of the significance of that day is one more step, no matter how small, towards a goal for which we should all strive. Just one day of peace, after all, allows humanitarian aid to be delivered and lives to be saved in the calm before the storm resumes. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. There’s Chris Martin for a start. And Jimmy Cliff and Dave Stewart. Throw in Annie Lennox, Badly Drawn Boy and Corinne Bailey Rae, and it’s a veritable ABC of celebrity, all helping to spread the word in the form of song through packed out concerts.

Turning crucial issues into a celebrity circus can be a double-edged sword. Whilst giving them short-term prominence, it risks, in the long-run, downplaying or diluting the efforts of millions of activists who are still campaigning when the dust has settled. Poverty, after all, is not history, even though the media has moved on. But, with over 100 million people in every country in the world taking part in activities to mark the day in 2007, this is one campaign that truly seeks to engage every single person on the planet. This month, as Coca Cola ships out over a million unique Peace One Day cans to customers across the UK, urging them to think while they drink, the cause has truly entered the mainstream.

“This activity is really going to help us drive awareness and challenge people to think about what they are going to do on Peace Day,” says Gilley.

To date, as Peace One Day approaches its 10th anniversary, no government has signed a ceasefire on September 21st. But work by activists has already made a difference to people’s lives. Last year, 1.6 million children in Afghanistan were vaccinated against polio on Peace Day. Of course, it’s just a start and dreams like this do not offer easy ex machina means to right the wrongs of the waking world. Afghanistan remains a divided country, occupied by foreign forces, rife with conflict, poverty and corruption. Peace alone is not enough. For Marx, just as class conflict arises because of exploitative relations of production, conflicts between nations arise because of exploitative relations between rich and poor countries. Once the workers of the world had settled accounts with their own bourgeoisies, so the theory goes, such international disputes would, in turn, be settled. This is, naturally, too simplified an account for our modern, globalised, disjunctive world. However, a key point remains and it is one best phrased by soundbite stalwart Martin Luther King who said that: “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” As long as there is injustice, occupation, exploitation and imperialist aggression, peace will remain elusive.

Achieving lasting peace, then, can never simply be about a single day of ceasefire. Without addressing the underlying causes of conflicts, September 21st can only be one day of peace amongst 364 days of war. “Everyone has the right to defend themselves,” the ardent anti-war activist Tony Benn tells me. “That is why the Afghans are absolutely entitled to defend themselves as their country is being invaded.” Can we be pacifists just for one day? Perhaps not. But that was never truly the objective of the campaign. “It’s not just symbolic,” says Gilley. “It’s only the beginning.” The point of a global day of ceasefire and non-violence is to promote dialogue and understanding through which the most crucial issues can be addressed and a long-term peace can be realised. Because it was never about kicking a football across no man’s land on Christmas Eve 1914. It was always meant to be premier league 1914-1918.

Make a commitment to Peace Day 2009

Iraqi immigrant, Dana Ali, faces deportation after an alleged Home Office blunder fails to recognise his marriage to a British citizen.

Dana Ali was born in 1975. He grew up in Halabja, the Kurdish town in northern Iraq that the world first heard about on March 16th 1988 when 5,000 people were massacred by Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons. “Many of my family died in that attack,” Dana tells me. His story is the story of the Kurds, a stateless people facing the brutal repression of a tyrannical regime. It is little wonder, then, that Dana became a vocal critic of Saddam’s government. “When I grew up, I began supporting the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq,” he says. Dana would distribute leaflets and newspapers for the party. That was how he came to the attention of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, an Islamist group that held power in the region. “They saw us as a threat to them,” Dana says. “They arrested me and I was threatened by them. I had to leave in the end. If I had stayed there, they would have killed me.”

Fearing for his life, Dana fled to the UK in July 2000. After being granted a work permit, he found a job at Buxted Chicken Factory in Suffolk. It was there that he met his wife, Taina Mason. “I was Dana’s boss,” Taina tells me. “We hit it off so well. We went out together for about eight months, then we were talking romantically and discussed getting married. So we eloped.” Dana moved to Lowestoft to live with Taina and they married in 2003. The year that Britain and America invaded Iraq, Saddam’s regime was toppled and the Islamists in the Kurdish north were crushed. “I didn’t support the invasion,” Dana says. “I was glad that they got rid of Saddam, but so many civilians were killed.”

Even in the darkest days of the occupation, with hundreds dying every day and the country on the brink of a civil war between Shi’ahs and Sunnis, Kurdish Iraq was held as a success story. That elusive island of calm in a sea of chaos. Dana, however, has no desire to return. “I don’t know if I will be safe,” he says. “There are still kidnappings in northern Iraq, the media here don’t cover that really, but if you look at the Kurdish newspapers you can see it, and I don’t know if the people who made me leave are still about.” Dana’s wife tells me he has no family left there. “His family are here, there’s no reason for him to go back. He’s worried he might be arrested or shot.” Hoping to settle in the UK to start a family with his new wife, Dana applied for a marriage visa and it should have been a happily ever after.

“We heard nothing back from the Home Office,” Taina says. She tells me that despite sending their passports and marriage certificate, the Home Office curiously failed to recognise their marriage. Taina believes that her husband had been confused with another person called Dana Ali. “We kept getting police phone calls and credit card companies saying you’ve taken out loans. They were looking for someone in Yorkshire. And we said that’s not him. He’s not allowed a credit card, he’s not allowed loans, he’s never been to Yorkshire.” Mistaking him for the other Dana Ali, the police turned up at 3.30 in the morning one day last year and arrested him. “They had a picture of this guy and they realised they’d mixed the papers up.”

The situation was soon resolved, but Taina believes that the mix up of the papers is the reason her marriage was never recognised and Dana was denied a visa. “At first they approved my application,” Dana says. “Then they said my leave to remain paper was a mistake because my file had mixed me up with someone else.” A UK Border Agency spokesperson denied the allegation that the papers had been muddled up, but declined to comment as to whether a marriage visa application had been received. “We would not remove anyone from the UK while there are outstanding applications or representations on their case,” the spokesperson said.

“They told me to go home and wait 3-6 months,” Dana says. “I waited and nothing happened. My solicitor phoned them and sent letters to them. After a couple of years, they just refused me.” As a result, Dana was forced to leave his job at the chicken factory. He has been out of work since 2004, unable to claim benefits and unable to help his wife with the mortgage, living in the country pending immigration investigation. “They told us, when they want him, they’ll come and get him,” Taina says. “He was getting so down; he just wanted to get out of the house. So a couple of nights a week he would help out his friend at the kebab shop and have coffee with him. He wasn’t working there and he wasn’t getting paid, and the manager told the Home Office that, but the authorities said that he was working and they issued him with a form telling him he had to sign in at the police station every month.”

Told that if he was caught helping out his friend again, he would be arrested and the owner of the kebab shop fined £5,000, Dana has been reporting to Lowestoft police station once a month since March. One day, however, he didn’t come home. When he turned up at the police station on July 31st, they took him into custody without warning. “I asked them why and they told me they had papers to remove me from the United Kingdom,” Dana says. “I haven’t been home since that day.” Dana has barely seen his wife since they took him to Oakington, the Cambridgeshire immigrant detention centre exposed by a 2005 BBC documentary for the violence and racist abuse carried out by some of its staff. “You think you’re not going to do anything ‘cos a white person tells you what to do. Well I’m afraid you’re wrong,” employee James Martin was filmed saying to a detainee. “My great-grandfather shot your great-grandfather and nicked his fucking country off you for 200 years,” he says before tipping the immigrant out of bed. In December last year, inspectors investigating Oakington declared it had “lost direction” and inmates felt unsafe.

“I think it’s like Auschwitz,” Taina tells me. Whilst it is probably a little unfair to compare Oakington Immigration Reception Centre to the Nazi concentration camp in which over a million people were killed, hearing Dana describe the razor wire, the guards, the dogs and the cramped conditions, it is easy to understand why he and his wife are frightened. “He’s had to see a doctor and a psychiatrist since he’s been there,” Taina says. “On one of his arms, he started scratching his skin to bits. He doesn’t realise he’s doing it, he’s so stressed. They’ve put him on anti-depressants, which took over a week for him to get. Even the doctor said she’s disgusted at how he’s being treated.”

“I’m being treated like a criminal,” Dana says. In the past, the British government treated the country’s poor as though they were criminals. Now that status is accorded to its immigrants. Dana has lost a lot of weight since his detention. Hearing about his experiences, it is not hard to imagine Oakington as some kind of Dickensian workhouse. “When we go for dinner, if you ask for one more piece of bread, they won’t give it to you. When I’ve complained, I’ve been told, I’m illegal in this country, I shouldn’t be here, why am I asking questions? This camp, the way they treat you, it’s somewhere else, it’s not England.”

His wife, Taina, is in quite a unique situation for a woman in Suffolk, a county seemingly immune to demographic changes, to mass immigration and to ethnic diversity. In fighting Dana’s corner through the years of alleged blunders and stalling from the Home Office, she has written to local MP Bob Blizzard, to Tony Blair, to George Galloway, and she has approached the national papers, but none of them took up her case. Married to an Iraqi immigrant, part of the problem she faces comes from the right-wing tabloids and the relentless stream of anti-immigrant propaganda they publish. “The government pays attention to the Mail,” writes Nick Davies in his book, Flat Earth News, describing the paper’s tendency to omit all the benefits of immigration in its reporting, quoting highly selective and distortionary figures to sell its own reactionary, and often false, line. “I’ve become immune to it, really,” Taina tells me. “Dana is such a loving person. Before this happened, he was the soul of the party, he’s such a brilliant host. When people start saying the immigrants come over here and get this and that, I think, well my husband’s not like that.”

Dana desperately wants to return to his wife. “There are many people here in the same situation,” he says. “They’ve been here for a long time, and they’re married, and they just want to work and get on with their lives and their families. Some of them have kids as well.” He tells me he’s hoping to start a family with Taina. “I want to have children. We haven’t been able to because I have a sperm problem and need to have IVF treatment. But that costs a lot. If I were allowed to work, I could afford it. I would like to have one baby or two.”

Having once again submitted his documentation to the Home Office, Dana is awaiting their response. Taina says that if they do not recognise their marriage and his eligibility to remain in the country, she will take the case to the High Court. “I spoke to my solicitor last night and he said if we go to the High Court it will probably cost £5,000 to get him free,” she says. “Where is the justice in this world if you have to pay for someone’s freedom?”

Dana’s life story, from his fight against Islamists in Halabja to his fight to remain in Britain, is testament to the fact that the price of freedom can be very high indeed.

Salman Shaheen

www.thethirdestate.net

Dana’s niece, Claire, has set up a Facebook group in support of their campaign.