Sorry, but

I am close to being able to coin something similar to the "sofa rule" for Aaro columns. The sofa rule is a useful metric for judging the likely quality of a televised sitcom; you simply count the number of sofas you can see, and if it's a number greater than zero, the likelihood is that it's going to be awful[1]. And so it is with Aaro columns that have a faux-conversational headline. (His mate Martin Kettle also has a line in faux-conversational heds, so it generalises). If this column had been called something like "I don't recognise this ghastly Britain", my heart wouldn't have sunk nearly as low as it did when we got buttonholed with the "Sorry" at the front. The "Sorry" in question is worth an essay in its own right; partly, it's the "sorry" of the pub bore and partly it's yet another example of the Decent Left (domestic grown-up liberal fraktion) desire to paint themselves as plucky little battlers against we the chattering classes, with only the shining sword of truth and the trusty shield of the actual policy of the current government to protect them. The one thing it isn't, is an apology from Aaro for berating us; he thinks we're bastards.

This is not to defend Libby Purves, for fuck's sake. Nobody wants to do that. And the whinging chorus of the Times editorial page is indeed often very dispiriting indeed (by the way, it is entirely worth reading Daniel Finkelstein's comment blog, because his summaries of the Times opeds almost certainly reflect what he had asked his columnists for, rather than what they delivered. This week, Aaro was meant to be giving us ""Surging" is not enough to win in Iraq and the Middle East"). But, and this is hardly a brand new insight of Aaronovitch Watch, whingeing about other people whingeing, is still whingeing and it's often even more annoying than the other kind. If you sneak ahead to the end of Dave's column, you'll see that he doesn't actually have a specific plan or project for all of this talk; his conclusion is just that is it just him, or is everything (in the world of commentary and culture) shit?

And in any case, surely there is a big element of crocodile tears here. Aaro has written on a number of occasions in favour of detention for 90 days without trial, so his indignation at Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto's treatment appears to be only that it happened to a history professor rather than a suspicious looking swarthy type. He is also in favour of identity cards surveillance cameras, smoking bans and Asbos, so his conception of the relationship between the individual and the state does not look like one in which the first word of the phrase "liberal democracy" is doing much work. And while he'll stand up for the right of people "short of incitement, to say and publish what they like" in principle, he is right up there with the John Lloyd agenda of putting in place all sorts of informal sanctions and principles of journalistic professionalism to police the boundaries of what can actually be published without ruling yourself out of polite society (sorry to harp on about this, but John Stuart Mill certainly thought it was important and so do I). It is hard to escape the view that, as an old Eurocommunist, Aaro's seventh paragraph bears rather close reading - it is indeed the "cause" of liberal democracy, rather than any of the specific structures of a liberal state, that Aaro is in favour of, and "the worst democracy" is pretty much all he's really prepared to defend.

And so we reach the end, in which Aaro tries to claim that Ed Balls is a bit cheeky for referring to the anti-Communist[2] side in the Cold War as "we". This stuff writes itself.

Then it's punchline time, and it's based on a massive misunderstanding. Did we really use "all the weapons of culture" to "join ideological battle with Soviet-style Communism[3]"? No we didn't. There was one side which turned over its culture industry to the production of propaganda for its political and economic system, but it wasn't us; it was the Soviet Union. I realise that Aaro's cultural consumption in the 1970s and 1980s might have been rather different from the mainstream then, but even so this is quite a mistake.

It looks like he's been talking to Michael Gove again. Gove is the current theorist of the "Battle of Ideas" - he often really does talk as if the Greatest Intellectual Struggle of Our Time is going to take place in Homeric style, across the centre of the Oxford Union, with the free world represented by Michael Gove in a Spartan helmet and Islamist totalitarianism represented by Tariq Ramadan, two falls, two submissions or a knockout. It has the major advantage over the Henry "Scoop" Jackson Society's plan that this would probably cost no more than low five figures to organise, but it's just as insane, and most "battle of ideas" theorists are also Scoopies, so no net gain there.

We've been proselytising the Muslims since roughly 516 AD and they've been proselytising us for about as long. With not much effect on either side. The one thing I think it is safe to say as a generalisation across Muslims, is that they really don't respond well to patronising lectures. We brought down the Berlin Wall with Coca-Cola, blue jeans and dodgy heavy metal. The first two are still in mass production, and Eddie Van Halen is still around if we need to ramp up on the third. The era of mass anti-Communism was a massive great failure in terms of actual progress made against global communism. The big lesson of the Cold War is that you defeat mass ideologies by boring them to death; without big headline conflicts to stir up the old patriotic fervour, sooner or later the massive gap in living standards leaves them feeling sillier and sillier and they give up. No specific action is required of the mass citizenry, which is why this is the perfect means of long term strategic conflict for a type of society that can't actually command its mass of citizenry into big projects.

If one was producing intelligent propaganda aimed at the Islamic world, one would be making films about young British Asians, and how they manage to peacefully come to terms with the conflicting demands of their religious and traditional roots and modern British society. If we're not producing loads of those at the moment it is not because we're too busy complaining about the trains. It's because we've made so many of them over the last ten years that they've become a fucking cliché.


[1] Before fans of The Royle Family get stuck in, I actually first came across this rule in an interview with Henry Normal, and like all other statistical generalisations it is not intended to cover every single data point.
[2] The Decent TARDIS has clearly been at work here and the Cold War was apparently a struggle against "totalitarianism", rather than Communism. I would actually quite like to see the episode in which Christopher Ecclestone and Billie Piper go back in time and rearrange things so that "we" didn't support any dictatorships and didn't destablilise any democracies.
[3] I swear to you that we also fought the Cold War against all forms of communism (and not a few liberal social democracies), not just Soviet-style communism. Did Aaro really not notice this through the Eurocommunist years? Did he think that he was in charge and able to pick and choose his wars then, too?