Oliver Kamm

Oliver Kamm (born 1963) is a British writer and journalist. He wrote Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (2005), an advocacy of interventionism in foreign policy. He is a leader writer and columnist for The Times.

Background

The son of translator Anthea Bell, Kamm was educated at New College, Oxford and Birkbeck College, University of London. He went on to a career in the Bank of England and the securities industry, including as the Head of Strategic Research at Commerzbank Global Equities in London. He helped start a pan-European investment bank in 1997. He is a former investment banker.

Politics

Kamm describes his politics as left-wing. Kamm's early activities in Labour included canvassing in Leicester South in the 1979 general election, which saw Margaret Thatcher become Prime Minister. While he continued to vote Labour into the 1980s, he eventually became dissatisfied with the party's leadership and policies, particularly its stance on nuclear disarmament, and left the party altogether in 1988. He worked for the 1997 election campaign of Martin Bell, who is his uncle, against incumbent Neil Hamilton, drafting a manifesto "so right-wing that Hamilton was incapable of outflanking it."

That year saw the election of the 'New Labour' government of Tony Blair, which Kamm strongly supported, particularly its foreign policy and 'liberal interventionism'. Although generally supportive of the Labour Party in the 2005 general election, Kamm stated that he could not support Celia Barlow, the Labour candidate in his local constituency, Hove, because of her opposition to Blair's foreign policies. Instead, he stated that he would vote for the Conservative candidate, Nicholas Boles, who supported the Iraq war.

A founding member of the Henry Jackson Society, Kamm supported the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. In 2004, he outlined a case for supporting the re-election of George W. Bush. In 2006, he was a signatory to the Euston Manifesto, arguing for a reorientation of the left around what its creators termed 'anti-totalitarian' principles. He favourably commented on Peter Beinart's The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, which has similar themes to Kamm's own book, arguing that the left should look to the policies of Clement Attlee and Harry S. Truman in the early days of the Cold War as a model for response to Islamism and totalitarianism.

On 27 January 2010, Kamm announced on BBC Radio 5 live that he believed Tony Blair had been the greatest peacetime Prime Minister of the 20th century.

Because of his position on war and terrorism, critics such as Peter Wilby have stated that he is not actually left-wing at all. Kamm rejects this criticism, saying that he "claim[s] to be left-wing, for the straightforward reason that it's true". He elaborates on his support for left-wing policies such as economic redistribution, progressive taxation and a welfare state. He also supports legal abortion and gay marriage. Regarding socialism, Kamm wrote that former Prime Minister James Callaghan's "greatest single achievement" was to "destroy socialism as a serious proposition in British politics." He has also supported the rendition of suspected terrorists.

Kamm has written in Index on Censorship in response to the 2009 visit of Geert Wilders argued that "No one has a right in a free society to be protected from anguish".

Regarding the bombing of Dresden, he has asserted that the bombing of the city "was not a crime. It was a terrible act in a just and necessary war."

In September 2011, Kamm wrote in the New Statesman that he supports the Euro and admonishes Labour's recent criticisms of it: "Monetary union is not the cause of the crisis. Done properly, it may help insulate member states from disruptive volatility in the international capital markets".

Criticism of Noam Chomsky

Kamm has criticised the linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky, with his work appearing in David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine. His thoughts on Chomsky are summarised in an article for Prospect magazine opposing a readers' poll choice of Chomsky in the top position for its 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll.

Chomsky in turn accused Kamm of "transparent falsification" and claimed that Kamm's article demonstrated "the lengths to which some will go to prevent exposure of state crimes and their own complicity in them". Kamm replied by accusing Chomsky of "polemical distortions" including quoting himself selectively.

Kamm continued to comment about Chomsky’s political writings on his blog. In 2005 Kamm maintained that the “leitmotif of [Chomsky's] entire political output, to which he returns again and again, is that the US is morally inferior to Nazi Germany.” In At War With Asia Chomsky wrote that “Nazi Germany was sui generis, of that there is no doubt. But we should have the courage and honesty to face the question whether the principles applied to Nazi Germany and fascist Japan do not, as well, apply to the American war in Vietnam.”

Monthly Review and Amazon controversies

In 2010 Edward S. Herman and David Peterson wrote a scathing article on Kamm in Monthly Review in which they point to what they consider Kamms obsessive if not nefarious techniques in attacking figures of the left, notably Noam Chomsky. They note that “At one stage in his career, Kamm went so far as to post negative reviews to the Amazon.com website of at least 19 books by or about Chomsky, rating all 19 of them with one star, the lowest possible for a reader's review of a book at Amazon.com.”