29 Oct 2012 12:45:58
Although Milne's sympathies are more often with the Labour left than with anarchists or Trotskyists, it's not hard to see why he infuriates many on the centre and right. The political tradition he comes from could broadly be described as communist, albeit in the softly-softly Cuban or Italian sense – and he evidently sees no reason to reject entirely everything about that heritage. As a Comment editor at the Guardian he earned much bile and some appreciation from opponents (such as hard-right Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, who magnanimously called him a "sincere, eloquent and uncomplicated Marxist"). But outside of the inflammatory, instantly forgotten controversies of the political press, Milne is probably best known for The Enemy Within, a 1994 exposé of MI5's covert campaign against the National Union of Mineworkers. The collusions it revealed between Thatcher, the secret services, the police and the tabloids meant that its readers wouldn't have been at all surprised by the recent revelations over phone-hacking and Hillsborough. The scope of this belated next book moves from one strike to the entirety of post-9/11 world history, with chapters on liberal interventionism and the war on terror, the rise of neoliberalism and its 2008 bankruptcy, the prospects of "21st-century socialism" and the contemporary Arab revolt.
Accordingly, there's little room for The Enemy Within's thriller-like construction in The Revenge of History. It is a collection of columns, with minimal editing; their force and immediacy in small doses produces a numbing effect if read consecutively. Not only is there repetition between the columns themselves, the new editorial interventions – a Preface and italicised introductory paragraphs to each section – are themselves repetitious, with cut-and-pasted sentences from the Preface returning verbatim later in the book to introduce each chapter. Milne's style, so poised through The Enemy Within, is here crammed into tight word counts, and shows rather too much fondness for "clarion calls", "siren songs", and other expressions only ever used by political commentators. Perhaps this format is dictated by the book's persistent, if entirely forgiveable undercurrent of "I told you so!"
Milne has a knack for making arguments which when published are excoriated as unforgivable, and which then gradually become guiltily commonsensical. Never obviously bothered by tact, Milne could publish a column a couple of days after 9/11 bemoaning that those in the US asking why the attacks occurred "still don't get it". Similarly unpopular and similarly vindicated were his articles insisting that resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan would be ferocious, that PFI would be ruinously expensive and inefficient, that the "end to boom and bust" was illusory, and that the riots of 2011 were largely a rational, political act. But politically, "winning arguments" is not enough, and Milne knows it.
Another argumentative approach which appears to infuriate is an insistence on seeing current events in a global and historical perspective, or "whataboutery", as it's known. He likes to ask why authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are supported by western governments and those in Zimbabwe and Cuba are not, to ask why Stalin is culpable for the famine of 1933 and Churchill not for that of 1943, to ask why Leopold II's victims are forgotten and Mao's commemorated. All political traditions, he insists, have blood on their hands, and liberalism is certainly no exception.
Milne's opinions are more complex than caricature might imply. The earliest piece here, a 1997 post-election profile of New Labour, shows him willing to settle for at least a tolerably reforming government – and given his partial optimism, it is unusual in this collection for not being vindicated by events. It does, however, boast the revelation that in 1997, Blair was privately comparing himself with De Gaulle – as only the great war hero could withdraw French troops from Algeria, only his Labour government would be able to truly dismantle the benefits system. The strong line taken here on Israel goes alongside a dismissal of the notion of an "Israel lobby" that supposedly bends US policy to its will. Milne's somewhat vague, ambiguous view of the Soviet Union means at least that he is one of the rare western journalists to have dared to point out how anti-communism in contemporary Europe often spills over into direct rehabilitation of domestic fascists and even, in Latvia and Lithuania, Holocaust perpetrators. Although slandered by the usual internet suspects as an "antisemite", he's been one of the few to expose this polite, Council of Europe-sanctioned form of Holocaust revisionism.
The real interest of the book, as its title implies, is in the prospects it holds for a revitalised left. He sees hope both in workers' strikes in China and in its mixed economy; in the nationalisations of the Latin American "pink tide" and in Occupy Wall Street; in a "multipolar world" where the US can no longer act with impunity. Eventually, however, he argues that a movement against neoliberalism will produce its own political form, one which we won't anticipate. Its policies will be an "ideologically driven improvisation" rather than a predetermined blueprint. It will, he insists, emerge "sooner or later". We can only hope history bears that out.
