Oliver Kamm

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Oliver Kamm (born 1963) is a British writer and newspaper columnist. He is the author of Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (2005), in which he advocates interventionism in foreign policy.^[1] He also writes opinion pieces for The Times.

Contents 1 Background 2 Politics 3 Criticism of Noam Chomsky 4 Criticism of Wikipedia 5 Notes 6 External links

[edit] Background

The son of translator Anthea Bell, Kamm was educated at New College, Oxford and the London School of Economics. He went on to a career in the Bank of England and the securities industry. He helped start a pan-European investment bank in 1997 and is part of its management.^[2] He is a founder of WMG Advisors, a hedge fund and financial services group.^[3]

[edit] Politics

Kamm, having a long background with the Labour Party, 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,^[4] he eventually became dissatisfied with the party's leadership and policies, particularly its stance on nuclear disarmament, and left the party altogether in 1988.^[5] He worked for the 1997 election campaign of Martin Bell, who is his uncle,^[6] against incumbent Neil Hamilton, drafting a manifesto "so right-wing that Hamilton was incapable of outflanking it."^[7] That year saw the rise of Tony Blair and his "New Labour" policies, which Kamm has been strongly in support of, particularly in regards to foreign policy and intervention. 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.^[8]

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.^[9] 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 Atlee and Harry S. Truman in the early days of the Cold War as a model for response to political Islam and totalitarianism.^[10]

Because of his position on war and terrorism, critics such as Peter Wilby have stated that he is not actually left-wing at all.^[11] 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. However, these are not regular themes in his work. He also supports legal abortion and gay marriage.^[12] 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."^[13] He has supported the rendition of suspected terrorists [1].

[edit] Criticism of Noam Chomsky

Kamm is well known for his criticisms of the linguist and libertarian socialist political writer Noam Chomsky. These are summarised in an article^[14] for Prospect magazine opposing its readers' choice of Chomsky in the top position for its 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll.^[15] 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".^[16] Kamm replied by accusing Chomsky of "polemical distortions" including failure to quote himself correctly.^[17]

[edit] Criticism of Wikipedia

Kamm is a longstanding critic of Wikipedia. In an article for The Times^[18] in August, 2007, he wrote that Wikipedia "combines the free-market dogmatism of the libertarian Right with the anti-intellectualism of the populist Left...The problem is not that there are too few voices in the editorial process, who can skew the result, but the opposite. Participation is prized more than competence...The notion that a false claim to knowledge is wrong is not part of Wikipedia’s culture."

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Oliver Kamm's blog