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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 and was appointed as a leader writer of the newspaper in July 2008.

Background

The son of translator Anthea Bell, Kamm was educated at Wyggeston School, Leicester, New College, Oxford and Birkbeck College, London University. 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.^[2] He is a founder of WMG Advisors, a hedge fund and financial services group.^[3]

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] Kamm has written about how Hamilton was a corrupt politician, and deserving of defeat.

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 Attlee and Harry S. Truman in the early days of the Cold War as a model for response to Islamism 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. 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 also supported the rendition of suspected terrorists [1].

Criticism of Noam Chomsky

Kamm is well known for his criticisms of the linguist and libertarian socialist political writer Noam Chomsky. His work has appeared in David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine. 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]

Criticism of Wikipedia

Kamm is a longstanding critic of Wikipedia. In an August 2007 column in The Times, Kamm asserted 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."^[18]

In April 2009, Kamm wrote in a column for The First Post that Wikipedia "is not part of a democratic culture so much as a populist one: a combination of the anti-intellectualism of the Left and the free-market dogmatism of the Right."^[19] Kamm said Wikipedia is "by design, an anti-intellectual project" and "its guiding principle is agreement rather than truth." Kamm wrote "Wikipedia has no means of arbitrating between different claims, other than how many people side with one position rather than another." Kamm also offered multiple criticisms of the book The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih. Kamm concluded, "Wikipedia is indeed comprehensible, and some of its articles effectively mimic the language of scholarly reference. The venture is junk, nonetheless. Wikipedia occupies a prominent part of the Web; the rough beast's hour has come round at last. But there is no reason to accept or value it, still less use it for its intended purpose."^[19]

In November 2009, Kamm wrote a column in The Times arguing that Wikipedia was "an anti-intellectual venture". Commenting on the Wall Street Journal article that Wikipedia was rapidly losing editors^[20] he argued that it "may signal the end of the dominance of a remarkable online resource", and that Wikipedia is "an affront to the notion of disinterested intellectual inquiry".^[21] He recorded an extended version of the article, which included earlier criticisms, for the December 2, 2009 episode of Radio 4 program You and Yours.

Notes

External links

• Oliver Kamm's blog
• The Left-Wing Case for Liberating Iraq Interview with FrontPage Magazine