I’ve written a great many different things in my time but never anything as difficult and sad as this. What I say about him cannot be called objective by any standard, but I hope that will be forgiven.

Certain facts, the sort of thing you would find in traditional obituaries, are known and can be looked up on the Internet. The reaction there to his death was something that took me and the rest of his family by surprise. If you had told him, during his last illness, that the Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian would carry full obituaries, he would not have believed you. The cards and letters and emails I received after his death demonstrated a fact that none of us had quite realised before: that what he’d been writing on his blog from July 2003 till the last week of his life was important to a great many people in countries all over the world.

Norm was an academic at Manchester University from 1967 to 2003. He wrote books (The Contract of Mutual Indifference, Marx and Human Nature and others) and articles and spoke often at conferences and seminars. But it was normblog, one of the first weblog journals, which best displayed Norm’s particular combination of gifts. Everything he wrote was clear and rigorously logical but he combined these qualities on the blog with other things that made him the person he was. He was passionate about cricket, (especially his great love of the Ashes and his unswerving support of the Aussies) jazz, country and Western music, and Manchester United. Also, he was funny and not a little bonkers. Who else would have a strand on his blog where he reviewed different brands of soap, discussing their respective merits in all seriousness?

He became a born—again fiction reader in 2007, while we were on holiday in Florence. He had taken Pride and Prejudice with him and as he read it, I could see him falling in love. That is not putting it too strongly. From that time on, he was a devoted Janeite, working his way joyfully but in a typically thorough fashion through the novels, biographies, criticism etc.

The strongest and most abiding love of his life was his family. His children were more important to him than anything else, and he was immensely proud of both our daughters. He also loved being a grandfather and doted on all three of his grandchildren. I am sad that he did not live to see the new addition to the family, a boy who was born on August 26th, almost on Norm’s birthday but not quite…

He was never boring. He made me laugh. I get emails from friends all the time saying:

“We need to know what Norm would think about this or that issue. We want to know what his views would have been…”

I feel exactly the same. What disappears when you’ve lost someone you’ve loved and been close to for decades is a private, shared language. You no longer have the conversations which have sustained you for most of your life and which you cannot have with anyone else. I miss him every day.

Adèle Geras

[First published in The Daily Telegraph]

Norman Geras, who has died aged 70, was a Marxist academic, cricket enthusiast and political blogger who broke with Left-wing orthodoxy to support the American-led invasion of Iraq.

Geras, a former Professor of Government at Manchester University, set up his website, Normblog, in July 2003, out of a feeling of alienation “from people I perceived as being in my neck of the woods”—academic colleagues, friends and sundry Guardian writers who saw the 9/11 attacks as a response to American foreign policy (notably its support of Israel), and opposed the invasion of Iraq.

“The next day [after 9/11], or the day after, I open the newspaper and see—within hours—people talking about ‘blowback’, ‘comeuppance’,” he recalled. “They didn”t even have the sense of horror, of shock, to wait. I was just appalled. I thought, ‘That’s it’.” His first post read: “In the immortal words of Sam Peckinpah. Let’s go.”

From then on he blogged almost every day, and his website became essential reading—not only for the tiny ranks of the pro-war Left, but also for the Neocon Right. For, despite his Leftist credentials, Geras praised President George W Bush and argued that the invasion of Iraq was necessary to oust the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. His daily jottings earned him the nickname “Stormin’ Norm”. The Wall Street Journal reprinted one of his articles and his words were often cited by American pundits.

One of Normblog’s constant targets was the selectivity in the way people invoke “root cause”explanations for terrorist atrocities. In the wake of the 7/7 attacks in London, which many pundits on the Left attributed to Muslim anger over Western intervention in Iraq, he observed that while such arguments purport to be about causal explanation rather than excuse-making, they are invariably deployed on behalf of movements or actions for which their proponent wants to win sympathy.

“A hypothetical example illustrates the point,” he said. “Suppose that, on account of the present situation in Zimbabwe, the government decides to halt all scheduled deportations of Zimbabweans. Some BNP thugs are made angry by this and express their anger by beating up a passer-by who happens to be an African immigrant. Can you imagine a single person of left or liberal outlook who would blame this act of violence on the government’s decision or urge us to consider sympathetically the root causes of the act? It wouldn’t happen.”

Geras’s measured and tightly-reasoned critiques of fashionable Leftist nostrums were not universally popular, and he found himself denounced as an “imperialist skunk” and a “turncoat”. In one posting, following the Iraqi elections of 2005, he imagined awakening from a nightmare to see Ken Livingstone, Harold Pinter, George Galloway, John Pilger and other opponents of the war advancing upon him—only to raise a finger stained with the purple dye of an Iraqi voter. “Everybody and his brother has had a go at me,” he said. “But I started the blog because I was fed up with the prevailing left and liberal consensus that the war in Iraq was wrong.”

In 2006 he launched a more wide-ranging assault in what became known as the “Euston Manifesto”, a proposal for a renewal of progressive politics, which he put together with others in a Euston pub. The document called on the Left to support universal human rights; to abandon anti-American prejudice; to see all forms of totalitarianism as being essentially the same; to be willing to support military intervention against oppressive regimes; and to promote democracy, equal rights and free speech.

The manifesto was billed as an attempt to reclaim such principles for the Left, but it served only to highlight the gulf between the socialist democratic tradition represented by Geras and the anti-democratic, neo-isolationist and reflexively anti-American tendencies of the contemporary Left.

“I have been flattered by an invitation to sign the manifesto,” wrote another renegade Leftist, Christopher Hitchens, “and I probably will, but if I agree, it will be the most conservative document I have ever initialled. Even the obvious has become revolutionary.”

Norman Geras was born to Jewish parents in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, on August 25 1943, and studied PPE at Pembroke College, Oxford. After graduating with a First, he took up a post at Manchester University, where he remained until his retirement in 2003 as Professor of Government.

Responding to his critics on the Left, Geras was always keen to prove his radical credentials: “I am part of the 1960s generation. I was no Tariq Ali but I took part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War… I was at an academic conference in Italy the day the Left-wing Allende regime was overthrown by a coup in Chile in 1973. I left the conference to join a march in the streets.”

Geras wrote some eight books, ranging from rather obscure works of political theory (Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind; The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty) to books about cricket (for some reason he supported Australia).

In The Contract of Mutual Indifference (1998), perhaps his most important work, he sought to remedy the inadequacy of response to the Holocaust in political philosophy. Focusing on the so-called bystander phenomenon—the inaction of ordinary Germans, Poles and others while the Jews went to their deaths—he identified a “contract of mutual indifference”, a sort of inversion of the you-scratch-my-back code.

This ethos, he argued, is morally indefensible, yet it still prevails today, reflected in widespread indifference to torture, hunger and other varieties of suffering across the world. Any political philosophy which neglects the primacy of the human duty to help others, he concluded, is short-sighted and shameful.

It was from this perspective that he supported the invasion of Iraq.

After retiring from Manchester, Norman Geras and his wife Adèle, an award-winning children’s writer, moved to Cambridge.

She survives him with two daughters, one of whom is the poet and crime fiction writer Sophie Hannah.

LOCATION: The Yorkshire Grey pub, 2 Theobalds Road, London WC1X 8PN

TIME: 1930hr GMT to 2200hr GMT

DATE: Wednesday, 27 November 2013

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Editor’s Note

[Norm told me more than once to my face that, even when it was used ironically, he detested the term “Decent Left”—not least of all for its presumption of moral superiority. It was used in to mock him (and the rest of us) on more than one occasion, but he never to my knowledge used it of himself. Because of that, I’m pretty sure that he would have disliked this article—respectful, admiring and well-written as it is.

As with the other entries in this archive, I have cleaned up the HTML source of the text of this essay for mark-up consistency, typography, semantic tagging, and formatting; but, despite my strong reservations, I have not changed its title or content. I just felt I owed it to Norm to add this note.]

[first published in the The Tower magazine]

Until his final blog post, Norman Geras dedicated his life to showing that you can be a faithful member of the hard Left without submitting to the temptations of anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism.

When I heard the news that blogger, activist, and political philosopher Norman Geras—known affectionately to all of us as “Norm”—had died on October 18, 2013 at the age of 70, the first thing I thought of was, strangely enough, the day of the September 11 attacks. A native New Yorker, I was far from home when the attacks occurred, and I learned of them from a stranger on a quiet train platform in Hungary. Like many Americans overseas, I was promptly stranded for days, trying to find a way to get back to the United States. I made it as far as London, and was made to wait there indefinitely.

To add insult to injury, I had just been robbed. So there I was, living on limited, borrowed funds, barely enough to pay for the use of Internet kiosks and despondent visits to pubs. During one of these visits, I happened upon a large Englishman slumped in front of a pint. He had a tabloid open to a picture of a radical Muslim, who was demonstrating either against the U.S. or in favor of the attacks. I grimaced and felt forced to say, “I’m from New York.” He gestured toward the guy in the picture and, with a look of bovine malice, replied, “Well, I think he’s got a point.”

Initially, such reactions to the 9/11 atrocity were almost impossible to fathom. It wasn’t so mysterious that people like Osama Bin Laden existed and wanted to kill as many of us as possible. But I did not anticipate the extent to which ostensibly intelligent and rational people expressed the same lazy contempt as that lone Englishman in the pub. I expected that, at least in the Northeastern United States, a clear-eyed understanding would prevail that mass-casualty terrorism by racist fundamentalists is the very opposite of liberal values. Yet over the coming months I felt a stronger and stronger sense of betrayal as so many strove to “contextualize” the attacks and ascribe rational motives to the perpetrators. In my own liberal-Left political milieu and many of its preferred media outlets, such as The Nation, the London Review of Books, and The Guardian, it was easy to find the assertion that because of U.S. malfeasance of some kind—our foreign policy, our exploitation of developing countries and the environment, our support for Arab dictators and the state of Israel, our racism, arrogance and ignorance, etc.—the Al Qaeda hijackers did indeed have “a point.”

Norman Geras delivering a lecture. Photo: Coxar / flickr. Used with permission.

So it was with pleasure and not a little relief that I discovered Norm Geras’ blog shortly after the third anniversary of 9/11. It was one of the earliest and most perceptive blogs on the subject of the War on Terror and its intellectual implications, and in the sparest format permissible by web standards—even the name, “normblog,” was rendered with typographical understatement—Norm addressed all of the pernicious phenomena mentioned above.

“For some time,” Norm, himself a lifelong man of the Left, once wrote, “it has been clear beyond reasonable doubt that a wide swath of the liberal-Left has learned nothing, and will learn nothing, from its sorry historical experience in the 20th century.” Noting the apologetics for 9/11 and Islamic terrorism in general spreading among his own political comrades, Norm noted that “There are always Leftists ready to believe that if a movement has some justice to its cause, a progressive component in its program or outlook, it is to be supported. And that means its crimes and deficiencies must be passed over, be silently ignored, or at the very least played down.”

It was precisely these Leftists that Norm would spend the rest of his life criticizing and opposing. Most importantly, he held that such an attitude was, in fact, a betrayal of the Left, that the defamation of America and apologetics for its enemies were inherently illiberal and accompanied by the abandonment of “democratic values.” Indeed, it was Norm who gave one of the most perceptive and incisive descriptions of this troubling phenomenon and its implications. “At best,” he wrote,

you might get some lip service paid to the events of September 11 having been, well, you know, unfortunate—the preliminary &”yes” before the soon-to-follow “but”…. And then you’d get all the stuff about root causes, deep grievances, the role of U.S. foreign policy in creating these; and a subtext, or indeed text, whose meaning was America’s comeuppance. This was not a discourse worthy of a democratically-committed or principled Left, and the would-be defense of it by its proponents, that they were merely trying to explain and not to excuse what happened, was itself a pathetic excuse.

Both Norm’s intellectual talent and his moral clarity made him a beloved and important figure on what is sometimes called Britain’s “decent Left”—men and women who believe in social-democratic principles and are also consistently anti-totalitarian, opposing tyranny and tyrannical violence whoever commits it. This group includes writers and thinkers like Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, Eve Garrard, Oliver Kamm, and Francis Wheen, and serves as a modern analog to the anti-Stalinist New York Intellectuals of the mid-20th century. Much of their energy focused on opposing terror and tyranny arising from radical Islam and its Western apologists.

Norm served as one of the intellectual and political leaders of this informal group. His blog and its considerable influence culminated in his co-authorship of the Euston Manifesto in 2006. The manifesto was a collaboration between around 20 members of the “decent Left,” with Norm as the principal author. It called for a “fresh political alignment” according to 15 categories, including democracy, equality, internationalism, universal human rights, and opposition to tyranny, terrorism, and racism. One of the things that set it apart was its emphasis on anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism as forms of bigotry equally dangerous as others emphasized by the Left. It sought, in other words, to purge progressive thought of its most self-defeating tendencies.

The manifesto was published in the New Statesman, as well as The Guardian‘s “Comment Is Free” opinion site, both venerable Left-wing publications. It garnered thousands of signatures, including those of linguist Shalom Lappin, historian Marko Attila Hoare, and political theorist Alan Johnson. A U.S. version followed, entitled “American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto,” which was signed by hundreds more, including Daniel Bell, Leon Wieseltier, Jeffrey Herf, and Walter Laqueur. The effort established a provocative platform that was much discussed and debated. With typical modesty, Norm simply said that it was “the main political outcome of my blogging and… something I’m happy about.”

It is not surprising to me, and should be surprising to no one, that Norm became such an important and central figure on the “decent Left.” Of all the Virgils who led me through the maze of bewilderment, anger, and alienation caused by the indulgent intellectual reaction to 9/11, Norm always struck me as having a constellation of qualities that made him the ideal advocate for a truly progressive politics. This was the result, I think, of his long and often revelatory intellectual journey.

Norman Myron Geras was born in 1943 in Bulawayo in what was then Southern Rhodesia. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1962 and studied politics, philosophy, and economics at Pembroke College, Oxford, graduating First Class in 1965. Soon after, he married the writer Adèle Geras and the couple moved to Manchester. Norm would spend the rest of his academic career at the University of Manchester, retiring in 2003 as Professor Emeritus of Politics. But few outside the rarified world of academia know just how significant that career was to the development of late-20th century political thought.

Norm’s scholarly focus was the political philosophy of Karl Marx. His approach was marked by his desire to achieve “standards of clarity, precision, consistency”; something that, along with his lapidary and accessible prose, set him apart from many of his peers. This quality, as well as the diversity of his interests—he loved both historical materialism and cricket equally—was probably how a man of such esoteric concerns eventually wrote a blog that commanded a readership in the thousands.

Alan Johnson, Eve Garrard, Nick Cohen, Shalom Lappin and Norman Geras signing the Euston Manifesto. Photo: fys / Wikimedia

In 1983, Norm published his most significant work, a major contribution to Marxist theory called Marx and Human Nature. In it, Norm confronted the “legend” that Marx denied the existence of human nature. Norm argued that human nature did in fact exist, that Marx was well aware of it, and that it was ethically incumbent on socialists to account for it. Concise and argued with a force arising from the straightforward elegance of its prose, the slim volume is now regarded as a canonical work on Marx’s treatment of the topic of “nature versus nurture.”

For Norm, however, this did not entail repudiating Marx. “It is a choice,” he once explained to an interviewer who asked whether he was “still” a Marxist, “to work within a flawed tradition, in the hope of strengthening and adding to it.” But Norm’s theories did have a very beneficial effect. By rejecting the kind of vulgar determinism embraced by many Marxists, according to which every aspect of human life and society is determined solely by economic conditions, Norm saved himself from being forced to shoehorn reality into ideological fantasy. It protected him from the cartoonish morality and conspiracy theory that typifies much of the contemporary Left, and allowed him to make a lucid and cogent response to current events from a Left-wing perspective.

Geras was at the forefront of the “decent Left,” supporting democracy and freedom above all else.

Like any other capable thinker, Norm’s ideas matured over time, and 15 years later, he published The Contract of Mutual Indifference, a major work of political philosophy. The book was inspired by a very unusual circumstance. Norm had found himself on a train, reading a book about the Nazi death camp at Sobibor while on his way to spend the day watching cricket. This “not very appropriate… conjunction,” as he called it, set Norm on the path to considering some of “the implications for modern political thought of a catastrophe of the order of the Holocaust.” He concluded that there was a decidedly dark side to the classic political theories of the “social contract” advanced by such thinkers as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Norm posited that the traditional concept of the social contract involved “a contract of mutual indifference,” in which people reached an unspoken agreement not to care for one another. “To the extent that calamities of this genocidal scope,” he wrote, referring to the Holocaust,

as well as other great and continuing brutalities—the widespread practice of torture, the enslavement of large numbers of young children in labor or prostitution, deep, life-reducing poverty—are countenanced, tolerated, lived with, by millions of people who know about them and do not do anything (much) to stop them, they testify to the reality of [a contract of mutual indifference], as governing most of the inter-relationships between the earth’s inhabitants.

Norm argued, however, that there was a way out of this dark vision of human relations: a “positive duty to give aid,” which he saw as a “reconstructed Marxian ethics of revolution.” It was based on a simple moral proposition: “If you do not come to the aid of others who are under grave assault, in acute danger or crying need, you cannot reasonably expect others to come to your aid in similar emergency; you cannot consider them so obligated to you.”

This became the foundation of Norm’s approach to issues of war and peace. In particular, it led to his support for military intervention in Iraq. It is wrong, he believed, to be a “bystander” to genocide and mass murder. Accordingly, the state that commits crimes against humanity effectively surrenders its sovereignty, and “there is no other moral option than to support the removal of such a regime if a removal is in the offing.”

It is no secret that much of the political Left and the political class in general have been evolving in a very different direction from Norm. He himself described this shift as based on

a thesis about America’s role in the world: the thesis that, as the hegemon of global capitalism, the U.S. government has pursued over many decades a foreign policy of assisting anti-democratic forces and opposing progressive change, and has often done so by lethal means, including terror, for which purpose it has supported proxies of one kind and another.

As in most ideologies, there is an element of truth in this—such as the case of Chile or Nicaragua—but Norm lamented that this thesis had come to “so [dominate] people’s vision that nothing else relevant to the issues can be allowed its due place.” This, he believed, resulted in “a displacement of the Left’s most fundamental values by a misguided strategic choice, namely, opposition to the US, come what may.” In other words, anti-Americanism had stultified the moral intelligence of much of the Left.

After the end of the Cold War, this resulted in a strange and paradoxical alliance between the far-Left and the far-Right. The tendency on the far-Left to ruminate on the unique evil of America found in the nativist isolationism of the far-Right an unlikely complement. When NATO finally engaged in the Yugoslavian wars, the far-Left opposed it as U.S. “imperialism,” while the far-Right echoed the sentiment from its perspective, asking why American lives and money should be spent on helping foreigners in distant places. A consensus on non-interventionism was forged at both ends of the political spectrum.

The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made non-interventionism mainstream. Liberal democracies tend to have a shallow appetite for long, bloody, expensive counterinsurgencies, and the wars became increasingly unpopular among the American people. As a result, mainstream liberals began to embrace non-interventionism, and were reinforced by extremists on both the Left and Right. The result was a new embrace of “political realism” by the establishment, a realism that was deeply skeptical of the use of military power and eager to depict America’s most fanatical enemies as viable partners.

Driven by his analysis of the “contract of mutual indifference,” Norm was having none of this. On Afghanistan, Norm applauded the U.S. liberation of the Afghan people “from a vile political and social tyranny, even if only as a byproduct of America’s own objectives.” Similarly, he believed that the world had a positive duty to aid the victims of Saddam Hussein. “Whatever subsidiary reasons could have been—and in fact were—given for the war to get rid of the Saddam Hussein regime,” he wrote,

the most powerful reason in its favor was a simple one: the regime had been responsible for, it was daily adding to, and for all that anyone could reasonably expect, it would go on for the foreseeable future adding to, an immensity of pain and grief, killing, torture and mutilation…. This was not merely an unpleasant tyranny amongst many others—it was one of the very worst of recent times, with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on its hands.

Norm could not locate a moral case for opposing the intervention, though he allowed that “there were creditable moral reasons for having doubts about the moral case for it.” He saw intervention as an effort to deal with a humanitarian emergency. “The house was on fire,” he wrote of the Hussein regime’s atrocities. “No argument against trying to save the people in the house is worth a fig if it doesn’t accept this fact honestly, and recognize that there is something considerable to be said for indeed trying to save these people.” To Norm, interventionism was not just a necessary foreign policy tool; it was in some cases a moral imperative.

Norm also made a significant and influential stand against another toxic tendency on the left that intensified after 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror: anti-Semitism. Indeed, almost from the moment the towers fell, a miasma of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories settled over the incident. Theories like the claim that Israel had foreknowledge of the attacks and failed to warn anyone except “4,000 Israeli workers”—embraced, for example, by erstwhile New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka—grew into Lindberghian fantasies of Jewish political influence in America and Britain. They quickly spread into ostensibly reputable organs of the intellectual left. In 2002, for example, the New Statesman investigated the “Zionist lobby” in a cover story illustrated by a Star of David pinned to a Union Jack. In 2004, Kalle Lasn, publisher of the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, asked about American neoconservatives, “Why won’t anyone say they’re Jewish?”

Unfortunately, there is a long history of anti-Semitism among revolutionary movements both Left and Right. Indeed, anti-Semitism was once called “the socialism of fools,” referring to the scapegoating of Jews in the name of social justice. Over the course of the 20th century, among the Nazis, the Soviets, and their facsimiles, anti-Semitism often served as an engine of revolution.

Karl Marx. Photo: Wikimedia

Liberals and social democrats often fail to understand this. Heirs to the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism, they often find it difficult to acknowledge the role of the irrational in politics; how anti-Semitism can be used to mobilize a “people of light” against a “people of darkness” in an eschatological end-game. As a result, the liberal democrat often learns about a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and concludes, not that the bomber was seeking—quite consciously and deliberately—to achieve religious ecstasy through the murder of Jews, but rather that the bomber must have been driven to madness by the occupation of the West Bank. No rational person could do such a thing, this observer believes, unless they had been made insane by oppression.

Norm was painfully aware of all this, and it led him to the tragic realization that “Not much more than 60 years after the Jews of Europe were nearly annihilated… the Jewish state has become an object of special opprobrium,” which, Norm wrote, went well “beyond that criticism which is justified, equitable, applied in equal measure to other nations when it fits.”

Through analysis of Marx’s writings, Geras concluded that there was a moral duty to aid the oppressed.

Disgusted that such critics “could only give out a thin, calculating, morally depleted discourse of “contextualization,” Norm was devastating in his critique, saying that “The root-causers always plead a desire merely to expand our understanding, but they’re very selective in what they want us to “understand.” They empathize with Palestinian terrorists, he wrote, but not “the worries of Israeli and other Jews,” despite “the decades-long hostility of the Arab world to the State of Israel and the teaching of hatred there against Jews” as well as “the acts of war against that state and the acts of terrorism against its citizens.” Although “this would seem to constitute a potentially rich soil of roots and causes,” Israel’s critics appeared remarkably uninterested in them. “A thing held too close to the eye,” Norm once wrote of anti-Americanism, “obstructs the vision.” When applied to Israel, this approach leads to the indulgence of anti-Semitism. Norm referred to several “alibis” proffered by anti-Israel activists and thinkers in order to justify this myopia, such as treating anti-Semitism “as a pure epiphenomenon of the Israel-Palestine conflict.” He cited British film director Ken Loach, who said in March 2009 that if there was a rise of anti-Semitism, “it is perfectly understandable, because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism.” Norm wrote that “the key word here is “understandable”, which means “something along the lines of “excusable” or, at any rate, not an issue to get excited about.”

Norm had little patience for the standard defense that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. “No, it isn’t,” he wrote, “unless it is.” He granted that the two are not necessarily the same, but he rejected the idea that simply announcing the difference grants immunity from charges of racism. “In the outpouring of hatred towards Israel today,” he wrote, “it scarcely matters what part of it is impelled by a pre-existing hostility towards Jews as such and what part by a groundless feeling that the Jewish state is especially vicious among the nations of the world… Both are forms of anti-Semitism.”

The implications of this were both ominous and deeply sad for Norm, who wrote stoically, “We now know… should a new calamity ever befall the Jewish people, there will be, again, not only the direct architects and executants but also those who collaborate, who collude, who look away and find the words to go with doing so.”

Unfortunately, even now, 12 years after that day in the pub, I find myself constantly faced with reminders of just how relevant Norm and his work remain. To cite one current example, here is Robert Wright in The Atlantic on the subject of negotiations with Iran:

If you’re like the average American, here’s a fact you don’t know: in 1953, the United States sponsored a coup in Iran, overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a brutally repressive regime that ruled for decades. Iranians, on the other hand, are very aware of this, which helps explain why, to this day, many of them are gravely suspicious of American intentions. It also helps explain the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran—an event that many Americans no doubt chalk up to unfathomable religious zealotry.

One wishes Norm were around to criticize the toxic naiveté that removes “religious zealotry” from the causes of the 1979 revolution and Iran’s ultimate takeover by a regime of religious zealots; or the refusal to contend with what Iranian government officials have said about Israel; or the claim, by people like Wright, that genocidal statements by leaders like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad are still considered “disputed.” One wishes Norm were here to note just how many precursors to Wright similarly “contextualized” the Nazis.

And Norm’s unique voice seems equally present in the face of the ongoing efforts of many to portray Israel as a state in which racism is its defining characteristic. Efforts like Leftist journalist Max Blumenthal’s just-published Goliath, which sniggers darkly that Israel is a place where you can learn “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People.” Blumenthal’s blinkered and one-sided conviction that Israel is fundamentally racist, but that Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism is at worst what Norm called an “epiphenomenon of Zionism,” is precisely the sort of thing Norm was so adept at deconstructing and demolishing.

From his simple blog, Geras forcefully denounced the anti-Semitic underpinnings of anti-Zionism.

Losing Norm’s voice isn’t easy. One of the worst things about death is the sense of futility it imparts, a reminder of the truth expressed by the famous quote from the Tao Te Ching: “Heaven and Earth are indifferent, and treat the creatures as straw dogs.” That a voice so important to one’s political development and convictions could be silenced is a hard thing to accept. 9/11 was the great trauma of our generation, and as the response to it began to echo the initial obscenity, for many of us Norm became the moral last helicopter out of Saigon.

In a sense, however, the continuing relevance of Norm’s work, though unfortunate, is also a kind of consolation. He helped us all understand our own inchoate belief that the Left did not have to embrace the political dysfunctions of our era. One did not have to leave the Left in order to remain true to its principles. He was not a neoconservative, though his policy ideas sometimes overlapped with theirs. He was an authentic Marxist who nonetheless saw in liberalism and American values a wellspring of progressive politics. And he understood that American power, including military power, was not inherently evil, but could be a means to achieve ethical outcomes. Today, as the U.S. begins to withdraw from the Middle East and reconsiders critically its conviction that American power carries ethical responsibilities to the rest of the world, it is worth remembering Norm’s admonition that none of us is required—or has a right—to honor a contract of mutual indifference. One hopes that this simple moral imperative will ultimately prove to be his greatest legacy.

[first published in The Times]

Wide-ranging political philosopher who was an unswerving enemy of tyranny and terrorism and found late fame as a blogger

Norman Geras was a penetrating political theorist who found fame in retirement as a pioneering blogger.

In his scholarly work he made substantial contributions to the study of Marxism and of international ethics. He served his entire academic career at the University of Manchester, where he was head of the Department of Government from 1998 till 2002, and ended as Professor Emeritus of Politics.

He then made skilful use of the new medium of the internet to inform and entertain a much wider audience. In dismay at what he considered their failure to defend Western democratic values against totalitarianism, he broke with many of his former comrades on the Left.

His acute insights and coolly analytical style of argument were admired by columnists across the political spectrum, who grew accustomed to checking their opinions on topical issues by considering what he had to say.

Norman Geras was born in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in 1943. He arrived at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1962 to read Law. On his first day he met a friend who was to read Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE); Geras had been unaware of the existence of this celebrated degree course and instantly switched to it. He graduated in 1965 with a first.

At Oxford he met his future wife, Adèle, who was studying Modern Languages at St Hilda’s College. She was to become an eminent and prolific novelist for children and young adults. They married in 1967 and moved to Manchester, where Geras took up his first academic appointment. He remained in the same department till his retirement in 2003.

His academic specialism was the theory of Marxism. He was steeped in its literature and contributed to it some notable and original studies. A forbiddingly abstruse type of Marxism associated with the French communist ­intellectual Louis Althusser became popular with European radicals in the 1970s. It stressed the purportedly scientific character of Marxist analysis. Geras was highly critical of this school and sought in his book Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (1983) to establish a humanistic type of Marxism, which took seriously human nat­ure and its capacity to develop and change.

Geras also wrote a study of the thought of Rosa Luxemburg, the chief theorist of the German far Left, who was murdered during the crushing of the revolutionary uprising of 1919. She had been prescient in her warnings of the dictatorial character of Leninist rule in the nascent Soviet Union.

Geras was at the time of publication associated with a Trotskyist organisation called the International Marxist Group. He set out to defend (as he would then have seen it) Luxemburg’s Marxist orthodoxy. It may seem perverse to Geras’s later admirers across the political divide that he would then have regarded this as a point in Luxemburg’s favour, but the quality of his scholarship was undeniable. He showed that Luxemburg had largely shared Lenin’s own pre-1917 analysis of the revolutionaries’ task.

Though Geras never ceased to ­regard himself as a Marxist, his political interests were wider and his views ­always more heterodox than the doctrinal rigidities characteristic of that school of thought.

In The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust (1998), he turned his attention to the great humanitarian evils of the modern age. He asked why such catastrophes as the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s or the ferocious xenophobic persecutions in Bosnia in the 1990s produced the phenomenon of bystanders—those who know that something terrible is happening yet are locked in a pattern of indifference. He proposed that the first task of politics was the “moral necessity [of] mutual human support and aid, the universal responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of others”. Any politics that excluded this primary duty to give aid and support was inadequate.

This conviction explains much of Geras’s post-retirement life, in which he became known to a far wider audience than he had enjoyed in the academy. In the digital age, political commentary could be instantaneous. Geras read some of the earliest political blogs and decided to start his own, called “normblog“. He launched it in 2003 and for the next ten years posted to it almost daily. His principal interest was the ­humanitarian theme of his political philosophy: that bonds of human obligation do not stop at national boundaries. It led him to conclusions radically different from those of his former allies on the Left.

Geras had been a prominent member of the editorial board of New Left Review, the radical theoretical journal, from 1976 to 1992. He was appalled, however, by the attitude of much of the Left to the attacks of 9/11. While former comrades had typically interpreted these atrocities as a response, however brutal, to Western imperialism, Geras saw in Islamist extremism everything he reviled. Believing in liberal democratic rights, female emancipation and secularism, he supported the interventionist policies of Tony Blair.

He was one of a small group of left-wing commentators to support military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.

A secular Jew, Geras was also distur­bed by an increasing tendency in Western commentary, not only on the Left, to smuggle the premises and language of anti-Semitism into ostensible concern for the just cause of Palestinian statehood.

A great deal of his polemical and ­intellectual effort was devoted to ­exposing the moral confusions of those who looked at the imperfections of democratic societies and fastidiously saw little to choose between them and anti-Western dictatorships. He helped to draft a statement known as the ­Euston Manifesto in 2006, setting out a set of principles from the Left that uncompromisingly attacked ideological apologetics for tyranny and terrorism.

Geras had prostate cancer diagnosed in 2003. It did not prevent him pursuing his interests and enthusiasms, which he rarely did in moderation. His remorseless blogging influenced and informed commentators who were close to his way of thinking, such as Christopher Hitchens (obituary, December 17, 2011), and many more.

He also used the medium as an outlet for other enthusiasms, among which sport was prominent.

He had run two London marathons and was a cricket fanatic who amassed a library of some 2 100 books on the subject. Having resolved in his youth that he could not give support to South Africa in Test match cricket, owing to his revulsion at apartheid, he gave it instead to Australia in preference to the old colonial power. His interest in games extended to devising his own board games, including one involving Marxists called (invoking a dictum of Marx’s) “The Point is to Change It”.

Geras and his wife moved to Cambridge in 2010 to be closer to family. His cancer returned this year. He is survived by his wife and their two daughters.

Norman Geras, political philosopher, was born on August 25, 1943. He died on October 18, 2013, aged 70

[first published at Never Trust A Hippy]

Prominent bloggers probably get more obituaries than most, and I don’t think that I can add much to the tonnage of praise and regret that has marked the passing of Norman Geras, late of Normblog.

However, I do have a three-part theory about why Normblog was so important.

Turning off the comments

Sure—the quality of writing and thinking on the site were pretty impressive. It stands to reason that retired Professor who is on a mission is likely to produce something worth bookmarking. But the site’s success can be traced to Norm’s decision not to enable the ‘comments’ function on his blog.

Even if you don’t write about anti-semitism, fielding comments can be a fairly soul-destroying experience. Once you start blogging about the You-Know-Whos, it gets a great deal worse. Norm’s combination of patient rigour and (almost) faultless civility would probably not have lasted long with that additional burden.

A lot of us started blogging to expose our thinking to a critical audience in order to develop our voice. We needed the commenters. We’d be depressed if we didn’t get them.

Norm didn’t have that need. His postings were unusual in that they tended to reflect thinking that was at a more advanced stage of gestation. Turning off the comments feature on his blog undoubtedly suited Norm, but it created a temporary vacuum that allowed this thinking to take on viral properties.

To either challenge or develop Norm’s thinking, you had to set up your own site or comment on the sites of others who linked to him. The need to respond, or to drag a tangent from one of Norms posts brought many of us over the tipping point.

Each new post, sparked by one of Norms, sent dozens of new readers Norm’s way and attracted comments of their own.

Revisionism

Norm’s politics had some of the properties we find in an Internet meme, or at least, one that works for the people who read newspaper op-eds.

It appealed to the innate fascination that politicos have for ‘revisionism’, and (treading carefully…) it was a sign of the muddle that the wider left was in at the time that an assertion of rational enlightenment ideas, or a rejection of anti-semitism, made his posts read like revisionism.

Many of us went through a cycle of curiosity, discomfort, reflection followed by the partisanship of the convert. But even for those who didn’t, the challenge was compelling.

A good example

Most instances of Internet activism have been about harvesting existing support or giving energy and efficiency to already-existing viewpoints. Norm established what the necessary conditions are for the creation of an online project that actually changes minds.

I actually can’t think of another project that has changed minds as effectively as The Euston Manifesto. With all due respect and apologies to the other people involved, Norm was the one who co-ordinated the thinking.

It was his incremental work that smoothed the rough edges off it. Ideas that are going to gain traction need this kind of streamlining, and by the time The Euston Manifesto was published, it could be said to have created a new model for the promotion of political ideas.

That’s my fourpence worth. On the wider question of “political blogging”, October 2013 feels like the end of an era on that one. As the old ‘personal blogging’ space gives way to the social networks that are displacing it, it may be the case that we will soon be drawing a line under this particular episode and reaching our conclusions.

Has it improved the way we think, and talk about politics? The jury is still out on that one. But Normblog did. It cascaded and catalysed.

I’m late—again. Like so many who followed his blog and corresponded with him, I was not surprised, yet shocked nevertheless, to hear that Norman Geras had passed away after a long illness. Having read a number of the touching tributes to him, I’m struck by how little I could say that is in anyway original. Not that originality is what is required at such times. Many have talked about his writing, what it meant to them, and what they did and didn’t agree with. I recognise much in what has been said but would want to stress the way in which I found, as many others obviously did, normblog to be an invitation to have a conversation, whether you agreed with him or not. This could, and did, take the form of reciprocal posts across the blogosphere—which were then carried on to the email circuit.

That my experience was nothing unusual is testimony to how generous Norm was with his time towards his readers. For my own part, I have reason to be particularly appreciative since what disagreements we had were largely a consequence of my own belligerence. This commitment to conversation was reflected in his work and regarding this there’s a point worth stressing: “It’s still out there”, as Max Dunbar says, and what a substantial archive the weblog of Norman Geras actually is. Until recently, it was updated most days—often more than once. I can’t think of any columnist who could have held my attention for so long. I don’t want to do the, ‘I agreed with this, but not with this’, too much but I will say that his writing on contemporary antisemitism was nearer the mark than just about anyone writing today. But I love the fact that the last post by this man of letters was not about politics but books.

I have been reflecting on the question of whether and to what extent you know someone with whom you’ve communicated electronically but never met? I came to the conclusion that you don’t really know them at all. One face-to-face meeting is worth a thousand emails, which is why when Norm asked me a few years back if I “ever came down this way”, I regret that it was at a time when I was too confused and disorientated even to leave the house for too long. Then, after the trouble had gone, so much time had elapsed that I was too embarrassed to take him up on the offer.  I didn’t know Norm—but I wish I had and I miss him anyway.

Following the news of the untimely death at the age of 70 of thinker, teacher, writer and pioneering blogger Norman Geras, I have been re-reading his essay, The Contract of Mutual Indifference, first published in 1998.

It is a masterpiece of the form—just over 80 pages of knot-tight argument on the ability of human beings to live their lives in apparent contentment even when living alongside others who suffer.

Long before he started writing his Normblog in response to the apparent indifference of the Western liberal elite to the suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam, Norman Geras—who was emeritus professor of politics at Manchester University—as expressing his concern at the West’s failure to intervene to stop genocide.

In his attempt to examine this “bystander phenomenon”, he listed examples of human rights abuses in Bosnia: a crucifixion, a girl raped with a bottle, lungs burst with a vehicle exhaust, children disfigured with hot irons.
“Here is the core idea,” he explained. “If you do not come to the aid of others who are under grave assault, in acute danger or crying need, you cannot reasonably expect others to come to your aid in similar emergency; you cannot consider them so obligated to you.” This is the contract of mutual indifference.

The starting point for Norman Geras was the Holocaust, but the context was contemporary international politics.
In one of his last blog posts, he wrote about Syria (as in the case of Iraq, Normblog supported intervention) and described a common attitude: “Something should be done about this; I hope somebody or other will do it (but don’t look at me).”

Professor Geras believed passionately in the principles of humanitarian intervention and the “responsibility to protect” under international law.

Personally, I couldn’t join him in support for the Iraq war. Nor could I sign the Euston Manifesto, a statement of principles for what became known as the “decent” left. But I recognise it as his greatest legacy.

Norman Geras changed the way I think. In particular, he forced me to recognise that those who chose not to support the Iraq war had to take responsibility for the moral consequences of their decision as much as those who called for military action.

In the week of Professor Geras’s death, we read of snipers in Syria targeting the bellies of pregnant women in a game to win cigarettes, while Facebook refuses to remove snuff films of beheadings from the web.

How can we remain indifferent to such horror? How can we not act?

This week I was reminded of the words of a Kurdish Iraqi refugee from an Amnesty appeal quoted in The Contract of Mutual Indifference: “When our children were dying, you did nothing to help. Now God help your children”.

Norm, just before he left Bulawayo for Oxford