Seumas Milne responded to 9/11 by attacking America – no wonder he works for Jeremy Corbyn
You can tell a lot about a person from their reaction to tragedy. Eighteen years ago this week, 19 al-Qaeda fanatics hijacked four airlines and crashed them into the two towers of the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Around 3,000 people were killed. While rescue workers struggled to retrieve corpses from the smouldering ruins, journalists around the world penned their responses. Seumas Milne, who worked as Comment Editor at the Guardian between 2001 and 2007, before going on to become Jeremy Corbyn’s communications chief, was no different. But his reaction certainly did stand out, both for its heartlessness and its promotion of what we would now term “fake news” conspiracy theories.
Milne’s initial response to the attack on the American people, titled “They can’t see why they are hated”, was published by the Guardian just two days after the attack. It was a ferocious assault aimed, not at the theocratic terrorists who carried out the massacre, nor the nilhistic ideology that inspired them, but at the reply of American civil society. Addressing the US reaction, Milne wrote “it is painfully clear that most Americans simply don’t get it”. He continued “any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness…seems almost entirely absent”. The use of the term “sacrificing their own lives” to describe terrorists who flew airliners into buildings packed with civilians was both curious and revealing; it is a term usually reserved for peace activists who starve themselves to death, or soldiers who fall fighting an armed enemy.
The essential argument of Milne’s piece was that the 9/11 attack, though unacceptable, was a logical and perhaps even inevitable reaction to the excesses of American foreign and economic policy. It was worthy of condemnation to be sure, but by God, the Yanks had it coming. Milne went on to make the comparison between the al-Qaeda atrocity and US Government behaviour explicit, suggesting Americans “might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world”.
This was an argument that, in various forms, dogged the western left for at least a decade. Terrorists, in particular Islamist fundamentalists, were stripped of agency, with their behaviour seen as entirely reactive to western actions. They were angered by US or British foreign policy, in particular the Iraq war and support for Israel. Or perhaps it was socio-economic deprivation, or a response to Islamophobia. Anything in fact, than the logical outcome of the ideology held by a small group of theocratic fundamentalists who killed far more followers of their own faith than any other.
Leftists, perhaps until the emergence of ISIS, struggled to appreciate that there really are people who desire to live under, and impose on others, a political system based on an ultra-reactionary reading of a seventh century religious text. As a result, the Islamist far-right, unlike the western far-right, was afforded a certain respectability in some leftist circles. Jeremy Corbyn could describe members of Hamas, a ferociously bigoted group whose founding charter calls for the murder of Jews worldwide, as his friends. In 2004, Milne could publish an article reportedly from Osama Bin Laden, based on the audio recordings the terrorist leader periodically produced, in the Guardian’s comment section. It is very hard to imagine the Guardian, quite rightly, reproducing the propaganda of a white supremacist terrorist in the same way.
Alas, moral indecency wasn’t the only fault in Milne’s article. It also contained staggering factual inaccuracies, to the point that I struggle to understand how nobody at the Guardian intervened before publication. Milne claimed, entirely without proof, that “Bin Laden and his mujahidin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6”. This is inexcusable nonsense.
It is, of course, true that the Americans provided significant assistance, rightly or wrongly, to various mujahidin factions that fought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Many, perhaps most, of these subscribed to an ultra-conservative Islamist ideology. But there is no evidence it ever backed al-Qaeda, a tiny and virtually insignificant faction in the conflict, despite the propaganda it published later. There are some on the far-left, as on the far-right, who will term any religiously conservative Muslim as a member of al-Qaeda when it’s politically convenient. We are seeing this again with the Syrian conflict, where some leftist Assad apologists endeavour to prove the Free Syrian Army and ‘White Helmet’ rescue workers bear little distinction from ISIS and Al-Qaeda. It is now, as it was then, bigoted nonsense.
If you want to understand the ideological origins of Corbynism, a fusion of statist economic policy and inherent sympathy for just about any group or state that vows to oppose the liberal-democratic west, the comment pages of the Guardian under Seumas Milne is a good place to start. Milne’s response, beyond its obvious tastelessness, revealed one of the chief deficits of the western left. An assumption that hostile actors, be it Putin or ISIS, act predominantly in response to western excesses. Deprived of their agency, their violence becomes understandable, their butchers transformed into men with whom we should empathise. This belief system has already dragged the British Labour Party towards moral insanity. I very much hope the country as a whole won’t follow the same path.
