David Patterson
A Genealogy of Evil
Cambridge UP, 2010
312 Pages
£55.00
ISBN 978-0521197472

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David Patterson may well be right to bemoan contemporary academics for their “reluctance to use terms such as evil”. Many subjects are of deep moral importance, and removing all emotion or moral conviction from their study can enervate academia of its humanity. But few books can provide a more illustrative validation of academia’s conventional detachment than Patterson’s own A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism, from Nazism to Islamic Jihad. It advances the claim that modern Jihadism has its intellectual roots in Nazism, a link which has been provocatively drawn before, notably by Jeffrey Herf of the University of Maryland, and the American editor of Dissent magazine, Paul Berman. There may be some truths in this argument, but it remains deeply contentious, not just for flaws in the conceptualisations and claims involved, but also given the aggressive stance on fighting terrorism which self-styled liberal hawks like Berman wish it to advance. Both these concerns make Patterson’s misguided contribution to the debate, founded on an utterly absent methodology and frequently lapsing into mendacious and polemical tactics, all the more dangerous an intervention.

Patterson begins with an introduction on “The Essence of the Jihadist Evil”, a somewhat disconnected outline of the views of Jihadists: an undefined category of violent Islamists consumed with anti-Semitic beliefs and rhetoric. While some of this analysis is intriguing, the few substantiating arguments are worrying in their ambiguity and crudity. Patterson then presents the “Jihadist echoes” of Nazi ideology, an all too accurate label given the superficiality of the similarities listed, whose importance is left thoroughly unclear. It is in the subsequent history of sources and quotations, however, that Patterson really attempts to establish a “genealogy”, tracing a lineage from Jihadism’s early medieval foundations to various Nazi influences on modern Islamic “ideologues”, before finally considering both religious and secular offshoots of the Jihadist phenomenon.

This cursory synopsis betrays the first major problem with Genealogy of Evil: Patterson’s unwillingness to offer any theoretical or methodological foundation for his work. Despite writing explicitly in terms of “totalitarianism”, “evil”, and Nazi and Jihadist “ideology”, Patterson produces not a single definition, nor any engagement with the extensive literature, on what these terms mean. Yet plenty of his claims rest on these concepts, albeit sometimes unwisely, as when Patterson argues that Jihadism is even more “evil” than Nazism, because its assault on Jews is religious as well as political. What this distinction consists of, and why it is the criterion for evil, is left entirely unexplained.

But the more fundamental problem is Patterson’s choice to frame his analysis around confusing talk of “what Jihadism is about”, casually glossing a range of independent questions. Is Patterson concerned with what causes Jihadism? What its aims are? How it wins people to its cause? These issues are conflated, and this conflation underpins the claim, repeated with a frequency that betrays its political motivation, that because Jihadists proclaim to hate Jews as an inherent embodiment of evil, Jihadism therefore “has nothing to do with political or territorial issues surrounding the Jewish state; least of all does it have to do with check points or the security fence.” Patterson seems blind to the obvious fault in his inference; Jihadists’ belief that “Jews are evil irrespective of what they/Israel does” does not demonstrate that Israeli actions do not play a causal role in explaining Jihadists’ anti-Semitism, or in providing a narrative within which anti-Semitic rhetoric is persuasive for potential audiences. This is not to mention the numerous Jihadists cited elsewhere in the book who expound on the significance of Israel to their worldview, and whose words are reconciled to Patterson’s thesis with increasingly tortuous logic. Take the following quotation, from Haj Amin al-Husseini:

“Our fundamental condition for cooperating with [Hitler’s] Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world.”

Patterson infers from this that Jihadist anti-Semitism predated the founding of Israel, and therefore Israel must have no bearing on contemporary Jihadism. This clearly does not follow; a far more logical reading is that precisely because Jihadism was concerned with the presence of Jews in Palestine and the Arab World, the establishment of a territorially embodied Jewish state is relevant to Jihadism’s genealogy.

That contrived interpretations like these frequent Genealogy of Evil reflects on the flawed mentality associating Nazism and Jihadism. Patterson argues that an essential similarity between Jihadists and Nazis is that their anti-Semitism lies in Jews’ embodiment of the view “that…ready answers of the creed are not enough”. This dubious claim is given just two pages of discussion, with not a single reference to any Jihadist or Nazi text. Why is Patterson so keen to advance such an argument, in lieu of any evidence for it? A plethora of vague and meaningless resemblances through the book’s middle chapters ensure that intellectual links remain necessarily speculative, despite laboured assertions by Patterson that “there can be no doubt” about them. Indeed, the problem is not just individual acts of interpretation: something about Patterson’s whole argument seems contrived, perhaps because he never successfully addresses the quantity of evidence, much of it included in his section on medieval Islam, showing the extent to which Jihadist anti-Semitism predated Nazism entirely, as well as the substantial differences between them.

But Patterson’s “genealogy” is not just bedevilled by the persistency of poor interpretive method. As the book advances, increasingly unpleasant contrasts between the violence of Islam and the peacefulness of Judaism give the reader pause, as does Patterson’s occasional economy with the truth. He falsely claims that Islam has no distinction between just and unjust war, and berates “the nations of the world—with the admirable exception of the United States and Israel”—for applauding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic UN speech in 2008, failing to mention that representatives of all EU nations, plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Costa Rica, staged a walkout. And despite an assurance that he is only concerned with Jihadism, Patterson frequently generalises about Islam as a whole: “Jihadist hatred of the Jews”, we are assured, “is woven into the fabric of Muslim culture.”

Such views are not only likely to offend and outrage many. They expose how thoroughly the content of Genealogy of Evil is actually dictated by Patterson’s prior political and religious convictions. These reach a peak in a truly bewildering final chapter, titled “Humanity’s Need for Israel”, in which the Jewish people’s responsibility for the “prohibition against murder” is counterpoised with the expansionist, totalitarian inclinations of Islam, Christianity, Hellenic Civilisation, and the West. While Patterson has repeatedly insisted that the Jewish people embody opposition to dogmatic creed, they are nevertheless “singled out” as “witnesses to an absolute, revealed truth” from the “same source that sanctifies humanity: the divine commandments of the Torah”. Patterson goes on:

“Beyond Israel’s lifesaving contributions and examples of aiding others [wherever disaster strikes] humanity’s need for Israel is a need for an alternative to nihilism, an alternative to the dictum that nothing is true and everything is permitted…”

In fact:

“There is much for the world to atone for, starting with the countless UN resolutions against the Jewish state… [for] while Mecca signifies the truth of Islam, Jerusalem signifies the holiness of humanity – that is what makes it God’s dwelling place…Jerusalem is not only the capital of Israel, it is the centre of the world…hence humanity’s need for Israel.”

Readers hardly need assistance in evaluating these passages and the motivations behind them.

Ultimately, there is something more worrying here than just a biased polemic by a lone academic. The cadre of figures who are noisily trumpeting connections between Nazism and Jihadism, whether genealogical, rhetorical, or moral, link this argument to wider political projects with suspicious consistency. It is not that there is nothing to the argument; by far the most compelling section of Patterson’s book is his mention of Nazi Arab-language broadcasts, and former Nazis’ roles in the governments of Arab states, although both phenomena are detailed briefly and with insufficient criticality. But whether with Berman’s advocacy for humanitarian intervention, or Patterson’s deflection of criticism from Israel, prior political or religious projects are driving the production of supposedly empirical claims, rather than visa-versa. Political analysts are human. They hold preconceptions and are naturally reluctant to change or abandon their theories, but the least we should demand is that they acknowledge these dangers and work to counter them. That authors like Patterson eschew such efforts with so casual and complete a disregard is dangerous precisely because Jihadism is a phenomenon of such great moral and emotive significance. That it may legitimately be called evil only reinforces the damage that will be done by mystifying its nature and causes.

Indeed, the flaws of Genealogy of Evil are so extensive and visible that regrettably one cannot but ask serious questions as to how it possibly got through the Cambridge University Press vetting process. The limited truths—that some influence was wielded by Nazism over certain Islamic extremists, and that exterminationist anti-Semitism continues to motivate many of them—do not disguise the overwhelmingly propagandistic nature of this book. Its appalling abuse of interpretive method, and Patterson’s transparent promotion of an analytically blinkered political and religious agenda, have no place in anything with pretensions to academic work.

Jonathan Leader Maynard is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at University College, Oxford.

There is something about the cold month of November which has particular resonance in the annals of murky Cold War history. The Russian Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall both took place in November. The space race kicked off in November 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 2, carrying the ill-fated dog Laika. And in an event perceived by many to be of equal significance, on 21 November 1979 the government revealed that Sir Anthony Blunt, a seemingly unassuming Cambridge professor and member of the Royal Household, had been a spy for the Soviet Union.

Suggestions have been made that information passed on by Blunt between the 1930s and mid-1950s may have cost the lives of British agents. While these claims are firmly denied in almost all credible studies of the affair, there is good evidence that during World War II—notably during the period when Soviet Russia had entered into alliance with Nazi Germany—Blunt relayed intelligence to Russia from his position in MI5. He also used his post at Cambridge University to recruit students for Soviet espionage. “We do not know exactly what information he passed”, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told the House of Commons in an explosive statement revealing Blunt’s identity. “We do know, however, to what information he had access by virtue of his duties. There is no doubt that British interests were seriously damaged by his activities.”

The 30th anniversary of Blunt’s public outing comes hot on the heels of the publication of his memoirs, which remained classified at the British Library for the last 25 years. The resulting reinvigoration of debates over Blunt’s espionage has raised some thorny questions—not just about Blunt’s own story, but also about how we understand, recollect, and depict the Cold War.

The most obvious—though perhaps not the most pressing—question raised by the memoirs is the issue of Blunt’s motives. What led this academic, the son of a vicar and a distant cousin of Elizabeth the Queen Mother, to take such a treasonous course of action? Blunt explains himself in a handful of ways, most of them unconvincing.

First and foremost, he situates his decision against the background of British appeasement of Nazism during the 1930s.

I had come to believe – or to think I believed – that Marxism…supplied the solution to the political problems with which the world was faced in the mid-1930s…The rearming of Germany, failure to resist the occupation of the Rhineland and the policy of non-intervention in Spain [during the country’s Civil War] seemed to prove that nothing could be expected from the British or French governments and that the only force really determined to resist Nazism was Communism, based on Soviet Russia.

Then there was Blunt’s relationship with fellow spy and Cambridge undergraduate Guy Burgess, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1951. Burgess became notorious as the inspirational figurehead of the ring of Soviet collaborators popularly known as the Cambridge Spies. Blunt explains:

…Guy, who had extraordinary powers of persuasion, eventually convinced me that I could do most for their cause by joining him and working for the Russians.

Blunt also protests that his allegiances to Britain were, in any case, rather tenuous. Much of his early adolescence was spent in France where his father served as a chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris. As a result—in an explanation which raises complex questions about the concept of citizenship—Blunt argues that “my country” was:

not a principle that was deeply instilled. My loyalties were international as much as national, and above all they were directed to causes.

Reflecting on the fateful decision to spy for the Soviet Union, Blunt insists that the slaying of Fascism was his primary concern. However, subsequent developments, most notably his realisation that Stalinist Russia was “a tyranny as bad as Hitler’s”, gave him pause. “I made the greatest mistake of my life”, Blunt ultimately admitted.

Readers will not be fooled by this apparent volte-face. Blunt may have penned these words out of genuine remorse in the last days of his life; he may have struggled to live with the shame he felt at being stripped of his knighthood and becoming a social pariah (he was booed out of a Notting Hill cinema in 1980, and died largely cut off from the world three years later). Still, the general consensus among historians is that if Blunt intended his memoirs to serve as adequate explanation for his treason, he singularly failed. At best, his papers are an apology stunted by the Official Secrets Act which curtailed his freedom to speak frankly.

At worst the memoirs are a mealy-mouthed insult to the reader’s own intelligence. Blunt devotes pages and pages to his views on art history and self-serving reflections on the honours he received as art historian. More pressingly, he admits to continued contact with the Russians well into the 1950s, when Nazism had been defeated. Blunt explains that this continuing espionage was borne less from principle than a commitment to protect his friends—including Burgess and Donald Maclean, another Cambridge spy whom he helped escape to Moscow in 1951—still involved in espionage. Though we might acknowledge this loyalty to his friends, Blunt’s support for these defectors should earn him no sympathy.

The inadequacy of Blunt’s explanations raises a second, more pressing issue—that of how, in this month of remembrances, we remember the Cold War itself.

For one reason or another, our recollection of the Cold War has become—or perhaps always has been—remarkably ill-defined. The current fashion is for a fuzzy sort of nostalgia: film buffs chew popcorn while watching offerings like Goodbye Lenin! or The Lives of Others, while well-meaning lefties wear the Soviet red star or Che Guevara images as badges of honour. This commodification—how Marx would laugh—of the lifestyles and iconography associated with the Cold War seems relatively banal. But (as Hannah Arendt would remind us) what lies beneath is a far less light-hearted story in which Che t-shirts obscure outrage at the abuses perpetrated by the communist regimes of Europe. Unlike the sombre quality of our recollection of the Second World War, we remember the Cold War with frosty detachment.

Previous coverage of the Blunt affair has been caught up in this process. In an otherwise worthy biography of Blunt in 2002, Miranda Carter sought to counterpoise Blunt’s defection with the inadequacy of British intelligence, which failed to unmask him despite suspicions of communist sympathies and even, rather embarrassingly, bestowed knighthood upon him in 1956. Reading Carter’s book, the Blunt affair appears more as a comedy of diplomatic errors than a single link in a chain of terrifying Soviet political might. As one reviewer commented, Carter’s coverage frame the Soviet spy games in which Blunt was engaged as “never much more than civil servants playing Cowboys and Indians.”

Thirty years ago, Rhodes James, MP for Cambridge, offered a more serious and damning reading of the Blunt affair. For James:

…a traitor is a traitor is a traitor. I ask those who try to exculpate Mr. Blunt to think just for a moment what their attitude would have been had he been discovered to be a German rather than a Soviet agent.

For those who may—inadvertently or otherwise—underplay the seriousness of Cold War espionage, this is a rather sobering reading of the case of Anthony Blunt.

James’s comparison with Nazism is illuminating. In the “hot” war against Nazism there were clear ramifications of combat—the deaths of millions of serving soldiers (also remembered in this month of November) and the chilling figures of civilian deaths from bombing raids, military action, and Nazi genocide. British collaborators with the Nazis such as John Amery or William Joyce were dealt the ultimate punishment after the war.

Though the Cold War cannot provide such simple lines of cause and effect, men like Anthony Blunt played their own part in supporting an oppressive, sometimes murderous regime. Commemorations of the collapse of the Iron Curtain ought to remind us of the many millions of people who suffered from the excesses perpetrated by Europe’s communist parties—not just the headline-grabbing events of the Ukrainian holodomor in 1932-3, the Hungarian Uprising, or the Prague Spring, but the daily privations experienced by normal citizens. One wonders whether it’s wholly unreasonable to cast the kind of opprobrium we levy upon Nazi collaborators upon Blunt—and, if it’s not, why we so rarely do.

Whether we credit Anthony Blunt with any role in the maintenance of the communist system, his name will forever be connected with it in the public mind. This is an insinuation his memoirs do nothing to allay. But while historians and commentators are quick to criticise Blunt in the wake of his memoirs’ publication, this clamour also—and perhaps more importantly—illustrates a double standard in our treatment of 20th-century history: where collaboration with Nazism is deemed a “war crime”, collusion with the Soviet Union is merely a feature of Cold War “spy games”.

It is not the job of the historian to decide which of these equally barbaric tyrannies of the 20th century was the more reprehensible. It is, however, a key part of the historian’s role to ascertain and maintain an appropriate sense of perspective on historical events. Remembering, as we do this month, Novembers past, we would do well to re-evaluate our bizarrely benign interpretation of European communist regimes.

James Appell graduated from St Antony’s College, Oxford in 2009 with an MPhil in Russian and Eastern European Studies. He is a travel journalist and freelance sportswriter living in London.