Difference between revisions of "Jeffrey Ketland"

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(New page: '''Jeffrey Ketland''' is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Edinburgh who says he opposed the war in Iraq and yet signed the Euston Manifesto, which stated that the left as a w...)
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Revision as of 10:53, 21 April 2009

Jeffrey Ketland is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Edinburgh who says he opposed the war in Iraq and yet signed the Euston Manifesto, which stated that the left as a whole is too critical of the actions of Western governments, including the military presence in Iraq. Regarding what he terms "militant jihadism", he writes in a statement on the Unite Against Terror website, "we must ... challenge the "Chomskified cretino-left which has made common cause with this totalitarian ideology".[1]

"There’s nowt wrong," Ketland notes, "with regular insults for views which — one judges to be — are morally indefensible and deranged".[2] "I sometimes," he adds, "call... [such people]... 'cretins', for it is a precise way of expressing my horror at their dementedness."

Views

Ketland gave this account of his views on politics and war in September 2006:

For the record, I’ve always been a rather boring Labour supporter, probably in the “right” of the party (e.g., I opposed Foot/Benn; I welcomed Kinnock and Smith). Regarding British (and/or Western) military action since 1982, my views were:
Falklands (in favour; hideous military dictatorship invades part of a liberal democracy),
1st gulf war (in favour; Saddam’s barbaric regime, extending itself violently into the gulf),
Kosovo (in favour; I had long felt that we appeased Milosevic’s aggression for far too long; I argued, often bitterly, with friends about this),
Sierra Leone (in favour),
Afghanistan (against—it’s a pathetic excuse, but I was badly influenced by Chomsky’s “silent genocide” line of argument in late 2001, which also seems to have been similar to what Nick Cohen argued; Chomsky has never admitted he was wrong),
Iraq war (against; sceptical of WMD claims; worried about the medium-term consequences, both in Iraq and globally, of a screw-up).
I was certainly *wrong* about Afghanistan, and I feel irritated with myself for getting it wrong. That feeds into my animosity against Chomsky and I know quite a few people who feel similarly. Brad de Long has said similar not too long ago on CT in relation to Chomsky’s bizarre analysis of the Cambodian genocide. I have to thank Oliver Kamm, again publicly, for educating me on the speciousness of Chomskyism.
I still do not know whether I was right or wrong about Iraq. I am one of the EM signatories who opposed the Iraq war, as are Jon Pike and Shalom Lappin.[3]

Website

His personal homepage on the University of Edinburgh website circa 2006 revealed:[4]

Affiliations

Contact

Department of Philosophy, David Hume Tower
George Square, University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh EH8 9JX
44 (0)131 650 3662
jeffrey.ketland at ed.ac.uk
Website: homepages.ed.ac.uk/jketland

Related Articles

  1. Jeffrey Ketland's statement on Unite Against Terror, accessed from the Internet Archive of 9 November 2007 on 17 March 2009
  2. Jeffrey Ketland, Comments on the Blog Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War'Early Euston Manifesto Manifestations, Friday 29 September 2006 at 23:58
  3. Jeffrey Ketland, Comments on the Blog Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War'Early Euston Manifesto Manifestations, Friday 29 September 2006 at 23:58
  4. Jeffrey Ketland Other Things, University of Edinburgh Personal Homepage, Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 10 November 2006 on 17 March 2009
  5. Jeffrey Ketland Other Things, University of Edinburgh Personal Homepage, Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 10 November 2006 on 17 March 2009
  6. Jeffrey Ketland Other Things, University of Edinburgh Personal Homepage, Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 10 November 2006 on 17 March 2009
  7. Jeffrey Ketland Should there be an academic boycott of Israel? (To be published as an invited comment in The Philosopher’s Magazine, May 2005. The comments here are entirely my own, and are in no way endorsed by the University of Edinburgh.), University of Edinburgh Personal Homepage, retrieved from the Internet Archive of 3 May 2005, accessed 17 March 2009