Alfred Sherman
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Sir Alfred Sherman (10 November 1919 – 26 August 2006) was an English writer, journalist, and political analyst. Described by a long-time associate as "a brilliant polymath, a consummate homo politicus, and one of the last true witnesses to the 20th century", he was a
Communist Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, di ...
volunteer in the
Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War () was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republican faction (Spanish Civil War), Republicans and the Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War), Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the Left-wing p ...
but later changed his views completely and became an adviser to
Margaret Thatcher Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013), was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of th ...
.


Personal life

Sherman was born in Hackney,
London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
, to
Jewish Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...
immigrants Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not usual residents or where they do not possess nationality in order to settle as permanent residents. Commuters, tourists, and other short- ...
from Russia, Jacob Vladimir and Eva Sherman. His early years were spent in grinding poverty; as a child he suffered from
rickets Rickets, scientific nomenclature: rachitis (from Greek , meaning 'in or of the spine'), is a condition that results in weak or soft bones in children and may have either dietary deficiency or genetic causes. Symptoms include bowed legs, stun ...
. He attended Hackney Downs County Secondary School, which was then a grammar school and regarded as a flagship of opportunity. He went on to Chelsea Polytechnic, where he studied science. He married Zahava Zazi née Levin in 1958, and they had one son, Gideon. After her death from cancer in 1993 he married Lady Angela Sherman in 2001.


Young communist

Alfred Sherman joined the Communist Party as a teenager and abandoned his studies at Chelsea Polytechnic at the age of 17, later explaining, "to be a Jew in 1930s Britain was to be alienated. The world proletariat offered us a home." He then volunteered to fight for the Major Attlee Battalion of the
International Brigades The International Brigades () were soldiers recruited and organized by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front (Spain), Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. The International Bri ...
during the
Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War () was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republican faction (Spanish Civil War), Republicans and the Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War), Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the Left-wing p ...
, 1937–38, where he was taken prisoner and repatriated to Britain. After returning home, he worked in a London electrical factory. Between 1939 and 1945, he served in the
Middle East The Middle East (term originally coined in English language) is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. The term came into widespread usage by the United Kingdom and western Eur ...
in the Field Security and
Occupied Enemy Territory Administration The Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) was a joint British, French and Arab military administration over the Levantine provinceswhich had been part of the Ottoman Empire for four centuriesbetween 1918 and 1920, set up on 23 October ...
. After the war, in the summer of 1948 he was expelled from the Communist Party for "Titoist deviationism" and subsequently spent some time in Yugoslavia as a volunteer in a "youth work brigade".


Political changes

After graduating from the
London School of Economics The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), established in 1895, is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. The school specialises in the social sciences. Founded ...
(LSE) in 1950, he returned to Belgrade as a correspondent for ''
The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. First published in 1791, it is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper. In 1993 it was acquired by Guardian Media Group Limited, and operated as a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' ...
''. Already fluent in the language known as
Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian ( / ), also known as Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually i ...
at that time, he acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history, culture and politics of the
South Slavs South Slavs are Slavic people who speak South Slavic languages and inhabit a contiguous region of Southeast Europe comprising the eastern Alps and the Balkan Peninsula. Geographically separated from the West Slavs and East Slavs by Austria, ...
. He also developed a lifelong affinity for the
Serbs The Serbs ( sr-Cyr, Срби, Srbi, ) are a South Slavs, South Slavic ethnic group native to Southeastern Europe who share a common Serbian Cultural heritage, ancestry, Culture of Serbia, culture, History of Serbia, history, and Serbian lan ...
, comparable to that of Dame
Rebecca West Dame Cecily Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books ...
. That affinity was rekindled in the 1990s, when Sherman became a leading critic of the Western policy in the
Balkans The Balkans ( , ), corresponding partially with the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throug ...
. During a subsequent protracted stay in Israel in the late 1950s Sherman was a member of the economic advisory staff of the Israeli government and had a close relationship with
David Ben-Gurion David Ben-Gurion ( ; ; born David Grün; 16 October 1886 – 1 December 1973) was the primary List of national founders, national founder and first Prime Minister of Israel, prime minister of the State of Israel. As head of the Jewish Agency ...
. After returning to London, in 1963, he joined the '' Jewish Chronicle'' as a leader writer, later writing for ''
The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was found ...
'' from 1965 (leader writer from 1977). About 1970 he joined the Conservative Party and the following year was elected as a councillor for the
Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (often known by its initialism as RBKC) is an Inner London, Inner London borough with Royal borough, royal status. It is the List of English districts by area, smallest borough in London and the secon ...
(1971–78).


Relationship with Thatcher

Sherman was critical of
Edward Heath Sir Edward Richard George Heath (9 July 1916 – 17 July 2005) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 ...
's
Conservative Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civiliza ...
government because of its public spending and its failure to implement
free market In economics, a free market is an economic market (economics), system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of ...
policies. In 1974 he co-founded the
Centre for Policy Studies The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) is a centre-right think tanks, think tank and advocacy group in the United Kingdom. Its goal is to promote coherent and practical policies based on its founding principles of: free markets, "small state," lo ...
with Sir
Keith Joseph Keith Sinjohn Joseph, Baron Joseph, (17 January 1918 – 10 December 1994), known as Sir Keith Joseph, 2nd Baronet, for most of his political life, was a British politician. A member of the Conservative Party, he served as a minister under f ...
and
Margaret Thatcher Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013), was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of th ...
. Sherman was subsequently Director of the CPS and a member of the Conservative Philosophy Group. The CPS was the real launching pad for Margaret Thatcher, gradually transforming her from the untried party leader of 1974 into a prime-minister-in-waiting. More than any one man, Sherman provided her with the strategy for capturing the leadership of the Party and winning the general election of 1979. However he was a loose cannon when it came to the media and an early display of his outspoken racism was when he told the
Soviet The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
newspaper ''Pravda'', in 1974: "As for the lumpen proletariat, coloured people and the Irish, let's face it, the only way to hold them in check is to have enough well-armed and properly trained police." Eventually he upset so many people at the CPS that its Chairman, Hugh Thomas, decided that Sherman was "impossible to work with: he has to go", and expelled him in 1983. In her memoirs, Thatcher herself paid tribute to Sherman's "brilliance", the "force and clarity of his mind", his "breadth of reading and his skills as a ruthless polemicist". She credits him with a central role in her achievements, especially as Leader of the Opposition but also after she became Prime Minister: in July 2005 she declared, "We could have never defeated socialism if it hadn't been for Sir Alfred". But his unwillingness to make compromises with the establishmentarian consensus never enabled him to fit into the clubbable world of British politics. By 1982, the latent strains in his relationship with Mrs Thatcher became fully apparent. She complained that he was dismissive of the obstacles she was encountering in dismantling the legacy of the post-war consensus, while he berated her for betraying the promise of her early years. After his exclusion from her inner circle she nevertheless continued to regard him with "exasperated affection", and rewarded him with a knighthood in 1983. Yet in the 1990s he said of her, "Lady Thatcher is great theatre as long as someone else is writing her lines; she hasn't got a clue". In July 2005 they were reunited at a reception marking the publication of Sherman's last book with a revealing title, ''Paradoxes of Power: Reflections on the Thatcher Interlude''.


Western Goals

From about 1986, he and his son Gideon were members of Western Goals (UK), Gideon serving on the Directorate. Sir Alfred was one of the signatories to a letter in ''The Times'', along with Lord Sudeley, Professor
Antony Flew Antony Garrard Newton Flew (; 11 February 1923 – 8 April 2010) was an English philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, Flew worked on the philosophy of religion. During the course of his career he taught ...
and Dr. Harvey Ward, on behalf of the Institute, "applauding
El Salvador El Salvador, officially the Republic of El Salvador, is a country in Central America. It is bordered on the northeast by Honduras, on the northwest by Guatemala, and on the south by the Pacific Ocean. El Salvador's capital and largest city is S ...
's President
Alfredo Cristiani Alfredo Félix Cristiani Burkard (born 22 November 1947) is a Salvadoran politician who was President of El Salvador from 1989 to 1994. Life and career Born into a wealthy family in San Salvador, his father Felix Cristiani was an Italian im ...
's statesmanship" and calling for his government's success in defeating
Cuba Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the ...
n and
Nicaragua Nicaragua, officially the Republic of Nicaragua, is the geographically largest Sovereign state, country in Central America, comprising . With a population of 7,142,529 as of 2024, it is the third-most populous country in Central America aft ...
n-backed communist FMLN terrorists.


Views on economists

"When you get a loss of faith, say if bishops cease to believe in God, they go in for socialism or
sodomy Sodomy (), also called buggery in British English, principally refers to either anal sex (but occasionally also oral sex) between people, or any Human sexual activity, sexual activity between a human and another animal (Zoophilia, bestiality). I ...
. But an economist who's
agnostic Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, the divine, or the supernatural is either unknowable in principle or unknown in fact. (page 56 in 1967 edition) It can also mean an apathy towards such religious belief and refer to ...
about economics is unemployable, and therefore they say, "We ''know'' if you do this and if you do that.." And the economists will argue with each other, but none of them will ever question whether economics ''is'' as scientific as it claims."


Views on the Balkans

In the last 15 years of his life, Sherman was an outspoken critic of western policy in the former Yugoslavia. In 1994 he co-founded The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies as a research institute. In Sherman's words, it was "designed to correct the current trend of public commentary, which tends, systematically, not to understand events but to construct a propagandistic version of Balkan rivalries, designed to facilitate the involvement of outside powers". In 1992, writing in London's '' Jewish Chronicle'', Sherman warned against "the lapse of logic" in confusing the Bosnian Muslims with the European Jewry under Hitler.
"It does us no good to claim a locus standi in every conflict be equating it with the Holocaust", he wrote, "or when third parties in their own interests take the name of our martyrs in vain; Bosnia is not occupied Europe; the Muslims are not the Jews; the Serbs did not begin the civil war, but are predictably responding to a real threat. ... Since 1990, the independent Croatian leadership—with its extreme chauvinist and clericalist colouring—and the Bosnian Muslim leadership—seeking, in its Islamic fundamentalist programme, to put the clock back to Ottoman days—have threatened to turn the Serbs back into persecuted minorities".
By the end of the decade, Sherman saw the U.S. policy in the Balkans as inseparable from the drive for global
hegemony Hegemony (, , ) is the political, economic, and military predominance of one State (polity), state over other states, either regional or global. In Ancient Greece (ca. 8th BC – AD 6th c.), hegemony denoted the politico-military dominance of ...
. In 1997, he noted that the American century began with the
Spanish–American War The Spanish–American War (April 21 – August 13, 1898) was fought between Restoration (Spain), Spain and the United States in 1898. It began with the sinking of the USS Maine (1889), USS ''Maine'' in Havana Harbor in Cuba, and resulted in the ...
, and that it was ending with American penetration of the Balkans. But in contrast to the Spanish–American War, he argued, U.S. intervention in the Balkans has no clear strategic aim, but is allegedly a moral crusade on behalf of the "
international community The international community is a term used in geopolitics and international relations to refer to a broad group of people and governments of the world. Usage Aside from its use as a general descriptor, the term is typically used to imply the ...
":
"This begs many questions. First, is there such a thing as 'the international community'? Do people in China, which accounts for a fifth of the world's population, and the Buddhists, who account for another fifth—among others—really want the U.S. and its client states to bomb the Serbs or Iraqis? And who exactly, and when, deputed the U.S. to act on behalf of this 'world community'? ... Secondly, can the blunt weapon of force, of whose use U.S. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright (born Marie Jana Körbelová, later Korbelová; May 15, 1937 – March 23, 2022) was an American diplomat and political science, political scientist who served as the 64th United States Secretary of State, United S ...
boasted, balance conflicting and competing ethnic, religious, economic and political interactions over this wide and conflictive region? Can the U.S. raise the expectations of the Albanians and Slav Moslems without affronting Macedonians, Greeks, Italians, Bulgars and Croats, as well as Serbs? ... Thirdly, can force be a substitute for policy? It was a wise German who said that you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. The same goes for gunships, the modern equivalent of gunboat diplomacy. Bomb and rocket once, and it has an effect. But if the victim survives, the second bout is less effective, because the victim is learning to cope."
Well before the
11 September attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...
and the
Iraq War The Iraq War (), also referred to as the Second Gulf War, was a prolonged conflict in Iraq lasting from 2003 to 2011. It began with 2003 invasion of Iraq, the invasion by a Multi-National Force – Iraq, United States-led coalition, which ...
, Sherman argued that Washington had "set up the cornerstone of a European Islamistan in Bosnia and a Greater Albania, thus paving the way for further three-sided conflict between Moslems, Serbs and Croats in a ''
bellum omnium contra omnes , a Latin phrase meaning "the war of all against all", is the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state-of-nature thought experiment that he conducts in ''De Cive'' (1642) and ''Leviathan'' (1651). The common modern ...
''. ... Far from creating a new status quo it has simply intensified instability." The U.S. may succeed in establishing its hegemony, in the Balkans-Danubia-Carpathia and elsewhere, "but it will also inherit long-standing ethno-religious conflicts and border disputes without the means for settling them." As he wrote in May 2000,
"The power and the prestige of America is in the hands of people who will not resist the temptation to invent new missions, lay down new embargoes, throw new bombs, and fabricate new courts. For the time being, they control the United Nations, the World Bank, most of the world's high-tech weapons, and the vast majority of the satellites that watch us from every quadrant of the skies. This is the opportunity they sense, and we must ask what ambitions they will declare next. ... Instead of rediscovering the virtues of traditionally defined,
enlightened self-interest Enlightened self-interest is a philosophy in ethics which states that persons who act to further the interests of others (or the interests of the group or groups to which they belong) ultimately serve their own self-interest. It has often been ...
in the aftermath of its hands down cold war victory, America's foreign policy elites are more intoxicated than ever by their own concoction of benevolent global hegemony and indispensable power.''The Empire for the New Millenium?'', by Sir Alfred Sherman


Notes


References

*
Western Goals Institute Western Goals Institute (WGI) was a far-right pressure group and think-tank in Britain, formed in 1989 from Western Goals UK, which was founded in 1985 as an offshoot of the U.S. Western Goals Foundation.''Labour Research'', November 1988, p. 2. ...
archives – form of CV, dated 1988. * ''Young European'' Newsletter, December 1988 edition, published by Western Goals UK, London. * Black, A & C, ''
Who's Who A Who's Who (or Who Is Who) is a reference work consisting of biographical entries of notable people in a particular field. The oldest and best-known is the annual publication ''Who's Who (UK), Who's Who'', a reference work on contemporary promin ...
'', London. (Various editions). * Monday Club Young Members' Group 1989 Annual Conference Programme. * ''
The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was found ...
'', 28 August 2006, Obituary.


Publications

* Sherman, Sir Alfred, ''The Paradoxes of Power: Reflections on the Thatcher Interlude'', (Imprint Academic, 2005).


External links


''The Scotsman'' obituary



Alfred Sherman papers held at Royal Holloway, University of London
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sherman, Alfred 1919 births 2006 deaths Communist Party of Great Britain members British people of the Spanish Civil War International Brigades personnel Spanish Civil War prisoners of war Conservative Party (UK) councillors Councillors in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Knights Bachelor English Jews Politicians from the London Borough of Hackney Jewish British politicians People educated at Hackney Downs School British people of Russian-Jewish descent British male journalists Writers from the London Borough of Hackney