OxBlog has a very interesting two part interview with Nick Cohen up (part uno, part due), where Cohen has some harsh criticism of the anti-war left.
'We’re all Hizbollah now.’ For journalist and author Nick Cohen, this slogan symbolises everything that has gone wrong with big parts of today’s British Left. Last July, some leftist protesters in London held up this placard, identifying themselves with a movement whose leader is openly anti-semitic, and whose former leader once announced ‘We are not fighting so that you may offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.’
Instead of merely opposing British or American policies and wars abroad, Cohen complains in his book What’s Left that influential and mainstream leftist have gone along with movements representing everything they are meant to be against: the ultra-right. In his own words, they have made excuses for, or sometimes sided with, a religious fanaticism that wants to ‘subjugate women, kill homosexuals, kill Jews, kill freethinkers and establish a theocratic empire.’
Refreshed by beers supplied by Oxblog, Nick smiles across the table in a little north London pub. He’s a friendly and incisive bloke who kindly takes time away from his deadlines to talk about what happened to the politics he once thought he knew, and what can be done about it. I asked him how he defined the new political landscape, and hurled some ‘devil’s advocate’ questions at him.
As well as being a regular columnist at the Observer, Nick helped to launch the Euston Manifesto, a statement of principles by democratic leftists concerned that some fellow progressives in their zeal to oppose American foreign policy were getting way too comfortable with reactionaries along the spectrum from misogynists to anti-semites, Baathists to Islamist militants.
Cohen argues that the demise of socialism as a credible programme of emancipation opened the way for a strange realignment of leftist opinion. The political left became far more defined by negation – what it opposed- than what it supported.
The result? British leftists in the antiwar movement making common cause with the far right Muslim Brotherhood; Iraqi socialists and trade unionists abandoned or ignored after the fall of Saddam; leftist intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky either denying or playing down ethnic cleansing of nationalists in the Balkans; the socialist Mayor of London hosting and defending preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who had called for the killing of apostates and homosexuals; in parts of the academy, the onset of an extreme relativism which taught that it was racist to oppose sexism in different cultures; the growth of anti-semitism of varying intensity, some of which makes its way into his email account from hostile readers.
Cohen tries to balance two arguments that rarely sit together in emotional equilibrium: anger with the flawed policies and incompetence of the Bush and Blair governments, but solidarity with Iraqis as they tried to build something better after decades of tyranny.
While Cohen’s remarks are specifically directed at the British experience, there is much overlap with the situation in the United States of today. If there was one thing you could always said about the left in the United States it was their uncompromising, zero-tolerance stand against anti-semitism. It went hand-in-hand with the left’s anti-fascist ideals since the rise of Hitlerian Germany in the 1930’s. You simply could not be a card carrying member of the left and espouse anti-semitism at the same time. The notion the left should make common cause with such racists would have been the non-starter of all non-starters.
Today that simply is no longer true. While it would be false to claim that a majority of the left embrace anti-semites in their anti-semitism, they do not seem to be overly worried about it. When the matter is brought up you are most likely to get a shrug and an “explanation” that in any broad based movement you cannot keep people with different ideas out. At that point the line begins to blur. Through the shifting sands of cultural relativism and moral equivocating tolerance is granted to the intolerant and, though it was in no way the left’s intention, anti-semitism gains legitimacy and a currency it never enjoyed before.
More from OxBlog:
So what is it to be left-wing? This, Cohen argues, is part of the problem. It has lost a coherent definition and set of baseline values, and has replaced the positive programme of reform with broad opposition to what it sees as American imperialism.
I suggested that there was arguably a resurgence of democratic socialism in parts of South America, but Nick said that this was often demagogy, financed by oil profits that lacked a true socialist programme of nationalisation of industry, and is highly dependent on anti-American oppositionalism than positive emancipation.
I asked Nick why it is that in this mixed up landscape, a neoconservative or right-of-centre folk are more likely to criticise without qualification the jailing of trade unionists in Iran than a leftist. To Cohen, it is partly that this kind of criticism is suspected of being a stalking-horse for cultural imperialism or an assertion of western hegemony.
He cautions against those who might be driven to denounce the reactionaries in the Iranian government in order to create a drive to war. But he also argues that the reluctance to ‘impose’ ‘our’ views, the reluctance to show solidarity with feminists, trade unionists and ethnic minorities in Iran is part of an insidious double-standard, a view that non-western cultures are incapable or unworthy of liberal values and that pluralistic civil society is specific to ‘us’, and not for poor brown people.
Cohen is correct in his assessment of this basic incoherence common on the left. The traditional left of center proponent encompassed a view of the human experience that transcended nationalistic borders. As an example, for those who championed them, the old Marxist ideals held for everyone who labored, not just white Europeans who did so. The new leftist ethos is more apt to deny this outright. In effect, the left is agitating for a world view that denies there can be a world view. At its least extreme, the new left believes the ideas of the West only apply to the West. Any attempt to use a “Western idea” in a non-Western setting is automatically viewed as illegitimate. However, once you start moving in this (inward) direction it is difficult to stop. The battles concerning the EU Constitution express this movement very well. You are seeing leftist forces in European countries decry ideas as being foreign because they are “American” or “English” (or “French” of “German”), so those of the left are moving further away from even being able to espouse a common Western belief. Basically, in half a generation we have seen a large portion of the left move to the right of Edmund Burke: There can be no human rights as such, just the rights of English men and women, German men and women, etc. The incoherence arises since so much of the rhetoric and what you might call the infrastructure of leftist thought still adheres to the earlier universal vision.
So you get folks like Nick Cohen arising with seemingly paradoxical ideas, for nothing has been more conservative than the appeal for a restoration to an earlier time.
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