Jewcy recently asked a select group of foreign writers we admire to state which candidate they'd vote for if they could, and why. Nick Cohen's response is the first in a series we will be running from now until Election Day.

Obama for four reasons:

1. Although McCain is an impressive man, he has not had an impressive campaign, and looks too old for the job to me.

2. He's been a maverick on many issues -- except the economy. What with one thing and another, new Republican thinking about economics is needed right now, and his failure to meet the challenge of the Crash by shaking himself out of conservative orthodoxy counts against him.

3. I know this is a despicable argument, I realise you must judge men by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin, but a black president is still one hell of a milestone to put behind you. The post-racial society an Obama presidency would inevitably bring, whether he wants it or not, is worth having. Wouldn't it be good if our children didn't have to go through all the speech codes, colour quotas and politics
of competitive grievance which have so numbed the minds and twisted the tongues of our generation?

4. Around the world, liberal opinion has desecended into anti-Americanism and fellow-travelling with totalitarianism. Liberals will find it harder to carry on with their old debased ways if Obama takes charge. Many will, of course, but some will recover their wits and return to honourable politics.

This is not an endorsement. I am a journalist, and I reserve the right to denounce Obama as a scoundrel from the moment he takes office.

[Nick Cohen, author of the bestselling polemic What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way (the subtitle's slightly different in the UK), has generously agreed to let us reprint his new preface for the paperback edition. In August, I defended Cohen's book, and the Euston Manifesto, against the mendacious attacks of Johann Hari. --MW]

Tony Blair: There is global struggle in which we need a
policy based on democracy, on freedom and on justice . .
John Humphrys (a BBC presenter): Our idea of
democracy. . .
Blair: I didn't know that there was another idea of
democracy. . .
Humphrys: If I may say so, that's naïve . . .
Blair: The one basic fact about democracy, surely, is that you
can get rid of your government if you don't like them.
Humphrys: The Iranians elected their own government, and
we're now telling them. . .
Blair: Hold on John, something like 60 per cent of the
candidates were excluded.
BBC Radio 4, February 2007

WHEN I published What's Left? I did not expect to be universally loved. I have lived among London's liberal intelligentsia long enough to know that while it is hard on others it is always easy on itself, and would not take kindly to a history of how leftish people had ended up apologizing for the ultra-right. The reviewers who praised this book are all over its cover, what surprised me about the critics was their denial. A few said the book was a defence of the second Iraq war, even though every time I mentioned opposition to the war I said the opponents were right in nearly all their arguments but had astonished me and others by their inability to support those Iraqis who wanted something better after thirty-five years of a vile dictatorship.
More common was a transparent shiftiness.

All right, critics conceded, a few leftists had flipped over and gone along Islamism and Baathism. But these people were not worth bothering with. No connection existed between the ideological contortions of the extremes and a liberal mainstream that remained wedded to the highest principles. All I had done was use odious but fringe figures to smear decent and moderate men and women, such as themselves. As an account of my argument, this was partial in the extreme. What's Left? looks at how the Left picked up and then dropped the opponents of Saddam Hussein; why the European Union stood by and allowed Slobodan Milosevic to ethnically cleanse the Balkans; the reasons for the liberal middle class's disillusion with democracy and free speech; the instant willingness of respectable writers to excuse Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks; the inability of the British Liberal Democrats and European Social Democrats to oppose George W. Bush while supporting a free Iraq; the growth of polite antisemitism; and the propensity of liberals everywhere to portray a global clerical fascist movement as a rational response to Western provocation. Say what you will, but these were and are mainstream phenomena. Liberal writers did not examine them and explain why I was mistaken. They just ignored what I had written and hoped that if they insisted on their righteousness with sufficient vehemence, others would believe them - and maybe they would believe themselves.

For denial about what had happened to the liberal-left was not confined to the reaction of a couple of reviewers to one political book. In Europe and North America intellectuals worked ferociously to maintain the illusion that a principled consensus survived the mayhem after 9/11. I can sympathize with them to an extent because although it is essential to realize where the received wisdom is going wrong it is rarely a simple or painless task. Historians have it easy. They can look back at another time and see the faults in what almost everyone took for granted. In theory, we know future historians will do the same to us and find elements of our beliefs as wrong-headed and narrow-minded as we find many of those of our ancestors. In practice, however, self-examination is psychologically impossible for many. When you live in a consensus, it does not feel as if you have an ideology that needs examining. If the overwhelming majority of people you meet agree with you, your assumptions do not appear tenuous or debatable. They are just there - as natural as the air you breathe and as unquestionable as the weather.

Continue reading...

If Nick Cohen sounds like he's on autopilot in this recent Comment is Free piece, it might be because the forces he's railing against are too. If your adversary repeatedly swings at you from the left, it's best to keep repeatedly blocking from the left. You'd think more liberals would welcome him after having witnessed so many of the disastrous consequences of the George W. right hook against radical Islam. But that's Cohen's point--he's speaking to and about those who don't intone any desire for a leftist ally against reactionaries, since they don't feel any troubling disparity between their notions of social justice and those of jihadis.

The aesthetic appeal of radical sounding arguments and their simulacra of intrigue can be dangerous and it takes somebody like Cohen to keep reminding us, every time a Garton Ash has an exchange with a Hirsi Ali, or an Amis with an Eagleton, we need to keep our ears open because these encounters will tell us where we stand in our ongoing quest for enlightenment, truth, justice and all the other things you aren't supposed to say without a wink of irony or a couched disposition. And if every single time these exchanges go down, some decorated posterchild for liberalism again reveals their lack of distaste for reactionary, violent extremist religious cults, somebody must keep saying so.

The issue Cohen raises here is of interest in particular because of the question regarding over whom, how much, and whether Hirsi Ali has any influence given what some perceive to be her brashness, disrespect, and inflexibility.

"...he stuck to the argument that there was no point in liberals treating her as a heroine because her abandonment of Islam and embrace of atheism meant her arguments carried no weight with Muslims. Instead he told us to encourage those Muslims who reject the stoning of women because they dispute its scriptural authority. Religious debates about whether the Prophet Muhammad really approved of stoning may be 'gobbledegook', but, he cried, 'We must support gobbledegook that is compatible with liberal democracy."

Ash sounds like he knows his Enlightenment history well, the story of how God was removed from politics in the language of Christian scripture. But to listen to him you'd gather that nobody needs a Voltaire just as long as there are Lockes and Rousseaus. I'd beg to differ. Do the multiculturalists really want to say that Muslims only understand the language of religious doublespeak (sometimes referred to a liberal theology)?

Have folks like Ash forgotten what religious inculcation is for children? A rigorous program of deflecting and redirecting their rational questions about the belief system into which they are being initiated. In other words, most kids know its silly from the get-go. "Enlightenment fundamentalists" are forcefully reasserting something almost all religious people knew as children and still intuit deep down--that it really is a big scam. For some, this loud affirmation of their doubts will be precisely what is needed to free them from the superstitions that enslave them. Of course there is a link between Hirsi Ali's courage and her transformation. It requires more guts to reject outright the cherished illusions of your culture and family. One can expect those who do so to be equally as courageous when enter the public sphere, equally demanding of the recognition of truth and the rejection of ' gobbledegook' at whatever cost.

In a perfect world, more tongues than you could count would be angrily flapping upon hearing that a respected man of avowed liberal persuasion spoke out in defense of gobbledegook. Kids know better. If anybody deserves condescension at this point in the game, it's precisely those who are currently doling it out.

Here's the problem with les enfants terribles: They grow up.

In the eighties, Martin Amis was the caustic golden child of the literary left, a chain-smoking, cliche-loathing prodigy who took time out of satirizing the brute materialism of the Reagan-Thatcher decade to condemn what he called the "mega-death intellectuals." You remember these guys, don't you? They were the ones who occupied the Rand Institute, quietly calculating the estimated corpses of a very likely nuclear "exchange" with the Soviet Union. They weighed their options of a "first-strike" against Russia. They rationalized "escalationism" as the only means of ensuring peace. Perhaps most important of all to language worshiper like Amis, they used these terms outside of inverted commas; they spoke of nuclear war unironically because they thought it was a war that could be won by something other than nuclear weapons.

Yes, the left once loved Martin Amis. But no more. Today he rightly calls Islamism a "murderous ideology" (all mega-death, in other words, no intellectuals). Amis deplores Bin Laden almost as much as he does those correct-thinking Londoners who make excuses for him, or elect to do his PR work. This is a surprisingly large segment of the population, mainly because it's an unsurprisingly large segment of the Guardian editorial board.

I've already posted about Nick Cohen's write-up of the London School of Economics rethink on Putin's Russia and how it has spawned a new generation of British fellow travelers. Well, now here's a thorough recounting of Amis holding forth at the Institute of Contemporary Arts against the same mouth-breathing contingent which applies itself toward the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein:

First question: "In view of the fear over Islamism, is it time to bring communism back?"

"Er, no", came the polite answer. "You loon", the impolite, unexpressed addendum.

It was at this point that TV's greatest satirist, the shaggy-haired Swift of our age, took his turn to speak.

And what a wonderful turn it was.

"How many members of the Muslim Brotherhood have you actually spoken to in your research?" he pronounced, in the tone of the man who's sure he's got a dead cert, TKO, killer question.

"Er, quite a few, actually," replied Anthony.

Needless to say, Morris was somewhat deflated, as the haymaker he was sure would condemn his opponents to the canvas somehow fell short. But like any true champion, he kept plugging away.

"And you're saying they're all murderers," he jabbed.

"I think Islamists subscribe to a murderous ideology," parried Amis.

"So you mean they're all murderers?"

"No, but I believe the ideology they subscribe to is murderous."

This continued for what seemed like years, until Anthony deftly tagged Amis, and immediately set about the exposed belly of Morris's argument.

"For example, [insert name of prominent member of MCB, well known to Cif readers] supported Osama bin Laden right up to Sept 11 2001, a period including the Kenyan embassy bombings among others."

Morris, on the ropes, threw out the last lunge any southpaw can in these situations: "Well we supported Saddam Hussein."

Robert Conquest once tried to account for why it was that certain countries were convulsed by full-blooded totalitarianism whereas other countries only ever suffered the outcroppings of it in endowed chairs at major universities. It's the difference, noted the author of The Great Terror and the onetime Sidney and Beatrice Webb Fellow at the London School of Economics, between  "ideitis" and "ideosis." Ideitis is a chronic ailment of ideological or messianic thinking, whereas ideosis merely the occasional and easily treatable case. Russia and Germany have ideitis, England and the United States have ideosis. When the two come together, we get the journalism of Walter Duranty, the plays of Lillian Hellman, the non-historical writings of Eric Hobsbawm, and titles like Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, written by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

Nick Cohen recently sat through what sounds like an agonized circle-jerk at the LSE about free speech in Russia. As ever, the Kremlin needn't have sent any of its own apologists:

On the stage were sleek representatives of Putin’s new civilisation. Like the Webbs before her, Dariya Pushkova, the London correspondent of Russia Today, a state-controlled TV channel, dealt with the difficult question of Kremlin repression by changing the subject. The British media were just as bad, she said. They reported unverifiable facts as truth and came out with half-baked accusations that Alexander Litvinenko had been poisoned with polonium 210 on the orders of Putin’s henchmen. What was the difference between her propaganda and ours? Who were we to throw stones?

Pavel Andreev from Novosti, the state-controlled Russian news agency, took the stage to argue for the censorship of investigative reporting. Eighty per cent of Russians approved of what Putin was doing and tough tactics were needed to give the people what they wanted. ‘Russia has always been best under strong leaders,’ he added with a nod towards the legacy of the Webbs’ Stalin.

I expected the audience to go along with him. Just as urban legend has it that you are never more than six feet away from a rat on the streets of London, so dismal experience has taught me that you are never more than six feet away from an apologist for tyranny at a meeting of London liberals. (A good example of this came a few days later when Martin Amis, a serious novelist, was confronted by Chris Morris, a light entertainer, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Amis was so exasperated by the betrayals of principle that he asked members of the audience to raise their hand if they considered themselves morally superior to the sexist, racist, homophobic and psychopathic Taliban. Fewer than a third did.)

I've just found out from Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin that Vladimir Putin's grandfather worked as a chef in the kitchens of Rasputin, Lenin and Stalin, a culinary trifecta that makes him the most poison-paranoid -- and poison-tempted -- man of the 20th century. Given that Alexander Litvinenko's assassination was eerily reminiscent of the KGB's "Umbrella Murder" of Georgi Markov (see my earlier post about that here), might we conclude that Putin channels his Soviet forebears in every way possible?

Another thing that's been bugging me all week. Martin Amis did not say, as the dire Terry Eagleton claims he did, that he favored treating Muslims as second-class citizens. Nor did Amis say it, as Eagleton maintains, in his Guardian essay, "The Age of Horrorism." Amis told an interviewer that "there is a definite urge" to treat Muslims badly until they "get their house in order," which is a distinction with a difference. Put it this way: If you argue against racial profiling on airplanes, do you do so because your instinct tells you that singling out the one demographic associated with religious terrorism is wrong? Or do you do so because you eventually reason that it is unjust and cruel? What is the "definite urge" and what is the moral calculation?

Eagleton, inexplicably credited for his way with irony, sculls the shallow bay of literalism when he says that he was able transition from Catholicism to Marxism "without having to pass through liberalism." How easy it must be to reupholster the wardrobe of the captive mind. But odd that a literary critic would so disastrously confuse "texts;" odd also that he is able to parse Amis' "definite urge" as Amis' endorsement of state policy.

Apropos my defense of the Euston Manifesto and Nick Cohen's What's Left, here's another perspective from E.J. Dionne on the prospects for a revival of liberalism after George Bush. Money graphs:

[After] Bush leaves office, liberals will face a moment of truth on foreign policy. It is easy enough to reject Bush's unilateralism, his squandering of the post-9/11 opportunity, his failure to understand what the invasion of Iraq entailed and required, his expansive view of executive power. Far more difficult will be settling arguments between advocates of democracy promotion and opponents of imperialism; between realists who have learned the need for prudence from the Iraq adventure, and idealists who insist (as in Darfur) that there is still a role for American power to promote moral ends, and to avert moral catastrophe.

In principle, American liberals can repair the model of international cooperation pioneered by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But it would be foolish to assume that such an approach to foreign policy can be miraculously recreated in a world very different from the one they confronted, or to assume that the dilemmas of liberal foreign policy will disappear when the Bush administration does.

First it was the sight of leftist organizations and middle class liberals marching in “peace” parades alongside Islamic thugs calling for the murder of apostates. Then there were the formerly progressive gazettes like The Nation and The Guardian championing corpse-mutilating theocrats like Muqtada al-Sadr and the suicide bombing “resistance” in Iraq. And the coup de grace: London’s Labor party mayor Ken Livingstone graciously welcoming Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a cleric who called for the murder of

Democratiya's summer issue is out, and it's required reading. Here is Nick Cohen reviewing a new collection of Orwell's journalism:

When the Poles rose up on the orders of the exiled government in London to throw the Germans out and stop the Soviet Union taking the city [Orwell] protested 'against the mean and cowardly attitude' of the liberal press, which urged that they should be left to die.

What I am concerned with is the attitude of the British intelligentsia, who cannot raise between them one single voice to question what they believe to be Russian policy, no matter what turn it takes, and in this case have had the unheard-of meanness to hint that our bombers ought not to be sent to the aid of our comrades fighting in Warsaw. The enormous majority of left-wingers who swallow the policy put out by the News Chronicle, etc., know no more about Poland than I do. All they know is that the Russians object to the London Government and have set up a rival organization, and so far as they are concerned that settles the matter. If tomorrow Stalin were to drop the Committee of Liberation and recognize the London Government, the whole British intelligentsia would flock after him like a troop of parrots. Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not 'Is this policy right or wrong?' but 'This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?' And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power.

Today, you don't here a single voice raised in protest about what al Qaeda is doing to Iraq or against the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere in the world. If anything the duplicity is worse than during Stalinism. Then, leftish intellectuals could pretend to themselves that the Soviet Union was progressive and at some level shared their values. By contrast, Islamism makes no secret of its contempt for the Left and for liberalism or its appropriation of Nazi conspiracy theory. From the Iranian Revolution onwards, the first task of radical Islam has been to persecute Muslim socialists, liberals and freethinkers.

 

I knew George Soros' comment, cited by Marty Peretz, that what America required was a "certain de-Nazification" was hardly inventive. Inexpensive talk like that never is. Like our quaint evolutionary forebears, tirelessly clacking away at a thousand typewriters, Soros simply hit upon an old line from a major author. Best of times, not really. Worst of Noam Chomsky, for sure. In his first political tract, American Power and the New Mandarins, Chomsky wrote that in the wake of the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he had his formative epiphany that democracy was a hornswaggle run by corporate-industrial murderers. What American needed most was a "kind of denazification."

Chomsky's book came out in 1969. Since then, all the steroidal muscle of his moral equivalence has atrophied by his defense of Robert Faurisson, whom he described as a "a kind of apolitical liberal" (what is it with a lefty linguist who hedges with wish-washy modifiers like "kind of" all the time?). Chomsky not only defended Faurisson's right to deny the Holocaust, as he should have, but colored the lately anointed guest of the Islamic Republic a noble scholar pursuing historical truth, harried by right-wing censors beholden to Israel and international Zionism.

So real Nazism isn't quite so bad as the American version, which we've got to be rid of -- or had to, at any rate.

Thanks to Nick Cohen, whose excellent polemic, What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way, tipped me off to the Soros plagiarism.

RELATED: Soros on AIPAC [Daily Shvitz]

Nick CohenI conversed a little with Alan Johnson, the editor of Democratiya, when I was compiling Hitch's dossier on George Galloway more than a year ago. I wish I could say that I "know" Alan, but the plain truth is I don't, because I still can't understand how someone could so consistently put out a bimonthly literary journal that demands reading cover to cover. Usually you open a review and take an interest in one or two of the advertised pieces, not all of them. Democratiya cheats only slightly in its advantage by being as nostalgic as it is forward-looking, recycling old material (nothing wrong with that on the left) with its continued relevance in mind.

A note to aspiring start-up publications: See what you can get away with in terms of plumbing the archives for old essays and speeches. Everyone from Sidney Hook to Nye Bevin to Tony Blair has graced Democratiya's table of contents.

I've only just got through, in the latest issue, Oliver Kamm's anticipated review of Nick Cohen's What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, which, among us Eustonians, is the polemic of the hour.

Some of the references to ancient and localized struggles (Eric Hobsbawm and Raymond Williams as young apparatchiks, anyone?) don't travel so easily across the Atlantic. But it's worth emphasizing that contests within the British left are worrisome for the same reason they're healthy -- they're waged out in the open. In the United States, whatever passes for leftist factionalism (usually a question of whether we should pull out all troops from Iraq, or just some) is whispered and semi-occluded, and therefore more dangerous. No one wants to be seen as a defender of George W. Bush's war policy, which is why the editors of The New Republic can't go a week without apologizing for their former pro-regime change alignment.

At the more popular level, activists will attended so-called antiwar demonstrations on the streets of New York and San Francisco, not knowing -- or really caring -- that Ramsey Clark's Stalinist organization ANSWER is the main engine behind the events. And they'll say that Michael Moore doesn't actually mean to depict prewar Iraqi children as doe-eyed, kite-flying innocents; he's just doing it for "dramatic" effect to underscore the imperialist criminality of deposing Saddam in the first place.

In the UK, at least Saddam is explicitly defended by the RESPECT and Socialist Workers parties. It's right there in their literature.

To even indicate that American liberals often objectively side with monsters is to run the risk of being accused of attacking "fringe" elements at the expense of conveniently eliding an engagement with the "mainstream." Well, the fringe does infiltrate and shape the opinions of the mainstream. Funny that such a concept should be so hard to comprehend when leftists routinely account for White House foreign policy by using neoconservative as an adjective to modify cabal.

The driving force behind the American contingent of Euston, therefore, is to show that this liberal mainstream is either too myopic or too stupid to realize the bedfellows it makes. In Britain, the job does itself:

Unsophisticated though it may be to say so, a Left worth its name and honouring its traditions ought to be defending the principles of secularism, science and liberty rather than worrying about the offence they might cause. Yet the principle of a common citizenship under law is – from my experience at least, and recalling that Livingstonian conference in January – a sectarian and even fringe position on the Left. When the declared leaders of religious and other groups assert a claim to be heeded in public debate, they speak as sectional interests. Every time you hear the word 'community' in a BBC report try replacing it with 'lobby', and you'll get some idea of the prominence of these demands. A democratic society does not elevate group identities; it aims to supersede them. What's Left? is a spirited and elegant exposition of what ought to be axiomatic on the Left, and extraordinarily is not.

 

Norm Geras: Euston Manifesto co-author and prominent UK bloggerLate last summer I engaged in an email-based exchange with Norm Geras, a professor of Government at the University of Manchester and a prolific Marxist intellectual with one of the most widely read blogs in the UK. Like Oliver Kamm and Nick Cohen, author of the new polemic What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, Norm has made a name for himself as a leading spokesman for leftists with no truck for what passes for “left” politics in Britain these days. Along with Cohen, he drafted the Euston Manifesto, a declaration of progressive principles for the post-9/11 era. An explanation of what’s in the often misunderstood (and more willfully misinterpreted) document follows in the pair of letters below, but suffice it to say that Euston has been the source of no little controversy and ridicule in the UK, while remaining something of a little-mentioned curio on this side of the Atlantic. As a signatory, and an avid reader of the Euston blogs (of which my own, Snarksmith, is one), I was most interested to hear what Norm thought about the Left in the United States, which he had just visited for the first time prior to this discussion, and where Euston and its supports might go from here.

To: Norm Geras
From: Michael Weiss
Subject: Self-Evident Truths As the New Radicalism?

Dear Norm,

Not that such a friendly exchange about the state of the modern Left should begin with a loyalty oath, but I should probably admit upfront that I am both a signatory of the Euston Manifesto and an avid reader of normblog. Before we get into things, I'd like to give our readers some background on what Euston is as well as the motivation for drafting it.

Back to Basics: Jefferson's self-evident truths are anything but to the mainstream LeftThe goal of the manifesto, named for the area in London in which it was conceived and composed, is straightforward enough. It demands pluralism and democracy for all peoples. It denounces reactionary regimes no matter in what former colonial outpost they inhabit or under what confession they claim to govern – no confession being preferable, as the guiding principles of 1776 are reaffirmed in the manifesto.

Egalitarianism is given as the ideal mode of political economy, yet Euston has a non-exclusive membership policy, which would allow like-thinking conservatives and libertarians to add their names.

An unequivocal respect for human rights, including a firm opposition to the enslavement of women and the murder of homosexuals under sharia law, is also enshrined.

And though the crimes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay as well as the practice of "rendition" are justly abominated, Euston deplores the double bookkeeping of much of the Left, which uses these incidents to eclipse the horrors of Ba'athism or jihadism, or to draw moral equivalence between George Bush and Tony Blair on one side, and genocidal dictators on the other.

A point that has been repeatedly distorted by the media is that Euston is "pro-war" when in fact it takes no position on the wisdom of regime change in Iraq. However, as regime change is a fait accompli, the document is firmly in favor of the budding democratic – and, indeed, socialist and trade unionist – elements there. It has no truck with the jihadist and Saddamist "insurgency" looking to hobble the formation of a postwar democratic state.

(If I may go out on a limb and address the realities in Iraq a year after Euston was written: an incipient civil war between religious sects is no reason to abandon the foregoing commitments to human rights and secular and progressive principles.)

So where did this all come from? And why are such self-evident propositions suddenly in need of a new covenant?

"Anti-Imperialist" According to the Chomskyites: Balkan genocide architect Slobodan MilosevicThough polarities on the Left had been widening during the crises of Bosnia and Kosovo, 9/11 really marked the point at which they became irreconcilable. Independent leftists, mainly in the UK, found themselves strangers in the same land with former comrades who were now nodding along with the slogans of theocracy and fascism.

The effusions from some quarters are now notorious and the stuff of verbal and mental cliché: 9/11, in one frigid formulation, represented America's "chickens coming home to roost." Slightly more generous in syntax is what you refer to as the "yes-butter" argument: "Yes, the attack on the World Trade Center was awful, but hadn't decades of U.S. foreign policy lit the fuse?"

As you've noted, this rhetoric failed on two separate levels because not only did it apply to the victims in Lower Manhattan, it also applied to victims of other man-made nightmares around the globe, from the desaparecidos of Pinochet's Chile to the Tutsis of Rwanda to the black Muslims of Darfur…What are they to make of such blithe treatment of human suffering? Is there no universal outrage against mass murder? (As somebody who’s looked into the Holocaust, and also criticized leftist scholarship on the subject, you seemed particularly well poised to demand an answer to this question.)

Christopher Hitchens has remarked that the Left’s automatic response to such a world-upending – and worldview-shattering – event recalled the line from The 18th Brumaire, the one about how acquiring a new language can be a tricky business because the inclination is to translate everything back into the native tongue. In politics, this inclination can be lethal.

The Shady Game of Moral Equivalence: Tariq Ali lets photoshop do the work for himThis is why outspoken intellectuals like Tariq Ali openly compare the "resistance" in Afghanistan and Iraq to the guiding lights behind the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences – footnote assemblies to mainstream historians, perhaps, but to radicals with long memories, the most esteemed antiwar gatherings of the World War I generation. (And what might Trotsky, who later had Hitler pegged, have made of al-Qaeda? His phrase to describe the origins of Nazism, "undigested barbarism," sounds about right.)

Actually, Ali isn't alone in dipping into the archives of 20th-century revolutionism to account for the ongoing war against Islamism. I've found another example of more recent vintage, one which I think you’ll enjoy. Here is Terry Eagleton writing in The Guardian last year:

“Ordinary, non-political suicides are those whose lives have come to feel worthless to them, and who accordingly need a quick way out. Martyrs are more or less the opposite. People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round.

“Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them in the process. The martyr bets his life on a future of justice and freedom; the suicide bomber bets your life on it…" [Italics added.]

So we have reached the point where a well-regarded Marxist literary theorist can mention Rosa Luxemburg in the same breath as suicide-bombers in Jerusalem and Baghdad. And their mutual objectives – "justice and freedom" – differ only quantitatively in terms of a willingness to sacrifice... Can you actually hear the chorus of "The Internationale" fade into absolute silence?

Noble Radical: Rosa LuxemburgAs a reconciled Marxist, you've argued very elegantly that the Left both deserves credit for past accomplishments and bears a responsibility for past failures. Many socialists, of factions too diverse and many to mention here, fought and died combating Stalinism, a pathology they were able to diagnose earlier than anyone else. But precisely what allowed them to diagnose it – that it was a recognizable distortion of their own system – also added a responsibility to remain self-critical and ever vigilant of future distortions.

As late as 1994 you observed in the New Left Review that Marxism

"will continue as a programme of research, a tradition of enquiry, and take a more modest place in the democratic cultures it finds, with all those still fighting under darkening skies for a world for everyone. It will contribute what it can to strengthening those cultures and that fight, as one voice amongst many in a coalition wider than the working class, if not as wide or shapeless as mere 'discourse' would imply. And it will know that the horizon really is open. There have already been, goodness knows, more than enough defeats, and the infamies continue to pile, irredeemable, on one another. But there is no guarantee of a final victory."

Is the Euston Manifesto, then, an attempt to split the difference between old principles and new historical conditions, a way of returning to the heritage of noble radicalism rather than abandoning that heritage altogether? I wonder if your enduring optimism for the materialist conception of history is not your saving grace after all, especially when those claiming to march under the red banner of socialism have grown so jaded about their roots as to also swath themselves in the green flag of jihad.

One vindication of the dialectic, however grim.

Thank you, Norm. Eagerly awaiting your reply.

Best,
Michael

To: Michael Weiss
From: Norm Geras
Subject: A General, Abstract Argument, But Also Necessary

Dear Michael,

Thanks for yours and for inviting me to take part in this exchange.

I'll start with your question about the Euston Manifesto. Did we conceive it as a return to the “heritage of noble radicalism”? I hesitate to answer that in the affirmative or to present the manifesto in any other grandiose terms, and this is for one simple reason.

Tory Critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft: He argues that the Iraq war is seen by the Eustonians as an update of Marx's imperialist designs on IndiaWhen we first mooted producing such a document, we had a rather more modest aim: to define a few positions common amongst us (a group of bloggers and others), positions that we see as a legitimate part of contemporary left-liberal discourse but at odds with much else in that neck of the political woods. So much written about the manifesto since it was published has been so far wide of the mark that those of us who know of what we speak in this matter have a responsibility to try to keep things firmly on the ground.

On this score let me just briefly say that I take encouragement from the fact that, of the unfriendly responses to the Euston Manifesto, I've yet to see anything that we Eustonians would have trouble answering. Leaving aside willful misconstruals of what we were saying, and angry but more or less self-refuting denials that this had any purchase on the state of would-be “progressive” opinion today, there was a common observation of the manifesto's being very abstract and general. Yes, it is. So what?

Its generalities are ones that needed reaffirming; and they were a starting point for further discussion and further work, as we clearly stated. Some other criticisms were offered in a positive spirit and we replied to these as well as to representative examples of the more negative - and fancifully inventive - ones.

All that said, we were obviously wanting to insist on the importance of certain principles of liberalism and of the left that we feel have been lately subordinated to other less salubrious objectives. Yet I still prefer to pass as regards “noble.” We were just making a necessary argument, is all.

Turning to your question about the materialist conception of history, I don't think you can read the Euston Manifesto in that light. Remember that even though I had the principal part in drafting it, I did so on behalf of a group, only some of whom (as I knew) were of Marxist formation and commitment. So I didn't write it as a Marxist document, and that is clear from the whole shape of it.

“Splitting the difference” maybe makes some sense, therefore, in this context, in that the document looks for what Marxists, other kinds of socialist, social democrats, democrats period, and liberals, can defend in common amidst the political divisions rending the world today.

Not Necessarily Marxist: Euston makes common cause with free-market liberals and even some conservativesEven as far as I, personally, am concerned, I'd be hesitant to draw too strong a link between a general endorsement of historical materialism, such as I affirm, and any very particular political alignment. Despite the much spoken of “unity of theory and practice” within the Marxist tradition, I've never much been persuaded that you can move in a straightforward, linear way from a person's theoretical beliefs to their political views; and the last five years would have disabused me of that notion if I had been persuaded of it.

Not to belabor the point, but who could have anticipated that one day – in the last few months, in fact – organizations of the left of unambiguously Marxist lineage would be marching alongside reactionary religious fanatics and proclaiming their oneness with an outfit (Hizbollah) that openly proclaims its hatred of Jews and has no qualms about terrorist murder? Unthinkable, no? But having now to be thought. As Primo Levi observed out of a more terrible experience, everything happens.

Yes, in so far as the materialist conception of history and the commitment to rational analysis of social and economic forces that it depends upon don't sit well beside anti-modernist and obscurantist ideological impulses, one wouldn't expect the sort of alliances I've just spoken of, or the wider indulgence towards anti-democratic movements there now is on the Western left: the excuse-making or just lack of enthusiasm for speaking plainly against them. For myself, the central theoretical tenets of Marxism would seem like a sufficient defensive armory against such tendencies.

But then there's a cheap kind of “sociologism” of grievance around these days, which though in no way specifically Marxist since you can read and hear it everywhere where the well-meaning folk of the global dinner party are gathered, is easily derivable from a crudified historical materialism. It says: oh yes, they are terrorists, or at any rate “terrorists,” and this isn't ideal; but it is caused by grievances resulting from US foreign policy and from capitalist imperialism, and that is the overriding evil of our world, eclipsing, relativizing, every case of tyranny, mass murder, genocide - for, when all is said and done, these things can be traced back, reduced, to that.

As a Marxist I've never believed, naturally, that Marxism itself leads inevitably to such simplification. But like every other large body of ideas it is open to it.

Leftists and liberals today are faced with a serious challenge, part of the same challenge that menaces democratic societies overall. In those circumstances, an exclusivist insistence on one particular doctrinal heritage is not to the point. It isn't to the point anyway for other reasons. We need all the moral and intellectual resources we can muster, to defend moral and political achievements that were historically hard won.

Best,
Norm

To: Norm Geras
From: Michael Weiss
Subject: The Herd of Independent Minds

Dear Norm,

Thanks for your reply, and for setting me right on the lineaments of your political past and how they apply to the present. My interest in this direction was chiefly historical and perhaps a touch romantic.

PR Gang: The Partisan Review began / In Nineteen Thirty-Four / (Conscience took a few years more) / Between the start of a Five Year Plan / And Kirov hitting the floorThe most inspired kind of socialism to which I’ve been drawn, as if to a rare bottle of wine that long ago peaked, is the eccentric, unorthodox kind: Firmly anti-totalitarian, internationalist, and cosmopolitan; probably Trotskyist, and very probably found in the yellowed pages of the old Partisan Reviews. (Harold Rosenberg’s celebrated formulation of the New York intellectuals as a “herd of independent minds” always struck me as being almost as affectionate as it was sarcastic.) So if in some sense Euston is a necessary departure from this tradition rather than an update of it, I suppose that this just heightens the urgency and relevance.

Still, the left wouldn’t be the left without an exhausting faction fight and, as you point out, Euston has not been without its critics, many of whom scream from the hilltops about just how meaningless it all is. Quite a few are misinformed as to the content of what they’re rebuking (who really reads such tracts anymore?) while others are just peevish about being called out by former comrades.

But one fraternal admonition I’ve seen is that the manifesto makes self-evident propositions seem as if they had just been invented. Let’s see, now: no brooking the erasure of art and culture, the enslavement of women, the cult of death, the drawing of moral equivalence between venal democratic statesmen and genocidal dictators, rampant Jew-hatred, and all sorts of strangulating medieval tendencies… This is getting back to basics in a major way. I mean you can even download Voltaire these days.

So why can’t a true left-liberal struggle be waged without even countenancing the sinister fools who believe that there is something redeemable about Osama bin Laden and his aims? Can’t these people just be dismissed?

I suppose to some extent they can. But then, just when you think that the merits of the Enlightenment are a foregone conclusion, and that arguments against the failures of Bush and Blair can resume in earnest, you encounter such an intellectual and moral degeneracy among those claiming to uphold solemn “progressive” principles. Then you see the size of their cheering sections and you’re chilled to the bone.

Ramsey Clark does pro bono work for mass murdering monsters yet he rallies thousands to the streets of Manhattan simply by mouthing the term “antiwar.” George Galloway openly declares solidarity with Saddam Hussein, steals from the people of Iraq through the oil-for-food racket, yet still he enjoys a seat in British parliament.

No "Fundamentalist" of Any Stripe: Ayaan Hirsi AliAnd even a few sane and admirable liberals like Tim Garton Ash and Ian Buruma wrinkle their nostrils at what they view as Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Enlightenment fundamentalism.” (Having just gone through her autobiography and read her generous accounts of Muslim rites and rituals, I fail to see how this comparison holds up even as a clever act of rhetorical jujitsu. No bona fide fundamentalist pays any compliment, be it aesthetic or moral, to what she opposes.)

At the more esoteric level, nasty endorsements of fascists get buried in droning academism but are no less nasty for that fact. I realize that I’ve picked on him already, but this recent paint-by-number scrawl from Tariq Ali can’t be ignored, if for no other reason than its use of the oldest, most hackneyed meteorological imagery: “A radical wind is blowing from the alleys and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth, surrounded by the fabulous wealth of petroleum.”

Who are the valiant figures feeling the warm currents of change at their backs, you ask? Muqtada, Haniya, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad. Oh my.

So I do think Euston serves a purpose beyond congratulating its backers for noticing the obvious. However, for all the hue and cry one hears about it in the British press, there has been a corresponding absence of discussion in the U.S. You linked to a Dissent essay in your letter, and it’s true that Michael Walzer and Paul Berman (both Euston signatories) are mainly responsible for the stateside advent of a “decent” left.

But as someone who covers the blogosphere for Slate, I can attest that there has been radio silence on this subject on my side of the Atlantic – ironic, when you consider that the manifesto was the product of cyberspace, the first realm that is literally “without borders” and thus ideal for promulgating internationalist doctrines.

Wells of Yank ink have instead been spilled on behalf of the so-called “netroots” movement founded by the DailyKos crowd, which is now as much a part of the cynical Washington establishment said to have first forced it into existence.

Why, then, are all Eustonians situated in Albion? For the uninitiated I would point to the following catalogue of online worthies: Harry’s Place, Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War, Butterflies and Wheels [which has an Anglo-American editorship, but this is a rare exception], Bloggers 4 Labour, Labour Friends of Iraq, Little Atoms, and Alan Johnson’s excellent new literary journal Democratiya.

It’s on these sites that one will find frequent reference to some of the noble traditions of radicalism of which you modestly decline inheritance. There’s ample space here for May Day reminders alongside more pressing alarms about the congruence between sharia-minded clerics and the Socialist Workers Party of London. And doesn’t Euston more or less grant its geographical limitations by pledging itself again fashionable anti-Americanism?

Toad to Damascus: RESPECT Party MP George Galloway never met a dictator he didn't likeMy country’s politics of consensus and Europe’s fondness for political polarities have long been mutually unintelligible. Even “New” Labour is much farther to the left than the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” to quote Howard Dean. While “Trotskyists” in Bethnal Green and Bow today may not resemble pale shades of their former ideological selves, the adherence to the old nomenclature at least indicates some sense of revolutionary discipleship. In New York and Chicago, such is not the case (even when mass transit strikes are led by a union official with the provocative name of “Toussaint.”)

The joke had already grown stale in the sixties, when young American radicals who went around paying lip service to Marxism hadn’t actually read a single word of Marx. Now, not even the lip service is paid. It’s all just a mishmash of improvisational activism.

Funny, though, that Euston’s logic is indecipherable to precisely those groups that claim to represent the plights of the industrial working-class, the socially alienated, and the indigent at home and in the third world – all without a “doctrinal heritage” to take up. You alluded to some gooey late-nineties theoretical excesses: postmodernism, post-colonial studies, etc. No wonder you’re talking in tongues when you say that the great existential crisis of the new millennium has nothing to do with Halliburton’s last fiscal quarter…

This is what I was trying to get at before: Euston may have a wide purview but it does seem to attract a disproportionate following among those of classical Marxist and social democratic orientations. Netroots culls from the ranks of disaffected liberals (even some Republican conservatives) and pretty much everyone and anyone of the “Anybody But Bush” mentality.

So what’s the next step in swaying my compatriots, Norm? And what to be made of the fact that the only ones taking positive notice of Euston on these shores are the – gasp! –neocons of the Weekly Standard?

Best,
Michael

To: Michael Weiss
From: Norm Geras
Subject: Forget "Decent Left"

Dear Michael,

From the day it was published, I've been in no doubt whatever that the Euston Manifesto served a purpose. In fact from well before that, otherwise it wouldn't have been written. But the very vehemence of the reaction to the manifesto, and the combination of that vehemence with the charge that it was full of well-meaning generalities, reinforced the conviction that certain things which should be well enough known by now on the left, but evidently aren't, needed to be said.

An Early "Islamophobe": Baruch SpinozaWho can doubt this when it happens in Britain that emphasizing the enduring importance of Enlightenment values can bring down upon those who do so the charge of Islamophobia? Just like that. You care about freedom of speech and opinion, principles of secularism, pluralism, democracy, and you argue for the superiority of these principles vis-à-vis any closed religious truth? Same deal: it's Western arrogance. And this in newspapers and on websites firmly confident of their own left-liberal credentials.

The response to the Euston Manifesto may well have been more muted in the US than it was in this country, but that's surely understandable. The group that produced it was based in the UK and the initial press coverage was concentrated here. Nonetheless, despite its initially modest ambitions, there was reaction to the manifesto in other countries too - in Australia, Canada, Italy and elsewhere. The document is now in translation in eleven languages. And it did get a significant number of signatories from the US, though I can't say exactly how many. One initiative from a group of US signatories has come to fruition with the joint statement 'American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto' (see also here).

I say all this not to exaggerate the reach of the manifesto but just so as not to overlook what movement there has been. The standpoint it represents within the left is far from being dominant, so it's as well to register everything positive that there is. Beyond this I don't have anything useful to add on the imbalance you draw attention to between the US and the UK.

I'd like to say in this connection, though here I speak only for myself (other Eustonians may see it differently), that I don't hold with the label “decent left.” I don't claim it and I don't use it. I'm aware in saying this that the phrase originates with Michael Walzer, and I don't have any quarrel with his stated intention in introducing it: looking for a politics at once “intelligent, responsible [and] morally nuanced,” and free of the more lamentable impulses displayed by sections of the left in the aftermath of September 11 2001.

Dissent Decent: Michael WalzerMany of these were indecent, no question about it. But I prefer to argue against, and where appropriate to label, particular tendencies, forms of argument, exercises in apologia and what have you, without generally laying claim to and denying to others the moral status of “decency.” The category isn't much used as a claim, and I'm happy to abandon it to those by whom it is much used, but pejoratively: a small group in the British blogosphere, dismissive of Euston Manifesto politics and its authors and supporters. “Anti-Decents,” as it were, yet they are endlessly drawn back to the critique of “Decentism,” as if they have something stuck in their eye.

As for your question about the next step, I'm not confident enough in my knowledge of US conditions to venture anything very bold, but one thing I can say follows from what the Euston Manifesto group is and what it isn't. It isn't a political party or organization, and neither is it a political movement. We've been very clear about this from the beginning. The manifesto stated a broad political position, which those of us who produced it hoped might serve as a rallying point.

So the best thing you can do in the US is the same thing that we have to do here: help to make the argument, to continue the conversation. The future of the manifesto depends on this, on our elaborating on the positions already stated, making clearer things that aren't sufficiently clear, being more specific where so far we may have been too general and abstract, trying to answer some of the tough questions that are posed to liberals and people on the democratic left today.

Best,
Norm

Didn't take long for Nick's book to set les bien-pensant hopping. Norm Geras anatomizes one obsession of the left:

One confirmation of the fact that Nick Cohen's target is a real one wider than the SWP, is the intense hostility there has been, way beyond that organization, towards the pro-war left. Dip into any relevant comments thread on the Guardian's Comment is Free for a dose of such poison; note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call 'the decents'; give some time, if you can bear it, to re-reading through the comment and opinion pages of the liberal press for the last four years. That you were of the left and supported regime change in Iraq has just been unthinkable, unassimilable, for many - hence the hostility and the anathemas. It could not be that there was a difficult issue and a difficult choice, with weighty reasons on both sides. If, on the other hand, you consider what volume of critical animus and commentary has been directed from the same quarters at the rank apologists in the anti-war movement, you'll find that it pales by comparison.

Oliver Kamm does another:

The alliance of Islamists and Leninists that makes up the Respect coalition is not a dalliance born of opportunism. It reflects an extraordinary process in which part of the left has ended up arguing for what by any objective standards are reactionary positions: promotion of religious obscurantism in place of secularism; segregation of the sexes at public events; abridgement of free speech in deference to the sensibilities of those who claim themselves victims of the phantasm of "Islamophobia"; and most pernicious, the resurrection in political debate of some highly traditional motifs of antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Nick CohenShall I go out on a limb and say that Nick Cohen's What's Left?, which I haven't read yet because it hasn't been published in the states yet, might be the most important polemic you'll come by this year?

Finally, one of the drafters of the Euston Manifesto and a social democrat, who stayed angry but salubrious after 9/11, puts all his thoughts between two hard covers and his own political allegiance between a rock and a hard place.

Cohen's brief is simple: The left has abandoned its principles for fashionable anti-Americanism and anti-Ukanianism. Radicals with hoary Marxist and socialist credentials care little for the plight of Muslims (Bosnia? Kosovo?) but everything for the plight of Tony Blair and George W. Bush.

Their rancid and inverted ideology does not, to be fair, encompass all of the anti-war movement, but it does delimit the motives of old 'activist' hands who know better about the Baath Party and its criminal history, yet find higher favor with them than with any policy that could ever emerge from 10 Downing St. or 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Read these paragraphs and try to keep your powder dry:

On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini's old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery. In Greece, where the previous generation had overthrown a military junta, the police had to fire tear gas at leftists who were so angry at the prospect of a fascist regime being overthrown that they armed themselves with petrol bombs.

The French protests against the overthrow of a fascist regime went off without trouble. Between 100,000 and 200,000 French demonstrators stayed peaceful as they rallied in the Place de la Bastille, where in 1789 Parisian revolutionaries had stormed the dungeons of Louis XVI in the name of the universal rights of man.

In Ireland, Sinn Fein was in charge of the protests and produced the most remarkable spectacle of a remarkable day: a peace movement led by the IRA. Only in the newly liberated countries of the Soviet bloc were the demonstrations small and anti-war sentiment muted.

The protests against the overthrow of a fascist regime weren't just a European phenomenon. From Calgary to Buenos Aires, the left of the Americas marched. In Cape Town and Durban, politicians from the African National Congress, who had once appealed for international solidarity against South Africa's apartheid regime, led the opposition to the overthrow of a fascist regime. On a memorable day, American scientists at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica produced another entry for the record books. Historians will tell how the continent's first political demonstration was a protest against the overthrow of a fascist regime.

Don't you know your left from your right? Part II | Review | The Observer