To begin, I’ll declare an interest: the journalist Nick Cohen is a friend, and in his new book, What’s Left? How the Liberals Lost Their Way, he makes several references to this blog and thanks me for helping him. (In fact all I did was drink several pints of beer with him, send him a few documents and read a couple of chapters, but it’s always pleasant to be appreciated.) I’m looking forward eagerly to his launch party the week after next.
So it would be easy to dismiss as mutual backscratching my broad agreement with the argument of his book, that since 9/11 a large section of the British left has been so blinded by its anti-Americanism that it has embraced the worst sort of Islamist reaction. But it isn’t backscratching. I’ve been saying much the same for as long as he has – though with little of his rhetorical force or skill – and I’d recommend his book had I never met him. It’s a brilliant excoriating polemic that should be read by everyone on the left.
Not that I think he’s right about everything. As others have pointed out, he’s got a terminology problem that runs through the book. I don’t think “liberal-left” works as “a cover-all term for every shade of left opinion”, nor is “liberals” synonymous for me with “the middle-class left”. Unlike him, I opposed the war against Saddam in 2003 on the grounds that it was likely to be protracted and bloody and that the US had no credible plans for what happened afterwards. I don’t think Cohen recognises how many people who were against the war in 2003 also found the pro-Saddam posturing of George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party utterly disgusting and distrusted the alliance with reactionary Islamists that Galloway and the SWP created in the Stop the War Coalition.
Still, Cohen’s central thesis is absolutely to the point. Most opponents of the war who did not share the “revolutionary defeatism” of Galloway and the SWP or the reactionary politics of their Islamist allies turned a blind eye to them. They certainly did nothing to distance themselves publicly – let alone anything to seize leadership of the anti-war movement.
And since 2003 the obsession of most people on the non-Leninist left who opposed the war – I know there are honourable exceptions – has simply been to get their own back on George Bush and Tony Blair for starting it. For the parochial self-righteous left, the important thing about the growing sectarian strife in Iraq is not that it threatens to turn into a full-scale civil war that then engulfs the whole Middle East. It is that it shows Bush and Blair were wrong three years ago — just as we said they were. Pinning the blame on Bush and Blair and demonstrating we were right matters more than working out how best to support the Iraqi people against the murderous militias terrorising their country. It's comfortable collective political narcissism, no more.
There are lots of good things in What’s Left? apart from the core argument about the left, 9/11 and Iraq – among them an excursion into the left in the 1930s and the Communist Party’s defeatism during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact, a pointed assault on the idiocies of postmodernism and a chilling account of how the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party took money from Saddam (and praised him to the skies) in return for spying on Iraqi dissidents in Britain. I don’t think he captures just how wrong the left consensus was in the 1930s or how the WRP’s relationship with Saddam was only a little more compromised than that of other Leninist sects with other third world dictators, but these are minor points. This is extended pamphleteering at its best.
16 comments:
Paul, what is Nick (and for that matter what are you) actually suggesting as to how best to support the Iraqi people against the murderous militias terrorising their country?
When I asked him, he just made some reference to the PUK (which is hardly to the point) and to Iraqi trade unions (which rather ignores the fact that the majority of Iraqi trade unions actually want an immediate end to the occuption, a measure which Nick is visibly not campaigning for although the StWC are).
It very much seems to me that Nick's central charge appears to rely on assuming that getting the troops out of Iraq is not a policy which could be recommended on grounds of support for the Iraqi people, on the belief that the occupation is making things worse rather than better. This is actually the opinion of a majority of the Iraqi public in polls and the official policy of nearly every Iraqi left political movement. It has always had substantial popular support among Iraqis even when it wasn't a majority view.
While it's certainly possible to hold the opposing view, as the al-Maliki goverment does, at no point has it ever been acceptable to simply dismiss this view as intrinsically unserious or so obviously wrong that it doesn't need to be argued against. And that's exactly what Nick does, and I think that he (and you) has to make this illegitimate assumption in order for his wider critique of "the Left" or "left-liberals" to go through.
Extended pammphleteering? More like extended navel gazing. Read Terror Inc: Tracing the Money behind Global Terrorism by
Loretta Napoleoni if you want learn about the bad guys and the network that really sustains them. Extended parochial finger pointing at various pamphlet toting groupuscules on the British left seems rather tangential.
Reading the reviews, I'm wondering just how Cohen has managed to stretch his rather tiresome newspaper columns on the state of the Left to 400 pages, especially when I got the impression that he cribbed most of them from a leftie message board he used to lurk on.
Please tell me he's not arguing that the cultism of the WRP, the Stalinism of the CPGB and the populism of the SWP are all essentially at root the same thing...
A serious point from Daniel, but I don't think he or other advocates of US/UK withdrawal have grasped just how psychotic the ethnic and religious tensions are in Iraq right now. For what it's worth, which is not a lot — the opinion of a man in Ipswich — I can't see how withdrawal will lead to anything other than ethnic cleansing of an awful kind (India at partition, Palestine 1948). The key question now is how that can be prevented, and I'm not sure that there is any real option other than (a) staying there and (b) rooting out the militias by brute force.
why exactly, given the role of coalition forces in producing these tensions in the first place, are they a suitable tool for dispersing them?
It's not like these tensions existed when the Americans showed up in Iraq., they developed and deepened over the course of a brutal occupation.
Quite apart from that, where is the interest on the part of the Americans in rooting out pro-government militia/death squads? Isn't it just the logical conclusion on their little Plan Salvador?
Where does this level of credulity about coalition aims/ethics/interests come from?
What sort of Leftist is Nick Cohen? Was he ever a member of a political party? Did he ever march, campaign, picket, leaflet or do anything other than sit on his backside and type out his opinions? His gradual transformation into Melanie Phillips in drag comes as no surprise.
A few examples
Nick Cohen supported the invasion when the Iraqi left opposed it (Talabani is Socialist in the same way that Tony Blair is). Cohen is very selective when t comes to solidarity.
Here Cohen suports the use of torture and the deportation of people on the say so of MI5
'We have to deport terrorist suspects - whatever their fate'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1939959,00.html
Not long ago, just after 9/11, Nick supported anti-americanism, something he now tries to pin on the left.
'Why it is right to be anti-American'
http://www.newstatesman.com/200201140006
He supports the return of selection in schools
'Long live grammars'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1539682,00.html
If he is a friend you should choose your friends more wisely Paul and please don't try to pretend this charlatan is part of 'the left'.
Anonymous: (1) I am not endorsing everything Nick Cohen says; (2) On all available evidence, he's as much part of the left as you are, chum; and (3) I'll choose my friends as I wish. I'm an atheist and a leftist but I have pals who are Catholic Tories. And many of them are better people than ... well, you guess.
And many of them are better people than ... well, you guess.
Because... 'Anonymous' criticises Nick Cohen on your blog. Interesting.
Nick Cohen does this 'lefter than thou' business reasonably well, will appeal to some, but I suspect it will hit the bargain buckets quite soon and be quickly forgotten.
Of course, since Nick Cohen self righteously condemns so many in his tome, I think its necessary to hold Nick to standards that he uses on others.
What organisations and groups campaigning against totalitarianism, defending human rights does Nick belong to? Which campaigns and demos has he been on associated with these organisations over the years? In short, what has he done.
One small example: I searched Amnesty International for any evidence of Nick Cohen's practical involvement. There was none.
Jon: why is joining a campaigning organisation or going on a demo "doing something" and writing articles read by thousands of people "doing nothing"?
You didn't answer my question, Paul.
Strength of numbers, collective action, all that. I thought you were a lefty?!
Apparently poor Nick has been earning a pretty penny writing for the Observer for years, entertaining those crying into their cornflakes. Not been involved in much else has he? Google. Virtually no practical engagement in groups or campaigns.
He's a self-righteous scribbler of Farringdon Road - and not the only one.
Jon: I know Cohen is paid to write, but so what? People who run Amnesty International are paid to campaign for the release of political prisoners. I'm all in favour of collective political action but I think there are all sorts of ways of doing it. Even scribbling self-righteously on a large salary for a liberal newspaper involves others, if only the poor bloody subs who pick up your howlers...
Okay. So this guy condemns others for not standing up to totalitarianism, whilst living off a fat salary at a liberal newspaper, and whilst having virtually no involvement with organisations fighting totalitarianism at the coal face.
I'm beginning to get the picture now.
I think that's pretty unfair, Jon - Nick Cohen earns his living as a journalist, and he has used that platform to run some of his own campaigns and promote those of others, probably more so than most journalists in a similar position and including some very deserving cases that were having a hell of a time getting themselves heard.
On the other hand, I do think that, given the extent to which he sticks it to other people for not giving enough support to Iraqi trade unionists, I am surprised at his own record on three counts:
1) he really hasn't written all that much about them. As far as I can tell, he wrote about Iraqi trade unions once, in September 2004 in the Observer. He did write about the Iranian bus drivers' union in 2005 (which underlines what I said above, that he's a good campaigning journalist)
2) in as much as he writes about them, you would think that the only major problem that Iraqi leftwingers have is an insufficiency of statements of support from whoever Nick means to refer to when he says "the liberal left".
3) he picks and chooses the support that he is prepared to give them, in that a very substantial proportion of Iraqi trade unions are in fact in favour of immediate withdrawal of foreign troops and this doesn't ever get mentioned.
oh and
4) he does not really give credit where it's due. Amnesty International are specifically name-checked in his journalism as having campaigned on behalf of Iraqi and Iranian democrats, but they get only three mentions in the book, all of them unfavourable. They are also the only organisation specifically condemned by name in the Euston Manifesto, despite the fact that they are clearly and provably not guilty of what Nick claims is his only real disagreement with the "anti-war left".
I'd be interested to know what you think of this:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1321818.ece
and he has used that platform to run some of his own campaigns and promote those of others, probably more so than most journalists in a similar position and including some very deserving cases that were having a hell of a time getting themselves heard.
He's a good campaigning journalist? What campaigns, what organisations is he involved in? He mentioned a bus drivers strike once, wrote briefly about the Iraqi trade unions, big deal...
Nick Cohen is taken apart piece by piece in this wonderfully sustained demolition job. It's almost painful to read - are there no standards in British journalism?
Cohen seems to have believed that everything written by Kamm, Wheen and Hitchens is factually correct and so he could rely on them as sources. Big mistake.
http://indecent-left.blogspot.com/2007/02/whats-left-of-cohen.html
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