There was an article recently by Nick Cohen in The Observer recently (no longer online) which was fairly interesting to me. Personally, I still know wrong from right in my daily personal life, but in world affairs I’m a bit lost. I know that the bungled Iraq War is a disaster for American energy security, but that particular issue is something for neocons to be mad about, not “moral” people. The disastrous situation in Iraq now actually gives me an easy out, a way to still be against Bush’s war and say I was rightly against it all along. But I was originally against it because I thought Bush was planning to acquire Iraq as the “51st state”, which it turns out he wasn’t. The Coalition Provisional Authority DID cede power to an elected Iraqi government. So was removing Saddam a morally wrong idea, or merely a strategic blunder? What was the moral thing to do?
The author, a born and bred leftist, says that the European Left was against the war just because they hate America and that they have lost their moral compass. It’s a tad long-winded, but here’s the meat of it:
In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.
A part of the answer is that it isn’t at all clear what it means to be on the left at the moment. I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left wing than ours would look like and how its economy and government would work (let alone whether a majority of their fellow citizens would want to live there). Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone. Disgraced by the communists’ atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government. Even the modest and humane social democratic systems of Europe are under strain and look dreadfully vulnerable.
It is not novel to say that socialism is dead. My argument is that its failure has brought a dark liberation to people who consider themselves to be on the liberal left. It has freed them to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically, America. I hate to repeat the overused quote that ‘when a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything’, but there is no escaping it. Because it is very hard to imagine a radical left wing alternative, or even mildly radical alternative, intellectuals in particular are ready to excuse the movements of the far right as long as they are anti-Western.
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.
A few recognised that they were making a hideous choice. The South American playwright Ariel Dorfman, who had experienced state terror in General Pinochet’s Chile, published a letter to an ‘unknown Iraqi’ and asked, ‘What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the ousting of Saddam Hussein?’
His reply summed up the fears of tens of millions of people. War would destabilise the Middle East and recruit more fanatics to terrorist groups. It would lead to more despots ‘pre-emptively arming themselves with all manner of apocalyptic weapons and, perhaps, to ‘Armageddon’. Dorfman also worried about the casualties - which, I guess, were far higher than he imagined - and convinced himself that the right course was to demand that Bush and Blair pull back. Nevertheless, he retained the breadth of mind and generosity of spirit to sign off with ‘heaven help me, I am saying that I care more about the future of this sad world than about the future of your unprotected children’.
- Posted by JK
