(UPDATE: Moving this to the front--in light of the next item--from 12/24).
This disgraceful item, which is at the intellectual level of Instapundit or The Weekly Standard, appeared in, of all places, The Guardian! It purports to be a review of a recent book by Chomsky--though it fails to even mention the central impetus for Chomsky's book, namely, the fact that the United States government has issued an official National Security Strategy stating its intent to suppress all international rivals by force--but it is really a polemic against everyone opposed to the current mass insanity in the United States.
Did you miss the mass insanity? Let me remind you.
Less than nine months after fundamentalist religious zealots inflicted mass casualties on the civilian population of the United States, and only about six months after the U.S. toppled the regime that harbored them, a country of no consequence or relevance to the safety of the United States--a country hated by the fundamentalist religious zealots for its secular ideology and its Western treatment of women, a country with a devastated economy and crippled military, a country that the U.S. and Britain regularly bombed (since it didn't even have sovereign control over all its own terriroty), a nation half of whose population were children, a country which the US outspent on military might 400 to 1--this country was suddenly declared the most pressing threat to the U.S. and world peace.
In an American version of Ionesco's Rhinoceros--the brilliant, "theater of the absurd" rendering of the mass insanity that beset Germany in the 1930s--the American population was progressively whipped in to war frenzy through a series of lies, more or less brazen, to the point that, while no one in their right mind in the summer of 2001 would have described Iraq as a security threat to the U.S., by the late fall of 2002, a large portion of the U.S. population actually believed that. (It's worth noting that the lies, and the cover-up that followed them, were heavily abetted by the blogosphere, despite its self-important, but simply self-serving, claims to be a force for accuracy in news coverage.)
Despite the breathtaking propaganda campaign--the most frightening in the United States during my lifetime--significant portions of the U.S. population remained opposed to the lunatic belligerence of the current Administration; they were joined, of course, by the vast majority of the world's population, though in a signal victory for democracy, their voice was ignored by numerous "democratic" governments, who quickly joined the Administration's "Coalition of the Billing."
Which returns us to the dishonest Nick Cohen, a putatively left-wing journalist who, like Christopher Hitchens, has apparently discovered that there's more fame and profit in sucking up to power by heaping contempt on those who dissent. Cohen takes issue with the anti-war Left on the grounds that, previously, "the Left could be relied upon to fight fascism," but by failing to support the US/British invasion of Iraq, the Left, as seen through Nick Cohen's looking-glass, had now betrayed its "commitment to the Enlightenment ideal of universal freedom."
Apparently Nick Cohen has only a passing familiarity with the Enlightenment and its ideals, since he seems unaware that they also include, inter alia, the rule of law, the avoidance of war, democratic accountability, the elevation of reason over faith, rational decision-making that is public and transparent, and respect for the dignity of the individual (which, by the way, would include the tens of thousands killed and maimed in Iraq in the last nine months)--all ideals currently on the defensive in the current environment of mass insanity.
When exactly has it been the practice of the anti-fascist Left to align itself with anti-Enlightenment forces? Is Stalinist Russia Nick Cohen's model for the anti-fascist Left? Could it not be that the actual anti-fascist Left might weigh considerations like (1) the inevitable human carnage of war, (2) the importance of the rule of law in international affairs, (3) the track record of the United States, including many individual members of its current Administration, in supporting brutal tyrannies (including the Iraqi one) when it was economically advantageous to do so, and (4) the risk (and human consequences) of subsequent military actions against other nations by an emboldened American superpower, in concluding that opposition to the war was morally imperative?
Indeed, the sheer moral lunacy underlying the "logic" of Cohen's charge is breathtaking: notwithstanding the indisputable U.S. track record for five decades of staunch support for brutal tyrannies and oligarchies around the globe, whenever the U.S. decides, for whatever reason, to launch a war, in violation of international law, against a fascist country no longer in its favor, the Left has a moral obligation to support that war.
So when the US next declares war on Iran, on Syria, on Saudi Araba, on North Korea, on the central Asian kingdoms of the former Soviet Union, on any number of our current "allies," Nick Cohen will be standing by to counsel the Left to stand up for the Enlightenment as the bullets fly and the bombs rain down.
Yes, that is really what someone who claims to be on the left is advocating in a major British newspaper. This is how debased our public discourse has become.
If after reading through Cohen's misrepresentation of Chomsky's book, his lies about the Left's oppositions to U.N. sanctions on Iraq, even his lies about Chomsky's audience (which is not primarily the Western bourgeoisie)--
if, after all this, one were in any doubt about the desperate dishonesty of this polemic against opposition to war, one need only read the conclusion:
"Just before the war, Jose Ramos-Horta, one of the leaders of the struggle for independence in East Timor, looked on the anti-war protesters and asked: 'Why did I not see one single banner or hear one speech calling for the end of human rights abuses in Iraq, the removal of the dictator and freedom for the Iraqis and the Kurdish people?'"
Let us assume that Mr. Ramos-Horta really asked this pitifully stupid question, and did not do so rhetorically--the fact is Cohen repeats it, and repeats it as though the answer would be a mystery to someone over the age of 12 or 13: because protesting against dictators in foreign countries is a meaningless exercise, whereas protesting the conduct of democratic governments is, one would like to think, a meaningful exercise, a requirement of democratic citizenship.
If, as a consequence of the current mass insanity in the United States, some good actually results for those not already killed and maimed in Iraq; if it happens that Iraq ends up as something other than an outpost for U.S. oil companies and military bases; if Iraq's current puppet government is replaced with a democratic one; if Iraq manages to avoid sinking in to ethnic warfare or turning in to a fascist theocracy on the Iranian or Saudi Arabian models; if it happens that the U.S. stops jailing union organizers and suppressing free speech in Iraq; if, as every friend of the Enlightenment hopes, all this happens, it will not change the fact that the cost to all the other Enlightenment ideals has been too great. One may hope--an idle hope, I confess--that at some point in the future, new friends of the Enlightenment will look back in disgust and amazement at the tortured mendacity of the apologists for insanity like Nick Cohen.
UPDATE: John Kozak from the UK writes with a correction:
"The Cohen review was published in the Observer, not the Guardian. Their website suggests that they're the same thing, but they're not. They do now belong to the same group, but for less than ten years, and have distinct identities. The Observer is a mess of moral panics, marketing demographic analysis dressed up as cultural insight and really impressively incompetent journalism (they once carried a piece about a vast unpublished Wittgenstein work called "Nachlass"). The Observer's tone is much more narrowly Blairite than (even) the Guardian; indeed Cohen used to be their token leftie: and has, to be fair, written some serious criticisms of the UK government's dismal
policies towards immigration. Most of Cohen's journalism lately has been rather feeble anti-anti-war tirades - I suspect he senses a big lurch rightwards and is protecting his "personal brand".
"A similar phenomenon over here: one Francis Wheen has a pop book out
on irrationality; much bashing of crystals, homeopathy, Diana (Spencer) worship and so on in the name of an Enlightenment under threat. Thin stuff mostly, but worthy (I've only dipped into it). But, nestling in the middle of this is a denunciation of Chomsky backed up by quotes from Christopher Hitchens! err..."
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