Decentists and other ex-lefties – Page 3

Bullying is the new freedom of speech

Published on November 18, 2009

Harry’s Place attempts to prove Laurie Penny’s accusation of bullying wrong, by erm trying to bully her into withdrawing the accusation. For such macho culture warriors they have remarkably thin skins. It’s a trait they share with their ideological compatriots over here, as with the backlash against Geert Wilders finally starting, he has shown to be better at dishing it out than taking it as well.

The pattern until recently had been that he would say something incredibly insulting and/or racist (comparing Islamic headscarves to “dishrags” for example), would get widely if ineffectively condemned for it, which he in turn would use to show the political elite in Den Haag didn’t get it. But when in short succesion a government report called the PVV “an extreme rightwing party” and anti-democratic and a popular standup comedian compared it to the WWI Dutch nazi party, Wilders’ fondness for freedom of speech evaporated. While he called these accusations absurd and insane, his followers took more drastic actions and sent various death threats to Wilders’ more vocal critics…

Righwing blowhards can only win the debate when the opposition rolls over. When they themselves are attacked their true, bullying nature appears.

The ship has been scuttled before the rats could leave

Published on October 1, 2009

Further proof that Decentism is dying or dead: house organ Democratiya has been assimilated by the ur-decents Dissent Magazine, last seen ratfucking the anti-war movement in the runup to the War on Iraq. Meanwhile the Euston manifesto is moribund, while certain of Decentism more outspoken cheerleaders like Nick Cohen, seem to have dropped all pretense at being on the left and are metamorphosing into Tory supporters.

All of which might just have something to do with the slow collapse of New Labour’s prospects of winning the next election during the past two years, now made painfully clear at their party conference: barely any lobbyists and the party faithful putting their hopes in Mandy. The news that The Sun is now supporting the Tories was just the rancid icing on the Labour shitcake and the only question is what took them so long:

It would obviously be too much to expect a bullying, toadying media operation like the Sun to attack Gordon Brown when he appeared to be strong. But he’s been visibly weakening for the past year, and the paper still seemed nervous about changing sides, even when it became increasingly apparent that the illness was fatal. They didn’t attack him when he was strong. They were still scared of changing sides when he was weak. It’s only when he seems to be definitively, authoritatively and absolutely politically dead that they break into the funeral home and shoot the corpse.

It’s no more than fitting that such an embarrasing display was answered by Tony McNulty ripping up a copy while playing up his scouser roots and Harriet Harman making Page 3 jokes, something neither of them would’ve dreamed of even last week. Both sides have always been scared to test each other’s strength. But The Sun‘s “treason” does show how little appeal is left in New Labour even for business interests like Murdoch — Brown may have reason to be grateful for the economic crisis, as it meant he kept his usefulness longer. Interestingly, The Sun has not just ditched New Labour, but also its foreign policy the paper once cheerleaded. The whole idea of the Decent Left/Euston Manifesto/humanitarian interventionism seems increasingly unlikely to survive the demise of the political party with which is most associated.

like lottery winners preaching enterprise to the starving

Published on September 14, 2009

Jamie on the moral hypocrisy of Decentists and other Western Triumphalists

Ah, fuck ’em. Stalin’s their daddy. Everyone’s wrestling with the uncomfortable but persistent suspicion that it took Stalin to beat Hitler: it’s the big open dirty secret of World War two historiography. Stalin murdered millions of people to get the Soviet Union in some sort of shape to resist Hitler, millions more died in the struggle and his price was the life, liberty, and property of the people of Eastern Europe, which we were in no position to refuse him but which we gave him anyway. And then the Palestinians get stiffed with the bill for hundreds of years of European anti-semitism. Now we sit on top of this huge pile of corpses crowing about how our liberty makes us an example to the world, like lottery winners preaching enterprise to the starving.

I really do dislike the whole tribe of Westernists, right or pseudo left, even when I’m not drunk.

Any Questions and the limits of debate

Published on August 7, 2009

I tend not to listen to Any Questions, unlike my partner, as it annoys me too much. You have this ritualised debate between government and opposition politicians through yet another venue, enlivened by a healty dose of mainstream media commentators all carefully mixed to present a “balance of opinion”, chasing the issues of the day through a thoroughly mainstream Westminster filter. A perfect example popped up on this week’s episode, which for once I did catch.

It came through an audience question about Harry Patch, the last survivor of the war of the trenches, who sadly died earlier this week. Patch had been adamant that he considered all war to be a waste of human live and the question was whether the panel agreed. Said panel, consisting of “Charles Moore, British Medical Association chairman Hamish Meldrum, commentator and chief executive of the Index on Censorship John Kampfner and chair of the Health and Safety Executive, Judith Hackitt CBE” was quick to agree with this but even quicker to backpedal. It just wasn’t possibe, Britain needs an army as deterrent, there are evil countries that need to be defeated, yadda yadda.

The highlight was a short side discussion between Charles Moore, Britain’s slightly more polite answer to Bill Kristol and the “leftist” John Kampfner about Ruanda and humanitarian intervention. Moore started by lamenting the failure of the UN to act in Ruanda, which Kampfner followed up to by agreeing and giving more examples of countries that should’ve been humanitarian intervented: Darfur, Birma, Zimbabwe, the usual litany of soft liberal foreign causes. He then went on to mourn the war on Iraq, as it was this that had shied away western countries from other interventions.

Both either don’t know, or don’t care to think about the realities of all interventions (and Kampfner really has no excuse here, as he wrote a book on Blair’s interventions). None of these interventions is ever done out of charity, few if any make any real difference to the people themselves and they all take place in a context of western supremacy and compliance in whatever situation we are supposed to resolve some years later. As Lenny shows, the Ruanda is actually the perfect example of how western intervention really works:

the story of the Rwandan genocide was one of non-intervention. The ‘West’, or the Euro-American powers so designated, demonstrated ‘indifference’. They considered it just another example of ancient tribal hatreds finding an outlet in a new blood-letting, failing to accept that what was taking place was a genocide that demanded urgent intervention to protect the innocent. (These racist spiels about ancient tribal hatreds are certainly culpable, but I wonder if the reactionary discourse of ‘good-vs-evil’ that imperialists are fond of is really any better?) The lesson drawn from this by those advocating ‘humanitarian intervention’ is that new norms of intervention, mandating the use of military force in emergency cases, have to be elaborated and embedded in international law. Now, even if it were true that the ‘West’ had not intervened, it would by no means follow that it should: you have to make another series of assumptions to justify that conclusion. But it isn’t true, and the widespread acceptance of this idea cultivates the claim of US innocence, the obverse of ‘indifference.

Sending in the US army or the UN blue helmets is just the most visible part of western intervention in the rest of the world. As Lenny argues, it’s the context in which these interventions take place that is important. You just cannot naively wonder why nobody cares enough about Birma or Darfur or Zimbabwe to “do something” about them, without taking into account the interests of the nations that are supposed to act. There are no neutral actors. What’s more, to keep insisting in the face of the evidence, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the former Yugoslavia, that interventions actually solve anything is downright irresponsible if not criminal. It also smacks of a certain arrogance to argue for intervention in Zimbabwe, when the opposition there has always made it clear they don’t want it, they want to solve their problems themselves.

Why I loathe Norman Geras

Published on July 7, 20092 Comments

Geras who?

You’re excused if you never heard of him before, but back in the halycon days of 2002-03, Norm Geras was a big shot blogger. A real life socialist professor who had written real books on Marxism (!) and who agreed with the war on terror, Geras was the token leftie of the socalled warbloggers, who treated 9/11 as their Pearl Harbour, but instead of signing up for their tour of duty fired up the old keyboard and fought the Greatest Intellectual Struggle of Our Time from the comfort of their office during lunch breaks. Geras whole schtick was to link to some self declared socialist and to explain, more in sorrow than in anger, how real socialists like Lenin and Marx would’ve supported American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. In that slightly stupifying academese of his he would then suggest that his victim, far from coming by his opinions honestly, was duped or more sinisterly, had ulterior motives for opposing the war, was anti-western, anti-american or worst of all, anti-Israel. Since those halycon days Geras’ fame has slowly dwindled, trapped in his own circle of hell with the rest of the ex-leftists and Eustonites as the War on Terror went sour, the successes of 2002 and 2003 turned into defeats and more honest bloggers, both left and rightwing no longer felt the need to take those people serious.

Which doesn’t mean Geras and others like them have stopped blogging, just because we stopped paying attention. Nope, the professor is still plugging away, recycling the same old stale shit:

However, when it comes to large-scale trends it is not merely accidental what issues people gravitate towards in significant numbers. The contemporary liberal-left is much more drawn towards some of these than to others for its condemnation and protest – the actions of Israel, the US and other Western democracies come to mind – and there are political preferences and blind spots involved in this. What I doubt, as a matter of sociological explanation, is that their choices have to do mainly with the prospect of success. Or, looking back: the anti-Apartheid struggle did not, at the time, seem like one that would be rewarded with an easy or proximate victory, but this deterred no one from speaking and acting in solidarity with the South Africans waging it. One may or may not want to get involved oneself, but those who protest from afar in support of the democratic movements in Zimbabwe and Iran do something of what they can do. Silence as the better option for such situations is an eccentric and paradoxical counsel within the traditions of progressive politics – though naturally, as with everything else, one can speak and act to better or to worse effect.

Let’s overlook the simple fact that he’s, you know, wrong, there have been plenty of leftist, socialist and liberal bloggers talking about Iran and Zimbawbe, as a simple google search should have told him in seconds. What’s infuriating is not that, but the way in which he insinuates but never quite says outright that the reason “liberal-left” (sic) is silent on Iran but not Israel is because we are all a bunch of jewhating anti-americans. Instead he slips in his needle without ever having to say outright anything he has to defend later. If anybody takes offence they’re the bad guys; he stayed perfectly civil.

What’s also infuriating is the sheer bloody pointlessness of the complaint. Even if it were true, even if leftist bloggers paid more attention to what their own governments are doing, so what? South Africa under Apartheid is actually a nicely revealing example Norm is using there, as the very same arguments he and his friends have been using to disparage “the singling out of Israel by the left” were used by friends of South Africa then. Campaigners against Apartheid were communist dupes, or just out to bring down a western government, hypocritical for not paying equal attention to atrocities in Black ruled countries, etc. And the reason why these arguments missed the point is that like Israel now, South Africa then was activily supported by the British and American governments and hence opposing these policies could have an impact that a condemnation of a nation already in the shithouse like Iran doesn’t. It’s very well to say that what’s happening in Iran is bad, but what’s the point when everybody already thinks so?