Leftist political maturity

Decentists and other ex-lefties, War on Iraq
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For some reason, when I wanted to post a comment to this post at Reading A1 it was forbidden, so I’ll post it here. First, some context.

Michael at Reading A1 took to task Marc Cooper, yet another pseudo-Democrat who was wringing his hand on the lack of “viable alternatives” coming from the anti-war movement for the mess in Iraq. Michael correctly pointed out that it’s not the anti-war movement’s job to do this: we’re not in power,
we’re not listened to by Bush and co anyway and the only way that we can get any traction on this issue is to keep on calling loudly to get the troops out. So what is the motive for Cooper to criticise the anti-war movement for being too shrill as well as having the wrong elements in it?

Reading A1 hints at the answer in the last part of the post, which is what set me off:

Check out the update Marc Cooper thoughtfully added to his post, if you want to see a more unmediated version of his real politics:

Some of the more delusional responses [to the Juan Cole essay] predictably enough come from the
Idiot Right who accuse Cole of being a traitor. And, yes, also from those who want immediate,
unconditional, un-thought-out withdrawal on the Unrepentant Idiot Left. One of the more prolific buffoons from that corner — Louis Proyect the self-described “Unrepentant Marxist” — can offer no better response than to compare Cole with Dick Nixon and then further suggest I undergo a lobotomy for having linked to Cole and to cure what he diagnoses as my incipient Hitchens Syndrome (Ahh.. for the good old days of the Show Trials when prosecutor Vishinsky would end his feverish closing statements with a call to “Shoot these mad dogs!”). Oh well… I suppose every day that political Neanderthals like this have their mitts far, far, far from any levers of power is, at least, an OK day. For that I give thanks.

Still fighting the anti-Communist battles of the fifties, I see. And how are those “Neanderthals” (I make no endorsement of Proyect, by the way) any closer to power than you yourself are, Marc? And how close to power do you really think gloating over their lack of it is going to get you, or the people you endorse?

Of course, Proyect is right in saying that any sort of managed withdrawal of the sort Cole proposes and Cooper endorses is making the same mistake as the US did in Vietnam. Vietnam should’ve taught us that there are times when even the US cannot go against the tide of history: exactly the outcome it feared happened, only with many more lives lost than if it had not interfered.

Since Cooper is yet another beltway flack, this is of course far beyond his ken as none of these people has any sense of history or any desire to learn from it.

And it’s not even that his wishes for socalled “viable alternatives” is correct but mistimed, it’s that they’ve been wrong from the start and still wrong in their analysis of this war. Again this is from a lack of historical insight and a dependency on Beltway wisdom rather than real critical analysis.

What it all comes down to is that policy is nothing without ideology and people like Cooper have long let go of even their watered down version of liberalism for a misguided “realism”. This is the greatest disease afflicting the Democrats right now: the party’s elite no longer beliefs in anything but electability. Which is how abominations like the war on Iraq happen.

I guess No Man’s Land wasn’t that silly

Racism, US politics
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New Orleans under water

A couple of years back, there was this year long crossover in the Batman comics, called No Man’s Land. In this crossover, after Gotham City had been hit by an earthquake, the US government decided to cut its losses and abandon the city. At the time this was widely ridiculed as completely unrealistic; no government would act that way in reality.

This week New Orleans was hit by the worst disaster in its history, one of the worst natural disasters in the US in recent memory. Judging by comments made by Dennis Hastert, a senior Republican representative, the No Man’s Land scenario is not that silly anymore:

Despite the haste involved in congressional action, one senior GOP leader seemed to express some ambivalence about the extent of longer-term recovery efforts.

Asked in an interview with the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago paper, whether it makes sense to spend billions rebuilding a city that lies below sea level, a reference to New Orleans, Hastert replied, “I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

He added it was a question “that certainly we should ask. And, you know, it looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

Unspoken: “Hey, the victims are all poor and Black; they won’t vote Republican anyway. We already took away the money needed to improve the hurricane defences of New Orleans to pay for our war in Iraq. What makes you think we’d want to spent a single dime to help you now?”

Hence the demonisation of the victims, as Bionic Octopus explains:

This is how they’re going to play it. They’re going to try to blanket-criminalize the victims they can’t even be fucked to rescue. The tens of thousands of people they fucking abandonedVastly, vastly more have quietly waited to be rescued, in vain, or have taken provisions from stores to feed and clothe themselves, their neighbors and their children after waiting days to be given food, water, medical care. Tarring these victims as ‘a criminal element’ and using ‘looting’ as an excuse for the monumental, unforgivable cockup that is
this shambolic rescue effort is beyond outrageous. That is what’s criminal.

That’s Bush’s America for you. A country where the ruling elites have largely even given up pretending to care.

Handling criticism with dignity

science fiction
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As demonstrated by Tom Kratman, one of Baen Books ever increasing stable of rightwing milsf writers, in response to criticism of one of his books:

I thought it might interest you, you slimy little mincer, that sell-through on A State of Disobedience was 88%. This is extremely good and indicates how impotent you, and the rest of the left wing swine who infest usenet and lie on Amazon, really are. Impotent? No, that would be funny. And while you are a joke, you are not funny. (Besides, real impotence is likely untrue. You probably _can_ get it up…with fat little boys.)

Pussy.

  • Homosexual slur: check
  • Sales as measure of quality: check
  • Accusations of impotence: check
  • Accusations of pedophilia: check
  • Use of “fat” as a slur: check
  • “Pussy”: check
  • Writer making a complete ass of himself and losing the respect of everybody but his most dedicated fans:
    check

Impressive…

Sliming the Justice 4 Jean campaign

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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For some reason best known to the local cable company, our local BBC station is BBC London and it was on their local news bulletin that I saw the worst smear attempt I’ve seen in a long time. Apparantly, with Jean Charles de Menezes now entirely blameless in his own killing, the Metropolitan Police and/or its allies have shifted their focus on his family and the Justice 4 Jean campaign. Dimly realising that smearing the family themselves may backfire, the police or its allies have chosen to smear their advisors, which resulted in this “news” item: “is the Menezes family’s campaign for justice hijacked by the far-left?”

The common sense answer is of course “no”, but that’s not what the BBC wanted to show so we got treated to several minutes of ominous, slo-mo shots of two of the family’s advicers, one Asad Rehman, who turned out to be connected to George Galloway and Respect (no!), the other, Yasmin Khan who, so the BBC revealed after some intensive googlin^wresearch revealed to be behind the Corporate Pirates website, which is devoted to the plundering of Iraq by big business. At no point was explained why this was so sinister; any appeal was emotional not reasoned.

Two talking heads were asked to comment, one some wet behind the ears police spokesman, who adviced the Menezes family to change advisors — as if they’d take the advice of their son’s killers— the second Brian Coleman, who was indentified as being on the Greater London Assembly, but not as a Tory, strangely enough, who saw it all as a “far-left plot” to damage the police and “sir” Ian Blair. Neither had any political agenda themselves, I’m sure.

The interesting thing was how this was presented. I’m sure the BBC London news team meant this all to be outrageous, but it just fell flat. Course, I might not be the best person to judge this by, but I don’t think this would convince anybody who didn’t already think Menezes had it coming and “those lefties” should stop hassling the police. It was all too American, too Republican and while the British public can be just as ignorant, pigheaded and stupid as the American, it’s not this stupid. Anti-war is not a scary word in the UK, not like it is in the US: the gulf between cant and reality in this programme was just too great for anybody to swallow…

Which does not mean this wasn’t a slimy piece of biased crap for which everybody responsible at the BBC should be sacked, of course. But that’s no more then we’ve come to expect from the post-election, post-spine BBC.

No coverup? Suuuure

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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Yes, we figured the police lied from day one about the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes, but as usual the police bosses, Ian Blair first, were adamant this was all a ghastly mistake and the police behaved properly. Even after hard evidence emerged that the version of events the police put forth was simply not true, they kept denying wrong doing. Yesterday the other shoe dropped: the Metropolitan police chief Ian Blair tried to stop the independent investigation without which we would’ve never known the truth:

Britain’s top police officer, the Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Ian Blair, attempted to stop an independent external investigation into the shooting of a young Brazilian mistaken for a suicide bomber, it emerged yesterday.

Sir Ian wrote to John Gieve, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, on July 22, the morning Jean Charles de Menezes was shot at short range on the London tube. The commissioner argued for an internal inquiry into the killing on the grounds that the ongoing anti-terrorist investigation took precedence over any independent look into his death.

Further down in the article:

But a statement from the Met yesterday showed that despite the agreement to allow in independent investigators, the IPCC was kept away from Stockwell tube in south London, the scene of the shooting, for a further three days. This runs counter to usual practice, where the IPCC would expect to be at the scene within hours.

Gee, such a departure from normal procedure. I wonder why? Blair can “reject the concept of a coverup” as much as he wants, but I have only one response:

bliar