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January 21, 2007
Iraq War Has Liberal Columnist Nick Cohen Questioning the Left
Posted by Dave Blount at January 21, 2007 9:39 PM
As the media is always so eager to remind us, our struggle in Iraq against Islamic fascism and terrorism has failed to be a cakewalk. In the short term, this has benefited the Left, which is why the Democratic Party has worked so consistently to ensure our defeat. But in the long haul moonbattery may suffer, as the implications of the Left's willingness to side even with terrorists and genocidal dictators to advance their nihilistic objectives sinks in. Liberals with consciences may even abandon ship — as Observer columnist and lifelong progressive Nick Cohen seems ready to do.
The war in Iraq — and the Left's reaction to it — started Cohen asking himself some disturbing questions:
Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?
He arrives at answers that won't surprise conservatives, but are major revelations to a lib like Cohen:
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. […]
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 leftwing 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.
This is how it could come to pass that progressives only disapprove of fascism if it puts their own country first, or as Cohen puts it, "overwhelmingly and everywhere, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties."
According to the Left's own rules, leftists have become the bad guys. Whatever high ground they may have held in the past, if only in their own minds, has been sacrificed to their all-consuming hatred of America and the moral greatness it represents.
Even with socialism dead, liberals still own a hodgepodge collection of causes in which they pretend to believe, but their eagerness to block for Saddam Hussein and the Taliban proves that their commitment to these causes is insincere. Deep down, they do believe in nothing.
You can't beat something with nothing for long.
On a tip from V the K.
