Whats Left [Paperback]

In this fascinating book, Cohen tries to find answers to why the world is upside down, why liberals and leftists are nowadays more likely than conservatives to excuse fascist movements and governments. With the exception of their native western far-right parties, they embrace all foreign oppressive governments as long as these oppose the West. The author argues that the death of communism has brought a dark liberation to those who consider themselves on the left; they are now free to champion any totalitarian group that is anti-western and anti-American. This mindset is particularly prevalent amongst the intellectuals and the mass media, as also documented in Can We Trust the BBC? by Robin Aitken.

Third world democrats, feminists and liberals have been betrayed by those who so style themselves in the West. The fall of communism and the disappearance of a coherent set of principles have liberated Western leftists into a kind of nihilism that is akin to modern consumerism. Now you can pick your issue du jour from an anti-Western smorgasbord. Cohen chronicles the etiology of the disease - how it started with postmodern theorists and obscure fringe groups, entered the mainstream and led to the failure of left-liberals to confront genocide in Bosnia, Kosovo and the Middle East until it grew into an all-consuming fever. He also attempts to salvage the best of the liberal-left's internationalist and democratic traditions. In this regard, please consult A Matter of Principle edited by Thomas Cushman.

The author chronicles these developments in part by telling the story of Iraqi human rights campaigner Kanan Makiya who exposed Saddam's atrocities in the book Republic of Fear and was later shunned by his former so-called comrades. Makiya was prescient as he foresaw the outcome of these relativist multiculti tendencies in his 1993 book Cruelty and Silence. Many myths and lies are exposed by Cohen, for example those concerning Saddam's arms suppliers. For the record, between 1973 and 2002, 57 per cent of those weapons came from the Soviet Union/Russia, 13 per cent from France and 12 per cent from China. The USA and UK together did not contribute even one per cent.

Other revelations concern sinister British groups on the left, like the Workers Revolutionary Party of the thug Gerry Healy, a toxic cult if ever there was one. Some of the juiciest writing is about the obscurantism of postmodern theorists - it makes you laugh out loud. The Sokal Hoax is inter alia covered here, but the very best dissection of this species may be found in Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen Hicks.

Cohen observes that the utopian, the hate-filled and the irreconcileable do not dissappear with geopolitical changes, so a revived radicalism was inevitable after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the death of communism gave birth to a nasty nihilism, the breast milk of the Moonbats. Not surprising since one of their intellectual masters, Michel Foucault, already hailed the Khomeinian ayatollocracy back in 1978. Thus his intellectual heirs ended up endorsing anything that was against liberal democracy.

The author examines these disturbing trends against the history of the 1930s, the infamous Hitler-Stalin pact and the disgraceful behaviour of some Tories and Leftists at the time. The book provides too much evidence to discuss in one review, but Cohen's analysis of characters like George Galloway and the Hezbollah shill Noam Chomsky is superb. Further information on the sinister marriage of leftism and fascism is available in Unholy Alliance by David Horowitz.

The book provides a vivid picture of people so deluded, they have completely abandoned the values that once formed part of the democratic mainstream and swopped them for a nihilistic culture steeped in hedonism and ignorance. That is why they embrace or excuse losers, demagogues and dictators like Mugabe and Chavez. It is not a large leap from marching in support of homicidal terrorists and sadistic Islamist and Baathist regimes to nurturing the loathsome antisemitism which motivates the moral inversion that they need in order to appear the champion of the victim. The eerily erotic quality of the expressions of their hatred has been well documented by writers like Christopher Hitchens and Julie Burchill.

These faux liberals desperately need to have faith of some sort, no matter how evil or psychotic, to persuade themselves that their paranoia about an American "theocracy" or a "Zionist conspiracy" is valid. They cling to their conspiracy theories so fervently that it is impossible for verifiable facts or reality to penetrate the bell jar of lunacy. Their delusions shield them from the implications of the abject failure of their murderous ideology that has brought misery and death to millions.

The intensity of their projection derives from the need to believe that the latest manifestation of their bankrupt collectivist ideology, properly called "transnational progressivism" stands for peace and that the Neocons/Christians/Zionists/Capitalism cause all the world's evil rather than their own utopian grotesqueries. The paranoia and projection of the PoMo liberals and leftists and their newfound friends amongst the wingnut paleocons like Pat Buchanan and "libertarians" like Lew Rockwell anaesthetize the pain and make them feel good about themselves.

In their chosen role as the victims of America and Israel, these pampered elites congratulate themselves on their "courageous" and "principled" stand against "Western hegemony." They are thus not to blame for the terrifying emptiness within and the encroaching darkness of terrorism out there. Without Bush, the world would be a paradise. Externalizing the blame for their own unease is essential in order to deny the facts and banish the gnawing of reality. Without their projection - The Perpetual Banishing Ritual of the Progressive Sinisterist - there is nothing left.

The book concludes with 19 pages of notes arranged by chapter, plus a thorough index. In order to further investigate the matter and the overall spirit of the times, I highly recommend the following:

The Big Lie by David Solway

The Force of Reason by Orianna Fallaci

The New Anti-Semitism by Phyllis Chesler

Exposing the Real Che Guevara by Humberto Fontova

Sinisterism - Secular Religion of the Lie by Bruce Walker

The Death of Right and Wrong by Tammy Bruce

Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom

Nick Cohen's argument is (in one sense) a simple one. Once upon a time, the Left championed all the right causes: women's rights, free speech, universal education, human rights, unions, solidarity with the oppressed, amongst others. And it championed those causes on behalf of the working class which the Left (largely composed of middle-class intellectuals) romanticized on the one hand and despised on the other. And then the working class got all these rights and all this education and all these opportunities but didn't support all the causes the (middle class liberals) of the Left wanted the working class to support. And in their disappointment and defeat, the middle class liberals cast about for new heroes to romanticize. They found them in the fascists of Third World countries who claimed to be revolutionaries (well, they were and are against the established order anyway) and who declared themselves to be for the people (of a certain culture and religion).

The privileged of the West, in other words, found solace in identity politics which led them to support of fascism. And this, in turn, led them to identify those who support fascism with the Left.

A simple argument, as I have said. But this book (which is so rich and so filled with wonderful anecdotes--from professorial mumbo jumbo to Hamas' Charter) is much more than a mere argument. It is a call to action. For this wonderful book ends by pointing out that a group of "politically aware citizens" who were not "intellectual celebrities" met at a pub in Euston to draw up a manifesto spelling out what the Left truly is. And that, by restating what should have been obvious (but wasn't) these men and women found a way to make a difference. Because they did not abandon the effort, the hope, the principles of the Left.

Just as Nick Cohen hopes (and hope is the last word in this book) that he has made a difference with his book. So now it's your turn and mine. What do you say?

Nick Cohen's well written book is not quite an Encyclopedia of all things Left, but it's close. Where else can you read about Ernst Bevin and Jacques Derrida, Celebrity Big Brother and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the bloody history of the Baath party?

It's hard to argue with Cohen's main thesis: There are many in the Left for whom the loathing of everything western, particularly everything American, erases any sense of moral perspective. Thus the Liberals and the Lefts support the worst kind of anti-Westerners: racists, fascists, terrorists - anything goes as long as you're against America.

As an Israeli, I'm most attuned the anti-Semitic instances (but there are many others): As I'm writing this, the British Union of Colleges and Universities has cast another academic boycott of Israel. That decision is patently anti-Semitic: It singles out Israel from other nations. Alan Dershowitz is fond of quoting an exchange with Harvard's racist president in the 1920s, A. Lawrence Lowell:

Lowell decided that the number of Jews admitted to Harvard should be reduced because "Jews cheat." When a distinguished alumnus, Judge Learned Hand, pointed out that Protestants also cheat, Lowell responded, "You're changing the subject; we're talking about Jews."

Supporters of the Boycott of Israel will happily tell you all about the horrors of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, (while ignoring or excusing Palestinian terrorism), but they won't tell you what kind of criteria exists for boycotting Israel rather then the US, Russia, China or Sudan. That this sort of blatant racism is now heralded by Leftists and Liberals is symptomatic of a wider spread malady - the Left's crisis of faith.

Nick Cohen tracks the roots of the Left's crisis to many sources: I think he's right that the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of Socialism as a viable option had much to do with it. I'm less certain that Deconstruction and the Nazi-Soviet pact are really direct causes. But whatever it's causes are, the left today knows what it is against: America, the West and Israel, but is far less certain about what it is for - which allows it support the Ayatollah Regime in Iran, murderous Baathists in Iraq, Castro's dictatorship in Cuba and Kaddafi's in Libya: in short, everyone who is against the West.

Nick Cohen rightly lashes against these trends. But even as he takes us back to 19th century Russia or to the wildest domains of French pseudo-intellectualism, the central point is always Iraq.

Cohen supported the Iraq war. Maybe he supports it still. He does not like the Bush administration and its lies and deceits. He acknowledges that there was a good case against the war; but the enthusiasm of the European crowd, their march against Bush became almost a celebration of Saddam's rule. In Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, pictures of pre-invasion Iraq are always idealic: the ethnic cleansing, the prison abuses, the rapes, the one-party-rule and Saddam's personality cult go entirely unmentioned. That the left could be against the war is understandable. That they could be so oblivious to Saddam Hussein is troubling.

The Iraq War raises the question of Cohen's affinity to an earlier generation of disillusioned Lefties: The Neo-Conservatives. Although the Neo-Conservative alliance is a complex one, at its heart were a group of Lefties who revolted against the moral relativism of the extreme Left in much the same way Cohen does. They remained committed to Liberal causes such as human rights and the welfare state, but rejected the Left's descent into relativism, anarchism and moral blindness. (See George Packer's The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq for an intellectual group biography).

It is easy to identify with the Neo-Cons critique and with Cohen's rage. But when Neo-Conservatives came to power, thirty years after their parting of the ways from the Leftist establishment, a terrible thing happened: The Iraq War. The bankruptcy of the Neo-Cons would be the Death of the Cohenesque Left (dare we call it Eustonian Left after the famous Euston manifesto?)

There are, currently, three major schools of thoughts about how the West should treat "The Rest", and particularly the Middle East. According to the Chomskyan approach which Cohen targets, the West is responsible for everything bad that happens anywhere in the world. The root of Terrorism is in the justified grievances of Palestinians, Saudis, Afghanis, etc, etc. Once these grievances would be assuaged, the problems in the Middle East: The Dictatorships, the Terrorist regimes, the extreme fundamentalists would go away. This is what Cohen goes out against: It is the main target of his books.

The second approach is realism: the view that the Middle East is dangerous and unstable and the West should seek to stabilize it by negotiating with the dictators in it, supporting client states such as Saudi Arabia against internal and external enemies. This is a gloomy view, and unlikely to appeal to Leftists. It calls, explicitly and unshamefully, for the maintenance of the Status Quo, the anathema of anything progressives.

The alternative offered by the Neo Conservatives was muscular democracy: No longer shall the West sit quite while genocide and oppression takes place within other countries. "No man is an island" said Donne, and the absence of Freedom for Iraqis is a problem for Westerners as well, who should help - militarily if necessary - in the over through of Dictatorships. This is a grand vision, suitable for the Left. It has also led to the greatest foreign policy failure in living memory.

This is not the place for a post mortem of the Iraq War. But clearly, its failure has discredited the Neo-Cons, and thus also the prospects of Eustonian Leftists to reverse the Left's trend towards nihilism and Chomskyan accomodationism. Unless the Neo-Conservative project can be resuscitated - and I see scant hope of that happening anytime soon - or unless some previously unthought-of of policy would emerge, Leftists stand to chose between Noam Chomsky and Henry Kissinger. And for most Leftists, that is not a hard choice.

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