My defense of Euston and Nick’s book is now up at Jewcy. Relevant passages for the comrades already acquainted with - and weary of - l’affaire Hari:
Euston was an attempt to end the polarization that’s infected the left since the collapse of the Soviet Union robbed the movement of its sense of historical direction. Without a coherent strategy, liberalism devolved into a balkanized nightmare where liberal precepts were lost to the pressure of radical imperatives. It was a time for unity.
That time was short lived. In the August 5th issue of the New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff represented his support for the intervention as the product of foolish “emotion” for the suffering of the Kurds and Shia of Iraq. But opposition to the slaughter of minorities is no frivolous emotion; it is an essential and non-negotiable feature of leftist politics. Ignatieff is entitled to change his mind, but he should have the self-respect not to mischaracterize his former position and thus suggest there were no compelling reasons for ending a genocidal fascist dictatorship.
Of all those who once backed the war but then recanted, surely none has matched the shamelessness of British journalist Johann Hari, who today denounces Euston with all the hysterical and slanderous zeal of a penitent heretic seeking to return to Holy Mother Church.
Hari’s “eulogy for the pro-war left” was published in the Independent newspaper as an expanded version of his blunt hatchet job for Dissent magazine on the book What’s Left: How the Liberals Lost Their Way, written by the Observer columnist and Euston Manifesto co-author Nick Cohen.
What’s Left is a bitterly candid history of the left’s penchant for betraying its own ideals when they matter most. It’s a tale that begins not with the nutbags of the ANSWER coalition or the Socialist Workers’ Party, or the RESPECT Party ghoul George Galloway, but with Communists who allied with Hitler during his notorious pact with Stalin, a period rightly termed the “midnight of the century.” From here, the left’s plunge into desuetude became easy: Cohen chronicles the radical chic of the sixties and seventies, when celebrities like the Redgraves were in thrall to the “Trotskyist” cult leader Gerry Healy, and when New Left icons like Sartre and Foucault cheered theocratic reactionaries like the Ayatollah Khomeini and sport-killing rebels like Che Guevara.
Today, with the rise of various schools of postmodern theory, a politics of improvisation prevails. Anything goes on the left, including doing the rancid public relations work of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. To glance at some of the slogans of antiwar marches – “Hands Off Iraq” neatly conflated a people with its enslaver – is to see how such fringe thinking has penetrated the liberal mainstream.
Hari’s unlettered and willful misreading of Cohen’s book has been well documented by Euston bloggers, most notably by Oliver Kamm (see here and here) and Norman Geras. But the essence of Hari’s efforts to discredit the Euston Manifesto is his claim that the document is explicitly pro-war.
Here is what the Euston Manifesto actually says about Iraq: “The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against.” One of the figures conspicuously in the “against” camp was Michael Walzer, Hari’s own editor at Dissent! For his part, Cohen supported the military overthrow of the Ba’ath on human rights grounds, but rejected what he called the “false bill of goods” with which the White House and Downing Street sought to scare their constituencies into battle.
Mutiny on the Manifesto | Jewcy.com
