Not dead enough…

Yes — really…

I have a longish post up at Jewcy about Alan Wald’s new study of Commie lit. A taste:

It was on a trip a few years ago to that mecca of petit bourgeois decadence, Las Vegas, that I devoured Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left. This book is now widely considered the definitive text on the various trotskisant movements (or “groupuscules”) that peppered the Gotham cityscape in the twenties and thirties. Mostly Jewish, with as much a tropism for literature as for politics, these sons and daughters of immigrants started out as revolutionaries and wound up anti-Communists, either of a liberal or conservative stripe. (Wald deftly showed that the was as nerve-racking as it was satisfying, especially for latterday patrons of the establishment who traffick in selective memories about the old days and bygone struggles, who took what position when, who did what to whom.)

A number of these complicated and dynamic figures are now forgotten: If Herbert Solow can’t earn a place at the table for being the leading American Trotskyist before World War II, then he at least deserves recognition as the man who helped nurture the critical talents of one Lionel Trilling. Others are famous for their continuing influence (Norman Podhoretz is an advisor to Rudy Giuliani) and their semi-permanent positions on the mastheads of great, or once-great, journals of opinion like Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary and Dissent. On the whole, they’re all defined more according to their ex-identities, those idealistic and embarrassing vestiges of a radical past which they’ve spent the second and third acts of their distinctively American lives repudiating. As Irving Kristol once put it, “As long as I can remember, I’ve been a ‘neo’ something. I was a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neocon. Eventually I’ll just be a ‘neo.’”

Read more here.

Addendum: Jimmy Bradshaw has a fine take on neoconservatism also at Jewcy. (Note: This isn’t the second part of his four-part series on the state of the left. Just a bonus post.)

All these come in. Alvaro gets to stay. The Elephant Man can’t come in. These ones are just whining.

Send this one back. She goes. He goes.

This was the right decision. This was the right decision. This was wrong in so many ways I lost count. This was the right decision.

If the people don’t make the decisions, market forces will. Which is why NOII isn’t enough.

Snarksmithy and Will have posted on the case of Blackwater in Iraq, but the problem with privatised security services is universal. The Independent has carried out an investigation into the treatment of failed asylum seekers as they are deported. They have compiled a dossier of 200 cases, which comprises of a catalogue of violence, abuse and racism. Guess what,

In nearly every case, the allegation of mistreatment is made against private security contractors employed by the Government to carry out enforced removals of asylum-seekers.

The three companies used by the government are Group4-Securicor, International Training Academy and an American company, GEO. Their response?

A spokesman said Group4- Securicor was aware of complaints made but said they had never been proven – adding the company would condemn any such action. GEO and International Training Academy both declined to comment.

Great.

So far as I can tell, for all the noise about banning and free-speech trampling and whispers about the Power of The Lobby, all we really have here is a case of some daft Catholic university officials passing on a proposal to invite a Protestant archbishop to speak on their campus because some local Jews said their feelings would be hurt on account of certain intemperate remarks the archbishop has made. While certain other local Jews said they were fine with the invitation, the Catholics decided to pipsqueak and defer to the feelings-offended, who we are now admonished to blame, even though they didn’t make the decision, and the archbishop is coming to town to speak anyway, at a different venue.

I bet you ten bucks the shouters in this rumpus would be switching sides in a heartbeat if hurt-feelings Muslims prevailed in a case of some other prospective lecturer known for other kinds of intemperate remarks. We’d have the formerly free-speech side boasting a victory in the great Struggle Against Islamophobia, looking around for someone braying about Dhimmitude to pick an argument with. Betcha.

La vie, c’est absurde.

Mind you, His Grace appears to be putting himself to some good use in the Sudan: “We are hoping not to be seen as another tourist group seeking photo opportunities in Darfur.”

Very well then.