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What's Left?How liberals lost their wayWHAT’S LEFT? I was brought up in a family which voted for the old Labour party. Leaning towards the political Left as a boy, I learned that ‘The people’s flag is deepest red and stained with blood the martyrs shed...’. But somehow, along the way, the martyrs of Socialism got confused with martyrs for Christ and by the time I went up to Sussex University in the 1960s I had become a Christian. Sussex in the 60s was a bastion of the Left. No matter which course you studied, Karl Marx came into it. Students protested against the Vietnam war and my Communist party friend Andy wore his wire-framed glasses and Dr. Zhivago great coat, talked of revolution and could not take the CU seriously. Communism was the future. 40 years on I have often wondered what happened to Andy and the old socialist Left. This most interesting book, What’s Left? by journalist Nick Cohen, seeks to provide an answer. I suppose, to cut to the chase, the answer as to who killed off the Left is (although there were a number of historical accomplices) that it was done by postmodernism. Against SaddamCohen begins his story with Kanan Makiya, a Socialist committed to the old values of justice and humanity, who campaigned in the West during the 80s against what Saddam Hussein and his bloodthirsty Baath (‘Renaissance’) party were doing in Iraq. He received fervent support from the old Left. But, on August 2 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait and set in motion the conflict with the West, the consequences of which we are partially still experiencing through the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. In many ways this invasion brought to the surface a reversal of the ideals for which the old Left had stood. This reversal of values had already eaten into the Left’s intelligentsia in the previous decade or so. When Saddam was defeated and thrown out of Kuwait, Makiya, concerned for the Iraqi Kurds and Shia Arabs, protested that the West had not gone far enough. They should have overthrown Saddam and his rolling programme of war and genocide. Instead the West hoped for an inside coup which never came and, as Makiya continued to highlight Saddam’s horrors against his own people, the Left turned on him. Where had all this come from? The Left, which used to support oppressed people everywhere and oppose dictatorships of the Right, now began to make excuses for regimes like that of Saddam. Flight into relativismTo explain what was going on, Cohen takes us back to the Conservative revolution of the 1980s led by Thatcher and Reagan. Not only the trade unions, but Socialism itself was crushed. It was no longer credible. There were still many ‘Leftists’, but they had no practical plan for society. Bring on the so-called ‘theorists’. There was a move from the old values of justice as an absolute to the postmodernism of ‘identity politics’. Cohen writes: ‘But as many radical intellectuals in the West retreated into the lecture halls before the tide of conservatism … they fled from universal values. To generalise, the idea that a homosexual black woman should have the same rights as a heterosexual white man was replaced by a relativism which took the original hopeful challenge of the early feminist, gay and anti-racial movements and flipped it over. Homosexuality, blackness and womanhood became separate cultures that couldn’t be criticised or understood by outsiders applying universal criteria. Nor, by extension, could any other culture, even if it was the culture of fascism, religious tyranny, wife burning or suicide bombing.’ The Russians love the PrussiansSo, driven half-mad by the death of Socialism, the far Left began to produce apologetics for the totalitarian movements of the far Right. In various chapters we are taken on a grand tour of recent history. Cohen leads us to see Arab intellectuals reflecting what he calls ‘mainstream Muslim opinion’ by refusing to confront crimes against humanity committed by Muslims against Muslims. He shows us that the anti-globalisation movement faces up to injustices which are an affront to human conscience but fails to produce any universal political programme which could handle tyranny and genocide. (How could the postmodern mindset ever do this?) He points out how the prosperity of modern society has weakened people’s inclination to make selfless commitments required to change things. He says that the ‘do nothing’ attitude of John Major’s government to the atrocities in the Balkans in the 1990s actually anticipated the stance taken by the liberal ‘Left’ to so many of today’s atrocities — in Israel, Iraq and Darfur, for example. And somehow the sicknesses of the world are always the responsibility of the democratic countries — especially America. In chapter 8, the author uses the WWII pact between the Russians and the ‘Prussians’, Stalin (Left) and Hitler (Right), as a paradigm for the way the Left has now come to support right wing (Islamic?) governments and values. He does make a clear distinction between Islam and what he sees as the great danger of ‘Islamism’. ‘Islamism differs from conventional Muslim belief in that it is a political movement, which sees the answer to every moral and social problem in the dictatorial implementation of Islamic teaching.’ Islamist terrorThe Left’s retreat from universal values into a postmodern outlook makes it impossible for today’s liberals to see al-Qu’eda for what it really is. Cohen goes so far as to entitle one chapter ‘The Disgrace of the Anti-War Movement’, basically because of what he sees as this blindness. ‘Why’, he asks, ‘can’t we be anti-war, but pro-democracy, justice and humanity in Iraq?’ It is not that there are no grounds for Muslim grievance in the world. But that is not actually what Islamic terrorism is about. In particular, Cohen accuses the liberal intelligentsia of not listening to what bin Laden actually said after 9/11. So keen were they to blame America for everything that they misread it completely. Interviewed on Al-Jazeera in October 2001, bin Laden did mention the wars where Islamists were rubbing up against other cultures, but his surge of energy came when he let out an elated cry: ‘The values of this Western civilisation under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers which speak of liberty, human rights and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.’ And, with a postmodern mindset which can no longer defend universal values of liberty and human rights, the liberal left does not know how to respond, and therefore keeps reinterpreting what is going on in terms of continually blaming the West. (Thus we have the BBC asking questions of Iraqis as to how their quality of life has been affected ‘since the American invasion’, but not asking them how their quality of life has been affected since the insurgent terrorism started.) Cohen comments on bin Laden’s words, ‘It was the best of the West Islamism was against, not the worst, and its detestation of Enlightenment values was nothing new’. We are made to wonder if, as a man of the old Left, but friend of Saddam, George Galloway understands this? Fabian elitismWith the adoption of postmodernism by the liberal Left there is no clear future. The last chapter of Cohen’s book is simply entitled, ‘Why bother?’. The Left is politically a spent force. New Labour is not the old Left. A political party which really does care for the poor and the common working man seems miles away. The gap between rich and poor has widened immensely in recent years. And the old Labour of the early 20th century would not have been happy with the moral degradation, drugs and gang warfare which, sadly, do reign on many a state-benefit-supported council estate today. But perhaps the old Socialism was a mirage anyway. Cohen produces many quotes from the founding fathers of the Fabian Society to show that the common good never was the real agenda. Shaw and H.G. Wells spoke of the use of eugenics. ‘If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit in.’ Virginia Woolf, doyen of the 1970s feminist movement, spoke about the working classes as ‘sordid’ people. So where do we look for a true basis for humanity, care and liberty? The secular Left is evidently a flawed and failed project. Surely you must go back to a worldview which can defend the reality of absolute values of justice and human dignity. Perhaps my 1960s friend Andy the Communist ought to have taken the university Christian Union more seriously. John Benton© Evangelicals Now - October 2007 |