Nick Cohen's latest piece for The New Statesman has the Stop the War Coalition spot-on (link via Harry's Place):
The British anti-war movement is falling apart, but for a reason that the most cynical observer of the left in the 20th century could never have imagined. The left, or at least that section of it which always manages to get the whip hand, has swerved to the right - to the far right, in fact - and is actively supporting theocrats and fascists: the oppressors of racial minorities, secularists, women, gays and trade unionists.
One point that I hope will be noted by anti-war campaigners with no time for the totalitarian and anti-Jew politics of the Socialist Workers' Party, for which the Stop the War Coalition is a front, concerns the moral evasions of the party increasingly favoured by The Guardian:
If you think the sell-out is just a local problem confined to a few creeps on the far left who believe that anyone who kills Americans is a freedom fighter, consider the case of the Liberal Democrats. Charles Kennedy managed to get through his entire speech to the Liberal Democrat party conference without once mentioning the liberals and democrats in Iraq who face kidnap or murder for fighting for the rights that he takes for granted. I can't remember a single occasion when the Lib Dems have taken up the cause of Iraqi democracy.
Isolationist realpolitik dolled up as multilateralism is a longstanding stance of British Liberalism. As the Liberal leader Herbert Samuel, than whom no more feckless appeaser could be found in the House of Commons, remarked in July 1934 (quoted in R.A.C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement): "The collective system must be really collective, and there is no reason why this country alone, or even with one or two sympathetic allies, should undertake obligations which really devolve upon humanity at large."
I don't know what humanity at large is, but I do know who the victims of Baathist tyranny were, for Coalition forces have been exhuming the bodies from the mass graves for the past 18 months. A professed liberal party with nothing to say to those who lived under - or more properly, survived the violence of - a fascist regime commits a betrayal even greater than marching alongside the totalitarians of the Stop the War Coalition.
Cohen concludes:
No one who considers himself a democrat, liberal or socialist can continue to associate with the Stop the War Coalition.
Or indeed should ever have done so in the first place.
