Forces of reaction

A few weeks ago I quoted an email accusing me of employing gutter language in attacking the progressive Left, to which I responded that this was scarcely a plausible charge given that I am myself a member of the progressive Left. Two items in the press confirm me in that diagnosis.

My position is properly described as left-wing because I favour revolutionary change. I support the overthrow of repressive regimes and the promotion of global democracy. I welcome the shift in US foreign policy in recent years away from the notion of ‘realism’, which stresses the balance of power, and towards the belief that global democracy is the best guarantor of peace and security. Realism, as it was practised by the Reagan administration (in its notorious tilt to Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war) and the current President’s father, turned out not to be based on an understanding of the world as it is, for it neglected the ideological character of the threats to Western security.

David Aaronovitch in The Times refers to the British counterpart to the American examples I have just cited. He rightly identifies the ‘conservative pessimism’ that caused the Major Government to abandon Bosnia’s multi-ethnic democracy to Serb aggression in the early 1990s, and points to the strategic as well as moral implications of that stance:

All through the Hurd and Rifkind years [Hurd was Foreign Secretary and Rifkind Defence Secretary at the time], the years when conservative pessimism was triumphant, the ingredients for al-Qaeda stewed away, emerging here and there in the occasional explosion. When some of the 9/11 bombers met up in Hamburg, one of their teachers was a veteran jihadi. He had fought in Bosnia, where, he said, the West had betrayed the Muslims.

To try to identify a proximate cause for Islamist terrorism against us is futile because Islamists’ complaints are not negotiable political demands. A demand to abandon Western civilisation is not in our power to meet, and we should be proud to attract hatred from such atavistic forces. But if you adopt the logic of, say, George Galloway and the Respect ‘Coalition’, you might as well respond, to the hoary question “why do they hate us?”, with the observation that abandoning European Muslims to genocide was – quite apart from moral considerations - scarcely a wise piece of realpolitik.

The trouble is that those who urged non-resistance to fascism then were, by and large, those who urged that we leave fascism in place in Iraq more recently. Noam Chomsky, in an interview contained in The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (1994), gave a peerlessly weaselly response to the question of humanitarian intervention in Bosnia by worrying “that’s not so simple”. Looking at the British scene, a Cambridge academic, Marko Atilla Hoare, noted of one supposedly left-wing account of the Yugoslav tragedy:

"Lessons for Socialists" is the subtitle of Michael Barratt Brown’s new booklet on the war in the former Yugoslavia. His publishers "Socialist Renewal" are perhaps more in need of lessons than most, having published in the past a tribute to Romania’s Ceausescu (The Man, his Ideas, his Socialist Achievements) by Labour MEP Stan Newens as well as the work of Mihailo Markovic, a "Marxist humanist" who helped write the 1986 Memorandum, served as Milosevic’s party ideologue throughout the war, and enunciated the principle that Serbia could become democratic only if it first became ethnically pure. British readers of Barratt Brown’s booklet will learn nothing of the former Yugoslavia, but gain some disturbing insights into the state of our own intelligentsia, particularly on the left. Only for that reason is it worth attention.

Meanwhile many neoconservatives (not Charles Krauthammer, but including Norman Podhoretz, Richard Perle and Jeane Kirkpatrick) and a few conservatives (Margaret Thatcher, Bob Dole) favoured intervention in Bosnia, as they did later in Iraq. Some of us on the Left (most prominently Hitchens, Ignatieff) took the same position on Bosnia and Iraq.

For examples of how far the reactionary quietism of the isolationists on the supposed Left will go, you need only look through the archives of this site or Harry’s Place for various instances of the alliance with fascism embraced by Respect, the Stop the War Coalition and their controlling organisation, the Socialist Workers’ Party. And for an example of the conceptual roots of such an alliance, you need only look at yesterday's Guardian, which carried this extraordinary letter from the High Tory commentator Peregrine Worsthorne.

Surely it is possible for a Muslim fundamentalist quite reasonably to see President Bush's aim of making the whole world safe for democratic capitalism as a no less mortal threat to his traditional way of life, or his traditional sacred values, as we saw the threats from Stalin and Hitler, or even from the Kaiser and Napoleon, as a mortal threat to our ways of life or sacred values. Once that effort of imagination is made, Muslim terrorism becomes understandable, not so much as a rational act to turn back the irresistible forces of modern capitalism, but rather as a form of madness which has many historical precedents - particularly in the cause of national self-determination - many of which posterity applauds.

In any case, it may be relevant to remember that only quite recently western foreign policy envisaged thermonuclear destruction of the entire human race rather than risk the spread of communism. Having quite happily countenanced that MAD idea myself - better dead than red - I feel bound in conscience at least to give today's extremists the benefit of the doubt.

So Worsthorne is unable to distinguish morally the cause of defending the civilised societies of the West, which exemplify however imperfectly the values of the Enlightenment, from theocratic fanaticism. (His claim that nuclear deterrence in the Cold War was premised on the notion of 'better dead than Red' is also nonsense.) Compare his sentiments with certain remarks delivered to the SWP’s ‘Marxism 2005’ jamboree this past weekend by the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, whose views have been described before on this site and by Harry's Place (emphasis added):

We all agree that Israel is operating as a Colonialist state motivated by racial supremacist views. But then, isn’t the case of Blair’s Britain very similar? If Tony Blair isn’t a white supremacist how dare he is suggesting that Democracy is the right way forward for the Muslim world. How come he knows better than the Muslims what is good for them? When you come to determine other people’s lives you must believe that you know better. You must assume that you are better.

Atzmon is a notorious antisemitic bigot and associate of neo-Nazis as well as the SWP. I am certain Worsthorne is no antisemite, but his most recent book, In Defence of Aristocracy, turns out to have a soft spot for agrarian pro-fascism. Worsthorne describes (pp. 176-7) the Vichy regime in France as:

… a blessing in disguise because during the Vichy years, for the first time since the Revolution, the pro-republican and anti-republican elites, at all levels, started to feel able to work together…. Unquestionably the Vichy years opened new wounds on France’s body politic, but these did not cut nearly so deep as the old revolutionary wounds which Vichy did so much to heal.

The anti-war movement is a supposedly heterogeneous coalition, and technically a Tory defender of privilege and a Trotskyite party might be thought antagonists. They are, in fact, the twin voices of reaction in defence of fascism - either by temporising it (Worsthorne) or actively supporting it (Respect/SWP). You may call me what you like, but I oppose these forces, and I therefore – if political definitions have any purchase at all on reality – stand on the progressive wing of politics.