Wrong End of the Telescope
This week’s Writer’s Choice at Normblog is Nick Cohen on Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. Don’t miss it.
Although I like to present myself as an open and rational chap, I can remember very few times when I’ve admitted being in the wrong. Not wrong in detail, but wrong in principle. In my experience the politically committed rarely do that. We change imperceptibly and grudgingly, while all the time pretending we haven’t changed at all but merely adapted to altered circumstances.
Hmm. I don’t know – sometimes those ‘wrong in detail’ admissions can add up to ‘wrong in principle’ ones. But that’s a mere quibble.
The only time I realised I was charging up a blind alley was when I read Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. I didn’t see a blinding light or hear a thunder clap or cry ‘Eureka!’ If I was going to cry anything it would have been ‘Oh bloody hell!’ He convinced me I’d wasted a great deal of time looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I was going to have to turn it round and see the world afresh. The labour would involve reconsidering everything I’d written since 11 September, arguing with people I took to be friends and finding myself on the same side as people I took to be enemies. All because of Berman.
The bastard.
Yes, one knows the feeling, or feelings. That ‘oh bloody hell’ thing (in my case it was more like ‘God I’m stupid’), that wrong end of telescope thing, that twitchy stuff about friends and enemies.
Terror and Liberalism is an essay rather than a history and its arguments come from the almost forgotten tradition of the anti-totalitarian left. Its central point is that Islamism and Baathism are continuations of Nazism and communism, not only in their fine points – founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Baath Party were admirers of Hitler and Franco – but in their fundamentals.
A chapter – ‘Wishful Thinking’ – explains why so many are reluctant to see clearly and in their blindness end up on the far right.
Now that really fascinates me, because we have a chapter called ‘Wishful Thinking’ in Why Truth Matters. I’ve been meaning to read this book; obviously I have to hurry up about it.
Obviously, the socialists couldn’t begin to show solidarity with the German socialists who were being persecuted by Hitler. How could they protest at their treatment or organize parliamentary debates calling attention to their plight when they were making excuses for the Hitler who was doing the persecuting?…To see the old process at work, one only has to look at how a large chunk of the world’s liberal opinion has got itself into the position where it can’t support Iraqi and Afghan liberals, socialists and feminists.
There is a lot more; a must-read.
OK. I’ll seek out the Berman book. But come on, OB, I understand that the tedious vagaries of the mainstream modern left make just about _everything_ seem refreshing – but this?
Reluctance to face up to what the Nazis were preparing to do in the 1930s was not just a feature of the anti-war left. The Dutch were basically baffled when the Germans attacked in 1940s, and sent an ill-prepared, ill-supplied army to a front that drew nearer very quickly; while days before, trainloads of Jewish refugees had been turned at the border, and communist journalists had been locked up for insulting a friendly head of state (guess which). By a conservative right-wing government.
And seriously, Versailles was a very bad idea. Acknowledging that doesn’t mean you don’t think Hitler was that evil. Hitler’s attack on Czechoslovakia was hardly supported by all of the anti-war left. I don’t know of the Communist hard left at the time (which swayed from pro-war popular frontism to an anti-war position and back again at the Soviet Union’s orders) but I do recall that the Trotskyists (which stuck to an anti-war position) were dead against it.
But I’m most peeved by the nazism/communism – islamism/ba’athism parallel, which Cohen doesn’t really support except in (part of) the left’s response to them. Now, I acknowledge that a respectable case can be made for the argument that the removal of Saddam Hussein justified the Iraq war. I do not agree with that argument, I think – but it has to be dealt with seriously. This does not mean the endless parallels drawn between Saddam and Hitler (and by proxy, the antiwar movement and Chamberlain-like appeasers, Galloway and Oswald Mosley, etc.) are not ridiculous. The victory of Nazism could have conceivable meant the end of at least the best parts of human civilization. Saddam was a murderous dictator of a type that, unfortunately, flourished in either the US or Soviet backyards during the cold war. I can’t see much of a parallel between islamism and fascism except that the two are similar in their nastiness and murderousness. And I don’t think that justifies terms such as “islamofascism” which you see flying around lately. Pretty much the essence of fascism is a very strong, jackbooted state. Islamic fundamentalism is extremely decentralized, anti-state, etc. (which is why a lot of these groups, Al Qaeda, Hamas etc. are pretty hard to get at).
The parallel between Nazism/islamism and communism just signifies that Cohen’s decent left isn’t my decent left. Thinking about that, might want to get into the decent social-democrat left’s attitudes towards war back in, oh, 1914. Not here, though. Wasted enough of your comments section. Anyway, I think Nick Cohen (and also Berman?) are way too much fighting the last war. Which isn’t a mistake unique to them, neither does it excuse the anti-war left (part of which seem to be way too forgetful about past history, notably the nature of anti-semitism, rather than too remembering). But I still think it’s a mistake.
Polemic ahoy….
Darn it. Yes but no but yes but no but yes ! I have recently started to move away from despising fellow ‘left’ leaning people for their juvenile blind spots regarding these Islamic theocrats. I just get so pissed off now with Bush and his cohorts, I’m not sure who I despise more. Bottom line, it’s Bush et al I guess. I mean, if global warming continues, in a couple of decades, the river Ganges could be running at a mere trickle of what it is now, produced as it is by increasing dwindling Himalayan glaciers. Global warming will take out much of India’s population. Half of Africa could be dead – Aids. The ‘West’ could be in perpetual economic decline due to utterly inhumane competition from China not being addressed properly at any level, by any govt or organisation. All this due to plutocratic greed in most quarters of the globe, but, hey, let’s face it – much of it in the USA. People who don’t give a flying rats arse about the above issues. People like Bush.
I hate that bastard Galloway and his self-righteous self-satisfied ilk, and the simple-minded liberals who smugly have a pop at Blair without coming up with any alternatives. But I have lost all patience with the neocon project. It’s dooming all of us. And I bloody hate them, those unfathomably rich murderous bastards.
That said, at least we beat the French in the Olympic bid.
And on that off-topic, an irresistible thought in the light of recent news. With Paris the front runner for so long, my theory is that the reason London won is because they knew that if they voted the Olympics to Paris, Paris would let the French vote on it in a referendum and they’d reject it.
Ha. That’s a good one, Stewart.
I first read wrongly that you were going to jeer at some financiers _with_ some crusties. Now I read that you’re going to jeer at them both. Good. Am reassured.
Ha, Stewart – very good.
Merlijn – sure, the Saddam-Hitler parallel is a crap one (I never use it meself, she said braggingly). But I took the point to be the similarity of the thought-process on the part of well-meaning people – who find themselves more or less trapped into downplaying the bad things done by [whoever it is at a given time] for the sake of arguing against (or at least not arguing for) doing anything about it. Which is not to say that ‘doing anything about it’ is always automatically necessarily the only right thing to do – it’s to say that there is a kind of pull, or undertow, that can cause this – bad epistemology, really. This desire to think and say and write that because war is appalling and terrible (which it certainly is) therefore [whatever the casus belli of the moment is] must be not worth a war therefore what Hitler or Saddam or the Interahamwe or [whoever it is] is doing is not so bad really if you take the long view and don’t live there yourself.
Mind you, I hate Bush too, and in the same way. Viscerally. And I don’t know what the hell I think about the damn war. But I also think it’s a mistake to pretend that Saddam is not that bad.
Hmm – I was talking to both Merlijn and Nick in that reply. That last para is more Nick-relevant.
Re. the disposal of Saddam and the anti-Bush left, TS Eliot has a couplet in ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ that I don’t think is quoted often enough in these circumstances:
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
Of course, what the antis do is essentially the reverse: right reasons, wrong actions.
Remember the history — even if Bush 1 had agreed to push on to Baghdad in ’91 and get rid of Saddam then, it would still would not have expunged US guilt for propping the bastard up all through the ’80s. Then again by propping him up, they were defending the Gulf region against takeover by the kind of Islamists this site despises, who on the other hand were being paid by the CIA to blow up Russians in Afghanistan.
None of the major parties in the current situation merits the support of rational individuals, but the minor parties who do are being squeezed out of existence by those willing to do violence… One would like to do a George Orwell, grab a gun and an unfeasably large pair of boots and go kill some fascists — but like him, I end up wondering where the gun ought to be pointed?
GT
“What really frightens me is the possiblity of a Nazi-Soviet pact between a future “really christian” US government and the islamist to crush secularism”
Or one of them teaming up with China in their own quest to bring peace and light to the world…
Yeah – that’s one of my nightmares too (as I guess is obvious enough) – the triumph of the theocratic principle everywhere. I would love to think it couldn’t possibly happen, but all I can manage is to think it’s not inevitable.