Nick Cohen - Whats Left? How the Left Lost Its Way
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- Book:Whats Left? How the Left Lost Its Way
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From the much-loved, witty and excoriating voice of journalist Nick Cohen, a powerful and irreverent dissection of the agonies, idiocies and compromises of mainstream liberal thought.Nick Cohen comes from the Left. While growing up, his mother would search the supermarket shelves for politically reputable citrus fruit and despair. When, at the age of 13, he found out that his kind and thoughtful English teacher voted Conservative, he nearly fell off his chair: To be good, you had to be on the Left.Today hes no less confused. When he looks around him, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, he sees a community of Left-leaning liberals standing on their heads. Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam that stands for everything the liberal-Left is against come from a section of the Left? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevics ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the Left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal-Left, but not, for instance, China, the Sudan, Zimbabwe or North Korea? Why cant those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a liberal literary journal as in a neo-Nazi rag? Its easy to know what the Left is fighting against the evils of Bush and corporations but what and, more to the point, who are they fighting for?As he tours the follies of the Left, Nick Cohen asks us to reconsider what it means to be liberal in this confused and topsy-turvy time. With the angry satire of Swift, he reclaims the values of democracy and solidarity that united the movement against fascism, and asks: Whats Left?
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NICK COHEN
Whats Left?
HOW LIBERALS LOST THEIR WAY
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2007
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2007
Copyright Nick Cohen 2007
Nick Cohen asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN 9780007229703
Ebook Edition JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007370030
Version 2015-06-12
Ebook Edition JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007370030
Version 2015-06-12
In memory of Hadi Saleh,
the last of the socialists
(1949 to 2005)
CONTENTS
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
W. H. Auden
IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES , my mother searched the supermarkets for politically reputable citrus fruit. She couldnt buy Seville oranges without indirectly subsidizing General Francisco Franco, Spains fascist dictator. Algarve oranges were no good either because the slightly less gruesome but equally right-wing dictatorship of Antnio Salazar ruled Portugal. She boycotted the piles of Outspan from South Africa as a protest against apartheid, and although neither America nor Israel was a dictatorship, she wouldnt have Florida or Jaffa oranges in the house because she had no time for the then American President, Richard Nixon, or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
My sisters and I did not know it, but when Franco fell ill in 1975, we were in a race to the death. Either he died of Parkinsons disease or we died of scurvy. Luckily for us and the peoples of Spain, the dictator went first, although he took an unconscionably long time about it.
Thirty years later, I picked up my mother from my sister Natalies house. Her children were watching a Disney film; The Jungle Book, I think.
Its funny, Mum, I said as we drove home, but I dont remember seeing any Disney when I was their age.
Youve only just noticed? We didnt let you watch rubbish from Hollywood corporations.
Ah.
We didnt buy you the Beano either.
For Gods sake, Mum, what on earth was wrong with the Beano?
It was printed by D. C. Thomson, non-union firm.
Right, I said.
I was about to mock her but remembered that I had not allowed my son to watch television, even though he was nearly three at the time. I will let him read the Beano when he is older I spoil him, I know but if its cartoonists were to down their crayons and demand fraternal support, I would probably make him join the picket line and boycott it as well.
I come from a land where you can sell out by buying a comic. I come from the Left.
Im not complaining, I had a very happy childhood. Conservatives would call my parents politically correct, but there was nothing sour or pinched about their home, and there is a lot to be said for growing up in a political household in which everyday decisions about what to buy and what to reject have a moral quality.
At the time, I thought it was normal and assumed that all civilized people lived the same way. I still remember the sense of dislocation I felt at 13 when my English teacher told me he voted Conservative. As his announcement coincided with the shock of puberty, I was unlikely to forget it. I must have understood at some level that real Conservatives lived in Britain there was a Conservative government at the time, so logic dictated that there had to be Conservative voters. But it was incredible to learn that my teacher was one of them when he gave every appearance of being a thoughtful and kind man. To be good you had to be on the Left.
Looking back, I can see that I got that comforting belief from my parents, but it was reinforced by the experience of living through the Thatcher administration that appeared to reaffirm the Lefts monopoly of goodness. The embrace first of monetarism and then of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism produced two recessions that Conservatives viewed with apparent composure because the lives wrecked by mass unemployment and business failure had the beneficial side effect of destroying trade union power. Even when the Left of the Eighties was clearly in the wrong as it was over unilateral nuclear disarmament it was still good. It may have been astonishingly dunderheaded to believe that dictators would abandon their weapons systems if Britain abandoned hers, but it wasnt wicked.
Yet for all the loathing of Conservatives I felt, I didnt have to look at modern history to know that it was a fallacy to believe in the superior virtue of the Left: my family told me that. My parents joined the Communist Party but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyns exposs of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the Left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The Left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the root cause of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.
Every now and again, someone asks why the double standard persists to this day. The philosophical answer is that communism did not feel as bad as fascism because in theory, if not in practice, communism was an ideology which offered universal emancipation, while only a German could benefit from Hitlers Nazism and only an Italian could prosper under Mussolinis fascism. Im more impressed by the matter-of-fact consideration that fascist forces took over or menaced Western countries in the Thirties and Forties, and although there was a communist menace in the Cold War, the Cold War never turned hot and Western Europe and North America never experienced the totalitarianism of the Left.
There were many moments in the Thirties when fascists and communists cooperated the German communists concentrated on attacking the Weimar Republics democrats and gave Hitler a free run, and Stalins Soviet Union astonished the world by signing a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. But after Hitler broke the terms of the alliance in the most spectacular fashion by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, you could rely on nearly all of the Left from nice liberals through to the most compromised Marxists to oppose the tyrannies of the far right. Consistent anti-fascism added enormously to the Lefts prestige in the second half of the twentieth century. A halo of moral superiority hovered over it because if there was a campaign against racism, religious fanaticism or neo-Nazism, the odds were that its leaders would be men and women of the Left.
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