What’s Left by Nick Cohen:
Kill them commies!
I always had a love/hate relationship with the American ‘Left’. I identify strongly with its emancipating potency, but there are some things that bug me.
You see, I’m not easily impressed by elaborate conspiracy theories, I’m rather put off by them actually, and the left had them in abundance after 9-11. Now at first I thought all these ‘truth’ theories (alive and well today) were a healthy human overreaction after such an horrific event, but unfortunately it made possible a more sinister undercurrent. This firestorm of conspiracies made it legitimate to blame the victims. America was to blame for the attacks. If not literally, than at least they had it coming. Or in the lucid words of Elias, the dope smoking sergeant from Platoon: “we have been kicking other people’s asses so long, I guess it’s time we got our own kicked.”
I won’t defend American hegemony, but glaringly overlooking the theocratic worldvision of Osama bin Laden in the wake of all this human suffering is a bad mistake. It’s not hegemonic to fight against theocracy and although America has its own set of problems, it’s still the greatest ally for the secular cause to have.
Anyway, this book hit all the right notes for me and made a lot of foggy issues cristal clear. A description:
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 he’s 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 Milosevic’s 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 can’t 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? It’s 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: What’s Left?
He even takes a chapter-long shot at Noam Chomsky. Bring it on! Don’t misunderstand please, I adore the Noaminator and his endless monotone anarchistic murmurring. I just don’t agree with him all the time. Even another Democracy Now! broadcast won’t sway me from my new found scepticism.
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