Remarkably, this has little to do with Basgen.
David
On Apr 20, 3:43 pm, Vngelis <meberr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> With friends like these . . .
>
> When David Mamet declared last month that he was no longer a 'brain-
> dead liberal', he joined the ranks of leftwing writers, from Arthur
> Koestler to Kinglsey Amis to Christopher Hitchens, who have moved to
> the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David Edgar
> challenges the new generation of renegades
>
> Saturday April 19, 2008
> The Guardian
>
> One striking aspect of the 1968 and post-1968 generation has been
> overlooked in the current nostalgia fest.
>
> Despite Robert Frost's stern warning against the dangers of youthful
> idealism ("I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would
> make me conservative when old"), remarkably few of those formed by
> 1968 and its aftermath have moved to the right in middle age. That is,
> until now.
>
> In the same way that a surprising number of Thatcher and Reagan's key
> thinkers were former communists, the ideological campaign for the war
> on terror abroad and against multiculturalism at home has been
> dominated by people who were formed by the student revolt, feminism
> and anti-racist movement of the 1970s. As with the political defectors
> of the past, their critique of the left is validated by personal
> experience. Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-
> lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with
> fascism as totalitarianism), so, now, influential writers seek to
> redraw the political map of our own time. And, intentionally or not,
> they are undermining the historic bond between progressive liberalism
> and the poor.
>
> Article continues
> I became interested in the politics of defection in the late 1970s.
> I'd written a play about the far right (Destiny), but as the National
> Front crashed to ignominious defeat in 1979, it was clear that its
> thunder had been stolen by a resurgent conservatism that owed much of
> its passion and its principles to deserters from the left. As the
> death-agony of the 1974-79 Labour government unfolded, former
> socialists and communists contributed to proto-Thatcherite tirades
> with titles like "The Future that Doesn't Work" and "An Escape from
> George Orwell's 1984". In 1978, former leftwingers such as Kingsley
> Amis, Max Beloff, Reg Prentice, Paul Johnson and Alun Chalfont
> anthologised their apostasy in a book proudly titled Right Turn.
>
> In my play about defection (Maydays, produced by the RSC in 1983), I
> speculated about how the British class of '68 might move to the
> conservative right. Essentially transposing the experience of earlier
> generations into the 70s, I don't think my central character's
> trajectory was implausible. In France, Bernard-Henri L=E9vy and other
> nouveaux philosophes had provided a vocabulary of retreat for the
> veterans of the Paris events of May 1968. Some American popular
> radicals had fled to business (Jerry Rubin) or to the religious right
> (Eldridge Cleaver), and former Ramparts editor and Black Panther
> sup****ter David Horovitz was to mount a 1987 conference, Second
> Thoughts, at which former 60s radicals such as Michael Medved and PJ
> O'Rourke confessed and renounced their errors. Nonetheless, most of
> the leading figures of the period - from Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin and
> Bernardine Dohrn in America via Danny Cohn-Bendit in Germany to Tariq
> Ali, Robin Blackburn and Sheila Rowbotham here - have remained
> faithful to their previous ideals. And while Alan Milburn, Alan
> Johnson, Alistair Darling and Stephen Byers have clearly moved a
> considerable distance since their days in or about the Trotskyite far
> left, they would doubtless claim to be pursuing a drastically revised
> version of the same, socially progressive agenda. Until very recently,
> almost everybody disillusioned with the far left felt there was still
> a viable near left they could call home.
>
> Now, that appears to be changing. Bookshop shelves are not quite yet
> groaning with defection literature, but Nick Cohen (What's Left?),
> Andrew Anthony (The Fallout), Ed Husain (The Islamist) and Melanie
> Phillips (Londonistan) are all self-confessed deserters (Phillips
> wears the "apostate" label with pride). Although Martin Amis was never
> part of the revolutionary or communist left (and attacked both his
> father and his friend Christopher Hitchens for so being), The Second
> Plane is an assault on the kind of liberal, literary intellectuals
> among whom Amis has moved throughout his life. And although Cohen,
> Anthony, Phillips et al have poured particular vituperation on
> leftwing playwrights (David Hare and Harold Pinter in particular),
> they have now been joined by one - David Mamet, who last month wrote a
> piece for the Village Voice entitled "Why I am no longer a 'brain-dead
> liberal'" (he no longer believes that "people are basically good at
> heart"). Like previous generations, these defectors have been there,
> done that, and can now bear witness to their former misbeliefs. In so
> doing, they are joining a club with an extensive member****p. Most of
> the radical and progressive achievements of the 20th century -
> including the Russian revolution - were brought about by an alliance
> between the oppressed and the intelligentsia, and a good pro****tion of
> them - particularly the Russian revolution - were followed by
> disappointment and desertion. For some, disillusion set in as early as
> 1921, when the Bolsheviks suppressed a sailors' uprising at Kronstadt,
> the ****t of St Petersburg and cradle of the October revolution.
> Subsequent "Kronstadt moments" included the Stalinist purges of the
> 1930s, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, the neo-Stalinist show trials in
> eastern Europe in the early 50s, Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's
> crimes in February 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November
> of that year.
>
> As a result of these crises, ex-communist writers such as Arthur
> Koestler and Stephen Spender moved to the liberal centre. Others, like
> WH Auden, withdrew from political involvement altogether. For many,
> like the American poet and bohemian Max Eastman and the fellow-
> travelling novelist John Dos Passos, the cold war provided a changing
> room from which they emerged - with new stars in their eyes - as full-
> blown, traditionalist conservatives.
>
> The events of 1956 changed the rules of member****p of the ex-communist
> club in two ways. The creation of a self-consciously non-Stalinist New
> Left gave people disillusioned with communism somewhere else to go. On
> the other hand, the subsequent activities of the New Left became a
> recruiting agency for the right among older radicals, socialists and
> even liberals. For ex-communist Kingsley Amis, opposition to the
> expansion of higher education ("more will mean worse") was the first
> of many Conservative causes which transformed the author of Lucky Jim
> into a Thatcherite cheerleader. Similarly, what became the Reagan
> coalition was given considerable intellectual ballast by a group of
> New York intellectuals surrounding ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol, for
> whom the hippy counter-culture, Black Power and later the women's and
> environmental movement demonstrated the infantilism and nihilism of
> the New Left. Self-defined as "liberals mugged by reality", Kristol,
> Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell were genuinely
> neoconservatives, having previously been revolutionaries (Kristol),
> radicals (Podhoretz, Glazer) or at the very least democratic
> progressives.
>
> As former victims of political delusion, these defectors claim a
> unique authority. But there is something quite particular about
> spending the second half of your life taking revenge on the first.
> Inevitably, however complete the conversion, what defectors think and
> do now is coloured by what they thought and did before. Most people
> who leave the far left do so because of their experience of far-left
> organisations: their authoritarianism and manipulation, their contempt
> for allies as "useful idiots", their insistence that the end justifies
> the means and that deceit is a class duty, their refusal to take
> anything anyone else says at face value (dismissing disagreement as
> cowardice or class treachery) and, most of all, their dismissal as
> "bourgeois" of the very ideals that draw people to the left in the
> first place. As Spender wrote in The God that Failed (1949), "the
> communist, having joined the party, has to castrate himself of the
> reasons which made him one".
>
> But, often, something else is going on. Frequently, there is a sense
> among defecting intellectuals that it's not just the party that has
> let them down. Most people move left either because they are outraged
> by the victimhood of the oppressed (Spender's distress at men and
> women "sealed into leaden slums") or because they are inspired by the
> left's revolutionary ardour (as many of my generation were by the
> Black Panthers and the Vietcong). The discovery that the poor do not
> necessarily respond to their victimhood with uncomplaining resignation
> is as traumatic as the complementary perception that they don't always
> behave in a spirit of selfless heroism.
>
> Hard enough to be fooled by the party; even harder to accept that you
> deluded yourself into believing that the poor are, by virtue of their
> poverty, uniquely saintly or strong. No surprise that this realisation
> turns into a sense of personal betrayal, which turns outwards into
> blame.
>
> One obvious result of this is the tendency of ex-radicals to become
> very conservative indeed, a tendency satirised by Edmund Wilson in his
> quip about John Dos Passos: "On account of Soviet knavery / He favours
> restoring slavery". Dos Passos was not the only American Marxist to
> pole-vault the cold-war liberal centre and land in the arms of William
> F Buckley's high conservative National Review. Initially claiming that
> he still believed in the end of working-class emancipation, former
> Trotskyite Max Eastman quickly turned on "mush-headed liberals" who
> "bellyache" about civil rights; for former beat critic and latter
> neoconservative Podhoretz, homo***uality was a death wish and feminism
> a plague.
>
> Above all, the reality that neocons felt mugged by was the moral
> inadequacy of the poor. Kristol's manifesto On the Democratic Idea in
> America blamed the free market for encouraging unreasonable appetites
> in the working class; as Robert Nesbit put it, "to allay every fresh
> discontent, to assuage every social pain, and to gratify every fresh
> expectation".
>
> Like Eldridge Cleaver, the neocons argued that the welfare state had
> turned the poor into parasites; James Q Wilson asserts that, in the
> black community, welfare became for black women what heroin was for
> black men. For Podhoretz, far from being "persecuted and oppressed",
> the blacks he knew were doing the persecuting and oppressing.
>
> The directness and lack of apology in neoconservative polemic is a
> result of the fact that its authors had discharged the same ordnance
> in the opposite direction, and knew the likely weight and calibre of
> the returning fire. Most political defectors leave the left because
> its authoritarian practices stand in such stark contrast to its
> emancipatory ideals. For many, however, there is a double paradox: on
> opening their suitcase at the end of the journey, they find not just
> that the libertarian ideals they left the left to preserve have gone
> missing, but that the only thing remaining is the very cynicism and
> ruthlessness which they left the left to escape.
>
> So, as on the far left, there is a tendency to see the world in stark,
> binary terms. Kingsley Amis once admitted that "it's all pretty black
> and white to me now. If you decide, as I have, that there are only two
> sides to the argument, then it's all quite simple." Kristol insists
> that environmentalists aren't really interested in clean air or clean
> water; what they're really after is authoritarian political power. And
> a condemnation of the practice of radicals and revolutionaries
> justifies the abandonment of the groups they seek to defend. For
> neocon Nathan Glazer, 60s radicalism was "so beset with error and
> confusion" that even its mildest manifestations - such as affirmative
> action for African Americans - had to be swept away.
>
> Is this pattern reflected among those defectors for whom the
> "Kronstadt moment" was 9/11? Certainly, Husain's The Islamist
> describes a progression towards and then away from the non-jihadist
> but pro-Caliphate Hizb ut-Tahrir, which will be familiar to any reader
> of defection literature; he is now working with the Conservative
> thinktank Civitas. Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and
> Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in
> political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s
> (Aaronovitch was one of Manchester University's notorious University
> Challenge team, who answered "Marx", "Lenin" or "Trotsky" to every
> question). Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive
> package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as
> they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam
> Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance - justified by
> modish, postmodern cultural relativism - with the far right.
>
> The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism,
> represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen
> to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those
> who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February
> 15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. And, as no one is suggesting
> that the Socialist Workers Party, or its fellow travellers in what
> Aaronovitch calls "the bruschetta crowd", is using the anti-war
> alliance to pursue a hidden, anti-feminist, homophobic and theocratic
> agenda, it initially appears that the dupers are conspiratorial
> Islamists and the dupees the naively innocent socialists who marched
> beside them. Just like the "useful idiots" of the 30s, they are giving
> aid and comfort to Muslim extremists, in the deluded hope (to quote
> Cohen) that the Islamists will "shake themselves and say, 'fair
> enough, we realise that now you've addressed our root cause, we don't
> want a theocratic empire after all'".
>
> No one on the progressive liberal left can be comfortable with any of
> the religions of the book, particularly when literally applied. And
> those of us who dismissed the oppression of women and gay people as
> "secondary contradictions" in the early 70s are correctly wary of
> putting those issues on the back-burner now. Certainly, the
> progressive left is in alliance with a group whose traditional views
> run counter to some central planks of its platform. Twenty-five years
> on from Maydays, I have written a new play (Testing the Echo), which
> is partly about the temptation - on these understandable grounds - to
> reject any kind of religious affiliation, to brand fundamentalist
> Islam as brown fascism, and (thereby) to abandon an impoverished,
> beleaguered and demonised community.
>
> For, let's be clear, the alliance to which the new defectors object -
> the alliance enabled by a multiculturalism that sought to give
> visibility and confidence to entire communities - is not just between
> a few deluded revolutionaries and the odd crazed Muslim cleric. Martin
> Amis denies he's declaring war on the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but
> his "thought experiment" about meting out collective punishment on
> Muslims (travel restriction, de****tation, strip searching) "until it
> hurts the whole community" makes no distinction between followers of
> Hizb ut-Tahrir and the man in the Clapham mosque.
>
> Cohen is careful to point out that "Islamism has Islamic roots", and,
> clearly, the group that he dubs the "far right" goes beyond the
> adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami. It's also a group that - defined in the
> old-fa****oned way as Pakistanis and Banglade****s - remains at the
> bottom of the socioeconomic heap. As Trevor Phillips pointed out in
> his "sleepwalking into segregation" speech, made after 7/7, a
> Pakistani man with identical qualifications to a white man is still
> going to earn =A3300,000 less in his lifetime.
>
> It is also a group that suffered, particularly during Cohen,
> Aaronovitch and Anthony's formative years. Throughout the 70s and 80s,
> Paki-ba****ng created an image of Britain's south Asian communities as
> a traditionally submissive group, victimised by unwarranted
> aggression. For some, this image was complemented by admiration for
> groups such as the Bradford 12, who sought to defend their communities
> against fascist attack, and won the right to do so in court. When, in
> 1989, Bradford's Pakistanis found a sense of self-confidence and
> identity through burning books rather than banks, it's no surprise
> that liberal progressives who had sup****ted, maybe even pitied, that
> community felt a sense of betrayal. In their books, Cohen and Anthony
> frequently point out how people on the left grow bitter when the poor
> fail to live up to the romance of unbridled heroism or untainted
> victimhood. They don't fully take into account the effect of that
> delusion on themselves.
>
> Many of the usual pathologies of defection can be detected in the
> current crop. The attack on multiculturalism - so often sold as a
> reassertion of Enlightenment principles - often masks a distinctly
> unenlightened reassertion of hierarchic and traditionalist thinking.
> Despite his defence of women's and gay rights against Qur'anic
> scholars, a distinct strain of hostility to the ***ual gains of the
> 60s runs through Cohen's What's Left?: he blames the anti-racists and
> ***ual reformers of the 60s for dissolving "the bonds of mutual
> sup****t", dips more than a toe into the Daily Mail's critique of the
> welfare state (breaking up families, privileging immigrants), and
> blames the Respect party for Pakistani and Banglade**** unemployment.
>
> Martin Amis's elegant prose shouldn't blind us to his seeming
> obsession with the Muslim birth rate as a "gangplank to
> theocracy" ("Has feminism cost us Europe?" he asked in an Independent
> interview). David Goodhart, editor of left-leaning Prospect magazine
> (who describes the 60s as "the decade that sharply eroded authority
> and constraint"), argued in his pamphlet Progressive Nationalism for a
> two-tier welfare system, the teaching of imperial history in schools,
> the creation of a migration and integration ministry, the raising of
> citizen****p test hurdles, the reassertion of the monarchy and the army
> as nationally binding institutions, the banning of certain forms of
> dress from public buildings and the reintroduction of conscription.
> That several of these proposals are now government policy is an
> indication of how Gordon Brown's golden thread of British liberties
> has thickened into what looks more like a whip.
>
> Most im****tantly, the culture of betrayal has blinded contem****ary
> defectors to the significant achievements of the alliance between
> British Muslims and the left. Along with Phillips, Cohen and the New
> Statesman's Martin Bright, Anthony is preoccupied with the Muslim
> Council of Britain and its spokesman Inayat Bunglawala, quoting his
> remark that the campaign against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses
> brought Muslims together and "helped develop a British Muslim
> identity".
>
> In fact, Bunglawala's attitude to Rushdie goes to the heart of whether
> the progressive-Muslim alliance is a genuine conversation or the
> contem****ary equivalent to the Nazi-Soviet pact. In a Guardian article
> last June, he reiterated the im****tance of the anti-Rushdie campaign
> in building self-confidence among a small, isolated, beleaguered and
> frequently victimised community, but went on to "readily acknowledge
> we were wrong to have called for the book to be banned". Now, he
> confesses, "I can better appreciate the concerns and fear generated by
> the images of book-burning in Bradford and calls for the author to be
> killed". Not least because, as he wrote in response to a critical
> blog, the same laws that allowed Rushdie to write The Satanic Verses
> protects the rights of Muslims to say what they think, too.
>
> Sup****t for human rights legislation that protects the rights of
> religious as well as ***ual minorities is controversial within the
> Muslim community, as are other examples of supposedly diehard
> Islamists responding to liberal criticism. For example, the MCB came
> under fire when it decided - not before time - to participate in
> Holocaust Day ceremonies. Azzam Tamimi is a leading member of the main
> Muslim organisation in the Stop the War Coalition, the British Muslim
> Initiative, a group much reviled for its close ties with the Egyptian
> Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian equivalent, Hamas. Tamimi's
> book on Hamas (published in America as Hamas: A History from Within)
> contains a sustained critique of Hamas's constitution, its treatment
> of the Jews, and its quotation of the tsarist antisemitic forgery the
> Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Another leading member of the BMI,
> Anas Altikriti, points out that the Qur'an says nothing about
> homo***uality beyond relaying the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah
> (and, for that matter, does not call for the execution of apostates).
> Altikriti negotiated for hostage Norman Kember's release in Iraq,
> campaigned against escalating protests over the Jyllands-Posten
> cartoons in Denmark (while sympathising with Muslim anger against
> them) and argues that, unlike the British government, he has been
> fighting separatist Muslim extremism since long before 1997.
>
> Despite the drumbeat of demonisation by media and politicians, these
> and other Muslim leaders are increasingly open to the argument that
> their shared interest in universal human rights trumps what we rightly
> regard as illiberal beliefs. They are, in other words, going in
> precisely the opposite direction from that which their detractors
> describe and predict. Are they really (to use Hitchens's formulation)
> to be anathematised as "fascists with an Islamic face"?
>
> All of the great progressive movements of the 20th century in the west
> - solidarity with republican Spain, the building of welfare states,
> the civil rights movement in the southern United States, the war
> against apartheid in South Africa - were led by an alliance between
> progressive intellectuals and the victims of oppression. The civil
> rights movement in particular allied secular Jews (often with
> communist backgrounds) from the north with black Christians in the
> south. The difficulties of that relation****p were demonstrated when -
> after victory was largely won - blacks asserted the need for an all-
> black leader****p of one of the main civil rights groups. Later,
> feminists properly criticised the leaders of the Black Panthers for
> the ***ism of both their political practice and personal behaviour.
> Despite all that, does anyone think the creation of the alliance which
> successfully desegregated the American south was a mistake?
>
> Whether they like it or not, the current defectors are seeking to
> provide a vocabulary for the progressive intelligentsia to abandon the
> poor. So, for civil libertarians, the divide is no longer between left
> and right, but between authority and personal liberty. For atheists,
> it is between secularism and religious belief. For some American and
> European feminists, it is between women's rights and a
> multiculturalism that validates Muslim patriarchy. For a number of
> former leftwingers, it is between the social solidarity of a
> conservative working class and the demands of multicultural newcomers.
>
> What all these fault-lines have in common is that they pit
> progressives against the group that is under the most sustained
> political attack, here and abroad, and that those who draw them
> include people who have the authority of the convert, having seen the
> error of their ways. It behoves those of us who have also been there
> and done that, not to defend the indefensible, but to protect the
> vocabulary of alliance that has done so much good in the past and is
> so necessary now.
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