New Humanist, September 2005
Although I present myself as an open–minded 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.
Actually, ‘very few’ is a self–serving exaggeration. 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 cry ‘Eureka!’ If
I was going to cry anything it would have been ‘Oh bloody hell!’. Berman
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 2001, 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.
At the time, I was trying to write a book of my own, Pretty Straight
Guys, which was an assault on the sliminess of New Labour and the
millennial madness of the dotcom bubble. I was aware I’d have to tackle
the left — Why did it always lose? Why didn’t it have solutions anyone
on the planet could use? I was working at the Observer and the New
Statesman and had noticed already a sour smell in the air. People were
very edgy about religion. Not Christianity or Judaism, naturally, but
Islam, or rather Islamism. Its loathing of democracy and human rights,
its hatred of women’s emancipation and its glorification of suicide and
murder was never described for what it was: a pathological movement of
the far right.
Then there was Iraq. I’d just finished a chapter on the loathsome way
asylum seekers were treated by Blair, and had to admit that an awful lot
of the mistreated were on the run from Saddam Hussein. But all around me
Iraqis were vanishing from polite society’s conversation. The Kurdish
socialists, who had received liberal London’s tea and sympathy when
Saddam was America’s ally, had been forgotten. Saddam’s murders of Kurds
and Arabs became, by a greasy process which was never made explicit, the
fault of Britain and America. By 2003, the tyrant of Iraq was held to be
no longer responsible for crimes committed in the tyranny of Iraq.
I’d have probably made a few mild comments and got into fewer rows if
Terror and Liberalism had not landed on my desk. It’s a dangerously
seductive book whose central point is that Islamism and Ba’athism are
continuations of Nazism and communism, not only in their fine points —
the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ba’ath Party were admirers of
Hitler and Franco — but in their fundamentals. Once again we had the
promise of earthly paradise, but not now the paradise of unexploited
labour or of an Aryan Europe, but the paradise of the early days of the
prophet or a reunified Arab nation, pure and free. Once again there were
semi–divine leaders who led the faithful into cosmic struggles. And once
again their programmes were insane.
Cleverly, Berman treats his targets very sympathetically. Readers who
want to disagree with him, as I did, are charmed because he understands
why we believe what we believe and more often than not explains our
ideas better than we can. The Russian terrorists who began the violence
which finished with the slaughters of the communists are morally
scrupulous. They won’t throw a bomb into the coach of the Grand Duke
Sergei, because there are children on board, or risk the lives of adult
non–combatants. True, they have no ideas beyond death, their own and
others, no plan for society which could possibly succeed, but that
doesn’t hide the desperation which had driven sensitive and high–minded
young men and women to rebel. Similarly, Berman is so angry about the
collapse of European civilisation into the barbarism of the World War I
that you could imagine him joining the communist party or becoming a
Nazi. He is so sympathetic to the intellectual currents buffeting
Sayyid Qutb that Qutb’s transformation into the intellectual founder of
a cult of death appears the most natural of developments, one you might
make yourself in the circumstances.
He avoids the usual polemical style because he is trying to overcome the
resistance of liberals who have seen the Iranian revolution and the
murder of millions, and the enslavement of whole African tribes in the
Sudan, and the destruction of every last remnant of freedom in
Afghanistan, but not understood that what they’ve seen is a totalitarian
movement going about its business.
A chapter — ‘Wishful Thinking’ — explains how decent people can end up
on the far right by using the history of the French Socialist Party in
the 1930s as a parable for our time. Leon Blum, its leader, knew that
the Nazis had to be fought. But a large faction, supported by the
teachers’ unions and many left–wing intellectuals, was horrified by the
prospect of a conflict which could exceed the carnage of World War I.
If they had looked the Nazis in the face, they would have realised that
war was inevitable. Rather than see clearly, they allowed the best of
motives to convince them that the German people hadn’t fallen for an
insane cult. Why would they? Wasn’t it almost racist to believe that
they were anything other than as rational and decent as the French?
Take Hitler’s demands to expand the German Reich. In a certain light
these could be seen as a menacing expansion of the Nazi state, but was
it not the case that the Treaty of Versailles had imposed punitive
conditions on Germany at the end of the World War I? Was it not
reasonable for Hitler to ask that Germans should be freed from control
by the Poles and the Czechs and returned to their mother country? Hitler
may have been from the extreme right and they may have been from the
democratic left, but an argument wasn’t necessarily wrong just because
Hitler made it.
Many socialists were therefore enthusiastic supporters of the Munich
agreement. They believed, says Berman, in the ‘simple–minded optimism’
of 19th century liberalism — a liberalism of denial. Human beings were
essentially rational. Politicians and propagandists who pretended
otherwise were the tools of the arms corporations and media empires
which were leading France into an unnecessary pre–emptive war:
“The anti–war socialists,” writes Berman, “gazed across the Rhine and
simply refused to believe that millions of upstanding Germans had
enlisted in a political movement whose animating principles were
paranoid conspiracy theories, blood–curdling hatreds, mediaeval
superstitions and the lure of murder. At Auschwitz the SS said ‘Here
there is no why.’ The anti–war socialists in France believed no such
thing. In their eyes, there was always a why.”
There was a price to pay for rationalism. 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
organise parliamentary debates calling attention to their plight when
they were making excuses for the Hitler who was doing the persecuting?
Then there were the Nazis’ Jewish victims. As good men and women of the
Enlightenment, the anti–war socialists couldn’t tolerate anti–Semitism.
Yet they were determined not to let their sympathies get out of hand.
Weren’t the Jews always showing their wounds and trying to make others
feel guilty for their past suffering? Hitler might be going a bit far,
but wasn’t it true that a disproportionate number of industrialists and
financiers were Jewish? And wasn’t it also the case that their leader,
Leon Blum, who was urging France to enter a bloody and worthless
confrontation with Germany was, well, Jewish, too?
In 1940, Hitler gave irrefutable proof of his intentions when he invaded
France. The French extreme right under the leadership of Marshall Pétain
proposed a collaborationist government. Blum and some socialists chose
to fight, but many of their colleagues accepted the occupation and, as
Berman concludes, went the whole hog and joined the Vichy government.
“Some of these socialists went a little further too, and began to see a
virtue in Pétain’s programme for a new France and a new Europe: “ a
programme of strength and vitality, a Europe ruled by a single–party
state instead of by the corrupt cliques of bourgeois democracy, a Europe
cleansed of the impurities of Judaism and of the Jews themselves, a
Europe of the anti–liberal imagination. And in that very remarkable
fashion, a number of the anti–war socialists of France came full circle.
They had begun as defenders of liberal values and human rights, and they
evolved into the defenders of bigotry, tyranny, superstition and mass
murder. They were democratic leftists who, through the miraculous
workings of the slippery slope and a naïve rationalism, of all things,
ended as fascists. Long ago, you say? Not so long ago.”
Indeed not. To see the old process at work, you only have to look at how
a large chunk of liberal opinion has got itself into the position where
it can’t support Iraqi and Afghan liberals, socialists and feminists.
You think the worst thing in the world is the developed countries, which
do, to be fair, have manifold faults. You are confronted with
totalitarian movements, which are worse, and your first thought is to
blame them on the West. Your second is to make excuses for them. Your
third is to betray your comrades. Your fourth is to go up to the
totalitarian movements and shake them by the hand.
Does the realisation that there are worse things in the world than
George W Bush and Tony Blair expel you from the left? Maybe. I could say
that I’m one of the few journalists in the liberal press who can pick up
the phone and talk to an Iraqi communist or a Kurdish socialist as a
comrade, but that’s ducking the issue. If most who say they’re on the
left prefer anti–capitalism to anti–fascism, then you aren’t of the left.
But so what? As Islamists bombs blow to pieces democrats in Iraq and
commuters in London, there are more pressing matters than political
positioning.
Nick Cohen
