Blog and Manifesto

I cannot in good conscience sign it, because I would be pretending to a virtue I do not possess: I supported the invasion of Iraq for several months, from sometime in 2002 to mid-2003, by which time the invasion had already happened and the ultimate failure of the enterprise started to become evident even to the dim.

So I am afraid that Judt’s accusation of complicity applies to me. I would require a weaker manifesto merely stating that the signatories acknowledge the moral shadow upon them but believe themselves to be capable of learning from mistakes.

I don’t see how the manifesto excludes those who once supported the invasion.

I’m guessing that would be this part:

We have all opposed the Iraq war as illegal, unwise, and destructive of America’s moral standing.

More generally, I don’t like the tone of this manifesto. It’s almost triumphalist. Take this:

The important truth is that most liberals, including the undersigned, have stayed our course throughout these grim five years. We have consistently and publicly repudiated the ruinous policies of the Bush administration, and our diagnosis, alas, has been vindicated by events.

Sorry, but no. Judt is not an intellectual hero of mine but he’s dead right about this: you guys fucked up big time. I’m angrier with you than I am with the rightwingers, only because there’s a chance you’ll listen to me. You let your country go to hell in a handbasket. You fiddled while Rome burned. Judging by this manifesto, you’re not even ready to admit it.

Todd Gitlin’s I was left, so I know just how wrong you leftists are schtick is almost the definition of supine in the face of the conservative onslaught.

Sorry, but no. Judt is not an intellectual hero of mine but he’s dead right about this: you guys fucked up big time. I’m angrier with you than I am with the rightwingers, only because there’s a chance you’ll listen to me. You let your country go to hell in a handbasket. You fiddled while Rome burned. Judging by this manifesto, you’re not even ready to admit it.

I think that those of us who fucked up and those of us who are claiming not to have fucked up are different people.

I find it interesting that their manifesto puts so much emphasis on America: America’s moral standing, American freedom at home, American ideals.

“The Bush administration disgraces America” – oh, that’s just terrible, who can imagine anything worse than America in disgrace?

I think that’s legitimate. If you look at US history, every liberal movement that has increased genuine justice in American society has used this tactic. Look at, say, Frederick Douglass: the point he kept hammering on was that the founders of the US claimed to support certain ideals that were logically inconsistent with slavery, and the hypocrisy had to end. The appeal to American ideals was the lever. You point out the disconnect between patriotic feelings and the reality: this sounds silly to people outside the US who have perfectly good free societies of their own, and to people whose criticism of American hypocrisies has led them to think of the whole project as fundamentally ill-conceived, but it is an extraordinarily powerful argument in the United States.

1948 is a bit late for Captain Cook, though. About 200 years too late.

abb1, are you suggesting that the colonising activities of the Europeans in the new world were in some sense less reprehensible because they were a long time ago? Captain Cook Joseph Banks had access to the same theories of justice as you do, saving a few refinements.

I’m saying that if colonization of Australia started in 1948, we wouldn’t be so emphatically insisting today that the militant British colony there has the right to exist.

In fact, most likely we would be saying exactly the opposite. So, I think your argument works in exactly opposite direction than you intended.

It doesn’t mean there aren’t other arguments, for example: ethnic Jews have often been persecuted, so they need a refuge – which, I suppose, was the main rational for creating this state in 1948. But I don’t see how this gives it the right to exist in that particular geographical location. That would seem difficult to explain without the bible.

abb1, no, we’re arguing in the same direction. We differ in that I’m suggesting that after three generations it’s too late to roll back history, however obnoxious that history may be, and that to do so would be to compound one injustice with another.

I find it ratheer bizarre that the second paragraph of a rather long manifesto is about Israel. Why? What is this obsession? Can somebody explain this? It follows the paragraph about Iraq and is entirely disconnected from it.

Algeria is in fact a false parallel, since the colonists were never the majority population there, as they became in the new world and in Israel.

Chris, certainly there has to be a compromise of some sort, no question about that, but I think that’s quite different from what the code-phrase “the right to exist” usually means. It’s not as if people objected to any kind of state in Palestine called ‘Israel’. The phrase “the right to exist” signifies the insistence on officially ethnocentric Jewish state, or at least that’s my impression.

Be that as it may, what the hell’s that paragraph doing there anyway – in a manifesto about American liberalism?

I think Mearsheimer and Walt could explain that one pretty easily…

As with some of the irritation here – at least one of the ‘liberals’ who has signed up is an unrepentant Marxist. Nor are these the ‘liberals’ as best as I can tell, who even lent tacit assent to the Iraq war.

But is is a “manifesto for liberals” whose aim is to enable “liberals to define ourselves”. Surely it is supposed to be speaking for liberals as a whole. Many liberals did not oppose the Iraq war. Most of those that did were hardly “steadfast” in their opposition. Ditto for many of Bush’s other administrative abominations. Is the manifesto claiming that such people are not “liberals”?

btw, I see that H.E.Baber (San Diego) has signed both this manifesto and the US statement in support of the Euston Manifesto. Of course she’s entitled to sign whatever she likes, but I’m guessing that the sort of people that would sign Euston are exactly the ones Tony Judt had in mind.

Louis would never sign this, it must be the Miracle Max.

IIRC, it basically excoriates those “liberals” whose visible support for the invasion created the shabby appearance of a consensus across the political spectrum—e.g. I think he talked about Thomas Friedman

I don’t think that would be a very accurate reading. Judt’s article is bylined “the strange death of liberal America”. He lambasts the “‘Clinton generation’ of American liberal intellectuals” for not living up the ideals of their intellectual forbears. He laments the fact that the “critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent”.

And yes, Judt also has some rather crude, and, in my blunt opinion, frustratingly stupid, mainstream American ideas about Evul Soshulism. That means that he doesn’t really have any place from which to mount a critique other than one which says “things were a lot better in the 80s”.

“I do have a problem with the (usually American) liberals who are as dismissive of anyone to the left of them, and especially socialists, as Judt is.”

That’s very common in the US. However, one way in which Bush has been a uniter rather than a divider is the way he’s brought centrist liberals and many much further to the left into an uneasy alliance. I think some former centrist liberals have even moved noticeably to the left, though not just because of Bush. (Krugman strikes me that way on globalization issues–he used to be quite the critic of the globalization protestors, but since Stiglitz came out of the closet he’s changed his tune somewhat.)

Getting back to Bush, though, it’s probably because his foreign policy horrifies so many mainstream liberals that you find Noam Chomsky being given semi-respectful treatment in the New York Times Book Review, for instance. And Robert Fisk as well.

When the classic Sensible Liberal excuse — ‘well, they were right, but they were right in the wrong way’ — is co-opted by Jonah Goldberg, you know something’s fucked up.

As an expat Brit, Judt has a sense of how the anti-war left back home was a force within (and without) the governing party, making the dynamics more complex. Many liberals in the US rolled over in 2002, when they were already the opposition.

I find it ratheer bizarre that the second paragraph of a rather long manifesto is about Israel. Why? What is this obsession?

A case of ‘the lady doth protest too much, methinks’: because for a large number of Serious Liberals, attitudes towards Iraq were shaped by that point.

As for the issue of Judt’s j’accuse, I suspect much of the irritation can be traced yet again to American confusion over the terms ‘leftist’ and ‘liberal’.

I posted this at one in the morning local time and now I’m at a loss to know to which ‘irritation’ I was referring. Let this serve as a warning to those who would post while half-asleep!

Oh, well, at least it generated an interesting discussion.

Henry – I think “Unrepentant Marxist” is the title of Louis’ blog. (btw, while I would not want to unreservedly defend LP’s style of online debate, I think it’s a bit unfair to be calling him a lunatic if we’re not going to let him respond)

I think “Unrepentant Marxist” is the title of Louis’ blog

Yes, sorry, that was just my little joke and I wasn’t trying to bait people to slag off Mr Proyect behind his back.

That said, I can’t resist saying why that phrase always stands out for me, which is that I can’t think of many other people who would voluntarily describe themselves as an “unrepentant Marxist”. That does seem to imply that, yeah, you’ve read Solzhenitsyn and Applebaum but you just don’t think there’s anything there to feel bad about. That may not be at all indicative of his views, but it is what the title suggests to me. (And I think that Marx was right about lots of things, and I don’t think the Soviet Union “proved” that Marxism is wrong. All off-topic anyway. I’ll shut up now.)

Louis Proyect comes from a Trotskyist background (USA SWP), so I doubt he’s an apologist for the gulags. I think it’s meant more as a response to the idea of having to be apologetic for being a Marxist in the “death of communism” atmosphere after the end of the Soviet Union. To return to Tony Judt, his NY Review of Books piece about Marx recently that someone linked above might be an example.

Nathaniel – I can easily believe that is the intention. As I said, I wasn’t trying to draw an inference about his views. I just think that calling yourself “unrepentant”, when the first thing that comes into most people’s minds in the US when they think of Marxism is the gulags, is a little tone deaf. And as I also said above, essays in the mould of Judt’s NYRB piece irritate me too.

…. CT as the kind of place that is “where you will find equal amounts of venom hurled at George W. Bush and Ward Churchill”. IÂ’d agree that the two are equally deserving of venom…

Seriously, John? I thought much better of you than that. Or have I underestimated Prof. Churchill’s body count by many orders of magnitude?

Churchill doesn’t believe in “the right to exist”, bastard. Hence he certainly deserves waaay more venom than Bush, who does.

“the tone in which the two deserve to be discussed”
But what you’ve got there really is two placeholders, the figures they are as they’ve been given to you – one, Bush, through a carefully controlled and constantly monitored set of media filters and buffers; the other, Churchill, through much the same process, with a lot of negative backspin, and of course far less attention overall.
The “deserve” part of that bit is an extension of the manipulative creation of image on both counts.
You’re being told what to feel about both men, by the same off-stage prompt.
Bush was expendable from the get. Anyone who thinks he’s presided over the clampdown of the polis and the gutting of the Constitution for his own accession to the throne is dangerously naive.
Considering the prominence and mainstream acceptance of grotesque actors like Dershowitz and so many others – considering the clear and full-system bias of American media, which is where both Bush and Churchiill exist, as they’re used here – it should be obvious that only someone like Proyect, already out at the thinnest margin of public discourse, is going to come in having Churchill’s back.
Repeating the mediated slanders and substanceless claims of Churchill’s detractors as though they’re proven fact is only possible in a climate where men like Alan Dershowitz have free and mostly uncriticizable rein at the public.
This doesn’t bode well for unprejudiced and furthering conversation.
I understand how difficult it must be to try and convince those to the right of you to get hold of some commonality before everything falls apart – with Churchill and really a very few others over to the left tossing Molotov cocktails into the dialogue – but he’s right in his main complaint, about the unaddressed genocide of aboriginal Americans – and that isn’t getting acknowledged, because it’s inconvenient, and there’s nothing driving the necessity for it, other than some vestigial moral regard.