The British journalist Nick Cohen has been sorely misunderstood. His book, “What’s Left?”, is not a phillippic of the pro-war “Decent” left at all. It’s a scholarly assessment of the authoritarian strains of left wing politics, and the tension between resistance under capitalism and resistance to totalitarianism, as exemplified in the writings of George Orwell for example. As he says:
I look at and explain how Bosnia revealed the dark side of the pacifist European temperament and how and why Douglas Hurd and other liberal Tories appeased Serb nationalism. There’s a chapter on the strange and virtually forgotten story of how pacifists and communists ended up arguing against the British war effort during the Blitz. There’s even a chapter of how the intellectual history of Islamism can be traced back to the insane conspiracy theories developed in the furious ultra-right reaction to the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
You would never guess it from what the critics are saying, but the story of the Stop the War coalition fills just half of one chapter in a 13-chapter book.Contrary to what Peter Oborne maintains, I go to great lengths to separate decent people from the scoundrels who lead them. I put their arguments as well as I can, and say they were right in all respects except one: they couldn’t support their comrades in Iraq once the war was over.
Which is odd, because the publishers, Fourth Estate, had apparently originally been pitched a book entitled “Our Friends On The Left”, being “an examination of agonies, idiocies and compromises of mainstream liberal thought”. Since Nick didn’t update his author profile on the Guardian blog, you can see the original blurb there.
Fair enough, maybe the project changed significantly in writing, as Nick decided that mainstream liberal thought wasn’t as agonised, idiotic and compromised as he’d previously believed when you get a good look at it. Except not.
Nick did update the biography on his personal website when he changed the title of the book. It’s described there as
“What’s Left? the story of how the liberal-Left of the 20th century ended up supporting the far Right of the 21st ”
I think the majority of Nick’s readers can hardly be blamed for taking exactly the same assessment of this book as its author. Did anyone really expect anyone to be fooled by this?
Background research on this subject provided by “Aaronovitch Watch (Incorporating Nick Cohen Watch)“, which is a general site about the nature of international politics in a world of globalisation, commonly mistaken for a specialist site for obsessives and stalkers of two named journalists.
{ 41 comments }
Marc Mulholland 02.01.07 at 5:16 am
Going to “great lengths to separate decent people from the scoundrels who lead them” means, for Nick, stating that millions of anti-war protesters marched to ‘save a fascist regime’, this repeated nine times in four paragraphs (pp 280 – 2 in the book; also the Observer extract). Presumably he wrote with a certain consciousness of the likely reception of his words. Cold feet since, however.
Brendan 02.01.07 at 5:42 am
Christopher Hitchens has a lot to answer for. You can infer the degree of his groupies’ slavish hero worship when they start to parrot some of ‘the Hitch’s’ favourite phrases. For example, from Cohen: ‘The best side of previous outbreaks of leftish passion was found in their concern for the underdog. You can see a hatred of sadistic authority running through my list of radical eruptions from the Enlightenment’s detestation of priests with the power to persecute to the sixties generation’s confrontations with racists. Today’s upsurge stands in a dishonourable contrast. Where are the underdogs on whose behalf it is speaking? Answer comes there none….‘
(‘Answer comes there none’ is of course Hitchen’s euphuistic euphemism (hey! dig that alliteration! I can write almost as badly as Hitchens!) for ‘there are plenty of answers but I am too drunk to understand them’. Cohen on the other hand, so far as I know, is usually sober, so what his excuse is I have no idea).
Andrew Brown 02.01.07 at 7:04 am
It is a shame the book was not called by its once projected title, “Fuck off the lot of you”.
dearieme 02.01.07 at 7:28 am
authoritarian strains of left wing politics: but one meets so few different strains of left wing politics.
Nick L 02.01.07 at 7:44 am
“the story of how the liberal-Left of the 20th century ended up supporting the far Right of the 21st”
It almost sounds like the blurb to an intellectual biography of the decentist movement itself…
Fun and games aside, there hasn’t at all been the kind of shift Cohen thinks there has. Stalinist authoritarians like Galloway carried on being Stalinist authoritarians. Foaming-at-the-mouth oppourtunists in the SWP remained true to type: the ‘revelation’ that Muslims are the new global proletariat is no more risible than the notion that the USSR was capitalist all along. Even Decentism has a long history, the traitorous Chancellor in A Very British Coup fits the mould perfectly. Fortunately, all three groups are utterly irrelevent as well as hopelessly tedious.
Matthew 02.01.07 at 7:45 am
“I say they [the anti-war lot] were right in all respects except one: they couldn’t support their comrades in Iraq once the war was over”
So is Cohen now an opponent of the invasion of Iraq (I use the term invasion to distinguish the first part of the war from the ongoing war]?
abb1 02.01.07 at 8:50 am
There’s a chapter on the strange and virtually forgotten story of how pacifists and communists ended up arguing against the British war effort during the Blitz.
What, pacifists arguing against war is a strange story?
derek 02.01.07 at 9:04 am
It’s a weird coincidence, but I don’t think I’d ever heard of Nick Cohen before last night, when I picked up a copy of the _Evening Standard_ (noted organ of the left.. not) to see that Mr. Cohen apparently has a regular column with them. That one started like “I was at a socialist meeting when somebody spoke out against the war, and I wondered again how it is the left supports islamofascism…”
It’s seems he has a nice little career as a tame token “leftie” who agrees with his right wing employers about traitorous lefties.
btw, if you want a strange and totally forgotten story of the Blitz, it’s how the Conservative party’s most senior members wrote to the Nazis to lobby them for a place in the occupation government after Britain fell, and not only paid no price for it, but actually succeeded in painting the left as a fifth column after the war. I doubt any of them was named Cohen, though, they probably just employed willing tools named Cohen instead.
Brendan 02.01.07 at 9:10 am
‘What, pacifists arguing against war is a strange story?’
If you read the rest of the sentence you quote, you will see that Cohen also apparently believes that the Nazi-Soviet pact is ‘virtually forgotten’.
Yet more stunning insights from Britain’s most overpaid columnist (there is plenty of competition).
Callan 02.01.07 at 9:18 am
This would be the book entitled ‘What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way’? Perhaps the subtitle will be excised from later editions.
"Q" the Enchanter 02.01.07 at 9:28 am
Brendan, the fact that Hitch inhabits a mental world between neurosis and sheer lunacy does not grant anyone license to bag on his writing. All the experts agree: Hitch writes good.
(Besides which, he would never use such dysphuistic alliteration. Though (I admit) I quite liked it.)
Steven Poole 02.01.07 at 9:40 am
All the experts agree: Hitch writes good.
Increasingly not so, actually. (Though I am not any kind of “expert” and have not applied for a license to criticise him: perhaps all the experts do still agree, whoever they are.)
Kevin Donoghue 02.01.07 at 9:49 am
Priority for “answer came there none†belongs to Lewis Carroll, I think (The Walrus and the Carpenter). His excuse was that he was writing verse and needed a rhyme for his punch-line, “they’d eaten every oneâ€.
But Hitchens and Cohen might have picked it up from Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, alias Peter Cook:
“I suddenly thought, as I was scrubbing my back with a loofah, I thought, ‘Where can a young couple, who are having an evening out, not too much money, and they want to have a decent meal, y’know, a decent frog and a nice bit of peach, where can they go and get it?’ And answer came there none. And so I had this idea of starting a restaurant specializing in these frogs legs and, er, peaches, and on this premise I built this restaurant.”
It’s a pity we don’t have Streeb-Greebling’s rationale for the troop surge.
Callan 02.01.07 at 9:52 am
This from Amazon.co.uk:
“From the much-loved, [sic] witty [ditto] 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.”
The last sentence seems reasonable enough. There’s more:
“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?”
Perhaps he should have a word with his publishers, his publicity people and himself, not necessarily in that order.
John Emerson 02.01.07 at 9:53 am
I have looked into Orwell’s attitude toward pacifism and the use of Orwell’s writings by American hawks — it’s written up at my URL.
The gist of it is that when Orwell was denouncing pacifists as “objective Nazis” in 1941 and 1942, he was an objective Stalinist using Stalinist language. In succeeding years he specifically rejected the term “objective Nazi” and that whole style of polemic, and ultimately he became good friends with two of the men he had denounced (Julian Symons and George Woodcock).
Michael Kelly, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Sullivan basically picked up Orwell at the bottom of his learning curve. The Orwell we honor is not the polemicist of 1941-1942, but the later Orwell who wrote “Politics and the English language”.
I think that “1984” reveals influence from the pacifists and anarchists who believed that the imperatives of war (“the lunatic atmosphere of war”) and the state have an intrinsic push toward totalitarianism. 1984 is unquestionably anti-Communist and anti-totalitarian, but it’s also an anti-war book. “Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia”.
franck 02.01.07 at 9:57 am
So here’s the thing: should NATO have intervened in Bosnia earlier? Why or why not? Should NATO have intervened in Kosovo? Why or why not?
I don’t think there is much agreement on these questions among the left, and I don’t think it tracks so easily with one’s later approach to the Iraq war (2003-).
Nick Cohen has a germ of an idea here worth exploring, but he’s hopelessly compromised and mostly not worth listening to.
I, for example, supported both interventions, but I realize that that would render me not of “the left” in people’s eyes. That isn’t a terrible thing in my eyes, but it is interesting.
For more fun, is a Turkish invasion of Iraq justified? How about the Russian actions in Chechnya, Moldova, and Georgia? Or how about the Pakistani actions in NWFP or Balochistan?
John Emerson 02.01.07 at 10:01 am
I did not know that the loofah was already around during the Sixties. It only recently came into my name via Bill O’Reilly, under the name “falafel.”
P O'Neill 02.01.07 at 10:07 am
Maybe the original title was “Liberal Fascism” until he discovered that was already taken.
Grand Moff Texan 02.01.07 at 11:21 am
I look at and explain how Bosnia revealed the dark side of the pacifist European temperament and how and why Douglas Hurd and other liberal Tories appeased Serb nationalism.
Oooh! Can I play, too! Perhaps the writer could also look into how certain Russian interests bought Tom DeLay’s support at the same time, no?
.
astrongmaybe 02.01.07 at 11:34 am
I always thought the phrase was “Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s raining.” Is this a variant or the usual version?
Backword Dave 02.01.07 at 11:34 am
Wonderful typo as Freudian slip.
roger 02.01.07 at 12:08 pm
Uh, the more interesting question to me is how much longer a very small group of thumbsuckers can continue to get inordinate media space to make arguments about the “left” that have little bearing on reality, seemed to be addressed to nobody, and studiously avoids the question of whether one should or should not support the ethnic cleansing being pursued by a theocratic government in Iraq at the moment. But I loved this sentence: “While growing up, his mother would search the supermarket shelves for politically reputable citrus fruit and despair.” So often, the contemplation of the once noble orange has the same effect on me – even though I come from more cheerful stock. My mother confined her searches to the politically reputable celery stalk. Ah, it was a happy domestic scene – sometimes Dad, after a hard day spent reading Karl Marx and Irving Krystal, would bring home some politically reputable popcorn, and we would all sing our favorite songs, like the Comrade Green Berets song (Put the stalin medal/on my son’s chest…) To quote Comrade Orwell, such, such were the joys.
Henry 02.01.07 at 12:11 pm
My favourite bit of Cohenabilia is this “post”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/11/nick_cohen_on_w.html by Oliver Kamm, which praises Cohen’s book for dissecting:
and then spends a couple of paragraphs, apparently in all sincerity, singing the praises of Christopher Hitchens.
I’m with Steven on the deterioration of Hitchens’ writing by the way, a matter entirely apart from the obnoxiousness of his opinions. Take, for example, this recent “they’re outbreeding us you know”:http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_urbanities-steyn.html number on the profundity and insight of Mark Steyn.
“his argument is exponential …”???? Not only does Hitchens again display his “sweet tooth”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/21/denial/ for bogus statistical claims, but the sentence is nonsensical.
Justin Horton 02.01.07 at 12:20 pm
The Orwell we honor is not the polemicist of 1941-1942, but the later Orwell who wrote “Politics and the English language”.
Well, that and the earlier Orwell who wrote Homage to Catalonia”. Or a wide variety of other fine works at a wide variety of times.
John Emerson 02.01.07 at 12:49 pm
Just not the 1941-1942 Stalinist. I like the earlier books too, but without the last three years of his life he’d be a pretty minor writer.
SamChevre 02.01.07 at 1:02 pm
Almost OT, but I think “Down and Out in Paris and London” and “The Road to Wigan Pier” are the best of Orwell’s work.
constablesavage 02.01.07 at 1:47 pm
24-26 yes, but its the minor work of GO that seems to so fascinate the decents.
At about 15 I went through an Orwell phase. It was recognised as the sort of thing you did. But if you hadn’t grown out of it before 17 you were reckoned a bit slow
Almost wish we could resurrect the old horror to let him loose on some of those who are taking his name in vain
Even absent Orwell’s ghost someone should point out to Cohen that starting a war, any war, means condemning some of your citizens to death in a cause they may not believe in. Both on left and right there are those who have honourable reservations about that. Mind you the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ in decent discourse have become so removed from what they mean that Cohen may not agree
engels 02.01.07 at 2:11 pm
What would Orwell have to say about the Decents? Always a good question, particluarly while Harry’s Place (and Decent Dave’s blog for that matter) is currently dominated by a series of threads whose only purpose appears to ve to humiliate and whip up outrage against one of their own regular anti-war commenters (“Benjamin”). Keep throwing those stones at Emmanuel Goldstein, guys!
Daniel 02.01.07 at 2:38 pm
I think he might say:
“They are red-hot revolutionaries as long as all goes well, but every real emergency reveals instantly that they are shamming. One threat to the Suez Canal, and ‘anti-Fascism’ and ‘defence of British interests’ are discovered to be identical.“
John Emerson 02.01.07 at 3:06 pm
From reading his letters, one of Orwell’s main active political committments during his last thee or four years, possibly his only one, was the “Freedom Defense Committee”, which specifically was intended to protect minority political opinions.
And even at his worst (1941-1942) Orwell never approached the squealing rage characteristic of many of the Decents. (I’m more familiar with the “American” version of that shit — i.e., Hitchens, Sullivan, and Kelly — than with the Decents as such.)
Brendan 02.01.07 at 3:16 pm
‘What would Orwell have to say about the Decents?’
Following from Daniel, the ‘Notes on Nationalism’ is relevant. ‘The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.’
See also his definition of intellectual features of nationalism: obsession, instability, and indifference to reality.
It should also be noted that Orwell was always very clear that Zionism was a kind of nationalism.
According to his Wikipedia entry, Orwell opposed the creation of the State of Israel (now that I’ve mentioned that the truth loving Decents will probably go now and alter that entry).
dr ngo 02.02.07 at 12:55 am
As a fan of Orwell, I feel I ought to take part in this discussion, but actually to think about his various writings and assess them at this hour of the morning (almost 1 AM) is more than I can manage.
So I’ll content myself with a simple query arising from this quote:
“… search the supermarket shelves for politically reputable citrus fruit and despair.â€
Is the supermarket in fact the best place to look for politically reputable despair?
turkish bill 02.02.07 at 3:20 am
samchevre at 26: How do you rate ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’?
ajay 02.02.07 at 6:21 am
While growing up, his mother would search the supermarket shelves for politically reputable citrus fruit and despair
Aisle 1: Fresh Fruit and Vegetables, Lust, Envy, Ready-Made Salads, Sloth
Aisle 8: Household Goods, Cleaning Products, Anomie, Toiletries, Despair, Self-Loathing, Baked Goods
Moz 02.02.07 at 7:25 am
Comment 16: I supported both interventions, but I realize that that would render me not of “the left†in people’s eyes.
I think you’re doing the same thing Cohen is – define “left” in a way that suits your argument, and rejecting anyone who doesn’t hold that the idea you’ve defined. Which makes your/his argument easy, of course.
What amuses me with these arguments is that “the other” is required to have a single, consistent position that never changes in the face of new information, while “the good guys” are allowed to do whatever they like, build the dictator up, smash him down, “Oceania has always been at war” indeed.
On the left-right axis I’m definitely left, but I’m also strongly anarchist/green on those axes. And I have no problem at all supporting military intervention to stop genocide, as one possible approach. My problem with military intervention is that I want to see evidence that it actually works before I support it in a specific case. My understanding is that military interventions have worked, but not always, and the evidence suggests that the preconditions are not well understood. But I am probably wrong, military history is something I’m iggorent of.
Remember – the World Trade Center attack occurred on the anniversary of the US coup in Chile that installed Pinochet (who is still a darling of the right). I still wonder if that date was deliberate.
Brendan 02.02.07 at 8:31 am
Just to clear something up: contrary to what the Decents normally state or imply, there actually already is an international mechanism to deal with genocide: it is called the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and it came into effect in 1951.
Now, sidestepping the issues of how well this convention has functioned since then, one thing must be made clear: the UN and Britain did NOT attempt to ‘trigger it’ to provide a causus belli for the invasion of Iraq. Instead they concentrated on WMD ‘threat’ and Saddam’s alleged non-compliace with other, previous UN resolutions (but NOT the Genocide convention).
The Decent habit of going: ‘So what would you do about genocide then? Eh? Eh? Eh?’ is an interesting question, of relevance to experts on international law, but it is totally irrelevant to the morality or otherwise of the invasion of Iraq because, to repeat, genocide was not discussed as a motivation for that war.
Steve LaBonne 02.02.07 at 9:10 am
But it’s increasingly clear that genocide is damn well what’s going to happen as a result of the war. Funny how that wasn’t discussed during the run-up, either…
The “decents” should have the decency to shut the hell up.
Guano 02.02.07 at 10:58 am
Orwell got very hot under the collar about the word “trotsky-fascism” so he may have had a word or two to say about “islamo-fascism”.
SamChevre 02.02.07 at 4:16 pm
Turkish bill at #33,
I think “Keep the Aspidastra Flying” is OK, but I’m much more familiar with working-class poverty than artist poverty.
John Emerson 02.03.07 at 8:00 am
Aspidastra was Orwell’s least favorite, IIRC, and he may have refused to ahve it reprinted at one point.
clew 02.03.07 at 6:31 pm
Aspidistra was Orwell’s version of “the only position for women in the Movement is prone”, and I am glad to hear he was embarrassed by it later.
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