Well There Goes the Weekend

What? You couldn’t schedule a prostate exam or root canal instead?

Their main function seems to be as apologists for a brutal occupation. They are as bad as the apologists for Milosevic whom they presume to judge.

Does anyone else find it strange to see political electees engaging in a theoretical roundtable discussion? This would never happen in America.

Of course the Euston Manifesto implies that a certain sort of lunacy has escaped the luxurious confines of the American Enterprise Institute and associated venues.

Would someone please tell me, in 25 words or less, what the Euston Manifesto is?
“We, the undersigned, are too sexy for our shirts, so sexy it hurts.”

‘Would someone please tell me, in 25 words or less, what the Euston Manifesto is?’

Following up from Elliott’s attempt:

‘I don’t need to sell my soul

he (Tony Blair, presumably) is already in me

I wanna be adored…..

I wanna i wanna i wanna be adored….’

Or…..

‘Take my hand,
I’ve changed my mind again
Really, I believed it true
…
But I was wrong…
Take my hand,
Don’t think of hesitation…
Liberation!

Ta ra ra ra ra ra
Ta ra ra ra ra ra’

Or more simply;

‘Now I’m ready to close my eyes
Now I’m ready to close my mind
Now I’m ready to feel the hand
To lose my heart in the burnin’ sands

Cos now I wanna be your dog……’

Any clearer now?

Would someone please tell me, in 25 words or less, what the Euston Manifesto is?

I can do it in fewer than ten:

It’s the World’s most powerful tin-foil hat detector.

To save the commenters here from having to run through more of the usual deranged comparisons, here’s a fun round-up of just a few of the crazy rants provoked by this “implication free” document ,most of them, like the comments above I presume, quotes from members of the English-speaking world’s fine higher education establishments:

“I’m the first to agree that there are many, many, dreadful things happening in the world at the moment. The natural reaction of most people is to want to end this suffering… but are we right to? Within living memory us Europeans were butchering each other by the million. After centuries of this conflict, we’ve, hopefully, realised that it’s futile and we live in peace with protected human rights. Are we right to deny other societies this learning process?”

“The Euston Manifesto calls for nothing short of what happened in 1938 Germany. Placed back in that time, this piece of work would have called for support of the actions of Adolf Hitler.”

“I have a long and tedious post in the works about The Euston Manifesto and just why it’s a dangerous pro-capitalist tract dressed up as a harmless load of wet western wank (to borrow a phrase from my erstwhile lecturer in political philosophy).”

“I will not sign it, because I strongly believe that an ‘overthrow of Baathist government’ cannot be applauded on any level at all if it was not begun and wholly supported by the Iraqi people themselves. The US actions in Iraq are the same as in Vietnam, just on a smaller scale”

You can enjoy more here:

http://www.pootergeek.com/?p=2191

Daniel Davies, one of your co-bloggers, likes to accuse the Euston Manifesto’s authors of being “dishonest”. He’s yet to provide any evidence for this claim, so it’s pleasing that he is caught out lying immediately below the blog post I cite. (This upset the poor man so much he suggested elsewhere—again with no evidence—that I’d tinkered with his comments to make him look stupid; as if it required that much effort to make him look stupid, as if I could be bothered.)

There is a special room in hell reserved for the “decent left.” It’s just an empty room — the idea is that the combined smugness will be unbearable. I’m skeptical, given the high tolerance for smugness these people have demonstrated thus far, but I wasn’t on the committee.

Euston Manifesto (bats right, throws right) played for the Giants from 1963 to 1967, when he was traded to the Reds for a couple of relief pitchers who never amounted to much. He hit .307 that season for Cincy and was runner up for Gold Glove at short stop. Injuries plagued him in the following season and he was sent down to the minors for the balance of year. He was traded to Pittsburgh the following year in a multi-team swap involving 18 other players. He hit a pathetic .181 through June when he was benched for a rookie phenom the Pirates had paid a signing bonus of over $5,000,000, big bucks in those days. He was sent back to the minors where knee trouble finally ended his career two years later. Today, he runs a successful line of dry cleaning establishments in the Orlando, Florida area.

The other real story here is that the “smart quotes” system CT’s got running is so incredibly stupid that if you put a comma after what ought to be a close-quotation mark, it thinks “quotation mark followed by a printing character—must be an opening!”. I wonder if it’ll do the same to the mark followed by a period in the previous sentence…

Let’s find out!

“foo“,
“foo”,

The scientific method triumphs again!

As much as they want to disguise it, the guys who wrote the Euston manifesto were thinking of Whitney Houston. They were inspired by this passage in the American Psycho movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbkledi3bAE – in particular, Norman Geras found the inspiration for many of the most stirring passages in the manifesto from Patrick Bateman’s own paen to The Greatest Love of All, a ‘universal message that crosses all boundaries.”

There’s a much better pub in Euston anyway. But why have they changed its name?

I really am baffled by the accusation that the Euston manifesto lot are smug. Isn’t smugness plainly rather more common among the ‘we knew we were right all along’ crowd? One or two commenters on this website certainly aren’t short on it.

I mean if I had supported the Iraq war on the basis that I hoped it would improve the lives of the Iraqis, I’d be feeling anything but smug now, but rather horrified. Not to mentioned that a fair few Eustonites did not support the war, although that point seems to be hand-waved away.

And taking cracks at them for thinking that they are the moral arbitors etc., for Christ sake, surely that’s self evidently an incoherant criticism – anybody with a moral point of view can be accused of that, the Euston’s opponents just as easily.

For what it’s worth, I see no reason to doubt the sincerity of those Eustonites who did support the invasion, nor quite why their humanitarian motives should be sneered at quite so much, notwithstanding the fact that they turned out to be spectacularly wrong about the invasion of Iraq achieving what they’d hoped of it. No doubt a non-smug commentator will be along in a moment to point out how any idiot could have predicted it would end in disaster (after all, very many idiots did), but perhaps the world is a little harder to foresee than it is to pick apart in hindsight.

I think that the Eustonites make some good points in their criticisms of much of the popular expression of ‘anti-war’ opinion, (the Nick Cohen, Hitchens arguments), and I think that not being prepared to see any merit in their arguments (and just to just deride them – and to not see past the fact that they were wrong about Iraq) does not reflect very well on anybody. That is to say, I think ‘your’ attitude towards them stinks, if I may address some of you collectively. Childish, point scoring, closed minded – and some of you are supposedly truth seeking academics too. Tsk, shame on you – go away and read some Popper and Feynman, and come back when you’ve got a bit more of a generous intellectual attitude.

For what it’s worth too, I am not a Euston signatory.

So I read this as ” YouTube channel devoted to discussing the implications of the Eurovision contest” and that actually made more sense.

The reason it makes sense to give the Eustonies some stick is that they were the ones who decided that it was OK to behave like that. They wrote their manifesto when it was already obvious that Iraq was a disaster, and they said that they weren’t interested in “picking over the rubble” (a phrase I am going to continue to remind them of, because it was so disgusting) and that anyone who was interested in trying to establish some political consequences for this failure was in some way morally deficient.

They decided that it was OK to call people sympathisers with fascists, and they used a very broad brush when doing so. They decided they could do without Amnesty International and the United Nations (the only organisations criticised by name), because it was going to be the USA sorting everything out from now on. They were very keen on throwing around the accusations of anti-Semitism at anyone who didn’t agree with them about Israel. Now they want respect and serious treatment from us?

Fuck a bunch of that. There are plenty of people taking out a similar position on humanitarian interventionism to the Euston mob who didn’t act like such a petulant little bunch of wankers (hey guess what? Michael Bérubé is one of them and he has recently joined Crooked Timber!). Just as there ought to be political consequences for the people who made the disastrous misjudgement to invade Iraq, there have to be some consequences for the Euston Manifesto crowd for the unpleasant and uncomradely way they chose to carry out politics.

As part of that humanitarian surge in Iraq that drove so many people of good will to support the war, Nir Rosen’s article on the nearly two million refugees from the war has some eyeopening quotes – things that surely Nick Cohen’s comrades of the left, ever mindful that you have to break some eggs, can get behind. I particularly enjoyed this paragraph about the refugee situation form John Bolton:

“What I find most disturbing,” Bacon went on to say, “is that there seems to be no recognition of the problem by the president or top White House officials.” But John Bolton, who was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in the Bush administration, and later ambassador to the United Nations, offers one explanation for this lack of recognition: it is not a crisis, and it was not triggered by American action. The refugees, he said, have “absolutely nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam.

“Our obligation,” he [Bolton] told me this month at his office in the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, “was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.” Bolton likewise did not share the concerns of Bacon [an expert on refugee crises] and others that the refugees would become impoverished and serve as a recruiting pool for militant organizations in the future. “I don’t buy the argument that Islamic extremism comes from poverty,” he said. “Bin Laden is rich.” Nor did he think American aid could alleviate potential anger: “Helping the refugees flies in the face of received logic. You don’t want to encourage the refugees to stay. You want them to go home. The governments don’t want them to stay.”

Luckily, though Bolton was forced out by sympathizers of the islamofascist way, Rosen quotes Bush’s undersecretaries of state for dealing with refugees as agreeing with him. Nothing like getting people, in a humane but firm manner, to go back to a place where they will be killed by bullet, explosive, dental drill, etc. It is, after all, the price they pay for the democracy we brought them. And they should be damn grateful.

“…there have to be some consequences for the Euston Manifesto crowd for the unpleasant and uncomradely way they chose to carry out politics.”

Since those consequences at CT only entail childish petulance I fail to see the point. Having looked thru what the Eustonites have written and what gets written by their opponents my conclusion is that it’s their opponents who spend more time obsessively denigrating those they disagree with.

Thanks for sharing, Neil.

If the Eustonites were to be judged by the same standards that they applied to Milosevic they would all be tried by a so-called international court and sent to prison.

Aopologizing for people who have commited far worse actions than the people they themselves have previously judged to be criminals is doing something right? You have a strange sense of right and wrong.

Here is the structure of Ohenry’s fallacy:

The opposition is pissed off;

Ergo I am right.

That’s a nifty logical argument, isn’t it?

Isn’t smugness plainly rather more common among the ‘we knew we were right all along’ crowd?

Sometimes, Luis. There’s no monopoly on smugness in all this mess. For the record, I got a couple of things seriously wrong about five years ago, not that anyone’s asked. As of May 2002, I didn’t think Hitchens was going to go so far as to support war in Iraq, let alone degenerate to the point at which he would call the Dixie Chicks “fucking fat slags” a year later; later that year, I mistakenly identified Michael Walzer as a member of the prowar left, and I regret that to this day, because Walzer is, of all the Euston signatories, the one I respect most (he was also remarkably gracious in informing me, in the fall of 2002, that he considered the war foolish and unnecessary); and most of all, I would never have believed on May 13, 2002 that on May 13, 2007, the New York Times‘ lead headline would be “Civilian Deaths Undermine Allies’ War on Taliban”. I was kinda hoping that the “allies” would understand the importance of not losing Afghanistan to the Taliban all over again. But apparently they had other ideas.

I took my little swipe at Ignatieff above, though, because I think the people who applied the idea of “humanitarian intervention” to this pre-emptive war managed to trash the principle they were championing. (Likewise Jean Bethke Elshtain, who argued that Iraq was a “just” war. Though Walzer, who wrote the book on the subject, knew better.) The fact that the Eustonites now have themselves a series of YouTube episodes on “intervention after Iraq” is a little galling — though, with a tip of the hat to Daniel in 31 (with whom I disagree on Kosovo and Budweiser both), not quite so galling as that line about “picking over the rubble.” Especially since the rubble is still bouncing as we speak.

As it happens, I spoke at an anti-war teach-in in 2002 but would dearly have liked to be proven wrong in my reasons for opposing the Iraq intervention (wrong war, wrong time, especially wrong actors). As did, apparently, some of the Euston Manifesto authors. But isn’t it interesting how readily (reflexively?) abhoring the violence in Iraq –by ALL parties– is regarded as “apologizing for people who have commited far worse actions than the people they themselves have previously judged to be criminals”? Tlön anyone?

They abhored the violence in the former Yugoslavia as well and then imprisoned Milosevic for it. Why are they now excusing and apologizing for far worse crimes in Iraq?

Apparently Ohenry thinks that crocodile tears of bleeding heart abhorrence is the same as applying the same intemperate standards that they applied to Milosevic. If they had not applied that intemperate judgement, they would not now be forced to apply the same intemperate standard to their own. They made their own bed and now they refuse to lie in it. Ohenry finds this commendable.

Euston is not alone in blurring the distinction between liberal and humanitarian interventions. Virtually all of the Guardian’s in-house columnists do it as well. I think that a lot of people are genuinely confused.

What is uniquely destructive about Euston is that its supporters simultaneously claim to support the cause of human rights and humanitarianism while attacking its ‘actual existing’ institutions.

On the one hand Amnesty International, the UN and humanitarian agencies are maligned as useless’, ‘biased’, ‘accomplices to mass murder’ etc. but, on the other, the Eustonites arguments for humanitarian interventions, in certain circumstances, discredit genuine humanitarians by associating these with the cause of liberal imperialism.

It is a modern day version of Trotskyist entryism.

Does it mean that only those who “calibrated their views” were right and those who “would have said so no matter what” were sorta like a broken clock being right twice a day?

I haven’t been watching dsquared specifically, but I got the impression that he evolved from “not this war now” to “no wars of aggression ever”, or IOW, from “calibrated views” to “no matter what”.

So, Daveh at #6, I think that a good short characterization of the Eustonites would be:

– It was going to be “the winner takes all” in the wake of Iraq. We fucked up but, by God, are we sticking to our guns.

26 words.