Innocence lost
Guilt-ridden liberals need to start standing up for their ideals and values rather than falling out among themselves.
The first concerns his description of a column written by Seumas Milne, just after September 11 2001 which, Andrew Anthony claims was representative of a broader strand of ambivalence about the attacks among liberal-left opinion. The second is his critique of "knee-jerk anti-Americanism", which he says has become a shibboleth among this same group.
I was working in Kosovo on 9/11 and so have no direct knowledge of how the event was reported or discussed in Britain. However, my first comment piece in the Guardian was commissioned by Seumas Milne while I was working in Afghanistan and was in direct response to a letter I had written to friends and family describing my feelings after the murder of a colleague by the Taliban. It seems to me incredible that I should have to preface an article critiquing US foreign policy with a condemnation of the murder of civilians yet, judging from the chapter "kill us, we deserve it", in Nick Cohen's invective-filled book, this is the level at which political discourse is now being conducted among a section of liberal-left opinion.
Andrew Anthony cites the often robust debates at Comment is free as further support for his views, but, by this measure at least, the overwhelmingly negative reaction to a recent article by Neil Clark on the Iraqi translators sharply contradicts his thesis. For the vast majority of us, there is no contradiction between pointing out the roots of Islamic terrorism while also firmly condemning it.
The "anti-Americanism" about which he complains is not so much wrong as simply out of date. While it is true that this was a feature of the British left in the 1980s, while he was picking coffee in Nicaragua, my own memory is that much of the "thinking left" had taken on a more nuanced position by the following decade.
The end of the cold war, the spread of democracy in Eastern Europe and Latin America, and the growing influence of human rights, the environment and development, fundamentally changed the nature of political discourse in the 1990s. The traditional left analysis proved less and less able to explain developments in international relations - most notably in the debates that took place about "humanitarian interventions". From the UN's first operation in Somalia in 1991 through the Balkan wars, the Rwandan genocide and the civil wars that tore much of Africa apart, it was simply not credible to argue that the west was only interested in oil, or strategic interests or regaining its lost colonies. Political humanitarianism deserves to be criticised, on its own terms, without needing to pretend that it was part of some sort of western plot.
Ironically, though, Andrew Anthony starts his personal political journey just as America was moving back towards a self-interested unilateralism. The advent of George Bush's presidency, combined with the aftermath of 9/11, unleashed a rogue superpower on the world. The intervention in Afghanistan was the first salvo of a "war" that has also included support for an attempted coup in Venezuela in 2002, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, support for the bombardment of Lebanon last summer, proxy aggression in Somalia at the start of this year and threats of an attack on Iran today. The consequences of these adventures can be seen in this year's statistics of the number of refugees in the world, which now correlates almost directly with the places where the west is intervening, a marked reversal of previous trends.
The US "war on terror" has also seen an abandonment of some of the most basic concepts of international legality. Guantánamo Bay, secret renditions, Abu Ghraib and the moves to shield CIA operatives from prosecution for war crimes fit into a single pattern. It is hardly surprising that the US has done all in its power to destroy the international criminal court when Vice-President Cheney boasts that submerging people's heads under water during interrogation is a "no-brainer" if it saves American lives.
The neocons who dominated Bush's first administration had a clear political project, which involved reshaping the world in US interests. History will remember them as much for their incompetence as their ambition. But no account of the major political challenges facing progressives in the world today can neglect their influence. On this Andrew Anthony seems to be curiously silent. His assertion that the British left has been damaged by its "anti-Americanism" will also probably come as a surprise to most observers who have just watched a British Labour prime minister destroy his career by his slavish adherence to US foreign policy. Gordon Brown's subsequent decision to distance himself from this was an act of simple political survival.
Bush now has less than a year and a half left in office - a lame duck president who is increasingly isolated both at home and abroad. My guess is that most of the rest of the world's leaders are going to concentrate on trying to ensure that he does not do anything even more stupid during this time; which probably means trying to block him from doing pretty much anything at all. This is not a result of "guilt" or a "refusal to face reality", as Andrew Anthony implies, but a hard-headed political calculation.
Where most of us would agree with Andrew Anthony is in his view that a reassertion of liberal values should start with a reaffirmation of the universality of human rights. That means challenging violations everywhere, including those committed by our own governments, and recognising all the threats that exist to peace in the world today. Waking up to reality means more than announcing that you have suddenly decided to stop internalising your guilt for being a liberal. It actually means standing up for those ideals when it is difficult.
To read more on Andrew Anthony's latest book, click here
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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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