Nick Cohen: What’s Left?
Posted on Monday 29 January, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized
In the post this morning comes my review copy of Nick Cohen’s eagerly anticipated new work ‘What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way’. Just for once, I’m going to break with my usual practice in such matters and actually read a book before reviewing it.
But the basic thesis – as has been trailed on websites of some of Nick’s political friends, such as Oliver Kamm – is that the left as we know has been transformed from well-meant harmless wusses into bunch of objectively Islamofascist-lovin’ scum-suckin’ tossers.
That may be something of an oversimplification. But not – I suspect after having read two chapters already – that much of an oversimplification of the contents of what is shaping up to be a one-proposition pony of a book.
Just as an aside, here are a couple of extracts from the blurb on the back:
‘Nick Cohen comes from the Left. While growing up, his mother would search the supermarket shelves for politically reputable citrus fruit.’
Obviously a posh boy, then. My mum memorised the prices of all types of foods at every shop in town and trekked from one to the other on foot to buy things wherever they were cheapest.
The cover also compares the writing of Cohen – pictured left – with ‘the angry satire of Swift’. Well, as it happens I recently reread ‘A Modest Proposal’. Them there’s high standards you’re asking to be judged by, Nick. But OK, let’s play it your way.
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15 Responses to “Nick Cohen: What’s Left?”
It’s a total jumble from what I can gather. There was a long extract in the Observer. I have to wait for my copy from the Library, so I just rely on this.
It neither new nor startling to have a few digs at the ‘life-style’ left, who nowadays have air-miles and a host of organic criteria at the ehart of their feeble politics.
In the ‘sixties/seventies North London liberal lefties certainly took seriously the campaign against South African for the very good reason that the ANC and the Anti-Apartheid Campaign asked them to. My Woodcraft Group in Muswell Hill (drawing on Haringey as a whole, and further afield) had plenty of ANC exiles’ kids in it, so it was hardly an abstract matter for those who grew up in the real left. And so what if others acted as guilty liberals? A bit of internationalist alturism is surely better than the kind of self-indulgent Green ‘life style’ today. BTW: my mum would go to the Greengrocer’s in Middleton Road rather than a pricy supermarket any day.
As for apologists for Islamicism: well there’s plenty of people who post on Dave’s Blog who’ve been at the forefront of the fight against this. The idea that an alliance with the blood stained Islamicist bourgeoisie is ‘anti-imperialist’ or siding with the ‘oppressed’ (that is backing one group of oppressors against another) is, Cohen is quite right, as enormous a hallucinatory, lying and hypocritical strategy as the British CPGB’s worst complicity in Stalinism. Those who tag along with this, making softer noises, or whingeing about Islamophobia when their reactionary allies are criticised, are frankly simply wishful thinkers seeking some glimmer of hope where there is none.
But why this means that we should back the even more morally tarnished neo-Conservatives, or US policy on ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ in the Middle East is beyond my ken. The Charnel House that is Iraq today was built by the US occupation; the sectarian killings fueled by its government’s strategy; the mass thieving of its resources by International Business, sponsered by its administrators; and I haven’t even got to the murders and torture by its army. Nor the UK’s role in all this. It hasn’t ‘gone wrong’ despite good intentions: the invasion was based on a denial of the moral rights of the people of Iraq, and the means used were patently only capable of causing misery and destruction.
Why do we bother about people like Cohen, Hitchens and the like. They might be very vocal and visible in certain quarters but when it comes to the key issues/campaigns of the Left they’re a laughable irrelevance – haven’t the Left got more important things to think about than these saddos (yes, I know the irony of sending this message)?
And as for Cohen and his chums in the Euston group etc describing themselves as Left – well, you can call your pet Fido but if it’s small, orange and swims around in a bowl it’s probably not a dog.
I always thought the key test for a socialist was where you stood when it came to imperialist aggression (sorry about the jargon) and that your main enemy was your own ruling class.
Also, I wonder how much the attitude of Cohen and other pro-war ‘leftists’ is fatally warped by
their attitudes to the Israel.
I have to say that you can oppose the Iraq War and disagree with the likes of Cohen yet still not slip as far as Doug has done.
I find his definition of ‘socialist’ quite a way off the mark. I don’t see why socialists should always oppose their own ruling classes under any circumstances, and also why this should lead them to sympathise with all classes that are not ruling. ‘Imperialist aggression’ is quite a difficult concept and takes the mistaken line that socialists should always argue for ‘national self-determination’, which has been so problematic in the past. And, as for Israel, this is hardly a black-and-white issue for the left.
Oh dear, more in sorrow than anger. Part of the problem is that Cohen takes Paul Berman’s textual analysis of the works of Qatb too seriously. Scary stuff – but no real substitute for wider analysis of the rise of Islamism and the failure of progressive forces in Middle East and North Africa.
Cohen seems the mirror image of too many people who can’t forgive Blair for Iraq but if it wasn’t for that would evidently forgive PFI, foundation hospitals, faith schools, top up fees, etc, etc. Before all this Cohen did at least bang on about PFI, treatment of asylum seakers, new Labour’s failure to tackle poverty and inequality at a time when criticism of Blair was deeply unfashionable in Fleet Street. I hope rather than expect once Cohen has got this out of his system he’ll go back to writing what he used to – there’s been the odd piece lately on issues like rich tax avoidance – rather than follow the Melanie Phillips path.
And, as for Israel, this is hardly a black-and-white issue for the left.
Well, no issues are black-and-white, to be honest: or scarcely any. But sometimes there are central truths to a conflict which have been ignored for so long that they need to be stressed ad stressed again so that they are not left out of the dicussion ads they have been hitherto. One of these is the fact of the Nakba and its consequences.
Amongst other bizarre claims, Cohen’s book states that the anti-war movement in Ireland was led by Sinn Fein. This “fact” is then used to paint the movement as hypocritical or simply ridiculous.
Now I don’t have much time for Sinn Fein, so my chief problem with this isn’t that it implies that Sinn Fein couldn’t be sincerely or even admirably anti-war. My main problem is that the claim is completely and utterly untrue.
Sinn Fein had small but organised contingents on the big anti-war demonstrations. They provided a speaker to most of those demonstrations. They brought a few banners. They were also affiliated to one of the less visible anti-war groups, the Peace and Neutrality Alliance, although they weren’t the dominant force in that group. They were part of the anti-war movement, but they weren’t even the most significant element of it.
No fair minded observer could even possibly think that the anti-war movement in Ireland was Sinn Fein led. It’s most prominent strands were at various times the SWP, direction actionistas, the Socialist Party, various liberal or left labour types. None of these groups ever managed to exercise a real hegemony over the anti-war movement.
Mere facts aren’t of interest to Cohen however. His only interest in the anti-war movement in Ireland is to make a rhetorical point: equating Sinn Fein with hypocritical opposition to war and the anti-war movement in turn with Sinn Fein.
Be aware that in the passages on Foucault and Irigraray, Nick appears to be getting his material at third or even fourth hand, and that there are plenty of people who disagree with him on the interpretation of a number of things he says, and do so from the advantageous standpoint of having read the books in question.
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ftssoldier.blogspot.com
http://www.edwardsaid.org
How is Nick cohen paid form his weekly columns
in the The Observer?
Please reply?
When I was a kid one of the things that I found unappealing about the conservative folk I lived amongst was their certainty on things derived from ‘how things should be’. The working class could aspire to be worthy, white foreigners might be good chaps after all and the only good thing about people of different races was that odd individuals might rise above their colour.
Now I am a grumpy old man one of the things I find unappealing about the right on folk I now live amongst is their certainty on things derived from ‘what we should think’. Britain is second only to America in being racist, gays make better parents than non-gays – presumably grumpies, and ensuring that the most troublesome hooligan is included into schools where others are trying to learn is the way forward for education.
J. B. Priestley described how his socialism arose from his abhorrence of the waste of human beings. It seems many on the left now are more interested in ensuring a complete wasteland to fit in with their ideology of how things will be, whether the people want it or not.
I haven’t had the chance to read Nick Cohen’s book yet but I suspect my howls of rage might find company in it. There are a number of people, still socialists in the JBS sense, who are putting pen to paper about the betrayal of a socialism for humans rather than ciphers. As a newish phenomonon it doubtless is a bit rough and ready, not as polished as the output of the Tariq Alis, Noam Chomskys and Polly Toynbees of this world but these brutish folk are getting their bearings. It takes courage to step out of the mind ghetto and first steps are often clumsy. Possibly even a little ‘rough trade’ compared to the elegant wordsmiths – obviously I don’t include Michael Moore – of the Senior Common Room of the left establishment.
Scribblers of the left think! You have nothing to lose but your certainty!
Of course JBS should have been JBP
Nick Cohen used to be brilliant, didn’t he? Well that’s how I remember it, although I’m sure our right-wing opponents found him as exasperating as most lefties do now. Still, he was a good guy to have on your side. Gave a shit and hated bien-pensant Blairism. I must track down my copy of Cruel Britannia .
I would like to see a review that actually picks Cohen up on his various factual errors, his limited research, and his general delegation of thinking to a handful of loudmouth blogs. If anyone is interested, there is my own review here . I wouldn’t normally self-advertise, but I feel I must share the pain of reading What’s Left?.
One thing I point out is that Cohen purloined the bulk of his irrelevant riff on post-modernism from Wheen’s How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World and the blog Butterflies and Wheels. He got the French collaborationists and some Qutb from Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (other Qutb appears to have been pasted in from the Guardian Saturday Review site). He got George Lansbury and the appeasers from Kamm’s Anti-Totalitarianism. The socialist masterplan reference was taken from Harry’s Place. His Makiya material comes from Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate. His attacks on Chomsky come from — who else? — Oliver Kamm. The rest appears to be a recycling job on his old columns. I can see no evidence that he conducted any first-hand scholarship at all. His sources are limited, predictable and, for the main, monotonic.
Not that much of this has any bearing on the anti-war marchers he so dislikes. That seems to derive from the unwillingness to campaign against insurgents, and their willingness to march behind George Galloway. It’s all astonishingly dull for anyone who’s read his sources already, quite apart from the facile nature of the arguments.
StuartA, nice review, but the people Berman talks about mainly were mainly collaborators (people who collaborated without being Nazis, mainly based in Vichy) rather than collaborationists (ideological fascists mainly based in Paris).
Sorry, but as a lefty, ideological distinctions are my meat and drink
Thanks for raising the distinction, Chris. Does this mean that when Cohen says Petain “proposed a collaborationist government” (p 251) that he was wrong? In a brief flick through I can’t see Berman using either term.
Chris is right about collaborators vs collaborationists – almost everyone collaborated, but there were very few collaborationists. What Petain proposed was to collaborate & do it enthusiastically. He dressed it up in a ghastly right-wing rhetoric of national sacrifice and self-abasement – essentially France had been very very bad and needed to be punished. (Masochism and the extreme Right – there’s something going on there…) But it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Petain proposed collaboration, and he certainly proposed to be head of the government; I think ‘proposed a collaborationist government’ (although strictly speaking wrong) is close enough for journalism.