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Monday, August 07, 2006

Leftover business

When I returned from blogging in mid-July after a seventeen-day layoff, one of my critics was here to greet me.  It seems that I had committed the thoughtcrime of calling Israel’s bombing of Lebanon “disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive,” following this in comments by saying that Israel’s response to Hezbollah was “morally illegitimate” because of the degree of civilian casualties it entailed.  That condemnation of Israel, however, was not good enough.  Instead, it earned me this little comment:

Sort of like labelling the Nazi response to the Reichstag fire “German’s disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive response to the latest Dutch anarchist outrages,” isn’t it?

When I objected to the implicit Israelis = Nazis trope animating this remark, calling it a form of moral idiocy, my critic reappeared to explain that I had misunderstood him.  It turned out that he was not likening the Israelis to Nazis; no, he was likening me to Nazi apologists:

But as you know very well, this trope is not a = b (Israelis = Nazis).  The trope is x:a::y:b - Those who cluck their tongues about Israel’s “overreaction” to Hizbullah terrorism are analogous to those who clucked their tongues about the NSDAP’s “overreaction” to the communist torching of the Reichstag.

1933: “I agree, the Communist menace in Mitteleuropa must be stopped, but the Reichskanzler’s reaction to the fire has been disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive.”

2006: “I agree, Hizbullah’s terrorism must be stopped, but the Prime Minister’s reaction to the kidnapping has been disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive.”

Liberal moral cowardice, right across the board.  Is there a difference?  Sure.  In 1933, the Center Party honorably refused to support the Reichstag Fire Decree.  In 2006, HRC has announced unequivocal support for this slaughter.  No doubt you’ll be sending her a check in two years’ time.  The plague take you all.

Well, thank goodness that little misunderstanding was cleared up!  And once it was all straightened out, I banned this person from further commenting.  (First, however, I consulted the Blogger Code of Ethics, just to make sure I had no obligation to continue playing host to someone who wants to abuse me in this fashion.) The striking thing is, though, that this guy was not just any ordinary loudmouth at the bar.  He is, in fact, Professor Michael McIntyre, the director of the International Studies Program at DePaul University.  That’s right, the director of the International Studies Program at DePaul University showed up on my blog to suggest that I am akin to post-Reichstag Nazi apologists for not condemning Israel’s bombing of Lebanon with the all-out Godwin’s-Law-violating vehemence with which he wanted it condemned.  Which is really kind of depressing when you think about it.  And also kind of depressing when you don’t.

At first I had a few ungenerous thoughts about this.  A plague upon us all, eh?  Maybe I should get out of the defending-the-academic-left business, I thought, and just let David Horowitz take the hindmost. But then, after a few days’ reflection, I decided that Professor McIntyre simply was not my friend, and I crossed him off my invitee list for my big Chairman Mao Birthday Celebration this December. 

And then a few days later, to my astonishment, I realized that even Professor McIntyre was Anti-Israel Lite compared to some of more impassioned voices in the “radical” “left,” online and off.  Over the course of this week, I’ll try to persuade some of you that these people should be considered neither radical nor left, and that’s why I’ve put “radical” and “left” in “scare” “quotes” in the preceding “sentence.” But why am I bothering to devote a week to this nonsense?  Why, that’s a very good question.  Most of the time, I try to ignore it, on the grounds that (a) these people constitute a lunatic fringe about whom no one cares except their competitors in other post-neo-crypto-Situationist fringe groups, who routinely denounce them as “splitters,” and (b) to criticize them is to invite all the usual garbage from them and their friends, about how I’m a corporate imperialist running dog DLC operative who’s only trying to burnish my mainstream credentials by taking out a few radicals here and there.

But here’s the problem, folks.  We are now at the point at which one wing of the “radical” “left” has announced its support for

– the Iraqi resistance,

– Hezbollah,

and, in one extraordinary case,

– Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

For the “we are all Hezbollah now” “left,” check out this remarkable fellow, whose support of Hezbollah is nothing if not full-throated.  For the pro-Iranian “left,” there’s a “leftist” the like of which has not been seen since the final days of the liberation of Symbionia, and who has taken to cheering Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the “Persian Chavez” who should serve as a model for “the rulers of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.” Amazingly enough, she is the editor of the zine of the Monthly Review.  And for the pro-Iraqi-resistance “left,” there’s the New Left Review and its many expressions of solidarity with what it calls the “Iraqi maquis,” on the grounds that the Iraqi resistance has the moral authority of the French resistance during World War II, and the U.S. . . . well, you can complete the analogy easily enough, I’m sure.

How bad have things gotten?  Well, when you’ve got an American graduate student writing a love poem to Hezbollah, you know things are pretty bad out there.  I’m sorry to see that Ms. Lucas and her poem have lately become the toast of the right blogosphere—and I’m sorry for any number of reasons, not least of which is that this kind of attention can’t be good for Ms. Lucas’ health or peace of mind.  Another is that in the wake of Israel’s pulverization of much of Lebanon, I see another perfect political storm brewing, the like of which I sensed in early 2002: a crazed, radical kleptocrat-theocon administration in power, a volatile geopolitical crisis, and a “radical” (that is, reactionary) “left” opposition (International Neo-Stalinist ANSWER then, “we are all Hezbollah now” now) that couldn’t be more foolish or more destructive of the legitimate goals of a truly global, truly democratic left.  (No, not the left of those Euston fellows!  They botched the job with all their prowar-in-Iraq apologetics, and I didn’t sign their chatty, scattershot little manifesto.  But the straight-off-the-cliff pseudoleftist phenomenon to which they were trying to respond is quite real, more visibly so in the UK than here.)

And how in the world do things get this bad on the left?  Over the course of the week I’ll offer a couple of suggestions, and I’ll start with this one: in some quarters of American life (very few, needless to say), people operate under the strange assumption that the political position calling itself the “leftmost” position is necessarily the most virtuous, and that people like me back off from the “leftmost” position either because we don’t have the moral courage to speak the unvarnished truth (that’s the benign interpretation) or because we are actively “aligning with power” (that’s the darker interpretation, advanced by, among others, frequent ZMag contributor Ed Herman, to whom we’ll return on Thursday).  Whenever and wherever that assumption is in play, you have the potential for some real mischief, as you’ll see in the next couple of installments.

The other reason things have gotten this bad, at least for the “radical” “left,” is that it has been decided—again, in some quarters, where the “leftmost” position is the most betterest—that the proper “left” position is an “anti-imperialist” one, and therefore all forces that are anti- the Empire deserve at least some degree of our support. A very smart essay by Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” critiquing this position, has been gradually making the rounds, and at the risk of doing some injustice to Professor Postone here, I’ll summarize his argument briefly: when the “anti-imperialist” forces are in fact organizations like Hezbollah or al-Qaeda or the Iraqi resistance, “anti-Americanism” is the anti-imperialism of fools.

Of course, some of this “radical” “leftism” is just the sloppy thinking of people who believe that in order to oppose Israel’s response in Lebanon, one has to endorse the other side—as has the Los Angeles chapter of the newly re-formed Students for a Democratic Society, which has apparently decided to bypass the early democratic years of the initial SDS and move right into the Weather Underground phase.  But here on this blog, where we condemn Israel’s response while desiring Hezbollah’s disarmament and wishing that all parties in the region would acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, we try to avoid that kind of sloppy either-or thinking.  We also think there’s more to it than just some sloppy thinking, and so, begging your indulgence, we begin Democratic Left week with a nod to the good people at Human Rights Watch, where they hold all parties to the standards that every democratic leftist should support.

Posted by Michael on 08/07 at 10:51 AM
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