After 9/11, in the winter of 2001-2,
like thousands - maybe millions - of others,
I converted to libertarian-right.
Above all else, I was shocked by
the left's response to 9/11.
I was so naive as to think that the left I had grown up with
hated fascism, especially religious fascism,
and would be the first to join a war against it.
Instead they have emerged as the war's opponents,
often with open sympathy
for the fascists.
Secondly, I was impressed by the neo-conservative right's analysis
of the problem
(that it was not caused by poverty,
for example),
their understanding of human nature
and of the mind of the enemy,
and of what had to be done
for victory.
Leaving the left is not about "selling out"
to mortgages and money,
or anything so mundane.
It is about growing up
and understanding better
unchanging human nature
and the bleak tragedy of the world.
Also,
I always despised
Islamic fundamentalism.
I only ever had contempt for the Iranian revolution, for example.
I just never regarded Islamic fundamentalism as a threat to me
until 9/11.
Until then, it was just the backwater beliefs of primitive faraway
people of no importance.
I certainly didn't regard Israel's war against it
as my war too.
I didn't recognise the Palestinians as Islamic fundamentalists.
I thought anyone who criticised immigration must be racist.
I knew that many third world people were bigots and racists,
but I couldn't believe that one day
fundamentalist immigrants would start
threatening our freedom
and
killing us.
I admired the left for
its opposition to apartheid and racism;
its opposition to religious and sexual censorship;
and its defence of freedom of sexuality,
separation of church and state,
and the rights
of atheists and homosexuals.
That hasn't changed.
What has changed are mainly my opinions on foreign policy.
The 1990s:
Despite the opposition of many people I admired,
I supported the first Gulf War in 1991.
I welcomed America flexing its muscles as a lone superpower.
I thought that would make a much safer world.
I still do.
I was a liberal interventionist in the 1990s.
I was disgusted by what the Somalis
did to the Americans
who were only trying to help them.
I wanted Clinton to bomb the Serbs,
and cheered when he finally did.
I wanted America (or someone) to stop the
Rwandan genocide,
but they didn't.
I was sickened by the sadism of the
Algerian jihad
and had no illusions about what jihadis were like.
I wanted the Taliban deposed
as soon as they got into power in 1996.
I would have supported war against them for any reason.
I had no problem with the
bombing of Saddam's Iraq
in the 1990s,
and I wanted Saddam to fall.
So long before 9/11, I had some neo-con tendencies,
though I still regarded myself as on the left.
I wasn't particularly bothered by
Bush's win in 2000.
I liked Clinton, but I didn't like Gore much.
Long before 9/11, I had also abandoned left-wing economics.
It was obvious to me, living in Ireland, and working in technology,
that left-wing economics
led to poverty, unemployment and emigration.
I only voted left in Ireland for their social policy (e.g.
separation of church and state),
and despite their economics.
My leaving of the left, 2001-02:
September 11th
changed me.
It made me finally and irrevocably pro-America
and pro-West.
It made me re-appraise everything
I grew up with.
It made me pro-Israel,
and newly sceptical of Europe.
I thought I had nothing more to learn
after abandoning religion
when I was 17.
But I did.
At age 33
I was still young enough to change,
and learn the lesson of
September 11th
- that our civilization will die if we do not defend it.
That the left-liberal worldview is wrong
- as wrong
as the religious worldview.
This is 1940 again.
This is a war against fascism and the liberal left will not support it,
so I am breaking with them forever.
September 11th
is the Hungarian Revolution
or the Cambodian genocide
of our time
- the moment when a new generation, again,
realises the bankruptcy of
the progressive, "correct" ideologies that all
right-thinking people believe.
This is the moment when a new generation, again,
leaves the left,
never to come back.
In 1986, I naively marched in a protest against the
American bombing of
Libya in April 1986.
"Stop the killing", I think I remember saying.
Unfortunately,
Libya
was busy planning its own response.
It decided to murder
270 innocent men, women and children
over Lockerbie
as its reply.
Well that put me in my place.
Andrew Anthony
on how 9/11 smashed his left-wing self-image:
"If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a 'liberal'. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn't question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn't try to understand myself."
Iraq is free at last,
Ann Clwyd,
March 30, 2004,
The Guardian
- "Some will continue to argue that internal repression is not a matter of
legitimate concern for other countries. I disagree."
William Shawcross
has made a similar journey,
from promoting in the 1970s the idiotic theory
that the Khmer Rouge killed
because they were "angered" by US bombing
(rather than because they were genocidal communists),
to a modern day supporter of Bush.
They should be ashamed
- on Robin Cook, Clare Short,
and other opponents of the freeing of Iraq.
- "The record will .. show that Mr Cook and Ms Short
have behaved in a manner which should
shame even them."
Shawcross' site
still promotes his appalling book on Cambodia,
Sideshow,
which blames the US for the Khmer Rouge.
He should simply renounce this book.
Like Hitchens, he does not
make my list of
writers on politics that I like.
He needs to change more.
Flemming Rose,
editor of
Jyllands-Posten,
lost his faith by meeting Soviet dissidents:
"I returned [to the Soviet Union] in 1990 to spend 11 years as a foreign correspondent.
Through close contact with courageous dissidents who were willing to suffer and go to prison
for their belief in the ideals of Western democracy, I was cured of my wooly dreams of
idealistic collectivism. I had a strong sense of the high price my friends were willing to pay
for the very freedoms that we had taken for granted in high school
- but did not grasp as values inherent in our civilization:
freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and movement."
The book
What's Left?
How Liberals Lost Their Way
(2007),
about the left's support for Islamism:
"the story of how the liberal left of the 20th century
ended up supporting the far right of the 21st".
His documentary,
No Excuses for Terror (2006)
is a stunning indictment of the modern hard left
and its tolerance of and apologies for
violent reactionary Islamist religious fascism,
from Hezbollah to Hamas to the London bombers to the Iraqi so-called "resistance".
On the Iraqi elections:
"Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause
...
I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.
...
Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom."
He is disgusted (as am I) by
"the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January."
Former hard leftist Christopher Hitchens
has been moving away from the left since 9/11.
Hitchens is fascinating not because his analysis is the best
(the conservative
analysis is, I find, far superior),
but because he is going through the same process of
utter disgust with the left
that I am going through.
A View From The Patriotic Left
by Hitchens
- "Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant
that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth.
We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth."
Hitchens says
Sept 11th
was a moment the left should have seized:
"Reflect upon it: Civil society is assaulted in the most
criminal way by the most pitilessly reactionary force in the modern
world. The drama immediately puts the working class in the saddle
as the necessary actor and rescuer of the said society.
Investigation shows the complicity of a chain of conservative client
states, from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, in the face of which our
vaunted "national security" czars had capitulated.
Here was the time for radicals to have demanded a war to the
utmost against the forces of reaction, as well a full house cleaning
of the state apparatus and a league of solidarity with the women of
Afghanistan and with the whole nexus of dissent and opposition in
the Muslim world. Instead of which, the posturing loons all
concentrated on a masturbatory introspection about American
guilt, granted the aura of revolutionary authenticity to bin Laden
and his fellow gangsters, and let the flag be duly seized by those
who did look at least as if they meant business."
Hitchens is still wrong about a lot:
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million,
by Martin Amis (*)
criticises Hitchens
for his remaining attachment to butchers like
Trotsky.
See
review.
Hitchens
talks rubbish about the genocidal communist butchers of
North Vietnam.
He calls them
"a very civilized foe and if they had had weapons of mass destruction, for example,
wouldn't have used them and didn't target civilians, ..
were not torturers and mass murderers and so forth."
In short, Hitchens has been wrong all his life,
and he still doesn't realise it.
More rubbish:
"I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi,
the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us.
These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge."
He claims that:
"If one question is rightly settled in the American and, indeed, the international memory, it is that the Vietnam War was at best a titanic blunder and at worst a campaign of atrocity and aggression."
Had America's opponents turned out to be democrats
who wanted to build a free society,
he would have a point.
Since they weren't, he doesn't.
He is absurdly impressed by the fact that:
"Ho Chi Minh quoted Thomas Jefferson in proclaiming Vietnam's own declaration of independence".
So what?
Ho Chi Minhcould have set up a parliamentary democracy after 1946.
He chose not to. Why?
Because he did not believe for one minute in parliamentary democracy
or a free society.
He was a totalitarian communist thug.
Why can Hitchens not see this?
"It is true that the collapse of the doomed American adventure in Indochina was followed by massive repression and reprisal, especially in Cambodia, and by the exile of huge numbers of talented Vietnamese. But even this grim total was small compared to the huge losses exacted by the war itself".
So the Cambodian genocide,
the boat people deaths,
and the North Vietnam killings
were "small" compared to the Vietnam war?
Please provide numbers, Hitchens, to back up this claim.
You've got to hand it to him, though, for tortuously trying to justify his
past writings, by claiming
simultaneously that
the Vietnam war was wrong and the Iraq war is right.
Is there anyone else in the world who holds these two positions simultaneously?
As I say, Hitchens'
analysis is not the best.
The conservative analysis is, I find, far
superior.
So Hitchens does not
really make my list of
writers on politics that I like.
Maybe someday.
But he needs to change more.
His main argument seems to be that we should vote for personality and image,
rather than the actual policies the candidates have stood for
(like McCain's support for the Iraq surge versus Obama's opposition to it).
Yes, that does seem to be his argument.
He says:
"I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors".
Yes, "used to" is right.
No one who thought like that could possibly pick the candidate who opposed the Iraq surge.
Pathetically, Hitchens claims that:
"the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction".
Yes, they must be the ones who are deluded. Not Hitchens.
Allahpundit:
"Hitch ... gambles the war on terror on the premise that Obama won't be as left-wing in office as his background suggests. ... it's ... surreal to see one of the world's foremost skeptics taking The One's exquisitely timed tack towards the center over the past few months at face value. I never figured him for a cheap date."
The Liberal Quandary over Iraq
- on the new phenomenon of "liberal hawks".
- Read the scene at the end
with the Iraqi dissident
Kanan Makiya.
Julie Burchill
I'm not a fan of Julie Burchill.
She seems rather silly and unserious to me.
Even when she is making a good point, she does it in such
a sloppy way, often with daft over-generalisations.
But she too is undergoing a journey:
Good, bad and ugly
- Julie Burchill
leaves The Guardian
because of its bias against Israel.
".. if there is one issue that has
made me feel less loyal to my newspaper over
the past year, it has been what I, as a non-Jew,
perceive to be a quite striking bias against the
state of Israel. Which, for all its faults, is the
only country in that barren region that you or I,
or any feminist, atheist, homosexual or trade
unionist, could bear to live under."
Terror and Liberalism, 2003,
by Paul Berman - An intelligent liberal tries to deal with the fact that
his side won't oppose religious fascism.
He also argues that fascism, communism and Islamofascism
are all different sides of the same thing
- the totalitarian reaction to liberalism
that really got going in 1914.
See his article, Oct 2001.
- "The genuine solution to these attacks can come about in only one way, which is by following the same course
we pursued against the Fascist Axis and the Stalinists. The Arab radical and Islamist movements have to be,
in some fashion or other, crushed."
Ch.6, "Wishful Thinking" tells the fascinating story of the
left in France in the 1930s, who were so
"anti-war"
that they tried to "understand" Hitler's demands.
After conquest, they went on to serve in the Vichy government,
while the liberals who opposed Hitler
were sent to the camps.
A Friendly Drink in a Time of War,
by Berman,
shows his infantile prejudice against Bush
(one reason he doesn't make my list of
writers on politics that I like),
but he also expresses well the disillusion
of former believers in the left like me.
The left doesn't support democracy in the Arab world because:
"a lot of people, in their good-hearted effort to respect cultural differences,
have concluded that
Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships
...
Which is to say, a
lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance,
have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only
be regarded as racist against Arabs.
...
The old-fashioned left used to be universalist
- used to think that everyone, all over the world, would some day want to live according
to the same fundamental values, and ought to be helped to do so.
... But no more! Today,
people say, out of a spirit of egalitarian tolerance: Social democracy for Swedes!
Tyranny for Arabs!
...
The left, my friend, has abandoned the values
of the left"
Niall Stanage
is somewhere in the middle.
He supported the Iraq invasion,
but became a defeatist eventually as the war continued.
He's mad about Obama.
He was never pro-Israel.
Left gets it wrong again on Iraq war, 27 Apr 2003.
"I .. believe that the left, in Ireland and throughout Europe,
has disgraced
itself over the war in Iraq.
...
I always thought the left was in favour of freedom above all things."
Forget the critics, he really is more steak than sizzle, Niall Stanage gushes about Obama, 7 Nov 2009.
This article
shows Stanage has settled back into the left-wing view of foreign policy:
"In the wider world, Obama has shown little sign of timidity or naivety. He set a withdrawal from Iraq in train months ago. Frontline US combat troops will be home by the end of next summer; all US forces will be out by the end of 2011. ...
As for Afghanistan, what is unforgivable "dithering" in the eyes of some is, to others, an admirable belief in the need for rigorous analysis. When it came to dispatching American troops to far-off lands, George W Bush never dithered -- and two botched and disastrous wars were the consequence.
There are undoubtedly some areas in which Obama has fallen short. He is unlikely to meet the one-year self-imposed deadline for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay."
The left does not understand Islamism:
"liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world
- specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.
On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right."
I don't like his hostility to the right, but I love his bluntness on the war:
"This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy."
If you believe in death for apostasy and blasphemy, then
we are at war with you.
It is not a legitimate opinion. You are the enemy.
He says our enemies number as high as
"tens of millions of people in the Muslim world".
Sadly, he is right.
This does not mean we have to fight them all.
But we need to be realistic about how many people support the enemy side.
And he understands this war is about
hallucinatory religious and totalitarian ideas,
not about "poverty", "oppression" or foreign policy:
"And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism."
And sadly the article contains lots of nonsense too:
He is just silly about the Western right, focusing on irrelevant people
like biblical Christian fundamentalists:
"Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies."
Nonsense.
The people speaking with moral clarity about the war
are the neo-con right
(of many religions and none).
The biblical Christian right are not listened to outside their flocks.
They have no influence,
and their statements are full of
confusion,
not moral clarity.
"The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe,
... The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists."
Rubbish. Name names as to who you think are "fascists".
One could just as easily call Sam Harris a "fascist".
He is as hard on Islam and Islamism as any European I've ever read,
save perhaps Oriana Fallaci.
In summary, Harris is so obsessed with distancing himself from (perhaps imaginary)
American "biblical Christian fundamentalists"
and European "neo-fascists"
that he fails to see the vast number of reasonable people
(including secular people) lined up on the right.
In short, he's got a long way to go before he makes my list of
writers on politics that I like.
The liberal-left
Thomas L. Friedman
spent the early years of the War on Islamist Terror
trying not to agree with Bush and the neo-cons,
yet smart enough to see the good they were doing.
He has a good line in tough criticism of the Islamic world,
but he is too critical of Israel and the US.
Unlike much of the left,
he does basically support the democracies.
It's just he's so negative and critical.
He never celebrates
the West's achievements, for example.
Instead he always moves on to criticism of the next job.
He never celebrated the fall of Afghanistan or Iraq, for example.
".. even though the Bush team came to this theme late in the day,
this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building
project since the Marshall
Plan.
...
I don't know if we can
pull this off.
...
But it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad"
"For my money, the right liberal approach to Iraq is to say: We can do it better.
Which is why the sign I most hungered to see in London was,
'Thanks, Mr. Bush. We'll take it
from here.'"
One of the comments
here
expresses my feeling about Friedman:
"Here's a typical Friedman column since the war started.
He knows that our course of action is just,
but he can't get past the fact that it's Republicans doing it. So he has to rain
on the parade at every opportunity even though he supports it."
Friedman eventually gives up on Iraq, Aug 2006:
"three years of efforts to democratize Iraq are not working.
That means "staying the course" is pointless, and it's time to start thinking about Plan B
- how we might disengage with the least damage possible."
Well it was always going to happen.
People like Friedman are not reliable allies.
I haven't read him in a long time.
Has Friedman gone mad in the last few years?
See
Friedman on the communist tyranny of China, September 8, 2009.
He is whining about the fact that the opposition dares to oppose
the great Obama,
who is only trying to help us all:
"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.
...
Our one-party democracy is worse."
For some people, there was a moment of clarity after 9/11 in 2001,
when they saw the face of the foreign enemy,
and realised that we might need America to help us fight this.
And then the novel feeling faded,
and old ways of thinking returned.
Others have been moving in the wrong direction for longer.
Some bravely opposed Saddam when he was America's friendly dictator
in the 1980s,
but then betrayed that by switching to
supporting him once he became America's enemy from 1990 onwards.
Andrew Sullivan
wrote eloquently in support of liberating the Middle East in 2001-03,
but ultimately he could only support the flawed Republicans for so long.
Because he could not support those flawed people who are pursuing the fight,
he has abandoned the fight itself,
and now spends most of his time criticising our side rather than the enemy.
Sullivan says he has left the right, 1 Dec 2009.
"I found it intolerable after 2003 to support the movement that goes by the name "conservative" in America."
Richard Dawkins
had moments of insight in 2001.
But then the darkness came over once again.
Eamon Dunphy
was interestingly pro-West earlier in his career
(see his
1992 attack on the Workers Party)
but by the time of 9/11
he had become just another leftie anti-American.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
is one of the odd brand of "left-wing Tories" -
Little Englander isolationists
who long for the old days of British power,
and do not accept that the most noble thing Britain can do
is to support America.
His instinctive dislike for the left came out after 9/11:
Give me Churchill, not Burchill,
Oct 28, 2001,
supports tough military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
He recognises his support for
Tory isolationism in the 1990s
might have been wrong:
"I was one of those who deplored the bombing of Serbia.
Elementary observation now suggests that Serb forces are no longer terrorising Kosovo,
that Serbia is returning to something like democracy and that Milosevic is on trial.
Would that have happened if we had dropped John Pilger, Julie Burchill
and Simon Jenkins on Belgrade (tempting as that thought is)?"
Two years of gibberish, Sept 11, 2003,
attacks intellectuals' responses to Sept 11th,
and says their response
should be taken with awareness of their appalling history:
"an alarmingly high proportion of the eminent writers of the past century veered towards
the totalitarian heresies of left or right,
attracted by communism or ... by fascism.
This might not be accidental. Imaginative writers are distinguished not by a sweeter character
(too often very much not), greater intellectual honesty, or even deeper intelligence, but
... a way of looking at the world which is interesting because it is exaggerated or distorted."
But the feeling is soon forgotten,
as his Britain-first, anti-American
isolationism returns.
Now he is on the same side as the left:
A rare sight: a party leader's penitent change of course,
Sept 28, 2006
- hoping Cameron will be an isolationist;
attacking neo-cons, the Iraq War,
and Britain's alliance with America;
and
praising old-school Tory realpolitik figures like
Douglas Hurd, Kenneth Clarke, Malcolm Rifkind, Ian Gilmour and Douglas Hogg.
Brad DeLong,
January 16, 2004,
attacks Wheatcroft for describing the emergence of the US as
"a bitter pill" for Britain.
"First of all, the emergence of the United States as the greatest power on earth
in the twentieth century was not a "bitter pill" for Britain.
It was Britain's greatest strategic advantage.
It's the equivalent of being dealt two aces in the hole at the start of a seven card-stud poker game
...
The loss of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Britain
- which is what would have happened without the United States
- would have been a considerably more "bitter pill"
than having an amazingly powerful ally willing to join your side in your big wars."
As Brad DeLong points out,
Wheatcroft's Little Englander Tories are no heirs of Churchill:
"they have, somehow, forgotten what it is to be a Great Nation.
Winston Churchill's Britain was truly a Great Nation because it placed itself in harm's way
- when everyone else was running for cover
- to fight and destroy Nazism. A Britain that made peace with Hitler in 1941
because American Lend-Lease aid was insufficiently generous would not be a Great Britain,
but a Very Small Britain indeed."
As John Bolton
says:
"'If the Brown government wants to be more European than Atlanticist, let's hear it. If they would rather not have a special relationship, let's hear it.' And then comes the zinger: 'If they want to be a part of Europe in the same way as Belgium and Luxembourg, let's hear it.' Bolton believes Britain must face the question: 'Do you want to be an independent country or a county in a big Europe?' The way he tells it is guaranteed to offend our national pride, but you can't say he hasn't warned us. 'If Britain wants to be subsumed into the European soup, the United States will have to react accordingly - and we will, make no mistake.'"
Johann Hari
should be on our side, but isn't.
Here he explains why not.
He's explaining why good liberals, even if they hate Islamism (as he does),
shouldn't support Bush
and the American right.
I'd like to go through his list,
because it's a good list
of where I differ from the left
(and where I don't):
Hari says:
I say:
"there needs to be a Marshall Plan for the Arab world"
I disagree:
(1) The source of terror is not economic.
(2) A Marshall Plan will achieve nothing if these states are
non-democracies.
The Western European countries after 1945 were democracies,
not tyrannies.
"and a determined effort to tackle legitimate Muslim grievances"
I disagree:
(1) Climate change may be imaginary.
(2) The left's solutions are to stop growth and spread poverty.
Climate change would be better than that.
"The fight against the continuing existence and potential use of nuclear weapons"
I disagree
in the sense that I am happy with possession of these by
democracies.
I agree that their possession by non-democracies
is a major threat.
But this is entirely part of the WoT.
Other goals on which he claims the American right
are on the wrong side:
"The fight to extend democracy to peoples remaining under tyranny"
"The fight to ensure that democracy is meaningful,
and not hollowed out by corporations, the rich .."
Just another leftie whining because no one votes for him.
"The fight for equality for gay people"
Pretty much done in the west.
The fight is elsewhere - notably in Islamic states.
So you should support the people who are doing something about those states
- i.e. the American right.
"The fight for equality for women"
Pretty much done in the west.
The fight is elsewhere - notably in Islamic states.
So you should support the people who are doing something about those states
- i.e. the American right.
"The fight to end the disastrous "War on Drugs""
Yes, I'm with you on that one.
It's just not as important as the WoT,
so it's just going to have to wait.
Of course, if there was a party that was sound on drugs and on the WoT,
we wouldn't have to choose, but there isn't.
"The fight to end the spiritual tyranny of "religion""
Pretty much done in the west.
The fight is elsewhere - notably in Islamic states.
So you should support the people who are doing something about those states
- i.e. the American right.
"The fight against poverty"
You're simply wrong on the solutions.
The solution to poverty
is democracy
and capitalism.
You think the problem is:
"the extreme .. neo-liberalism imposed on much of the world's poor"
and the lack of
"social democracy .. corporate regulation [and] redistributive taxation".
You are campaigning against the things that will end poverty,
and in favour of the things that will increase it.
Hari's list is interesting.
For some issues I agree with him - but think the WoT overrides them.
For other issues I simply disagree with him.
Scott Burgess
replies
(and here):
"And now a gedankenexperiment. Imagine that George Bush was shutting down opposition TV stations, passing laws forbidding making fun of him, implementing enabling laws and overturning term limits for his own benefit.
What are the chances that Johann Hari would describe that behaviour as "dictatorial"?"
Johann Hari
introduces Mark Steyn in an article,
with that classic left-wing snobbery, as
"a Canadian former disc jockey called Mark Steyn".
As if somehow Hari is a more profound thinker than Steyn!
Johann Hari defends pirates!
They discovered
"a different way of working on the seas"
apparently.
No, this is not a joke.
Radical Son
by David Horowitz, 1997,
describes the abuse that Horowitz got when he left the left in the 1980s
and started supporting Reagan.
With no sense of irony or foresight,
he describes two of the most vicious leftist critics of his apostasy as:
Christopher Hitchens.
Paul Berman.
4 years later, 9/11 would happen.
Hitchens and Berman would both lose their faith
and become supporters of America.
Indeed, Hitchens and Berman are the two most prominent
leftist apostates produced by the whole 9/11 era.
You couldn't make it up.
And the story will repeat.
Maybe in the future
George Monbiot
or
Richard Dawkins
will get sense and leave the left.
9/11 didn't do it for them.
But some further, worse attack could.
Leaving the left is not about "selling out"
to mortgages and money,
or anything so mundane.
It is about growing up
and understanding better
unchanging human nature
and the bleak tragedy of the world.
(1985)
by
Sting.
Hitchens supports Obama over McCain, Oct 2008.
Since 1995.
