A World To Lose

"Leaving the Left can be a bit like trying to quit the Mafia," Marc Cooper writes. "You can’t get out without getting assassinated -– literally or figuratively. The Left, infused with a 'class-struggle-a-world-to-win' ethic, tends to look upon its apostates not only as enemies, but as downright traitors."

Cooper's reflection was sparked by this piece in the "Independent" by Johann Hari, the young British writer and playwright who is still a self-described leftist, though he understands the menace of Islamofascism. Hari interviewed his friend and, in some sense, mentor, the uber-apostate socialist, Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens tells him why he left The Movement:

He explains that he believes the moment the left's bankruptcy became clear was on 9/11. "The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who represents all the most reactionary elements on earth. They stand for liquidating everything the left has fought for: women's rights, democracy? And how did much of the left respond? By affecting a kind of neutrality between America and the theocratic fascists." He cites the cover of one of Tariq Ali's books as the perfect example. It shows Bush and Bin Laden morphed into one on its cover. "It's explicitly saying they are equally bad. However bad the American Empire has been, it is not as bad as this. It is not the Taliban, and anybody -- any movement -- that cannot see the difference has lost all moral bearings."

Hitchens -- who has just returned from Afghanistan -- says, "The world these [al-Quadea and Taliban] fascists want to create is one of constant submission and servility. The individual only has value to them if they enter into a life of constant reaffirmation and prayer. It is pure totalitarianism, and one of the ugliest totalitarianisms we've seen. It's the irrational combined with the idea of a completely closed society. To stand equidistant between that and a war to remove it is?" He shakes his head. I have never seen Hitch grasping for words before.

(At his personal site, Hari continues the thought-train that left the station during his interview with an apostate mentor. And there he outlines his own difference with Hitchens on the "one issue" support of Bush and presents what strikes me as an honorable and humane multi-issue rejection of Bush -- one of the few I've read.)

Cooper takes the broader view of the modern left:

The truly disconcerting part of all this, to borrow a descriptor from Hari, is that lefties rarely apply this purity test to those who stand to their purported left (but who, in reality, are reactionary enemies of democracy).

Example: Hitchens is drummed out of the left because his interpretation of anti-fascism brings him to support certain U.S. government policies and even the President. But what consequences among leftists does, say, Ramsey Clark reap for joining, literally, in the defense of Milosevic and Saddam? Anybody call him a traitor to the left recently?

What about college-activist favorite Michael Parenti who actually boasts that Slobo was a socialist, and anti-imperialist no less? What price does Parenti pay on the left for peddling such rubbish?

Just who on the left refuses to work with International A.N.S.W.E.R. whose propaganda denounces Bush but praises Kim il Sung? Did anyone care that the Not In Our Name campaign, that got squishy anti-war liberals to line up behind it, was organized by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, by folks who have defended, I might point out, the public execution of drug users?

Oh perish the very thought! Dare to criticize any of those folks from within the left and it’s tantamount to McCarthyism. But trashing a great mind like Hitchens, publicly condemning him as a traitor, a delusional alcoholic or as a queer, as Alexander Cockburn did? Well, no, that’s just sport, comrade.