Norm Geras has published Nick Cohen’s wonderful review of Terror and Liberalism (ht: Clive Davis and Neo-Neocon). After reading Nick I have ordered Paul Berman’s book for myself.
In case you aren’t familiar with British writer Nick Cohen, he is another of those on the left who have realized that the (extreme) left has transformed into an anti-liberal, reactionary force. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia page on his background:
An erstwhile darling of the left, Cohen created controversy in 2002 when, in several hard-hitting columns, he announced his support for the invasion of Iraq and denounced the left for its support, as he saw it, of Saddam Hussein.
Cohen attacked the left for forming alliances with rightwing Islamic and Islamist groups in its opposition to the war, writing that the "principled left" is a thing of the past.
Here is Cohen on Berman:
Although I like to present myself as an open and rational chap, I can remember very few times when I’ve admitted being in the wrong. Not wrong in detail, but wrong in principle. In my experience the politically committed rarely do that. We change imperceptibly and grudgingly, while all the time pretending we haven’t changed at all but merely adapted to altered circumstances.
Actually, ‘very few’ is a self-serving exaggeration. The only time I realised I was charging up a blind alley was when I read Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. I didn’t see a blinding light or hear a thunder clap or cry ‘Eureka!’ If I was going to cry anything it would have been ‘Oh bloody hell!’ He convinced me I’d wasted a great deal of time looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I was going to have to turn it round and see the world afresh. The labour would involve reconsidering everything I’d written since 11 September, arguing with people I took to be friends and finding myself on the same side as people I took to be enemies. All because of Berman.
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His avoidance of the usual polemical style has a purpose which is obvious on a second reading. Berman is trying to overcome the resistance of Western readers who have watched the Iranian revolution and the murder of millions and the enslavement of whole African tribes in the Sudan and the destruction of every last remnant of freedom in Afghanistan and not understood that what they’ve seen is a totalitarian movement going about its business.
A chapter – ‘Wishful Thinking’ – explains why so many are reluctant to see clearly and in their blindness end up on the far right. It deals with the Chomskys and the creeps who were to dominate the anti-war movement; but to my mind the best part of the chapter and the book is when he uses the history of the French Socialist Party in the 1930s as a parable for our time.
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To see the old process at work, one only has to look at how a large chunk of the world’s liberal opinion has got itself into the position where it can’t support Iraqi and Afghan liberals, socialists and feminists. You think the worst thing in the world is the developed countries because they brought the First World War, which to be fair is a charge worth making, or globalisation and McDonalds, which to be fair is a charge that is infantile. You are confronted with totalitarian movements, which are worse, and your first thought is to blame them on the West. Your second is to make excuses for them. Your third is to betray your comrades. Your fourth is to go up to the totalitarian movements and shake them by the hand.
Because I’d grown up in a time when there was no left worth speaking of, I’d rather blithely assumed that its remnants were filled with decent people and that the worst thing in the world was New Labour.
In part because of the evidence of my senses and in part because of Paul Berman, I know better now.
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