Seeker Blog

Seekerblog is a signer of the Euston Manifesto. From Norm Geras’s talk at the Euston Manifesto launch:

But there has been another discourse of opposition to the Iraq war, starting with the banners and slogans for that Saturday on 15 February 2003, from which one would never have known what kind of a place Saddam’s Iraq was. It has been a discourse of denial, evidenced by the numbers of those on the left unwilling to allow, or even comprehend, why others of us on the left supported the war; by a rancorous hostility towards the pro-war left; and, most seriously of all, by the lack of interest in initiatives of solidarity with the forces in Iraq battling for a democratic transformation of their country, itself part of a wider lack of enthusiasm for the success of this enterprise.

To those who now say that such criticisms leveled by the Euston Manifesto at a large part of the anti-war left are misdirected, applying only to a small number of people on the far left, I have two answers. (1) Not true. (There’s a more forceful way of putting that, but it violates the rules of public civility.) (2) That it isn’t true has been documented at length.

In any event, this takes us back to those shameful responses to 9/11 from which I started - because some of the themes of what I’m calling the discourse of denial in argument about the Iraq war are for their part shameful too: a tendency to go silent about, or at least to minimize, the horrors of Baathist Iraq; a manner of distributing blame for everything that has gone wrong in that country in such a way that the daily killing of civilians by so-called insurgents figures only as one of the lamentable consequences of coalition failure, and barely at all as the result of the actions of those who are directly responsible - as if they were merely a hive of bees stirred up and not people making choices; only the most grudging acknowledgment - if that - that millions of Iraqis voting for a different kind of future for themselves was a matter of some significance.

One has to draw a line. This is not the authentic voice of the left, and it is not a voice which any self-respecting liberal should be willing to own. It is a disgrace to the best aspirations of the progressive and democratic tradition.

So, some people - bloggers, the owners of other websites, trade unionists, other kinds of activists - come together last May. We know there are others out there who share our sense of non-belonging to the left-liberal consensus on such issues. We know because of the feedback we get. ‘Thank goodness, I found your blog. Thank goodness I’m not the only one who feels that this left doesn’t speak for me.’

We decide to produce a document setting out some general principles, some common positions. The Euston Manifesto steps out into the world. What it says I hope many of you now know, and I won’t try to rehearse it here.

But thank you all for coming this evening. We need to insist that there is a different tradition which socialists and democrats and liberals can speak out for. There’s been quite a chorus of voices these past few weeks saying that the Euston Manifesto is of no account - though a lot of those saying so seem rather animated about it. Well, we make no extravagant claims. It’s a beginning, that’s all.

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