Overthrow
Anarchy in the UK
January 23, 2007 15 comments
On Sunday, the Observer ran extracts from Nick Cohen’s new book:
On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini’s old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery […] On a memorable day, American scientists at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica produced another entry for the record books. Historians will tell how the continent’s first political demonstration was a protest against the overthrow of a fascist regime.
[INT. EVENING: AN ISLINGTON KITCHEN. BRUSHED-STEEL APPLIANCES HUM SMOOTHLY. MRS C SITS AT A TABLE, SIPPING HERBAL TEA, READING A COPY OF ‘UNSPEAK’. SUDDENLY THE CALM IS BROKEN BY THE SOUND OF A KEY RATTLING IN A LOCK, AND THE FRONT DOOR OPENING. ENTER, DISHEVELLED, WITH STARING EYES, MR C.]
Mr C: Hi honey, I’m home! Shall we overthrow a fascist regime?
Mrs C: [TO HERSELF] Oh no, not again…
Mr C: Answer me! Shall we overthrow a fascist regime or not?
Mrs C: Which one is it this time?
Mr C: It doesn’t matter! Answer the question!
Mrs C: [DECIDES TO HUMOUR HIM] All right, how do you plan to do it?
Mr C: What do you mean?
Mrs C: Well, “overthrow” a “fascist regime”. “Overthrow” sounds quite vague, like “remove” or something. What is the actual plan?
Mr C: Well… obviously, we need to have a war!
Mrs C: A war?
Mr C: Yes, a short, sharp, clean war! With flowers and laptops raining down afterwards!
Mrs C: [SIPS TEA] Ah, so by “overthrow a fascist regime” you mean kill some people.
Mr C: We regret all collateral damage! And anyway the point is to save people!
Mrs C: By killing them?
Mr C: [SHOUTING] Do you hate justice? Do you spit on the idea of democracy? You can’t overthrow a fascist regime without breaking eggs!
Mrs C: I suppose you’re pretty sure you’re going to save more people than you kill?
Mr C: [SPLUTTERING] Th-th-that’s just . . . consequentialist sophistry! [WITH TRIUMPH] Islamo-utilitarianism! I can’t believe I’m hearing this!
Mrs C: Look, is war really the only option right now or –
Mr C: [WITH SUDDEN QUIET MENACE] What, are you a pussy?
Mrs C: Excuse me?
Mr C: I said, are you a snivelling pussy?
Mrs C: I’m your wife.
Mr C: You’re secretly a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, aren’t you? All so-called ‘liberals’ are the same!
Mrs C: This is getting absurd –
Mr C: [GESTICULATING WILDLY] Shut up! Do you want to overthrow a fascist regime or not? Yes or no?
Mrs C: Well, darling, I’m really not convinced that a war right now is the best –
Mr C: [CLUTCHES HEAD AND SCREAMS] Oh my god! I can’t believe that you support a fascist regime! My wife is in love with totalitarianism! You fascist! That’s it! I’m leaving!
[EXIT MR C WITH SLAMMING DOOR. MRS C SIGHS, SIPS TEA, HUMS NOSTALGICALLY A SNATCH OF ‘BOSS DRUM’. GOES BACK TO READING ‘UNSPEAK’. FADEOUT.]
In similar vein, Bob the Angry Flower is smashing! hand! with hammer! It’s only tangentially related, but I like it.
According to Christopher Hitchens in his review of this bizarre Cohen book (seriously – who’d pay £12.99 for that load of recycled tripe?) in the Sunday Times, you have misjudged Mr C:
“Cohen has no problem with those who are upset about state-sponsored exaggerations of the causes of war, or furious about the bungled occupation of Iraq that has ensued. People who think this is the problem are not his problem. Here’s his problem: the people who would die before they applaud the squaddies and grunts who remove hideous regimes from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet who happily describe Islamist video-butchers and suicide-murderers as a ‘resistance’. Those who do this are not ‘anti-war’ at all, but are shadily taking the other side in a conflict where the moral and civilisational stakes are extremely high.”
And that’s just one paragraph…
(No, I didn’t make it to the end of the review.)
My question has always been – where are all these people who want “our boys” dead while applauding the “suicide-murders” (truly a bizarre piece of nonSpeak)? There must be about four of them, all of whom belong to the same splinter group from the SWP. Somehow this has become the biggest straw man in the history of politics, and a classic example of Unspeak, as Steven pointed out in his post.
It’s common – and completely understandable – for radicals to become more conservative as they get older. I have a sneaking suspicion that Cohen (and Hitchens et al) feel their activist credentials slipping away with age – and since their entire careers have been built on those credentials, they’re quite desperate to simultaneously claim them back while rationalising the loss.
Indeed, Steven. As Jim Henley puts it, what’s being decried here is the reluctance to send armies thousands of miles to kill foreigners, which apart from showing one’s lack of commitment to spreading democracy is also liable to get you labelled xenophobic.
If only Mrs. C would call a doctor. Or, for that matter, Mrs. B.
Actually, I saw, on the September 2002 demonstration, someone marching in a fake suicide bomber’s belt, who was rapidly removed from view by the organisers. I’m sure there is a segment of Muslim opinion in this country perfectly happy with the deaths of American (and British) troops in Iraq. But they aren’t what Cohen means by “the Left”.
But the problem is also that Cohen (and the Observer) are a bg disengenuous about what’s really bugging them. The key paragraph is: “A part of the answer is that it isn’t at all clear what it means to be on the left at the moment. I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left wing than ours would look like and how its economy and government would work (let alone whether a majority of their fellow citizens would want to live there). Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone. Disgraced by the communists’ atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government.”
“I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left wing than ours would look like?”
Excuse me, but to coin a phrase, We Are Everywhere. What do you want, a floormap? The ***** ice caps are melting and people like Cohen are saying “there really is no alternative” with a straight face!
It also exposes a different kind of UnSpeak – the tired and distressed kind. Cohen – and much of the media – find it nearly impossible to understand a world through anything other than a left-right paradigm. With “the left” (whatever that means) gone, the only alternative they can see is “the right” (whatever that means).
With their worldview confined by this UnSpeak, their political discourse swings from the sublime to the ridiculous (but only in that direction), never quite getting to grips with what is actually going on in the world.
Andrew Brown (#6): which “segment of Muslim opinion in this country [is] perfectly happy with the deaths of American (and British) troops in Iraq”? There are some Muslims who not only do not support the Iraq war but actively support the insurgency, just as there are some Muslims in the UK, France, Germany, the US, Canada, etc., who would actively support Al Qaeda. Does that make them a “segment of Muslim opinion”? Perhaps there are reasons why some of them believe this, but are those reasons all identical? Can we be sure of this? Perhaps some of them are vicious bastards, so we might say there is a “segment of vicious bastard opinion in this country perfectly happy with the deaths of Americans, etc.” Some of them may be parents. There is indeed a “segment of Parental opinion in this country perfectly happy with the deaths of American (and British) troops in Iraq”.
My point is this: as I suspect you would agree, opposition to the war, for whatever reason, is not synonymous with wanting US and British troops dead – the debate about wanting US and British troops dead, and which “segments” of which group actually want this, is a rhetorical trap set by those who want opposition to the war to be conflated with wanting US and British troops dead.
All this talk of segments has me jonesing for a Chocolate Orange.
PS: here’s a link to the wonderful cartoon merkur mentioned at #1.
His comment about the left being dead looks particularly silly given what has been going on in South America. Whether one likes, or condemns, it; its definitely a form of socialism.
There’s also this:
“Disgraced by the communists’ atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies”
a) Not everyone on the left is a communist, and many were severe critics of it.
b) Success for whom? In the USA, apparently capitalism at its most successful, the median wage has declined from its peak in the 70s. And while things are better in the UK, it is only the well heeled (like Cohen) who are doing spectacularly well in the UK. Its not been spectacular for most Indians or Chinese either (though hopefully that will change).
or there’s this:
“I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left wing than ours would look like and how its economy and government would work (let alone whether a majority of their fellow citizens would want to live there).”
Well no, but then you could have made similar arguments about democrats in the age of monarchy. I doubt very much that the Wright brothers could tell you what an aeroplane would look like prior to building theirs (or what future planes would look like). This proves nothing.
Thanks Steven – for some reason, the link I put into my original post fell apart.
SW’s demonstration of the possible intersections in political set theory at #9 strikes me as very useful. (Let me acknowledge that there is also no doubt a segment of unspeak.net readers’ opinion that thinks I’m an idiot.) Also, isn’t there something about the word “segment” itself that implies a non-trivial size, as opposed to, say, “sliver”?
Re Cohen’s
If that is true, doesn’t it imply, more than anything else, that “left wing” and its opposite have become largely imaginary categories, fit for abusing strawman opponents but not really robust enough to base a book on?
(For more on the cunning uses of left-right paradigms, see this post.)
Cian wrote: ‘His comment about the left being dead looks particularly silly given what has been going on in South America’. Well absolutely, or for example the Zapatistas, or for that matter the anti-war movement itself which has ‘pioneered’ some new and old-new forms of decision making.
It’s a lazy insular writing.
Update: the unedifying spectacle of Cohen failing to answer some very apt and pointed questions from Daniel Davies can be seen here.