THE HOPELESS VS. THE HOPEFUL:

Where have all the children of the left gone?: Those who used to burn with anger against oppression and were united in fraternity with the vulnerable are today all too happy to whitewash Saddam's regime and applaud Michael Moore's films. (Nick Cohen, 16th August 2004, New Statesman)

Ask an Iraqi communist or Kurdish socialist today what support they have had from the liberal left and they won't detain you for long. Apart from the odd call from the Socialist International, there has been none worthy of the name. One expects the totalitarian left to be stuffed with creeps, but the collapse of the democratic left strikes me as catastrophic. Why couldn't it oppose the second Gulf war while promising to do everything possible to advance the cause of Iraqi democrats and socialists once the war was over? Why the sneering, almost racist pretence that Saddam had no honourable opponents?

The ineluctable answer is, I'm afraid, that there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race. The audiences at Michael Moore films don't look at his propaganda images of kite-flying kiddies and pull themselves up short by thinking of what happened to their comrades in Iraq. They have no comrades. They don't support Saddam. They don't support his foes. They have no policy to offer. The noise of their self-righteous anger is merely a cover for an indifference bred by failure.

Marxist-Leninism is as dead as any idea can be - it made the fatal blunder of putting its ideas into practice and died of shame. Fifty years ago, there were revolutionary socialist movements in dozens of countries ready to take power. Today there isn't one, and the world is a better place for that. The nobler traditions of the social-democratic left are also under enormous strain. It seems that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown is about as good as it can get in Britain. Europe has leaders who appear more left-wing on paper, but to date they have failed to pull the Continent away from stagnation.

Unless you believe that the failure of the world's peoples to look leftwards is all the result of brainwashing by the corporate media, you have to conclude that the left is dead. The anger that propelled it is still there, and although it won many battles, some of the oppressions it fought against remain as grievous as ever.

The pity of the aftermath is that while the honourable traditions of the left are forgotten, the worst flourish and mutate into aberrations that would have made our predecessors choke.

Here are the final paragraphs of the story we cited earlier:

"I don't blame President Bush for trying to remake the Middle East" by developing a democracy in Iraq. But "on the ground, it's very difficult."

His family remains on that ground. He has a lot of family in Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood controlled by the hard-line Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The hospital where one of his sisters works was hit by a rocket attack.

"You don't know who the attackers are," he said. "Whoever hit the hospital is not part of any religion. It's just criminal."

The last step of his trip from Baghdad to Hanover, in June, was one of the longest. He missed several connections between Indiana, where he had taken an intensive English class, and New Hampshire. Instead of flying into Lebanon, he ended up in Manchester, past midnight, and the airline paid for a cab to take him up Interstate 89.

"I was unfortunate in every step I took from Indiana to Hanover," he said.

But that taxi driver, a woman, was kind to him. She had a son and daughter, and her son was over in Germany. But later she told him that was a lie. Her son had been killed in Iraq, she said. She stayed with him for half an hour when there was a problem with his hotel reservation. The brief comnnection, perhaps not what the Fulbright program has in mind, stuck with him.

"She lost her son in Iraq and she was kind to me."

People who look at the war in Iraq and see only Abu Ghraib or a blinking Halliburton sign are deranged.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 15, 2004 7:57 PM