THE POINT OF MAKING ALL CULTURES EQUAL IS TO DESTROY YOUR OWN:

A hard-line leftist's change of heart: a review of The Fallout: How A Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence by Andrew Anthony (Michael Burleigh, 10/04/07, Daily Telegraph)

The struggle against jihadist terrorism and the war in Iraq have prompted similar recantations among the 'liberal' Left, giving rise to several books, notably the Observer columnist Nick Cohen's insightful What's Left? His quondam colleague Andrew Anthony weighs in with a more comprehensive assault on the mindset that brings us The Guardian, the BBC, Channel 4, the Left University, and what he calls that Arts Council subsidised 'inksheet' The London Review of Books. [...]

After a spell at City and East London College, Anthony went to London's School of Oriental and African Studies where he took a degree in history and politics.

Mediocre lecturers inducted him into the alphabet soup of the 1980s sectarian hard Left; the SWP, RCP, WRP and CPGB among them. He was so committed that he went to Nicaragua for six months, as part of a work brigade designed to free up fighters for the Sandinistas.

On his return, Anthony worked as a trainee reporter on a trade paper, acquiring a criminal record for defrauding his expenses. As a result of that shock, he made some key existential decisions: 'I began to grow up. This meant developing a career, forming a committed relationship, owning property (even a car) and all the other bourgeois trappings. But to put it in political terms, it also meant that I became a liberal.'

It was time to stop blaming capitalism, class, the US, racism or other anonymous forces for matters that were the responsibility of individuals, although as Anthony strikingly admits, he regularly omitted things from his articles that might have grated on the sensibilities of Guardian readers.

Anthony reached the key insight that: 'A more pervasive theme shared by the old Left, and the new multiculturalist Left, and seen in local government, academia, and some areas of the media is the old loathing of Western society and humanist values that blinded a previous generation to the horrors of Communism. The anti-Westernism no longer takes the rigid form of pro-Communism but instead the more protean shape of cultural relativism.'

Anthony has some savage passages on Ken Livingstone sucking up to Islamist anti-Semites and homophobes, or about the Cambridge don, Mary Beard, who notoriously felt – rather than thought – that Americans had 9/11 'coming to them'. He joins the increasing number of thinkers who reject the ideology of multiculturalism, and has some candid observations about what is wrong with black culture in this country, at least in its gun-fetishising machismo varieties.

Like many liberals on the Left, Anthony is exercised by how many of his erstwhile comrades have become apologists for homicidal jihadism, falling, in their guilt-ridden way, for the purposive lie of 'Islamophobia', a trend that afflicts a police force that one eminent commentator in this newspaper recently described as the 'paramilitary wing of The Guardian'.

That's a great line.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 4, 2007 4:48 PM