Sore winners
Left-wing intellectual Norman Geras on Nick Cohen’s new book:
…note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call ‘the decents’…
As opposed to…
…note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call ‘the stoppers’…
…I suppose.
But wait, there’s more from Norman:
…give some time, if you can bear it, to re-reading through the comment and opinion pages of the liberal press for the last four years. That you were of the left and supported regime change in Iraq has just been unthinkable, unassimilable, for many - hence the hostility and the anathemas.
Jesus Christ, man, let it go. You got your invasion, you got your liberation, and you got your victory. And you’re still whining. You and Cohen and ‘the Decents’ were listened to and the anti-war crowd were ignored - that’s why the world looks like it does today. And you’re still not happy?
That Nick Cohen should then feel compelled to write a book rubbing us anti-war types’ noses in it, despite getting everything he wanted, smacks of gloating. Nobody likes a sore winner.
Update: If I was as articulate as John Harris I’d have put my argument something like this.
Posted on January 30th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
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Justin - the time they could have gloated was at the precise moment the statue of Saddam fell in front of the world’s news cameras. It’s been downhill ever since, with the protestations of the Decents rising in inverse proportion. They’ve always been a disproportionately noisy bunch (’Poor us in a minority on Iraq with Tony Blair…and David Cameron…and Dubya…oh woe is me’), and now that they’re stuck with their new friends (Bush, al-Maliki, the sectarian governing parties) in the ruins of Iraq, they’ll get even noisier.
The ruins of Iraq? Eh? I got so bored with the whole thing sometime around March 2003 that I’ve set my mental filters to block out all Iraq news for the last few years.
I assumed that we’d shocked and awed everyone so brilliantly that the Middle East is once again flowing with milk and honey, with Jews and Sunnis and Shias and Kurds skipping hand in hand through flowery meadows in the midst of a glorious Babylon reborn.
Have I missed something?
You’re right - it’s almost as is things haven’t gone quite as planned. They behave like poor losers - even though they got their way
Nosemonkey: I assumed that we’d shocked and awed everyone so brilliantly that the Middle East is once again flowing with milk and honey, with Jews and Sunnis and Shias and Kurds skipping hand in hand through flowery meadows in the midst of a glorious Babylon reborn.
Have I missed something?
Nah.
Also nobody likes a short-sighted-dimwit when they have a say in how countries are run.
Come on, stop complaining. It’s funny.
It’s an old tactic, accuse your enemy of your own weakness thus making it their problem, basic Rovism. Nevermind reality. The statue toppling was run by a Marine officer and wasn’t a spontaneous Iraqi action. Like US lefty blogs are we going to have to start proclaiming ‘Proud members of the reality based community’. I’d like to think that all their bleating is because they are on the run from their own blackened souls, but that may be giving them too much credit.
Redpesto wrote: “the time they could have gloated was at the precise moment the statue of Saddam fell in front of the world’s news cameras.” But actually even then everyone knew this was a piece of shite spin, it was so fucking crass. Everyones media savvy these days. Even the media.
“Everyones media savvy these days.”
What I saw was many Iraqis hitting a broken iron statue with their shoes. This was a genuine display of emotion, whoever pulled the statue over for whichever tv company. It’s these Iraqis who have had their hopes raised and now dashed. They are not throwing insults at each other now, they are paying a dreadful price in blood, torture and fractured communities. Who gives a toss whether one side of the left in the West bitches about the other side? Collectively we failed to rein in our shabby collection of democratically elected war-mongers.
Lobster: Amen.
Collectively we failed to rein in our shabby collection of democratically elected war-mongers.
Absent armed insurrection, how do you propose we should have stopped them? Nobody  but nobody  in any position of ‘authority’ was paying attention to any of the millions of us who were saying, ‘Stop!’. The facts were all known and well-publicised, but those presenting them were ignored, ridiculed, and defamed. The war was preordained; nothing was going to stop it.
I’ll plead guilty to not taking up an AK-47 and storming Parliament, and to not hijacking a plane and flying it into the Capitol. But ‘collectively’? ‘Democratically’? Fuck that. I’m not responsible for those shitheads.
It almost makes you cry.
“But, but,… why does everybody hate us?”
Dunno Norm. You were spot on from the start, and have conducted yourselves with exemplary decorum throughout.
Love from,
The Jew-hating, America-hating, terrorist-appeasing, Saddam-loving, duplicitous, fascist Left.
They did in fact gloat, in quite the most repulsive manner possible, in January 2005 at the time of the Iraqi elections. This was by no means atypical:
“John Pilger, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Seamas Milne, Saddam Hussein, George Galloway, Michael Moore, your boys took one hell of a beating today……..”
This has to be borne in mind when you see these lads accusing anyone else of only really wanting to say “I told you so” and not caring about the Iraqis.
By the way, “the decent left” is the name they selected for themselves, not a derisive nickname pinned on them by anyone else. Its original source is in Michael Walzer’s essay “Can There Be A Decent Left?” and it’s self-application to the British pro-war left can be voluminously documented to Alan “Not the Minister” Johnson, Norman Geras, Christopher Hitchens and Harry’s Place, all of whom have used it non-ironically to describe themselves.
The epithet “The Decent Left” has become discredited by association with them, not vice versa.
Norm’s correct, of course - being half-crazed myself, there’s nothing I enjoy more than pointing at the Decent Left’s masturbatory arguments and laughing like a drain.
What he’s failed to spot is that, with their earnest self-righteousness and unpleasant mudslinging, they’re ripe targets for mockery. There’s nothing more enjoyable than applying the pin to the overinflated ego.
They are, in short, comedy gold. If they gave up bleating about their fascist political opponents, I’d have to give up blogging.
More power to your arm, Norman! Continue with your asinine assaults on lefty straw men, and let us laugh long and loud!
Most of these points well put by the esitmable Mike Marqusee some time ago. The final paragraph especially.
This being the piece to which I was trying to refer, sorry.
I heard the execrable Cohen talking about his equally execrable book on Radio 4’s Start the Week while driving to work Monday.
Ugh….smug,oafish and with a pronounced speech impediment, I wondered how a spineless jerk-off could dare to lambast the anti-war movement when events in Iraq have turned out exactly as we predicted.
Cohen resembled Blair on Sunday t.v.reports claiming that the eventuality of a civil war in Iraq following a US invasion had not been widely predicted.
What Cohen and Blair should have done after the catastrophe in Iraq became public knowledge was to do the same as Channel 4’s Davi Smith did.
Who,I hear you ask?He was the guy that stood in front of the White House each evening for weeks in the lead up to the Iraq war saying to Channel 4’s John Snow that if Saddam didn’t do this and if he didn’t do that then it was going to be war,John!He repeated this night after night ad infinitum until many were convinced that war was inevitable.
What happened to David Smith…he went away and died!If anyone knows where he is now get in touch.
When Cohen and Blair leave the stage the wars they fired will likely be proceeding to their inevitable conclusion:ignominious defeat.Who’ll remember Cohen,Aranovich,Hitchens et al then?
[...] British neocons and the Iraq war: here. [...]
I am anti war, was from the start…but there is one thing we have not got our heads round…
When you are on anti-war marches, look around. Many are from VERY conservative religious groups that the Left, as I understand it, and in any other place, would not be seen dead with.
It shows that both parts of the left at the moment – anti-war, pro war, have very conservative instincts. And that’s why the left is irrelevant and ineffectual at the moment.
We anti-war types have got to stop making allies with those who oppose our basic values…. of equality of the sexes, free speech, etc…
Of course the left wing neo cons – and that is what they are – will always have one over us, because they are not making alliances with weirdo religious groups. I have been left wing since I was 16 – long time ago – but I will never march with religious, sexist, bigots. And that is what the anti-war left is doing.
That is why it is so hard being anti war…because we are making allies with SEXIST, ANTISEMITE CONSERVATIVES…
The ‘decent’, British Neo-Con yes-men have got blood on their hands. Their Good War has caused terrible problems. They feel guilty, and everyone can now point at them.
But all this noise and bluster isn’t about the anti-war movement or the ‘liberal press’, it’s about the all the Norman Gerases rationalising with themselves that somehow the mess is not their fault, that somehow they were right, and that the blood isn’t really there. If they keep saying it out loud and agreeing with each other then maybe it will be true.
I trust beetroot isn’t referring to MAB which is affiliated to STW.There’s a lot of Islamophobic twaddle spoken about muslims who have the temerity to challenge Western imperialism and I am proud to march with them.
The muslim element on such marches are as mixed as any other faith represented.I’ve lived in muslim countries and nobody but nobody ever tried to stuff their religion down my throat.It’s rollocks!
Is beetroot aware that the tens of thousands of US mercenaries in Iraq e.g. those working for Blackwater are all funded by fundamentalist Christian groups back home.We don’t hear much about these fundamentalists do we.
Sounds like someone bought into another mainstream news agenda and left a lot of other important facts unresearched.Result:a v.partial picture indeed.