Them and us?
It's getting to be a bit of a pattern. Someone generically of the left - or so they regard themselves - writes about regrettable features of leftist advocacy and alignment in recent times and is met by a chorus of voices saying, approximately, 'Who, me? Who, us? What, the left? No, never. Unheard of.' Think Andy Anthony's new book - and before that Nick Cohen's. And before that the Euston Manifesto, and before that sundry journos and bloggers on account of columns and blog posts they'd written. Not that I mean to assimilate all these people to one another. Yet there does seem to be a pattern in the responses to them nonetheless.
The no-never chorus isn't completely homogeneous. It contains at least two different types of voice. One is the voice of the who-mes. The who-mes are the direct targets of the kind of critique I'm talking about but they can't for the life of them think of anything they've ever said that deserves the relevant criticism. The other voice is in some ways more interesting; it is the voice of the what-the-lefts. The what-the-lefts are not themselves the object of the critique, but they get upset by it all the same, because the way they tell it, apart from Colin Crazed-Stalinist, a tiny handful of members of the Socialist Workers Party, and just possibly a dog, there is no significant presence on the liberal-left of the opinions being subjected to criticism by the mischievous critics.
It's quite a mystery, this. The volume of foul apologetics that streamed across the pages of the left and liberal press in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 is a matter of public record. The 'understanding' impulses towards terrorism in general, and towards terrorism aimed, more particularly, against Israeli civilians, to say nothing of the terrorism that struck London just over two years ago, have also not been miserly in expressing themselves. Same thing with regard to mealy-mouthed responses from liberals and leftists where principles of free speech run up against 'outrage' of one kind and another. But you say a word against the left or the liberal-left? Then it's the whole 'Who, me? Who, us? What, the left?' rigmarole.
Anyone would think that the object of criticism was some spotless paragon, a virtuous aunt who'd devoted her life to charitable works, including a long stint in some faraway place helping people abandoned by the world to their suffering. One might somehow have forgotten that part of the history of the left, and not a small part but over generations, is of a tradition absolutely steeped in apologia for the most terrible crimes, ready to shut its eyes against compromises or outright rejections of every democratic principle, every moral constraint, in the interests of 'the movement', or 'the cause', or an imagined future, and never mind the cost. And it wasn't just back then during the purges and the Moscow Trials. A later generation took up the word on behalf of Mao and China, or some other would-be socialist paradise not obviously all that paradisical, but requiring a patience from the faithful. There were parties of indulgent, admiring Western leftist visitors to China, to Albania. In my own person I knew a graduate student of sociology at the time of Pol Pot's bloodletting in Cambodia who explained to me that I needed to take account of the specificities of that culture and not just speak condemnation from afar. And neither was it only hard-core - extreme - leftists who formed part of this history. There have been well-meaning, 'liberal' fellow-travellers with the whole damn thing, from the worst crimes of Stalinism to the democratic deficits of Castro's Cuba.
Why shouldn't we on the left - yes, from within it - tell it like it is, to use the old formula, in this regard as well? Not because that tradition is the whole tradition of the left, but precisely because it is not - precisely in order to fight for the best traditions of the left, its embrace of democracy when it has embraced it, its concern for the rights of people everywhere, and especially of those who are oppressed, and tyrannized, who do not have the basic means of life and health and happiness. If there is an idea that by condemning others on the left you weaken your 'own side', well, the hell with that. That idea would be dismissed with the contempt it deserves by the very same protectors of the reputation of the left from a criticism they find too scathing, if it was put to them that they should not criticize democratic failures in their own societies for fear of giving comfort to some 'enemy'.
Them and us is a complicated business. As I've said before here, you can be of the left and not want to be united with certain others who are also of it, but prefer to be divided from them. This for the sake of the left itself, among other things.
