A lot of bloggers have linked to Paul Berman's article in Dissent over the last few days, with most of those I've come across doing so in an endorsing ('what he said') kind of a way. I want to do something slightly different here and distinguish amongst seven of his points in order to end on a question. As those who have read his article will know, Berman proffers six reasons - each accompanied by a thump on the bar he's sitting at - why people on the left don't see things his way over the war in Iraq. Abbreviating greatly here, since you can follow the link to read for yourself his own exposition of those reasons, and also adding a seventh to his six since it appears towards the end of the piece, though unaccompanied by a thump, I set out the reasons Berman gives for why others on the left take a view opposed to his - and, of course, that of other pro-war leftists: 1) Bush; 2) America; 3) support for anything construable as anti-colonial; 4) cultural relativism; 5) Israel; 6) a failure to take anti-Semitism seriously; and 7) lack of any genuine grasp of, or feeling for, the meaning of extreme forms of evil and oppression:
I always figured that a keen awareness of extreme oppression was the deepest trait of a left-wing heart. Mass graves, three hundred thousand missing Iraqis, a population crushed by thirty-five years of Baathist boots stomping on their faces - that is what fascism means!I don't quarrel with the claim that, within current political debates, all of these seven themes figure as part of that left advocacy which Berman, and others of us, have opposed. But I want to raise a different question. Does any of these reasons have priority for the distinctively socialist far left, some of it of Marxist persuasion or at any rate formation, and amongst whom I would reckon cultural relativist and postmodern tropes are generally weak?
The answer to this question that I suggest is that, yes, two of them do carry more weight: namely, numbers 2 and 7. One way of supporting this suggestion is to point out that a very large segment of the political constituency I'm talking about not only opposed the Iraq war, but also opposed the intervention in Afghanistan before that, and in Kosovo before that, and so on back to the first Gulf War that evicted Saddam's armies from Kuwait. And either some or all of Berman's other reasons - 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 - did not figure in these previous conflicts. However America, as foremost representative of global capitalism, on one side, and (speaking loosely) regimes and movements of an utterly ghastly kind politically, on the other - those are two common poles throughout.
It's not a deeply researched or even much pondered argument this, just an early and provisional reaction to reading the Berman article, and one therefore which I may well want to amend or retract. But if there's anything in it, it prompts a further question. Why does this particular thematic combination lead so many to come down each time on the side they do - morally and politically, in my own view, the wrong side?