“What’s Left?” asks Nick Cohen in his virulent polemic against what he describes as the “left”. This is at the root of my difficulty with the book. His definitions of the left vary according to the targets in his sights. Sadly, it seems to mean whatever he wants it to mean.
I have always read Cohen’s columns, and, invariably, I have enjoyed them. Whilst often disagreeing with his conclusions, I never doubted his good intentions, nor failed to enjoy his caustic criticisms. I have also participated in two television productions with Nick, whom I found to be both engaging and well-informed. It is, therefore, with some regret that I find his book unworthy of him in so many instances.
By his own admission, he uses “the left as a generalisation”. Yet he does not fail to pick his specific targets with what appears to be personal malice, as with Harold Pinter. He is particularly savage towards Noam Chomsky and George Galloway. Predictably, David Aaronovitch is an injured party to Cohen, whilst Christopher Hitchens is an exemplary savant of current affairs.
This is the clue to the author’s starting point. All three have moved far from their political roots. All three have acted as apologists for the invasion of Iraq. All three see merit in the thinking of the American neocons. Certainly, regular readers of Cohen’s columns will have noted his increasingly hysterical defence of the indefensible in the Middle East.
That is not to say that he is not right on many things in the book. He is right to point out what terrible events have gone unchallenged by the left. However, it is also a question of degree. The book goes to extraordinary lengths to show how wrong the left has been throughout recent history. He begrudges, for example, Labour opposition to Hitler. It came anyway, he argues, from the right of Labour, from Ernie Bevin.
Indeed, very early in the book, I formed the impression that the author had an agenda to communicate, and that he had set out his case with that end in mind. As such, much of what he writes is partial; sometimes it is selective; very often, it is inconsistent. He speculates on Iraq’s “bomb”, and Israel’s pre-emptive strike in 1981, whilst never mentioning Israel’s bomb – the sin of omission which he constantly attributes to the left.
There are two recurrent themes to this book. One is the repeated attack on those whom Cohen views as left intellectuals – the Palestinian Edward Said is a particular object of derision, although he reserves a special antagonism towards Jewish intellectuals like Pinter, Chomsky and Naomi Wolf. This links into his other theme – that of anti-semitism.
No one can argue that there has been an increase in recent years in anti-semite incidents across the globe. It is an affront not only to Jews, but to any civilized society. Yet to imply that “The Independent” and “The New Statesman” were neo-Nazi, and that “The London Review of Books” reinforced anti-semitism is pure fantasy.
He imagines that a modern audience “willed me to substitute” “Zionist” for “Jew”, to cloak their anti-semitism in more acceptable language. Political anti-semitism, he says, has replaced religious anti-semitism. He denies that the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank are in any way a “root cause” of what he describes as “the resurgence of fascistic ideologies in the Middle East”. Why not, he postulates, a standard anti-colonial hatred of immigrant settlers? He answers his own question – right wing Arabs turned to the Nazis for support!
He is talking of a fringe, having already noted that “the loss of Palestinian land, the barrier of partition….., the humiliations endured at the hands of Israeli forces and the poverty of the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population are evils which are worth fighting.” Only having declared the obvious does his own reality check kick in, and anti-semitism becomes his total explanation for Arab and Islamic hostility to Israel.
Nick Cohen is right to point out that reactionary regimes in the Middle East (and beyond) are quite happy to divert attention from themselves to Israel by any means which comes to hand. All the more reason, then, that the West – particularly the American super power – ought to tread more warily when dealing with the likes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Nor can al-Qaeda or anyone else justify murderous attacks, whether on New York office workers, Israeli children, or Iraqi civilians. As Cohen emphasises, although Palestine is used as an excuse for 9/11, none of the hijackers was Palestinian, nor were they Iraqi.
I have no problem with Nick Cohen having a go at a variety of targets – that is what he does best as a journalist. Yet for such a man to lash out so indiscriminately and so viciously is still a shock. I am quite happy for him to lambast the pernicious Socialist Workers Party, and its infiltration of the “Stop the War” Coalition. Most people accept his generally trenchant views. Many will find this book too much.
Having read the book, I felt quite sad putting it down. It was like one of those family get-togethers where one member has too much to drink, and decides to tell everyone else exactly what he thinks of them. To read him praising Kagan and Wolfowitz, whilst dismissing millions of anti-war marchers, is disconcerting. To say of Cardinal Renato Martino that “he upheld the worst traditions of the Catholic Church when he said that far from being exultant at the arrest of Saddam, he felt pity for the man destroyed,” is to dismiss a charitable motive, and suggests a bias which he would eagerly condemn in others as prejudice.
Ironically, the last hurrah of the book is Cohen’s endorsement of the Euston Manifesto – what he himself describes as “a statement of the obvious produced by obscure men and women”. A pessimistic conclusion to a pessimistic view of the left.
