Liberalsm, Terrorism and State Power. posted by Richard Seymour

Yesterday, I noticed a piece by the ex-Marxist Norman Geras on Blair's apparent conversion to the Marxist philosophy of Law. It more closely resembled, I noted, the Hobbesian view of an anarchic war of all against all in which the powerful must provide order, and it is the powerful who get to determine what the law ought to be.

He is at it again, with a cheapshot at John Pilger . He compares Pilger's attitude to US power , and specifically to the wafer-thin difference between the Democrat and Republican Presidential candidates, to the attitude of the "third period" Comintern under Stalin toward working with other forces of the working class against fascism:

"I'm reminded of so-called Third Period Comintern policy in the early 1930s, when the German Social Democrats were dubbed 'Social Fascists' by the Communist Party and regarded as a greater menace than a certain other political outfit which was just then on the verge of inaugurating a German - and European, and global - catastrophe."

Two obvious points. 1) The Democrats are not a working class party, and have no organic connections to the labour movement. They take campaign money, and that's it. They are a party of big business and the rich, just like the dynastic Liberals of Victorian England. 2) The comparison of Bush and his neoconservative chums to Adolf Hitler is of course very radical sounding, and it certainly resonates with Pilger's hyperbolic claim that Bush is a "crypto-fascist", but it's so patently absurd as to not merit prolonged consideration.
Less obvious points to make may be that Norman Geras, as a born-again Cruise Missile Liberal, is of course an ally of both Blair and Bush. If Norman Geras thinks there is a sincere difference between John Kerry and George W. Bush, (and presumably Kerry represents the anti-fascist resistance in this equation), then Geras would have to be the first Marxist to both support the 'fascist' and denounce others who failed to rally behind the 'anti-fascist'. He also cites the intellectually neutered considerations of Henry McDonald , a blow-em-up liberal at the Observer:

"To understand the cynicism behind the brutality of last week's slaughter of Shia pilgrims in Karbala and Baghdad, try making a comparison with Northern Ireland.

Imagine that bombs had been planted in and around Clonard Monastery in West Belfast at the time of the Solemn Novena every June. Or, alternatively, that explosive devices had been strategically placed along the route march of the Orangemen all the way from Clifton Street to the Field. At either event, both sacred days for Catholics and Protestants, the likelihood would be carnage on a grand scale. And the likely result of such large loss of life would undoubtedly be outright civil war. . .

The cheerleaders from the Irish and British ultra-left who for so long lent republican violence some spurious radical edge would have left the field instantly once their 'heroes' started fomenting total sectarian conflict."

This, a reference to the calls by many on the anti-imperialist Left to support to resistance to the occupation of Iraq, makes one mistake characteristic of liberals, with their gaping blind-spot - he doesn't realise that the argument cuts both ways. That if, in fact, the United Kingdom had dropped bombs on the citizens of Northern Ireland after thirty years of having imposed some tyrannical monster on the country and economically crippling sanctions to boot, there might in fact have been something worse than "total sectarian conflict". London would have been blitzed every week, I venture, and perhaps we would be describing Republican anti-occupation violence as "fascist".

The argument also manages to conflate the actions of the resistance to the occupation, and of those who are deliberately trying to create civil war (supposing Zarqawi is actually behind these latest attacks) - between those who want to unite Iraq against their tormentors and those who want to destroy Iraq by setting ethnic and religious wells of resentment alight: "the far left have awarded the alliance of the ex-Baathists and the Islamists the morally loaded nomenclature 'resistance'."

The absolutely corrupted and servile attitude to Western power could not be more obvious:

"Why does the left in Ireland have no problem siding objectively with those determined to strangle democracy at birth in Iraq?"

The fact that a Western intellectual would take at face value the moral prescriptions and pretensions of US power is not even a source of discomfort for the pro-war Left. The imperial projections of neoconservatives, from the Project for the New American Century, to Rumsfeld's 9/11 memos, to the National Security Strategy and beyond, apparently have no interest for these ersatz anti-fascists. Indeed, the standard ideological gesture of extricating from a dense mesh of geopolitical interests a simplistic humanitarian scenario is always the cheapest shot of all. The Iraqis themselves, of course, have responded to this by suggesting that if the Americans aren't willing or able to provide security for them, perhaps they'd best be left to do it for themselves. Not that demands for self-determination cut any ice with the occupying forces. McDonald hails "the courageous Welsh Labour MP Ann Clywd who, unlike most of her counterparts in Britain and Ireland, had seen at first hand what the Baath dictatorship inflicted on the Kurds." I'd like to know exactly what is courageous about supporting power, specifically the most powerful country on earth as it delivers airborne death to one of the weakest countries on earth. I'd like to know why McDonald assumes that Saddam's torture of the Kurds had anything to do with the reasons for going to war when elementary logic suggests that this cannot be the case. I'd like to know why on earth he imagines that democracy is nascent in Iraq, given the strictures already imposed by the US on what sort of governments Iraqis may choose. I'd like to know if there is any intellectual contortion and self-ridiculing posture to which the infantile warniks of the Left will not submit themselves in the service of the power they have come to love.

And a quick update. The US is detaining 10,000 Iraqis without charge , and the families don't know what's become of them. All hail freedom, all hail democracy. Rejoice, rejoice for the New Iraq...