Cynicism and innocence: on the pro-war Left. posted by Richard Seymour

Yesterday's post by H.U.H.? provides me with another opportunity to riff on the cynicism-innocence theme. Tim, who writes at said blog, suggested that for substituting moralism for substantive political analysis, "the pro-war Left are romantics in the most teenaged sense". No, no, no, I thought - these guys are jaded cynics, fully aware of the kind of people they are expecting to be "liberators". However, since many of them are Marxists or ex-Marxists, they neither have any illusions in the UN nor see the international working class as having the kind of muscle that is capable of delivering emancipation. Hence, we are left with the problem of what to do with all these killers in the world. To which the obvious reply is to harness the might of the American state.

True, the US has its faults, isn't a perfectly secular democracy, has plutocratic tendencies, may even organise alliances to defend oil and profit from its wars - but it isn't a fascist regime. As corrupt and venal as the American state may be, there is nothing supererogatory about it. There is no excess of violence, nothing that is not rooted in the perceived interests of the state or the interests it defends. Therefore, we may not be unreasonable in hoping for some confluence between the interests of the imperialists and those suffering under autocracy - it worked in World War Two, no? The US has every reason to want some form of democracy to work in Iraq, and since this is the bare minimum we owe to Iraqis after years of collusion in their oppression, shouldn't we tactically support the war?

Now, if the above resembles something like the argument of pro-war leftists, then one might expect some humility with it, some acknowledgment that there is a gamble involved, a very considerable gamble and one that involves thousands of lives overseas at that. Not a bit of it. The pro-war Left has been redoubtably aggressive, adamant, strident in its arguments. In fact, those who opposed the war have been accused of all sorts of ill motives, wrongdoing and stupidity. In fact, some members of the pro-war Left seem rather more comfortable having an argument with Saddam or France than with, say, Noam Chomsky. And now that the war is over, and the outcome has indeed proven disastrous, the pro-war Left would prefer it if we moved on, stopped living in the past and supported "Iraqi democrats" in Iraq now (not the ones who oppose the occupation, for obvious reasons), even if they themselves have not quite "moved on".

My suggestion, therefore, is that the more sophisticated pro-war Left know full well what kind of ruthless bastards they have been placing their money on, and are even cognisant of the scale with which they can deal in death just in the course of ordinary business. They know of the hugely dangerous nature of the trajectory being taken by US neoconservative, that it is in the history and nature of the state the neoconservatives now control to prioritise political hegemony over human survival. They know all this - they just disavow it. This accounts for the apparent combination of worldliness and innocent faith in the arguments of the pro-war Left. The innocence itself is sustained by a core of deep cynicism.

Cynicism and innocence were seperated at birth, but in the spectacle of political radicals stoutly defending imperialism they are rejoined.