Update on last post. posted by Richard Seymour

It isn't really an update on the actual material covered in the last post, which was a rather vicious but nonetheless jocular dig at some of Johann Hari's polemical tactics. I made clear then, and want to doubly emphasize now, that I do not regard Hari or any of his liberal colleagues in the media, as left-wing equivalents to the fraudster known as David Irving. It is an update on one of the reactions.

The reason I come back to this is that I advertised my post at MediaLens , which is an excellent site for media analysis and criticism from a Chomskyist point of view. The editors are very tolerant about my attention-seeking, so whenever I think I've produced something half-decent I seek an audience there. Most of the people who post there are intelligent and thoughtful left-wingers, many of them unusually perceptive. Unfortunately, I seem to have elicited a bout of Holocaust denial from one of the regular contributors there. He proceeds in the usual fashion, claiming that there is some chain of equivalents that links liberal supporters of imperialism to Nazi apologists like David Irving: in particular, the myopic liberal David Aaronovitch was compared with Irving. I explained that I was joking, and also that such comparisons if offered seriously in print would lose a libel suit any day of the week. What then followed was a bundle of falsehoods and bizarre inversions of reality, perhaps retailed in good faith (and so much the worse if they were). These often coincided with the kinds of claims made by the idiotic Irving himself.

I have no truck with idiots who claim that the Left is drifting toward anti-Semitism in its criticism of Israel, or toward Fascism in its refusal to back imperialist wars which are justified as humanitarian ventures. But there is a real problem if people like this believe what they do, and still place themselves on the left. They are either deeply confused, or deliberately dissembling. At any rate, to allow their version of events to float in the blogosphere, untouched and unanswered is to normalise it, make it an acceptable and normal kind of argument. It should be exposed for what it is, which is dangerous delusion at best.

Fascism has not gone away, in case anyone has been living under a rock. It is a crime in progress in many parts of the world. There is a serious danger that, given a sufficient concatenation of crises, a full-scale revival of Fascism could be convoked. The myths which will help midwive its rebirth have to be challenged.