Ooh aah, Hezbollah. posted by Richard Seymour

Shortly after posting pictures and video of the 100,000 strong London demonstration against the war on Lebanon, I started to get hits from Michael Berube's site. He appears to be lit crit, as well as a pet cret of the Dems. No, really, I have no idea who the guy is. Berube was whining about my support for Hezbollah and, as I seemed to be a merely incidental character for his diorama of infidel leftists, and since he is clearly incurably banal, I decided to leave him alone. Maxims and Reflections has a word or two, however:

[T]here is a powerful undertow toward power in the discourse of the "democratic" "left" that I finally find so dismaying that I have no choice but to reject the thing root and branch. Because few people they accuse of defending Milosevic or Hussein or Nasrallah or any other Hitler-Of-The-Month has defended these people with anything like the vigor and passion with which the "democratic" "left" has implicitly defended Bush, Clinton or Bush; or, if not these men themselves, then the right of these men to send an army anywhere, to level any city from the air, to destroy any state, to define any population as criminal, outlaw, subhuman.

The "democratic left" is the "civilised left" of which hucksters like Kamm speak, it is the domesticated left, the left that is constantly refashioning itself in the image of the bourgeoisie, the left that accepts liberalism as the horizon of discourse and thinks democracy is the same thing as liberal capitalism. The "democratic left" supports the right of no oppressed group to defend itself against violence by "democratic" states. No matter how bad the murder is, self-defense is an offence. Hezbollah has no right to defend itself because it is not composed of liberal democrats. Same goes for Hamas, and the Iraqi resistance. Axiomatically, the honorary White Man of the Levant does have a Right to Defend Itself - against ambulances, villages, fleeing cars and so on.