I’ve had some interesting correspondence on my recent posts about David McKnight and Naomi Klein. Clive Bradley writes regarding the former:
[He] refers to the Worker-Communist Party as ‘Iran-leaning’ – which is certainly false. They are militantly anti-clerical… They are linked to a party of the same name in Iran – perhaps that’s what he meant. The rest – that they denounce the ‘resistance’ as terrorists – is true. I interviewed one of their leaders in our paper a while back.
Here is the link to the interview Clive mentions. It contains much interesting information while also embodying, in my own view, the same contradiction as is to be found in David McKnight’s piece: Muayad, the leader Clive interviewed, says his organization didn’t see the war as a liberation, and the conditions and difficulties he sets out are indeed daunting. At the same time he describes an explosion of political and civil activity that would not, without the Coalition intervention, have happened or be happening.
South African reader DF writes:
Your posts on the comments of David McKnight and Naomi Klein underline a growing sense that many who were passionately antiwar are now, in the face of undeniable evidence from Iraqis themselves, not to mention the continuing exposure of Saddam’s tireless atrocities, beginning to realise there is a moral fissure at the heart of this option.
Both these commentators… are clearly trying to resolve their moral dilemma. It may be that many cannot bring themselves to do so without simultaneously denying any moral right on the side of the wartime allies. I’m encouraged anyway.
Relatedly, Alan Johnson has pointed me to this letter of his on the Worker’s Liberty website. Speaking of ‘propagandists of the denial’ like Michael Moore, Alan says:
In this white and padded world there is no terrorism, only “terrorism”. No democracy, only “democracy”. The substitution of clear thinking by the tyranny of the inverted comma is now learnt as the very height of critical thinking at Smart Alec 101 classes across the world, while the Wahhabi-funded madrasas churn out another kind of education altogether.
In Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, the good humanists keep repeating, as the plague spreads, “There are no rats in Oran”. You see there cannot be.
Large chunks of the left are today like the people of Oran. Quite why this is so, or why some are even starting to half support the rats, I don’t have space to discuss here. But we should not indulge them.
Wake up, and repeat after me, THERE… IS… A… TERRORIST… THREAT. Now, does the left have anything sensible to say about that threat? Anything? Any distinctive ideas about how to defeat it? Can it even allow itself to pose the question of how to contain and defeat the terrorist threat? Or can it only make silly jokes?
The ‘good humanists’. That is a label I would willingly share. But over a decade or so I have begun to wonder whether there is something intrinsic to a certain kind of well-meaning progressive outlook that makes it resistant to recognizing the darker possibilities which from time to time overwhelm whole segments of humankind.