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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
High Time, 2 May 2008
At last, a writer who isn't afraid to challenge the posturing of a now ridiculous 'liberal left', a loose political grouping who really should have the collective intelligence to know better. Until recently I've counted myself as one of them but now I just feel ashamed. This fine writer will tell you why. But one of his chapter titles, 'Kill us, we deserve it', pretty well sums it all up.
Cohen's analysis is as sober as it is disturbing and I read this book well into the night, as gripped as by any thriller. He also writes lucidly, an especial advantage and in direct contrast to the disappointing traditions of inpenetrable prose by many leftist thinkers.
Nick Cohen, given his fine liberal background, is a brave man to have written this book. He has had the courage to stand up and be counted and should be applauded for it.
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65 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I'm Left wondering, 31 Jan 2007
I suspect how people react to this book will depend quite a bit on where they stand politically. I have noticed on blogs and messageboards that it has enraged the Trots and Trot-lite fellow travellers in the anti-war movement. It's also had enthusisatic approval from those you might expect it from - Christoper Hitchens, John Lloyd etc. Whereas I imagine some on the Right will (wilfuly?) misread the book as "all Lefties are soft on terrorists". (Although having said that Peter Oborne wrote a very fair-minded review)
Speaking personally as a fairly moderate but anti-war Labour supporter I found myself nodding in agreement with much of his analysis of elements of the Left but a bit annoyed by some of the extrapolations he makes.
It is definitely true that much of the Left these days seems to watch what America does and then look for the reason why US policy is wrong. The same could be said about their view of Blair. It is also true that there is often an undue focus on the "causes" of terrorism, rather than simply facing up to the fact that this is an extremist movement that has no problem with killing opponents. (No-one on the Left was bothered about the "causes" of the far-Right bomber who set off bombds in Brick Lane, Soho etc).
It is also true that the tendency to side with the underdog leads many lefties to turn a blind eye to some rabid anti-semitism on the part of those they support. And the treatment of some Iraqi trade unionists who opposed pulling the US & UK troops out of their country by members of the anti-war movement is simply shameful.
However these are often failings of subgroups within the Left (often those trying to fit the current maelstrom in Iraq into a crude imperialist/anti-imperialist framework) rather than the Left as a whole. And the book seems to veer between awareness of these subdivisions and lumping everyone in together. In addition he does often read like a recent convert to his position, advocating it without nuance, and failing to spot the nuances in others' arguments. A good example of this is where he misreads (in my view) a quote from Amnesty's secretary general (p324-325). I think the context to this quote is Amnesty's interest in economic human rights, and as such I don't think it means what Nick Cohen thinks its means (that human rights don't matter to poor people).
Overall I think it is worth anyone on the Left reading this book with an open mind. It is well-written, even if it does feel a bit like a pamphlet that's been strung out for a couple of hundred pages. And it should at least make those who can be a bit objective question some of their on views and ways of thinking (so that probably leaves out the membership of Respect, SWP etc).
He's no George Orwell though!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very relevant and timely, 19 April 2009
This is a polemical work and as such, the tone is a little shrill in places. Its central argument however is very sound and well made. This is that too many people on the liberal-left in the last decade and a half or so in particular have allowed hatred of the West and in particular of America, to distort their political judgement and lead them into unholy alliances and making excuses for appalling reactionaries and mass murderers such as Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden and other nihilist Islamists. In particular he recounts in great detail how so many leftists rightly supported Saddam's victims in Iraq as they were oppressed and murdered in the 70s and 80s, but withdrew much of their criticism during the first Gulf war in 1991 and even more so in the lead up to and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The author does not argue that they should necessarily have suspended their criticism of the 2003 invasion simply because Saddam was a fascist monster who deserved to be overthrown (though that seems a pretty good reason for overthrowing him to me), but argues that they were utterly wrong, after the fall of Saddam, to oppose the efforts of the Iraqi people to try to build a new more democratic society in the following years. The Stop the War coalition has made excuses for the Baathist and Al Qaeda militants who have blown up and killed so many of their fellow Muslims, calling them "the resistance", while denying support to Iraqi trade unionists trying to organise in the admittedly shaky but still real new democracy the country is trying to forge.
The phenomenon of some members of the liberal left excusing the actions of dictators as long as they are anti-Western democracy is not new and the author recalls the excuses made for Stalin during the 1930s and denial of the reality of the purges and show trials. However, the more recent excuse-making is, he says, less understandable as these modern critics do not seem to be motivated in favour of a positive liberal or socialist vision for society, but merely by all-consuming hatred of their own Western governments and political systems. The actions of the latter, whether good, bad or somewhere in between, are invariably portrayed as worse than even the most appalling atrocities carried out in modern dictatorships, including now for example Sudan, Zimbabwe and North Korea - regimes who are very rarely publicly criticised by liberals or leftists outside government. The best these critics will concede is that there is no difference between their Western governments and these tyrannies and they will frequently distort facts to "prove" this, e.g. by claiming that the US and UK were primarily responsible for arming Saddam in earlier years, whereas far more weapons were given by the Soviet Union, China and France (see the table on p366 of this edition); or by asserting that any admittedly horrible act committed by an individual member of the US armed forces show that they are no better than a mass murdering nihilist like Bin Laden.
The arguments in this book have helped me to crystallise my own feelings about the misjudgements so many on the left of British politics have been making, especially since 9/11, when thinking on foreign policy has so often come to mean "find out the US view and then take the opposite one". So, overall, a very welcome book, the more impactful as it comes from someone who himself has many criticisms of Western governments but also clearly possesses what his critics lack - a sense of proportion and a healthy respect for liberal democracy as a concept in itself.
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