Mick Hartley

The Winter 2007 edition of Democratiya is now online. The only essay I’ve yet looked at is Nick Cohen’s – a new postscript to his “What’s Left” book:

Often it takes a fresh set of eyes to see a stale world anew. In 2006, after two years of living in South America, Martin Amis returned to Britain find a liberal-left wallowing in self-delusion. When asked by the Independent what had shocked him most since he got home he replied: ‘The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators waddling around under placards saying, “We Are All Hezbollah Now”. Well, make the most of being Hezbollah while you can. As its leader, famously advised the West: “We don’t want anything from you.We just want to eliminate you.”‘

Critics could say that leftists boasting of their conversion to Islamism were a fringe phenomenon; although they only ever said that when they were cornered. At all other times, they never discussed the movement from the far left to the far right, and their silence implied complicity.

In any case, Amis made it clear that he was talking about the mainstream, not the fringe, when he continued that he then went on Question Time, the most popular political discussion programme of the day, and ‘a woman in the audience, her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument. Since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, “should be dropping bombs on themselves!” And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a credal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.’

So they were, and so they remain to this day, as any honest examination of mainstream liberal culture would show.

To that catalogue of the idiocy of “mainstream liberal culture” we can add the sanctification of the wretched Brian Haw, represented by the latest Turner Prize farce – see below.