Mick Hartley

Timothy Cootes at Quillette:

The most contemptible of John Pilger’s declarations of left-wing solidarity was made in an interview with Green Left Weekly in January, 2004. The Australian journalist was asked whether the Left should support the anti-occupation movement in Iraq. Pilger replied:

Yes . . We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance.

One must remember that in the ranks of the resistance were the Ba’ath party loyalists and the newly arrived jihadists of al Qaeda, who set out to foment sectarian war and leave Iraqi civil society in ruins. And they succeeded. For Pilger, the fascists and Islamists were the true friends of the Western Left.

Pilger had a lot of other friends, too. Radicals and populists such as Michael Moore, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy, and the Stop the War Coalition came out to support the resistance, oppose the United States, and demonstrate their commitment to barbarism….

A reader or two might be thinking: why is the author wandering around a left-wing graveyard and disinterring John Pilger? Surely he doesn’t carry much influence anymore. Why breathe life into these old and decaying arguments?

I do so for two reasons. First, recent political events have given a freshness to these kinds of arguments. The former chairman of Stop the War is Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader of the UK Labour party and self-declared chum of Hamas and Hezbollah. His Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, has a soft spot for Mao. Their Executive Director for Communications and Strategy, Seumas Milne, remains unconvinced of the demerits of Stalinism. All are unrepentantly anti-Western and anti-imperialist.If the ideas of John Pilger could be channelled into a political party, it would look like Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn’s rise has energised and frightened the Left, probably in equal parts. So, I don’t think these arguments have gone away. I think they remain very important.

Second, John Pilger and his role in the recent history of left-wing disputation meet up with an  intellectual trend that characterises the present moment. I am speaking of the regressive left, a term coined by Maajid Nawaz. The regressive left refers to the nominally liberal writers and intellectuals who have stopped defending liberal principles, and now expend considerable energy excusing and defending the Islamist movement and its vicious assault on secular and Muslim societies. The term has been stuck to writers like Glenn Greenwald, CJ Werleman, Chris Hedges, and a cluster of outlets like Salon, The Intercept, Alternet and countless others in the US and Britain.

What defines the regressive left? It is the same assumption of Western culpability and confusion between friends and enemies that led to left-wing support for genocide denial in the 1990s and for the resistance in Iraq. In his excellent collaboration with Sam Harris, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, Nawaz shows that the regressive left “leap(s) whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world.”

In doing so, the regressive left has abandoned the people in the Muslim world it is supposed to be defending: the Muslim liberals, the Muslim feminists, the Muslim homosexuals, the ex-Muslims and atheists, the secular bloggers in Bangladesh, and the raped and tortured Yazidis, to name just a few….