Tim Wilkinson, at his Spartan (19 posts since 1997 and no pictures!) and thoroughly scholarly blog Surely Some Mistake?, has offered up the most insightful review I've yet seen of Peter Hitchens's latest book The Broken Compass, his latest lament on the decline and fall of British politics and all who sail in her.The main focus of Tim's post is on Peter's analysis of British former Trotskyite popinjays (drink-soaked, fag-fogged or coke-dusted) and other less colorfully plumaged chirpers, cheepers and warblers of the "neocon" dawn chorus, including those bold enough to have scratched their beaks on the signature column of the Euston Manifesto. (The opening section is below the photo.)
Nick Cohen (absolutely no sign of substance abuse there) is the thinking Brit's Pat Condell. But could Peter Hitchens really have sunk so low as to use the notorious anti-Muslim drama queen and Sarah Palin fanboy as a voodoo doll to get a few stabs in at big brother Christopher?
The history of most neocons is a strange one. Many are ex-Trotskyites subsequently affiliated to the Democratic Party, only later moving to the right (along some axes) to form an influential part of the Republican party apparatus. The neocons' Global War on Terror and anti-Islamic rhetoric seems to have prompted a similar phenomenon in the UK, with a number of prominent left-wingers rallying to the cause.
A group of such journalists even produced the rather thin 'Euston Manifesto' to formalise their new alignment (Euston being the area of London in which it was devised). Among the left-wing converts to GWOTism is, famously, Christopher Hitchens, whose brother Peter attempts in his recent book The Broken Compass to explain this phenomenon, diplomatically using not his brother but another Eustonian journalist , Nick Cohen, as exemplar. Hitchens (the unadorned surname will henceforth signify Peter) cites Cohen's scurrilous assertion that 'a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist dictator' as typifying the crude trickery and misrepresentation that Cohen brought to bear in the service of his newfound belligerence (in similar mode Cohen has recently taken to smearing those who raise doubts about the surely unsafe conviction of the alleged Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi).
Hitchens rightly suggests that an explanation is required for how a supposedly left-wing commentator (Cohen, doing double duty for Hitchens, C) has adopted the openly authoritarian, born-again Zionist ("it was clear to me that when Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Israel it had declared war and had to accept the consequences. I would not have thought that five years ago") and implicitly American Supremacist GWOT agenda. Hitchens's explanation for this whole-cloth adoption of neocon propaganda is threefold: first, a hatred of religion (this perhaps aimed more at his flamboyantly Atheist brother than his nominal target); second, a soft-focus way of retreating from an imputed anti-Zionist past; and third and most prominently, a desire to recant 'leftist' mistakes and move closer to a conservative position. As Hitchens puts it:
"Left-wing dogmatists can appear to change their minds, and be given credit (or be enjoyably attacked by their former comrades) for having done so, without undergoing any true revolution."
There is certainly something in this, but it is hard to agree entirely with some of Hitchens's presuppositions. He claims, largely on the evidence of a book by renegade left-winger Andrew Anthony, that the Eustonians (and perhaps by implication the Neo-cons) have seen the error of their ways in regard to "crime, Leftist excuse-making, double-think about the Soviet Union, multiculturalism, vandalism, crime, the catch-all accusation of 'racism' and the uselessness of a liberalised police force." The basic conception of the GWOT as providing the Eustonians with the 'acceptable' face of recantation may be correct (and Hitchens seems correct that the anti-religious aspect plays a part in making the position palatable to them - along with the rhetoric of freedom and human rights, which could probably be adapted to almost any foreign policy position). But the nature of that recantation and the motivation for it are not to my ear correctly described.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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