Fake Orwell Impersonators-Introducing Peter Bracken

The Guardian continues on it's "Comment is Free" site to offer more of the same: no real facts or deeper reporting on the real reasons for Britain's involvement in the Afghanistan War and appalling articles by so called "pro-liberation leftists". This is Orwellian language for those who rationalise resource wars by recourse to nominally left wing ideas.

The worst one so far has been written by a pompous individual who lacks even the intelligence of Christopher Hitchens, some nonentity called Peter Bracken who got rewarded with a being able to pen article for it at shortly after I was banned for Comment is Free for drawing a parallel between the disproportionate fuss over the theft of the Auschwitz sign and Saakashvili's demolition of the Red Army Monument in Kutaisi in Georgia.

Bracken writes,

I write as a supporter of the left. That might strike some interlocutors as delusional, but that's only because the authentic left renounces everything the deluded left has embraced. And in embracing an illiberal perspective on world politics it has – I believe – forfeited its right to membership of the left. The term "deluded", in other words, not only refers to a wanton disregard for the values of the left, it also suggests that those afflicted by it no longer belong where they think they belong.

The attribution of delusion is ruinously simple to sustain. That's because, at heart, this section of the left denies the mainstay of the authentic left's agenda: liberalism.

The deluded left occludes the self-evident power of this most potent expression of civilisation by applying the prefix "neo", or conflating it with capitalism, both of which attempt to sustain another obfuscation: that liberalism is but a fig leaf for imperialism. By which circuitous route we arrive at the nub of the deluded left's unprincipled bête noire: the west.

But a left that aligns itself against the west cannot be a progressive force, especially one which vents its opposition by finding cause with the grotesque illiberalism of theocratic and proto-fascist regimes.

Bracken the gives evidence of this,

The evidence is legion:

In the morally depleted rationalisations that "explained" 9/11 (the US had got its comeuppance).

In the contrast between the excoriating criticism of Israel and the understanding accorded the vicious antisemitism of Hamas.

In the apologia for the genocidal, ethnic cleansing regime of Serbia's former President Milosevic.

In the twisted logic that casts Iran's pro-democracy movement as a US-inspired neocolonial threat, and which induces it to remain silent in the face of despicable human rights abuses.

In the fanciful opinion – expressed only recently by Seumas Milne – that China, far from being an exemplar of human rights abuses on a colossal scale, is in fact an exemplary bulwark against a rapacious, capitalist hegemony.

And, above all, in the singularly depressing capacity of the deluded left to overlook every nook and cranny of fundamentalist oppression because "who are we to preach?" The bogeyman of moral relativism, hinged remorselessly to anti-westernism, is surely the fulcrum of this left's delusion.

The term delusional left has some merit in describing those "anti-war" types who are not, in fact, at all "anti-war" but on anti-Imperialist war, condemners of "bourgeois-liberal" militarism. As was Leon Trotsky before he and the Bolsheviks assumed power in 1917 and created a militaristic state based on One Party Totalitarian rule.

Such deluded left wingers include those on the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist left who still continue to dominate what they consider the mass protest against Afghanistan and the Iraq Wars which are equally supported by deluded figures on the liberal left such as Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen.

Instead of indulging in theological disputes about what are sinful "leftists" and the ones with the "correct line" few on the pro-war left ( those supporting "humanitarian intervention" ) have looked at the empirical evidence but supported US superpower rather like Stalinist fellow travellers had blind faith in the USSR.

Bracken has a point that hypocrisy and doublethink on the "anti-war left" is seldom appreciated, the fact that whilst Pilger lambasts Britain for trading with Burma, his hero Hugo Chavez blocked sanctions against the military junta there. Censorship by omission indeed. Chavez also aligns with Iran.

But the fake labels being bandied around in these internal squabble within What's Left of the Western left are part of the problem ( What's Left being Nick Cohen's punning title of an abysmas boof in 2005 ).. The fact is that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an oil grab and Western foreign policy in Afghanistan is about energy security.

Yet screaming that "it's all about the oil" and greedy corporations is, however, also a delusion. The West, including those who oppose wars, seldom offer constructive alternatives to oil over dependency. Yet their everyday lives depend on this oil imperialism. So this is the issue that needs to be addressed.

It's interesting that all those who pretend towards some "decent left" are deluded that Orwell can be cited as a model of moral clarity. But Orwell lived at a particular time of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism which only has partial relevance to the post-Cold War realities the West faces.

True, many mere "leftists" are what he called "transferred nationalists". Bored and depressed by the failure of revolutionary Marxism, they have turned desperately to 'identity' politics, of trying to transfer hope from a diminished working class in the West to Islamism as a global revolutionary challenge.

Yet Islamism is not one monolithic threat as Bracken would have people believe, as if the complexity of conflicts from Israel and Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan can be boiled down to a simplistic narrative of "us" versus the barbarians who present some new 'seamless totalitarian threat'.

That was Michael Gove's phrase in Celsius 7/7 and what is so sinister about UK foreign policy is the lack of independent thought being given to intractable dillemas. The fact is that both traditional conservative caution has gone, the coherence of the left fractured and political liberalism in retreat.

All we get from polemicists who, lets face it, have no real power over events, is asinine discussions often with very Orwellian language. Having the "anti-war" left led by repellent sympathisers of the USSR like Murray, Galloway et al is bound to put people off trying to re-invigorate real democracy in the UK.

On the other hand nothing is served by the messianism of the Trotskyist left having metastasised into the apocalyptic form of progressive Utopianism espoused by those like Miliband, Hichens, Cohen, Berman et al which supports some "pro-liberation left" using state power in places like Iraq.

It is possible to think that both are as bad as each other as remnant Trotskyists accuse those in New Labour of apostasy or "selling out" but those who continue to venerate the Utopianism of Trotsky in 2010 sold out their right to be regarded as democrats long ago .

Terms like "anti-war", "pro-liberation left", delusional left" etc etc are all framing devices used to try and create a mood of fitting the facts to the prescriptions of a creed. After all, few want to be seen as "pro-war" or "imperialist" on the left. So those like Norman Geras brand themselves "pro-liberation".

Even words like "progressive" are now mendacious as few want to be seen on the left as anti-Progress was what is at stake here are two rival interpretations of an Enlightenment secular creed that is both self absorbed and parochial. The changing and more dangerous world needs better thinking.

The only figure on the social democratic left that still retains moral clarity and integrity is Tony Judt whose brilliant Ill Fares the Land ( 2010) excoriates both the reflexive "transferred nationalists" and the liberal armchair war mongers who hitched themselves to a neoconservative war

Iraq was fought as Judt states, by those deluded that it was for their purposes. It was not .And that is the delusion Bracken ought to be concentrating his fire on, not a bunch of remnant Respect cranks and SWP fanatics with zero impact beyond being noisy and rather irrelevant. But still given space in the Guardian.

Tony Judt wrote a seminal essay On the Strange Death of Liberal America in 2006 for the LRB , later reprinted in his brilliant collection of essays Reappraisals, which is closer to the . liberal social democratic politics of Orwell. To understand Brackens "position" one need merely read it to understand him as a feebler version of Hitchens.

For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance.

They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear.

The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.

Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war.

Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War on Terror and the early Cold War.

Neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence.

But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms.

In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us.

To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have listed and many others besides have carried editorials criticising Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of torture and above all the sheer ineptitude of the president’s war. But here, too, the Cold War offers a revealing analogy.

Like Stalin’s Western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism, so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ‘preventive war’ a bad name.

Plus the facts pertaining to the actual continuing war in Iraq, the Great Game, and the building of the TAPI pipeline make pipe dreams of the shifting expedient falsehoods used to rationalise the war there. True, "Enlightened self interest" could be citied. But the self interest is merelt rationalised by recourse to secular Enlightenment doctrines.

But even then the main aim is to get the TAPI completed before Obama's re-election. The absurd notion that can be done whilst winning a War of Drugs which funds the Taliban to attack the areas where the pipeline will run through ensure the delusionary left is the one Bracken supports.

It is quite possible to criticise the liberal left's trend towards messianism and fake Orwell "decent left poses" simply by countering it with the empirical evidence that is routinely censored from mainstream media. Afghanistan is a geopolitical conflict, a resource war.It was not fought for "humanitarian" reasons.

The humanitarian aspects have barely been backed up with real investment as it is in any case impossible to transplant liberal secular democracy there by force of arms. Ethical realism demands a satisfactory withdrawal of troops which wil not be disastrous for people in Afghanistan and not tedious point scoring.

But to understand the war we need more access to the real facts of why it has been fought. The TAPI is a fact but the policy of oil diversification is seldom mentioned. If not why not? It's not a conspiracy theory. It is mentioned as an explicit aim by US think tanks e.g The Heritage Foundation.