What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way
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From the much-loved, witty and excoriating voice of journalist Nick Cohen, a powerful and irreverent dissection of the agonies, idiocies and compromises of mainstream liberal thought.Nick Cohen comes from the Left. While growing up, his mother would search the supermarket shelves for politically reputable citrus fruit and despair. When, at the age of 13, he found out that his kind and thoughtful English teacher voted Conservative, he nearly fell off his chair: 'To be good, you had to be on the Left.'Today he's no less confused. When he looks around him, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, he sees a community of Left-leaning liberals standing on their heads. Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam that stands for everything the liberal-Left is against come from a section of the Left? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the Left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal-Left, but not, for instance, China, the Sudan, Zimbabwe or North Korea? Why can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a liberal literary journal as in a neo-Nazi rag? It's easy to know what the Left is fighting against – the evils of Bush and corporations – but what and, more to the point, who are they fighting for?As he tours the follies of the Left, Nick Cohen asks us to reconsider what it means to be liberal in this confused and topsy-turvy time. With the angry satire of Swift, he reclaims the values of democracy and solidarity that united the movement against fascism, and asks: What's Left?
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Nick Cohen. What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way
NICK COHEN. What’s Left?
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE Morbid Symptoms
CHAPTER ONE An Iraqi Solzhenitsyn
CHAPTER TWO ‘Sacrificed So Much for This Animal’
CHAPTER THREE Leftists Without a Left
CHAPTER FOUR Academic Scribblers and a Defunct Economist
CHAPTER FIVE Tories Against the War
CHAPTER SIX The Boy on the Edge of the Gang
CHAPTER SEVEN What Do We Do Now?
INTERMISSION A Hereditary Disease
CHAPTER EIGHT All the Russians Love the Prussians
PART TWO Raging Fevers
CHAPTER NINE ‘Kill Us, We Deserve It’
CHAPTER TEN The Disgrace of the Anti-War Movement
CHAPTER ELEVEN The Liberals Go Berserk
CHAPTER TWELVE The Jews, the Muslims and – er – the Freemasons
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Why Bother?
POSTSCRIPT
1. Socialism for Shoppers: The Rise of Consumer Leftism
2 Multi-Culti Going Faulty
3. Liberal Disillusion
4. Fear
If you enjoyed What’s Left?, check out these other great Nick Cohen titles
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NOTES
PART ONE: Morbid Symptoms
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
INTERMISSION
Chapter Eight
PART TWO: Raging Fevers
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Postscript
PRAISE
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
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HOW LIBERALS LOST THEIR WAY
the last of the socialists
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Those researchers and historians who call themselves objective might very well be presenting different viewpoints and possibilities to explain one event … leaving it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions … The Baathist must never deal with history and all other intellectual and social questions in this way … They must take on the same specificity as our Baathist way; in other words, the writing of Arab history should be from our point of view with an emphasis on analysis and not realistic story telling.
The truth was what the Baathists said it was. Adults would have memories of different truths from before the Baathists took power, but the Baathists would be able to control their children and mould them into a new type of Arab, conditioned from infancy to obey. In Iraq’s case, indoctrination began at primary school where textbooks presented Saddam Hussein as Baba – ‘father’ – Saddam, an alternative object of love and loyalty to their parents. Spies watched to see if pupils participated in Baathist rallies and kept files on the political reliability of their mothers, fathers, grandparents and so on to cousins of the third degree.
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