(Reviewer: Gary Selikow, Vol. 68, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2013)
Nick Cohen comes from a left-wing family. His great-grandparents fled from the Tsarist Empire at the time of the pogroms, but their son, his grandfather, revolted. He became a Communist and married outside the faith. “My father was brought up with no connection to Judaism and, inevitably, so was I” he writes.
In his influential What’s Left? (subtitle: How the Left Lost Its Way), Cohen recounts growing up in a doctrinaire leftist home where his mother had trouble searching the supermarkets for ‘politically reputable citrus fruits’ boycotting Spain and Portugal for their right-wing authoritarian governments, South Africa because of Apartheid, the USA because she did not like President Nixon and Israel because of the alleged ‘occupation’ of the West Bank and Gaza. He himself was deprived of watching Disney movies (being adjudged ‘rubbish from Hollywood corporations’) and even the popular ‘Beano’ book was banned from his childhood home because it was printed by DC Thomson, a non-union firm. As Cohen says, “I come from a land where you can sell out by buying a comic, I come from the left”.
Cohen’s beliefs were reinforced, of course, by Margaret Thatcher’s rule of Britain and war against the country’s working classes, but he began to question left-wing double standards with regard to not speaking up against Communist regimes for human rights abuses while excoriating right-wing governments for the same thing. He still believed until the 2003 Iraq war that the left would always stand up against Fascism, but his paradigm shift came during that war when the bulk of the British left came out in support of the totalitarian and murderous Saddam Hussein.
Of course, speaking up for Israel’s right to exist or suggesting Israelis are entitled to human rights does not make one popular today with the post-modern left. Cohen writes how when he stood up to the left on their Israel-hatred, he was accused of ‘being a Jew’ or having married ‘a hard right Jewish woman’ (his wife is in fact a liberal Catholic).
As Cohen says, “Although I want to see every Israeli settlement on the West Bank dismantled, 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. You do not need me to add that mine is a minority point of view among liberals, and that British Jews are living through a very dangerous period. They are the only ethnic minority whose slaughter official society will excuse. If a mass murderer bombed a mosque or black Pentecostal church, no respectable person would say that the “root cause” of the crime was an understandable repulsion at the deeds of al-Qaeda or a legitimate opposition to mass immigration. Rightly, they would blame the criminal for the crime. If a synagogue is attacked, I guarantee that within minutes the airwaves will be filled with insinuating voices insisting that the “root cause” of the crime was a rational anger at the behaviour of Israel or the Jewish diaspora”.
I was delighted to find through this book that there are writers who feel like me about the moral rottenness of the post-modern left. Like Cohen, I supported the war to free the Iraqi people from the genocidal tyranny of Saddam Hussein, a cruel despot who had killed with chemical weapons thousands of Kurds and Shia Marsh Arabs. I was incredulous and angry that millions marched around the world to protect this modern day Hitler, claiming they were the custodians of human rights and peace. As the author shows, the leftists who opposed the Iraq war simply refused to talk to the actual Iraqis, those who were jailed and tortured and who saw their friends and family murdered by the Baathist regime. After the war, these same leftists refused to help build a new democratic Iraq or to have anything to do with Iraqis building their new country.
I am not, in my own estimation, a conservative. Rather, I support the values of the old social democrats and social liberals of the 1950-70s, such as Harold Wilson and the old UK Labour Party and the creators of the social market economy such as Ludwig Erhardt in West Germany. At the same time, I despise the hypocrisy and nihilism of the post-modern left, whose proponents do not care about class equity in its real sense, or human rights or gender rights but simply, as Cohen demonstrates, support anything nihilistic and anti-Western.What’s Left? is an erudite, witty and penetrating work and a must read for anyone wishing to understand the anomaly of the modern left and human rights.
