A Shameful Legacy

In response to the dangerous rantings of Richard Gott in today's Guardian, Norman Geras has some strong criticism of

senior figures on what once saw and represented itself as a new, democratic, anti-Stalinist left, but who have lately caved in and gone politically berserk; people who have been on the wrong side of nearly all, or indeed all, of the key international conflicts since the first Gulf War, resolutely anti-American and ready in this with cheap and grotesque Hitler-Nazi references, but somehow a little bit less resolute in what their alignment might mean with respect to the likely future of the most noxious movements and lethal regimes there are; 'democrats' in everything except a proper recognition of the democracy that exists in the US and other Western nations, and of what the absence of democracy means for those peoples for whom it is in fact - daily, ruinously - absent; loud denouncers of the abuses and crimes or alleged crimes of the US, or the UK, or Israel, but more tactful and tactical in relation to other and much worse; people for whom George W. Bush is a more hated figure than Saddam Hussein or anyone else is or was, and for whom the discontinuation of that monster's rule in Iraq today seems to be of less importance morally than the failure to find WMD there or an 'international law' to which many of them have never shown any visible attachment hitherto.

What is it that has led to this intellectual and political debacle of so much of the left of (roughly) my own generation? The pathology of anti-Americanism? The failure to call certain political phenomena by their proper names? A loss of nerve and/or moral perspective in face of a capitalism seemingly everywhere triumphant? Perhaps (three times). But a debacle is what it is - the loss to progressive opinion of half a generation or more of those who might otherwise have been expected to pass on a mature wisdom to younger others. Instead, this shameful legacy.