WHATS LEFT EB

Nick Cohen

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780007229703
• eBook ISBN: 9780007370030
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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?

PART ONE

Morbid Symptoms

Yet it is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility.

Norman Cohn, 1996

CHAPTER ONE

An Iraqi Solzhenitsyn

When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already … What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’

Adolf Hitler, 1933

YOU’RE NOT meant to say it, but great men and women still matter. Even in the modern age when elitism is a sin and the media labour to show the famous are no better than they ought to be, people still need heroes and heroines.

The politically committed need them more than most. They are partisans whose passions can make them appear unhinged. The babble of the therapists and the daytime TV hosts about each of us being special in our own unique way cannot disguise the banal reality that, like everyone else, the politically committed are not especially good or intelligent. Self-doubt creeps in. Why should others believe them when they say their plans for society won’t end in the usual mess? Why should they believe themselves? Heroes make them feel comfortable. When they go to a meeting and hear a fine mind who knows more than they can ever know telling them that their cause is just, they are gladdened. When they turn on the television and see a brave woman abandoning her easy life to fight their battles, they know their battles are worth winning.

Until 2 August 1990, Kanan Makiya was a hero of the Left. We looked at him and felt good. It wasn’t just that he was eloquent, courteous and intelligent, Kanan Makiya stood out because he did what the Left was meant do. He exposed in horrendous detail the mechanics of a totalitarian state without a thought for the consequences. Complacent foreign ministers practising the debased art of ‘realism’ and the executives of companies growing fat on arms contracts didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Public opinion knew little and cared less about his cause. He wasn’t downhearted. He would be heard.

As befitted a Left that said it believed in universal principles, Kanan Makiya was born into a cosmopolitan family in 1949. His father, Mohamed Makiya, was a Shia Arab and one of the first Iraqis to qualify as an architect. Mohamed founded the University of Baghdad’s school of architecture and taught his students to create a new style for the Arab world by combining the motifs of his beloved Islamic tradition with the techniques of modernism. While he was studying at Liverpool University in 1941, he met Margaret Crawford, a history student and the daughter of a strict Derbyshire headmaster. To the horror of her conventional parents, they fell in love. When they said she must choose between him and them, she made matters worse by marrying Mohamed and moving to Iraq. Her family renounced her, and Kanan grew up without knowing his English relatives. Margaret was as much a part of the Left of the Forties as Kanan was of the Left of the 1968 generation. (If you were a nice Derbyshire girl from a good family, you had to be very left wing sixty years ago to defy your parents and run off with an Arab.) While they were students, she would take Mohamed away from his town planning classes to hear Bertrand Russell talk on philosophy and the socialist intellectual Harold Laski lecture on the new world which was coming.

The Makiyas were members of what people at that time called the ‘progressive middle class’ or the ‘intelligentsia’. They brought fresh ideas with them when they settled in Baghdad. Mohamed’s fusion of old and new styles began to make him a leader of Arab architecture. Margaret organized the first modern art exhibition in Baghdad. They had the self-confidence of a young and bright couple who see a future full of possibilities in front of them.

Kanan admired his parents and wanted a cosmopolitan education of his own. He won a place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and arrived in America as the protests against the Vietnam war were swelling. Family tradition and his own radical temperament made joining them an easy choice. From Prague to Los Angeles, the Left was in revolt in 1968, against war, oppression, racism and the creaking religious taboos that repressed human sexuality.

The attempted Arab invasion of Israel in 1967 had proved to be a spectacular miscalculation when the Six Day War ended in a stunning Israeli victory and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For Kanan, as for so many other Arabs of his generation, the Israeli subjugation of a large Palestinian population was a great radicalizing moment. He had no time for nationalism – Palestinian, Arab or Israeli – and embraced a Trotskyist variant of Marxism, which promised to provide answers for all the peoples of the world regardless of colour or creed.

At a teach-in on the plight of the Palestinians, Kanan met his future wife Afsaneh Najmabadi, an Iranian physicist. ‘He didn’t look like an Arab,’ Najmabadi told Lawrence Weschler, Makiya’s biographer. ‘He had incredibly bushy brown hair in those days, like a halo, and I thought he must be an American Jew, and was struck by the progressive stands he was advancing. I went up to him and introduced myself, and told him where I was from. He gave his name – Kanan Makiya – and said he was an Iraqi. “But Shia,” he immediately added to put me, an Iranian, at ease.’

Kanan was following the standard course for a leftist of his class and generation. His enemies were Iran and the other pro-American dictatorships of the Middle East, Israeli colonialism and, more broadly, ‘capitalism’. We remember the movements of 1968 he joined as a failed revolution. The student protests in Paris did not bring a change of government; and it was far from clear that any conceivable French government however socialist or anarchic could have satisfied the confused demonstrators. Soviet tanks flattened the attempt by the gallant Czechs to break the grip of communism. America’s war in Vietnam continued despite the protests, although to give the demonstrators their due they increased the pressure on Washington to pull out. Historians put the revolts of 1968 in the same box as the revolutions of 1848: failed uprisings that none the less had lasting and unintended consequences on culture and politics. The historians don’t quite get it right, however. One country had a successful revolution. Unfortunately, it was a fascist putsch.

In 1968 the Baath Party seized power in Iraq and forced Kanan Makiya to think about a subject very few leftish men and women of the time wanted to discuss: the possibility that fascism had not died in the Forties, but had lived on and flourished in the poor world.

Ominous forces were buffeting his father. The design dearest to his heart was a commission to build a university in the Shia city of Kufa. Shia businessmen had bought the land, while Mohamed and other Shia architects and builders had offered their services pro bono. Within months of the coup, the Baath Party nationalized the university. They did not intend to allow Shia students to have an independent education. Instead, the new development minister came up with a kitsch money-making scheme and ordered Mohamed to design a hideous resort on the site of ancient Babylon.

Mohamed told him, ‘This is crazy. You are asking me to turn Babylon into a tourist trap with a Ziggurat hotel. This is a crime against history! The man was my worst enemy at the time – he was the one who had ordered Kufa shut down – but he listened, and I managed to convince him. Later, they killed him’.

Iraq became dangerous for the Makiyas. While her husband was abroad on business, Margaret received word that the Baath Party had his name on a list of subversives. His crime was to be a member of a sinister conspiracy of Freemasons.

Er, Freemasons?

Her husband wasn’t a Freemason. Even if he had been, the charge would have made no sense. What kind of ideology believes that men who roll up their trouser legs and greet each other with funny handshakes are plotting to overthrow the state? She was mystified.

Margaret had taught English at Baghdad University for twenty-seven years. Half the Iraqi elite were her former pupils, and it didn’t take her long to find well-connected friends who knew what the new regime had against Mohamed. Their explanation was the strangest story she had heard. In the Fifties, a British colonel had served as a military adviser to the old Iraqi monarchy. He was a meticulous man who kept records of every trivial event in his life and stored them in his strong box. He fled when the army overthrew the monarchy in 1958, leaving his box behind. It sat in Baghdad for twelve years until the Baathists decided to look inside.

The commonplace has supernatural significance to the conspiratorial mind, and the Baathists found evidence of an abominable intrigue in the humdrum files of a middle-aged Englishman. The records showed that the colonel had been a Freemason. They also showed he had invited hundreds of Iraqis for drinks at his home over the years. Mohamed was a neighbour living in the old British quarter of Baghdad. He spoke excellent English and was a graduate of a British university. It should have surprised no one that the colonel had asked him to one of his many parties. The Baathists put two and two together and concluded that the box revealed a vast conspiracy of Freemasons and British imperialists against the Arab nation. Secret policemen were preparing to arrest Mohamed and 400 others named in the dusty files.

‘Don’t laugh, they’re serious,’ Margaret’s ex-pupils told her. ‘Get out now.’

The urgency in her informants’ voices was authentic, and Margaret realized that her husband was in mortal danger. Fortunately, he was abroad working on a project in Bahrain. She told him to stay there and used her connections to ship her family and their belongings out of the country

A Baath official requisitioned the Makiyas’ home.

Later, they killed him.

The Makiyas found asylum in Britain and Mohamed set up the architectural practice of Makiya Associates in London. Kanan worked for his father’s business while running campaigns to protect the Iraqi Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s campaigns of racial persecution that were heading towards genocide. Mohamed was a good businessman as well as an excellent architect, and Makiya Associates won contracts from many Middle Eastern countries, with the obvious exception of Iraq.

In 1980, however, his pariah status changed. By then Saddam had total control of the Baath Party and with it Iraq. He wanted glory. He wanted to destroy Iran and make himself the undisputed master of the region. The Conference of Non-Aligned Nations was to meet in Baghdad in 1982, and he wanted the poor world’s prime ministers and presidents to look on the works of his new city – and despair. Like many a totalitarian leader before him, he had a craving for triumphal architecture. Unfortunately, most of Iraq’s architects were unavailable for work. After ludicrous show trials of alleged ‘economic saboteurs’, they were either dead or among the millions of refugees who had fled abroad.

Desperate to find alternative talent, Saddam’s officials wrote to Makiya Associates to tempt Mohamed into reshaping Baghdad. Saddam was prepared to forget about his part in the global scheme of British Freemasons against the Arab nation, they told him, and shower him with lucrative commissions. Mohamed was wary, but few architects can resist the chance to follow Christopher Wren and Baron Haussmann and stamp their mark on their capital. ‘My mother was the one who was interested in politics,’ Kanan told me. ‘My father went along with her, but all that really mattered to him was architecture. He was an architect to his bones. He wanted to build.’

The Baathists could not have been more attentive when the exile returned. They waved away the customs officers at Baghdad airport and treated Mohamed as a VIP. A member of the Revolutionary Command Council gave an unctuous speech on how proud Iraqis were of Mohamed’s achievements.

‘He was a very nice man,’ Mohamed recalled.

‘Later, they killed him.’

Makiya Associates’ willingness to build for Saddam provoked Kanan into a savage argument with his father. ‘This is for history,’ Mohamed snapped. ‘It’s not for the people there now. It’s got nothing to do with them – they’ll be gone. This is for the future.’

Kanan couldn’t stand it. He hated the thought that by working for Makiya Associates he was helping Saddam create his city of the future. The Iranian Afsaneh Najmabadi, who was his wife by 1979, needed a break, too. Her world had stopped making sense.

The West’s support for dictators convinced leftists of Kanan Makiya and Afsaneh Najmabadi’s generation that its democracy was a laughable fraud. Nowhere was the contrast between idealistic rhetoric and sordid politics clearer than in Najmabadi’s native Iran. At the bidding of Britain, America had overthrown Iran’s popular government because it had threatened to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The West installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran and allowed him to reign as an autocrat whose love of grandiose uniforms and glittering medals would have been ridiculous had it not been combined with the cruel suppression of dissent.

To Kanan, Afsaneh and their friends it was natural to expect that an illegitimate monarch doing the bidding of the West would provoke a revolution. And in 1979 there was a revolution in Iran. It was as profound and shocking as the French and Russian revolutions. Its consequences were as far-reaching – you hear of them daily on the evening news. But it was a revolution of a kind the modern world had never seen. Instead of being led by workers demanding fair shares for all or middle-class radicals demanding human rights and democratic elections, Iran had an Islamist revolution led by priests determined to impose their god’s law on men and women (especially women).

Iranian leftists went along with them, somewhat stupidly as events were to turn out. Although they didn’t agree with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s belief that everything the human race needed to know was revealed in a seventh-century holy book, they reasoned that any revolution was better than none. The mania for Islam would pass, they thought. Religious exuberance was just a craze that flared up every now and again, then disappeared. All serious people knew that religion was hardly worth thinking about. Once the priests had discredited themselves, the scales would fall from the eyes of the masses and they would turn to the true faith of socialism. Everything the Left thought it knew stopped it from understanding that their socialism was dying, while militant religion was taking its place. Kanan stayed in London and watched from afar, but Afsaneh Najmabadi went back to fight with her comrades for a new Iran. The leaders of the Iranian left...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Morbid Symptoms
• Intermission A Hereditary Disease
• Part Two: Raging Fevers
• Postscript
• Keep Reading
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Notes
• Praise
• Also by the Author
• About the Publisher