> I think someone forwarded this piece to the list. SA maybe? At any
> rate, I think it was because of that forward that I joined their
> discussion list on yahoo groups -- just for hellovit.
OK, so I went and read the article this time - followed the conversation only last time... why is it that I don't recognize any of the people I know on the left as resident among the folks Hitchens seems to virulently to hate?
Among my circle, and across my readings, I don't remember a single critique of the Iraq war based the goodness of Saddam or a single critique of (the idea and reality of) local resistance to murderous scum like Saddam. The critiques came from folks immediately seeing through the lies we were being told about the UN inspections, WMD, and the ties between Al Queda and Saddam... as well as an awful lot of work historicizing our relationship with Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia - and the rest of the world - in a way that asked: "Why Iraq?" and "Why Iraq alone among the many many oppressive states we have supported and support now?"
(And, for that matter, I attended a conference at MSU where Mike Hardt and Gayatri Spivak expressly focused on the negative consequences for folks engaged, prior to Sept., 11, in subaltern resistance in Afghanistan and Iraq of our militarist response. If such things were said in East Lansing, MI, then they were surely available for Hitchens' approval, rather than moralistic misrecognition, had he chosen to be less of a chump.)
Furthermore, I don't remember anyone I knew or read on the left - not even the much excoriated Ward Churchill - supporting Al Queda and other reactionary/romantic terrorists or suggesting a renewed isolationism and back-to-the-land pastoralism (or traditional-urban-community.)
While it is incomprehensible that anyone could argue against the idea that the "death of the left" occured as a significant result of the contradictions of the left, it is equally incomprehensible that this could be the extent of the argument made by anyone cognizant of the history of the lefts (note the plural form) in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
Its as if Hitchens has intentionally forgotten the legislative (and cultural) constraints on unions in the US and class power in Parliamentary democracies; its as if he's never heard of the bureaucratic capture and bastardization of social movement agendas; its as if he wants to impose some kind of post-hoc purity to - a purity subsequently tarnished by - the New Left; its as if he has no understanding of the refusal of many on the Old and New Left to either see the legitimacy of, or substantively engage with, New Social Movements (and the latter's refusal, largely based on a reversion of Progressive-style politics, to see the centrality of democratizing production and/or the state) all in the name of ideological correctness; and its as if he has forgotten COINTELPRO, murderous police forces and twenty years of combined attack by governments dominated by ideologues of economic neoliberalism and cultural neoconservatism... what a putz.
Its as if the Platypus folks - or at least the reviewer - has no more historical and material sophistication than Hitchens... which is pretty sad.