What’s Left?

Nick Cohen, in “What’s Left?  How Liberals Lost Their Way,” just out in paperback:

And – incredibly yet incontestably again – the ideas that destroyed Europe in the Thirties and Forties survive to this day.  The Muslim far right quite deliberately took the ideology of L’Abbe Augustin  Barruel, Tsar Nicholas II, Benito Mussolini, General Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler, and transferred it to the Middle East; not just in part, but in every detail . . .

The resurgence of fascistic ideologies in the Middle East was explained away by the liberal-left and just about everyone else with the assertion that its “root cause” was the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. 

Very few stopped to think how [obtuse] they sounded.  They had to pretend that from the 1790s until the 1940s, fascistic ideas were deranged conspiracy theories employed by the ultra-right, and ultra-left on occasion, to justify tyranny, censorship, the suppression of the rights of women and genocide.  As soon as the Second World War ended and the state of Israel was established, however, the madness vanished, and fascistic ideas became rational responses to a colonial venture by refugees from Europe.

Cohen prefaces this part of his book with an extended quotation from Christopher Hitchens, writing in 2004, placed along on an entire page of Cohen’s book:

Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now.  And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the Left.  From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudo-intellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. . . . Suicide murderers in Palestine . . . described as the victims of “despair.”  The forces of al-Qaeda and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for anti-globalization.  The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as “insurgents” or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.