London Calling: The Whole World Is Upside Down

"In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and everywhere, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally."

That's from Nick Cohen's What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way, which is excerpted at length in the Observer today. I expect to be reviewing What's Left? in my Dissent column soon.

Over at the Sunday Times, Christopher Hitchens observes: "Cohen has no problem with those who are upset about state-sponsored exaggerations of the causes of war, or furious about the bungled occupation of Iraq that has ensued. People who think this is the problem are not his problem. Here’s his problem: the people who would die before they would applaud the squaddies and grunts who removed hideous regimes from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet who happily describe Islamist video-butchers and suicide-murderers as a “resistance”.

The book has set off the usual berserking, in spades.

Cohen is a writer I've long admired. His web page is here.