A tribute to "activists with impeccable credentials on the European left."

. . .When these intellectuals see the word Islamo-fascism, they do not rail about the abuse of language, denounce George Bush, or make furious comments about misplaced historical analogies. On the contrary, they place themselves, and belong, squarely in the progressive European tradition.

This is a significant development in the intellectual and political history of German-speaking Central Europe and perhaps for Europe as a whole. It has parallels to the “Euston Manifesto” from London, and to its American cousin, published in Washington, DC in 2006. Now it’s one thing for British leftists or American liberals to revive the language of anti-fascism of the 1940s. Churchill and Roosevelt, after all, still reign for us as icons. Although anti-fascism was also a Central European tradition, it had been drowned out, even trumped, by anti-imperialism and Third Worldism since the 1960s. But in recent years liberal and social democratic variations of the anti-fascism of the 1940s and 1950s have made common cause with a distinctive brand of left-liberalism that emerged first in Germany and then in Austria.

That's from an important essay by Jeffrey Herf in The New Republic. Do note the reference to the Euston Manifesto, to which I lent my own name straight out the blocks (I explained my reasons in this 2006 essay in the Globe and Mail). The manifesto grew out of what the Guardian's Keith Kahn-Harris last October called "the most serious split within the left since the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956," which is a reasonable assessment in an otherwise unreasonable speculation that the split is healing.

Three years ago, in his Atlantic magazine essay Whither The Antitotalitarian Left?, James Kirchick accurately predicted the retreat of the U.S. Democratic Party into an isolationist posture that he likened to "a feral crouch from which it is more suspicious of what the Western democracies do to protect themselves than it is with the plight of oppressed people abroad." A suitable description of Canada's New Democratic Party, that.

But a truly progressive politics keeps on erupting from the ashes of the old. See, for instance: Though Cowards Flinch And Traitors Sneer. Directly related: Antifaschismus: Shifting the Paradigm, In for The Long Haul. You'll find more adumbration than you will likely need in this conversation in Platypus Review: Afghanistan, Internationalism and The Left.