From Normblog, the weblog of a political academic and supposed leader of the Blairite intelligentsia:
The first of these: 9/11 - September 11, 2001. It is a day imprinted on the public memory - indelibly - because the crime committed in New York and Washington DC announced a terrible willingness, of which few previously had been aware: a willingness to use terror without limit for political ends; a terrorism, that is to say, unconstrained by any concern about the numbers of the innocent dead. That day was both an end and a beginning because it showed, and to many of us in an instant, that the world was now different, dangerously so, and in a way not amenable to simple-minded responses.
I think I could easily write 2000 words just on that paragraph alone, but it’s hardly worth it. All the same, two key things that rise to the surface are:
The Blairite obsession with History. They once believed opposition to the invasion of Iraq would fade after a quick victory and the creation of a wonderful new Iraq. We whingers would hang our heads in shame over our cowardly doubts, and history would record Blair as The Great Strong Leader Who Saved Iraq. As the utter carnage in Iraq continues, the entire region destablises, and more facts about the ‘planning’ of the invasion emerge, it looks as if they’ll be remembered with all the fondness of Nixon and Kissinger. As a result there is a desperate scramble to hang on to the history that didn’t happen, a strange parallel world where the people of Iraq are enjoying Liberty rather than suffering in The State of Nature.
The writer’s astonishing lack of self awareness. This person is supposed to be a thinker, but writes things like the above without any apparent realisation of what he’s actually written. “… a willingness to use terror without limit for political ends; a terrorism, that is to say, unconstrained by any concern about the numbers of the innocent dead” - who is he writing about again? He accuses the anti-war “left” of repeating their mistake of being apologists for the crimes of communist states, while he himself is desperately trying to excuse the actions of Blair and Bush using the exact same rationalisation process!
The entire Euston Manifesto appears to be a bundle of weak apologist rhetoric and obvious logical fallacies tied together with frayed string and decorated with buzzwords ( ‘Open Source’ indeed!). It has more straw men than a scarecrow festival.
I’ve long thought that the Socialist Workers Party were wilfully naive, but the Euston Manifesto gang are true masters, publishers of smug auto-satirical wibble. A world “not amenable to simple-minded responses”, eh?
