Martin Kettle's piece in today's Guardian, approvingly quoted by both Tim Worstall and Harry's Place, reiterates the smear that opposition to the new moral order, in which Things Have Changed, is the result of some kind of realpolitik calculation by equally hidebound Stalinists and Islamofascists to join forces so as to achieve their common goal of destroying our precious bodily fluids. Yeah, well, hardly a huge surprise. The idea that principled opposition to foreign policy misadventures on the grounds that violence is bad, whomever commits it, might be possible evidently escapes him, just as the thought that locking people up without good public evidence for doing so is hardly the apogee of moral rectitude does. Again, hardly a huge surprise.
There are two things that are interesting about it, though. The first is that it reveals, which I didn't know, that Kettle, like a number of other figures on the decent left, comes from a genuinely hard left background. I return to the point I made about horseshoes a while ago. There are common dreams, aspirations, most obviously of a transcending of politics, a sweeping aside of the messy business of justified disagreement, of conflict, of compromise, of an age where a moral law is flawlessly and totally enacted. That step from one tip to another is not so hard to make, I think. The second is how obvious Kettle makes his own realpolitik. If we agree on the danger of politics, that the supression of dissent is necessary, how easy it must be to come to an agreement with those who share some other goals on the grounds that, well, there have been stranger bedfellows.
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Kettle, like a number of other figures on the decent left, comes from a genuinely hard left background
Steady on. Kettle (like a number of other Decents and NewLabourists, from Charlie Leadbetter to 'Harry') comes from a Communist Party background. In other words, he's from a group which identified the revolutionary hopes of socialism with Stalinism - that weird combination of great-power realpolitik, bureaucratic Gleichschaltung and Fabian gradualism - and denied that any rival claimant to the title deserved the name. The most revealing passage in that column came when he gestured towards 'other' socialisms, which he immediately qualified as 'democratic and moderate', i.e. reformist. Even now, the possibility of being left of Stalin doesn't occur to him.
People who think like this often don't find it difficult to make the transition to New Labour.
Phil,
I see what you mean. On the other hand though, I don't think its either uncommon or unreasonable to use the hard left as a kind of antonym of the more flexible, democratic, even libertarian, socialism that I think certainly you and to an extent I prefer. To put it another way, not only does hard here not necessarily signal the furthest point of the spectrum, but what counts as being to the left of Stalin depends on the shape of your spectrum. On the Communists and New Labour, I remember my father being irate at being accused of disloyalty by a party he'd spent his adult life in when men like John Reid, new cheerleader for extra-judicial violence and ex-Communist agitator, were regarded as party stalwarts. The machine is what counts.
The idea that principled opposition to foreign policy misadventures on the grounds that violence is bad, whomever commits it, might be possible evidently escapes him
He wasn't talking about 'principled opposition' to US foreign policy based on an eschewal of all violence - rather those who take the 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' line. This is a position that it is impossible to take if you are opposed to violence.
Shuggy,
oh, come on.
"Too many haters of capitalism and the United States still cram everything into the frame of untruth and self-deception that says my enemy's enemy is still my friend because, even if he blows up my family on the tube, murders my colleagues on the bus or threatens to behead me for publishing a drawing, he is still at war with Bush, Blair and Berlusconi"
Who, in a purely descriptive sense, does this refer to? It doesn't refer to anyone, in that sense, because there's no-one who uses 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' to justify alliances with really crazy Islamists, because no one is allied with really crazy Islamists. Alright, Respect is, so far as I can see, allied with some fairly crazy Islamists, but ones who at least distance themselves from actual acts of terrorism. So, on a really, really wide reading, we get an attack on a party made up of the SWP, some radical Muslims and a glory-hunter, which holds one parliamentary seat. But that's clearly not who he's having a go at. He means everyone on the left who isn't NuLabour and particularly who didn't support the war. And I think I'm entitled to really, really resent the accusation that I support terrorism.
He means everyone on the left who isn't NuLabour and particularly who didn't support the war.
Does he? I really don't understand why you think this. There are plenty of people who opposed the war yet haven't gone on to rationalise terrorist atrocities in the name of anti-imperialism. Kettle wasn't talking about them, you.
Shuggy,
if Kettle had wanted to be specific, he would have been. The fact that the 'pure' descriptive reading of his intended reference picks out virtually no-one indicates to me that he doesn't intend it to have its 'pure' descriptive reading put on it. Why would he bother writing an article in a national newspaper to berate no-one? The sensible reading, given Kettle's support for the war and various other parts of the NuLabour project, seems to be those who have opposed the NuLabour project and in particular the war. If someone talked about people who used blood to leaven their bread, no-one would think that the obvious descriptive reference was the one they meant (that's just meant as an example of ways in which it might not be sensible to read things purel descriptively, not to compare in any way anything).
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