Neocon Propaganda

Good stuff from Alan Johnson at CiF on the use of neocon as the latest all-purpose insult:

Seumas Milne turned the Guardian's Comment & Debate pages into the fons et origo of many of the ideas that have led the left astray in his time as its editor (prompting one blogger to establish The Seumas Milne Trophy for Relativist Crap). Milne dismissed Ed Husain's 2007 book The Islamist - a penetrating account of extremism in UK Islamist networks - by attacking its author as a "poster-boy for the neocons".

The Muslim Council of Britain dismissed the finding by a thinktank, the Policy Exchange, that anti-semitic and anti-western hate literature was on sale at a quarter of UK mosques as another of the: "transparent attempts to try and delegitimise popular mainstream Islamic institutions in the UK and replace them with those who are subservient to neo-conservative aims."

In the face of mounting evidence of the relative successes of the "surge" in Iraq, the New Statesman editorialised recently that such talk was nothing but "neocon" propaganda.

The left is vulnerable to neoconitis because it takes its cue from what it is against rather than what it is for. In conversation with the Polish anti-Stalinist dissident Adam Michnik in 1993, the liberal philosopher Jurgen Habermas admitted "he had avoided any fundamental confrontation with Stalinism". Why, asked Michnik? He did not want "applause from the wrong side" replied Habermas. You have to read that twice, and then think about the enormities of Stalinism, to realise just how appalling it is. But Habermas was only expressing a piece of liberal-left common sense.

Parts of the left did not "lose their way" after 9/11. They found their old groove.

62 comments as I write, and I'm not going to read any of them.

Update: but Stephen Pollard, unwisely, did read them.

Comments

[dearieme]

Is that SM the IRA man, or some other SM?

[SnoopyTheGoon]

Tovarisch Seumas... ehehe. Getting his name at the start of a quote makes it usually difficult for me to follow the rest - the red rag syndrome, you know ;-)

But anyhow - good piece. Thanks.