When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. - Corinthians 13
In talking with and reading the writings of a lot of the left-wing something has been illustrated with astounding clarity. It is also relevant to the above quote so fear not, this has not become some forum for Bible Bashing.
A lot of the liberal ideals I embrace today are far from those which I ‘inherited’. None of my family is particularly liberal, I instead obtained my world view from a voracious appetite for journalistic comment. I read Time and Newsweek and whatever papers were available to me. It was not a construct of my mind, it was instead a rubber stamp of liberal ideology, that marked me down with a certain set of beliefs and a certain way of thinking, as macabre and Leninist as that might be to imagine.
However something changed all that, and I am in a morbid way, thankful for it: September 11th and the ensuing war on terrorism.
My sixth form class was unique amongst all the other sixth forms of Shatin College both previous and forthcoming, in that it was the only year to not have access to a common room. Ours was annexed to make more teaching rooms for our year and a new one was built the following year. The 2 year period in which there was to be no biliardino (foosball) table, no lounging sofas or stereo coincided precisely with my lower and upper sixth years.
(Man that was annoying - it is a little known fact that I am a foosball god having spent all my young summers in Italy learning from the best players in the world - Italians are preternaturally good at biliardino. Seriously, some people can put their fist in their mouths, others can name all 50 states, I can rocket a little plastic ball into a goal at such pace as to make grown adults cry with the flick of a wrist with no spinning. Heck I used to beat kids twice my age in country clubs and anonymous europeans in cafes.)
Instead we had what was known as the SSC, the Sixth form Study Centre. A room filled with computers, desks and a small enclave containing all the liberal literature one could wish for, flanked by some low-slung fabric loungers and bean-bags. As a result a lot of my year were very well versed in common affairs and it made for some interesting conversations.
However after the September 11th attacks I found the newspapers and journals wanting. I spent weeks being told by all manner of publications that the US would be hopelessly bogged down in Afghanistan, a veritable middle-eastern Vietnam, that George W Bush was a bozo (didn’t take long for that veneer of false sincerity to wipe from the liberal establishment over Bush’s administration) and that America deserved what it got. September 11th I was told, was a slightly irrational reaction to American Neo-Imperialist policy in the middle east. Baaaaad Israel Give those Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians and Lebanese back their land!
The liberal media had done what is seemingly their wont - they had overplayed their hand. Within a few weeks America hadn’t sustained more than 50 casualties. This wasn’t a war - this was a whitewash. Where were the broken down burning hummers? The countless body bags that I had been told to expect?
This was the straw that broke my political scaffold. Everything I’d been told to believe seemed tainted by some insane desire amongst the left to keep things meaning what they always had meant. My naive idolization of the UN, brought on by days spent in the Hong Kong Model United Nations seemed a joke.
Slowly I discovered that there were alternatives, I read the blogosphere intently and finally decided that I’d bring my laughable personal blog into the arena of political discussion. As insignificant as it may have been it provided a tool to engage in debate, something which I had enjoyed on the loungers of the SSC was now available to me at a level of complexity and intellect that far exceeded what I was used to, I relished every jagged paragraph of it.
Sullivan, Arranovitch, Cohen, Reynolds, Simon. Just a few of the writers who’s work challenged me. I had learned the lessons from my childhood to early adulthood. I didn’t accept anything as gospel and approached everything with a critical eye.
At the end of it I joined the New Labour Party, specifically under the leadership of Tony Blair. I have always been clear as to which party I joined, if Blair were to depart and be replaced by someone who would return the party to it’s 80’s to early 90’s idealism I would quite simply rescind my membership.
I saw a few more grey areas and at the same time, saw where I had been plain wrong in the past. I saw that Neo-Conservatism, that spectre of far-right dominance that has long been projected by the left as a hideous imperialistic beast was in fact not a ‘disease’ but an attempted cure for the chronic affliction which has befallen our international institutions. The right wing was at least attempting to formulate policy to tackle this issue, as were some sectors of the centre-left where I pin my own views like some over-eager blindfolded child at a birthday party. The left that I ‘left behind’ so to speak was petulantly denying the festering wound which defaced those institutions that I so believed in.
Iraq proved the death knell for anything I had left in me of my old beliefs, any vestiges of conventional left wing politics fled with its opposition to the toppling of a fascist murderous dictator and far more sickeningly its childish refusal to support the Iraqi people in their new struggle for democracy. It even now disgusts me to think that many cheered on the bloodthirsty bastards who continue to terrorize the Iraqi people.
So now that I find myself on the centre-left, steadily moving towards the plain centre with the recognition that right now I would support Bush over Kerry in an American presidential election, it seems ironic to see some of those writers who so helped dismantle and reassemble my political beliefs, recognize those faults that they had inadvertently pointed out.
Harry’s Place has a link to Nick Cohen’s latest piece in the New Statesman - ‘Where have all the children of the left gone?’. It’s a good read and an interesting one, on the fall from grace of the now reactionary left. As an email I received from the Labour Party boldly stated “We must win the Battle of Ideas” - that skirmish is necessary, but rather than being a campaign over the broiling sea of public opinion it must instead be fought within the consciousness of the rest of the left wing. I’ll be standing over here if any of them want to come join me, thankful that the leader of the Labour Party understands what needs to be done.
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at August 14, 2004 03:51 PM | TrackBack