The civil civil war on the left

I was reading Marc Cooper's post entitled "Slobbering Over Slobo," in which Cooper expresses sympathy neither with Milosevic nor with those who apologize for him. Cooper, who is what Norm Geras might refer to as a "principled leftist," also takes on the "blame America first, often, and always" crowd:

Believe it or not there are those who continue to make out the Butcher of the Balkans as some sort of victim. The U.S. — it turns out– was the true source of evil in the decade-long series of wars that took hundreds of thousands of lives. Poor old Slobo, you see, was just a “piker” compared to the real fascists (i.e. whoever the U.S. supported).

Commenter J Cummings responds, here:

More serious is M Cooper’s subtle orwellianism. He claims that there is no distinction between Ramsey Clark and friends on one hand, and those of us, on the other hand, who put Milosevic AND Bush in the same war criminal category - and point out that in terms of raw numbers, Bush has killed more people.

Although this is an aside, one of the things that continues to amaze me is the protean use to which the adjective "Orwellian" can be put. It always strikes me as ironic that Orwell himself--Eric Blair--probably wouldn't have been any too happy about his name being immortalized as a synonym for distorting and reversing the truth in clever and devious ways, since this is what he was warning us against. But no matter; the greater irony is that those who cry "Orwellian!" are all too often guilty of the charge themselves.

Positing this simple fact of dead=dead is a strange sort of moral equivalence. In a way, it's actually an amoral equivalence, since taking no account of the context in which a death occurs is doing away with some basic considerations that are necessary for any sort of moral evaluation of that death.

I've noticed this process again and again on the left, and I've wondered about its origins. Is it sheer sophistry, something even the writer doesn't believe but which he/she considers an effective rhetorical ploy? That may be true in some cases, but I tend to doubt it accounts for many.

Is it a lack of ability to make such distinctions, a failure of logic? Perhaps, at times. But again, I don't think that's what's operating in most cases.

I believe its origins lie in a process I've discussed previously in this post: the need some people have to preserve their own moral superiority in an absolutist sense, the desire to keep their own hands clean. Of course, this can only be done if others are willing to get their hands dirty (bloodstained, that is) in order to protect these people's right to keep theirs pristine and unstained. But in this country, fortunately, that's still possible.

Belmont Club touched on this theme in his post on the dreadful murder of pacifist Tom Fox in Iraq. And it's also implicit and explicit in my pacifism series, which describes some of the potential dreadful consequences of absolute pacifism.

In that series, I've also described the deep divisions within the Quaker community on just how far pacifism goes, or should go. I was surprised by the fact that even among Quakers, renowned for the depth of their devotion to that cause, there are many who argue for a pacifism that is more--well, more "nuanced." The views of one of the founders of the Quaker religion, George Fox, were as follows:

Fox was not a pacifist in the modern sense that he utterly rejected participating in all wars and violent conflicts. He couldn't imagine himself bearing the sword, at least under {his} present circumstances... but he also recognized that someone must wield the sword against evil-doers."

Ingle goes on to say, "Fox would not condone violence except 'in the cause of justice'... 'in a war with the devil and his works'... 'for a righteous cause'... or for 'keeping the peace and protecting people's estates' (i.e. not their property but their condition), and Ingle continues that Fox would 'never deny the right of a nation's rulers to wield weapons in defense of a just cause. The problem was in defining such a cause.' Thus the dilemma.

For those pacifists (and leftists or liberals) who do accept that someone must wield the sword against evil-doers, the dilemma becomes how to define an evildoer. And if the government of the US (especially any Republican government) is reflexively defined by some as "evildoers," why then, those particular pacifists and/or leftists cannot support its wielding the sword, and the distinction between war and war crimes becomes obliterated: war by the US is defined as a crime, unless it is in response to something as unequivocal as a wholesale invasion by an enemy military force (something unlikely to happen).

The civil war (and it is a rather civil one) among pacifists is mirrored by this civil war among leftists. Marc Cooper and Norm Geras are among those who hold up one end; commenter J Cummings represents another. Here's a portion of Marc's response to Cummings:

[Bush's] ill-fated war in Iraq was — whether we like it or not– waged with overwhelming congressional approval. Sad but true. Thousands have died in Iraq… I would say for the most part with not much of a good reason. It’s the sort of war that should cost a sitting president’s party their hold on the White House and should be a teaching moment about the limits and pretensions of imperial power. Iraq, however, is not a genocide and it as much or not a war crime as most any war is.

Milosevic was but a thinly disguised Nazi; he blatantly expoited ethnic and religious differences to whip up a murderous nationalism. His militias, death squads and soldiers had a policy of blatant massacre. The butchery at Sbrenjica and the Siege of Sarajevo are horrific, blood curdling crimes.

What’s amazing is the self-hatred that you display as an American. If U.S. military policy were the same as Milosevic’s then you would be committing a war crime by not taking up arms against the Bush regime. You have rendered yourself incapable of distinguishing among liberals, conservatives and beligerant fascists.

Clearly Cooper doesn't agree with those of us who supported the Iraq war, either on whether it should have been started in the first place, or whether it's time to declare it failed. But he expresses himself well, and the last paragraph, in particular, rings with a sort of righteous rage at how the left has been co-opted by voices such as Cummings's instead of those such as Cooper's own. The former have come close to drowning out the latter, which is a sad and troubling development. Cooper and Geras have been fighting this fight for some time, and though they seem to be losing the battle at the moment (at least, to my eyes), I hope they win the war.

Here is Cooper approximately a month after 9/11, in an article of his that appeared in the LA Times:

The end result of this psycho-political micro-climate are two generations of American leftists who lack the political sensibility and even the simple emotional language that would allow them to see their own fellow citizens, even transitorily, as victims rather than victimizers, that would allow them to distinguish between a CIA coup abroad and the butchering of thousands of innocent American civilians at home...

It's one thing to argue that Americans are naive and perhaps arrogant to have believed in a historic exceptionalism that could immunize them against pain and bloodshed on their own soil. It's quite another to suggest, as I repeatedly heard during that peace rally, that America somehow invited last month's massacre. Morally repugnant and politically unviable, this sort of demagogy can only render the left irrelevant....

These difficult times require the active and effective presence of a clearer-thinking left, one that can offer unique and salutary perspectives to counter a war-empowered, conservative Bush administration.

It must begin with an unequivocal acknowledgement that the perpetrators of Sept. 11 are in no way the avengers of some oppressed constituency. They were atavistic, religious fascists whose world view is diametrically opposed to all humanitarian and progressive morality.

And the left must recognize that these forces cannot be neutralized by nonviolent moral suasion or international law alone.

Cooper goes on to advocate some positions with which I disagree. But that's not the point. The point is that the left is not unitary, nor are pacifists, and both have some voices of reason who can make important moral distinctions. But their voices seem increasingly to be lost in the din of shriller voices, screaming in a sort of Orwellian--yes, Orwellian--rage that the US is the font of most of the evil in this world.