…asks recent immigrant to these shores, Pommygranate, on a Catallaxy thread. I think there’s quite a simple answer to that question. Despite the globalisation of the news cycle, and increasingly of selected political issues, there are still significant differences in national political cultures. Australia never needed Eustonistas because it was the Liberals who took us into Iraq, and the Labor Party (and other left and centre-left parties) was consequently united in opposition. A big contrast both to Blair’s warmongering, and to the way such issues play among the Democrats in the States. And the “Third Way” project needed no great defence because it never took off in Australia - the reason being first that the Australian Labor Party shed its socialist clothes at an earlier stage (and in fact the Hawke/Keating government inspired much of Blairism rather than the influence being from Britain to Oz) and secondly that the far left in Australia has not for many years had anywhere near as much influence or presence as in the UK.
The absence of Eustonistas (and I discount the odd voice in the papers, like Pamela Bone, because they represent more a punditarian slot for an op/editor to fill rather than any real political grouping) is a good thing. We have no need of a “pro-war Left” and it’s significant that tiny sects such as the Maoists at Last Superpower are the only political formations who actually represent in a real sense this tendency in Australian politics. The battle lines are relatively clear, with the right wing commentariat being the exemplars of tortured non sequiturs and ludicrous leaps of logic in the face of the collapse of the Iraq War. In any event, such voices are usually very muted (and fewer) now as reality has finally caught up with the faith based community. The probable election of a Rudd government will see the last embers of the fires of the Iraq War in Australian political debate die away very quickly, and hopefully we will have learned some lessons.
All this is well analysed by Guy Rundle in Overland. Those who do argue the Eustonista position in Australia - and there are a few around the blogosphere if not in the media and in political parties - do so largely through emotional hyperbole and rhetorical tricks - whose lack of substance is also ably pinged by Rundle. The original Eustonista nonsense is admirably dissected by Johann Hari, who remarks:
Cohen, ostentatious claimer of George Orwell’s mantle, has forgotten the quality that made Orwell great - the power to face inconvenient truths. He simply averts his gaze from the burning vistas of Iraq that contradict his thesis, turning towards George Galloway to give him another well-deserved - but increasingly irrelevant - spit in the face.
Hari demonstrates that the claim that only the pro-war left care for “ordinary Iraqis” is the product of yet another false dichotomy.
The privileging of rhetoric and emotion over reason is characteristic of the “pro-war Left”. That deserves some analysis in itself, but these postmodernists of (post)Marxism demonstrate largely the incoherence that results when those who still want to identify with the project of the left become a cheer squad for the wars of the right.
Very well put Mark.
Cheers, mick!
Yep. No need of any of the lilly-livered pontificators around these parts, largely because the entire jerry-built structure was a belated bulwark in defense of Tony Blair and his indefensible Iraq adventure.
In common with their Bushista soulmates, I notice that none of the signatories actually felt like signing anything else, like enlistment papers for her majesty’s infantry.
Stripped of all their high-minded pretensions, they remain chickenhawks to a fault.
This review has been getting a bit of attention, and I’ve just finished a post on it at my blog.
Mark’s question is a valid one. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the ‘third way’ types, with their hyperbole, generalisations, and apologetics for war, are seen in Australia as being something other than the ‘third’ way.
mark says:
So we can we take it as read that in AUstralia “those who still want to identify with the project of the left” have officially abandoned any pretence of supporting the mission of allied troops in Afghanistan? I am assuming that Afghanistan is a “war of the right” here, although this assumption is open to question if female emancipation is still an issue dear to the hearts of those on the Left.
The more interesting question isn’t why Eustonistas don’t exist in Australia.
The more interesing question is why they exist anywhere.
Eustonistas are a symptom of neurasthenic, decadent, late-debased moral vanity of social democrats.
How absurd it is for Eustonistas to believe the world works according to the parlour rules of Methodist Creeping Jesuses?
And how recklessly blind to all tenets of common sense for Eustonistas to believe that the idiot scion of the Bush dynasty would be the instrument of the forces of history.
Dario Fo meets Gilbert and Sullivan!
“Australia never needed Eustonistas because it was the Liberals who took us into Iraq, and the Labor Party (and other left and centre-left parties) was consequently united in opposition.”
Suppose Labor had won in 2001 and so Bomber Beazley been PM in 2002 and early 2003 when the fateful decisions were made.
Would Beazley have caved in to the pressures of being a good ally of the US and sent troops to Iraq?
Would Beazley have succumbed to Tony Blair telling him that they, the world’s leading social democrats, had an internationalist obligation to rid the world of Baathist fascism and the threat posed by Iraqi WMD (and the two of them could keep Bush under control)?
Might the Bomber have been inclined to send troops in anyway?
I reckon: yes, yes and yes.
In which case, a local version of the Eustonistas would definitely have emerged.
As for Labor opposition being opposed to the war, if Beazley had stayed on as Oppposition leader after 2001, it would have been a very different opposition. (I’m trying to recall what Beazley said about the war during his second go as Opp leader in 2005 and 2006, but honestly I can’t recall anything about what Beazley said about anything during that time.)
So, uh, I’m kinda new around here. Can anyone explain to me what a Eustonista is? (And, for that matter, a Eustonard?) Google was little help…
I reckon yes!
Jon, you can read the Euston Manifesto here:
http://eustonmanifesto.org/?page_id=132
And here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_Manifesto
No, not if you think about it for a few moments, Jack, though I deny that the war in Afghanistan is a war for “female liberation”!
Let’s look at the Bushite project that the Eustonistas have shackled themselves to:
1. First Afghanistan:
Article 130 of the Constitution of Afghanistan bans apostacy from Islam, punishable by death:
2. Meanwhile in the New Iraq, that Beacon of Eustonista Light in the region
Eustonistas don’t even qualify as useful idiots.
The project didn’t have to make sense. It was little more than an extended love letter to Tony Blair.
Katz, in the Eustonista world view, and this applies especially to Pamela Bone, if you do something with good intentions then it doesn’t matter what the outcomes are. What’s more, anyone who successfully predicted the outcomes prior to the event must have been motivated by bad intentions.
Eustomism is just a feel good fantasy — all care, no responsibility.
Rundle on Bone:
“So, uh, I’m kinda new around here. Can anyone explain to me what a Eustonista is? (And, for that matter, a Eustonard?) Google was little hel…”
Jon, these sites are useful, too.
Mark on 25 July 2007 at 9:19 am
Mark, You need to focus more on objective consequences rather than subjective motives. In all areas not just where it is politically convenient.
No doubt Bush could legitimately complain that his motive in launching Iraq-attack was not to ignite a civil war b/w Shiites and Suunis. But that was the consequence, for which people like Mark rightly hold him responsible.
“Female emancipation” was not the motive for the Coalition’s Afghan-attack. But it has had that effect, in some way. The consequence of the Coalition’s Afghan-attack is that more females have been emancipated than would otherwise have been the case. Wikipedia reports:
The progress of conflict in the Afghan theatre shows that the War on Terror will be won on the homefront, rather than on the battlefront. THis is part of the point of the Euston pro-war Leftists, and it is a valid one to that extent.
It would be nice if anti-war Leftists could encourage the real progress being made on this front. To paraphrase Orwell, “A thing may happen, even if [Bush] said it happened”.
Katz on 25 July 2007 at 9:35 am
For some reason I am reminded of Karl Marx’s aphorism, that “It is the mark of a fool to judge social systems by their formal constitutions”.
No doubt Katz, like most sensible people, takes no notice of Marx these days.
Spiros on 25 July 2007 at 9:59 am
Correct. So far as real politic is concerned, good intentions are not even neccessary. All that is required are good consequences.
To that extent, Iraq-attack has demolished the deontological position once and for all. Teleologists rule!
By the same token, if there are unintended good consequences of another course of action - such as female emancipation through Coalition military action in Afghanistan - then logical consistency demands that some credit should be attributed to the source. In this case, Bush.
Otherwise, to paraphrase Spiros, anti-Eustonism “is just a feel [bad] fantasy”, no care for all responsibility.
Best post ever!
It’s the mark of an imbecile to mistake a political system for a social system.
The progress of conflict in the Afghan theatre shows that the War on Terror will be won on the homefront, rather than on the battlefront.
Is this your way of saying that there has been no “progress” on the military front in Afghanistan?
By the same token, if there are unintended good consequences of another course of action - such as female emancipation through Coalition military action in Afghanistan…
Female emancipation doesn’t result from military action, any more than the military can prevent child abuse.
Katz on 25 July 2007 at 11:04 am
It is the mark of a moron to expect a primitive multicultural social system like Afghanistan morph into something like Scandanavia in quick time, or in any time, for that matter.
But even a moron should be prepared to give credit where credit is due, for steps in the right direction.
But the purpsoe of military action is to produce the warm fuzzy feeling that the real men are in charge again, dishing it out in righteous dollops to all the usual suspects. Most satisfactory all round.
And you are performing that task admirably Jack.
Congratulations on finding an avocation appropriate to your talents.
I take it Eustonistas are along the lines of the “Larouchies” I read about about after the recent climate debate on the ABC ( only worse ).
Szego and Bone are cited as probable examples. I take it the local “Eustonista” would be someone like Iemma or Rudd; a person horrified by and in total flight from ethics, imagination, ideas and compassion..
Katz on 25 July 2007 at 12:33 pm
Dont play much chess do you Katz? You have managed to become check mated in two moves.
By affirming my conclusion you have about-faced and conceded my original substantive point. Namely that civil progressive “steps in the right direction” have been made by the Coalition in Afghanistan.
THat’s Fools Mate, “an avocation suitable to your talents”.
The Eustonistas seem to find it astonishingly difficult to believe that one can object to Saddam, Islamic terrorism and human rights abuses, and the wars of George W. Since these positions are more or less consistent, the onus is really on the Eusless Manifesters to explain how the use of cluster bombs and white phosphorous corresponds with ‘Enlightenment principles’, or constitues ‘humanitarian intervention’.
As for Afghanistan being ‘emancipated’ - just a few weeks ago, the pro-US leader of the country complained that invading forces appeared to regard Afghan lives as ‘cheap’, and reprotes noted the fact that Coalition forces had killed more civilians this year than did the insurgents. The ‘unintended consequences’ of those humanitarian bombs, you see.
Where are the Australian Eustonistas? Waiting to emerge after a terror attack on Australian soil, no doubt.
The soggy left’s cultural relativism that has lead them to decide that Islamacist anti-American far outweights Islamacist homophobia, persecution of women, support for theocracy etc will look pretty bloody facile then.
But what is the morality of leaving either the Taliban or Saddam in charge of their respective countries?
Id invite a few of the posters to go and have a chat to a few of the Hazara boys who came across in 200-01 and ask them how they thought the Talibs should be dealt with.
Maybe the chap whos back was a solid mass of scar tissue from butt to neck? Or the chap whos 2 brothers were shot when he hid from conscription.
Or even the one who was “fined” (using a perverted interpretation of Islamic law) for not keeping a talib troops fire going while they went away for a week.
It is NOT a moral position to allow that to continue, it is however moral to propose practical alternatives to military actions which will work in foreseeable periods of time.
As an example what would posters here “do” about Zimbabwe? I think everyone agrees something should be done to ease the suffering of the majority of the population there but what?
In all seriousness what other than military action or a coup (maybe only installing another despot as bad) can cause a speedy demise of Mugabes mob?
BTW neither the left nor the right can claim any credit on its actions there at the moment, thats why I picked it rather than the more polarising Darfaur.
Hope to get a couple of interesting postings from this, Thanks.
Jeez Christian, wasn’t Bali enough?
Shorter Christian Kerr: “Australia is deficient in martyrs.”
Mark
I have to just smile and grin at your moral vanity, delusion and misrepresentation. The Euston movement grew out of the ugly anti-Semitism and bovine reflexive paranoid anti-Americanism that has gripped the British Left. Australia has not had to deal with this as our working and lower-middle class said “ENOUGH!” in 1996 and made it quite clear that those luvvies were no longer welcome. Labor finally worked this out and so, over the past five years, has also worked overtime to marginalise the type from whom the Eustonites have split.
Euston is not relevant to Australia because the Australian people neutralised and marginalised the offensive types all on our own.
‘Cultural relativism’? A choice between Osama bin Laden and Bush/Blair is no choice at all. It’s a bit of mushy post-modern thinking on the part of the neo-liberals and co. to justify the moral exceptionalism that characterises the foreign policies of the US, and others. By the same ‘logic’, we might as well support Russia’s ‘liberation’ of the Chechnyans from their ‘backwardness’, or China’s attempt to free Tibet from its religious superstitions.
The solutions for different human rights abusers need to be different in each case, given that each case is different. Humanitarian arguments for military intervention are undermined when the ‘liberators’ are acting unilaterally, and entirely out of self-interest, disregarding their own abuses along the way.
A good start to finding solutions would involve nation-states refraining from propping up dictatorships in the first place. This wouldn’t have necessarily have helped Zimbabwe, but it might have made a difference elsewhere.
Never mind Eustonistas - I’m still wondering what happened to the small-l liberals in a Liberal government. It will be interesting to see if they will come out of the woodwork post-Howard, and what form moderate liberalism could take after being out to lunch for the past eleven years.
Surely Mark you’d support unilateral action by a large power to stop genocide. You wouldn’t wait for the security council.
So frankly, it is the war in question - Iraq - you have a problem with.
I didn’t see anyone requesting Afghanistan or strikes on Serbia be authorised by the UN.
I think it possible to be Left and have supported wars in the name of liberal democracy.
Mark
You misunderstand the basic tenets of the Euston Left. To label them as the ‘pro-war’ Left is lazy and incorrect. Who on earth is pro-war? Put simply these folk led by Nick Cohen and Norm Geras and including media cheerleaders such as Christopher Hitchens are people who believe it is morally wrong to stand back and watch as the population of a country is tortured (Iraq), murdered (Darfur) or starved to death (Zimbabwe) by its corrupt leadership. To use a different analogy, if a girl is getting harassed by a guy on a bus, do you bury your head deeper into your paper or do you weigh up the consequences of action and help.
Regarding Iraq, most Eustonistas were against the US-led invasion believing (correctly) that the risks of insurgency outweighed the benefits of removing Saddam. However, none were against the invasion of Afghanistan. Two very different wars.
A war conducted in the name of ‘liberal democracy’ as opposed to a war conducted by polities claiming the mantle of ‘liberal demcoracy’ would be an interesting thing indeed. Can you point to one, and inform us how such a war can be usefully distinguished from just ordinary old war type wars?
War is liberal democracy by other means.
What a load of tosh! Bloody Marxists.
Only Socialists think Afghanistan was a mistake.
“To use a different analogy, if a girl is getting harassed by a guy on a bus, do you bury your head deeper into your paper or do you weigh up the consequences of action and help.”
False analogy: this is just muddying the waters by individualising the situation and making it emotive on an interpersonal level. As such, the analogy implies a kind of moral naivety which is inappropriate to the scale of action under discussion. I also note the way in which this analogy rests on assumptions about gender.
Adam, what about Darfur. I’d support major action by a major power to bring a semblance of law - unilateral if needs be.
“Adam, what about Darfur.”
Ah, yes, this is a classic refrain in a tradition of anti-intellectualism, earnestness and action within the left. My comment was about pommygranates analogy, not necessarily about the Eustonist position. But since I’m going to get dragged into this anyway, I think the Eustonists replicate aspects of the aforementioned analogy by appealing to individualised notions of moral action, and by lazily lapsing into an assessment of the morality of actions on the basis of intention only. Almost anything is permissible when framed in this way, and hence the admonition to ‘do something, anything’ is an imperative that I am very wary of. I also agree with Melanie Klein’s insights about the violent potential of an exaggerated desire to ‘do good’.
I’m just interested in allowing the discussion to flow, so I’m not commenting on individual instances, except to suggest that while there are circumstances under which I would support some form of intervention in Darfur, it is firstly a false dichotomy to suggest (as other commenters have noted) that the only or even an effective response to a humanitarian crisis is military (and see comments from members of the Clinton administration regarding Kosovo) and secondly that as Adam implies, “what about this?” is very flawed reasoning when discussing international politics.
It’s also interesting to reflect on the fact that many of those who welcomed Kosovo as an “emerging norm of international law” shifted their ground when it came to the actual bombing, and many others later realised a precedent had been set which actually facilitated lawlessness.
Carl Schmitt said “Whoever invokes humanity, invokes barbarism”.
Tosh. If you are going to talk about something at least know something about it.
From the Euston Manifesto:
And of course this segment of the Euston Manifesto carries its most egregious logical flaw.
The Manifesto asserts that the Left has done little but whinge “over” intervention.
In fact, many Leftists have argued about intervention.
What is the distinction between “over” and “about”? Subtle but crucial.
“Over” connotes obsessional arguments about motives. This is the view of the Left that the Manifesto wishes to smuggle in.
“About” connotes engaged arguments about methods. The Left correctly perceived, and have not tired in pointing out to an increasingly convinced world, that the methods of intervention were doomed to failure and were therefore easily disposed of using consequentialist arguments.
Pommygranate misrepresents the Manifesto.
The Manifesto misrepresents the Left.
A sad hodge podge, really.
Quit with the psycho-babble. People are dead. It is simply a question - will intervention help if the government/dominant group are keeping an oppressed in near slavery or worse. What kind of heartless soul turns their back on catstrope in the name of ‘non-interventionist peace’.
It is also like the current Aboriginal intervention - so may be there is a Euston Left - you may disagree in part with the tactics but the scale of action is manifestly necessary.
Exactly. In both cases we have an ill-conceived ‘intervention’, and hysteric cries of betrayal launched at anyone who dares to disagree with the official propaganda. In both cases, a complex scenario is reduced to an issue of force, with little apparent attempt to think through the consequences of ‘intervention’.
Happy Revolution, do you daily think through ‘non-intervention’ as well and does it just make you feel all warm at night knowing the all of people around the world being beaten, harmed, enslaved or simply hungry.
Again, you illustrate my points for me. Real world problems exist, and you frame the options as either bloody-minded displays of force, or ‘non-intervention’. Anyone who disagrees with some dubious scheme to beat Iraqis/Aboriginals into submission is denounced as a supporter of torture/child abuse. There are other options here, Frank. I don’t know of anybody whose stomach got filled by swallowing American lead.
The pro-war party (interventionist Left and militarist Right) are completely discredited. The anti-war party (legalist Left and isolationist Right) have more or less won the warfaring argument.
The Australian Euston pro-war Left never got off the ground because of the small size of the ideological Left in this country. The pro-war Right seems to have been more or less run by Murdoch, apart from some useless idiots cheerleading from the blogosphere.
More generally, the radical Left in the UK and US has a substantial grounding in the Jewish revolutionary tradition. This is a fertile breeding ground for the kind of personality that glimpses a once-and-for-all fix of social problems besetting the Holy Lands.
This radical tradition is absent in Australia because most Jews came out here to make money not trouble. And because revolution is not that attractive a proposition to warring classes who would rather go sailing.
Afghan-attack was a justifiable war as it addressed a real threat (terrorist bases), had limited aims and has been executed with reasonable competence. It has also had an unintended benefit of improving the civil condition of that god-saken nation.
It would be nice if just one anti-war Leftist could bring themselves to acknowledge this fact. One hopes the requirement for ideological vigilance does not prohibit a minor concession in this area.
Katz
In no way is what i wrote a misrepresentation of the Euston position. As opposed to your cutting and pasting a section of the manifesto, i know many of those involved. There was a huge debate and much soul searching regards the Iraq war.
“what about this?� is very flawed reasoning when discussing international politics.
Is that because it requires thinking rather than merely parroting slogans?
For f**cks sake FE, just because a person doesn’t support action that will make the situation worse, doesn’t mean that they support doing nothing.
Why you, and others like you can’t understand this concept is beyond reason.
You’re right! There’s no time to lose! FAB Franky.
Right, so where do we start?
Zimbabwe
Darfur
The Congo
Burma
Ethiopia
Irian Jaya
Sri Lanka
Chad
Cameroon
Saudi Arabia
Central African Republic
Belarus
Liberia
Central African Republic
Burundi
Yemen
Sierra Leone
Bangladesh
Nepal
Uganda
Nigeria
Uzbekistan
Rwanda
Colombia
Kyrgyzstan
Malawi
Burkina Faso
North Korea
Fiji?
Hmm, this is gonna be tricker than I thought. Maybe it’ll just be easier to sit on my arse in front of a keyboard, pour another drink and castigate other bloggers for not sufficiently exerting their geo-political powers to make the world a better place.
Cheers, mine’s a Talisker.
As a comradely rejoinder to Pommy, as a Euston signatory (though not of course an actual Eustonista) I was opposed to both the invasion of Iraq and that of Afghanistan.
But Euston embraces all sorts. It’s one of its strengths.
I’ll go back to what I said in the post about Eustonistas preferring emotional hyperbole to reasoned argument.
As to whether the Eustonistas are identical with the pro-war Left, there’s a huge overlap (and with such a wordy piece of verbiage you can find almost anything in it to argue the toss) and there’s no doubt in my mind either that without the particular conjuncture of events in British politics which the Iraq invasion caused, it would never have come into existence. Which is also the point of the post.
Anyway, I’m out tonight at the Gruen grogblogging.
Anyone reading this post who wants to do something about oppression might consider leaving a comment on this post, though in order to generate some dollars, you have to do so without scoring political or personal points:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/07/04/egypt-fgm-and-making-a-contribution/
Which is kind of the point about Euston as well - they never miss a chance to diss someone on the left in the name of “principles”.
“What kind of heartless soul turns their back on catstrope in the name of ‘non-interventionist peace’.”
You are not offering any particularly good reason to take on what you are saying. By insisting upon my heartlessness, you have only antagonised me. And this is the problem with Eustonism in a nutshell: it attempts to interpellate its supporters and opponents within an individualist moral economy, when the problems are manifestly more complex than that. The primal scene of Eustonism is interpersonal, but the terrain it hopes to act upon is global, and the agents are states and militaries - ie institutions. It has an individualist imaginary which is more at home with anecdotes of resistance, than with the machinations of military intervention.
Lost me, Adam. Translation, please.
Rob
You were against the invasion of Afghanistan? i’m genuinely surprised.
Pommy, yeah, I thought it was a dumb thing to do. No invader has ever succeeded in Afghanistan. But more than that, the Taleban were born, trained and nurtured in Pakistan.
I thought the US should have attacked Kandahar and Kabul, probably with flights of cruise missiles, in retaliation for 9/11, to destroy or at least dislodge al Qaida, but not invaded. Invasion was what bin Laden wanted, so he could inflict on the US the kind of defeat he imagined the Islamists had inflicted on the Soviets.
[sniping at blog-admin deleted]
I was one of those persons.
But I withdrew my support as it became clear:
1. The US was outsourcing to the warlords, who were the worst of the worst.
2. The US attempted to bring about social reform on the cheap.
3. The process of political reform was thoroughly corrupted.
4. The US decided that OBL really wasn’t worth bringing to justice.
5. The US began to make precisely the same bone-headed mistakes as every previous occupier of Afghanistan.
All of these insights convinced me that Bush was completely inadequate to the much more complex challenge of Iraq, which I lampooned with deadly prescience from Day One.
Pommygranate, I’ve provided you with a direct quote from the Manifesto, which is consistent with your assertion about it. How do you explain this inconsistency?
(Please note, I said inconsistency, not contradiction.)
err, that should read inconsistent with… sorry
Not that there’s anything wrong with fried-egg sandwiches.
Excellent with bacon, too, especially if you started early in the morning to get to Canberra by lunchtime. The Seymour roadhouse does themn well. Not so good on the chips, though.
Roo sausages are good, too. Have you tried them? Wowed a bunch of American visitors with them out at the old space tracking station site at Ororral. Live roos hopping around at the time as well.
No fried eggs though.
Mind you, Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station is more of a wow. That’s where the first pictures of the moon landing came down in ‘69 - but only because the Americans had set the switches wrong on the camera gear. Still, another first for Oz.
Can you believe that half the internet believes the whole thing was faked?
Canberra’s a great place for space. Did you know that the big tracking dish at Tidbinbilla is 70 metres in diameter? That’s the biggest dish in the Southern Hemisphere. I was down there the day three years ago when Cassini-Huygens began its orbital burn and dropped down toward the surface of Saturn. Amazing.
As a point of information (for those in Sydney anyway):
This Friday 27th July at 6:30pm
University of Technology Sydney
Building 1 Level 4 Room 6
Sohaila from the Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association will be speaking about her experiences in Afghanistan. Soahila is a women’s rights campaigner and helps run a school set up by RAWA to counter the lack of basic education for women.
RAWA is an independent women’s rights organisation. According to RAWA, the situation for women has not improved as a result of the US invasion.
For more information about RAWA see their website: http://www.RAWA.org
Sohaila will also be speaking at Sydney University on Thursday 26th
at 1pm in the Old Geology Lecture Theatre
What I mean, Rob, is that the way in which Eustonists seem to approach these problems is in terms of a simplistic morality that is more at home in the interpersonal than the international. The call to act and to intervene may be a moral imperative if faced with an immediate situation at the personal level, but what seems to be lacking in interventionism is a thoroughgoing examination of the medium of intervention. This strikes me as an ideological effect, or an effect of language: it relates to how we talk about and conceive of our institutions. While I don’t doubt that many who subscribe to these ideas are far from blind to the complexity of ‘action’, most of the rhetoric I’ve encountered is Manichean.
This radical tradition is absent in Australia because most Jews came out here to make money not trouble.
For goodness sake, enough of the sweeping generalisations (not to mention ethnic stereotyping).
Thanks for the link, suz. I was reminded of this event after a lecture this morning. I’m not sure if I can make it yet.
I’m all in favour of simplistic morality, Adam.
And roo sausages.
Interesting discussion. The internal dynamics of Euston will necessarily elude me because I have little aptitude, and even less taste, for ideologically pure or consistent positions. I’m just thinking out loud here, not trying to support any argument. If it helps other people to fine-tune their own arguments a bit, fine; but otherwise feel free to ignore this, if you feel like it.
The phrase “anti-war Left” (or “pro-war Left” for that matter) is essentially meaningless to me. The root of the wars in both Afghan and Iraq was, whether just or unjust, accurate or inaccurate, wise or unwise, a local issue, not a universal principle; it was simply an issue of US national security. The decisions about the war (or whether to even have a war) should have been based on a careful examination of the facts, and an exhaustive and aggressive criticism of the actual detailed plans, strategies and goals for the war and its aftermath, as they related specifically to US national security; and not to bizarre goals of spreading democracy, or hidden goals that have to do with oil or Israel or anything else. I don’t think very many people in the US government in 2003 behaved like either patriots, honest citizens, grown-ups, or sober professional policy-makers, and that is a lasting disgrace. (But in fairness, the urge to “spread democracy,” when it wasn’t acting as a cover for simpler and grosser ambitions, probably is rooted in a mistaken but wholly understandable extrapolation of the successful reform of Japan and Germany to embody a universal policy principle, instead of the once-in-a-lifetime bonanza it probably really was. How did the old song go? “We did it before, and we can do it again…” Huh.)
I can’t see what any of this has to do with improving the lot of working-class and property-less people in industrial Western nations, which to my mind is the fundamental brief of the Left. (And if that’s not what the Left is primarily about, can someone ’splain to me what it IS about? I mean, short of a quasi-religious position?) How the Left came to have a detailed prix fixe position on so many other, rather comically unrelated, issues, is to me a source of perpetual mystery. What is the Left’s position on my car repairs, or what I plan to have for breakfast? I think that the Left, like the United States, has unwisely and even dangerously expanded its portfolio to include the entire universe, and that just never works out so good. The Euston people, as I see it in a big-picture sort of sense, were simply trying to treat, or perhaps to quarantine or neutralize or reform, some of the barking hydrophobic quarters of the grand Left; which quarters, take it from a disinterested outsider, are a little larger than you lefties tend to realize. Naturally there are plenty of kooks on the Right, too, but we just ain’t talking about them today. (But actually I tend to think that the malign influences on the Right come in greater force not from actual barking-mad kooks, but from very dishonest people.)
Personally I don’t think the US owed the Afghans anything at all in the way of democracy, social reform, feminism, etc.; it owed the Afghans and the Islamists a good old-fashioned ass-kickin’, nothing more. As I said above, I think the urge to rebuild or remake such a deeply alien society stems in part from the rather cantilevered idea that that’s the lasting key to national security, making Them into Us, a la Germany and Japan. But just because the first success was spectacular, doesn’t make it a general principle for all time. A friend of mine once pointed out that Japan and Germany both largely turned (and not without ENORMOUS effort!) because the outcome of the war had enabled them to see, very very clearly, that the fundamental ideological basis of their society had been entirely, completely discredited. Nothing of the sort is true in the Islamic world, and therein lies a critical difference.
I had more to say about all this, but it’s getting kind of long and I should quit hogging the mic. Maybe I’ll come back later…
Some good points there zengerman.
However:
A very laudable aim. Shame it was executed in practice with all the denouncing, knowing bad faith, self-righteous grandstanding and high-flown yet ineffectual posturing that so often plagues the Left elements for which the Eusties think they’re providing an alternative. I mean can anyone point to a single outcome from the eManifesto that has made the world any better? I mean beyond turning one bunch of ideological moralisers on eachother instead of on the rest of us?
True though it does accurately reflect the issue that inspired it in that it’s another possibly well intentioned yet woefully planned and incompetently delivered clusterfuck.
Also jpz, do you not note the discrepancy between:
and
That second point is a good observation yet it appears no one pulling the main levers of US power has worked out that their efforts should be devoted to that as a central principle of all their actions.
The 911 killers overwhelmingly came from and/or got funded and radicalised through the US’s two main Islamic client states/allies/geo-political floozies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which are artificial states carved out of colonialism and now run by corrupt oligarchies, majorly propped up by Western military-industrial-oil alliances and full of angry and frustrated young men watching pirated first world porn and yet can’t easily get a root. That’s just asking for it, whether you think the overall settings are right or wrong.
Damn right, if Australia was attacked on the same scale as 911, I’d wanna see some arses kicked too but I’d like to see our leaders (our employees basically) kick the right arses so they stay kicked.
But Iraq and Afghanistan have had their arses kicked in a way in a way that just inflames and not drains their pilonidal cysts.
(Come to think of it, the Bali bombings, both in terms of per capita casualties and of a very nasty shock to a populace’s sense of how it’s seen in the world, were not that dissimilar to 911.
Yet John Howard behaved not at all like Dubya and just like I’d hoped an intelligent first world leader would under such circumstances. He handled the shock, grieving and mourning process with low key but fitting dignity, quickly despatched much needed and effective medical , forensic and law enforcement resources to the scene of the crime and didn’t invade Malaysia.
I was quite proud of him then. Then of course after that he went back to whipping up hysteria over fauve issues for grubby political gain.)
Anyway, getting back OT. Never mind the morality of the kind of interventions endorsed by the Eusties, what about the practicalities?
The kind of western liberal democracies we’d trust to some degree or another to intervene appropriately already have their forces seriously stretched in South Asia and/or are now distinctly wary of such similar engagements for the future - while, after the Mesopotamian fiasco, t’would be hard to imagine any potential interventees welcoming any such intervention with open arms, flowers and rosewater.
Therefore I put it to you that the Eusties are just the latest generation of ideologues issuing feel good manifestos secure in the knowledge they’ll never be tested in reality.
And of course banging on on blogs about the merits or demerits of the eManifesto does nothing more to make life better for 70% or so of the world living in various degrees of shit.
But at least the likes of FE, Rob etc get to check out the cut of their International Rescue costumes in the mirror. The one that doesn’t lead to the cockpit of Thunderbird 2.
Maybe it’s because I’ve had a few very fine pinot noirs tonight but can someone enlighten me as to why Rob is banging on endlessly about bangers? Is there some subtle sausage sizzle a la Eustonista that I’m too frizzled to get?
Just wonderin…