Rediscovering Paul Berman

Fergus Pickering

Sorry mate, I seem to have missed this. Who WERE the British 68-ers? Never heard of any of them.

Beer Moth

Truly the best item I've read in ages.

Amidst all the feverish window dressing in preparation for the non-event of the coming election, this piece has its eye trained on the matter of real political power, and what needs to be done.

Not just our politicians though. Whatever result we get in the spring, we will be left with the same group of people, able through their position, to scupper or promote the actions of the government in the same way they have done throughout the present administration. It is this body which is most lacking in the ability to move on from the hidebound motivations of campus '68.

We need more of this Martin, so that the realisation alluded to here, becomes more concrete and indeed respectable, and so that it is made obvious to those concerned that they are allowed to move on and in doing so that are -far from betraying anything - coming to the rescue.

Rhoda Klapp

The 68ers are doing climate change now. One only needs to observe that the fixes they espouse for it are the same old agenda, with a bit of neocolonialism thrown in.

cityboozer

I don't mean to be a dick about this, but if you cannopt correctly use "accept" and "except", is there not perhaps a limit to how seriously we should take your intellectualising?

Beer Moth

cityboozer.

A mere keyboard error I would normally overlook, but in this pedantic instance: 'cannopt'? Glass houses, stonethrowing and all that.

ndm

Martin Bright writes:

It argues that, although some on the European left continued to promote a knee-jerk anti-American, anti-colonialist position well into the 1990s, others (Bernard Kouchner in France, Joscha Fischer in Germany) began to realise that such "anti-fascist" sentiment could easily mutate into its opposite. This is most obvious when Israel enters the equation.

He is absolutely right but only because he misunderstands the relation between the two sentences.

For the last forty years Israel has engaged in a wanton oppression of the Palestinian people made most obvious in its illegal colonization of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This colonization has resulted in 400,000 Israelis violating Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the transfer of citizens into occupied territory. This is by far the most serious war crime committed by any Western Nation since the German occupation of Europe and the horrors consequent to it.

Bright observes that "others" realise that such "anti-fascist" sentiment could easily mutate into its opposite>. But he is not wise enough to realize and recognize that this mutation has occurred in the so-called settler movement whose core ideology is the vile ideology that in Europe would be called neo-Nazism. Anyone who attacks those who condemn the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people implicitly, if not explicitly, supports that vile ideology. They aid its continued appropriation of what could once have been a great country but which has shown that it too can fall into the evil it professes to be an escape from.

Beer Moth

ndm.

I get it: whenever non-muslims move to settle upon land, then that is called colonisation; but when it's the expansion of muslim populations, then that is an accommodation of the wellspring of humanity. Neat trick that.

Martin Bright

The except/accept error is now corrected. Thanks for pointing that out cityboozer.
May the intellectualising now continue!

cityboozer

Mr Bright - intellectualise away!

david baker

I'd never heard of Berman until I listened to his interview on Little Atoms. Have to admit it made me buy Power and the Idealists.Its a suprisingly good read.