What's Left?

What's Left?

Author: Nick Cohen
Desc: From the witty and excoriating voice of journalist Nick Cohen a powerful and irreverent dissection of the agonies idiocies and compromises of mainstream liberal thought. He comes from the Left. When he was a child his mother would search supermarket shelves for politically reputable citrus fruit and despair. Aged 13 when he learned his kind and thoughtful English teacher voted Conservative he nearly fell off his chair: 'To be good you had to be on the Left.' Today he's no less confused. When he looks around him in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq he sees a community of Left-leaning liberals standing on their heads. Why do apologies for a militant Islam standing for everything the liberal-Left is against come from a section of it? After the US/UK wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic's ethnic cleansers why were some on the Left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal-Left but not for instance China the Sudan Zimbabwe or North Korea? Why can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they'd like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC why were you as likely to read that a conspiracy of Jews controlled US or UK foreign policy in a liberal literary journal as in a neo-Nazi rag? It's easy to know what the Left is fighting against--the evils of Bush and corporations--but what and who are they fighting for? As he tours the follies of the Left he asks us to reconsider what it means to be liberal today. With the angry satire of Swift he reclaims the values of democracy and solidarity that united the movement against fascism asking: What's Left?.