Fuck the soixante dixhuitards
David Aaronovitch is a fucking unpleasant man. In the Guardian today he gloats about Saddam’s humilitation:
This bum was Saddam? You could almost smell the hole he had been in, the sweat, the bits caught in the tangled beard; taste the thick breath as the medic probed the old dictator’s mouth like doctors do in geriatric wards.
He then goes on to exult about the execution of Ceausescu, and express regret that Idi Amin and Pol Pot died in their beds.
Now, don’t get me wrong, all the above are thoroughly unpleasant people, and any misfortunes of theirs shouldn’t be an especial source of sadness. But Aaronovitch’s glee is something else entirely, something so repulsive and so at odds with basic humanitarianism it gives the lie to the pro-war left’s claim to be the true advocates of human rights and international solidarity.
I think I’ve figured it out: the pro-war left position is the ressentiment of the powerless who find themselves allied to someone with power. The social democratic left has been utterly defeated by capitalist restructuring (particularly globalisation) post-1968. There’s little left for them to smile about, so how can they not cheer on the tough guy who beats up one of their old enemies? Never mind that this is just another step in the construction of a world order that is everything they were fighting against: they’re finally getting a chance to be on the winning side, and they’ll hang on to it for all they’re worth.
On the other side, we have a strange coalition: the stupid, joyful optimism of the globalisation movement (those of us who know the world is beautiful, seen through the cracks we make in capitalism’s facade), and the cynical vanguardism, the creepy ‘optimism of the will’ of the trots and stalinists of the old left. We believe in everything, the sparts never believed in anything, but what I have in common with Andrew Murray (the only thing) is that we are not disappointed. That’s why we have everyone under 30 on our side: the allure of left-wing pro-war sentiment requires the belief in a dream they know to have failed, but which they can’t move on from (witness the endless trot-baiting and quaint ’80s hard-left interpretations of the anti-war and anti-globalisation movement from Nick Cohen and the like).
So let’s leave the old men to their sour pleasures and their fawning over the guy with biggest muscles. We can be happy Saddam is gone, and we’ll be happier still when Bremmer is gone too. Ours is a politics of love, love for people in Iraq and for the whole world; hell, we can include Saddam in that, poor bastard (and to call him poor now doesn’t mean we forget what a bastard he is), because we’ve got more than enough love to spare. The disillusionment of a generation of leftists doesn’t need to get us down.
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