For liberals and other southpaws - your opinion on the Euston Manifesto

Why don't you give us a brief synopsis, gwayneco. Thanks.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

Seems to be some movement to realign the left in Great Britain. It's getting some run in mostly conservative rags with headlines like "a few good liberals" and "at last, our lefties see the light."

 

AVHTJ

 

Huh!?

Sounds like pretty reasonable stuff to me. Except it is an exceedingly small left group that espouses those values, yet tries to be neutral or even pro- Iraq War, which was a gross violation of international law and has led to increased terrorism, which the manifesto rightly decries.

I would say delusions of grandeur on the part of this small grouplet.

 

acronym

 

Please explain for the acronymically challenged.

 

I haven't read it all but not surprising it supports the invasion of Iraq. As I've said before the idea of invading to spread democracy is classicly liberal.

 

Really? I guess we have to define "classicly" or "liberal."

Liberal (small L) thought in this country has been dominated since WWII and especially since Vietnam by the idea of "national interest." Though often at odds with Liberals, particularly on the topics mentioned by Kennan, I can't think of any significant liberal or Liberal thinker who would have favored Iraq. If you want to argue pre-1930's, then maybe, but that just means the Repubs/neocons are thinking without recognizing what the Soviet Union, Depression, and WWII wrought.

 

For me progressive thinking is thinking that considers different viewpoints and synthesizes the valid concerns of different sides into a new understanding, (new for a given society anyway), of what is just and fair in that society. And I call this a new level of understanding, one which does not wholly discard previous levels of understanding but instead sees them in their proper context, and now also sees a broader context that is revealed in the afore mentioned synthesis.

So, when I read, “We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently ‘understand’, reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy.” I can’t define this as a progressive group. While much of what is said in that piece is on one level commendable, the self-righteousness and in particular the assumption of the inerrancy in their perception of the other side’s position and of their own moral understanding reveals them as reactionaries as well, imo. I think this is a good example of what Habermas is talking about when he talks about the conservatism of much of the left these days.

 

I believe in the document itself it mentions that the group who wrote it contained both those for and against the intervention. The main thrust IRT the war in Iraq was to focus on the present and the future instead of continually rehashing the reasoning of undertaking the intervention in the first place. Basically, the war in Iraq is fact, and no amount of finger pointing or proof of the absence of WMDs, etc. is going to change that fact.

 

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, right? And isn’t that in large part the cause of what’s happening now in Iraq, people who didn’t understand war and didn’t understand the region felt they were above taking advice from those who did, and they blundered ahead and gave this generation its Vietnam. Not looking back to analyse what happened and to learn how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future is hardly progressive.

 

Its classicly Liberal in terms of the idea that you can and should use power (economic or military) to impose values. More specifically its Wilsonian and Wilsonian thought has been present in Liberal circles all the way up through Carter. What happened with the Cold War and NeoConservatives is that Conservatism, which is classically isolationist, also started buying into the idea that force should be used to impose values.

 

Not in the least. That would preserve the status quo, right? That would be just another form of conservatism. What I’m saying is essentially the opposite of that.

 

As I said I haven't read it all and only had a chance to skim some of it but from what I saw it seemed to be arguing in support of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan on the basis of spreading democracy. A classicly liberal Wilsonian viewpoint. There are many liberals out there who have supported the invasion on that basis such as Hitchens and Friedman and I Tony Blair is essentially a modern liberal who strongly supports the invasion on that basis.

 

I’m going to have brush up on Woodrow Wilson but was he really advocating imposing values on other peoples?