Wild men of the right

Fed up with wars committed in the name of freedom? Read an interesting article in today's Financial Times by Anatol Lieven. He points out that US President Roosevelt's 1941 speech calling for war against Germany and Japan famously lists 'four freedoms'. These are freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear (by which he meant abolition of aggressive war).

Missing from the list, Lieven points out, is the freedom to vote. He suggests this is for two reasons: that the Nazis were in fact elected, and their success stemmed in large part from the failure of the parliamentary system in Germany to deal with effects of inflation, unemployment and the onset of economic slump.

How differently the question of freedom is dealt with today. 'US official and semi-official rhetoric has too often reduced Freedom with a capital "F" chiefly to the right to vote. Even freedom of expression is usually taken to mean little more than unrestricted private media ownership.'

The recent Freedom House report, partly US government funded, treats, as Lieven says, the US 'as the embodiment of democracy and support for America as a key index of virtue.'

Roosevelt had his own reasons for putting forward his particular four freedoms. But they are still wanting today: freedom from want is a freedom lacked by millions, as is freedom from fear. Freedom of worship is denied or made extremely difficult in a number of countries. Freedom of speech and expression...in Saudi Arabia? in Egypt? even in the US, where dissent is all too often clamped down on?

If some one time liberal commentators had their way, there would be even more clamping down on dissent. Sent crazy by the failure of the imperial project on which they pinned all their hopes, Hitchens, Amis and Cohen sketch wilder and wilder plans for how to save the world. Hitchens 'Facing the Islamist Menace' (winter 2007 City Journal)ends with a ten point plan which looks to me a lengthy but infallible recipe for more wars, terrorism etc which Hitchens will then declare need even stronger remedies to defeat.

His plan includes an open alliance with India on all fronts against 'Muslim fascism', energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran, and comes out with this gem: 'We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous _Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind_that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon or Iraq without bearing this in mind.'

He quotes Martin Amis at length from a Times interview. Martin (isn't he so like his father?) says he has an urge to say the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. His suggestions for suffering: 'not letting them travel. Deportation _further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan'.

At least we wouldn't have all that hold up at airports _or perhaps we would as they would be full of people being strip searched or deported.

Martin doesn't bat an eyelid at these tactics which would be familiar to anyone who lived under a dictatorship or even fascism. Which brings me to the third Musketeer, Nick Cohen. Cohen has out a new book on the left and the war. Apparently, he equates opposition to the Iraq war with support for Hitler. Is this arrested development (he came from a Communist family but clearly hasn't caught up with Communist opposition to war and imperialism)? Or has he just boiled his brain?