Nick Cohen, blaðamaður á The Observer, skrifaði um daginn bók sem fól í sér harða gagnrýni á andstæðinga íraksstríðsins. Egill Helgason fjallaði nýverið um bókina undir yfirskriftinni Vinstrimenn fá á kjaftinn.
Eins og ég gat um á dögunum eru pennarnir á Spiked of flugbeittir. Nú hefur Michael Fitzpatrick skrifað dóm um bók Cohens, sem er mjög í anda þeirra Spiked-manna. Hann heitir: You’re so vain, Nick, you think this war is about you – sem er óneitanlega svalur titill.
Dómurinn byrjar kröftulega:
Walter Benjamin wrote that the polemicist approaches his text ‘as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby’. In this book, Nick Cohen aspires to the tradition of radical polemic but he reproduces only its confrontational form, without grasping its intellectual content. Whereas polemic presents a battle of ideas, Cohen’s book is about conflicts of feeling and emotions. The Princess Diana of the journalism of attachment, he reduces political comment to personal psychodrama, passion to petulance, argument to abuse.
Og ekki er niðurlagið síðra:
Cohen makes some legitimate criticisms of the anti-war movement, of its self-hating moral relativism, of its crass anti-Americanism, of its self-absorbed fears of terrorist retribution, of its indulgence of anti-Semitism and Islamic reaction. Yet even these pointed observations are drowned in a torrent of self-exculpatory bile. Everything comes back to Cohen’s inner turmoil, and the ongoing battle for his soul, between the former Blair-baiting journalist and the new Cohen, Blair apologist and laptop bombardier. What is extraordinary in the public discussion of What’s Left? is that so many commentators take this contest as seriously as he does. That those who must know better should indulge this rot is shameful. It is bad faith, driven by the guilt so many feel for so rashly sponsoring the futile, brutal politics of the invasion.
Nick Cohen’s book takes its place with the autobiographies of Robert Kilroy Silk and Derek Hatton as one of the worst books I have ever been asked to review. He shares most obviously their combination of self-regard and lack of self-awareness, but also their limited historical and political purview. Like them, too, his relationship with the left seems to have been a curious accident.
Svona ritdóma sér maður því miður ekki í íslenskum fjölmiðlum…
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íðan sparkaði ég með litlu tánni í stólfót. Það var vont.
Megi Moggabloggið reka litlu tánna harkalega í.