Nick Cohen
No, not another link to Nick Cohen's classic piece, "Why it is Right to be anti-American", but instead to one of his whinges:On the one hand, there am I delivering a ’scathing’ critique of the Left, and on the other, there is the ‘brave’ figure of old Footie offering his long life as a rebuke and reply. Except that What’s Left? is a book suffused with the anti-totalitarian and internationalist values of the democratic Left, of which Michael Foot is a part.I consulted him, quoted him in the chapter on the 1930s and thanked him in the acknowledgements.
If "Why it is Right to be anti-American" gave us some clue about what would be in his latest book, we can go one better with this new nugget of information. Cohen has reviewed a Michael Foot book in the past (no web link, but it was in the Independent on Jan 10th, 1999), "Dr Strangelove, I Presume", and indeeed found himself agreeing with much of it:
To my knowledge Foot, a Labour loyalist, ignored for years the repeated urgings of his friends to stand up against the Blair leadership until the Prime Minister supported the US attacks on Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. The folly of recent Anglo-American foreign policy was too much for him and his anger inspires a book which starts as an oddity and concludes with a convincing synthesis. Gradually, Foot's passion and intellect take hold and by the end you are presented with a picture of the globalisation of the nuclear menace in which the supposedly incompatible forces of fundamentalism and the West mesh together neatly...The UN weapons inspectors in Iraq might have been a model for monitoring world disarmament, but were hopelessly compromised by their subservience to the US and, at American insistence, Israel another breaker of UN and nuclear proliferation resolutions and manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction which receives no punishment, even though fundamentalist not to say lunatic factions are honoured by and represented in its government. It is truly eccentric to see Foot as a silly old man.
This new book from Nick Cohen is going to be a classic.
Labels: Nick Cohen
posted by Matthew @ 1/15/2007 09:22:00 PM
Comments: 7
