Johann Hari reviews Nick Cohen
Former Harry's Placer Johann Hari reviews Nick Cohen's book, "What's Left", for Dissent magazine. By and large Hari nails Cohen's bizarre views and illogical conclusions in a forceful piece:Cohen seems, by the time he writes passages like this, to have lost touch with reality....This book appears to have been written as Cohen hit a personal tipping-point..and an admission that Cohen is sliding into full-blown neoconservatism....After this, there are even worse moments, when his views disintegrate into a drizzle of dismaying right-wing talking points.
He concludes:
Cohen, ostentatious claimer of George Orwell's mantle, has forgotten the quality that made Orwell great - the power to face inconvenient truths. He simply averts his gaze from the burning vistas of Iraq that contradict his thesis, turning towards George Galloway to give him another well-deserved - but increasingly irrelevant - spit in the face.
Anyway read it all, as they say. I would add two things (of many that could be said) about Cohen and the book. On the latter, I think much of it was summed up for me by his concluding, with a flourish, with a description of a dedication made by Azar Nafisi's which didn't exist. Remarkably, and stretching the bounds of probability, this was an identical mistake (and it wasn't an easy mistake to make - I spotted it immediately and I'm hardly a careful reader) to one Christopher Hitchens made a few months earlier. So did Cohen actually read the book he was claiming the virtues of? This seems to be a theme of What's Left.
On Cohen, as I have said before, his one clear consistent theme is a hatred of liberals. When, in the months after September 11th 2001, Nick Cohen was publicly anti-American, he used to have a go at "liberals" for being too pro-war. Neither of these pieces reflects well on him. He has never explained why his anti-Americanism changed (I've read his book, the nearest we got was something on Normblog) or why he held it in the first place. But anyway, now of course it is "liberals" who are anti-American and insufficiently pro-war, even though the first charge is impossible to substantiate and the second seems well supported by events.
Labels: Johann Hari, Nick Cohen
posted by Matthew @ 7/25/2007 07:07:00 AM
Comments: 4
