Give me a pound for every obituary for the Left penned over the last 100 years, and I’d doubtless be a very rich capitalist. The latest fatal announcement comes from Nick Cohen, in an article mixing perverse tristesse with perverse relief. Its one of those ‘with-bitter-honesty-reluctantly-and-in-the-face-of-sadness’ articles, which is of course a sure index of Truth. For those of you who don’t know, ‘brutal candour’ is Cohen’s patented style, it differentiates him from other commodities in the journalistic marketplace and so helps to sell papers.
Like some ghost of his own previous self, Cohen has come back to earth with some uncomfortable truths for us, in short: ‘The ineluctable answer is, I'm afraid, that there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race’. Not just here and in England, it would seem, but, 'ineluctably', anywhere in the world. Resourcefully, the concept of this great world-historical shift has been cobbled together from a handful of current media events – reaction to Michael Moore’s latest film, the visit of an obnoxious Muslim cleric to the UK, and of course the morally insolvent decision of the Left (along with the majority of Europe) to oppose an imperialist (sorry ‘anti-Fascist’) war. In these paltry runes, the global death of radical thought is legible.
In the strange temporality of the media-world, great sea-changes in human consciousness, abrupt shifts in the Zeitgeist and epoch-inaugurating actions and speeches happen with alarming regularity, or can be telescoped through the lens of a few prepackaged headlines, before being inexplicably dispatched to oblivion by the ‘next big thing’.
Meanwhile, one can only hope that the rage against injustice and the silent weaving of hope persists, ineluctably, beneath the noise of the news.
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