On Euston

of expression, and the separation of Church (or Mosque) and State.

It is especially strong in its condemnation of the anti-Americanism which, it notes, is “now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking.”

The Manifesto also blasts some liberals for “the excuse-making for suicide terrorism [and] the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the ‘anti-war’ movement with illiberal theocrats.”

The manifesto may sound like a lengthy statement of the obvious. But, in a way, that’s the point.

And Christopher Hitchens:

I believe there are three explanations for this horrid mutation of the left into a reactionary and nihilistic force. The first is nostalgia for the vanished “People’s Democracies” of the state socialist era. This has been stated plainly by Galloway and by Clark, whose political sect in the United States also defends Castro and Kim Jong-il.

The bulk of the anti-war movement also opposed the removal of the Muslim-slayer Slobodan Milosevic, which incidentally proves that their professed sympathy with oppressed Muslims is mainly a pose.

However, that professed sympathy does help us to understand the second motive. To many callow leftists, the turbulent masses of the Islamic world are at once a reminder of the glory days of “Third World” revolution, and a hasty substitute for the vanished proletariat of yore. Galloway has said as much in so many words and my old publishers at New Left Review have produced a book of Osama Bin Laden’s speeches in which he is compared with Che Guevara.

The third reason, not quite so well laid out by the rather 10th-rate theoreticians of today’s left, is that once you decide that American-led “globalisation” is the main enemy, then any revolt against it is better than none at all. […]

I have been flattered by an invitation to sign it [the Euston Manifesto], and I probably will, but if I agree it will be the most conservative document that I have ever initialled. Even the obvious has now become revolutionary. So call me a neo-conservative if you must: anything is preferable to the rotten unprincipled alliance between the former fans of the one-party state and the hysterical zealots of the one-god one.