[Marxism] Norman Geras toast of the neocons

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Sunday Times - Britain

 February 06, 2005
Stormin’ Marxist is toast of the neocons
Maurice Chittenden

AN OBSCURE Marxist professor who has spent his entire academic life in
Manchester has become the darling of the Washington right wing for his
outspoken support of the war in Iraq.
Despite his leanings Norman Geras, who writes a blog diary on the
internet, has praised President George W Bush and says the invasion of
Iraq was necessary to oust the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein.

His daily jottings have brought him the nickname of “Stormin’ Norm”
from the title of his diary, Normblog. The Wall Street Journal has
reprinted one of his articles in its online edition and American
pundits often cite his words.

But the British left has turned on Geras, a veteran of demonstrations
against the Vietnam war. He has been denounced as an “imperialist
skunk” and a “turncoat” in e-mails to his blog, which has up to 9,000
readers a day.

Most mornings Geras, 61, the author of such obscure books as
Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable
Liberalism of Richard Rorty, sits in the upstairs study of his
Edwardian semi in Manchester to type his latest entry.

Last week he gave thanks to Bush, quoting an Iraqi who wants to build
a statue to the American president as “the symbol of freedom”.

He also lambasted “all those conflicted folk who would like to remain
true to their values and be pleased about the Iraqi election, but don’t
want George Bush to be able to take any credit for it”. He picked
Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent newspaper, for special
mention.

In another posting he imagined awakening from a nightmare to see Ken
Livingstone, Harold Pinter, George Galloway, John Pilger and other
opponents of the war advancing upon him — only to raise a finger
stained with the purple dye of an Iraqi voter.

Stephen Pollard, David Blunkett’s biographer and another avid blogger,
describes him as “unmissable”. Andrew Sullivan, The Sunday Times’s
columnist in Washington, said: “He’s fearless, intellectually honest
and actually cares about democracy in Iraq and the degeneracy of the
Euro-left.

“The medium of blog has made his ideas transmissible across the
Atlantic. He’s a genuine man of the left, which means he barely
recognises the quislings and cynics who now make up much of it.”

Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, whose
instapundit.com has become one of the most influential websites in
American politics, said: “He writes well, and what he writes makes
sense. Unlike too many on the left these days, his moral sense hasn’t
been obliterated by hostility towards the West in general and America
in particular.”

Geras, who was born in what was then Southern Rhodesia, earns no money
from his blog and pays about £3 a month to post it on the internet. He
started it in July 2003 after he retired from Manchester University,
where he is still a professor emeritus of politics.

He intersperses his political writings with salutes to the Australian
cricket team and polls among readers to find the greatest rock’n’roll
band — the Rolling Stones came top.

“I am part of the 1960s generation,” he said last week. “I was no
Tariq Ali but I took part in demonstrations against the Vietnam war
and other issues. Luckily I was never arrested.

“I was at an academic conference in Italy the day the left-wing
Allende regime was overthrown by a coup in Chile in 1973. I left the
conference to join a march in the streets.”

He added: “Everybody and his brother has had a go at me. But I started
the blog because I was fed up with the prevailing left and liberal
consensus that the war in Iraq was wrong.
“If those people who marched against the war had been successful they
would have prolonged a brutal regime responsible for 300,000 deaths.
They could have chosen not to support the war, but they chose to
oppose it.

“I do not see myself sharing Bush and Tony Blair’s outlook, but that
doesn’t mean there cannot be common elements.”

He believes any controversy over the British and US government’s use
of flawed evidence on weapons of mass destruction was secondary to the
humanitarian grounds for removing Saddam.

Andrew Burgin of the Stop the War Coalition, which is organising a
rally in Trafalgar Square on March 19 to mark the second anniversary
of the outbreak of the war, said: “I don’t think Bush wakes up and
thinks ‘How can the Iraqi people be free?’ Those like Geras who take
him at face value need to go back and look at their ABC of Marxism.”

But Liam Byrne, Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and one of Geras’s
former students, said: “As a skilled Marxist, Norman Geras is clearly
pursuing a very clever entryist strategy to the American neocon
movement. I await with bated breath the overthrow of every last one of
them.”












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