Remembering the Eustonards

Is it still possible to imagine a "decent Left"?

I would like to believe that it is still possible to imagine such a thing, in the knowledge that even at this late hour the Left is certainly not entirely indecent. In any case, the question comes up because the other day, in correspondence with an old acquaintance, I was reminded of the Euston Manifesto.

In my Boxing Day newsletter there was this: I highly recommend Shalom Lappin’s book, The New Antisemitism: The Resurgence of an Ancient Hatred in the Modern World. Shalom and I go way back, to the days of the Euston Manifesto. Here’s Shalom’s recent essay in Fathom Journal: ‘Is it time to leave?’ The resurgence of antisemitism in the modern world.

Shalom has an essay in a forthcoming issue of Fathom tentatively titled ‘The Nazification of the Postmodern Left.’ I’ll keep subscribers posted, and Shalom and I are planning a podcast for what will likely be a long conversation. Now, about that manifesto we signed. . .

The Euston Manifesto encapsulated what was described in the Guardian at the time as “the most serious split within the left since the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956,” which might not have been a stretch. If that’s what it was, the good guys lost, and defeat meant the losing side’s arguments were buried in a bottomless digital memory hole.

Strange to think that it was almost 20 years ago, an effort that strikes me as prescient, and more relevant now than ever. When you’re done with this newsletter, the manifesto is right here. It was put together in the hope of sketching out a possible realignment of the orientation and trajectory “the Left” had taken on.

Sorry, there is no “your truth” and “my truth.”

Real Story subscribers will know that a primary purpose of this newsletter has been the work of sorting out just what the hell has happened to the capacity of the liberal democracies’ institutions - especially the conventional news media - to establish consensus about what’s true and what isn’t.

It’s all about epistemology (see When ‘narrative’ replaces facts), and the epistemic crisis that has crippled “the discourse” is by no means confined to Trumpism. As I’ve put it more than once, it’s not just that the truth doesn’t seem to matter anymore, it seems that it doesn’t matter that the truth doesn’t matter anymore.

Getting your head around this strange state of affairs is necessary to sorting out what to make of this monstrous thing that has poured into the streets since the Simchat Torah pogrom of October 7, 2023. The point I’ve been hammering at: Everything Has Changed. It's not just about Israel. It's about civilization and its enemies. And its enemies are among us.

Some saw this coming a long time ago, and the best barometers were calibrated by intellectuals within the Left itself. I was drawn to their company. Because antisemitism is such a pronounced marker of the squalor the Euston Manifesto attempted to steer away from, Jews were prominent among the first to notice the spreading rot. This partly explains how it came to pass that an Irish Catholic immigrant to Canada such as myself would be drawn to the companionship and company of Jews and Zionists.

So, with no paywall today (although for the love of G-d please stop me from doing this work for free and take up a paying subscription), here are a couple of things that should go along way to explain the depravity that has become embedded in all the places where the Left used to be, and how some of us have been trying to figure it out, and get shut of it.

All this is probably a bit much to absorb in one go. So. . .

The fulcrum of the Eustonard conversations was curated by the great Manchester University professor Norm Geras, who was really not so much a Marxist university professor as a professor of Marxism. A while back I referred to an anthology of his essays, The Norm Geras Reader, edited by Eve Gerrard and Ben Cohen, and I mentioned that Fathom journal editor Alan Johnson and I contributed the opening and closing essays.

So for old times’ sake and to give you a sense of what all that Euston business was about, here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote in the Globe and Mail back in 2006, followed by one of Johnson’s compositions from ten years later, which he reconstituted as a long thread on X, of all places, just the other day.

SHAKE IT TO THE LEFT, Globe and Mail, June 3, 2006.

It began as a conversation among friends in O'Neill's, a London pub just across from the British Library on Euston Road, a short walk from the Euston tube station. They were journalists, academics, activists and students, all markedly leftish in their views, and they decided to write down some ideas they had been kicking around.

Not exactly a ship docked at the Kronstadt naval base in 1921 or the dockers’ hall at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in 1980, but still.

The result was published in the New Statesman weekly magazine on April 7. Within days, the "Euston manifesto" had attracted the strangely favourable attention of some infamous American neoconservatives, a rousing chorus of cheers from certain semi-repentant Marxists, and an enthusiastic but typically nuanced congratulation from polemicist Christopher Hitchens. It was also drawing a great deal of vitriol from self-proclaimed anti-war activists.

What followed was a tidal wave of praise and rubbishing, in roughly equal parts. It roared through hundreds of Internet web logs and rumbled on through the pages of The Guardian, The Hindu, The American Spectator, and Blueprint, the magazine of the U.S. Democratic Leadership Council. The last time I typed "Euston manifesto" into Google's search engine, there were close to 300,000 responses. The really odd thing is that it's mainly just a reiteration of certain basic principles that have always united democratic socialists, progressives and liberals - I happily added my own name to its signatures, which now number close to 1,800. So why the astonishing firestorm? Why such a worldwide rumpus?

One of its authors, Shalom Lappin, a 55-year-old linguistics professor at the University of London, says it's because the document deliberately draws attention to deep, worldwide fault lines that run across the broad political spectrum of the liberal left. These are ruptures, rarely acknowledged in the press, that are buckling the tectonics of the entire liberal realm.

The manifesto rejects terrorism of any kind, for any reason. It affirms the importance of historical truth, stands squarely for free speech and universal human rights, for the emancipation of women and for workers' rights, and calls for a tough internationalism that puts the dignity of the citizen before the sovereignty of the nation-state. It also acknowledges that the United States is a great democracy.

On those grounds, the manifesto calls for a "fresh political alignment" of the socialist left with egalitarian liberals and genuine democrats, of all stripes, specifically "drawing a line" against leftists "for whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic anti-imperialism."

Prof. Lappin, a Canadian who happily describes himself as "a Toronto boy, born and raised," concedes that he experienced a certain frisson signing on to the American-friendly bits. And, indeed, it is the manifesto's assertion that the United States is not irredeemably bankrupt that has provoked some of the most vituperative and venomous reactions.

"Some of the response has been absolutely toxic," Prof. Lappin says.” It's the so-called anti-war left that has been especially furious about it all. Why? "Because they've sold out the values of the liberal left, and they don't like to be reminded of their betrayal."

He says he means not just the general trajectory of the left over the past 30 years or so, from an unambiguous working-class politics to the fuzziness of postmodernist relativism and "identity" politics. He also means specifically the "socialism of fools" in which it ends up - a dead end where avowed liberals blindly sympathize with "anti-imperialist" tyrants, and ostensible socialists openly collaborate with theocratic fascists. . .

In Canada, the Socialist Workers Party's affiliates are successfully framing the issue for the left. They provide the key co-ordinators for the Canadian Peace Alliance, the War Resisters Support Campaign and other such groups. All this suggests that the line-drawing work the Euston Manifesto describes holds particular relevance for Canada, where debates about war, national security, civil rights, immigration and relations with the United States are posing increasingly divisive, litmus-test questions.

Jack Layton's New Democratic Party is vacillating in its support for Canada's military presence in Afghanistan, while much of the party's activist base straddles precisely the line the Euston manifesto proposes to draw between the traditional left and the pseudo-left. The Liberal Party, after pioneering the United Nations' "responsibility to protect" doctrine, which is specifically singled out for support in the Euston Manifesto, is in the throes of reconstruction. Leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff is gingerly staking out a clearly "Eustonian" position - unapologetically of the centre-left, for social justice and a robust internationalism.

Interestingly, the manifesto's main authors came from opposing camps on the question of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. (Prof Lappin was against it.) But they ended up united, mainly around the conviction that after the bombs started falling on Baghdad three years ago, what the left should have done was mount an all-out campaign of solidarity and material support for Iraq's democrats, trade unionists, progressives and feminists. Instead, in the main, the Anglo-American left retreated into a cul-de-sac of narcissism and self-righteousness. . .

The decision to sign the Euston Manifesto was pretty easy for me, when I considered the company I would be obliged to keep. In the manifesto's authors and in its signatures, I recognized a pretty trustworthy crowd.

There is Norm Geras, Marxist scholar and emeritus professor at Manchester University; left-wing Independent columnist Nick Cohen; Paul Berman, author of Power and the Idealists; Marc Cooper of the venerable U.S. magazine The Nation; Francis Wheen, a foremost authority on Karl Marx; historian Marko Attila Hoare; poet George Szirtes; Wellesley professor and Journal of Human Rights editor Thomas Cushman; Dissent editor Michael Walzer; and on and on.

The Canadian list made the decision even easier. Its signatures show a healthy cross-section of academics, writers and activists. They include anthropologist Nadia Khouri, Toronto student activist Nav Purewal, Ontario gay-rights leader Jim Monk, Concordia University social-work professor Amiel Pariser, McGill sociology professor Axelvan den Berg, Jack Cunningham of the Inuvik library board, Vancouver punk-rock writer/blogger Simon Harvey, University of Toronto philosophy professor Paul Franks, and many others.

Ms. Khouri was unequivocal about her reasons for signing: "The radical left's negative reaction to the whole question of humanitarian intervention, their tolerance for post-colonial tyrants and hereditary dictators, their sick 'root cause' explanations of terrorist butcheries of innocent civilians, their pathological anti-Americanism. I'm also stunned at the Western feminists' betrayal of their oppressed sisters in Muslim countries."

But will the Euston Manifesto change anything?

McGill's Axel van den Berg says he thinks so. He considers the manifesto a kind of "revolt," and, at the very least, he says, "a strong reassertion of some universal perspective is very encouraging." The University of Toronto's Paul Franks is convinced the manifesto's authors are on to something: "It hit a nerve," Prof. Franks says. "This is a conflict. It's a conflict over identity and tradition, and there are people who do not want to be put into a position where they have to defend these principles."

He had no qualms about those principles, his obligation to defend them, or which side he was on. So he signed. "Besides," he says, "it's just good to know there are some kindred spirits out there."

Five reasons I am a non-Israeli, non-Jewish, two-state Zionist (meaning ‘a supporter of a continuing, secure, sovereign Jewish state and homeland in Israel’)

- Alan Johnson

First. Sean Matgamna. It was Sean Matgamna – or ‘Rebbe Matgamna’ as some in the Union of Jewish Students affectionately called this brilliant Irish intellectual and former docker at the time – who woke me from my dogmatic One-State slumber in the mid-1980s.

Sean was the leading theoretician of Socialist Organiser, the far-left group I had been a member of since 1980. Out of a clear blue sky he walked in one day with a paper arguing that we should drop the demand for a ‘democratic secular state’ and embrace ‘two states for two peoples.’

After a long internal debate – the sophistication and seriousness of which I was never to find in academia – his arguments prevailed.

“It seems to me,” Matgamna wrote, “that the terms of the only just solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are clear and unmistakeable. Unless you think the interests of one side should be entirely sacrificed to the other – that is, unless you are either an Arab or an Israeli chauvinist – there is only one acceptable solution. Each nation should have self-determination in the territory where it is the majority.

“I understand that to mean, essentially, the 1967 border. There should be full equality for members of each nationality in the other’s state. The secular democratic state necessarily involves replacing the Jewish state of Israel with another arrangement in which Jews will not have a state. The goal is not only to secure Palestinian rights by putting an end to Israeli rule in the Palestinian territories, but to deprive Israeli Jews of their national rights.”

Well, indeed. Obvious enough, you might think, but those ideas were a heresy on the far left at the time. And so we were heresy hunted. ‘Zionists!’ screamed Chris Harman, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party. The Workers Revolutionary Party even wrote that ‘a powerful Zionist connection runs from the so-called left of the Labour Party right into the centre of Thatcher’s government in Downing Street’. Armed with those ideas, and those enemies, we fought alongside UJS in the mid-1980s to halt and reverse the far left drive to ban student Jewish Societies.

Second. Leon Trotsky. I still revere the Old Man and bristle when people attack him in words that should really be reserved for his followers. His final words were read out at my wedding to Debbie, a Matgamna girl, by our children:

“Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full.”

And it was from Trotsky that I learned that the assimilationist approach of classical Marxism to the problem of antisemitism was wrong. A target of both Tsarist and Stalinist antisemitism himself, Trotsky understood antisemitism was no feudal hangover. He grasped the modernity of antisemitism. I read his searing account of the antisemitic pogroms of the 1905 Russian Revolution and his desperate and prescient warnings about Fascism. “The next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.” he wrote, before his murder by the Stalinists in 1940.

As Enzo Traverso, an intellectual historian of Marxism and antisemitism, has put it, ‘The rise of Nazism in Germany led [Trotsky] to a global revision of his approach to the Jewish Question, i.e. to the question of antisemitism. Though Trotsky never thought of himself as a Zionist – having faith in a World Socialist Revolution which we cannot, in good faith, still claim – he became convinced of the necessity of a national solution to the problem of radicalising antisemitism.

“The Jews, Trotsky came to believe, have every right to live in a ‘compact mass’ as a nation. And nations, he wrote as far back as 1915, “constitute an active and permanent factor of human culture. The nation will not only survive the current war, but also capitalism itself.” “The Jewish nation,” he said in 1937, “will maintain itself for an entire epoch to come.”

Third. Isaac Deutscher.

From Trotsky’s biographer, the Polish socialist Isaac Deutscher, I learned that the Jewish state is not only a right but a necessity, and that to oppose its existence on the basis of abstract left-wing dogma is, literally, a matter of Jewish life and death:

“I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism,” wrote Deutscher, “which was based on a confidence in the European labour movement, or, more broadly, in European society and civilisation, which that society and civilisation have not justified.”

He continued: “If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers. For the remnants of European Jewry – is it only for them? – the Jewish State has become an historic necessity. It is also a living reality.”

Fourth. The experience of teaching the Holocaust.

A sustained engagement with antisemitism as a university teacher – deep reading in the texts, images, films, memoirs, and histories; sustained discussion with your students; the effort to write about antisemitism, in my case about the work of Primo Levi – produced this insight: our natures are mixed, capable of great good and great evil.

In the words of the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, we are centaurs, a ‘tangle of flesh and mind, of divine inspiration and dust’. Then add this in: humanity, for reasons that do not concern us here, for no good reason, again and again, has selected the Jew as the scapegoat. More precisely, and with a smidgeon more hope, let us say that humanity has done so for millennia and is still doing so today, though we can allow ourselves the hope – as we may hope for the return of the Messiah – that humanity will not do so in the future.

But what we can’t not know is that from time to time, in the words of Levi’s favourite writer Dante, western civilisation takes leave of its senses and ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums’. And when it does, the Jews – not only, but above all, the Jews – need a state with ramparts and an IDF standing on those ramparts. At one level, my Zionism comes down to that brute fact.

Fifth. Boys and girls in Jerusalem.

Walking in Jerusalem one day I came upon Jewish children playing in a narrow street, the early evening sun warming the stone flags and lending their ringlets a glow. They were playing a game I could not understand, white shirts flapping, kippahs in danger of falling off, one shriek chasing another.

I had two thoughts. My first, as ever, was about Primo Levi. I was reminded that in play we adults can find again ‘the savour of childhood, delicate and forgotten,’ and that to enjoy play is rather ‘like receiving, free of charge or almost, a rare and beautiful object.’

A second thought then shadowed my first, a typical experience for anyone who has spent a lot of time reading about the Holocaust, let alone those who have a familial connection to the Shoah: other images and other shrieks from another time arrived unbidden. In some indefinable way, my own Zionism was expressed in that scene.

All for now. -tg. You know what to do: