Cohen is arguably a neocon and a right-winger. See below.
This is a lie and you are a liar. Nick Cohen is nowhere even remotely like that but like the purveyors of FUD who shilled on behalf of Miscrosoft against Linux you have to keep repeating that sort of lie over and over again.
Me too, card carrying Wobbly since '99, and member-activist and professional organizer for other unions for over a decade. I've organized workplaces, led strikes and other industrial/direct actions, litigated at the labor board-- so what? Many of the Italian fascists started off as anarcho-syndicalists as well. And the neocons started off as Trots.
And by this you are attempting to infer that I have made such an ideological shift? Yeah right.
Your ideological or organizational background does not necessarily preclude you from making an ideological shift. I'm not nearly as right-wing as I was when I was a teenager, and not as radically left wing as I was when I was in my 20s. In fact, I recall you said yourself on this forum that you had departed from the left some time ago, in the context of a debate we were having. In fact, you compared it to apostating, and I disagreed with your comparison. I can't be bothered to find it right now, but I'm sure you could find it if you wanted.
I really didn't make an ideological shift but rather saw many of my former friends and FW's follow the party line of the cultural Left and actually become supporters of Hamas and other assorted jihadis. They did this knowing full well that this sort of behavior contradicts socialist and anarchist principles and ideals. With a 'so what' (your words) coming from you any socialist beliefs you may have are shallow and crude.
So just because you have experience on the left and can probably lay claim to understanding some left wing ideology more than some other folks do, that doesn't mean that you are left right now.
But I am and you have to live with that fact.
Yes, I understand that many former left-wingers who are apologists for imperialism and neocon ideology (like Cohen and Hitchens and some other folks besides you I've run across on internet forums) like to continue to classify themselves as left-wing,
There you go again making use of Joseph Goebbels advice:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
just composing some kind of principled left-wing opposition, and appeal to the legacy of George Orwell. But I don't buy it. I think you guys are just former leftists who don't want to admit that as you got older you turned into the very reactionaries you once despised.
You simply can't face the fact that you are of that ilk who decided to flush any principles down the toilet. Plenty of us on the Decent Left have had moments of doubt and wondered what we were doing agreeing with those whom we had heartily disagreed with on just about every other subject. But how can we be reactionaries when we were not the ones who collaborated with so many types like Yusuf al-Qardawi and
Hamas? With that in mind it's quite obvious that we have not "turned into the very reactionaries we once despised."
Yes. Hang your head in shame.
Ugh. Looks like its time for another break. See you guys in a few days.
You'll need to once you see the challenges I have for you at FFI. Since you lurk there you can post there.
Topic: FFI vs. COEM [Split: Poster of the month!]