Harry Hatchet (or Harry Steele as I first knew him) has for the past three years maintained Harry’s Place, a blog dedicated to putting forward the left-wing argument for a robust stance in the war on terror. Sadly, Harry is now hanging up his keyboard, although the site will continue. In his valediction, however, Harry fires one last shot at his erstwhile Comrades in the antiwar movement, and hits them dead on:
Of course the left has always had its splits, divisions and in-fights and if we look back to the Spanish civil war there was certainly no love lost between the Anarchists, the Trotskyists and (Stalin’s) Communists. But the difference with today is that back in the time when the International Brigades were fighting fascism in Spain, no-one on the left actually urged support for Franco.
But that is, effectively, what Murray, German and Galloway have asked the left to do for the past three years – to support first a Ba’athist-fascist dictator (because ‘victory to Iraq’ could mean nothing else) and then after his defeat to back the murdering dead-enders of his overthrown regime in alliance with the greenshirts who wish to create a new ‘year zero’ Taliban regime in Iraq. It remains a matter of astonishment that a large swathe of left opinion has been able to either support this turn to fascism or to turn a blind eye to it in the interests of anti-war unity.
But, while being on the other side in a struggle against fascism is something unprecedented, it is no novita that part of the left has been willing to defend the indefensible and justify the unjustifiable.
Right on, Comrade.