The Left Revisited

My comment about the Left emerged, I think, when I read an interview in the Monthly Review, a journal that styles itself as an independent socialist publication, about the Chinese cultural revolution in which some hack was explaining that any excesses--meaning killings, beatings, humiliations, etc.--were not "mainstream": when in all probability they were nothing but "mainstream."  I get the same feeling when I listen to corporate spokespersons blithely defending the indefensible: do they even know just how deluded they are?  OK.  So people lie.  Everybody lies.  Big deal--no news there. And when their job is on the line, people are even more apt to dissemble.  But when thousands or millions of lives are suddenly imperiled, then lying--for whatever reason--becomes not just less acceptable but unbearable.  (But we might also ask--is it a lie when you've convinced yourself that it's not a lie?)

Oh, and I'm reading Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, his compelling account of how Europe (and thus the world) went to war in 1914.  My sense is that World War I occurred because enough men in power wanted a war--and even more thought it inevitable--and most of them lacked the moral imagination to consider just how catastrophic such a war, even of short duration, would be.  Sleepwalking?  I'm not so sure.  But one lesson is that political systems headed by someone who has his position merely on the basis of the accident of birth (that is, hereditary monarchs) usually don't function very well.  Lesson two?  That even fairly intelligent people can miscalculate, especially when they have created the conditions (here, security alliances based on animosity towards an enemy and on misunderstandings and foolish delusions of others' capacities).  Lesson three? That world history is filled with these kinds of miscalculations and misunderstandings and that enough idiots exist who believe in the lies they're told and feel free to act upon them (blithely marching off to slaughter).

So it's 2014: what miscalculations this year will trigger a global catastrophe?  In 1914, for most people (at least outside of power) a world war muat have seemed inconceivable.  Is it so different now?