Für Extremisten aller Art gibt es nichts Verwerflicheres als Abweichler, Häretiker und Renegaten. Für Liberale hingegen ist die kontinuierliche Modifikation der eigenen Ansichten über die wandelnden Realitäten in Politik, Wissenschaft und Religion eine der wichtigsten Tugenden freiheitlichen Denkens. In Großbritannien ist dieser Tage eine neue Debatte über ehemalige Linke entbrannt, die neue Wege eingeschlagen haben. Hier ist ein kurzer Überblickt:
When David Mamet declared last month that he was no longer a ‘brain-dead liberal’, he joined the ranks of leftwing writers, from Arthur Koestler to Kinglsey Amis to Christopher Hitchens, who have moved to the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David Edgar challenges the new generation of renegades.
I am following with no little fascination the controversy over David Edgar’s article in the Guardian last Saturday, which has upset certain left-wing folk by suggesting that writers such as Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Andrew Antony, Martin Bright, David Mamet and Ed Husain are but the latest to have deserted the left and moved to the right. Oh—and me. This list is in itself absurd. As Andrew Anthony has pointed out, in renouncing seventh century Islamism, Ed Husain has moved (insofar as these terms still have any meaning) from right to left. As for several of the others, they have merely understood that one cannot be a true progressive and at the same time support the continuation of certain tyrannical regimes that enslave and murder their populations, even if they do belong to the sainted third world.
Do we get the idea that describing the Soviet model, with its vast network of gulags and millions of state murders and total party control, as “totalitarian” was a historical error? Certainly, that’s the suggestion left hanging like a two-pig-owning kulak. Then it’s on to the defectors from left to right, a taxonomy in which I am included. The key name, here I think, is that of Ed Husain. If you can really view someone who leaves an imperialist, anti-semitic, anti-democratic, ultra-religious party like Hizb ut-Tahrir and comes out in favour of democracy and religious tolerance as a defector moving rightwards, then it shows your political - not to mention, moral - compass is in urgent need of repair.
Edgar’s complaint seems to be that when leftwingers criticise some aspect of the left, they then jump the centre and head straight for the right. Well, it’s easy to name examples where that’s true, but really what Edgar is arguing is that unless you sign up to his vision of the left, you have by definition joined the ranks of the right.
