Observer - The Day Reality Hit Home

[outsider]

Check out article in today's 'Observer', 'The Day Reality Hit Home'. This should give us opportunities - I haven't figured all the angles yet, but it looks very promising. Boy, has he opened himself up!. Go get 'im, lads and lassies!

[Newspeak International]

A direct link would be nice Paul

Found it here though:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2151530,00.html

[outsider]

[TonyGosling]

..............In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a 'liberal'. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn't question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn't try to understand myself.

In a sense 11 September was the ultimate mugging, a murderous assertion of a new reality, or rather a reality that already existed but which we preferred not to see. Over the years I had absorbed a notion of liberalism that was passive, defeatist, guilt-ridden. Feelings of guilt governed my world view: post-colonial guilt, white guilt, middle-class guilt, British guilt. But if I was guilty, 9/11 shattered my innocence. More than anything it challenged us all to wake up and open our eyes to what was real. It took me far too long to meet that challenge. For while I realised almost straight away that 9/11 would change the world, it would be several years before I accepted that it had also changed me. I had been wrong. This was my story, after all...........

[xmasdale]

Yes I think Andrew Anthony should be approached - perhaps asking him to come and talk to us about his book would be the way forward.

[blackbear]

A contribution:

Well, is he?
Posted by Gene

I know we've asked variations of this question many times, but: is Guardian associate editor Seumas Milne for real?

I refer to the first paragraph of Milne's latest Comment is Free column at the Guardian website. The nominal topic is Andrew Anthony's book The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence, which I won't presume to pass judgment on. But consider the utter, breathtaking, insulting wrongness of the following:

There's now a well-established tradition in Britain of recantations by people who have moved from left to right, and either try to justify their embrace of the powers-that-be or, alternatively, insist they haven't changed at all, it's their former allies who've abandoned their principles. The genre goes back at least to the anti-communist tome The God that Failed, published at the height of the cold war, and includes the gruesome Thatcherite Right Turn collection of the late 1970s.

Now the most charitable explanation for this assertion is that Milne has not actually read The God That Failed. But I fear the disturbing truth is that he has read it, and wrote this anyway.

As I hope most of our readers know, TGTF-- published in 1949 and edited by the Labour MP Richard Crossman-- is a collection of essays by well-known former Communists and fellow travellers (André Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler and Louis Fischer) describing their disillusion and ultimate break with the Party. As far as I know, all of these writers maintained a leftwing commitment to social justice after leaving the Party. But none of them could stomach the Party's undemocratic structure and brutal methods.

And Milne accuses them of moving from left to right and abandoning their (presumably) fine principles? I can only repeat my original question.

http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/...enjoy the comments....

Notice the links to this anti-muslim hate site.....