Does it surprise you that that would happen on the left? Would it have surprised Orwell?

It certainly wouldn't have surprised him because his essay "Politics and the English Language" and his other reflections on this certainly do address themselves to power and the way that power distorts. And in particular most of his favorite examples are from what the French used to call the langue du bois, the wooden tongue, which I'm afraid to say we know under its more farcical pseudo-compassionate form of political correctness. It used to be better known as a language of thuggery used by the Communist left. Actually, a bit of both of these is involved in the witless slogan "no war with Iraq," or "no war on Iraq."

If one were to look at your writing, say, since Sept. 11, there are threads of Orwell in it, aren't there? Whether or not they're cited?

Well if someone wanted to say that, I wouldn't feel I had to repudiate it. Because I can't believe Orwell would've been neutral [in the debate] between theocratic aggression and civil society. The idea that something like Afghanistan is the ideal society -- I know what I think about that. If it involves smashing planes full of people into buildings full of people, I'm against that too. How tough is that? More surprising I think are the people who would evade that question, or try to change the subject. But I think Orwell was a help in guessing the motive of that kind of masochism, that kind of self-hatred.

In what way?

He was quite clever at analyzing the way that people who repudiate patriotism will transfer that allegiance to other people. They'll be patriotic about others, or they'll make excuses about others they wouldn't make for themselves. It's a sort of psychological displacement, if you will. There was and there still is a sickening amount of that on what you could call the American left and, of course, never forget, on the American right. After the Sept. 11 attack, the first people to say the USA deserved this, and people who probably believed it in the most sadistic manner, were [Jerry] Falwell and [Pat] Robertson. "Of course what'd you expect, in a hedonistic, multicultural, sexually open country -- naturally God will punish that."

Where does it come from on the left? What's the source?

I'd have to say -- let's call it honorable. There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar. For some people that's definitive. They can't get over it. So the idea that the United States could use force with moral justification is to them totally alien. They can't -- they can't go there. They won't. But that is more a proof of their inflexibility than their attachment to principle. It's an empty position. It's a nihilistic position. If they said, "Yes, if bin Laden's the only revolutionary, he may not be perfect, but we're on his side," well, I could sympathize. No -- I won't say sympathize, but I could see it, I could respect it. But they don't do that. They look for bogus equivalencies that actually lead to a cop-out. "Well, he did this bad thing, but we've done this bad thing." That leaves you exactly nowhere. And surely it should at least condemn both. In fact it appears to excuse both.

And Orwell was clever about this. I mean, there were a lot of people, a very large number in fact, in 1940, for example, not just in England but in Europe and America, who would say, "Well, this Nazi business in Poland is pretty rough, obviously, but look at how the British behave in India. Why should we pick a side?" He sort of knew by the same instinct that I hope your readers have why that stinks as a means of arguing. I could explain why it stinks, but if I had to explain why to someone who didn't get it right away, I probably would never succeed.

Because it's obvious on its face?

I would distrust at once someone who didn't see there was a fallacy there. And those who didn't I think would not be open to persuasion.

What is the fallacy?

The fallacy is one of moral equivalence. The motive for it, or the ruse of it, is -- I prefer to call it masochistic. It's a self-hatred. It's a refusal to believe that you would ever be justified yourself in having the arrogance to define and defend yourself against or to destroy an enemy. That would surely make you no better than them. But this is disabling.

It seems to me that the left has a reflexive pacificism --

Well, I wish it was pacifism.

-- an unwillingness to fight wars.

If you're a Quaker, you say: "It's not that I'm afraid to die -- I'm afraid to kill. I don't think anything would justify it." That's fine. But in practice, it isn't that. The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved. Ramsey Clark didn't organize a protest against Saddam Hussein's attack on Iran, or Kuwait. He's not antiwar to that extent. And nobody complained about the failure of the West -- nobody complained in an organized street-protest way -- about the failure of the West to rescue Rwanda. And nobody complained about Milosevic's invasion of Bosnia -- well, that's not true, a lot of people did -- but their juices only kicked in when there was intervention to remove him. Voilè! You see the bad faith of this all the way through. It culminates in the most fatuous slogan yet devised, which is: "Stop the war before it starts." Which is a protest against removing either al-Qaida from Afghanistan or the Taliban from Afghanistan or both. Well, at this point it has to be said I think that the left has lost every moral and political element that made it a formidable force as an antiwar movement in the 1960s.

I wonder if you can trace for me your disillusionment with the left.

My tradition from the extreme left days is different from that of most mainstream leftists, I think, in that I was a Trotskyist. The group I was a member of, International Socialists, was a dissident splinter of the Trotskyist movement -- you were always fighting a war on about five fronts. But it was worth doing. It taught me how to argue, streetfighting, polemic and so forth. With the Clinton years, I realized that the left had moved literally to the right, because it was willing to excuse things that the United States did that it shouldn't do if it was done by someone claiming to be a liberal Democrat. Horrifying things, like the bombing of Sudan on the international front, and horrifying things on the home front like the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act [of 1996], which, if either of these things were done by either Bush or Ashcroft, everyone would know what to say. When they were really being done and they were both worse things.

Clinton didn't consult the U.N. about bombing Sudan. He didn't consult Congress. He didn't consult his Cabinet. He didn't consult the CIA or the National Security Council. He overruled the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He got a free pass. And every lawyer who wants to throw someone in jail quickly with a minimum of trial knows to charge them under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Against which there's no defense. And then there was Bosnia. If you are ever going to be confronted with a moral issue in your lifetime, one where there isn't much wiggle room, it would be: Here's an attempt to destroy, physically to destroy, a European minority, the third attempt of the 20th century. The first being the Armenian Christians, the second being the Jews, the third being the Muslims of the former Yugoslavia, or Bosnia Herzegovina. If you can't be against that, when it's taking place in front of your own eyes, what the hell can you say you are against?

All the Chomskyans and that lot -- I call them Chomskyans for short now -- said, "No, the problem with that was American imperialism daring to intervene in the Balkans." As to the destruction of the Muslims, they had nothing much to say. They made weird predictions, like, "It'll lead to a quagmire, it'll lead to mass civilian casualties, it'll lead to a wider war with Russia" -- and so on, all of which was false. Then comes bin Ladenism. Suddenly the people who didn't care about the murder of the Muslims [in Bosnia] say, "You musn't offend Islam." Bad faith. Catch them doing it twice, bad faith. It's a pity there isn't a term for this pathology. I'm certainly at the point where I think I can tell it when I see it, or smell it or taste it. And it's summarized most recently in: "No war with Iraq." In other words, let's discuss Mesopotamia as if human rights didn't matter. Well, I'm not willing to accept that invitation. So that's how gradually one was diverging.

The culmination, it seems, was your decision to quit the Nation.

I got this feeling like a dog being washed all the time in left-wing company and then, just recently, it struck me that the excuses I'd given to myself -- well, the Nation is a broad church or a big tent, and it's all a friendly debate -- were ceasing to be true. My quarrel isn't with the editors. It's with the readers. The magazine published a special Sept. 11 commemorative issue where they solicited letters from readers, "Tell us what Sept. 11 means to you." I think they printed three pages of these. The revelation of what readers thought and how they thought was so depressing to me. Most of those letters in an ordinary week would not have been chosen for publication because they just weren't up to the standard. They were very weak and badly written. Instead of which there were three pages of them, all of which said: "Here's what Sept. 11 means to me -- I've discovered I live in a fascist state." I said, "Well, that's goodbye." I don't want to have anything to do with reinforcing that kind of public opinion. When I can't persuade myself any longer that I'm just one among the columnists, I think I can't recommend to anyone that they read the magazine.

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