World Events

Anne Applebaum can’t tell left from right

John Quiggin11 Comments

Columns in the Guardian by Jonathan Steele and John Laughland, asserting that demonstrations against the rigging of the Ukraine election were a Western-funded plot, have been the subject of a lot of criticism here and on other blogs. As far as Laughland is concerned, there’s a good rundown on his views and assocations (which could broadly be described as lunar right) from Chris Bertram and more, in the Guardian itself, from David Aaronovitch.

Now we get this column from Anne Applebaum (reprinted in the SMH with the appropriately paranoid headline The plot against Americaclaiming that Steele and Laughland are part of a leftwing plot

The larger point, though, is that the “it’s-all-an-American-plot” arguments circulating in cyberspace again demonstrate something that the writer Christopher Hitchens, himself a former Trotskyite, has been talking about for a long time: At least a part of the Western left — or rather the Western far left — is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States.

Applebaum is generally well-informed and, while she does not name either Steele or Laughland, she says “Neither author was a fringe journalist”, which implies some familiarity with their positions. In any case, she presumably reads The Guardian. Why then doesn’t she acknowledge that the views they put forward draw the (minuscule) support they have attracted from the right as well as the left ?

11 thoughts on “Anne Applebaum can’t tell left from right”

  1. I wonder if part of it was prompted by the webdiary article that mentioned the Guardian article and used it to support a link between fraud in Ukraine and fraud in the US.

    Had it just been a couple of blogs I’d agree with you, but if she was commenting on it because of it’s appearance on webdiary, it’s probably more reasonable to raise it (and ascribe the views to the “left” – in spite of Margo’s oft repeated centrist self-image).

  2. I think it’s fair to assume that Applebaum (an American) doesn’t read Webdiary, though she implies that she has run across similar views on the left.

  3. John,

    In regard to Anne Applebaum’s complaint about the unfairness of it all. Are you more concerned about her:

    1. Trumped up whipping boy fetish that she shakes at the Left?

    or

    2. Her disingenuous conflation of “anti-Bush” and “anti-American”?

    or

    3. BOTH?

    (I like [3] myself.)

  4. apart from the fact that she might want to investigate whether an opinion writer is right or left, she might also want to look and see what each candidate’s position on ukraine’s military participation in iraq is before she assumes to know who would derive support from reflexive anti-bushism.

  5. “At least a part of the Western left — or rather the Western far left — is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States.”

    Go back over back numbers of Quadrant, Readers Digest, News Weekly, The Australian’s op-ed columns or Coalition speeches in Hansard from the 1980s, and you’ll find that “at least a part” of the AUstralian right and centre-right – in fact, virtually all of it except Malcolm Fraser – was then so anti-communist and anti-Soviet that it actually preferred the apartheid regime in South Africa as a lesser evil to Nelson Mandela and the ANC, due to the latter’s “pro-Soviet” affinities.

  6. How refreshing, JQ, to find that some people can still spell “minuscule” correctly. On the Anne Applebaum question, is it possibly relevant that she used to work for the Spectator, or that her husband is a Polish politician? Whatever, the point I would draw from the this incident is that the far right and the far left frequently have more in common with each other than with any other part of the political spectrum.

  7. For some weird reason the direct link to the whole of this doesn’t work, just the “comments only” part. Is this temporary, just my system, or what?

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