"America has fallen to a Jacobin coup."

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

As they ride off into the sunset, I was wondering if anyone else here had ever tried googling 'Neocon Jacobin'? It makes for very...strange...reading. I first came across this sort of thing in 2003, in an article by the loopy Thatcherite-but-changes-with-the-weather 'philosopher' John Gray in the New Statesman (before I cancelled the NS - longstanding flagship mag of the British Left - after their 'Kosher Conspiracy' issue - google 'the new antisemitism' for the grisly details of that fracas). Gray has gone on to write a book on the same lines - 'Black Mass'. There seem to be a number of American and Canadian articles and books (Claes Ryn, whoever he is) on the same lines, coming from the Right. It has also filtered into fiction: a recent film (which I haven't seen, so I'm going on hearsay) by Milos Foreman, and scripted by the bloke who adapted 'Danton', called 'Goya's Ghosts', has Javier Bardem as a Spanish Jacobin type who comes out with lines like 'no liberty for the enemies of liberty' - I gather this is supposed to mean Guantanamo Bay (but as I said, I haven't seen it!). More obviously, it's the undercurrent - if not the raison d'etre - of the long HBO series 'John Adams'. Adams is a peculiar choice for hero of a 9 hour drama, unless you read it as an attack on Neocon foreign policy - he is contrasted throughout with Jefferson: Jefferson wants America to intervene in a foreign war to defend liberty and democracy abroad - Adams 'sensibly' wins and America sits on its hands. 'Oh, if only Bush had been like that', is the subtext - and the reason the series was garlanded with Emmys - 5 years earlier, the pro-war 'The Gathering Storm' had got a similar treatment, which shows how times had changed (that had Churchill as Bush/Blair). The actor playing Jefferson even looks a bit like Bush. The British BBC Radio 4 history of America series went further: in its episode on Adams and Jefferson, it said Adams kept America out of 'the first War on Terror'.

In Britain, Bush has always been seen as a retard cynically motivated by revenge and oil greed, so it's rather amusing to see the American Right portraying him as a dangerous liberal steered by Trotskyist utopian neo-Jacobins. I find it all rather disturbing, though it does add another strange slant to the ruckus that has been going on in the British left, which has been tearing itself to pieces since 2001.

Comments

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I don't know - the Jefferson comparison was odd, given the portrayal in the series: I think my question caught him rather off-guard, as he'd turned up to talk about audiences and funding! The director was British, so presumably won't have any of the reverence Americans are raised with (ok, crudely generalising here) regarding the 'Founding Fathers', and probably takes them as they come, on their merits (or what he has been led to believe by biographers about their merits!). Interesting to note the casting of Rufus Sewell as Hamilton - Rufus Sewell is casting shorthand for 'baddie'! I read some Hamilton fans complaining on a forum about it...The armed missionaries quote turned up a few times during the Iraq war - often unattributed! Well, I suppose people wouldn't want to be seen as enlisting the blood-drinking panto villain of popular fiction to aid their argument!

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

I didn't know the director was British; that explains why the series had the merits it did, at least as far as not making the "Founding Fathers" flawless, or nearly flawless, heroes. It's funny you should mention that about Rufus Sewell; I guess he does have a reputation for playing villains, but it always strikes me as funny, considering the first time I encountered him was as the love interest/antihero in the not-very-accurate-but-entertaining "Dangerous Beauty." I'm never for the demonization of historical figures, and this series did portray Hamiliton as a very negative caricature... but all the same, if anyone involved in the American War of Independance deserves a negative portrayal, it's probably Hamilton. (Though his friend John Jay was admittedly worse.)

I'll bet some of the people using the armed missionaries quote don't even know where it comes from.

[trf-chan.livejournal.com]

Probably not - I've seen it turn up randomly here or there quite a few times, and very rarely is credit given where credit it due, so to speak.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Not surprisingly, unfortunately.