Welcome to 1789...

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.