The left's year of living in lunacy

A wonderful article by Tim Blair in The Daily Telegraph bq. IT used to be difficult keeping track of the left. They came in more categories than could be found on supermarket breakfast cereal shelves: you had your Stalin Death Crispies, your Maoist Flakes, your Anarcho-Syndicalist Bix, your Socialist Bran, your Third Way Brits, your Commie Loco Pops, your Environmentalist Wheat Bubbles. bq. And that was before you busted them down to their various factions-within-factions -- Labor Feminists Against Fast Cars and Molluscs, perhaps, who would be the sworn enemies of the Anti-Mollusc and Rapid Car Collective of Labor Wimmin. bq. After September 11, however, the global left gathered into two main groups: the sane and the insane. bq. The sane left realised that the threat represented by fundamentalist Islamic terrorism was directed mainly at them; Osama bin Laden and his supporters would sooner put progressive, pro-feminist, pro-equality activists against the wall than they would any right-wing businessmen. bq. On the sane left we subsequently found such people as Christopher Hitchens, the British ex-socialist turned defender of western democracy; The Melbourne Age's Pamela Bone, who wrote in July: "I do not see, in the light of those mass graves, how it is now possible to say this war should not have been fought"; Michael Totten, a US journalist and Democrat who now warns his party that your enemies are those who are trying to kill you. Excellent...