From British journalist Nick Cohen’s “The Cowardice of John Le Carré” for the April issue of Standpoint magazine, a passage about the author’s “post-Cold War politics”:
From the Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2016
Connoisseurs
of his public statements can tick every space on the bingo card. Le
Carré believes that corporations brainwash the bovine masses (check) on
behalf of the imperial American hegemon (check) which is itself
controlled by a conspiracy of right-wingers (check) who are pulling our
puppet strings at the behest of—guess who?—the Jews (full house!). Or as
le Carré explained, the neoconservatives are “appointing the state of
Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global
policy.”
Then there is the self-pity, that most deplorable
affectation of Western intellectuals, who have never once faced the
smallest threat of persecution or punishment for their writing. At one
point during the last decade, le Carré compared himself to the
German-Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, who miraculously survived life under the Nazis. Liberals of a certain age remember that when the Ayatollah Khomeini’s assassins imitated the Nazis and threatened Salman Rushdie’s life the Klemperer de nos jours opined that Rushdie had brought death on himself by insulting the great religion of Islam.
