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Jewcy Signs The Euston Manifesto

You'll have noticed that Jewcy is now a signatory to the Euston Manifesto. After consulting with the editors and getting their consent, I decided it was time to add an institutional imprimatur to this worthy document. (As far as I know, Jewcy is the only publication to have signed it.)

No one at this office agrees on everything, much less on foreign or domestic policy. However, I can't tell you how proud I am to be associated with an organization which appreciates the need for an internationalist leftist politics that repudiates excuse-making and rationalization for fascism, be it the secular or religious.

For those unfamiliar with the principles affirmed in the Euston Manifesto, please see my exchange with one of its authors, the political philosopher Norm Geras. Below is an extract. (Oh, and sign the thing yourself.)

The goal of the manifesto, named for the area in London in which it was conceived and composed, is straightforward enough. It demands pluralism and democracy for all peoples. It denounces reactionary regimes no matter in what former colonial outpost they inhabit or under what confession they claim to govern – no confession being preferable, as the guiding principles of 1776 are reaffirmed in the manifesto.

Egalitarianism is given as the ideal mode of political economy, yet Euston has a non-exclusive membership policy, which would allow like-thinking conservatives and libertarians to add their names.

An unequivocal respect for human rights, including a firm opposition to the enslavement of women and the murder of homosexuals under sharia law, is also enshrined.

And though the crimes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay as well as the practice of "rendition" are justly abominated, Euston deplores the double bookkeeping of much of the Left, which uses these incidents to eclipse the horrors of Ba'athism or jihadism, or to draw moral equivalence between George Bush and Tony Blair on one side, and genocidal dictators on the other.

A point that has been repeatedly distorted by the media is that Euston is "pro-war" when in fact it takes no position on the wisdom of regime change in Iraq. However, as regime change is a fait accompli, the document is firmly in favor of the budding democratic – and, indeed, socialist and trade unionist – elements there. It has no truck with the jihadist and Saddamist "insurgency" looking to hobble the formation of a postwar democratic state.

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