On the police and TLS - Andy Beckett in LRB:

“On 30 september 2001, Tariq Ali was arrested at Munich airport. His hand luggage contained two objects which were regarded as suspicious: a book by Karl Marx and a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, which included a review, annotated by Ali, of a volume about Algeria. These items were confiscated and he was taken to the airport’s police headquarters. ‘You can’t travel with books like this,’ the arresting officer said. It was less than three weeks after 9/11. He was told by another officer that he would probably be detained until at least after his flight had left.
‘At this point,’ Ali writes in You Can’t Please All, his second volume of memoirs, ‘my patience evaporated and I demanded to use a phone.’ The second officer asked whom he wanted to call. ‘The mayor of Munich,’ Ali replied. ‘His name is Christian Ude. He interviewed me about my books and the present crisis on Friday evening at Hugendubel’s bookshop. I wish to inform him of what is taking place in his city.’ The officer left the room and was replaced by yet another, who told Ali to come with him. Without saying anything else, he led Ali to his flight, which he was allowed to board although the gate had closed. A German fellow passenger approached Ali and ‘expressed his dismay at the police behaviour’. Further compensation of a sort came later from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which ‘asked me to write a piece’ about the episode. He doesn’t say whether he ever got the Marx or the TLS back.”

(…)

‘Ali’s first volume of memoirs, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, was published in 1987, when Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their free-market disciples were at their zenith. It ended on a downbeat note: ‘Most of the world is passing through bad times, but ... hope itself cannot be abandoned.’ Yet much of the preceding narrative was about Ali’s involvement in radical struggles that either succeeded or, for a time at least, felt promising and thrilling. He described flying into a bombed and blacked-out Hanoi to support the North Vietnamese against the Americans and being interrogated by soldiers at gunpoint during a Bolivian insurgency. In London, he helped run a new countercultural newspaper, the Black Dwarf, whose offices were ‘a regular port of call for visiting revolutionaries from all over the world’. During his teens, twenties and early thirties, he was considered such a troublemaker that the governments of Pakistan, Britain, France and the US, among others, either banned him, considered deporting him, or threatened his personal safety. Street Fighting Years turns all these adventures into a (relatively) concise and pacy story, with a clear arc: from a politically precocious adolescence in Lahore, where he was born and organised his first demonstration as a 14-year-old, at a time when protests were illegal in Pakistan, to his later global status as one of the half-dozen subversives whom unpolitical people may have heard of.”

(…)

“Sometimes, he suggests, they even agree with him: ‘Western intelligence services regularly tell their leaders that the radicalisation of a tiny sliver of young Muslims ... is a result of US foreign policy.’”

(…)

“He is dismissive of the leftists and literary types who gave up on these struggles or even went over to the dark side, such as Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. ‘The useful idiots of the empire’, ‘the empire loyalists’, ‘the belligerati’: Ali’s contempt has the fluency of someone who has taken part in factional battles for decades. Hitchens is a particular target, for supporting the invasion of Iraq and the recklessly bellicose presidency of George W. Bush. ‘What happened to make him a Bush apologist?’ Ali asks. He suggests that Hitchens was warned by one of his editors that if he remained a critic of America ‘his career and bank balance might suffer.’ It’s a typical Ali attack: part analysis of an enemy’s place in the system, part gossipy speculation. But as he says more about Hitchens’s break with the left his tone becomes more melancholy: ‘From then on he and I debated in public but we never spoke.’ Like Ali, Hitchens was a writer and talker of great fluency and charisma, who agitated all over the world and became a radical celebrity. Perhaps his abandonment of the cause was, and still is, a little haunting.”

(…)

“This bleak, contemptuous view is one long associated with the New Left Review, with which Ali has been closely involved for decades: there are several lengthy sections here about its complex and sometimes fractious internal politics. NLR’s usually elegantly expressed and well-evidenced pessimism can be very persuasive: many of the bad things Ali saw in Britain in 2005 have got much worse. And his argument that centrists often do terrible things in office, partly because they see themselves, and are seen by centrist journalists, as reasonable people who would never do such things, or would only do them as an absolute last resort, is a strong one. Yet sometimes his disdain for centrists, just like NLR’s merciless cataloguing of their failures in office, leads him to treat more right-wing governments less harshly, as if he prefers their more consistent and unashamed nastiness.”

(…)

“That left was less concerned than today’s with checking its privilege, more comfortable with personal myth-making and heroic individuals, and, to judge from this book, a lot more fun.”

Read the article here.

The left, especially th radical left tends to despise the center more than the extreme-right. There is an analogy here with Weimar, but we should not use the word “Weimar” frivolously.

As to the fun, probably the revolution is fun, above the revolution waiting to come to love, and often never passing this state of being half-born.

After the fun, the damage, the destruction, the bloodshed. For some (the revolutionary sadists, the opportunists) the fun continues till the end.