I’m not going to dignify the over-publicised thumbsuckings of the Observer’s former TV reviewer with any comment. Anyway, dennisthemenace puts it so much better than me at Comment is free:

“I’m really curious about these ‘nazi’ accusations that are supposedly thrown at people like Andrew Anthoney. Which serious commentator on the left has called you a nazi? In my experience it would appear the other way around – those on the left, and in the wider population in general, who have stood opposed to imperialism have been accused of being either soft on ‘fascism’ or in alliance with ‘islamofascists.’ It’s the cruise missile liberals who seem to throw these terms around willy nilly.

Anthoney writes that “…it’s not an argument that liberal democracy should be imposed on authoritarian regimes by western military intervention.” But it is, isn’t it? That’s precisely where this argument hangs, and it is precisely what the vast majority of posters who support you here will think. And those who are opposed to the fantasy that democracy, women’s liberation and equal rights can be imposed by cluster bombs and military occupation will be accused of being ‘relativists’, as if simply repeating the same old nonsense enough tines somehow makes it true.

The fact is that people wherever they are have a right to resist foreign military occupation and control of their country. It is ludicrous to insist that these movements hold ‘liberal’ values before they exercise that right. And it isn’t about the tired old accusation of ‘anti-Americanism’. either. People in Afghanistan had as much right to resist the Russian occupation as they do the US/UK one. It’s just that in today’s world it happens to be the US which has assumed the role of world policeman for the interests of corporate big business.

Liberal values cannot be defended, either in the ‘third world’ or here, by supporting imperialism. And those who are morally outraged by western deaths, while being able to live their liberal lives quite happily with the far higher death toll colonial intervention brings, are perhaps the true relativists.”