Power and the Idealists by Paul Berman

Author:Paul Berman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

II.

Makiya grew up in Baghdad in the nineteen-fifties and sixties—he, too, a child of privilege. His father was an architect prominent in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Frank Lloyd Wright, on his travels, once paid a visit to the Makiya home. The young Makiya studied at the Jesuit academy in Baghdad and then he, too, went on to study in the United States—in his case, at MIT, a proper school to immerse himself in the family business, which was architecture. He enrolled in 1967. The movement against the Vietnam War was just then beginning to swell into something massive, and went on swelling until the 1968-era uprisings had broken out, which, in Cambridge, took place in 1969. And so, like everyone else, Makiya found himself floating along in the floodtide of the New Left, participating in the antiwar agitations and the leftwing excitement. Afterward, he worked for his father at the architectural firm, in its London office. The father’s status bobbed up and down among the Baath party leaders back in Baghdad, which led the elder Makiya, out of caution, to spend most of his time away from Iraq. Still, sometimes the father was summoned back home to engage in personal consultations with Saddam himself. Saddam bestowed commissions, and the father had not much choice but to accept, which meant that, for a while, young Makiya, as his father’s employee, found himself toiling away on behalf of the tyrant. The young Makiya was never a Baathist, nor even a skeptical believer in the Baathist revolution, nor the slightest bit comfortable working on a Baathist commission. He remained under the influence of the student leftism he had seen at MIT and in the leftwing zones of London in the seventies. And so, even as he labored on his father’s projects, he pursued his own career as a Marxist, in a retro version. Azar Nafisi was fascinated by Mike Gold, and Kanan Makiya, by Leon Trotsky.

Trotskyism proved to be exceptionally strong in the British New Left, much stronger than in Germany or even France, not to mention the United States, and this meant that young Makiya’s Trotskyist affiliations seemed fairly conventional in London. Perhaps Trotskyism may have seemed a little idiosyncratic from a strictly Iraqi point of view—or so I can imagine. In Iraq, the main left-wing political tradition was Moscow-line Communism, which proved to be highly attractive for a while. The Iraqi Communist Party commanded an enormous following during the nineteen-fifties—though, in the course of the sixties, the party ended up getting out-maneuvered by the Baath, which began by stealing some Communist techniques, and concluded by crushing the Communists. By the late sixties, as the Baath solidified its dictatorship, the Iraqi Communists were getting decimated. One of the Communist factions (here was a Communist Party that did have factions) launched a guerrilla resistance in the Kurdish north. The guerrillas, too, were crushed. Still, the Iraqi Communist Party managed to cling to life in exile and underground in Iraq—an opposition party

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