Nick Cohen

Nick Cohen (born 1961) is an English journalist, author and political commentator. He is a columnist for The Observer, a blogger for The Spectator and TV critic for Standpoint magazine. He has written for the London Evening Standard and the New Statesman.
Born in Stockport and raised in Manchester, Cohen studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University before entering journalism.
Cohen has written five books: Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous (1999), a collection of his journalism; Pretty Straight Guys (2003), a highly critical account of the New Labour project; What's Left? (2007), which he describes as the story of how the liberal left of the 20th century came to support the far-right of the 21st; and Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (2009). His most recent book, You Can't Read this Book, was published by HarperCollins in 2012 and deals with censorship. The Orwell Prize for political writing shortlisted What's Left? in 2008.

Born in Stockport, but raised in Manchester, Cohen was educated at Altrincham Grammar School for Boys and Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). He began his career at the Sutton Coldfield News, before moving to The Birmingham Post, later becoming a contributor to The Independent and The Observer.

He was an advocate of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and a critic of the Stop the War Coalition. In 2006, he was a leading signatory to the Euston Manifesto, which proposed "a new political alignment", in which the left opposes terrorism and anti-Americanism. An opponent of what he has termed the "tyrannophile left", Cohen has criticised individuals such as Andrew Murray and George Galloway, while expressing his admiration for the opposition movements in countries such as Belarus. Cohen is an atheist. Cohen called for Western military intervention in the Syrian Civil War. He also supported the NATO-led intervention in Libya to oust former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. In August 2014, Cohen was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue. Cohen criticised Ecuador for granting political asylum to Julian Assange and called Ecuador a "petro-socialist authoritarian state".

In his book What's Left?: How the Left Lost Its Way (2007), Cohen argues many leftists are blinded by instinctive anti-Americanism, with their opposition to imperialism leading them to defend brutal dictatorships and terrorist movements. He focuses on several foreign policy issues: the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s, the Iraq War in 2003, and the broader war on terror, including Israel's conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah, to argue that many socialists and liberals have misplaced priorities, condemning American and Israeli policies but ignoring the crimes of autocratic regimes.

In Chapter 1, "an Iraqi Solzhenitsyn", Cohen discusses his friendship with exiled Iraqi dissidents in the 1980s, including trade unionists and Kurdish human rights activists, as well as architect and writer Kanan Makiya. He then argues that the British left, in adopting an anti-war position in 2003, effectively betrayed these dissidents by opposing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Criticizing the massive anti-war rallies in the weeks before the invasion, he writes: "On February 15, 2003 a million liberal-minded people marched … to protest the overthrow of a fascist regime."

Chapters 4 and 5, "Academic scribblers and a defunct economist" and "Boys on the edge of the gang" discuss the Left's reaction to Serbian atrocities against Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s. He details how scholars like Noam Chomsky, along with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), denied the existence of concentration camps and the Srebrenica massacre. He also discusses the Living Marxism trial, in which survivors of Trnopolje concentration camp testified against Living Marxism magazine, which had published an article claiming photographs of the camp were fabricated. The far left's defence of Milosevic, Cohen writes, was not a product of Islamophobia but of instinctive anti-Americanism; once the US bombed Serb forces in 1995, the far left set out to claim the intervention had been unjustified: "The ignoble and inevitable terminus of the reasoning of Chomsky and his comrades was denial. It had to be. The Yugoslav equivalents of the gas chambers of Auschwitz were Srebrenica and the pictures of wild-eyed starving men at Trnopolje. Both had to be denied if the project of blackening the belated intervention in the Balkans was to stand a chance of succeeding.". Chapter 9, "Kill us, we deserve it", criticises how many leftists reacted to 9/11, arguing the atrocity was motivated by anger at American foreign policy, rather than by the violent ideology of al Qaeda. By dismissing the attacks as a response to American misdeeds, Cohen argues that leftists failed to acknowledge the threat of al Qaeda's own hateful narrative.

He lives in Islington with his wife and their son.