The New Leftists

I’ve been reading David Horowitz’s book “Unholy Alliance” and just had to quote a bit of it. If your like me you just cannot figure out how in the world leftists align themselves with those who strap a bomb on themselves and kill innocent people. David explains:

The problem presented in accommodating radical ideals to the realities of Islamic jihad is really no different from the problem faced by New Leftists in the 1960’s when they accommodated their New Left radicalism to Communist movements and regimes. When the leaders of Soviet Communism acknowledged the crimes of the Soviet state and thus the totalitarian nature of the cause progressives had supported, the exposure did not prompt them to leave the radical faith. Instead, radicals proclaimed themselves “anti-anti-Communists” and thus on the same side of history the Communists had claimed as their own. In this way New Leftists were able to maintain their connection to Communist movements, focusing their attention on what they believed to be the more attractive proxies of the cause, the regimes in Cuba and Vietnam. Because Cuba and Vietnam belonged to the Third World, whose inhabitants were “of color,” leftists could imagine their Communist rulers to be persecuted Davids, racially oppressed and struggling for self-determination against the white, rich Goliath of the north.

Such sentiments were accurately expressed in an article titled “One-and-a-Half (Strangled) Cheers for the USSR” that appeared in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was written by a noted New Left author, Andrew Kopkind, who put forward the same defense of the Soviet state as Eric Hobsbawm: that whatever atrocities the Soviets had committed or miseries they had caused, the Soviet state was nonetheless a defender of revolutionary hopes and an obstacle to the predations of the democratic West.

“The real world as it has evolved since World War II is convulsed in a crisis of revolution and reaction,” wrote Kopkind. “For reasons neither pure nor simple, the Soviet Union has almost invariably sided with the revolutionaries, the liberationists, the insurgents. The United States, with equal consistency, has supported the enemies of rebellion.” To substantiate this claim, Kopkind provided a list of insurgencies that the Soviet Union had supported and the United States opposed. The list included Zimbabwe (where a Marxist revolution in fact produced the racist police state of dictator Robert Mugabe), Iran (where the insurgents were Islamic radicals who instituted the fascist theocracy of the Ayatollah Khomeini), and Ethiopia (where the so-called liberationists established the Stalinist Derg of Mengistu Haile Mariam, who instituted a “Red Terror” and precipitated a devastating famine), as well as Communist Cuba, North Vietnam, and China – totalitarian tyrannies all. What these revolutions had in common that made them appealing to Kopkind and the Left (and has kept subsequent generations of that Left from being impressed by the damage they did) was that each tool place in a Third World country, had a Marxist agenda, and was a self-declared enemy of the United States and the West.

In other words, the condition under which the Western Left could join an international coalition with Islamic jihadists was the existence of a “liberation” struggle backed by Islamic regimes (however brutal) that were opposed to some degree by the United States. This condition was met in the Arab war against Israel, which in the last decade of the twentieth century became the fusion point of western radicalism and Islamic jihad.

A perfect example of this phenomenan is the story recently where some leftists called Israel a Apartheid nation while ignoring the Egyptian crackdown on protestors. Or the fact that the left consistently denounces the invasion of a horrible dictatorship (Iraq) which freed millions of people and even denounced the invasion of Afghanistan which freed millions of women. Why? For no other reason then the fact that the United States is involved, because you see…we’re evil.

A perfect example of this phenomenan is the story recently where some leftists called Israel a Apartheid nation while ignoring the Egyptian crackdown on protestors. Or the fact that the left consistently denounces the invasion of a horrible dictatorship (Iraq) which freed millions of people and even denounced the invasion of Afghanistan which freed millions of women. Why? For no other reason then the fact that the United States is involved, because you see?we?re evil.

Curt

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