The left thinks western capitalist democracy is basically flawed,
and is always in search of some kind of revolutionary "change"
that will make everything right.
As a result, the left
has a history of getting excited about romantic foreign leaders
and third-world "rebels".
The right, in contrast, thinks the answers to how to order society
lie in the Western Enlightenment
and were basically worked out
in the 17th-18th centuries.
As a result, the right
has little interest in new "revolutionary" ideas,
especially ones from outside the West.
The right is largely unimpressed
with the non-western world.
In fact,
the right
seldom gets excited about foreigners at all, especially if they are non-westerners
or third-world people.
The predictable result of these differences is that
the left has a far more embarrassing
track record of supporting foreign tyranny
than the right.
And because of these differences, this
track record is likely to continue
(see for example the recent
left-wing enthusiasm for the butchers of the Iraqi resistance).
This page lays out some of the shocking (and not widely-enough known)
expressions of support
from comfortable western intellectuals (mostly left-wing or left-leaning)
for foreign tyrannies
they would never live under themselves.
The western left has a long history of supporting
third world tyranny
that they would never live under themselves.
Shown here is how many western leftists still consider people
like
Che Guevara
and Mao
cool in some way.
From Fascism to Jihadism
by Yehudah Mirsky
- the 20th-21st century continuum of fascism, communism, and Islamic fascism.
The Chorus of Useful Idiots
by Bruce S. Thornton
- "Why people who enjoyed freedom and prosperity
worked passionately to destroy both is a fascinating question, one still with us
today."
From Moscow to Ramallah
by Michael J. Totten
- Western leftists and liberals are making the same mistake
with Israel as they did with communism.
- "Liberalism has a proud history that pre-dates Marxism. But the indulgence of communism will besmirch its record forever."
Intellectuals Who Distrust Freedom
by Jim Hoagland,
on why so many intellectuals won't support fighters for freedom
in the unfree world,
but instead support their oppressors.
- "American and European intellectuals have a history of distrusting
politicians and thinkers from oppressed countries who clamor for the same political
and economic freedoms that our savants enjoy. The clamorers cannot represent authentic
nationalism if all they want is to be just like us, the reasoning seems to go."
Arthur Ransome
wrote from Russia for
The Guardian
and other publications.
He knew and
supported
Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks.
He was a friend of the butcher
Dzerzhinsky.
The Guardian
supported Stalin,
and sacked the brave
Malcolm Muggeridge
for telling the West
about the genocidal
Ukrainian Famine
(when perhaps 7 million people were deliberately starved to death by Stalin).
Today, The Guardian opposes the war on
Islamic fascism and calls for appeasement.
Pulitzer-Winning Lies
by Arnold Beichman
- Duranty actually said:
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
Think about what this means:
You can't improve society without killing several million innocent
men, women and children.
Really?
Today, The New York Times opposes the war on
Islamic fascism and calls for appeasement.
The dramatist
Maxim Gorky
cheered on the Lenin killing,
and later
cheering on the Stalin killing.
He called for the extermination of Stalin's enemies
"like lice".
He supported the gulag system,
and glorified the use of innocents as
slave labour.
George Bernard Shaw
(and here)
despised democracy, supported Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet purges,
and denied the Ukrainian Famine happened.
He also
supported Hitler,
and denied the Holocaust happened.
More on Shaw and the Webbs' praise for Stalin
here.
When asked what Britons should do if the Nazis crossed the channel into Britain,
Shaw replied,
"Welcome them as tourists."
H.G. Wells
did not exactly support Stalin, but,
like many intellectuals, he had no understanding of what Stalin was.
Wells on Stalin
in 1934:
"I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and it is to these qualities and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendancy in Russia. ... I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realize he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him."
The playwright
Lillian Hellman
was a Stalinist, and
supported the Stalin terror.
Young Communist
folk singer
Pete Seeger
sang protest songs against the US fighting the Nazis in WW2.
Why? Because he supported the Soviet Union,
and this was the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Seeger changed his tune.
The Soviet tyranny and democide
was not inevitable.
As
Ariel Cohen
points out, it was caused by western inaction:
"If the West had seriously supported the anti-Communist forces
in Russia,
the Bolshevik dictatorship would likely have tumbled in
the 1920s."
George Bernard Shaw
supports Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini
and democide.
Clip from The Soviet Story.
"History legitimizes Germany to rule Europe and later the world.
Only a nation that rules ruthlessly can maintain itself.
Democracy cannot develop sufficient energy to rule Europe."
- Nazi atomic weapons scientist
Werner Heisenberg,
1943, as German genocide burned all across Europe.
And it's not just left-wing intellectuals and periodicals
that supported 20th century tyranny.
The
Daily Mail,
under
Lord Rothermere,
supported Hitler, Nazi Germany, Mussolini and British fascism in the 1930s.
The Daily Mail's support for fascist tyranny
ended when war broke out in 1939.
By contrast, the modern Guardian actually prints
articles supporting the fascist enemyduring the war,
while brave British soldiers are dying
to try to stop the fascists
slaughtering civilians.
Both of them are despicable,
but I suppose one would have to say that the Guardian
is worse
than the Daily Mail.
Like many other intellectuals,
Evelyn Waugh
supported
Hitler, Mussolini and Franco in the 1930s.
Though he made up for it by joining the Allied war effort in 1939.
T.S. Eliot
expressed
some sympathy
for
European fascism in the 1930s,
though again this ended with the war.
Many British
pacifists
did not explicitly support Nazi Germany,
but opposed the war against them.
The writer and critic
John Middleton Murry,
editor of the pacifist
Peace News,
said in 1940,
as Britain fought desperately for its survival against
genocidal Nazi Germany:
"Personally I don't believe that a Hitlerian Europe
would be quite so terrible as most people believe it would be."
The pacifist
Vera Brittain
complained about the publicity given to the gas chambers
when they were discovered in 1945.
She said
they were being publicised:
"partly, at least, in order to divert attention from the havoc produced in German cities
by allied obliteration bombing."
The Nazi democide
was not inevitable.
As
Thomas Sowell
points out, it was caused by western inaction.
Had Britain and France stood up to Hitler in the 1930s,
his regime would have fallen quickly
with little loss of life.
But he also
supported the Soviet Union.
He even supported Stalin's purges:
"In those purges the Communists did away with their
Quislings
and
Lavals,
and if other nations had done the same there would not be the original Quislings and Lavals today.
The only people who object to Communism and who use it as a bugaboo are the Nazi agents in this country."
The apologist for evil,
the Dean of Canterbury
Hewlett Johnson,
supported Lenin, Stalin, the Soviet Union
and North Korea.
He supported the
"anti-war"
(really, pro-Soviet communist)
group, the
People's Convention,
in early 1941,
which
wanted Britain to sue for peace with Hitler.
This was during the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
The communists all immediately changed their tune
after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union
later that year.
This disgusting man is glorified in the movie
Il Postino
("The Postman") (1995).
The feminist
Maria Antonietta Macciocchi
supported Mao,
and wrote
De la Chine ("Daily Life in Revolutionary China") in 1971
in support of the Maoist project.
The actor
Peter Ustinov
(or via here)
supported Stalin, the Soviet Union and
communist China,
and opposed action against Milosevic,
the Taliban, bin Laden and
Saddam.
He wrote Cambodian genocide-denial articles in the Guardian.
He met Pol Pot in 1978, and idiotically asked to see
deposed leader Prince Sihanouk,
and asked about various missing Cambodians and ministers.
He had no idea what he was dealing with.
Pol Pot responded by murdering him.
Sweden's
Olaf Palme
and Canada's
Trudeau
supported Nyerere's
one-party socialist state in Tanzania.
See summary
of his appalling regime.
Olaf Palme
opposed the toppling of Pol Pot,
on grounds of state sovereignty:
"the fact
that the auto-genocide has ended in Cambodia
is probably good for the Cambodian people, but one can never
excuse an intervention in a neighbouring country"
"Dinner with Pol Pot", a promotion for a Swedish exhibition, Sept 2009, on the Cambodian genocide,
and the Swedish leftists who supported the communist regime.
You can turn on English sub-titles (menu - CC).
Brian C. Anderson
on Sartre's support for Stalin, Mao,
Castro, Che Guevara,
and the Palestinian killing of civilians.
- "By the seventies, Sartre was really nothing more than an apologist for tyranny and terror."
Frantz Fanon
has inspired violent revolution in former colonies across the third world -
most of which has led directly to dictatorship.
Régis Debray
fought with Che Guevara,
and provided a safe house for the Baader-Meinhof gang.
The Khmer Rouge
trace their intellectual origins to France.
The butchers
Khieu Samphan
and
Pol Pot
were both educated in France in the 1940s-50s.
The Heartless Lovers Of Humankind
by Paul Johnson,
Wall Street Journal, 5 January 1987
- "The events in Cambodia in the 1970s, in which between
one-fifth and one-third of the nation was starved to death or
murdered, were entirely the work of a group of intellectuals, who
were for the most part pupils and admirers of Jean-Paul Sartre
- "Sartre's Children," as I call them."
The Iranian Islamist revolution
also traces its intellectual origins to
human rights-hating intellectuals
in France.
The Islamist thug
Ayatollah Khomeini
was granted exile in France,
where he openly denounced human rights and human freedom,
plotted the Islamist takeover of Iran,
and from where he returned in triumph in 1979.
The rise of Islamism
was not inevitable.
As
Alex Epstein
points out, it was caused by western inaction:
"Had we annihilated the Iranian regime 23 years ago, we could have thwarted Islamic terrorism
at the beginning, with far less cost than will be required to defeat terrorism today."
Derrida
bemoaned the end of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe,
as did many other tenured academics living in comfort in the free west.
A good example is Helena Sheehan,
writing in June 1989 as Eastern Europe
was being liberated from Soviet imperialism:
"The world is 'going our way', the leaders of 'the free world' have declared.
The iron curtain has come tumbling down. The Kremlin has been conquered without a single marine opening fire,
without a single ICBM being launched.
It unravels before me like a nightmare.
No more the red flags flying. No more the heads held high and the fists clenched
and the voices raised to the strains of The Internationale. No more the larger-than-life murals
of workers and soldiers and peasants marching into the future shaping the world
with the labour of their hands and hearts and minds. Now it is to be Mickey Mouse and Coca Cola
and Michael Jackson and Sacchi & Sacchi."
As any normal person would say: "Yes! Yes! Yes! "
And don't you just love those
sneer quotes
round 'the free world'.
Of course only a simple-minded idiot could believe the propaganda
that the open democracies were somehow superior to the
totalitarian communist police states.
Glazov and his family lived under the Soviet jackboot
before they managed to escape to the free world.
Imagine how he felt when he met people in the free world
who supported the Soviets.
My Second Marxist Indoctrination
(and here)
- "Imagine the utter amazement of a refugee from
a Communist country, where Marxism was forced on all students,
now having to sink in a puddle of socialist propaganda again
- but this time in the middle of an American university!"
Hate America Poetry Class
- A moving article on the heroism of the dissident poetry in the USSR,
contrasted with the utter failure of left-wing poetry in the west.
She recalls how in the Soviet Union,
"The mere existence of America gave us the courage to fight."
She is sickened by the Derridas and the Durcans of this world:
"When I see these Lilliputians attacking the noble and generous Gulliver called America, I lose my breath with fury. The attacks of these literary dwarfs on this country feel personal, against me and my safety."
Soviet dissident
Elena Bonner
supports war on Iraq.
As Eastern Europe's loyal support for the US shows,
those who have lived under tyranny
know the value of freedom.
We in the west
have forgotten,
and
have no imagination to imagine what it is like.
The western left has no idea what tyranny is.
Former East European dissidents
Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik and George Konrad
support Bush.
- "George W. Bush may not be our hero, but
he is the one we will support in the war with Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and Saddam
Hussein."
Heroic herald of freedom
by Michael Gove
- Natan Sharansky is the link between the War on Communism
and the War on Islamism.
"To have helped to bring about one revolution, liberating millions, must be considered heroic.
To have helped to start a second, with the chance of freeing millions more, is beyond doubt historic."
Figures who struggled (rightly) against apartheid
are often given great respect.
But being right about one thing
doesn't mean you are right about anything else.
The ANC supported the
Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956,
and supported the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Mandela on the terrorist butcher Arafat:
"Yasser Arafat was one of the outstanding freedom fighters of this generation, one who gave his entire life to the cause of the Palestinian people.
We honour his memory today."
Nelson Mandela, 25 June 2008, finally comes out with some late, wet and watery criticism of Mugabe.
"Nearer to home we had seen ... and the tragic failure of leadership in our neighbouring Zimbabwe."
That's it.
That's all he has to say - several years too late - about the brutal dictator that has destroyed Zimbabwe
and starved its people.
Pathetic.
A tragic failure of leadership is right.
Former African Slave Blasts Bishop Tutu: Stop Attacking Israel, Help Africans Under Arab Siege.
Simon Deng, a black African who was held as a slave by
Arab Islamists in Sudan,
defends Israel against Tutu's attacks.
"The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families - even though I also drove on Israeli roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools, and get the best medical care in the world. I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. ... None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutu's South Africa.
I also know countries that do deserve the apartheid label: My country, Sudan, is on the top of the list, but so are Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What has happened to my people in Sudan is a thousand times worse than Apartheid in South Africa. And no matter how the Palestinians suffer, they suffer nothing compared to my people. Nothing. And most of the suffering is the fault of their leaders. Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud."
Kader Asmal, in Phoenix, 21 May 2010, calls Israel,
the freest country in the region,
an "apartheid" state.
He says Israel is to blame for the breakdown in the peace process.
He calls for a boycott and sanctions against Israel.
Yes, it was entirely wrong for South Africa to deny the vote and human rights on grounds of race.
No argument there.
But that does not mean we have to worship Nelson Mandela.
Look at him here, standing in front of the symbol of a country that oppressed
a hundred times worse than South Africa.
Mandela, like many other flawed figures, was ultimately not against
the oppression of all human beings.
He was only against the oppression of his people.
Trevor Phillips
(now head of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission)
Arthur Scargill,
who described the tyranny of Cuba as:
"a new and better society in which to live. The future is Socialism and Cuba will show the way."
Oddly, rather than stay in Cuba,
he decided to live in a free, capitalist country.
Writer Joseph O'Connor
supported communist
Nicaragua
in the 1980s,
as did I.
I don't know why we thought this communist country would be different from other communist countries.
As well as supporting Castro and Milosevic,
the Nobel Prize winning leftist
Harold Pinter
has also
described
the US government as
"the most dangerous power that has ever existed".
He describes Guantanamo POW camp
as a "concentration camp".
He actually believes Bush got elected because of
"propaganda and control of the media"
(rather than, say, because thinking people were convinced by his arguments,
and think people like Pinter are ignorant crackpots).
"Today, we the people of Iran are under the yoke of a regime no less brutal than the Nazis.
Just like the Nazis, the Islamists are motivated by an ideology of hate.
They have destroyed our country that they conquered through terror.
They are as ruthless as the Nazis.
Can Mr. Printer tell us, how can we fight them back with our bare hands?"
"Mr. Pinter is not moved by the misery of people who may not be as white as he is.
...
He thinks others have to fight for their freedom if they really want it badly.
Did you fight for your freedom Mr. Printer or was it given to you in silver platter,
courtesy of the very Americans that today you disregard. How ungrateful of you Sir!"
"As the oppressed people of a third world country, that will remain a third world as long as it is not liberated, we would like to thank the United States of America, the Great Britain and all other countries that helped to get rid of the blood thirsty dictators such as Saddam Hussein, Molla-Omar and the Taleban.
...
We dream of the day that our flag will be hoisted next to the flags of other free nations
and will dance in the wind proclaiming our freedom to the world. The oppressed people
will be victorious and you and your ilk will be remembered as those who sided with their oppressors.
Your name will be covered with shame."
The Islamintern
- Islamism is the 21st century's Communism -
the vast, global, utopian ideology of world revolution.
And as there were with Communism,
there are many useful idiots for Islamism in the West - notably in the media
and the academy.
The left has a long history of supporting
third world terrorists such as the Palestinians.
But there is also a left-wing tradition of terrorism itself.
This reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s
before burning itself out,
as western leftists became unwilling to risk their lives for the
glorious revolution
that looked like it would never come.
Few leftists today
believe in anything enough to die (and kill) for it, and that is a good thing.
One interesting aspect of modern left-wing terror
is how the greatest left-wing terrorist of all,
the only man to kill a U.S. President since 1901,
has been airbrushed out of history.
Sure, we all remember JFK's assassination.
But we try to forget that his killer
was a pro-Castro communist leftist
who killed JFK because of his anti-communism.
It had nothing to do with civil rights.
Remembering JFK without remembering he was killed by a communist
is like remembering 9/11
without remembering it was carried out by Islamists.
The greatest success ever for left-wing terror was the
assassination of anti-communist U.S. President
John F. Kennedy
by the communist
Lee Harvey Oswald
in 1963.
This was so traumatic for the left that they have spent more than 40 years
in denial about what happened:
Rich Lowry:
"In a crucial and counterintuitive interpretive act, the nation's opinion elite made JFK a martyr to civil rights instead of the Cold War. Kennedy had been killed by a communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, who a few years before had tried to defect to the Soviet Union. Liberals nonetheless blamed the assassination on .. "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots."
...
In the paranoid theories that sprang up in the wake of Kennedy's assassination - many of them to avoid the simple, uncongenial fact that a lone communist had killed the president ..."
Ron Capshaw:
"Denial that a Communist could have killed Kennedy afflicts the Left even to this day. A search for a more politically satisfying sniper - a Cuban exile, say, or a CIA spook - has obsessed them since 1963.
...
The fact that Kennedy's assassin was a Communist sympathizer with possible ties to Cuba's intelligence service (and perhaps even the KGB) fits uneasily into a political script in which the president is seen as a liberal martyr. ... The truth, in other words, is politically problematic."
Daniel Pipes
on the bizarre contortions by which JFK's assassination
was blamed on something other than communism.
James Piereson:
"Liberals who were rational and realistic accepted the fact that Oswald killed JFK but at the same time they were unable to ascribe a motive for his actions. They tended to look for sociological explanations for the event and found one in the idea that JFK was brought down by a "climate of hate" that had overtaken the nation. Thus they placed Kennedy's assassination within a context of violence against civil rights activists. They had great difficulty accepting the fact that Kennedy's death was linked to the Cold War, not to civil rights.
...
Liberals at the time were convinced that the nation was threatened more by right-wing radicals like Sen. McCarthy or fundamentalist preachers than by Communists. Given their assumptions, they had great difficulty assimilating the fact that JFK was shot by a Communist - for this was exactly the kind of thing that the hated Sen. McCarthy had been warning against.
...
The conspiracy theories do not arise from any evidence but from a need to believe that Kennedy was shot by someone other than Oswald."
Of course, for conservatives it was different:
"Conservatives like Bill Buckley, Russell Kirk, or Barry Goldwater accepted the fact that Kennedy had been shot by a Communist. This did not surprise them in the least."
James Piereson:
"The assassination of a popular president by a Communist should have generated a revulsion against everything associated with left wing doctrines. Yet something close to the opposite happened. In the aftermath of the assassination, left wing ideas and revolutionary leaders, Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro foremost among them, enjoyed a greater vogue in the United States than at any time in our history."
Rich Lowry:
"Bizarrely, after a liberal hero was slain by a Marxist, communist icons and ideas became more fashionable on the left than ever before."
Why did Oswald kill JFK?
Oswald was not angry about
JFK's support for civil rights.
Quite the opposite.
He supported civil rights.
He had tried to kill the segregationist
Edwin Walker in Apr 1963.
Rather, the communist Oswald was angry about JFK's anti-communism.
The pro-Israel
U.S. Presidential candidate
Bobby Kennedy
was assassinated
by the
anti-Israel
Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan
in 1968.
Bobby Kennedy is another assassination that leftists can't get their heads round.
A communist and an anti-Israel Palestinian
- how could they be the bad guys
who killed the Kennedys?
Sympathy For The Devil
by the Rolling Stones (1968)
includes the lyrics:
"I shouted out,
'Who killed the Kennedys?'
When after all,
It was you and me".
Um, no.
It was
a communist and an anti-Israel Palestinian.
They were the ones that killed the Kennedys.
James Piereson:
"that song reflected a deep belief in liberal culture, that somehow "we" had killed the Kennedy's - when in fact an anti-American Communist killed President Kennedy and a Palestinian nationalist killed Robert Kennedy, both in retaliation for American policies abroad. Oswald killed President Kennedy to interrupt his efforts to eliminate Castro; Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy because of Kennedy's support for Israel."
The 1960s
The communist American terrorists
The Weathermen
or Weather Underground
(and here)
Bernardine Dohrn
(and here)
celebrated the Manson butchers
in 1969:
"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them,
they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!"
No tears for dead cops,
Michelle Malkin, Dec. 11, 2002
- remembering the victims of these leftist terrorists.
The openly communist Weather Underground manifesto
Prairie Fire:
It says:
"We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years."
As "Zombie" says:
"many media reports and articles blandly described Ayers as a "Vietnam-era radical" and the Weather Underground as a group that set bombs "to protest against the Vietnam War." Both of these characterizations are demonstrably inaccurate."
Inaccurate because their aim was (a) communist victory in Vietnam,
and (b) the violent overthrow of the elected US government
and the establishment of a communist dictatorship in the US.
They dedicated the book to Robert F. Kennedy's killer Sirhan Sirhan,
among others.
The Baader-Meinhof gang
had a strange way of showing they were not like their parents.
These German killers
joined people (the Palestinians) who had supported the Nazis in WW2,
and they bombed
people (US army bases) who had fought the Nazis.
In WW2 I imagine the Baader-Meinhof gang
would have been bombing American soldiers too.
The RAF founder
Horst Mahler
has made the short journey to the far right, and is now a neo-Nazi
who has been convicted for Holocaust denial.
In their assault on the tolerant and free democracy of West Germany
the RAF received support from the oppressive police-state dictatorship of East Germany.
Many people think the movie
The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)
glorifies the
Baader Meinhof gang.
I didn't think so.
The movie portrays the mindset of young utopian killers,
which
Douglas Murray
nicely describes as:
"narcissism, wildly misconceived altruism, youth, envy, .. will to destruction and utopian absurdity".
The movie shows the decency of the tolerant West German state.
It shows how the Baader Meinhof gang are the same as the modern jihadis.
Historian Götz Aly says
"the German 68ers were wretchedly similar to their [Nazi] parents."
Journalist Micha Brumlik says the radical Left rebellion against their Nazi parents
was "a contradictory process of identification with them and their hatred of Jews."
Oliver Kamm
on the German far-left's similarity to the far-right.
Joschka Fischer
had
an appalling
radical youth,
which included violent attacks on policemen.
And later as the
left-wing German foreign minister
he split with America and
opposed the Iraq War in 2003.
But he also supported German participation in the Kosovo War in 1999,
which was a major breakthrough for Germany.
So he is not all bad.
France
The French
Action Directe
(also here)
also targeted Jews
in their brutal quest to establish a communist tyranny
in place of the free democracy they grew up in.
Harry's Place
compares the JRA to modern young jihadis:
"This is where the narcissism of revolutionary violence of all types is laid bare. The transgressive glamour of violence, attached to transformative ideology, generates a sense on the part of the revolutionary terrorist that there are no limits to their methods.
... Anyone who has watched the martyrdom videos of more recent British terrorists, full of angry self-justification but rarely stating anything that could resemble a political programme, will recognise exactly this phenomenon."
Carlos the Jackal converts to Islamofascism.
Carlos and his communist father illustrate the
steady descent into evil
that is being followed by many idealistic young people
in the West:
From a good bourgeois family background
to the sick rebellion of communism,
to the radical and terminal sickness of Islamofascism.
Carlos the Jackal:
"Only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States".
No right-winger could have put it better.
ETA in Spain
and the IRA in Northern Ireland
were both also Marxist revolutionary offspring of the 1960s.
It is no coincidence that
ETA's campaign started in 1968
and the
IRA's campaign started in 1969.
Marxist revolution was in the air then.
We are still living with the consequences of that time.
It is not true that we must always eventually
talk to and compromise with terrorists.
The 1970s left-wing terrorists simply gave up
without achieving any of their goals.
Their inspiration and sponsor, the Soviet Union, collapsed,
and they lost all hope in the glorious totalitarian future.
And similarly, the Islamist terrorists will give up
when they lose hope,
when their side no longer seems to be winning.
When democracy spreads through the Middle East,
when the Iranian revolution ends,
Islamist terrorists will lose hope and give up.
We do not need to make any concessions to them.
They will eventually give up.
Jones had strong links to the Democratic Party in San Francisco,
and this future mass murderer
was, incredibly, appointed Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission in 1975.
Many prominent American leftists praised Jones
and his apparently anti-racist, anti-capitalist, communist "church".
Carter's Vice-President
Walter Mondale
praised the People's Temple in 1976.
Gay hero
Harvey Milk
defended the People's Temple,
and attacked its critics, right up to 1978.
Drinking Harvey Milk's Kool-Aid, Daniel J. Flynn, 21 May 2009.
"Lionized by Hollywood ... the real Milk was a demagogue and pal of Jim Jones."
Flynn says about Milk's sordid campaign in support of Jim Jones:
"This, the only remarkable episode in Milk's brief tenure on the San Francisco board of supervisors, is swept under the rug by his hagiographers."
Or these horrifying young fascist people in Kuwait, Nov 2007
(see transcript),
who think that atheists should be arrested and even killed.
There is a lone elderly defender of freedom of religion,
the rather impressive Gamal Al-Bana:
"That is very sad. Most of you are young and do not believe in freedom."
No one listens to him.
It
shows 46 terrorist incidents in
2000-2005 (no later list available).
I adjust it as follows:
I exclude the
anthrax attacks
because they were not apparently motivated by an ideology.
(If there is no ideology, then what makes crime different from terrorism?)
I include the
2001 shoe bomber attack,
which the FBI list bizarrely excludes.
I include the
15
Beltway sniper
attacks in 2002,
which killed 10,
which the FBI list bizarrely excludes.
This gives 61 terrorist incidents in 2000-2005.
There are 18
(1 + 1 + 1 + 15)
Islamic terror attacks,
yielding 2984
(2972 + 2 + 0 + 10)
fatalities.
Here is the breakdown by ideology:
Type of terror
Number of incidents
Percent of incidents
Number of fatal incidents
Percent of fatal incidents
Number of fatalities
Percent of fatalities
Eco-terrorism
40
65.6
0
0
0
0
Islamism
18
29.5
12
100
2984
100
Anti-abortion
2
3.3
0
0
0
0
Neo-Nazi
1
1.6
0
0
0
0
This excludes terror attacks since 2005.
This excludes terror attacks outside the US.
It is noteworthy that all of the Islamic attacks were against randomly-chosen innocent civilians.
It is noteworthy that all of the Islamic attacks aimed to kill in large numbers.
Not make a point. Not scare. Not damage property. But kill.
The future
The Second Front
by David Horowitz, March 24, 2003,
wondered whether 1970s style left-wing terror was on the way back.
The 1960s America-hating "anti-war" youth movement
led (inevitably)
to a decade of killings
by 1970s left-wing terrorists like
Baader-Meinhof.
It took over a decade before the sickness of the 1960s
burnt itself out.
Horowitz makes the point that
the modern America-hating "anti-war" youth movement,
because it is aligned with
Islamic Fascism, could lead to far more serious
left-wing terror.
Thankfully, little has happened so far.
In the absence of a utopia to believe in,
like the Soviet Union or Mao's China,
few leftists today
seem to believe in anything enough to die (and kill) for it, and that is a good thing.
The Guardian
in Oct 2004, on the pending re-election of Bush, said:
"On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. ... The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?"
As Mark Steyn
replies:
"Well, wherever they are, they're probably saying: "Why bring us into it? When Lee Harvey decided it was time for JFK to get assassinated, he didn't sit around whining, 'John Wilkes Booth, where are you now that I need you?' Get off your butt and do it yourself, you big Euro-ninny." Ah, but for the armchair insurgents of the Western Left, the vicarious frisson is more than delicious enough. Anything else would interfere with dinner plans."
And that is a good thing.
The most successful left-wing terrorist ever.
The pro-Soviet, pro-Castro, communist
Lee Harvey Oswald
assassinated the
anti-communist, anti-Castro, U.S. President
John F. Kennedy
in 1963.
Probably neither
Cuba
nor the
Soviets
were involved.
Rather, Oswald was acting on their behalf on his own initiative.
Image from here.
"Liberals failed one of the
two great moral tests of the twentieth century,
[and] they still do not know they failed
and have not grappled with the implications of that failure."
- Mona Charen on the Cold War.
(1940),
a brilliant film mocking Hitler
and Nazism.
Since 1995.
