Mark Humphrys (politics)

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The modern left - The left's support for tyranny


  Pre-WW2

WW2

Post-WW2

France

The Cold War

Cuba

ANC support for tyranny

SF-IRA support for tyranny

The kidnap of leftists

The left's support for terrorism

The left's support for Islamism

The left's support for the Palestinians

The left's support for the Iraqi jihad

Irish support for tyranny
(Sunday Times article)


The left's historical support for tyranny and terrorism

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 but not all 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.






Pre-WW2




Western useful idiots are shown around Soviet Russia.
From Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930).


  

Irish supporters of the Soviet Union

  

Irish feminist and republican Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington praises Stalin's Soviet Union.
From Irish Press, December 15, 1932.


   
Another Irish useful idiot, feminist and republican Charlotte Despard.
From Irish Independent, December 24, 1930.




WW2


  • Right-wing support for fascism:
    • 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 enemy during 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.

    • British writer P.G.Wodehouse made radio broadcasts for Nazi radio. The broadcasts were harmless and he does not seem to have actually supported the Nazis. They seem to be the acts of an idiot rather than a supporter. They will, rightly, forever sully his reputation.
    • G. K. Chesterton praised Mussolini.
    • 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.




George Bernard Shaw supports Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and democide.
Clip from The Soviet Story.



George Bernard Shaw said in 1945 that the Nazis running concentration camps "were not fiends in human form; but they did not know what to do with the thousands thrown on their care."
From the 1945 preface to Geneva.
Capture from here.




Post-WW2


  • Irish right-wing support for Franco:
    • Some of the Irish Catholic right supported the Spanish dictator Franco because: (1) he was conservative Catholic, and: (2) he defeated a barbarous communism.
    • But the fact is, he was a fascist dictator who killed maybe 200,000 people and crushed liberal democracy.
    • Photo of Irish Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave signing book of condolence for Franco at his death in 1975. Posted here.




"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.




The left in France - The cradle of late 20th century tyranny

20th century French intellectuals have a lot of innocent third-world blood on their hands.




Sartre calls for the violent overthrow of bourgeois society.
Luckily for him, that never happened in France.
But the hatred of decency that he preached infected much of the third world, and led to millions dead.




The end of the Cold War




Proinsias De Rossa and Tomas Mac Giolla and Joe Sherlock attend a Soviet propaganda event in Dublin.
Irish Times, January 11, 1983.





South African anti-apartheid figures' support for tyranny




The left's support for communist Cuba




Galway City Council resolves in May 2011 to erect a memorial to the totalitarian communist Che Guevara.




The left's support for Serbia




The left's support for terrorism




The left's support for Islamism





The left's support for the Palestinians




The left's support for the Iraqi jihad






Hamas flag at anti-Israel demo, Dublin, 31 May 2010.



Hezbollah flag at anti-Israel demo, Dublin, 5 June 2010.



The left's support for tyranny will continue forever.
A play on a popular meme. Found here.



Hey tankies, have you considered just leaving?
See full size. 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.

"I wonder, however, why people are still puzzled over the double-standards within the Irish left and the Human Rights Industry vis a vis Israel. To me, it shows that people still believe that the far-left actually has a real sense of right and wrong. They do not. Leftism has no regard for right or wrong, its about favoring Designated Victim Groups. ... I actually suspect that if Hamas were a group of Christian fundamentalists, the left would have cheered on Operation Cast Lead, as Christians of all types are very low on the DVG-scale. If Israelis were predominately Arab Muslims, nobody would give a damn what is happening in the region, especially the left, as they could not feasibly demonise one side for the crime of being more white and western than the other."
- John Connolly on our perennial ability to be surprised or shocked at the left's support for tyranny.



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