The mind of the left
- The continued appeal of
socialism and totalitarianism to the young
What is wrong with us
that we are attracted to leftism when we are young?
Stanley Kurtz
describes the leftist mind
I know so well in Ireland.
Defending democracy and opposing tyranny
"is just too obvious
- too embarrassing"
for the sophisticated modern mind.
The young modern leftist prefers to feel that only he understands
the true state of the world
- that the rest of the population is too "stupid"
to see it.
The ordinary people don't agree with him
because they have their consent "manufactured"
by the media - they do not think for themselves
- but the leftist does.
He can see beyond the propaganda
and realise that the poverty, famine
and tyranny in the world
is caused by the West
(rather than, for example, by the moronic ideas
of the non-western world).
Concepts like "The Free World" are the absurd and simple-minded
propaganda of ignorant Americans
who do not understand the world.
The ordinary people
deal in concepts like "good" and "evil". -
Our leftist sophisticate understands how simplistic such ideas are,
and how genocidal police states
are just another culture,
and not to be regarded simplistically as "inferior".
The leftist liberates himself from the ideas of the "stupid" people
around him, and feels vastly superior to them.
In the extreme case he will quite literally
end up
defending tyranny and opposing democracy.
The ordinary people have no irony.
They just say flat out
that America is "superior" to
some illiterate Islamic theocracy,
or some famine-wracked totalitarian gulag state.
The leftist thinks they have never thought about it.
In reality, they are grown-ups
who understand all too well how the world works.
The leftist understands nothing except the coffee-house world
of safe, sheltered, protected, rich people.
Could this sum up why young people want to smash everything
that is working perfectly fine,
in favour of untried systems that won't work?
Graffiti on a wall in a wealthy area of Glasgow.
Photo by
JJ Gilmour.
Other views of the same wall
here
and here.
Note the defacement of a beautiful old wall.
Destruction of irreplaceable ancient beauty and heritage has been a main feature
of modern socialism.
Harry's Place:
"Of course the fools who believe this fail to grasp that for most ordinary people, the problem with capitalism isn't that it's boring; rather, it's not boring enough."
What Are Leftists?
by John J. Ray
- What is wrong with us
that we are attracted to leftism when we are young?
Ian Buruma
has written some good stuff about the mind of the left:
Occidentalism
by Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma
- showing the common thread running through communism,
German and Japanese fascism,
Islamic fascism, anti-globalisation
and all anti-west ideologies:
"It is a peculiar trait of the bourgeoisie,
perhaps the most successful class in history,
.. to be hated so intensely by some of its most formidable sons and daughters,
including Marx himself."
"This contempt can come from many sources, but it appeals to those who feel impotent, marginalized, excluded,
or denigrated: the intellectual who feels unrecognized, the talentless art student in a city filled with brilliance,
the time-serving everyman who disappears into any crowd, the
young man from a third-world country who feels mocked by the indifference of a superior West; the list of possible recruits to a cult of death is potentially endless."
Ian Buruma
has written some interesting stuff.
But he is still way too left for me.
See
Pascal Bruckner's
review of
Buruma's morally-weak book
Murder in Amsterdam.
And more.
Bruckner has a withering criticism of
Buruma's refusal to admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali's
struggle against Islamism:
"It is well known that in the struggle of the weak against the strong,
it is easier to attack the former."
Among the Bourgeoisophobes
(and p.2)
by David Brooks
- "Hatred of the bourgeoisie ..
is the
major reactionary creed of our age."
(or via here)
The radical loser,
by
Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
casts a cold eye on the violent revolutionary
- whether Lenin, Hitler, IRA or jihadi.
"Neither poverty nor the experience of political repression alone
seem to provide a satisfactory explanation for why young people
actively seek out death in a grand bloody finale and aim to take as many people with them as possible.
Is there a phenotype that displays the same characteristics down the ages and across all classes and cultures?"
On self-appointed, unelected terrorists
like the IRA, Shining Path, FSLN, FARC, ETA, PFLP, and so on:
"Each of these armed rabbles calls itself an army, boasts of brigades and commandos, self-importantly issuing bureaucratic communiqués and boastful claims of responsibility, acting as if they were the representatives of "the masses"."
"Bomb Texas":
The psychological roots of anti-Americanism
- Links the western left's incomprehension of
criminals and unfree countries
to their life of luxury.
Insulated
"from the age-old struggle to obtain food, shelter and physical security from enemies both natural and human",
vast numbers of pampered people
form their views in a nice, safe, coffee-house world,
"without firsthand and daily exposure to backbreaking physical labor, unrepentant bullies or unapologetically violent criminals."
The Western Disease
- "There is something terribly wrong, something terribly
amoral with the Western intelligentsia
... thousands
of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely
divorced from the natural world - the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest."
They do not understand: (a) what it is like to live outside of their
nice, safe, free world:
"what it is like to be in a village gassed by Saddam Hussein",
and: (b)
they do not understand the
awesomely brave military
that protects the existence of their world:
"how hard it is to go across the world to Tikrit and
chain such a monster."
The postmodern left simply cannot handle good and evil.
"Nuance is the essence of relativist interpretation. Manichean notions of barbarity and civilization,
Western culture juxtaposed to eighth-century Islamic fascism, good versus evil
- these "reductionist" and "simplistic" notions of the present Bushworld simply cannot stand.
If such clear polarities were to be valid, the entire foundation of postmodern thinking would collapse"
Face up to the truth,
Nick Cohen,
The Observer,
July 10, 2005,
on the mind of the left:
Leftists have not understood
"that Islamism was a reactionary movement as great as fascism,
which had claimed millions of mainly Muslim lives in the Sudan, Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan
and is claiming thousands in Iraq. As with fascism, it takes a resolute dunderheadedness
to put all the responsibility on democratic governments for its existence."
"I feel the appeal, believe me. You are exasperated with the manifold faults of Tony Blair and George W Bush.
Fighting your government is what you know how to do and what you want to do,
and when you are confronted with totalitarian forces which are far worse than your government,
the easy solution is to blame your government for them."
"But it's a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good, comes from the West
- and a racist one to boot. The unavoidable consequence is that you must refuse to support
democrats, liberals, feminists and socialists in the Arab world and Iran who are the victims of Islamism
in its Sunni and Shia guises because you are too compromised to condemn their persecutors."
"Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist,
it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which,
like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do.
But I'm afraid that's what the record shows."
The Selfish Teenagers of the Left - Scott Burgess, March 22, 2007,
asks whether the left
is really about concern for the world's oppressed
(why so little concern for oppression that cannot be blamed on the West,
such as oppression by Islam)
or is it really for many leftists about personal identity and rebellion.
Some good comments:
Comment: "It's not always clear that much besides role-play and appearance was ever
a central motivation. And, as the imperatives of role-play change, so do the sympathies,
or affected sympathies. This might explain why previously favoured victim groups - say, women and gay people - now find themselves sidelined in favour of certain religious groups, whose victimhood is considered much more deserving,
regardless of its incongruity with earlier pet projects."
Comment: "It's very important to the "we are all Hezbollah" brigade, that they -- like teenagers -- target their rebellion against those who are least likely to physically damage them.
Teenage rebellion, whilst dramatic, is perfectly safe because it is couched against
those who love and protect the protester: i.e. their parents. Parents (by and large) are extremely tolerant of their children's rebellion, accepting enormous amounts of abuse and inconsiderate behaviour because, at the end of the day, they are far more mature and self-sacrificing than their children.
The deluded left's rebellion is aimed, likewise, at completely safe targets. It's funny how the two biggest targets are the US and the UK; by any external measure two of the most enlightened and safe democracies in the entire world.
...
It's easy to complain against the injustices of the United States and United Kingdom, because you can do it with a healthy moral glow of righteousness, and secure in the knowledge that you won't be dragged from your bed in the middle of the night and tortured to death.
It's a win-win situation."
From bureaucrash.com
(and search).
Che Guevara
was, of course, a fighter for tyranny, not freedom.
He fought against human rights, not for them.
Having to pay tax is a big reason why people stop voting left-wing and never go back.
Meme shows the person changing from
Bernie Sanders
to
Ron Paul.
The New Anti-Semitism?
by Rob Foot
- After losing the
Cold War,
a negative anti-Americanism
has become the core value of the left,
instead of something I could subscribe to,
such as a
positive
liberal internationalism.
"The Twentieth Century
was the site of the battleground of socialism and capitalism.
Towards the end of the century, capitalism won. Its victory was unexpected,
and unexpectedly swift, but near-total and unqualified."
And the left has not been able to handle it.
"The collapse of the Soviet empire, and the tearing-down of the Berlin Wall by its erstwhile prisoners, signalled the end of the socialist enterprise. Its story ended there and then, but it was a hard ending.
...
This is the font and source of the Left's rage and hate."
"The Real Axis Of Evil Is Pakistan - Saudi Arabia - Yemen",
interview with Bernard-Henri Levy
- "anti-Americanism is the most dangerous global ideology.
Today all the
totalitarianisms, the fundamentalisms, the anti-Semitisms
hide behind the banner of the fight against the USA."
Anti-Americanism:
The World's Most Dangerous Idea
by Fareed Zakaria
- "U.S. hegemony has its problems, but a world that reacts instinctively
against the United States will be less peaceful, less cooperative, less prosperous,
less open, and less stable."
He notes that:
"contrary to the notion that anti-Americanism is a reflection of opposition
to Republican presidents and U.S.-led wars, French sympathy for the U.S.
stood at 54% in 1988, during the Reagan administration,
but dropped to 35% by 1996, when Clinton was in office. Why the decline?
Simple: in 1988 the U.S. was a protector;
in 1996, after the Berlin Wall fell, it was a resented "hyperpower""
Europe's Anti-American Obsession
by Jean-Francois Revel
- on anti-Americanism in France.
- "Why is the USA casually accused of
"fascism," when it is a land that has never
known a dictator over the course of two centuries, while Europe has been busy making
troops of them?"
Anti-Americanism: An Introduction
(and here)
by Jean Francois Revel
- "The Left saw clearly what was at issue: my book was less about America and anti-Americanism
than about the epic
twentieth-century struggle between socialism and liberal democracy,
and they feared that
chances for victory might be
starting to lean in liberalism's favor.
The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is,
to discredit liberalism by
discrediting its supreme incarnation."
Americans: The Jews of the World
by Daniel Jennings
- The world is like old Europe before the Holocaust.
Millions of people
in the Middle East and Europe
have their heads filled with irrational, illogical hate
for Israel and America.
Millions of people are
ready and willing to repeat the Holocaust.
If they ever get more power,
a 21st century Holocaust against Israel and America
could be coming.
No one can relax as long as this hatred exists.
Hatred leads to action if it gets the power.
To end this illogical, hallucinatory hatred, America should not address it.
Rather America should take the fight to its haters,
in their home countries,
and
change their entire world against their will.
Charlie Gilmour, son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour,
attacks the Cenotaph
during violent
student protests in London in Dec 2010.
Photo from
Daily Mail.
More here.
Lots of rich kids demanding that the taxpayer pay for them.
In 2010,
Charlie Gilmour was
reading history at Girton College, Cambridge.
His father David Gilmour was
worth nearly
£80 million.
They lived in a £3 million house in Hove.
Charlie Gilmour spent
4 months
in prison in 2011 for this, for violent disorder.
His
whining, self-righteous article after his release, 7 July 2012, shows that he has learnt nothing.
A typical example of how he writes:
"Last summer's riots were disgraceful. But
it is my belief that Cameron's and Clegg's cuts have looted the prospects of the young ..."
etc. etc.
He says western leftists ignore jihad violence and defend Islam
because they think it helps display their superiority and cosmopolitanism.
They don't really care about human rights in the Middle East
(or else they would complain about all abuses of human rights).
It's not about the East at all.
It's all about the West.
It's a form of display behaviour
in front of their peers:
"what we need to remember is that appeasement of Islam really isn't about the Muslims, any more than it is about the victims of Islam around the world. Religious dupes of the Communists weren't really concerned what was going on in Russia, either ... In much the same way, war-weary Englishmen in the 1930s weren't interested in what was really happening in the Sudetenland or Poland. They wanted excuses not to become alarmed, and they wished above all to sound like the voices of reason against the "alarmism" spread by "jingoists" and "militarists" like Winston Churchill."
It is no coincidence that
so many of the modern academic left in the humanities have supported
fascism and communism.
Postmodernist "thought", with its lack of intellectual rigour,
its denial of the existence of truth and facts,
and its hatred of the Enlightenment and science
(basically, by people who were not smart enough to do mathematics or science),
lends itself naturally
to garbled, meaningless writing,
and support for non-rational, West-hating, totalitarian regimes.
Symposium on the Iraq War
- The archetypal muddled postmodern leftist
Stanley Aronowitz
comes face-to-face with the crystal-clear
defender of reason and the
Enlightenment
Victor Davis Hanson.
Meaningless business-speak and executive puffery
is also ripe for scepticism.
See Dilbert's hilarious
Mission Statement generator.
Part of the modern anti-intellectualism
is that clarity is bad and obfuscation is good,
and also that anyone who holds a position on anything is not open minded.
Nicely summed up by
Dawkins
(see edited version):
"Just as anybody who writes exceptionally clearly is damned as
'simplistic', it is often assumed that anybody who feels
exceptionally strongly about something must therefore be emotional or irrational, fanatical, rabid, or traumatised in
childhood. .. Rather than psychoanalyse an author who feels passionately about something,
why not look at his actual arguments and tell us what's wrong with them?"
Postmodernist publications,
since they are not based on reason and evidence,
are particularly vulnerable to hilarious hoaxing through fake papers.
Some wonderful work has been done exposing their shoddy standards in this way.
The more wide-ranging
Beyond the Hoax
reveals Alan Sokal to be, surprisingly, a normal (even far) leftist himself.
Crystal clear on science, his politics
is boilerplate leftism.
He cites Chomsky
and Hobsbawm.
He published at the Socialist Scholars Conference.
He describes the liberation of Iraq as obviously "immoral".
(Was the liberation of France immoral? If not, why not?)
He says Muslims have "legitimate secular grievances" against the West and the US,
and gives as his first example:
"One-sided support for the Israeli state against the Palestinians".
(As if we should be anything other than one-sided
when a democracy is in conflict with a non-democracy.)
He writes that:
"the computer has had applications that are beneficial to society (e.g. ...) as well as applications that are harmful (e.g. in allowing the U.S. military to kill human beings more efficiently)."
(Would he prefer that the U.S. military was weak, inefficient and powerless?
Would he really like to live in that kind of world?
Does he really think it would be a safer, as opposed to a much more dangerous, world?)
In short, I don't think much of his politics
(as I'm sure he wouldn't think much of mine).
But none of this can take away from the brilliance of his anti-postmodernist work.
The grievance studies affair.
A massive and wide-ranging hoax in 2018 by
Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian,
exposing the bankruptcy of a wide range of "Grievance Studies" publications.
"The function of language is to express one's thoughts. If you think truth is possible, then you work hard to understand the world clearly and completely. But if you doubt that truth is possible, that has psycho-epistemological consequences: you come to believe that the world is at best fuzzy and your mind incapable of grasping it - you come to believe deep down that all is fractured and disjointed - and your writing will tend to the fuzzy, the fractured, and the disjointed. And in consequence you will come to be suspicious of clarity in others. Clarity, from this perspective, must be an over-simplifying."
- Stephen Hicks on Postmodernism.
"We must hope that the painful bolus of postmodernism
will pass through the costive bowels of academic life sooner rather than later.
Pass, of course, it will eventually."
- Gross and Levitt.
The right is fairly straightforward.
It regards dictators, genocidal killers and terrorists as "evil"
and thinks killing them is generally great, and even to be celebrated.
The left loves to demonstrate its claimed moral superiority to the right
by mocking the right's "simplistic" ideas of "good" and "evil",
and by whining and complaining whenever a bad guy gets whacked.
I don't know who they're impressing.
Leftists often say that killing dictators is wrong:
A little spat in Feb 2007 illustrates why I am not a leftist.
The old
Charles Johnson
(and more),
back when he was good,
showed a photo of a meeting of
the enemy leaders of Iran and Syria -
unelected dictators who oppress their own people
and persecute minorities;
men who have the blood of innocent Jews, homosexuals, atheists, women,
and American and British soldiers on their hands;
men who are killing Americans right now in Iraq;
and men who threaten a second Holocaust of all of the Jews of Israel.
Charles Johnson captioned the meeting:
"Definition of a Target-Rich Environment".
Quite right.
Pious left-winger
Greg Sargent
(and more)
is horrified:
"Popular Wingnut Blogger Appears To Advocate Assassination Of Foreign Leaders".
Greg Sargent sums up why I am not a leftist.
Is this what the left stands for now?
That killing dictators is now wrong?
If so, I will never be a leftist again.
I support, now and always, the rebels,
those who would attack and overthrow the dictators.
I support the end of dictators, everywhere.
That is why I am not a leftist.
That is why I am a neo-conservative.
As a comment above says:
"Is your point that political leaders of enemy countries should not be targeted?
That's just bizarre."
Glenn Reynolds
(and more)
on Iran, Feb 2007:
"Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response.
We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists,
supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran,
putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc.
Basically, stepping on the Iranians' toes hard enough to make them reconsider
their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq."
Leftist
Paul Campos
bizarrely claims this would be "murder" and "a war crime".
He claims that "radical mullahs and Iranian atomic scientists"
are "civilian noncombatants".
He confidently claims that "Iran is not at war with America".
He says people who support attacking
the active, wartime, anti-semitic, fascist enemies of America, Britain and Israel
"sound very much like fascists".
He says this is "right-wing extremism" that should perhaps have legal consequences.
Paul Campos illustrates why I am not a leftist.
If you believe killing dictators and their lackeys is wrong,
I will never be on the same side as you.
If this is what the left believes, I will never again be a leftist.
Few people express the mad beliefs of the postmodern left as clearly as
Herfried Münkler,
professor of political science at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
On the Americans celebrating the killing of the monster Bin Laden in May 2011:
"Only someone who believes in the existence of 'evil' and who does not explain 'evil' in terms of an unhappy childhood, someone who upholds the Old Testament principle of an eye for eye and a tooth for tooth, is justified in publicly expressing their joy at the death of an enemy and their satisfaction at getting revenge."
Run that by me again.
He denies the existence of "evil",
and he actually thinks that "evil" is explained by unhappy childhoods?
He's not being ironic.
He thinks that all of history's mass killers had unhappy childhoods?
Has he ever actually thought about this?
Even the guy we are talking about - Bin Laden -
did not have an unhappy childhood.
The immensely annoying young British leftist
Laurie Penny
also disputes the concept of "evil".
Laurie Penny
appeared on
Young Voters Question Time,
3 May 2011.
Discussing Bin Laden's death, she denied that Bin Laden was evil:
"This is patronising and simplistic.
It's a simple narrative.
The goodies and the baddies.
...
The West is good.
Everyone else is wrong.
...
We are the goodies. They are the baddies.
We should be frightened of them. They're not like us."
Yes, the War on the evil, bigoted, racist, oppressive, genocidal doctrine of Islamism is all
merely because they have "different colour skins"
and we are "frightened of difference".
Smartass leftie Irish blogger
Bock the Robber, 2 May 2011, on the killing of Bin Laden, illustrates how the left has abandoned the concept of "evil".
He mocks the idea that Bin Laden was "evil".
"I wonder why we continue to swallow the nonsense put out by the media about how evil people like Bin Laden are."
He can't understand the simplest moral distinctions:
"When is it all right for people to dance in the streets when someone has been killed?
We all witnessed those evil Islamists firing guns in the air and dancing after the World Trade Centre atrocity
...
Today, we were treated to more pictures of people dancing in the streets after someone had been killed, but that was fine, because the dancers weren't Arabs but white Christians."
Um, no.
It was fine because the former were celebrating the killing of innocents.
The latter were celebrating the killing of a mass murderer.
Is Bock so stupid that this has never occurred to him
and he leaps straight to the obvious conclusion of ... racism!
He absurdly claims that America created Bin Laden. He says Bin Laden was
"created by the CIA to carry out dangerous work .. before he turned rogue."
He claims that Gaddafi is "another CIA creation".
He claims the leader of North Korea is an American creation.
Because non-western people can't be evil all on their own.
It must be our fault.
He slanders Blair and Bush. He says Blair
"took a decision to kill thousands of civilians
...
There's no danger of an attack force .. storming Tony Blair's house or George Bush's ranch, even though they killed far more innocent civilians in Iraq than Bin Laden ever did in New York."
No evidence is provided for these mad assertions.
If he can find a single specific instance of Blair or Bush deliberately ordering the killing of an innocent civilian anywhere,
maybe he could tell me here.
Martina Devlin, Irish Independent, 5 May 2011, also can't understand basic moral distinctions.
"Americans were infuriated by euphoric scenes at Tripoli airport after the Lockerbie bomber's release. ...
But why is public jubilation surrounding the death of your enemies acceptable in Times Square but not in Tripoli? Surely if it's barbaric in one country then it's equally unacceptable in another?"
Let me answer.
Celebrating the death of your enemies is not barbaric.
It is barbaric if you are the bad guys. (Celebrating the death of the innocent.)
It is perhaps tasteless, but generally fine, if you are the good guys. (Celebrating the death of the bad guys.)
American
Jay Austin
quit his job to go
cycling round the world with his girlfriend.
Here in
April 2018
in Morocco
he notes correctly that most people are good,
but then asserts that evil does not exist:
"Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own".
Three months later, in July 2018,
evil,
in the form of Islamic State,
murdered him and his girlfriend
in Tajikistan
because they were unbelievers.
In the real world, evil is not a "make-believe" concept.
Islamic State is evil.
Hamas is evil.
Jihad is evil.
And western intellectuals should stop making excuses for evil.
Multiculturalism by Victor Davis Hanson, September 27, 2010,
on the left's inability to apply the same standards to non-whites as they apply to whites.
"if, for example, a white, brown, or black American were to emigrate to China he would never be completely accepted into Chinese society - even if he were to obtain full citizenship, given that being genuinely Chinese entails a particular Chinese appearance.
Should 12 million Smiths and Joneses cross the southern border into Mexico ... they would never be seen as fully "Mexican" citizens."
"Multiculturalism trumps all.
The suggestion that there are Vietnamese racists, Palestinian sexists, or Chinese bigots causes us to pause".
Israel is the only country in the Middle East that seems to even attempt doing
what the left wants
(equality for women, gays, religious minorities, etc.)
while its neighbours are unsmiling right-wing oppressors
of a type unknown in the West.
But multiculturalism trumps all:
"The problem, of course, for Israel is that, under the doctrine of multiculturalism, its single sin of being Western trumps the many sins of its non-Western neighbors."
The consequences of the left's multiculturalism are that
"bigotry abroad will only grow, as others sense that the United States lacks the confidence in its own values to extend its self-critical principles abroad."
Posh Leftists, Muslims & the New Orientalism by Paul Austin Murphy, Sept 2013,
nails the new racism from wealthy white western leftists:
"SWP / UAF / Trotskyists / progressives will never uncover Muslim wrong or even speak about it. Instead they concentrate entirely on white 'Zionists', white Western leaders and the white working class of the UK - that terrible bugbear of London dinner parties, the very same class formerly despised by those ultra-posh leftist advocates of eugenics for the working class, the Fabians.
No Muslim can ever do wrong in the middle class Trotskyist's eyes; just as brown and black people cannot, by Marxist stipulation or diktat, be racist.
The Left's racism is inverted ... Brown and black people can never do wrong - only EDL 'chavs' and 'knuckle-draggers' can do wrong.
...
Leftists are indirectly arguing that Muslims are incapable of acting morally; of acting with free will and conscience; and of being adult human beings. They argue that because they are brown and Muslim, they can do things that they would never allow a white person to do.
For God's sake, how pure do you want your racism to be?"
South Africa v.
the rest of Africa
For example, the left (rightly) targeted
apartheid South Africa.
But now that apartheid is gone, we hear nothing about the rest
of Africa,
which remains largely a human-rights wilderness.
Today, if we look at the Freedom House
world map of freedom,
we can see that the
South Africa
area is now an oasis of freedom in Africa.
Why is this?
Are the natives in the south naturally more respectful of human rights
than elsewhere in Africa?
(Unlikely. See the figures for
Angola,
Swaziland
and of course
Zimbabwe.)
Or is it actually the influence of the European population
that has brought freedom to this part of Africa?
Such an idea is heresy to the left,
which will never criticise a black government,
and to whom imperialism and colonisation is simply all bad.
The left is racist.
What is the point?
The point is that the left is racist.
We must criticise abuses by non-whites
with exactly the same vigour as abuses by whites.
Otherwise we are not treating non-whites as adults,
who are responsible for their own behaviour.
Even worse, we are ignoring the suffering of non-whites
simply because their oppressors are natives
rather than imperialists.
But the pain, suffering and death is just as real.
If we really believed in the equality of
distant non-white, non-western people,
we would be outraged at their oppression
no matter who their oppressor was.
The left imagines itself to be the "modern" world view
that has moved on from 19th century racism,
but it is clear from its selective choice of campaigns
(South Africa, Israel, Iraq) that it has moved on very little.
The neo-conservatives, it seems to me,
are the post-racists in this world
- the people who have entered a new world where they
are utterly indifferent to
the colour of the oppressor and the oppressed
- they are simply in favour of freedom and against tyranny.
The left, it seems to me, are still in the racist world.
Peter Tatchell
shows what a non-racist left would look like.
He has all the trendy anti-Israel, anti-American politics,
and I have no time for him on that.
But in his campaign for gay rights he is not afraid
to criticise blacks and Arabs
- despite abuse from fellow leftists
and even death threats.
He doesn't care what is the colour of the skin of the bully and the victim.
He just supports human rights, and doesn't think that as a white man
he can only speak about white crimes.
As Johann Hari says:
"Tatchell is Britain's most eloquent campaigner against a new and lethal human rights Apartheid
where only white people can condemn white butchers and only black
people can condemn black murderers. He asks loudly: Is that progress? Is that anti-racism?
Are we supposed to abandon Jamaica's gay people because they have the wrong colour skin?"
It was easy for the west to condemn South African whites
and feel superior to them.
But in a survey
during apartheid,
John J. Ray
found that
South African whites were no more racist
than other whites in the west.
In other words,
apartheid was due to fear of what would happen
under black majority rule, rather than pure racism.
Such fears themselves can of course be seen as racist,
though sadly Zimbabwe shows
they were not entirely groundless.
South Africa
is going much better than Zimbabwe, though,
and everyone must be glad that apartheid is gone.
Despite an appalling crime problem,
South Africa is one of the few
free countries
in Africa.
African butchers:
The Marxist genocidal monster
Mengistu
of Ethiopia.
The Christian mass murderer
Emperor Bokassa
of the Central African Republic.
After Idi Amin spoke to the UN General Assembly
in 1975,
the US ambassador
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
called him a
"racist murderer".
As
Edward Hudgins
notes:
"U.N. diplomats were horrified that the American ambassador would be so undiplomatic
as to say such a thing about Amin
but were not particularly horrified that Amin was a racist murderer.".
Idi Amin supported Palestinian terrorism.
Israel dealt a blow to his evil regime
in the brilliant
Operation Entebbe
in 1976.
About 45 of Idi Amin's soldiers were killed by Israel, and about 11 Ugandan MiG fighter planes destroyed.
In his fury afterwards,
Idi Amin murdered an elderly Jewish woman
and massacred hundreds of other innocent people.
BBC dhimmi
Kate Humble
gives a striking example of the mind of so many confused westerners,
on the program
The Frankincense Trail (2009).
She
is in
Jeddah
in Saudi Arabia.
This is a religious dictatorship with
no human rights,
where gays, women and atheists are persecuted.
She hears the Islamic call to prayer,
in a country where other religions are not free to worship,
and she does not find it sinister but rather
moving.
She even cries!
She watches the shops closing without asking questions such as:
"What happens to a man who does not want to close his shop?
What happens if you do not want to pray?"
No westerner would give a pass to oppression by right-wing white Christians like this.
But oppression by strange non-westerners is somehow different, and even moving.
42 Christians arrested for prayer meeting in Jeddah, Dec 2011.
"Saudi police and security officers raided an evening prayer meeting at the home of an Ethiopian Christian
...
Security officials broke [into] the house and captured . . . beat and threatened them for death. . . They divided the men and the women and they are torturing them [in prison]".
Will Kate Humble cry at this?
The Christian women were sexually assaulted by the Saudi police. Report Feb 2012.
"They were using gloves to strip search and they were putting their fingers into their genitals".
Strip searching them!
Their only crime was to attempt to have a Christian prayer meeting.
"the men [were] beaten and called 'unbelievers'".
Kate Humble, you really need to read this.
Saudis deport the Christians, Aug 2012, after 7 months in jail.
"Saudi security officials assaulted, harassed and pressured the Christians to convert to Islam during their incarceration."
If Kate Humble ever issues a statement on this, tell me here.
Satire in 1999:
"Iowa family blasted for lack of diversity:
Exclusionary, all-white Petersens 'deeply offensive' say activists".
From p.150 of
Our Dumb Century,
The Onion, 1999.
Real life
in Dec 2013:
Progressives blast 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney for having only one black grandchild.
The anti-counterjihad Muslim comedian
Dean Obeidallah
sneers at the Romney family:
"I think this picture is great. It really sums up the diversity of the Republican party,
the RNC. At the convention, they find the one black person."
Coverage of Israel
Israel v. the rest of the Middle East
The left has a similar blind spot with
Israel.
90 percent of their energy should be spent
criticising the appalling, oppressive, human-rights-abusing
Islamic countries of the Middle East
such as
Sudan,
and perhaps 10 percent criticising the only free country
in the area, Israel.
But the left are racists.
The Arabs are excused as victims of history,
or slaves to their culture,
while only the Israelis are treated as adults capable of moral choices.
I would treat them all as adults.
The western media is racist about the Arabs and Palestinians.
It does not treat them as complex, diverse people and moral agents:
"A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters."
A tweet
by left-wing, anti-Israel MP
David Ward
sums up the racist view of the Palestinians.
This is on 18 Nov 2014, in response to the
synagogue massacre of Jews
by racists.
Ward says the racist killers can't help it. They are "driven to madness" by the failure of the international community to "deal with" Israel.
They are mere animals, or madmen.
They have no moral agency and cannot make any moral decisions.
Blaming Israel for Palestinian violence is racist: it denies that Arabs are moral agents, Alan Johnson, 20 Nov 2014.
"Palestinians are understood as a driven people, dominated by circumstance and emotion, lacking choice, below the age of responsibility, never to be held accountable. Israelis are the opposite; masters of all circumstances, rational and calculating, the root cause of everything, responsible for everything.
It is, palpably, an Orientalist view of the Palestinians as the Other, except this time they are affirmed as noble savages. It's a bit racist, to be honest."
This astonishing survey of human-rights criticisms by churches
sums up the entire sickness of the western left.
Every leftist in the world should read this report,
and read its recommendations.
This report explains exactly the difference between
my world view
and the left-wing world view.
It explains in a nutshell why I am not a leftist.
In summary, a survey of 199 human-rights criticisms
by mainline churches and groups in the US found:
36 percent of criticisms (72) were of Israel.
32 percent of criticisms (63) were of America.
Only 20 percent of criticisms (39)
were of the worst human rights abusers in the world
- the countries listed as "Not Free"
by Freedom House.
Only 8 percent of criticisms (15)
were of
countries listed as "Partly Free".
An incredible 73 percent of criticisms (145)
were of the best countries -
countries listed as "Free".
No criticisms were made of any country bordering Israel.
That is, no criticisms were made of the Palestinian Authority, Egypt,
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia.
No criticisms either were made of
China, Yemen,
Iran,
Libya, Algeria,
Belarus, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,
or the worst
human rights abuser on earth - North Korea.
As the white population of the West gradually became the most non-racist people on earth,
new strange forms of racism arose,
often promoted by left-wing white people.
But gradually, left-wing whites have been adopting anti-white racism too.
Critical race theory
Recently we have seen the rise of
Critical race theory,
which is the promotion of anti-white racism
by left-wing whites and others.
It is a new form of anti-white racism packaged in academic language.
It treats whites as a group rather than individuals.
It also treats blacks as a group rather than individuals, so it is racist about blacks too.
Critical race theory (CRT) is keen on a thing called
"Systemic racism"
or institutional racism,
which
does not really exist.
In the West anyway.
Critical race theory is also keen on a thing called
"White privilege",
which also
does not exist.
Critical race theory is also keen on a thing called
"White supremacy",
which also
does not exist.
These are made-up terms by people living in non-racist societies
to try desperately to find some racism.
CRT people are the actual racists.
They use racist terms like
"White fragility" and
"Whiteness"
to attack white people.
Anyone who uses such terms is a racist.
Translations from the Wokish
shows how modern woke theory has redefined many terms
far away from what normal people think they mean.
There are multiple definitions of "racism",
none of which make sense.
Woke theory
is an ideology not based on logic or evidence, or proof for its claims,
but one based on emotion, even hysteria, and games with language
to make the world look evil
and make the ideologues look like heroes.
Anti-white racism:
This trailer for
Everything's Gonna Be All White
(2022)
is one of the most racist things I have ever seen.
Absolutely disgusting. Just mean-spirited racist hate speech.
How I view CRT-style "anti-racism".
It is racism.
A new type of racism, but still racism.
From The Woke Temple.
Handy chart showing the main points of Critical race theory
and related ideas.
From here.
Affirmative action
is racist.
It discriminates against people on grounds of race.
It is racist against whites and Asians.
It should end.
US medical school acceptance rates by race, 2013-2016.
This shows US medical school acceptance is racist.
It discriminates in favour of black students and against white and Asian students.
Somehow this racial discrimination was found to be legal for years before 2023.
See full size.
From here.
See chart
from here.
Harvard admissions shortly before 2023.
This shows Harvard acceptance is racist.
It discriminates in favour of black students and against white and Asian students.
From p.24
of
Brief for Petitioner
in
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023).
This was the landmark case
which found that affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional.
The left is racist - It does not treat all races equally
When criticising people for human rights abuses,
the left is not colour-blind.
That is my basic criticism.
Not criticising Arabs or Africans does not show how enlightened you are.
It shows how racist you are.
"Moynihan's Law"
helps explain why the western left
hates free countries like Israel
and
loves unfree countries like Cuba.
It's basically down to ignorance:
Moynihan's Law
- "The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse
function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there.
The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better
protected are human rights in that country."
The quote
- "If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news,
the jails of that country will be filled with good people."
- US Senator Daniel Moynihan
Moynihan's Law applied to Israel
- "The degree of oppression of any people is an inverse
function of the amount of cries of oppression one hears from them.
The only government in the Middle East that does not indiscriminately
shoot Arabs who criticize it is that of Israel."
Socialism and anti-Semitism are closely related worldviews
by Theodore Dalrymple.
- "The liberal intellectual who laments the predominance
of dead white males in the college syllabus or the lack of
minority representation in the judiciary uses fundamentally the
same argument as the anti-Semite who objects to the
prominence of Jews in the arts, sciences, professions, and in
commerce. They both assume that something must be
amiss - a conspiracy - if any human group is over - or
under - represented in any human activity, achievement, or
institution."
Civilization and V. S. Naipaul,
Bruce Bawer,
The Hudson Review, Autumn 2002,
sums up why I find the western left racist,
and why I (in contrast to them) am not racist:
"Yet
[Naipaul]
is at the same time clear-sighted enough to recognize that
in today's world, the most reprehensible injustices are perpetrated by powers
aligned against the West, and that the West is now in fact the part of the world
in which human rights are most thoroughly protected,
human talents most consistently rewarded, human life most sincerely valued,
and human potential most fully realized. It is in the West, in short,
that men and women are most likely to enjoy the greatest gift of all,
the chance really to live."
"Consequently Naipaul cherishes Western civilization and refuses to condescend
to Third World peoples by using dishonest euphemisms to describe what he calls their
"half-made" societies. He cares enough for them to admit that they deserve
better - and what they deserve is Western civilization, which Naipaul,
in a 1990 lecture, identified as "the universal civilization"."
"The universal civilization, Naipaul states in his lecture,
"has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal;
it wasn't always as attractive as it is today.
The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint"."
I feel exactly the same. As an Irishman, I greatly admire
17th and 18th century England,
and see in it the heroic beginnings of the modern scientific culture.
And yet my Irish Catholic peasant ancestors
could not participate in that culture.
Only today does western culture finally deliver its fantastic universal
promise. Now everyone can join in.
Left-wing stupidity and blindness is not confined to the West:
Bollywood star
Imran Khan, a Muslim, wears a t-shirt in Mumbai on 26 Nov 2008, accusing Bush of being a terrorist.
On the very same day, in the very same city,
Muslim terrorists began a rampage killing 160 innocent people
in a multi-day orgy of slaughter.
Will Imran Khan ever wear a t-shirt condemning Islamic terror? Of course not.
As
Andrew Breitbart says:
"Mr. Khan - a member of India's Muslim minority - chose not to mock international terrorists who kill in the name of Allah. He and his co-religionists know the deadly results for those who do."
As Andrew Bolt
says:
"Hating dad is safer".
Picture credit REUTERS/Manav Manglani (INDIA).
From here.
An awesome example of the mind of the left.
This is the response of
gay rights group Stonewall
when in June 2020, a jihadist
killed three gay men
in a park in Reading, England.
After a homophobic attack killing three, Stonewall attacks
"Islamophobic, racist and xenophobic rhetoric".
Stonewall is simply not interested in the homophobic rhetoric and religious beliefs that drove the attack.