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.
Culture
Right-wing humour, parodies of the left, etc.

From ProtestWarrior.
See also the t-shirt.
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.
"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 left hates the West
above all other parts of the world.
They tend not to be interested in human rights abuses by non-whites
and non-westerners.
- The unfree world
-
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?"
- More on Africa
- African butchers:
-
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,
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.
-
Why Israel and not Sudan, is singled out
(or here)
by Charles Jacobs,
Boston Globe, 5 Oct 2002.
- Slavery in modern Sudan
doesn't bother the left.
The perpetrators are not white,
so the left isn't interested.
-
Why British academics are boycotting Israel
- article by Theodore Dalrymple
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.
- The Institute on Religion and Democracy
-
Human Rights Advocacy in the Mainline Protestant Churches (2000-2003): A Critical Analysis
- See summary of this survey.
- 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.
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."
-
The Paradox of the Fisks:
The most criticised societies in the world
will be the least criminal societies
- Affirmative Action
(also here)
is of course racist.
- It discriminates against people on grounds of race.
-
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."
- Capitalism magazine
-
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.
Return to The modern left.