The modern left
What does "left"
mean in the modern world?
I propose that the modern left is defined as
those who do not support the West against its enemies.
The left has a proud history on some issues (mainly social issues)
and a less proud history on others (mainly foreign policy).
The left pioneered rights for
women,
blacks,
gays,
atheists
and other minorities.
It opposed religious and sexual censorship,
and enabled sexual freedom.
This is the greatest part of its heritage.
But this is history now.
All this is uncontroversial now.
Most of the modern right agrees with this basic agenda.
Certainly I do.
So what defines "the left"?
I would submit that
the main thing that defines the left in the modern world is its approach
to foreign policy
- with
the economy
and
crime
being lesser issues that distinguish them.
And while I basically agree with the left on civil liberties,
on the issues of the economy, crime and foreign policy
I think the left is simply wrong.
Its ideas will lead to a less, not more, prosperous society.
Its ideas will lead to more, not less, crime.
And its ideas will lead to a more, not less, dangerous world.
The moderate peacenik leftist's foreign policy
is the most dangerous of all his ideas.
He does not explictly love tyranny and hate democracy.
But he talks as if he does.
He is disgusted by the West (especially leadership and front-line countries like America and Israel),
does not admire it,
mocks its leaders,
spits on its military and on any soldier fool enough to die for it,
and in general (whether he likes it or not)
gives support and encouragement
to the barbarians outside the gates
who wish to destroy the West and everything we love.
The mind of the left
is very familiar to me.
He does not really believe in the existence of barbarians outside the gates.
He thinks violent communist or third-world or Islamic revolutionaries
must have logical reasons for what they do.
They must be responding to rational grievances,
rather than be driven, say, by demons inside their heads.
He believes that if the West - and in particular America - was weaker, it would be a less
(rather than infinitely more)
violent and dangerous world.
In short, he is someone whose foreign policy ideas will lead to the triumph of tyranny abroad
and ultimately at home too.
Modern leftists
(on foreign policy and economics at least)
are the counter-Enlightenment
- those who refuse to believe that
we basically solved these problems in the 18th century,
and instead look to some imaginary utopia that won't actually work.
Safe in the bosom of capitalist democracies, they attack their protector,
and praise foreign tyrannies,
without fear of
consequences.
But their ideas do have consequences.
Western leftist intellectuals have spread endless misery to the third world,
leading to the death of millions.
And there is always a threat at home too.
So far, their ideas have not been successful at home.
If they ever were,
Israel,
and Europe,
and the West itself,
would fall.
- A good definition of the "left" is the people
who want the West to lose in war against totalitarian enemies, or don't care.
For example, the people who want America to lose in Iraq, or don't care.
-
Poll of Americans, Jan 2007 - 34 percent of Democrats want America to lose in Iraq,
and a further 15 percent don't know/care.
That's 49 percent of Democrats don't want America to win.
-
The War At Home, David Reinhard, January 28, 2007
- "American men and women are going off to fight, and perhaps die, and more than one out of five voters wants them to fail. Sorry, this tells us more about their cankered souls than about the war itself."
The dream of revolution
If we define
the modern left as those who do not support the West against its enemies,
then it has a wide range - from violent communist revolutionary totalitarians
to peace-lovers who simply abhor war and imperialism
and prefer to
appease foreign tyrants.
What they have in common - the moderates as well as extremists
- is a
dream
of a utopian society that is
different in some revolutionary way from modern bourgeois, western, capitalist consumerist democracy.
But perhaps the single most important lesson of the past century
is that
this dream of utopia has been responsible for more deaths and suffering than any other
human idea.
In the 20th century,
100 million people were killed
for the dream of a new revolutionary socialist society,
and the killing continues today.
2 billion more lives were ruined
through state-caused poverty, famine and emigration.
1 billion more people in the West
lived for
decades
under the threat of nuclear annihilation by Marx's followers.
The lesson of the 20th century is that boring bourgeois conservatives are not the mass killers
- starry-eyed idealists are.
And yet the western left seems to have learned nothing from the 20th century.
Here they are again, those siren voices, unashamed and free of guilt,
still insulting the West,
still looking for alternatives.
If we listen to them,
100 million more will die in the 21st century.
Read the
Communism
page first.
Understand the butchery that has already taken place first,
before you follow the siren voices of any new revolutions.
Revolutions do not necessarily liberate.
Historically, revolutions have enslaved as often as they have liberated.
100 million dead
The
Museum of Communism
has an excellent
FAQ
summarising a number of points I've felt for years:
-
Stalin
and
Mao
are (by a long shot)
the 2 greatest killers of all time.
Hitler is a far distant 3rd.
By any logical definition,
Stalin and Mao
are the 2 most evil men that have ever existed.
In fact, since there is no devil,
Stalin and Mao
are the 2 most evil beings that have ever existed
in the universe.
- Some people let Lenin off the hook.
Lenin was a mass murderer.
- Some people let
Trotsky off the hook.
As leader of the Red Army
in Lenin's war on the peasants,
Trotsky was
a mass murderer.
- Some people think Marxism is "a good idea in theory",
and the fact that every communist regime that ever existed
has been murderously totalitarian is "a coincidence".
This is crap.
Totalitarianism is inherent in Marxism.
- By any logical definition,
socialism is the most evil idea in human history.
Its record is
more murderous than
racism, tribalism, ethnic genocide and fascism,
or
the most bloodthirsty religion.
Socialism has killed 100 million people.
And it's still not finished.
Communism is a sister philosophy of Fascism
The Museum of Communism also makes the point that,
despite their denials,
fascism and communism are pretty much the same thing.
Both are totalitarian ideologies with contempt for dissent, debate and elections.
In both ideologies, the individual is worthless and exists to serve the state.
Indeed,
fascism
is merely a school of socialism.
- As John J. Ray points out,
fascism and communism are pretty much the same thing:
- Hitler did not invent the modern industrialised killing
of the genocidal totalitarian state.
Lenin did.
Hitler just copied what the Bolsheviks were already doing.
The Bolsheviks had already killed about
20 million people
before Hitler even got going.
- And the Nazis are the only example of a genocidal
fascist state
(unless we count their puppets like Croatia separately).
Mussolini and Franco were just "normal" murderous thugs
- not truly genocidal.
Whereas communism produces truly genocidal regimes routinely
- Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Mengistu.
Going by history,
communism is a far more certain route to genocide than fascism.
- My aim is not to defend fascism.
Between two philosophies that killed millions of innocents in cold blood,
one cannot say that one is "better" than the other.
Both represent pure evil.
Rather, my aim is to demonise communism,
and put it alongside fascism as a sister philosophy, little different
and certainly not "better" in any way than nazism.
The totalitarian left - let's kill 100 million more
-
Insane modern communists,
longing for another genocide.
100 million dead and they still won't give up
on utopia.
- Paul Bogdanor
- Other leftish philosophies that are usually (but not always) anti-West:
The peacenik left - let's make the West weak and defenceless
The
moderate, peacenik leftist does not of course want violent
communist revolution.
He believes the left's 20th century tolerance of communism
was a mistake in some way.
He thinks the left can reject this, and a "new left" can be formed which is still admirable.
But the consequences of his hostility to
America, Israel, Britain, and all front-line western states,
will be the same
- Western weakness and decline,
and the victory of anti-Western totalitarians
around the world.
The moderate, peacenik, atheist, gay-friendly leftist
does not really support
the medieval Islamofascist agenda of
Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and the Iraqi "resistance".
But he acts as if he desires their victory.
Bumper sticker
in
The Goode Family
sums up the bizarre moral universe of the modern peacenik leftie.
The mind of the left
- The continued appeal of
socialism and totalitarianism to the young
"Communism is not a reaction against the failure of the nineteenth century to organize optimal economic output.
It is a reaction against its comparative success."
- John Maynard Keynes, 1934.
"I do think
America is a great idea. I think
the American revolution is the only
one which has lasted, the only one left. It still has a dynamic. It is
the only one capable of a universal application."
-
Christopher Hitchens
with the last word on the end of
the
murderous utopian century of the left.
Return to
Communism page.
Since 1995.
