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 Marxist 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.
Complete list of assassinations of
US presidents
or
US presidential candidates.
Green shows left-wing assassins.
The greatest left-wing terrorist of all.
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.
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.
He accepts, unlike some of his fellow nuts, that Oswald did it.
But he then talks of
"the role played in Oswald's psyche by the torrid atmosphere of political rage in Dallas".
What?
What role?
No evidence is ever presented.
He complains that:
"Immediately after the assassination and ever since, the right has tried to deflect any connection between its fevered Kennedy hatred and Oswald's addled psyche with the fact that the assassin had briefly defected to the Soviet Union."
As
Daniel Greenfield
replies:
"How dare the right deflect its non-existent connection to the assassination by pointing out that the assassin was a Communist?"
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.
(Edwin Walker was also anti-communist.)
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 crackpot world of the American left,
where "shadowy right-wing forces" killed JFK and RFK.
Kevin Costner's speech in Oliver Stone's ludicrous movie JFK (1991).
Kevin Costner is not meant to be a loony here. He's meant to be the hero!
In real life,
the jury did not listen to the crackpot Jim Garrison
and took less than an hour to find the accused not guilty.
Hurray!
The commie
Lee Harvey Oswald
protests in support of communist Cuba in
August 1963.
A few months later he killed the anti-Castro American president, John F. Kennedy.
Oliver Stone also supports Castro and communist Cuba,
just like Lee Harvey Oswald did.
They have a lot in common.
Unable to face up to the fact that a leftie rather like himself killed JFK,
Oliver Stone in his movie
invents a ludicrous plot in which the right
(including the anti-Castro right)
kills the American president for some reason.
Truly disgusting.
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.
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 jihadism, 2003.
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 says:
"Only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States".
No right-winger could have put it better.
Carlos the Jackal is not having a fun life. He was captured in 1994 (age 45) and as at 2019 has been in prison for 25 years.
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."
Some people think this movie
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 jihadi scum
(who they train with in the scene above).
In real life:
The German Baader Meinhof terrorists
train with the Jew-killing PLO terrorists in 1970.
Yes, they're so different from their parents' generation.
Carlos
(or Carlos the Jackal) (2010).
Movie about the terrorist
Carlos the Jackal.
I do not think it glorified him.
If you admire him, then maybe you viewed the film differently to me.
But for any normal person,
it showed a bunch of insane, communist, pro-Soviet, pro-jihadist lunatics.
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.
Could there be a new wave of pro-Islam left-wing terrorism?
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."
Left-wing terror in league with Islamic terror:
The Entebbe hijack
of a flight out of Israel
in 1976.
Left-wing
German terrorists of the
RZ
help jihadists
kill Jews.
They dressed it up in some mickey mouse language about "imperialism",
but ultimately it was young Germans killing Jews.
Just like their parents' generation.
Image from the dramatisation
Raid on Entebbe (1977).
Left-wing terror in league with Islamic terror:
The leading Dutch anti-jihadist
Pim Fortuyn
was assassinated by a leftist in 2002.
All over the world,
young people and students can be vicious enemies of human rights and human freedom
just as easily as anyone else.
See these horrifying young fascist people in Kuwait
in Nov 2007,
who think that atheists should be arrested and even killed.
See transcript.
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.
