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.
From Fascism to Jihadism
by Yehudah Mirsky
- the 20th-21st century continuum of fascism, communism, and Islamic fascism.
The Chorus of Useful Idiots
by Bruce S. Thornton
- "Why people who enjoyed freedom and prosperity
worked passionately to destroy both is a fascinating question, one still with us
today."
From Moscow to Ramallah
by Michael J. Totten
- Western leftists and liberals are making the same mistake
with Israel as they did with communism.
- "Liberalism has a proud history that pre-dates Marxism. But the indulgence of communism will besmirch its record forever."
Intellectuals Who Distrust Freedom
by Jim Hoagland,
on why so many intellectuals won't support fighters for freedom
in the unfree world,
but instead support their oppressors.
- "American and European intellectuals have a history of distrusting
politicians and thinkers from oppressed countries who clamor for the same political
and economic freedoms that our savants enjoy. The clamorers cannot represent authentic
nationalism if all they want is to be just like us, the reasoning seems to go."
Arthur Ransome
wrote from Russia for
The Guardian
and other publications.
He knew and
supported
Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks.
He was a friend of the butcher
Dzerzhinsky.
The Guardian
supported Stalin,
and sacked the brave
Malcolm Muggeridge
for telling the West
about the genocidal
Ukrainian Famine
(when perhaps 7 million people were deliberately starved to death by Stalin).
Today, The Guardian opposes the war on
Islamic fascism and calls for appeasement.
Pulitzer-Winning Lies
by Arnold Beichman
- Duranty actually said:
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
Think about what this means:
You can't improve society without killing several million innocent
men, women and children.
Really?
Today, The New York Times opposes the war on
Islamic fascism and calls for appeasement.
The dramatist
Maxim Gorky
cheered on the Lenin killing,
and later
cheering on the Stalin killing.
He called for the extermination of Stalin's enemies
"like lice".
He supported the gulag system,
and glorified the use of innocents as
slave labour.
More on Shaw and the Webbs' praise for Stalin
here.
When asked what Britons should do if the Nazis crossed the channel into Britain,
Shaw replied,
"Welcome them as tourists."
In 1935, when Hitler was persecuting Jews,
Shaw said:
"There is much to be said for Hitler ... I would make it a crime .. for a Jew or Jewess to marry anyone except a Christian."
H.G. Wells
did not exactly support Stalin, but,
like many intellectuals, he had no understanding of what Stalin was.
Wells on Stalin
in 1934:
"I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and it is to these qualities and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendancy in Russia. ... I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realize he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him."
The Soviet tyranny and democide
was not inevitable.
As
Ariel Cohen
points out, it was caused by western inaction:
"If the West had seriously supported the anti-Communist forces
in Russia,
the Bolshevik dictatorship would likely have tumbled in
the 1920s."
Winston Churchill was
a pioneer and a lonely voice in trying to get the democracies
to end the communist regime in Russia at birth (1917),
declaring that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle".
German film director
Leni Riefenstahl
made propaganda films for Hitler,
which encouraged many young Germans to enthusiastically join
the growing Nazi genocide.
American writer
Ezra Pound
not only supported but actually worked for the fascists in WW2.
Belgian deconstructionist
Paul de Man
supported the Nazis.
"History legitimizes Germany to rule Europe and later the world.
Only a nation that rules ruthlessly can maintain itself.
Democracy cannot develop sufficient energy to rule Europe."
- Nazi atomic weapons scientist
Werner Heisenberg,
1943, as German genocide burned all across Europe.
Many British
pacifists
did not explicitly support Nazi Germany,
but opposed the war against them.
The writer and critic
John Middleton Murry,
editor of the pacifist
Peace News,
said in 1940,
as Britain fought desperately for its survival against
genocidal Nazi Germany:
"Personally I don't believe that a Hitlerian Europe
would be quite so terrible as most people believe it would be."
The pacifist
Vera Brittain
complained about the publicity given to the gas chambers
when they were discovered in 1945.
She said
they were being publicised:
"partly, at least, in order to divert attention from the havoc produced in German cities
by allied obliteration bombing."
The Nazi democide
was not inevitable.
As
Thomas Sowell
points out, it was caused by western inaction.
Had Britain and France stood up to Hitler in the 1930s,
his regime would have fallen quickly
with little loss of life.
Winston Churchill was
a pioneer and a lonely voice in trying to get the democracies to
oppose Nazi Germany at birth (1933).
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 enemyduring 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.
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 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.
But he also
supported the Soviet Union.
He even supported Stalin's purges:
"In those purges the Communists did away with their
Quislings
and
Lavals,
and if other nations had done the same there would not be the original Quislings and Lavals today.
The only people who object to Communism and who use it as a bugaboo are the Nazi agents in this country."
See source.
Hollywood
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo
was a communist who
supported Stalin, Kim Il-sung
and even
Hitler
(during the Nazi-Soviet pact).
Pete Seeger was a lifelong supporter of communism.
He was a member of the Communist Party.
He supported Stalin and the Soviet Union.
In
Songs for John Doe (1941)
he
sang protest songs against the US fighting the Nazis in WW2.
Why? Because he supported the Soviet Union,
and this was the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
Stalin's songbird,
David Boaz, 14 Apr 2006:
"Seeger is not the only aging Stalinist to get the misty-eyed treatment from elite journalists.
...
And it's an appalling double standard. Imagine a morally neutral, affectionate profile of a nostalgic 80-year-old Nazi. It doesn't happen, it wouldn't happen."
Brendan Behan
supported the Soviet Union,
and applauded the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution
in 1956.
"Long live the USSR",
he declared.
See History Ireland,
Vol. 22 No. 6 (November/December 2014).
Archaeologist
V. Gordon Childe
supported Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Stalin, of course, destroyed much of Russia's heritage.
The apologist for evil,
the Dean of Canterbury
Hewlett Johnson,
supported Lenin, Stalin, the Soviet Union
and North Korea.
He supported the
"anti-war"
(really, pro-Soviet communist)
group, the
People's Convention,
in early 1941,
which
wanted Britain to sue for peace with Hitler.
This was during the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
The communists all immediately changed their tune
after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union
later that year.
The Nobel laureate, the poet
Pablo Neruda,
supported Stalin and Mao and Castro.
He wrote a poem mourning the death of Stalin in 1953:
"To be men! That is
the Stalinist law! ..
We must learn from Stalin".
The feminist
Maria Antonietta Macciocchi
supported Mao,
and wrote
De la Chine ("Daily Life in Revolutionary China") in 1971
in support of the Maoist project.
The actor
Peter Ustinov
(or via here)
supported Stalin, the Soviet Union and
communist China,
and opposed action against Milosevic,
the Taliban, bin Laden and
Saddam.
He wrote Cambodian genocide-denial articles in the Guardian.
He met Pol Pot in 1978, and idiotically asked to see
deposed leader Prince Sihanouk,
and asked about various missing Cambodians and ministers.
He had no idea what he was dealing with.
Pol Pot responded by murdering him.
Olof Palme
opposed the toppling of Pol Pot,
on grounds of state sovereignty:
"the fact
that the auto-genocide has ended in Cambodia
is probably good for the Cambodian people, but one can never
excuse an intervention in a neighbouring country"
Being assassinated
doesn't suddenly make him a great leader.
The Swedish leftist
Jan Myrdal,
lifelong supporter of tyranny
and enemy of human rights.
In the English-speaking world, we are aware of the Ted Ralls and the George Galloways,
but we are vaguely aware that the non-English-speaking western countries
must have their traitors too.
In 2010 he declared his
support for the killing of western troops:
"My anger is so strong that I can feel the taste of blood in my mouth when I see TV pictures of US marines, Swedish mercenaries or Nato soldiers in Afghanistan.
... the only good foreign soldier on Afghan soil is a dead one."
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 Absolute Intellectual, Brian C. Anderson, February 1, 2004,
on Sartre's support for Stalin, Mao,
Castro, Che Guevara,
and the Palestinian killing of civilians:
"By the seventies, Sartre was really nothing more than an apologist for tyranny and terror."
Frantz Fanon
has inspired violent revolution in former colonies across the third world -
most of which has led directly to dictatorship.
Régis Debray
fought with Che Guevara,
and provided a safe house for the Baader-Meinhof gang.
The Khmer Rouge
trace their intellectual origins to France.
The butchers
Khieu Samphan
and
Pol Pot
were both educated in France in the 1940s-50s.
The Heartless Lovers Of Humankind
by Paul Johnson,
Wall Street Journal, 5 January 1987
- "The events in Cambodia in the 1970s, in which between
one-fifth and one-third of the nation was starved to death or
murdered, were entirely the work of a group of intellectuals, who
were for the most part pupils and admirers of Jean-Paul Sartre
- "Sartre's Children," as I call them."
The Iranian Islamist revolution
also traces its intellectual origins to
human rights-hating intellectuals
in France.
The Islamist thug
Ayatollah Khomeini
was granted exile in France,
where he openly denounced human rights and human freedom,
plotted the Islamist takeover of Iran,
and from where he returned in triumph in 1979.
The rise of Islamism
was not inevitable.
As
Alex Epstein
points out, it was caused by western inaction:
"Had we annihilated the Iranian regime 23 years ago, we could have thwarted Islamic terrorism
at the beginning, with far less cost than will be required to defeat terrorism today."
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.
Irish academic
Helena Sheehan
bemoaned the end of the Soviet Empire:
Helena Sheehan,
writing in June 1989 as Eastern Europe
was being liberated from Soviet imperialism:
"The world is 'going our way', the leaders of 'the free world' have declared.
The iron curtain has come tumbling down. The Kremlin has been conquered without a single marine opening fire,
without a single ICBM being launched.
It unravels before me like a nightmare.
No more the red flags flying. No more the heads held high and the fists clenched
and the voices raised to the strains of The Internationale. No more the larger-than-life murals
of workers and soldiers and peasants marching into the future shaping the world
with the labour of their hands and hearts and minds. Now it is to be Mickey Mouse and Coca Cola
and Michael Jackson and Sacchi & Sacchi."
As any normal person would say: "Yes! Yes! Yes! "
And don't you just love those
sneer quotes
round 'the free world'.
Of course only a simple-minded idiot could believe the propaganda
that the open democracies were somehow superior to the
totalitarian communist police states.
Land of the free, home of the brave, Brendan O'Connor, Sept 16, 2001,
on the reaction of the Irish left to 9/11:
"On Marian Finucane .. we were treated to The Irish Voice's
Patrick Farrelly, suggesting that because of the despair that was developing in the Middle East this kind of thing was bound to happen.
While even Iran was commiserating with the US, Helena Sheehan, an American former communist was there too. She admitted that her first thought when she heard about the tragedy was that America would now become even more dangerous in the world than it is already. And then, later, she thought of the human scale of it.
Farrelly batted back that you had to think something like this was going to "come down", given how close Bush's administration was to Ariel Sharon. Sheehan hit out at Bush for exercising power in a naked way, for Kyoto. They were the classic anti-social socialists. Ideology seemed to smother their humanity.
It was inappropriate and quite outrageous."
Soviet and East European dissidents
are the perfect antidote to these appalling thinkers.
Glazov and his family lived under the Soviet jackboot
before they managed to escape to the free world.
Imagine how he felt when he met people in the free world
who supported the Soviets.
My Second Marxist Indoctrination
(and here)
- "Imagine the utter amazement of a refugee from
a Communist country, where Marxism was forced on all students,
now having to sink in a puddle of socialist propaganda again
- but this time in the middle of an American university!"
Hate America Poetry Class
- A moving article on the heroism of the dissident poetry in the USSR,
contrasted with the utter failure of left-wing poetry in the west.
She recalls how in the Soviet Union,
"The mere existence of America gave us the courage to fight."
She is sickened by the Derridas and the Durcans of this world:
"When I see these Lilliputians attacking the noble and generous Gulliver called America, I lose my breath with fury. The attacks of these literary dwarfs on this country feel personal, against me and my safety."
Soviet dissident
Elena Bonner
supports war on Iraq.
As Eastern Europe's loyal support for the US shows,
those who have lived under tyranny
know the value of freedom.
We in the west
have forgotten,
and
have no imagination to imagine what it is like.
The western left has no idea what tyranny is.
Former East European dissidents
Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik and George Konrad
support Bush.
- "George W. Bush may not be our hero, but
he is the one we will support in the war with Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and Saddam
Hussein."
Heroic herald of freedom
by Michael Gove
- Natan Sharansky is the link between the War on Communism
and the War on Islamism.
"To have helped to bring about one revolution, liberating millions, must be considered heroic.
To have helped to start a second, with the chance of freeing millions more, is beyond doubt historic."
Trevor Phillips
(now head of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission)
Arthur Scargill,
who described the tyranny of Cuba as:
"a new and better society in which to live. The future is Socialism and Cuba will show the way."
Oddly, rather than stay in Cuba,
he decided to live in a free, capitalist country.
Ulick O'Connor
regards Che Guevara as a hero.
See Evening Herald, 11 Aug 2012.
Writer Joseph O'Connor
supported communist
Nicaragua
in the 1980s,
as did I.
I don't know why we thought this communist country would be different from other communist countries.
As well as supporting Castro and Milosevic,
the Nobel Prize winning leftist
Harold Pinter
has also
described
the US government as
"the most dangerous power that has ever existed".
He describes Guantanamo POW camp
as a "concentration camp".
He actually believes Bush got elected because of
"propaganda and control of the media"
(rather than, say, because thinking people were convinced by his arguments,
and think people like Pinter are ignorant crackpots).
"Today, we the people of Iran are under the yoke of a regime no less brutal than the Nazis.
Just like the Nazis, the Islamists are motivated by an ideology of hate.
They have destroyed our country that they conquered through terror.
They are as ruthless as the Nazis.
Can Mr. Printer tell us, how can we fight them back with our bare hands?"
"Mr. Pinter is not moved by the misery of people who may not be as white as he is.
...
He thinks others have to fight for their freedom if they really want it badly.
Did you fight for your freedom Mr. Printer or was it given to you in silver platter,
courtesy of the very Americans that today you disregard. How ungrateful of you Sir!"
"As the oppressed people of a third world country, that will remain a third world as long as it is not liberated, we would like to thank the United States of America, the Great Britain and all other countries that helped to get rid of the blood thirsty dictators such as Saddam Hussein, Molla-Omar and the Taleban.
...
We dream of the day that our flag will be hoisted next to the flags of other free nations
and will dance in the wind proclaiming our freedom to the world. The oppressed people
will be victorious and you and your ilk will be remembered as those who sided with their oppressors.
Your name will be covered with shame."
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.
