The Left is Wrong about Everything
The left has been wrong about everything, but that fact has never penetrated leftists' confidence in their own righteousness or shaken faith in their ideology. There is never any recognition by leftists that their own passionately held beliefs have been proven wrong again and again. On the contrary, my experience with academics on the left, which is the majority in most universities, is disdain for any opinion other than that approved by the leftist fraternity/sorority. Open-mindedness is not a characteristic of the left.
Bearing in mind this hallucinatory quality, let me offer a clear and fresh definition for the left. I've come to the realization that what distinguishes the left, and defines it, is delusion-- self-delusion and other-delusion.
First, a couple of examples of leftist self-delusion. David Horowitz in his book Radical Son, writes about his communist father’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1932, where and when he completely missed (or chose to ignore ?) the horror of starvation and death that killed 10 million peasants at the same time that he was there. All he saw and recorded were the supposed marvels of a changed society where harmony and loving companionable life was everywhere. His communist ideology and affiliation remained unshaken and unquestioning.
Another interesting case of self-delusion I personally witnessed as part of the student audience who came to listen to the highly acclaimed economist, Joan Robinson. Joan Robinson, the then definitive authority on the subject of capital, came to the University of Toronto to tell us about her visit to Mao-Zedong's China, where she was an honoured and feted guest. She too, like David Horowitz' father, was persuaded that communist Chinese society was one where humanity had already been transformed to peacefulness, harmony, honesty, egalitarianism, and tolerance. To my amazement she demonstrated the vitality of honour and honesty among Chinese people by an incident that had occurred to her there, when, having left a broken pen in her hotel room, a hotel staff member rushed to the airport to return it to her. And she told us this tale with sincerity, and what was for me, gullability.
The reason I was amazed by the great Joan Robinson's naivity is because I had a friend who had done business in China early on in the opening of trade with Canada who had had an identical experience. Moreover, when he was unimpressed with this sign of honesty and said as much, he was woken at night and brought to a police establishment for questioning, at which time he apologized for his transgression and blamed his expression of skepticism on having been drunk, enjoying the great Chinese beer too liberally. He did not want to end up in a Chinese prison.
When one contrasts the reactions of Joan Robinson and that of my friend to this nonsensical practice (the Chinese must have hoarded broken pens for the occasions), it can be explained with ease, because Joan Robinson operated on the self-delusion of the left, and my friend clearly did not.
I don't believe that Joan Robinson was out to delude us. But Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times was. He was fully aware of the horrors that were taking place in the Soviet Union in the '30's -- the deliberate starvation of hundreds of thousands if not millions of peasants, Stalin's murder and/or imprisonment of any opposition, and much more-- but Duranty chose to concealed it all. Why? "To protect socialism from its taint" he said. This is the nature of other-deception on the part of the left.
Leftists in the thirties were pacifists but mainly antifascists , especially in relation to the civil war in Spain. But then when Stalin made his pact with Hitler they became opposed to any war against Hitler, no longer were they antifascists. But this was followed by another about face when Hitler attacked Stalin. Now American and Canadian leftists became superpatriots, attacking any former political friend who failed in their eyes to support America’s war effort with sufficient zeal. When union leaders such as John L. Lewis refused to take a "no-strike" pledge, they accused them of being ‘pro-Nazi’ and ‘traitors’, of destroying the home front.
Let's be clear. These people knew exactly what they were doing. This was not a case of self-delusion. They were trying to propogandize others in the interest of their own ideological position. Did they really believe that no one would notice their hypocracy? Well, yes they did, and the sad truth is that to a large extent they managed to deceive and delude at least a sizeable portion of the public by their "progressive" imposture.
But with the end of WWII, when they became apologists for the new dictatorship that Stalin was creating in Eastern Europe, and the situation there was becoming more blatant, liberals began to distance themselves more and more. The deception of the left became glaringly obvious, especially after the revelations by Khrushchev in 1965 about the KGB and the Gulag . How could the most ardent supporters continue to spread their lies? The left's tactics had to change.
Their new focus was the "evil" democratic and capitalist West, in which democracy was denounced as a fraud and capitalism as an exploitation. Noam Chomsky was the modern hero of this transformed ideological position, and he set the politically correct position to take on many issues.
For all his outspoken in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came to the real world of international politics, Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, as well as Mao Zedong and the founders of the Chinese communist state.
First, a word about the Che Guevera that Chomsky so approved. Guevera defended the outlawing of opposition factions as a form of revolutionary "democracy", not unlike what Lenin or Stalin did. Also, he invented a universal theory--the wickedness of the international Jewish conspiracy--and he persisted in fitting every square peg of cold hard reality into that theory’s round hole. So, in endorsing Guevera, Chomsky was encouraging reverence of a despot and an anti-semite.
Now let's look at Chomsky and the leftist touting of the Chinese communist state. In December, 1967, he told a forum in New York that in China "one finds many things that are really quite admirable." He called Mao Zedong’s China "relatively livable" and a"just society". He maintained that the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles.
Chomsky had every resource and every reason to know better. At that same New York forum in 1967, he acknowledged both "the mass slaughter of landlords in China" and "the slaughter of landlords in North Vietnam" that had taken place once the communists came to power. But, he dismissed reports coming out of China that Mao was a mass murderer because his main objective was to provide a rationalization for this violence both in China and North Vietnam, just as the leftist voices had offered deceptive reports about the USSR in bygone days. A recent publication by Jung Chang called Mao: the Unknown Story, estimates that the number of deaths perpetrated by Mao at 70 million-- and this was during peace time-- and that Mao knowingly starved his own people in order to realize his dream of becoming a nuclear power.
The reason I focus on Chomsky is because I believe he sets the agenda and the terms of the agenda for what might be called the new left to distinguish it from the old left that concentrated its program around the USSR. The wrong-headedness of that new left is blatant when we look at Chomsky and the left's response to the Khmer Rouge when it took over Cambodia in 1975.
Both Chomsky and the new left welcomed it. And when news emerged of the extraordinary event that immediately followed, the complete evacuation of the capital Phnom Penh accompanied by reports of widespread killings, Chomsky offered a rationalization similar to those he had provided for the terror in China and Vietnam: ie., there might have been some violence, but this was understandable under conditions of regime change and social revolution.
Astounding too that the new left touted the wonders and miracles of Kim Il Sung of North Korea, that mass starver of his people. Ronald Radosh, an awakened leftist, writes about this and other mad delusions of the new left in the book Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left. This too is a book worth looking at for its revelations about the conspiratorial realities within the leftist organizations and various front groups.
The most egregious falsehoods that are coming out of the left today involves their denouncement of Israel and their verbal endorsement of Palestinian terrorist tactics. In this regard, the left has allied itself with the Muslim world. The hypocracy here is astounding because leftist progressivism is supposedly passionate about human rights and women's liberation, both of which are scarce as hen's teeth in Islamic societies. In the fall of 2001, being pro-gay and pro-feminist didn’t stop the left from defending an Afghan regime that disenfranchised women and executed homosexuals. But leftists don't worry about hypocracy or inconsistency. The main thing that is currently dominating leftist causes and positions is whether or not they are making a case against the United States and about their castigation of Israel.
The reason why this obsession of the Left with undermining Israel is so profoundly troubling is not only that it is the new pariah characterization of Jews through converting Israel into the universal Jew, although this form of anti-semitism has spread like a contagious disease through Europe and the Muslim world, but worse, the left has by this endorsement of Palestinian causes and practices, justified and enhanced the terrorist menace throughout the whole world. No one can deny that leftist media refusal to even name Palestinian terrorism for what it is, has an encouraging aspect to the murderous practices. To call terrorism militantism or insurgency or freedom fighting is meant to say it is most respectable and necessary. The left has now, as in the past, an awful lot of responsibility for the death of thousands of men, women and children that Jews and others have experienced because of their wrongheaded and even evilly intended ideological messages, along with their control over institutions such as universities, media and government.
Within the universities, including Tel Aviv University, there are professors who don't pretend that there is any purpose to their teaching of students other than to convict Israel of every evil that exists, to indoctrinate them in leftist ideology, and that there is no more place for academic freedom or for rational thought. You might want to look at an article by Leila Beckwith in the L A Times ( her article is to be found at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-academicfreedom28aug28,0,6415943.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary) in which she demonstrates the extent of this leftist destruction of academic freedom all in the interest of condemning Israel and promoting the Palestinian cause. But California is not alone in this regard. Where the left dominate, there is delusion and indoctrination. Frankly, it is time that parents and faculty and institutions wake up to the true and dangerous reality of the left.
Ronald Rodash concludes his personal recount of starting life in the bosom of the communist movement and his slow arousal to the fantasies of the left as well as its conspiratorial nature with the following:
In its many shape-shifting forms -- radical feminism, ultra-environmentalism, pro-Arabism, political correctness, the new anarchism -- the leftover Left has developed new issues and causes, all fought for with the same earnestness, arrogance and thougtlessness that we brought to the fight for communism and then socialism from the 1940's through the 1980's. Our history should have been a cautionary tale, but as the causes of yesteryear collapsed, my old friends found it hard to reevaluate their experiences or acknowledg that they were wrong.
Bearing in mind this hallucinatory quality, let me offer a clear and fresh definition for the left. I've come to the realization that what distinguishes the left, and defines it, is delusion-- self-delusion and other-delusion.
First, a couple of examples of leftist self-delusion. David Horowitz in his book Radical Son, writes about his communist father’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1932, where and when he completely missed (or chose to ignore ?) the horror of starvation and death that killed 10 million peasants at the same time that he was there. All he saw and recorded were the supposed marvels of a changed society where harmony and loving companionable life was everywhere. His communist ideology and affiliation remained unshaken and unquestioning.
Another interesting case of self-delusion I personally witnessed as part of the student audience who came to listen to the highly acclaimed economist, Joan Robinson. Joan Robinson, the then definitive authority on the subject of capital, came to the University of Toronto to tell us about her visit to Mao-Zedong's China, where she was an honoured and feted guest. She too, like David Horowitz' father, was persuaded that communist Chinese society was one where humanity had already been transformed to peacefulness, harmony, honesty, egalitarianism, and tolerance. To my amazement she demonstrated the vitality of honour and honesty among Chinese people by an incident that had occurred to her there, when, having left a broken pen in her hotel room, a hotel staff member rushed to the airport to return it to her. And she told us this tale with sincerity, and what was for me, gullability.
The reason I was amazed by the great Joan Robinson's naivity is because I had a friend who had done business in China early on in the opening of trade with Canada who had had an identical experience. Moreover, when he was unimpressed with this sign of honesty and said as much, he was woken at night and brought to a police establishment for questioning, at which time he apologized for his transgression and blamed his expression of skepticism on having been drunk, enjoying the great Chinese beer too liberally. He did not want to end up in a Chinese prison.
When one contrasts the reactions of Joan Robinson and that of my friend to this nonsensical practice (the Chinese must have hoarded broken pens for the occasions), it can be explained with ease, because Joan Robinson operated on the self-delusion of the left, and my friend clearly did not.
I don't believe that Joan Robinson was out to delude us. But Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times was. He was fully aware of the horrors that were taking place in the Soviet Union in the '30's -- the deliberate starvation of hundreds of thousands if not millions of peasants, Stalin's murder and/or imprisonment of any opposition, and much more-- but Duranty chose to concealed it all. Why? "To protect socialism from its taint" he said. This is the nature of other-deception on the part of the left.
Leftists in the thirties were pacifists but mainly antifascists , especially in relation to the civil war in Spain. But then when Stalin made his pact with Hitler they became opposed to any war against Hitler, no longer were they antifascists. But this was followed by another about face when Hitler attacked Stalin. Now American and Canadian leftists became superpatriots, attacking any former political friend who failed in their eyes to support America’s war effort with sufficient zeal. When union leaders such as John L. Lewis refused to take a "no-strike" pledge, they accused them of being ‘pro-Nazi’ and ‘traitors’, of destroying the home front.
Let's be clear. These people knew exactly what they were doing. This was not a case of self-delusion. They were trying to propogandize others in the interest of their own ideological position. Did they really believe that no one would notice their hypocracy? Well, yes they did, and the sad truth is that to a large extent they managed to deceive and delude at least a sizeable portion of the public by their "progressive" imposture.
But with the end of WWII, when they became apologists for the new dictatorship that Stalin was creating in Eastern Europe, and the situation there was becoming more blatant, liberals began to distance themselves more and more. The deception of the left became glaringly obvious, especially after the revelations by Khrushchev in 1965 about the KGB and the Gulag . How could the most ardent supporters continue to spread their lies? The left's tactics had to change.
Their new focus was the "evil" democratic and capitalist West, in which democracy was denounced as a fraud and capitalism as an exploitation. Noam Chomsky was the modern hero of this transformed ideological position, and he set the politically correct position to take on many issues.
For all his outspoken in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came to the real world of international politics, Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, as well as Mao Zedong and the founders of the Chinese communist state.
First, a word about the Che Guevera that Chomsky so approved. Guevera defended the outlawing of opposition factions as a form of revolutionary "democracy", not unlike what Lenin or Stalin did. Also, he invented a universal theory--the wickedness of the international Jewish conspiracy--and he persisted in fitting every square peg of cold hard reality into that theory’s round hole. So, in endorsing Guevera, Chomsky was encouraging reverence of a despot and an anti-semite.
Now let's look at Chomsky and the leftist touting of the Chinese communist state. In December, 1967, he told a forum in New York that in China "one finds many things that are really quite admirable." He called Mao Zedong’s China "relatively livable" and a"just society". He maintained that the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles.
Chomsky had every resource and every reason to know better. At that same New York forum in 1967, he acknowledged both "the mass slaughter of landlords in China" and "the slaughter of landlords in North Vietnam" that had taken place once the communists came to power. But, he dismissed reports coming out of China that Mao was a mass murderer because his main objective was to provide a rationalization for this violence both in China and North Vietnam, just as the leftist voices had offered deceptive reports about the USSR in bygone days. A recent publication by Jung Chang called Mao: the Unknown Story, estimates that the number of deaths perpetrated by Mao at 70 million-- and this was during peace time-- and that Mao knowingly starved his own people in order to realize his dream of becoming a nuclear power.
The reason I focus on Chomsky is because I believe he sets the agenda and the terms of the agenda for what might be called the new left to distinguish it from the old left that concentrated its program around the USSR. The wrong-headedness of that new left is blatant when we look at Chomsky and the left's response to the Khmer Rouge when it took over Cambodia in 1975.
Both Chomsky and the new left welcomed it. And when news emerged of the extraordinary event that immediately followed, the complete evacuation of the capital Phnom Penh accompanied by reports of widespread killings, Chomsky offered a rationalization similar to those he had provided for the terror in China and Vietnam: ie., there might have been some violence, but this was understandable under conditions of regime change and social revolution.
Astounding too that the new left touted the wonders and miracles of Kim Il Sung of North Korea, that mass starver of his people. Ronald Radosh, an awakened leftist, writes about this and other mad delusions of the new left in the book Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left. This too is a book worth looking at for its revelations about the conspiratorial realities within the leftist organizations and various front groups.
The most egregious falsehoods that are coming out of the left today involves their denouncement of Israel and their verbal endorsement of Palestinian terrorist tactics. In this regard, the left has allied itself with the Muslim world. The hypocracy here is astounding because leftist progressivism is supposedly passionate about human rights and women's liberation, both of which are scarce as hen's teeth in Islamic societies. In the fall of 2001, being pro-gay and pro-feminist didn’t stop the left from defending an Afghan regime that disenfranchised women and executed homosexuals. But leftists don't worry about hypocracy or inconsistency. The main thing that is currently dominating leftist causes and positions is whether or not they are making a case against the United States and about their castigation of Israel.
The reason why this obsession of the Left with undermining Israel is so profoundly troubling is not only that it is the new pariah characterization of Jews through converting Israel into the universal Jew, although this form of anti-semitism has spread like a contagious disease through Europe and the Muslim world, but worse, the left has by this endorsement of Palestinian causes and practices, justified and enhanced the terrorist menace throughout the whole world. No one can deny that leftist media refusal to even name Palestinian terrorism for what it is, has an encouraging aspect to the murderous practices. To call terrorism militantism or insurgency or freedom fighting is meant to say it is most respectable and necessary. The left has now, as in the past, an awful lot of responsibility for the death of thousands of men, women and children that Jews and others have experienced because of their wrongheaded and even evilly intended ideological messages, along with their control over institutions such as universities, media and government.
Within the universities, including Tel Aviv University, there are professors who don't pretend that there is any purpose to their teaching of students other than to convict Israel of every evil that exists, to indoctrinate them in leftist ideology, and that there is no more place for academic freedom or for rational thought. You might want to look at an article by Leila Beckwith in the L A Times ( her article is to be found at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-academicfreedom28aug28,0,6415943.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary) in which she demonstrates the extent of this leftist destruction of academic freedom all in the interest of condemning Israel and promoting the Palestinian cause. But California is not alone in this regard. Where the left dominate, there is delusion and indoctrination. Frankly, it is time that parents and faculty and institutions wake up to the true and dangerous reality of the left.
Ronald Rodash concludes his personal recount of starting life in the bosom of the communist movement and his slow arousal to the fantasies of the left as well as its conspiratorial nature with the following:
In its many shape-shifting forms -- radical feminism, ultra-environmentalism, pro-Arabism, political correctness, the new anarchism -- the leftover Left has developed new issues and causes, all fought for with the same earnestness, arrogance and thougtlessness that we brought to the fight for communism and then socialism from the 1940's through the 1980's. Our history should have been a cautionary tale, but as the causes of yesteryear collapsed, my old friends found it hard to reevaluate their experiences or acknowledg that they were wrong.
posted by Professor Sal at 7:10 AM
4 Comments:
I have often noticed the phenomenon of Jewish pre-eminence in the radical left. Some of this is family history. That needs clarification. Among Jewish intellectuals you will find a disproportionate number of second and third generation whose parents and grandparents were communists. That's the case of David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh, for eg., and in my university Leo Panitch. But that doesn't explain why the grandparents were communists. However, that is easier to understand. It was a time of secular revolt among Jews combined with faith in social and political reform as an escape from intolerable oppression. The Bund was a perfect example of what I'm talking about here. And another important factor is that Jews were ideologues traditionally, so that when they rejected the tradition they transferred their ideological attachment to the radical ideals of communism. If you ever argued with such people you'd know that no matter what, they are obsessive about the need to be right. Bear in mind, that although I'm not in any way a talmudic scholar, I know that the exercise is one that involves proving one's position to be right. That means that traditionally the training of Jews was towards ideology , newly leftist, and unwillingness or inability to see the truth because being right was the end all and be all.
This is an answer on the top of my head, but I'll be thinking about this some more and come back to it.
To Abborden I have this comment. I'm afraid that your lack of a home is worse outside of America than within its borders. The leftist anti-semitism of Europe is hated-filled and virulent, and it has allied itself with Arab Jew-hatred, which in turn has adopted the insanest aspects of European anti-semitism to add to its own Islamic-fascism. I have lived a long time by now, 3/4 of a century, and there's been no time in my life that I haven't been plagued by Jew-hatred, surrounded by it in one form or another. At first as a youngster by personal experiences, that soon translated into the recognition that such discrimination was manifesting itself into mass murder of my people, including members of my immediate family. Then Israel seemed like a way out, but of course it became the pariah Jew for specialized discrimatory comdemnation. Why? That's another topic. For now, Abborden, I'm grateful to hear from you who cares about Israel and Jewish life.
The crimes of the far left are indisputable, but the far right is just as ruthless and evil. You also write about Fascist Islam ignoring a similar Fascist ideology in Israel. People in the Center like myself prefer arguments that strive for a balanced approach. I fear that you'll end up creating more barriers than solutions.
Sorry anonymous but I don't see the evidence for Israeli fascism. There may be fascistic individuals in Israel as there is everywhere, but there is absolutely no policy of Israel's that is fascistic. Fascist societies do not tolerate disputing the official position. Israel's people and institutions are constantly challenging government policy, nor is the press in line with it (except by accident. Israel has the most quarrelsome people in the world, and it has 20% of its population that is Arab and often or regularly sides with the enemies of Israel, yet votes and has representatives in the Knesset. In fact, Rabin's acceptance of the Oslo accords that brought Arafat and his thugs to Israel, only happened with a bare majority in the Knesset vote of which five were Arab votes. In other words, the Jewish population of Israel did not get its way because they were outvoted by the Arabs' contribution.
A discussion, Anonymous, is not about "balance", it is about truth. Attacking Israel with falsehoods is not debate.
Post a Comment
<< Home