The Left, Geopolitics, and Believing Lies

Pro-Hamas insanity is part of a bigger malaise in the West:

In a radio interview I recently did (concerning the willingness of British young people to actually ban the Bible if they find it offensive), I mentioned that the left used to be known as standing up for free speech and opposing censorship. ‘Used to be…’

Now of course the secular left is all about defending woke ideology, and that routinely means cancel culture in all its ugly forms. It means censoring different points of view; it means preventing others from being heard; it means punishing those who do not think and say the “right” things.

In addition to today’s left seeking to silence all forms of dissent and contrary thought, a related hallmark is this: a willingness to believe a lie. Indeed, truth takes a hammering as falsehoods are embraced and promoted. We perhaps see no better example of how both these traits of the left are being played out today than in its blind support of Hamas and its frenzied hatred of Israel.

This sort of moral and mental madness is really no different from those who seek to argue that somehow the Germans and Japanese were actually the good guys during WWII. And yes, I just unfriended a social media “friend” for saying just that the other day!

All up we can say that the left is really morphing into the new Nazis of today. Two important thinkers have just penned pieces on this very matter, and they deserve to be heard. The first is titled “Has Hitler won on the left?” by Carl R. Trueman. He writes:

When is a crime victimless? When its perpetrators enjoy the status of victims, at least according to the nihilistic tastes of the West in our day. That is the lesson of reactions to various events in recent years, from the looting that accompanied many of the “mostly peaceful” BLM protests of 2020 to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 this year. The response to the violence in Gaza was especially chilling. While there is always room for debating whether a response is proportionate to the act of aggression, the jubilation and exhilaration expressed by American academics, students, and some politicians over the Hamas attacks started before the Israeli counter-attack.

 

The contradictions at the heart of the modern morality of victimhood have now been exposed to all with eyes to see, even to many who have been pressing it in the political sphere. When members of the LGBTQ lobby express support for Hamas, it is another reminder that many progressives have lost any sense of a moral compass. But this was predictable. When oppressor and oppressed, victimizer and victim are the decisive categories by which to understand the world with no broader moral framework for defining those terms, political morality defaults to that of ressentiment, a reactive stance that simply opposes on principle whatever is. It is the spirit of negation.

He finishes his piece with these words:

Watching the displays of anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas support on the streets of Western democracies over the last few months, I was reminded of two books. One is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In that work — the foundational text for critical theory — they argue that the Nazis needed the Jews because they required an inferior race to dominate in order to establish and justify their own superiority. Today, that necessity for demonizing Jews seems to be felt most acutely by the left. And that connects to the second book: Philip Rieff’s My Life Among the Deathworks. Near the end he recalls that his grandfather did not want to be buried in America, where he lived, but in Israel, where he had grown up. His reason was that “he thought Hitler had won in some way” in the West, and he did not want his grave there. It is a haunting comment. Rieff explains it by arguing that the West is susceptible to “decreation,” a Nazi-like cultural impulse to throw off all external authority and plunge civilization into an orgy of self-destruction. I had always thought it overstatement, but watching the decreation in which the pro-Hamas left have indulged over these many weeks, it is hard not to agree. Perhaps Hitler has won, though on the left — the opposite end of the political spectrum to that we might have expected. And it will take more than symbolic gestures by chief executive officers at Ivy League institutions to overturn that victory. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/12/has-hitler-won-on-the-left

Jordan Peterson is the second author to draw upon here as he rightly argues that “Pro-Hamas protesters are sanctimonious psychopaths”. He begins:

We are now exposed to the truly appalling spectacle of widespread demonstrations across the West supporting — explicitly or implicitly — the terrorists of Hamas. Some of the most shocking scenes unfolded in London, a city often held up as a beacon of immigration-fuelled multiculturalism — one that has now seemingly lost its shine.

 

Yet, troublesome though the impact of such accelerated immigration may be, it is by no means the main reason why Hamas has acquired so much support. It is instead the careless naivete and sheer blind heedlessness of the West in dealing with one of its most deadly national foes — Iran — in combination with the destructive ideological reaction presently threatening our culture to the core.

He continues:

Everyone who hasn’t lived under a rock for the last two decades understands that we are in a culture war of unprecedented depth and breadth. It has not yet broken out into full-fledged conflict, although it came close with the Black Lives Matter and January 6 protests and, most recently and seriously, the massive aforementioned pro-Palestine demonstrations.

 

Disturbing as the dark cloud of the latter may well be, it came with the proverbial silver lining: the unquestionable revelation of the true nature of the culture war: a revelation shocking to so many. How could it possibly be that so much of Western academia (as well as progressives, more generally) could support the very movement behind the worst planned attack on Jews since the Holocaust?

 

To understand that, we must come to understand the unholy alliance between postmodern philosophy and Marxism; something particularly, although not uniquely, attributable to one Michel Foucault, currently the world’s most-cited academic….

He closes with “A warning from history”:

The danger of the victim/victimiser narrative, as such, cannot be overstated. It was its promulgation that engendered Lenin, Stalin and Mao. It was its spread that gave rise to Nazi Germany, and to the more recent absolute catastrophe of the Rwandan massacres. It is a tale as old as time: Cain himself was the first victim, and his good brother, Abel, the first victimiser, deserving of nothing less than a violent death.

 

The instinct operating within the doctrine driving such divisions is aimed not at the forgiveness and peace it constantly claims but the punishment and mayhem that it more truly and most deeply desires. This is a motive in keeping that famously diagnosed by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, where he accused the intellectual socialists, in particular, of not so much loving the poor as hating the rich. Such simple and convenient identification of oppressor provides the murderous with precisely the balm to conscience required to despise and torture, with the best of conscience.

 

There are now hundreds of thousands marching for the demonisation of Jews, manipulated, behind the scenes, by the actions of the Iranian autocrats. They would have little purchase, however, if not enabled by the wretched, simple-minded, prideful “intellectual” Western ideologues, fulminating hatred in the name of compassion, contaminating everything everywhere of any worth whatsoever with the dread accusation of exploitation and oppression.

 

This has happened time and time again in history. The descendants of the ancient Israelites are the universal canaries in the coal mine. If we allow those who are envious of their success to rule, or even to move among us unimpeded in their actions, we are most truly laying our necks, as well as theirs, on the line. We will pay the dread piper, inevitably, as societies and the individuals who compose them have always paid for committing this most egregious, covetous, arrogant, prideful and sadistic of sins.

 

Enough stupidity and blindness. The barbarians are no longer at the gate. They are inside — inside our cities, our civilisation, and our souls. Too many clamour, in consequence, to once again punish Jews. The bloodthirsty desires and doctrines motivating and justifying such behaviour must be identified, understood and rejected, before things get seriously out of hand — and that could happen sooner and with more devastating force than even the most pessimistic among us might be inclined to think. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/14/jordan-peterson-pro-hamas-protesters-sanctimonious-psychopa/

I just read again this morning 2 Thessalonians 2:11 which says: “Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false”. While the context is the man of lawlessness, one has to wonder if such a text directly applies to what we see happening today.

It seems the West as a whole is under divine judgment as so many folks embrace lies, deceit and hatred, and are hellbent on destroying the West and everything that is good about it. How else do we account for this utter diabolical insanity covering the land today?

A word of thanks

I must again thank my good friend John for tipping me off to these two pieces. He regularly sends me links to key pieces – some of which I was not aware of. Thanks John!

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