Why the Modern Left is Unable to Muster a Damn

Thursday - April 05, 2007

Why the Modern Left is Unable to Muster a Damn

In a previous post, I attempted to put my finger on why the left seems to reject Western values. Soon after I wrote that post, I came across a highly intelligent and thorough assessment of what the author calls the post-modern left. The blog, Armed and Dangerous, looks at the communist inspired roots of our modern American left.

If you wonder why normal patriotic Americans feel uncomfortable around most Democrats and their leftist masters, it is because most Democrats and the left in general have adopted communist propaganda that the Soviets were using to undermine our Lockean based form of government. Here is a taste of the article. Make sure to read the entire post though.

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

* There is no truth, only competing agendas.
* All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
* There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
* The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
* Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
* The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
* For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
* When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia.

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals; summary by Koch here) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the “race bomb” rumor, really were instruments deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation, irony, or an automatic and half-conscious genuflection towards the altar of political correctness. In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.

The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion. Liberal anticommunists (like myself in the 1970s) thought we were being judicious and fair-minded when we dismissed half of the Right’s complaint as crude blather. We were wrong; the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss really were guilty, the Hollywood Ten really were Stalinist tools, and all of Joseph McCarthy’s rants about “Communists in the State Department” were essentially true. The Venona transcripts and other new material leave no room for reasonable doubt on this score.

While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn’t outlast it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture’s response to Islamic terrorism.

In this context, Jeff Goldstein has written eloquently about perhaps the most long-term dangerous of these memes — the idea that rights inhere not in sovereign individuals but identity groups, and that every identity group (except the “ruling class”) has the right to suppress criticism of itself through political means up to and including violence.

Mark Brittingham (aka WildMonk) has written an excellent essay on the roots of this doctrine in Rousseau and the post-Enlightenment Romantics. It has elsewhere been analyzed and labeled as transnational progressivism. The Soviets didn’t invent it, but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate — and appallingly successful — attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange.

Call it what you will — various other commentators have favored ‘volk-Marxism’ or ‘postmodern leftism’. I’ve called it suicidalism. It was designed to paralyze the West against one enemy, but it’s now being used against us by another. It is no accident that Osama bin Laden so often sounds like he’s reading from back issues of Z magazine, and no accident that both constantly echo the hoariest old cliches of Soviet propaganda in the 1930s and ’40s.

Another consequence of Stalin’s meme war is that today’s left-wing antiwar demonstrators wear kaffiyehs without any sense of how grotesque it is for ostensible Marxists to cuddle up to religious absolutists who want to restore the power relations of the 7th century CE. In Stalin’s hands, even Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon — it became increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive. The postmodern left is now defined not by what it’s for but by by what it’s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.

The modern American left is in fact, not even American in nature. The left rejects individualism, the basic building block of our Republic. Group rights, of course, politically belong to the left and their Democratic shills. Gay rights, women's rights, disabled rights, worker's rights. Never do the Democrats or the left talk about the God given rights of the individual. The danger of group rights should be self-evident. Groups can fall out of favor. Just ask the Jews for instance. But individual rights, rights that are given to men by their Creator, are by definition, beyond the control of government. How can a government go against God? The left is working to change that and as result, allow governments to define rights.

Furthermore, from this article, we find that in fact, the left and their Democratic lap dogs, have bought into the Soviet argument that all of the West's good means nothing because of Western imperialism. A light bulb should be going on in your head right now. This is why the Democrats and leftists are so opposed to the American use of force. They have bought into the communist propaganda that every Western action is tainted by the original sin of imperialism. The idiots on the left, apparently, failed their history courses. The source of their political philosophy is responsible for millions upon millions of deaths throughout the world. The starvation of the Ukraine by Stalin in the 1930s is just one example.

In American, right now, the only movement that embodies the American political tradition is the conservative movement. The Democrats and the left have adopted the warped propaganda of a dead empire. Where are the FDRs, the Trumans, the New Dealers? They left the Democratic Party long ago, when it started to adopt the talking points of the Soviet Union.

Update: I came across this article which was posted at RightWingNews. If this doesn't support the thesis that the American left is inspired by communism, and its anti-state, anti-capitalism, and anti-individual rights philosophy, then you have buried your head in the sand. This is how the left and the Democrats think. How can you be confortable with this line of thinking? It is just so un-American. So anti-Lockean. Yet so typical of our leftist leadership:

Increasingly, United States foreign and domestic policies are determined by a relative handful of cynical bourgeois, some of whom are not even US Americans. Their malevolence is exceeded only by their avarice.

True to their deceitful natures, the moneyed elite have contrived the “War on Terror” as an attack on those bold enough to violently oppose their enslavement. Yes, the latest campaign to enforce Pax Americana is simply a new front in the “War on the Poor and Oppressed.” Humanity has been embroiled in an epic struggle between the pecunious and impoverished since it developed agriculture, abandoned nomadism, and began the acquisition of wealth. Industrialization, consumerism, materialism, debt slavery, wage slavery, hyper-competitiveness, egocentrism, and the myriad of ills spawned by American Capitalism have catapulted the plutocracy into the stratosphere in terms of wealth and power. They are not about to quietly relinquish their ill-gotten spoils.

Despite the deepening misery and increasing numbers of indigent human beings, our corporate masters and their loyal propagandists assure us that the class wars are over. After all, the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s rush to embrace “free markets” “prove” that Socialism and Communism are utopian failures. The United States and the countries it has conquered (sorry, that’s liberated), are meritocracies. For those of you in rags, riches are just around the corner. Simply get off your lazy posteriors and apply a little elbow grease. Such tripe rolls easily off the tongues of those pulling down six, seven or eight figure incomes, people who nestle safely within the confines of their gated communities and rest upon the comfortable support of their inherited or plundered fortunes.

Yet far from having ended, thanks to the tireless efforts of Goldwater, Buckley, Nixon, Reagan, Cheney, Bush, and a host of other neo-fascists, the enduring socioeconomic struggle has reached a fever pitch. Tragically, the ruling elite have utilized their formidable agitprop to beguile the confused masses into believing that our depraved system’s victims (and their champions) are the enemy.

Consider:

In stark contrast to George Bush, a man responsible for the deaths of a million or more Iraqis and Afghanistanis plus thousands of US Americans in New Orleans and Iraq, Hugo Chavez has no blood on his hands. And Chavez, a man who has mitigated the suffering of millions of people, is the “threat”.

Resistance fighters battling to expel an imperialist foreign occupier which has been waging genocide against the Iraqi people since the Gulf War are “terrorists”. The invading hordes are hailed as “liberators”.

Ridiculously out-gunned and out-financed Palestinian groups like Hamas, which resort to violence in a desperate attempt to counter brutal Zionist ethnic cleansing, Apartheid, occupation, and colonization, commit “acts of terror” when they kill Israeli civilians. Conversely, Israeli IDF forces are “fully justified” when they commit murder on a much wider scale because they are “defending Israel’s right to exist”.