Twilight of the Red and Green
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The left has never adapted to the transition from nationalistic wars to ideological wars. It took the left a while to grasp that the Nazis were a fundamentally different foe than the Kaiser and that pretending that World War 2 was another war for the benefit of colonialists and arms dealers was the behavior of deluded lunatics. And yet much of the left insisted on approaching the war in just that fashion, and had Hitler not attacked Stalin, it might have remained stuck there.
The Cold War was even worse. The moderate left
never came to terms with Communism. From the Moscow
Trials to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left
slowly disavowed the USSR, but refused to see it as
anything more than a clumsy dictatorship. The only
way that the left could reject the USSR was by
overlooking its ideology and treating it as another
backward Russian tyranny being needlessly provoked
and pushed around by Western Europe and the United
States.
Having failed the test twice, it is no wonder that
the left has been unable to come to terms with
Islam, or that it has resorted to insisting that,
like Germany and Russia, the Muslim world is just
another victim of imperialism and western
warmongering in need of support and encouragement
from the progressive camp.
The anti-war worldview is generations out of date.
It is mired in an outdated analysis of imperial
conflicts that ceased being relevant with the
downfall of the nation-state and its replacement by
international organizations and causes based around
ideologies. Nazism could still loosely fit into the
jackboots of the nation state. Communism was another
creature entirely, a red virus floating around the
world, embedding its ideas into organizations and
using those organizations to take over nations.
Islamism is even more untethered than Communism,
loosely originating from powerful oil nations, but
able to spring up anywhere in the Muslim world. Its
proponents have even less use for the nation state
than the Communists. What they want is a Caliphate
ruled under Islamic law; a single unit of human
organization extending across nations, regions and
eventually the world.
The left is incapable of engaging with Islamism as
an ideology, instead it reduces the conflict to a
struggle between colonial and anti-colonial forces,
showing once again that the left's worldview is
usually at least fifty years out of date. Mapping
colonial and anti-colonial conflicts over a map of
Mali, where the anti-colonial forces are represented
by the slave-owning Tuaregs and the Arab and
Pakistani Jihadis invading an African country, makes
very little sense, but that is all that the left
knows how to do.
The anti-war movement does not deal with wars as
they are, but with a revisionist history of war. The
continuum from Oliver Stone to Ron Paul resolves all
questions through a historical revisionism that
locates the source of every conflict in American
foreign policy. By blaming America for it all, they
are freed of the need to examine who the other side
is and what it wants.
During WW2, Trotskyist unions in the UK claimed that
American troops weren't coming to help fight Hitler,
but to break up labor protests. That same obtuse
obliviousness, the insistence that a conflict
spanning centuries, religions and continents is all
about their pet cause, is how the left has responded
to every conflict since.
Their response to the Clash of Civilizations has
been to include Islamists in the global rainbow
coalition of minorities, gays and gender theorists,
indigent third world farmers, transsexuals, artists
and poets, sex workers and terrorists; without
considering what the Islamists were or how they
would fit into this charmed circle.
The left views the Islamists as just another front
group to be used. The Islamists see the left the
same way and in Iran, Egypt and Tunisia, the
Islamists have a better track record of getting the
better of the left. But the left never learns from
history. It never questions its outdated Marxist
fisheye view of events or realizes that the
Industrial Revolution, feudal peasants and the banks
are not a metaphor for absolutely every struggle
that takes place anywhere in the world. And so the
left dooms itself to repeat again and again the
history that it refuses to learn.
The left only recognizes one ideological war. Its
own. Through its narrow garret window, it sees only
the dead hand of the capitalist establishment and
the fossilized nation-state bound together by a
devilish compact of greed blocking its way. It
cannot recognize that there are other historical
forces at work and other fanatics who dream of
exploiting the collapse of the western nation-state
for their own purposes.
Progressives see history moving forward in their
direction and ignore the Islamists who see
everything coming up Jihad. There are two ideologies
who both see themselves as the culmination of human
history going down the same track and only one of
them can make it to the final destination. The
Islamists understand that, but the left does not.
Rather than deal with Islamism, the left persists in
fighting phantom wars against nationalism,
capitalism, militarism, colonialism and imperialism;
all things that are approaching extinction in its
sphere of influence, while thriving outside its
sphere of influence. The left is too busy fighting a
civil war to see that if it wants to survive, it
will have to fight a global war. True to its nature,
it is determined to finish digesting the West before
it is ready to defend it, and by the time that the
left digests the West, with the help of its Islamist
allies, the war will be over and the left will have
lost.
The left is undone by its own conception of history
as a treadmill moving forward through historical
stages, rather than a chaotic morass of forces
colliding together. In the progressive understanding
of history, progressive forces defeat reactionary
forces and humanity advances to the next stage.
There is no room in that neat orderly evolution for
the violent chaos of Islamism and its resurrection
of tribal forces, ethnic grievances and religious
intolerance into a worldwide movement that is every
bit as fanatical and determined to forcibly carve
out its own vision of a new world order.
From the progressive perspective of history as an
evolutionary process, Islamist tribal fanaticism is
from too early a stage to threaten the left.
Socialism must battle against the industrialism of
the previous stage, with each generation advancing
the future by destroying the achievements of the
previous generation in a species of grim historical
cannibalism. The left fears being held back by
capitalism, not by Islamism. It does not believe
that the values of the 6th century can compete with
it, only that the values of the 19th century can.
The left's rigid view of history has caused it
problems before. It rejected Zionism as a historical
aberration, and spent over a century fighting
against the idea with spiteful hate, propaganda,
terrorism and tanks. In the left's view of history,
a Jewish State is an attempt to turn back time by
building a state whose roots are in religious
scripture. Israel is ahistorical and must therefore
be destroyed.
What it rejected as ahistorical for the Western Jew,
who was expected to assimilate into the Socialist
society, rather than building a nation state of his
own, it accepted from the Muslim world, which it
deemed more backward and in need of passing through
all the historical stages to get to the red finish
line. The left has been willing to tentatively
accept Islamism, even when it is destroying Arab
Socialism, because it assumes that Muslims are
backward enough to need an Islamic simulation of
Socialism.
While the left sees itself as progressive and
Islamism as reactionary, it is the left that has
trouble adapting to new developments, while the
Islamists have successfully glommed onto everything
from the Cold War to the fall of the Soviet Union,
the rise of international organizations and even the
War on Terror, and exploited events for their ends.
In the new century, the Islamists have been riding
the left over the finish line, without the left
realizing that it was being ridden.
The Islamists are intellectually and morally
backward, but unlike their collaborators on the left
they are not bounded by an inflexible vision of
history. Their strategy is flexible and they are
willing to do anything that works. They are utterly
unconcerned with the tactics they use or with the
historical implications of movements and events so
long as they lead to them toward a Caliphate.
The Islamists do not need to understand the left.
All they need to do is go on using it. The left does
need to understand Islamists, but generally chooses
not to. When some among the left, like Christopher
Hitchens, take a long look at the Islamists, they
have the same reaction that the USSR did when the
Nazi tank began rolling across the Russian border,
and realize that it's come down to fight or die.
The left dwells in an intellectual bubble of its own
making. It transforms that bubble into an elaborate
place, furnishing the space until it resembles a
miniature world, but a bubble is not a world, it can
only ever be a bubble. Ideology is the left's
bubble. It is the lens that the left sees through,
the air that it breathes and the clamor that fills
its ears. Ideology conditions the left to view
history as an orderly progression. An arrangement of
chess pieces moving forward in a complex strategy to
cripple their opponents.
The left is often vicious, hysterical and
irrational, but underneath that is the vision of an
orderly historical progression toward a great
society. Trapped inside the bubble, it cannot
realize that the world is going backward, not
forward, that the 21st century is really the 7th
century and that the future is the past. The
Islamists understand this quite well. The left
cannot.