Daniel Greenfield
On the surface of it they seem to have very little in common. The left claims to be progressive, embraces gay bars, abortions, feminism, worker's rights civil rights, multiculturalism and obscene slogans. The Islamists throw acid in women's faces, hang gays on every streetcorner and repress minorities and freedom of expression. This seeming contrast baffles many who demand to know how for example the left can champion Islamic regimes which mandate the death penalty for homosexuality. The answer is very simple. The people asking the question have mistaken the facade for the reality. The left is socially progressive only in its revolutionary phase. The Soviet Union, Castro's Cuba and Communist China all had much the same view of gay people-- that Iran does today. While gay writers in America campaigned for the USSR or Cuba, both those regimes imprisoned gay writers. Homosexuality was a criminal offense in the USSR until its actual fall. None of this bothered liberals in the West, who were happy to trek to Moscow, meet with Soviet leaders and blame the US for the Cold War. And then come home and talk about how intolerant the United States is.
The USSR was happy to discuss the civil rights of African-Americans in the US. Liberals however did not care that most of the African-Americans who came to Russia early after the revolution wound up in Gulags or dead. This has been documented in books such as Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union by Robert Robinson, an African-American engineer who came to find a job but was unable to leave for over four decades, while remaining constantly in fear for his life in a racist society.
Then there's Castro's Cuba, which practices unofficial racial segregation. Yes, not a fact you're likely to see in a Michael Moore documentary.
Jorge Luis García Pérez in Cuba, a pro-democracy activist who was only recently released from prison, said: "The authorities in my country have never tolerated that a black person oppose the regime." Carlos Moore has said; "There is an unstated threat. Blacks in Cuba know that whenever you raise race in Cuba, you go to jail. Therefore the struggle in Cuba is different. There cannot be a civil rights movement. You will have instantly 10,000 black people dead." Do you think that any of the Hollywood liberals like Spielberg or Costner who fall over themselves praising Castro care? Why would they.
Shall we discuss worker's rights? In the West, Communists championed unions. In the USSR, striking workers were meant with machine gun fire. In 1962, workers in the city of Novocherkassk tried to go on strike to protest pay cuts. They were gunned down in the street in front of city hall by Soviet troops. This mind you was in the days of the relatively "moderate" Communist regime of Khrushchev. Independent unions were illegal there. Just as they are illegal in the USSR.
It's possible to write volumes on this topic, but let's just cut to the chase. An actual left wing dictatorship brutally represses everything they claim to fight for.
While in the West, experimental artists were cheering on the USSR, in the USSR, such art was considered degenerate, just as it was in Nazi Germany. And the same went for literature. The USSR did push a sham feminism and occasionally abortion rights, not because they believed in it, but because they needed to expand the workforce. On the other hand divorces were hard to come by, and women who obtained them risked being expelled from the Communist Party. All the elements of political equality and civil rights that the left claimed to be fighting for, were in fact completely absent from Communist regimes. And that never bothered the left at all.
The social progressivism of the left has never been anything but a fraud. A tool used to recruit bohemian activists to fight on their side, while purging them once the revolution was successful. The left tries to overturn the values of a target society as part of a comprehensive revolutionary assault. That doesn't mean that its actual values are different. Once the left gains absolute power, it seeks to create a static and unchanging system. The perfect Utopian society with immovable laws administered by an endless political bureaucracy. In the real world this translates into a repressive search for stability. Which means banning exactly the same things that the left had been fighting for. And the first thing to be banned is always the right to dissent. A right that the left insists on for itself when it is out of power, but does not permit to others when it is.
George Orwell expressed this closed circle at the end of Animal Farm by having the "new bosses" who were once pigs become indistinguishable from the farmers, the "old bosses". The pigs had not been interested in an animal run farm. What they all along wanted was to take over. To become the farmers. Championing the rights of all animals to be free was only a tool to accomplish their end goal. Absolute power.
This finally brings us back to Islam. There has never been any contradiction between the left making common cause with Islamist movements and regimes that murder gay people. Because if the Left in the West ever gained absolute power, they would murder them too. For that matter 90 percent of the idiots attending their anti-war rallies would end up in front of a firing square. Does this sound far-fetched to you? Guess what, virtually every Communist regime did the same thing in its time.
Do you know what the worst possible way to survive a Communist takeover is? It's being a member of a right wing organization. Do you know what the second worst way is? Being a member of a left wing organization. Do you know what the third worst way is? Being a member of the Communist party before the takeover. Yes, the third worst thing to be when the Communists take over, is to be one of them. Because you'll only get to live long enough to help wipe out the members of right wing organizations and the members of left wing non-Communist groups, before your own turn comes.
This is not just the norm for Communists, it's a common pattern on the left. The French Revolution degenerated into horrifying massacres and endless executions in exactly that same way. First the radicals purge "enemies of the state", then they purge each other, then they themselves are purged to make way for a more stable system. The end result is a repressive state that has wiped out anyone who might want to change things. Which was the goal all along.
So the idea that the Left would have only moral objections to the Islamists is just plain naive. In fact the Left and the Islamists agree on the essential bullet points, including the part about using actual bullets and who they want to kill. As far as both Left Wing and Islamist leaders are concerned, 90 percent of their movements consist of nothing more than useful idiots good for nothing but cannon fodder. Don't believe me? When was the last time, a Hamas leader sent one of his sons to blow himself up? It never happened. And never will.
The Islamists and the Leftists have the same goal. Absolute power. Islam like Communism is a means to that end. This is what makes them so dangerous. Their goal is to create absolute tyrannies based on ideologies that promise a better world. The ideology is what brings them to power as useful idiots kill and die, thinking that they're fighting to create a Utopian society run according to the Koran (a book supposedly dictated by an illiterate merchant who used his claims of getting divine messages from angels to rule over an entire region) or Marxism (essays produced by a man who never worked for a living, but was supported by the profits from a textile factory) that will usher in a new era where everyone (except all the people they killed) are happy.
The Left is on the same page as the Islamists. Just as they were on the same page as the Nazis. Just as they're on the same page with every reactionary totalitarian regime in the world, except those that they think they can overthrow, or those that are allied with the Great Satan or the Imperialist Capitalist Powers.
The Left tells its followers that they're smarter and more moral than ordinary people. What it really means is that they're dumber and more willing to sacrifice for its goals. The Islamists tell their followers that they're braver and more religious than ordinary people. What they mean, is that their followers are suicidally stupid and easily led around the nose. The common denominator isn't very hard to see. The Left is the Islam of the West. And Islam is the Left of the Middle East. But labels like that are virtually meaningless. Both are just totalitarian movements using gullible idiots following an ideology worked out by vicious greedy men to seize power. That is all there is to it in the end. The rest is just technique.
The Left has no problem allying with Islam. Nor does Islam have a problem allying with the Left. That is because they both agree on their enemies and their objectives. They have more of a problem allying with people who actually want to be free, then they do with slaves and their slavemasters. Of course once in power, one would have to absorb or destroy the other. Just as Communism and Nazism united to consume Eastern Europe, with the inevitable consequence that once the job was done, one would have to destroy the other. Hitler successfully fooled Stalin and nearly destroyed the USSR with a first strike. Islam will likely do the same thing to the Left, just as it did in Iran.
The Red-Green Alliance works because both are variations on a theme. The theme is totalitarian rule. It is not the Left that threatens Islam, nor Islam that threatens the Left-- but free societies and individual freedoms. When such societies prove successful, then they particularly infuriate those who insist that they must be replaced with their totalitarian rule. These twin impulses, fear of a loss of control over their own societies, and a lust for power, is what energizes the Jihad of Islam and the Revolutions of the Left. Both want control, rather than freedom. And offer promises of Utopian tyrannies in exchange for freedom.
Destroying Europe, America, Israel, Australia, Canada, etc is about power. Absolute power. And it is about putting out whatever light still shines in the West, for fear that it will spread. The light of freedom and civilization stands in the way of tyranny. And tyranny is the endgame of both the Left and Islam. Two sides of the same coin. Janus, with one head looking back to the impossible past of Mohammed, and with one head looking forward to the even more impossible future of Communism. Both forcibly ignoring the present in which people can still be happy and free.
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