Ernest Sternberg
Ernest Sternberg teaches at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
Abstract: The past decade has seen the coalescence of a new ideology that envisions social movements in a cataclysmic struggle against global capitalist Empire. Controlled by U.S. militarism and multinational corporations, in cahoots with Zionism, Empire contaminates environments and destroys cultures. Its defeat will bring about a new era of social justice and sustainable development, in which the diverse cultures harmoniously share the earth. Is this a totalitarian ideology? From fascist and communist precedents, we learn that lovers of renewed humanity are not sufficiently motivated by abstract
ideals. They must also identify humanity’s enemy, the cause of all suffering. Equipped with a scapegoat, diverse communities can achieve solidarity through shared execration. T
whatever new specters we would have to confront, totalitarian ideol-
ogies would not be among them. Fascism, communism, and their
variants would moulder in their political graveyards. Could it be that we hoped
in vain? Could it be that that, from their putrefied bodies, another world-
transforming ideology has emerged?
There is plenty of reason to think so. We are in the midst of the
worldwide rise of a non-religious chiliastic movement, which preaches global
human renewal and predicts apocalypse as its alternative. Like its twentieth-
century predecessors, the new ideology provides an intellectual formula
through which to identify the present world’s depredations, imagines a pure
new world that eliminates them, and mobilizes the disaffected and alienated for
the sake of radical change. Like the followers of totalitarianisms past, the new
ideologues also see themselves as the vanguard for the highest humanitarian
ideals. If many of us have failed to recognize the rise of this new movement, the
reason may be that we are still trapped in defunct ideological categories.
The new ideology is most clearly identified by what it opposes. Its
enemy is the global monolith called Empire, which exerts systemic domination
# 2009 Published by Elsevier Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Winter 2010 | 61
over human lives, mainly from the United States. Empire does so by means of
economic liberalism, militarism, multinational corporations, corporate media,
and technologies of surveillance, in cahoots with, or under the thrall of,
Empire’s most sinister manifestation, namely Zionism. So far there is no
controversy—these points will be readily admitted by advocates as well as
critics.
There is much less clarity about what the new movement is for. My task
here is to describe what it is for: to make the case that the new radicalism does
have a coherent vision and, in postulating both an evil past and an ideal future,
does qualify as a full-fledged ideology. Put starkly, the world it envisions is
pure. The earth will be protected, justice will reign, economies will be
sustainable, and energy will be renewable. Diverse communities will celebrate
other communities, with the only proviso that they accede to doctrine. Far
purer than democracies of the past, this future regime will operate through
grassroots participatory meetings in which all communities are empowered.
As old nation-state boundaries fade away, communities will coordinate with
each other globally by means of rectification cadres called non-governmental
organizations (NGOs).
STERNBERG
T
whatever new specters we would have to confront, totalitarian ideol-
ogies would not be among them. Fascism, communism, and their
variants would moulder in their political graveyards. Could it be that we hoped
in vain? Could it be that that, from their putrefied bodies, another world-
transforming ideology has emerged?
There is plenty of reason to think so. We are in the midst of the
worldwide rise of a non-religious chiliastic movement, which preaches global
human renewal and predicts apocalypse as its alternative. Like its twentieth-
century predecessors, the new ideology provides an intellectual formula
through which to identify the present world’s depredations, imagines a pure
new world that eliminates them, and mobilizes the disaffected and alienated for
the sake of radical change. Like the followers of totalitarianisms past, the new
ideologues also see themselves as the vanguard for the highest humanitarian
ideals. If many of us have failed to recognize the rise of this new movement, the
reason may be that we are still trapped in defunct ideological categories.
The new ideology is most clearly identified by what it opposes. Its
enemy is the global monolith called Empire, which exerts systemic domination
# 2009 Published by Elsevier Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Winter 2010 | 61
over human lives, mainly from the United States. Empire does so by means of
economic liberalism, militarism, multinational corporations, corporate media,
and technologies of surveillance, in cahoots with, or under the thrall of,
Empire’s most sinister manifestation, namely Zionism. So far there is no
controversy—these points will be readily admitted by advocates as well as
critics.
There is much less clarity about what the new movement is for. My task
here is to describe what it is for: to make the case that the new radicalism does
have a coherent vision and, in postulating both an evil past and an ideal future,
does qualify as a full-fledged ideology. Put starkly, the world it envisions is
pure. The earth will be protected, justice will reign, economies will be
sustainable, and energy will be renewable. Diverse communities will celebrate
other communities, with the only proviso that they accede to doctrine. Far
purer than democracies of the past, this future regime will operate through
grassroots participatory meetings in which all communities are empowered.
As old nation-state boundaries fade away, communities will coordinate with
each other globally by means of rectification cadres called non-governmental
organizations (NGOs).
n its name,’’ he writes, ‘‘the Left
possessed this virtue: it would stand firm against fascism.’’2 But after the
failure of socialism and revelations of communism’s mass crimes, the more
alienated members of the Left lost political bearings, without losing their
antagonism to the capitalist West. All the more so since the Iraq war of the early
2000s, the Left underwent what Cohen calls a ‘‘dark liberation.’’ Leading
members were now willing to deny documented genocide against the
Bosnians, avert their faces from genocide in Sudan, spread the theories of
Jewish-Zionist world conspiracy, ignore massive human rights abuses in the
Third World, and excuse even the most brutal theocratic-fascist regime, as long
as it opposed the United States and the capitalist status quo. The new Left
proved incapable of recognizing any crime that could not be blamed on the
capitalist West.
Cohen does not know what to call this new Left. At times, he writes, ‘‘I
call them nihilists because of their willful refusal to put an agenda before the
public.’’3 He is not satisfied with the name. ‘‘Because they don’t have a positive
programme, it is difficult to think of a better label, although I accept that one is
needed because they are the dominant left-wing force today.’’4
Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte does see in this reborn Left a
coherent political idea, which he calls ‘‘transnational progressivism.’’5 Led by
1
Benard-Henri Le´ vy, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (NY: Random
House, 2008). Some of the wording in this and the next paragraph replicates my book review,
Ernest Sternberg, ‘‘A Revivified Corpse: Left-Fascism in the Twenty-First Century,’’ found on the
Telos journal website at www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&
article_id=288.
2
Nick Cohen, What’s Left? How the Left Lost It’s Way (London: Harper Perennial, 2007), p. 4.
3
Cohen, What’s Left?, p. 14, italic in the original.
4
Cohen, What’s Left?, p. 14.
5
John Fonte, ‘‘Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Future of the
Ideological Civil War Within the West,’’ Orbis, Summer 2002, pp. 1–14.
Winter 2010 | 63
NGOs, which are unaccountable to an electorate and escape political checks
and balances, these progressives want to establish global laws that overcome
U.S. constitutional jurisdiction. To Fonte the new progressives also favor ‘‘post-
democracy,’’ a polity based (among other features) on group consciousness
instead of individual rights.6 Though Fonte has proved to be an early and
astute observer, his insight is partial: there is more to the new movement than
transnationalism.
It is hard to tell what the movement is for its intellectual leaders fall into contending factions. Said to be the most promi-
nent, Noam Chomsky attacks U.S.-led world capitalism without saying what
should be put in its place, other than that it should not be led by the United
States, capitalist, and unjust. Most of the theorists manage to marginalize
themselves through obscurantism. As ever, theoretical obscurity invests the
activist movement with a seemingly profound pedigree, while sheltering it
from prying questions. Still, if one trolls through the activists’ practical
literature, while conscientiously avoiding its theorists, a coherent political
vision does emerge. It needs a name.
What to Call It
To call this movement neo-this or neo-that, or to keep using hyphens is
as tiresome as it would have been to say Darwinian-National-Neo-Romanticist
Movement against International Plutocracy for what came to be known as
Fascism.
Bernard-Henri Le´ vy’s colorful terms (alongside ones already men-
tioned) include neoprogressivism, oxymoronic Left, cadaverous Left, and red
fascism.7 Among other writers, too, the older term left-fascism has reappeared,
having brief currency after the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas used it
in 1968 to label young radicals willing to suppress speech, excuse Stalinism,
and condone violence in opposition to the capitalist state.8 The term is now
found in more elaborate forms, such as red-brown-green coalition, with the
green referring to radical environmentalism or radical Islamism or both.9 The
colors are arrayed in various sequences, sometimes with black thrown in for
good measure, to refer to anarchism. Their combination is sometimes termed
the ‘‘coalition’’ or, more tellingly, ‘‘synthesis’’ of the extremes.10 On the
6
Fonte, ‘‘Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism,’’ p. 13.
7
Le´ vy, Left in Dark Time, passim.
8
Jurgen Habermas and Peter Dews, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jurgen
Habermas, (2nd ed.: London: Verso, 1992), p. 233.
9
Alexandre Del Valle, ‘‘The Reds, The Browns and the Greens or The Convergence of
Totalitarianisms,’’ Internationale Politique, (2004), tr. Erich von Abele; found on del Valle’s
website at www.alexandredelvalle.com.
10
Dave Rich, ‘‘Antisemitism and the Coalition of the Extremes,’’ November 2004, Community
Security Trust (UK) webpage: http://www.thecst.org.uk/docs/rich_essay_nov_04.pdf.
64 | Orbis
antifascist Right, David Horowitz calls it neo-communism and unholy alliance,
the latter phrase referring specifically to the Left-Islamist axis.
As for the movement’s proponents, they think of their cause as the
anti-globalization (or ‘‘alter-globalization’’ or ‘‘no-borders’’) movement,
eco-socialism, grass-roots globalism, global resistance, global justice move-
ment, global intifada, transnational activism, protest networks, movement of
movements, peace and justice movement, and coalition of the oppressed.11
The proponents’ labels are not much good either. The term ‘‘anti-
globalization’’ has led to the misunderstanding that the movement simply
opposes the expansion of international trade. This is incorrect on several
levels, the most basic being that the world economy has been globalized for
centuries. Furthermore, the movement is in itself explicitly global: adherents
actively seek to forge international links among their factions. At the same
time, this ideology is found within the U.S. in local political affairs. Advocates
for low-income housing, food purity, illegal immigrants, restrictions on genetic
engineering, and pollution controls often see each other pursuing a common
ideological cause, without even thinking about transnational links.
Nor can the movement claim distinctiveness through its appeals to
peace and justice, which all political persuasions espouse. Nor, again, is the
movement adequately defined by the fact that many groups have a part in it—
that it is a movement of movements—since, as a matter of course, democracies
routinely see coalitions arise and dissolve for the opportunistic pursuit of
overlapping interests. What should be more important in giving this movement
a name is the vision driving it.
What the movement actually opposes is not global connections, per se,
but a sinister force extending its mechanical feelers through all local commu-
nities and thereby exerting unjust power over them. Though a mouthful, world
purificationism would do well in expressing what the movement wants. It wants
to achieve a grand historical vision: the anticipated defeat of imperial capitalist
power in favor of a global network of beneficent culture-communities, which
will empower themselves through grassroots participatory democracy, and
maintain consistency across movements through the rectifying power of NGOs,
thereby bringing into being a new era of global social justice and sustainable
development, in which the diverse communities can harmoniously share an
earth that has been saved from destruction and remade pristine.
Read more, go to:Purifying the World by Sternberg in Orbis.pdf
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