06 April 2007

Modern Leftism: No There, There


A generous commenter might say that the modern left is living off its seed corn. But the sad truth is that the seed corn was eaten over a decade ago. The modern left is living off something far less savoury.
This same conundrum confounds Western liberals. They, as Postel documents, have been silent in the face of repeated student protests in Iran, imprisonment of Iranian activists and numerous other human rights violations that should have logically attracted their support. They are so locked in the singular prism of anti-imperialism that they are unable to make peace with the idea that it is liberalism rather than radicalism that is the true fighting creed in Iran. They are even less amenable to the reality that "the denunciations of U.S. Empire in Iran today are the rhetorical dominion of the Iranian Right, not the Left". As Postel states, "it is the reactionary clergy who wield the idiom of anti-imperialism and regime hardliners [who] legitimate the suppression of Iranian students". This aversion to recognising reality in Iran has exacted a huge cost; it has delegitimised the Western left and exposed its disinterest in championing the cause of Iranian liberals and pro-democracy fighters who suffer daily at the hands of an increasingly repressive regime. Postel exposes how the insistent prioritisation of anti-imperialism over all else has produced a repugnant inversion of itself - a new form of imperialism equally blind in its U.S.-centric perspective as its ugly counterpart.

....Postel recounts an incident in which Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, during a visit to the U.S., was confronted by an anti-war protester who suggested that she stop talking about human rights abuses in Iran because her arguments could be appropriated by the neo-conservatives. Ebadi's response was clear and unequivocal: "Any anti-war movement that advocates silence in the face of tyranny can count me out."

....This book is a timely indictment of the Western left's apathy, which justifies itself by constructing a deceptively dualistic model of Western engagement with the world. The time has come for the emergence of a new "radical" liberalism that rejects such misguided political perversions....
Source

Blind subservience to earlier generations of thinkers--revered in spite of their patent inferiority--is the hallmark of the modern left. With academia, journalism, and the popular media firmly under the thumb of blind leftists, it becomes ever more important for the alternative streams of thought and action made possible by the new media technologies to come to the forefront.

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2 Comments:

Blogger Audacious Epigone said...

The left-right categorization is often difficult to make sense of given contemporary American definitions of what the left and the right are. For example, in South Korea, it is the conservatives that are the internationalists who favor US involvement in their country, while the liberals are more nationalistic and are less amenable to the US. In Iran, the situation is basically reversed.

Some of the confusion stems from the similarities in the neocon/WSJ right and the Thomas Friedman left in foreign policy. The Burkeian right is underrepresented on the 'elite' level.

Saturday, 07 April, 2007  
Blogger al fin said...

Right. You have to specify which "left" or "right" you are referring to. As long as you supply a context, the confusion is minimal.

The point being made is that western leftism has become a caricature of itself. In its perennial and instinctive eagerness to attack the US for "imperialism," the left has chosen to ignore a host of victims that it claims to represent and defend.

It is not a matter of simple hypocrisy. Hypocrisy would be the leftist indiscriminately attacking the political institutions that allow the western leftist to speak out without fear of being stoned or imprisoned without cause.

This is more a matter of a corrupt duplicity that renders the left in a moral position inferior even to that of the butchers in the muslim world with which it sides.

Sunday, 08 April, 2007  

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“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” _George Orwell

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