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....

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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.