DescentBB

Large numbers of commentators and intellectuals associated with the “Left” in the West have, for over 100 years, continually allied themselves with totalitarian, extremist, thuggish, populist, militarist, extreme right-wing, religious fanatical regimes and movements abroad.

Whether it was George Bernard Shaw touring and apologizing for Stalin’s Russia, or Noam Chomsky claiming refugees from the Cambodian genocide were “unreliable” and that “massacre reports were false,” there is a long tradition of mitigating the kinds of crimes abroad people would never excuse at home.

To understand this phenomenon we have to unpack what it means to be “left-wing” in the West. To be on the Left is to be good, to be progressive, to be for women’s rights, gay rights, environmentalism, social justice, worker’s rights, and to be against racism and discrimination, perhaps against nuclear energy, against war.

It didn’t always mean that.

To understand this phenomenon we have to unpack what it means to be “left-wing” in the West. To be on the Left is to be good, to be progressive, to be for women’s rights, gay rights, environmentalism, social justice, worker’s rights, and to be against racism and discrimination, perhaps against nuclear energy, against war.