Depravity on the Left

Among the most shocking aspects of the current political scene is the fact that the American and the British left has been exposed as misogynistic, anti-Semitic and homophobic. 

Tom Slater of Spiked! summed it up:

In 2023, the radical left surrendered the moral high ground once and for all. For whether we like it or not, this is what the radical left is now. The conspiratorial Israelophobes and the woke racists run the show. The word ‘leftist’ has, with good reason, become a term of abuse among the very people leftists once aspired to liberate. Those who still find inspiration and meaning in the ideals the radical left has so spectacularly betrayed would do well to start marching under a new banner.

Previously, the left had claimed moral superiority. It occupied the moral high ground and looked down on everyone else. But, then, mirabile dictu, these moral paragons saw what happened on October 7, and either cheered Hamas or blamed Israel.

What does it mean to be radical, left-wing, progressive? Well, in 2023, it meant making excuses for a genocidal anti-Semitism, refusing to believe evidence of mass rape and naysaying about the terroristic murder of infants. This was the year the ‘right side of history’ brigade exploded their phoney moral superiority for good.

When Hamas sent men on paragliders, motorbikes and in jeeps into southern Israel on 7 October – murdering, raping, mutilating and kidnapping as many Jews as they could find – I thought those on the anti-Israel left would be forced to reassess. Forced to rethink their years of Hamas apologism – their thinly veiled support for these Jew-hating maniacs, who they have long whitewashed as a ‘legitimate resistance movement’ in Palestine.

Since leftists are idealists they do not accept that reality, that is, evidence and experience, can disprove their most cherished beliefs. Their genius lies in rationalizing failure, and now in rationalizing depravity. 

After all, that dark day these supposed leftists were – or rather should have been – confronted by the barbaric consequences of their own luxury beliefs. They were shown, beyond doubt, that Hamas’s genocidal founding charter was not just talk – that Hamas was not in fact ‘dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and long-term peace and social justice in the whole region’, as one Jeremy Corbyn once put it.

Many leftists openly celebrated the pogrom, hailing it as a ‘day of celebration’. The Socialist Worker called on its nine readers to ‘rejoice’. Many initially giddy tweets were deleted, as the more savvy left-wingers settled in to blaming Israel for being attacked and refusing to believe women were raped. It was victim-blaming on a geopolitical scale; atrocity denial for the Twitterring, TikToking age.

Their reaction to October 7 was Jew-hatred. It takes a special warp of mind to draw the conclusion, but they were up to the challenge.  

Meanwhile, these supposed anti-fascists turned a blind eye as ‘pro-Palestine’ protests turned our streets into an open sewer of Jew hatred. Genocidal slogans were chanted. Swastikas were brandished. Hate crime soared. And they just didn’t care.

Slater suggests that we should not be surprised by leftist anti-Ssemitism. After all, Soviet Communism stoked it, especially after the 1967 War.

Moreover, for those who believe in the Revolution, its manifest failure was merely a blip in the Zeitgeist. Once capitalism started invading formerly Communist countries, it went out looking for another revolutionary vanguard. It found one in Islamist radicalism. 

Failed Western revolutionaries began to outsource radical agency to Islamists – turning these Jew-hating, misogynistic, gay-bashing theocrats into ‘freedom fighters’, locked in some grand conflict between the West and the rebellious global Other.

As the author Jake Wallis Simons has argued, many of the tropes of today’s left-wing ‘Israelophobia’ – his term for the new, supposedly ‘anti-Zionist’ form that anti-Semitism now comes in – have their roots in Soviet propaganda, developed to shore up alliances between Moscow and allied Arab states during the Cold War.

Since the birth of the new millennium, all of the big, nominally left-wing movements – from Occupy Wall Street to the anti-Iraq War demos to the anti-Trump Women’s March to Corbyn’s Labour – have been pockmarked by anti-Semitism scandals or dodgy associations with hardline anti-Semites. 

It makes sense. It did not take very much to morph the war against capitalism into the war against Jewish bankers. A previous socialist movement had shown the way.

Leftists have come to see capitalism not as a structure of economic relations, but as a plot hatched among nefarious bankers – a manichean vision which maps all-too-neatly on to age-old anti-Semitic tropes. Their deranged hatred of Israel – and their patronising tendency to treat Muslims as the violent, benighted children of world affairs – means they now treat anti-Semitic pogroms as the voice of the unheard.

As for the role the Soviet Union played in stoking anti-Semitism, Isabella Tabarovsky writes this in Quillette:

The claim that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians is among the longest-running lies told about Israel. “Genocide Israeli style”; “Zionist-engineered genocide”; “the ‘final solution’ of the Palestinian question”—these may look like snippets from some recent campus proclamation, but they are not. They appeared in a Soviet pamphlet titled “Zionists Count on Terror.” Published in 1984 by Novosti, a Soviet foreign propaganda arm masquerading as a news agency, this pocket-sized brochure was meant to promote the Soviet view of Israel and Zionism to English-language audiences.

English-speaking readers around the world were meant to understand that Zionists were genocidal and racist settler-colonialists who deployed Nazi methods in the service of global imperialism, while suppressing the anti-colonial national-liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. In the pamphlet’s 76 pages, variations on the words genocide, terror, and racist appear some 300 times. Novosti made clear that Zionists were perfidious double-dealers by associating them with the CIA, MI6, and of course, the Mossad in 100 instances. Readers were told to dismiss Jewish claims of antisemitism as Zionist tricks meant to deflect attention from Israel’s crimes.

These calumnies will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the rhetoric that exploded in progressive quarters in the wake of October 7—the day Hamas raped, tortured, slaughtered, and pillaged its way through Israel’s southern kibbutzim. Isn’t this 40-year-old Soviet propaganda pamphlet speaking the language of today’s progressives? It is. Or to be more precise: today’s progressives are speaking the language of Soviet propaganda. The most extraordinary feature of the anti-Israel rhetoric flooding the West today is the extent to which it reproduces the motifs, tropes, slogans, and explanatory logic of late-Soviet communist ideology.

Does this sound familiar? It certainly should.

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