Oct 10, 2023·edited Oct 10, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
Western leftists are deluded in thinking that anything anti-American or anti-Western would bring justice or peace to the oppressed peoples across the world. In fact, it was American power which protected nations from being annihilated. It was American idealism which gave courage for those who were striving for their own freedoms. 1991 Gulf War was to rescue Kuwait from being annexed by Iraq. Bombing of Serbia was needed to prevent the genocide of Balkan Muslims. Moreover, dictatorships under US influence have a chance of becoming democracies one day as it was the case with South Korea. Nobel Laureate Kim Dae Jung, a staunch supporter of democracy and human rights, was saved thanks to American intervention. He was kidnapped by the security services of the time, but the CIA intervened to save his life. Korean democratization was possible thanks to US continuous pressure.
A post-American world order, and a post-Western order at large would only bring misery and more chaos since there would be no checks against totalitarian powers. Under such a scenario, there would be no future even for the most radical Western leftist.
Very similar in Germany. Somehow, the political left is overwhelmed by developments and increasingly inconsistent in every aspect of society. How do you defend people from racism and sexism if these very groups become racist and sexist, and you are afraid to criticism them due to the risk of being labeled as racist and sexist? Currently the answer seems to be to just accept it.
These are the mind-blowing and time-wasting conflicts of the political left instead of developing and providing helpful ideas for improving the country and society.
It is not a fringe group, the whole westen left has been siding more or less openly with terrorist organizations. Corbyn, former leader of the Labour Party refused to condemn the Hamas action. Let me add that western countries have a clear opportunity to sift immigrants and understand their attachment to liberal and democratic values. If you are cheering for Hamas then you are not eligible to stay in the Western world because you have not understood our fundamental values.
As someone with a friend/social-media bubble that is currently praising these latest happenings for Palestine without a hitch (like literally every left-leaning group I follow except one has been on the side of attacks as being praise-worthy) this series has been eye-opening. Thank you, truly. The me from a few years ago could've easily and ignorantly been on the same side as the praisers.
Just one thing, you keep claiming colonialism is dead, but (and I think I wrote this in a previous post) as a Puerto Rican living in PR, I think this statement should be reconsidered. What is Puerto Rico if not the oldest colony? We literally aren't a country, can't vote for president, have pricey imports because we can only import from US ships etc. but are a territory of the US with less rights. Many many Puerto Ricans view ourselves as a Colony and call for decolonization or annexation into the US.
Or am I wrong? Are we not a colony, but something else yet suffering from the same symptoms as a colony?
I didn't read any of your posts about Israeli settlers being protected by the IDF while they were attacking Palestinians and knocking down their homes where families had lived since before the establishment of the State of Israel by Europeans because there weren't any. I also didn't read your posts about the effect Israel's oppression of Palestinian Christians that results from their oppression of Palestinians because you didn't write about that either.
I condemn the Hamas attack as strongly as I can, but I also condemn treating Palestinians like animals.
These are the same morons who brought you "Defund." It might be time to consider that not only have they lost the plot morally but they're also just not very bright.
It’s a complicated history with what will likely be horrifying results (from Hamas’s attacks and from the retaliation from the IDF that had already started).
But hey, it’s much more comforting and easy to just say Death to all Jews, be annoyed when people point out how screwed that is, start ranting about Gaza being an open-air prison and antisemitism being a capitalist construct...?
We’ve going all the way around to Holocaust denial practically on the left!
It’s a bit extreme and most don’t hold those views fully, but most progressives seem to have taken a quite a few steps in that direction.
It’s a long, drawn out history to further point out that the entire Palestinian situation has also been exploited from an ethnonationalistic perspective by the Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes to keep their populations in line. Enough so that many Muslims have adopted the cause, feel it deeply, but will be confused (and have been) when regimes like the UAE and Saudi Arabia happily jettison it for economic gain in normalizing with Israel when they have alternatives to religious and Arab fervor now.
I suspect hatred of Israelis by the Western left isn't driven by antisemitism so much as by a view that the Israelis are the last white settler-colonialists who are potentially defeatable: white settler projects in Africa (apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia, the Portuguese colonial empire and French Algeria) have all now been defeated, while the colonization of North America and the Antipodes cannot feasibly be reversed because the native populations were all-but-exterminated by European diseases.
If we had a modern-day Christian crusader state instead of Israel, it would be at least as hated by the left.
I really find this report distressing. Cheering on terrorism - murder and violence is never the right thing to do. I am not a Democratic Socialist and I wonder what is going on with the groups illustrated-- when did they start waving Nazi flags? It is like living in the upside down. Is this another example of that horseshoe theory of politics where white supremacists RW groups and left socialist groups agree to hate on Jewish people and cheer their massacre? While I have never held any kind of stand irt conflict in Israel as it seems a complex, multi layered, historical issue and I just don't have any kind of real life connection to This horrific action just can never be aligned with my values and sense of right and wrong. My heart is heavy and I feel so much sadness and horror for the victims and their families.
Oh, come on. Everyone has lost the plot here, and lost it thousands of years ago: The politics of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is driven on all sides -- including the US side -- by delusional systems of religious belief rooted in texts of utterly dubious provenance composed by people who sacrificed animals -- and sometimes each other -- to appease their deranged, genocidal gods. Their claims of "right" -- in particular, to the tiny strip of land that lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean -- are grounded entirely the words imputed to these gods by the impossibly backward humans who imagined them into existence.
Madness begets madness. Always has, always will. The tiny group of powerless, lunatic leftists you've gone out of your way to excoriate -- oh, bravo! -- is just a brightly colored rubber duck bobbing haplessly in an vast ocean of deranged religious fanaticism, now linked inextricably to equally deranged fanatical nationalism.
That's the plot. Everything else is tinsel on the tree.
You’re doing that Fox News thing where you hand wave away the official DSA statement condemning the violence and pick the most extreme outliers online to say they represent “the Left.” Who is the most prominent leftist leader who has expressed support for these attacks? What is the most prominent leftist organization? You can always find thousands of crazies out of the billions on the internet. They don’t represent “the Left.”
I am very pro Palestine, but my reaction to the attacks was shock and deep sadness. It’s just important to remember that Hamas are not the true representatives of the Palestinian cause. They damage the cause with actions like these by alienating potential allies. Meanwhile, countless more civilians will be killed, starved, lose their homes, or otherwise suffer and die due to lack of sanitation and power. You can denounce atrocities and still side with innocent people who are not deciding to go to war. Also - to point out that the occupation has fueled more extremism is not to apologize for the extremism, but just to say that nothing short of liberating an oppressed people will put an end to resistance in all its forms, peaceful and violent inclusive.
"Hamas, in contrast, is a religious right-wing group, and its supporters explicitly use Nazi stylings."
I'm not sure that Hamas is pro-Nazism: doesn't their charter at one point liken their Zionist enemies to a "Nazi-Tatar invasion" (which also of course recalls how the Mongol hordes savaged the Muslim world in the 13th century)?
"Sure, some claim that African and Latin American countries are still “colonized” because they don’t get paid enough for their natural resource exports"
I've often thought that support for Russia in much of Africa and Latin America is motivated in part by (to bastardize Karl Marx) "Natural resource exporters of the world, unite!"
Western leftists are deluded in thinking that anything anti-American or anti-Western would bring justice or peace to the oppressed peoples across the world. In fact, it was American power which protected nations from being annihilated. It was American idealism which gave courage for those who were striving for their own freedoms. 1991 Gulf War was to rescue Kuwait from being annexed by Iraq. Bombing of Serbia was needed to prevent the genocide of Balkan Muslims. Moreover, dictatorships under US influence have a chance of becoming democracies one day as it was the case with South Korea. Nobel Laureate Kim Dae Jung, a staunch supporter of democracy and human rights, was saved thanks to American intervention. He was kidnapped by the security services of the time, but the CIA intervened to save his life. Korean democratization was possible thanks to US continuous pressure.
A post-American world order, and a post-Western order at large would only bring misery and more chaos since there would be no checks against totalitarian powers. Under such a scenario, there would be no future even for the most radical Western leftist.
Very similar in Germany. Somehow, the political left is overwhelmed by developments and increasingly inconsistent in every aspect of society. How do you defend people from racism and sexism if these very groups become racist and sexist, and you are afraid to criticism them due to the risk of being labeled as racist and sexist? Currently the answer seems to be to just accept it.
These are the mind-blowing and time-wasting conflicts of the political left instead of developing and providing helpful ideas for improving the country and society.
Bravo Noah. The Hamas attack was disgusting and reprehensible.
Once again a minority of evil creates havoc in our fragile world. I appreciate your perspective.
It is not a fringe group, the whole westen left has been siding more or less openly with terrorist organizations. Corbyn, former leader of the Labour Party refused to condemn the Hamas action. Let me add that western countries have a clear opportunity to sift immigrants and understand their attachment to liberal and democratic values. If you are cheering for Hamas then you are not eligible to stay in the Western world because you have not understood our fundamental values.
As someone with a friend/social-media bubble that is currently praising these latest happenings for Palestine without a hitch (like literally every left-leaning group I follow except one has been on the side of attacks as being praise-worthy) this series has been eye-opening. Thank you, truly. The me from a few years ago could've easily and ignorantly been on the same side as the praisers.
Just one thing, you keep claiming colonialism is dead, but (and I think I wrote this in a previous post) as a Puerto Rican living in PR, I think this statement should be reconsidered. What is Puerto Rico if not the oldest colony? We literally aren't a country, can't vote for president, have pricey imports because we can only import from US ships etc. but are a territory of the US with less rights. Many many Puerto Ricans view ourselves as a Colony and call for decolonization or annexation into the US.
Or am I wrong? Are we not a colony, but something else yet suffering from the same symptoms as a colony?
I didn't read any of your posts about Israeli settlers being protected by the IDF while they were attacking Palestinians and knocking down their homes where families had lived since before the establishment of the State of Israel by Europeans because there weren't any. I also didn't read your posts about the effect Israel's oppression of Palestinian Christians that results from their oppression of Palestinians because you didn't write about that either.
I condemn the Hamas attack as strongly as I can, but I also condemn treating Palestinians like animals.
These are the same morons who brought you "Defund." It might be time to consider that not only have they lost the plot morally but they're also just not very bright.
It’s a complicated history with what will likely be horrifying results (from Hamas’s attacks and from the retaliation from the IDF that had already started).
But hey, it’s much more comforting and easy to just say Death to all Jews, be annoyed when people point out how screwed that is, start ranting about Gaza being an open-air prison and antisemitism being a capitalist construct...?
We’ve going all the way around to Holocaust denial practically on the left!
It’s a bit extreme and most don’t hold those views fully, but most progressives seem to have taken a quite a few steps in that direction.
It’s a long, drawn out history to further point out that the entire Palestinian situation has also been exploited from an ethnonationalistic perspective by the Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes to keep their populations in line. Enough so that many Muslims have adopted the cause, feel it deeply, but will be confused (and have been) when regimes like the UAE and Saudi Arabia happily jettison it for economic gain in normalizing with Israel when they have alternatives to religious and Arab fervor now.
I suspect hatred of Israelis by the Western left isn't driven by antisemitism so much as by a view that the Israelis are the last white settler-colonialists who are potentially defeatable: white settler projects in Africa (apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia, the Portuguese colonial empire and French Algeria) have all now been defeated, while the colonization of North America and the Antipodes cannot feasibly be reversed because the native populations were all-but-exterminated by European diseases.
If we had a modern-day Christian crusader state instead of Israel, it would be at least as hated by the left.
I really find this report distressing. Cheering on terrorism - murder and violence is never the right thing to do. I am not a Democratic Socialist and I wonder what is going on with the groups illustrated-- when did they start waving Nazi flags? It is like living in the upside down. Is this another example of that horseshoe theory of politics where white supremacists RW groups and left socialist groups agree to hate on Jewish people and cheer their massacre? While I have never held any kind of stand irt conflict in Israel as it seems a complex, multi layered, historical issue and I just don't have any kind of real life connection to This horrific action just can never be aligned with my values and sense of right and wrong. My heart is heavy and I feel so much sadness and horror for the victims and their families.
Oh, come on. Everyone has lost the plot here, and lost it thousands of years ago: The politics of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is driven on all sides -- including the US side -- by delusional systems of religious belief rooted in texts of utterly dubious provenance composed by people who sacrificed animals -- and sometimes each other -- to appease their deranged, genocidal gods. Their claims of "right" -- in particular, to the tiny strip of land that lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean -- are grounded entirely the words imputed to these gods by the impossibly backward humans who imagined them into existence.
Madness begets madness. Always has, always will. The tiny group of powerless, lunatic leftists you've gone out of your way to excoriate -- oh, bravo! -- is just a brightly colored rubber duck bobbing haplessly in an vast ocean of deranged religious fanaticism, now linked inextricably to equally deranged fanatical nationalism.
That's the plot. Everything else is tinsel on the tree.
You’re doing that Fox News thing where you hand wave away the official DSA statement condemning the violence and pick the most extreme outliers online to say they represent “the Left.” Who is the most prominent leftist leader who has expressed support for these attacks? What is the most prominent leftist organization? You can always find thousands of crazies out of the billions on the internet. They don’t represent “the Left.”
Powerful piece. Agree 100%. We are witnessing the complete moral bankruptcy of the modern Western left.
I am very pro Palestine, but my reaction to the attacks was shock and deep sadness. It’s just important to remember that Hamas are not the true representatives of the Palestinian cause. They damage the cause with actions like these by alienating potential allies. Meanwhile, countless more civilians will be killed, starved, lose their homes, or otherwise suffer and die due to lack of sanitation and power. You can denounce atrocities and still side with innocent people who are not deciding to go to war. Also - to point out that the occupation has fueled more extremism is not to apologize for the extremism, but just to say that nothing short of liberating an oppressed people will put an end to resistance in all its forms, peaceful and violent inclusive.
"Hamas, in contrast, is a religious right-wing group, and its supporters explicitly use Nazi stylings."
I'm not sure that Hamas is pro-Nazism: doesn't their charter at one point liken their Zionist enemies to a "Nazi-Tatar invasion" (which also of course recalls how the Mongol hordes savaged the Muslim world in the 13th century)?
"Sure, some claim that African and Latin American countries are still “colonized” because they don’t get paid enough for their natural resource exports"
I've often thought that support for Russia in much of Africa and Latin America is motivated in part by (to bastardize Karl Marx) "Natural resource exporters of the world, unite!"
I, a liberal Jew who has always voted Democrat, am ready to take a red-pill after seeing the leftist response to this saga.