As I was pondering the recent development of western leftists now supporting the IRI because they are at war with Israel, thus abandoning the actual people of Iran to this brutal regime, and their earlier abandonment of Ukraine in favor of Russia, and their support for the Houthis, Hezbollah, and even in some cases the Taliban, I was trying to figured out how the hell one gets there from the starting place of supposedly supporting human rights. And the only unifying thing I can figure out is that it seems to come down to supporting anyone and any group that acts in opposition to “the West.”
But why?
What’s wrong with “The West"™️? What sins have been committed in the West that haven’t also been committed in the East (and in plenty of cases are actively still ongoing)?
Because to my recollection, the problem that leftists theoretically have with the West is that it has been built on and amassed wealth based on colonialism, imperialism, slavery, wars of aggression, genocide, and mass human rights abuses. Many take issue with Christianity (particular in its evangelical fundamentalist iteration) as a major driving force and weapon of Western imperialism.
Those are all objectively terrible, horrifying things and good reasons to hate the West and Western hegemony — you won’t get any disagreement from me there! However, none of that, no matter how deeply baked into the DNA of the West it may be, is (a) inherent to the West, or (b) unique.
In fact, the East is full of (and in large part also built on) colonialism, imperialism, slavery, wars of aggression, genocide, mass human rights abuses, and fundamentalist, expansionist religions. All of these same issues exist there too! The groups and countries western leftists are stanning are themselves guilty of these same things! So where is the value in being anti-West when the East contains the same problems?
I know I’m asking a dumb question here but: have the people supporting these groups actually thought through why they’re so anti-West lately? Because I really don’t think they have. There is nothing ontologically or uniquely evil about the West; if the justification for hating the West and everything that flows from it (or that they associate with it, correctly or not) is this list of egregious evil acts, surely they should hate any country or group that engages in that same evil act, no?
And I realize that there are a large number of this sort of person who are just ignorant of history and the facts on the ground outside of the West, or they have been made aware and choose to ignore it as "propaganda” or lies. Even if we rule those people out, I’ve encountered folks who still just have a burning hatred for the West even if they have accepted the reality of atrocities outside the West committed by non-Westerners against other non-Westerners. And that’s something I just truly do not understand; like what’s up with that? What gives?
Qatar, in particular, has been the “front” for a lot of this, the interface by which these Islamist groups pump money and propaganda into the Western Left information space; two concrete examples I can give of this is how Al Jazeera is owned directly by the Qatar royal family, and frequently has anti-western and anti-Israel biases in their coverage, and how there is a direct correlation between the money given by Qatar to American universities and the size/acceptance of the anti-Israel student encampments at those universities.
Other elements that I’ve noticed include what I can only call the Inverted White Supremacy of the Left–where only White People do colonialism, and reactionary tankies pining for the Good Old Days who haven’t realized that the Russian Federation is not the USSR (helped along by Putin leaning on his KGB training where he does Divide And Conquer–or occasionally Just Divide As A Distraction For Other Conquering).
And before Qatar was doing it, a lot of the Western Left was guzzling Soviet propaganda — that’s where a ton of the antisemitism on the left came from. The KGB had an entire “Zionology” field of “study”, devoted to exposing how evil Israel is. It sounds too crazy to be real when I tell you Mahmoud Abbas literally has a PhD in Holocaust denial, but he got it at a Soviet university!
@anonymousdandelion this reminds me of a post I saw a while back speculating about why so many American leftists act so much like conservatives. The gist of it was that they were raised conservative, and told all sorts of horrible things about leftists, like “they hate America, they hate religion, etc.”, so when they rebel against their parents, they literally become a Fox News caricature of a leftist, because that’s what they think leftism is. Of course there’s also the conservative mindset (don’t question (the right) authority, moral absolutism, person-based morality, etc.) that they were taught, and that many haven’t unlearned. I remember reading somewhere that it’s a lot easier to shift someone who’s been radicalized to a different extremist belief than to deradicalize them.
Everything’s terrible everywhere. People are the worst everywhere. The west isn’t special.
The sudden amnesia everyone gets when they pretend like all surrounding countries of Israel haven’t been planning and wishing death on the West and Israel for decades so any mobilization efforts they take are not acknowledged. Westerners everyday live in the comfort of their homes waking up to do their activities - this is the freedom that these remarkable people who study years and decades of logistics, warfare and military provide for you. If you are not willing to understand the background to the risks this takes, then it’s not appropriate to just say “we could have easily avoided this war”. Majority of the population do not know what it takes to sustain the world we have today.
The overwhelming obsession with hating Israel to the exclusion of literally anything else really has reached new levels of absurdity when leftist activists are defending IRAN of all fucking places, a fascist regime that has brutally repressed the Iranian people for decades, and where women are murdered for showing their hair.
But it can be reversed. Start small. If you hit this post then take 5 minutes to put your phone down in another room and do something. Do a crossword. Go for a walk. Be present! CBT is a hugely successful therapy for phone addiction and can even reverse the damage done to your brain.
I get it. I have dozens of beloved friends online, and I’m more informed now than I would ever have been without access to the Internet, but wouldn’t it be nice to wonder sometimes? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go outside and not itch for your phone screen? To have that creativity and confidence back? Start small. Start now.
