the left is our enemy within.
March 5, 2009
By Ronald Radosh
FrontPageMagazine.com
After 9/11, the social-democratic political philosopher, Michael Walzer, asked the readers of Dissent magazine a tough question: "Can there be a decent Left?" His essay was in reality an appeal for its creation, since Walzer was smart enough to realize that so many who spoke in the name of the Left that horrific year were anything but. But now, so many years later, little has changed. If anyone has any doubts about this, there is no better place to start than Jamie Glazov's important new book, United in Hate.
Glazov discusses both the philosophical underpinnings of the leftist world-view and the current form it's taking in the U.S. Starting from the premise that existing reality in democratic America has to be destroyed and that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," large segments of the left today seek to forge an alliance with America's enemies, once the Communist world, now the forces of radical Islam. Glazov traces and seeks to analyze the causes of this movement from the left's support of "the red flag of proletarian revolution" to that of the "black flag of Islamic jihad."
In many cases, Glazov shows how the same people who once sang the praises of Stalin as an anti-fascist leader now praise Islamic terrorists who seek to attack the West. While many learned from 9/11 that the West had real and very dangerous enemies, major figures of the once pro-Soviet Left apparently felt rejuvenated, viewing the attack on the twin towers as the revenge of the masses for American oppression of the Third World. For these people, Glazov writes, 9/11 was a "personal vindication," since they saw "only poetic justice in American commercial airplanes plunging into American buildings packed with people."
Now, they hoped that the project they thought had failed -- the replacement of democratic capitalism with a revolutionary socialist society -- might again have legs. Somehow the fact that radical Islam seeks to return the world to the seventh century as the basis of the social order, does not seem to faze them. Now, at least, they had a movement they could support which would enable them to realize the goal they once had -- the destruction of capitalism and the collapse of the United States.
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