Your regular reminder that I personally loathe Noam Chomsky for the reprehensible things he said in apologia for the Khmer Rouge - and has never really taken back. He was no friend to the Cambodian people.
(Not to mention his stance on Ukraine).
It's a bit funny because how quick the left usually is to cut people loose for failing purity tests, but there's always the few who manage to get into the state of grace where the test must be wrong.
Tbh the left is pretty fucking awful at enforcing the “supporting Russia/genocides committed by vaguely leftist seeming countries” purity test nowadays
If your leftism isn't fundamentally centered on the idea of human dignity and freedom as universal and immutable values of everyone, frankly, what is the fucking point of your philosophy.
That’s not even a leftist premise as such, it’s the fundamental principle of liberalism, in all its variants. So it’s not surprising it’s shared by left-liberalism but not by illiberal kinds of leftism.
A few weeks ago I had a pretty active leftist on here tell me that the ruling militia regime in Angola (responsible for lowering that country’s life expectancy to 40 and recruiting 6,000 child soldiers) the “good guys” in the Angolan Civil War just because they call themselves “communist.”
Christopher Hitchens had a line about at some point having to choose between the anti-totalitarian and the anti-imperialist left, which is obviously a false dichotomy, and yet,
Was thinking: this was true in the 60s too. North Vietnam was not one to cheer for, and Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh had been kicked upstairs to figurehead status, so they really were Le Duan fanbois.
Generally, it's simply hating on The Bad Guys, the one entity that is the fount of evil geopolitics, opposed by The Good Guys.
It's inverse American exceptionalism, believing that the US is uniquely bad rather than uniquely good. (Not original to me)
He was one of those guys who seemed to have a really well established leftist persona but never managed to put out anything but the most bland leftist analysis.
this, plus: "hurting people is always wrong and violence should be the very, very, VERY last resort" is such an easy, understandable, self-evident and obviously good principle. and yet.
A year or two ago, Beau of the Fifth Column pointed out that "leftism" covers a wide range that includes the sort of Communism Stalin practiced. I'm not polysci major but when ideology drives, basic compassion is often sacrificed to dogma.
And yet traditionally that hasn't really been a requirement for leftism. There are still old school authoritarian communists who really are gleeful about the idea of oppressing their enemies.
I think the point is supporting brutal authoritarian dictators who proclaim themselves the enemies of those in power closer to home who you resent-probably due to some fucked-up relationship with your father or both parents-so much you can't see they're 1000 less bad than the ones you're stanning.
"Purported" is le mot juste. The collaboration I had with a former Soviet bioweapons designer on his memoir taught me a lot. The corruption was so deep it was breathtaking. Nothing's changed now except the state ideology and who's in power...it was and still is a kleptocracy.
I visited twice in the 80’s and it was a shitshow of inequality with young Russians just enduring. The young Estonians would have Hulked out at positive descriptions of the communist totalitarian state.
