United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and
Terror
By Jamie
Glazov
(WND Books, 264
pages, $25.95)
What drives an intelligent, successful Western person — a
professor, a movie star, a novelist — to venerate totalitarian
movements and even make pilgrimages to fawn over mass-murdering
dictators? Jamie Glazov, managing editor of Frontpagemag.com (for which I’ve
been writing for over five years), seeks answers to that question
in this powerful book.
Allowing that, as a son of Soviet dissidents, “this leftist
choice to support tyranny over freedom has always shocked and
mystified me,” Glazov starts with a portrait of the leftist
believer. Such a person, he claims, suffers from “an acute sense
of alienation from his own society — an alienation to which he
is, himself, completely blind.” Moreover, the extreme leftist is
“in denial about the character flaws that prevent him from
bonding with his own people,” and so he “fantasizes about
building a perfect society where he will, finally, fit in.”
Drawn for decades to the heinous Communist regimes of Stalin,
Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and others — and more recently to the
likes of Khomeini, Arafat, Saddam, Hamas, or Hezbollah — the
Western leftist “consistently denies what is actually
happening within the totalisms he worships…. But” — and this is
one of Glazov’s central claims — “privately he approves of the
carnage; indeed, that is what attracts him in the first
place.”
If it may seem an excessive assertion, Glazov marshals impressive
evidence for it. Drawing on the earlier insights of Paul
Hollander, he notes, for instance, that the stream of Western
pilgrims to the Soviet Union and Maoist China peaked,
respectively, in the 1930s and the 1950s-1960s when the carnage
was at its greatest. It was in the blood-drenched '30s that
leftists like Walter Duranty, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertolt
Brecht most sweetly sang the praises of Stalin’s paradise; and
Mao’s monstrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution of the
'50s and '60s brought breathless admirers like Simone de
Beauvoir, Shirley MacLaine, and Orville Schell.
Then there was the reaction of many leftists to 9/11 itself. In
the U.S., philosophy professor Robert Paul Churchill said that
“what the terrorists despised and sought to defeat was our
arrogance, our gluttonous way of life, our miserliness toward the
poor…”; history professor Gerald Horne said “the bill has come
due…it is time to pay”; Norman Mailer called the suicide
hijackers “brilliant”; and Susan Sontag said “this was not a
‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or
‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed
super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American
alliances and actions….”
Abroad, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen said 9/11 was “the
greatest work of art for the whole cosmos,” and Italian Marxist
and playwright Dario Fo opined: “The great speculators wallow in
an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with
poverty — so what is 20,000 dead in New York?” — and all this
is only a partial list of leftist encomiums to the massacre.
Indeed, as Glazov emphasizes, if a certain ideological coherence
could be ascribed to the Western leftists’ love affair with
Communism with its ostensible values of equality and social
justice, their later romance with Arab-Islamic radicalism
conclusively tears the mask off any alleged humane underpinnings.
Already in the late 1970s, Michel Foucault was calling Khomeini a
“saint” and referring to the “rapture” of the bloody overthrow of
Shah Reza Pahlavi’s government; and by 2003 leftists were serving
as human shields for Saddam Hussein and marching en masse along
with Islamists and even neo-Nazis to “oppose the war” and save
his regime.
Glazov points out, however, that in some ways the leftists’
migration from the fallen hammer-and-sickle to the ascendant
crescent entailed not only contradiction but also continuation.
MacLaine, for instance, wrote approvingly that in Maoist China
“the uni-sex uniforms…de-emphasized sexuality…. Women had little
need or even desire for such superficial things as frilly clothes
and makeup….” As Glazov notes, this forced desexualized attire
“especially enthralled [Western] believers.” From there it was no
huge leap to present-day Western feminists’ deafening silence
about misogynic abuses in the Islamic world — or as Glazov aptly
puts it, “Leftist feminists not only refuse to criticize the
burqa, but romanticize and champion it, because they
cherish the idea of a tyrannical force smothering the components
of womanhood that they despise in their own societies and in
themselves.”
This book — concise, pungent, and a fast, addictive read — has
all the virtues of a tour-de-force while, tantalizingly,
leaving some questions not fully answered. While “alienation” and
“character flaws” that prevent bonding with one’s own people are
undoubtedly part of the pathology of the Left, can they suffice
to explain the bonding by outwardly civilized people with
murderous and even genocidal tyrannies and movements? Glazov’s
description of the psychosis is thoroughly compelling
but only partly — inevitably, I would suggest — dispels the
mystery of its motives.
There is also the question of the relation between the far-out
leftists like terrorist-groupies Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter
and ostensibly more mainstream figures; Glazov only hints at this
in observing that it was the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Ted
Kennedy — “Carter’s ideological soulmates,” as he calls them —
who spearheaded the Left’s agitation for the U.S. to abandon Iraq
just when there was progress toward democracy there. But there is
more — how influential is the radical Left, and in what ways is
it distinct or indistinct from the Democratic Party? — that
could have been explored here.
Those are just a couple of caveats about an astute, profound,
important book that shouldn’t be missed.
