Tag Archives: the Left

Whatever Happened to the Antiwar Left? By Sohrab Amahri

Protesting war used to be the one thing the Left was good for. Now it’s good for nothing. From Sohrab Amahri at theamericanconservative.com:

Now, as we face the prospect of new global conflict, it is everyone else’s turn to say “Not In Our Name.”

On Feb. 15, 2003, 14 million people poured into the streets of 800 cities worldwide to oppose the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It was a preemptive response to the preemptive war hatched by Bush administration, and according to the Guinness Book of World Records, it was the largest protest ever in human history. Yet the 2003 protest was also a swan song of sorts: the movement that gave rise to it is now all but defunct—namely, the antiwar left.

Two decades later, as U.S. hawks press for relentless escalation against nuclear Russia, and as European leaders unfailingly toe Washington’s line, there is no major movement of the left to channel dissent. Nor are there commanding antiwar figures comparable in stature to the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Labour M.P. Tony Benn, who spoke for the movement in 2003. Old antiwar groups, like the ANSWER Coalition, are either silent or struggling to be heard.

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Some two-dozen House progressives on Monday called for diplomacy, but antiwar leftists who championed the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and The Squad must surely be disappointed, as the few elected socialists on Capitol Hill dutifully voted “Yes” on one massive Ukraine military-aid package after another. Some veteran left-of-center restrainers, meanwhile, such as former Ploughshares Fund boss Joe Cirincione, sound downright Kristolian, what with the calls to smoke out a “pro-Putin axis.”

The post-9/11 atmosphere of pro-war conformity has returned—only, instead of dour “security moms,” it’s enforced by irony bros with Ukraine flags and pronouns in their bios. As I noted in these pages soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the same simplistic moral binaries that had been used to demand obeisance to the Covid regime were transferred to the war. Suddenly, progressives who were supposed to be post-nationalist became the most ardent nationalists, prepared to ignore even the most unsavory aspects of Ukrainian nationalism. Meanwhile, the street theatrics that used to be hallmarks of left-wing antiwar agitation are now used to promote no-fly zones (i.e., World War III).

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America Is More Fragile Than the Left Understands, by Victor Davis Hanson

Ayn Rand said the U.S. was more fragile than it looked . . . back in 1957. She also had a pretty good idea of why that was so. Writers and commentators have recycled her arguments for years, usually without attribution and usually without delving into deeper causes. Victor Davis Hanson does the same, but this article won’t take you as long to read as Atlas Shrugged. At least he cited Adam Smith. From Hanson at amgreatness.com:

Like a stunned adolescent whose reckless incompetence totaled the family car, the Left seems shocked that America proved so fragile after all.

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
— Adam Smith

The Left has been tempting fate since January 2021—applying its nihilist medicine to America on the premise that such a rich patient can ride out any toxic shock.

Our elites assume that all our nation’s past violent protests, all its would-be revolutions, all its cultural upheavals, all its institutionalized lawlessness were predicated on one central truth—America’s central core is so strong, so rich, and so resilient that it can withstand almost any assault. 

So, we can afford 120 days in 2020 of mass rioting, $2 billion in damage, some 35 killed, and 1,500 police injured. 

We can easily survive an Afghanistan, and our utter and complete military humiliation. There was no problem in abandoning some $70-80 billion in military loot to terrorists. Who cares that we tossed off a billion-dollar new embassy, and jettisoned a $300-million refitted air base, as long as our pride flags were waving in Kabul?

Certainly, we can afford to restructure all our universities, eliminate free expression and speech, and institute Maoist cultural revolutionary fervor in our revered institutions of higher learning—once the world’s greatest levers of scientific advancement and technological progress. 

We can jettison merit in every endeavor, from banning the world’s great books to grading math tests to running chemistry experiments. And still, a resilient America won’t notice.

We assumed that our foundational documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—our natural bounty in North America, our cherished rule of law, our legal immigration traditions that drew in the most audacious and hardworking on the planet, and our guarantees of personal freedom and liberty led to such staggering wealth and affluence that nothing much that this mediocre generation could do would ever endanger our resilience.

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Biden Becomes a Bernie Sanders Democrat? by Patrick J. Buchanan

The far left owns the Democratic party. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

“We’ve got the president of the United States on our side,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

“Got 96% of the members of the Democratic caucus in the House on our side. We got all but two senators at this point in the Democratic caucus on our side. We’re going to win this thing.”

The socialist senator from Vermont may be overly optimistic about how the party deadlock on Capitol Hill unfolds. But about the balance of forces inside the party, and the direction where it is headed, Sanders is probably not wrong.

Progressive Democrats won the week.

President Joe Biden confirmed it by casting his lot with the liberal-left on the sequencing of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and $3.5 trillion social safety net bill pending in Congress.

When Biden went to the Hill Friday, it was thought he was coming to rescue and liberate the Senate-passed infrastructure bill being held hostage by progressives until they got their way on the larger bill.

Progressives had threatened to sink the roads-and-bridges bill in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House, unless they received solid assurances that both houses would simultaneously take up and approve the $3.5 trillion bill.

When Biden reached the Hill, however, he threw in with the hostage-takers. He asked for a delay in House passage of his own infrastructure bill, until the demands of the progressives were addressed and met.

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Why Does the Left Seemingly Hate Israel? by Victor Davis Hanson

The left would answer that they hate Israel because the country oppresses Palestinians, yet the left is unmoved by the oppression suffered by many other groups. From Victor Davis Hanson at theepochtimes.com:

Commentary

With more than 3,000 rockets having been fired into Israel by Hamas recently, the Democratic Party seems paralyzed over how to respond to the latest Middle East war.

It’s not just that they fear that “The Squad,” Black Lives Matter, the shock troops of Antifa, and woke institutions such as academia and the media are now unapologetically anti-Israel. They are also terrified that anti-Israelism is becoming synonymous with rank anti-Semitism. And soon, the Democratic Party will end up as disdained as the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

The new core of the Democrats, as emblemized by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, has in the past questioned the patriotism of American Jews who support Israel, and occasionally has had to apologize for puerile anti-Semitic rants.

The left in general believes we should judge harshly even the distant past without exemptions. Why then, in venomous, knee-jerk fashion, does it fixate on a nation born from the Holocaust while favoring Israel’s enemies, who were on the side of the Nazis in World War II?

It wasn’t just that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi sympathizer. Egypt, for example, welcomed ex-Nazis for their hatred of Jews and their military expertise, including infamous death camp doctor Aribert Ferdinand Heim and Waffen-SS henchman Otto Skorzeny. The Hamas charter still reads like it is cribbed from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The left claims it champions consensual government and believes the United States must use its soft-power clout to isolate autocracies. But the Palestinian Authority and Hamas refuse to hold free and regularly scheduled elections. If an Israeli strongman ever suspended free elections and ruled through brutality, U.S. aid would be severed within days.

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The Civil War, by the Zman

How much longer will middle-class whites continue to turn the other cheek? From the Zman at theburningplatform.com:

America is a land that bans books, has political prisoners and condemns people to a form of internal exile where they cannot have a job or maintain a normal life. Ten years ago, if someone said Americans would lose their jobs because they liked something on social media, only the aluminum foil hat types would have believed it. Such things were considered impossible just a decade ago. In the 1980’s, these were the sorts of things that happened in the Soviet Union, which was why communism was considered evil.

Yet, here we are, seeing things we thought impossible not so long ago. This is a clip from a television show aired on one of the legacy networks. The video is a naked call for violence against whites. Even after all of the outrageous behavior we have seen from the ruling class the last few years, no reasonable person would have thought this was possible even a year ago. Even the Soviets at the worst were not exhorting people to commit acts of violence against enemies of the revolution.

Up until now, it was reasonable to think that the paleocons were right. The Left was using excited language in an effort to keep their coalition of non-white tribes focused on white men, rather than their many grievances with one another. That sounded logical and let’s face it, it is what most normal white people want to believe. After all, the implication of this line of reasoning is that the Left is struggling to keep it together. We don’t have to worry about facing them in a fight, as they will splinter and abandon the field.

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What They Want, Versus Will Get, from Raconteur Report

The left will start the civil war, the right will end it, and there won’t be much left left. From racenteurreport.com:

This from GVDL, WRSA, and originally KD.

As usual, Denninger gets things half-right.

There is intended to be a Civil War. The Leftards openly fantasize this, as they see themselves as swooping in to repeat another victory.

Except this time the South is every white person, everywhere.
(They think they’ll get over because they “identify” as gay black women. It won’t work any better for them than for the frog giving the scorpion a ride.)

But “we” (D. apparently has a mouse in his pocket) won’t be stopping it, because “we” didn’t start it, don’t control the narrative, and have neither the will nor inclination to prevent gravity from working.
The chimp-out under plan is being ginned up per protocol, exactly as thousands of smaller versions have, with a monotonous cadence of hoax crimes, all beating the drum inexorably to fan the flames and direct the muster of exactly the CW intended.

The surprise will be when (and if) it comes calling.

On Day One, predictably to a mathematical certainty, they run out of cops, after two or perhaps three volleys. The cops already know this to a man, hence the distinct lack of vigor to go about it in the first place.

If no learning occurs prior, on Day Two, The Culling begins in earnest.
Instructive, at this point, is the Flight 93 Effect: i.e. in this day and age, you’ve got about half an hour’s free reign to hatch your Clever Plan, and after that, the so-called Sheeple, having been red-pilled to the New Reality,  will come at you, if necessary with bread knives and rolled up magazines. And then you and your Clever Plan are over.

The problem for the Leftards is that Joe Average can do much better, on thirty minutes’ notice, than bread knives and rolled up magazines, unless he’s trapped in an aluminum tube at 40k’.

It will be ARs and Glocks and such, until all obvious targets have either changed shape, caught fire, or bled out.

Then, the survivors (and pure odds overwhelmingly favors one side, and that side is not The Diversity) will look to who started it, and The Hunt will begin in earnest.

By Friday, people will be rounded up in batches, and shot against the handiest wall, and it likely won’t end until Rush Limbaugh is considered the most Liberal Man in America.

You can forget the military; they’ll be hamstrung, and the wiser ones (about 98%) will either have joined the melee, or chosen to sit on their hands until the festivities are over, rather than wade amidst an internal war fray. They’ll retreat to their bases, and lock the gates, with orders to merely repel boarders, and fire only defensively. And for exactly the same reason the Beijing Guards wouldn’t fire on the Beijing students in Tiananmen Square.
The Chicoms had to import hicks from the sticks to do that dirty work.
Our military won’t have time for that, not being prepared beforehand.
And they’ll see what happens to the cops, from local to federal, and want no part of that pie for themselves. (“Only a fool fights in a burning house.“)

{In fact, see if you don’t find young and middle-aged guys headed home in their work out gear, and find piles of empty police uniforms in the police station parking lots, when most of them just go home to protect their own families.}

Besides, the military will generally have their hands full assuring six other world powers that the nukes are secure (nations that have them get itchy about that point, to a metaphysical certainty), and those other nations should fuck right off and stay out of this hemisphere, and not stick their nose into the bear fight, lest it get blown off with a response in the megaton range, by way of warning shot.
For the same reasons, there will be a rush to the Mexican Border, but it will be an exodus headed south, not north.

How long The Hunt lasts is an open question, as is how far the decline.
Some areas may last for weeks, some others for only a few hours.
The “Civil War” is liable to resemble more closely the Rodney King Riots, rather than the Unpleasantness of the 1860s. Ain’t nobody got time for that, and in any event, there’ll be no one left to whack after a few days or weeks, the rest either dead or in hiding or exile, with bounties on their heads.

You think the Left will suddenly show backbone?
Look at an Antifa event: one Moldylocks face punch, and it’s over.
The “brave” ones only attack with police escort and at 10:1 odds.
Toe to toe, they scurry like roaches, and when heads start exploding and guts opened up right and left, they’ll set Olympic track records getting back to the safety of mommy’s basement, if they can make it there unscathed. And those are their “tough” customers.

Hospitals and churches won’t be a safe zone sanctuary, and there’ll be no Geneva conventions: people will be pulled out by the hair and shot on the steps, when and where found.

Media outlets will be gutted free-fire zones: radio, TV, newspapers. Open season on “journalists”, and no bag limit. Mark my words. This ain’t going to be Vietnam or GWI or GWII: “PRESS” creds on your vehicle or person will be a death sentence. “The Revolution will not be televised.
You may get some Liveleak and youTube hashed up cell video, but it will look like shakey-cam outtakes from The Blair Witch Project or War Of The Worlds, and liable to get you shot in the face for doing it, so it will not be a wise move to be the guy holding out a cell phone camera like some talisman of protection, unless it’s got an NIJ rating sufficient to stop .30 cal incoming.

What happens after that is when things get interesting, in a Chinese curse sort of way, and my crystal ball is hazy by that point.

Then we’ll see who’s organized, and legitimized, or whether we enter the warlord and dictator period of history.

And whether it starts next month or twenty years from now – if it ever does – is still a wide-open question.

But the Left definitely thinks they want one to start, and are openly salivating at the prospect.
Like all mad dogs.

But mad dogs always get shot. Always.

Then you go after their owners.

The Great Myth of the Anti-War Left Exposed, by Andrew Moran

Maybe because some of it’s prominent older members demonstrated against the Vietnam War, there is still a widespread belief that the Left is anti-war. That’s no longer true, if it ever was. From Andrew Moran at libertynation.com:

Otto von Bismarck once said, “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” For decades, a common myth pervading the American political arena has been that the left is anti-war. But they are as much opposed to war as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) – at least he is honest about his appetite for blood and desire for perpetual regime change, no matter who occupies the Oval Office. So, from where did this mendacity come?

In 2008, the United States was entrenched in an election battle and two major wars – Afghanistan and Iraq. The Democrats portrayed themselves as the anti-war party, promising to correct the foreign disasters of the incumbent administration. Since then, it’s as if former President George W. Bush never departed. The Democrats have championed military interventions, twiddled their thumbs under President Barack Obama, and nominated a hawk to lead the party in 2016.

Progressives, the same ones who, under Republican administrations, routinely held massive anti-war rallies on days that ended in “y,” have been eerily silent for the last ten years.

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Armageddon Rides In The Balance, by Paul Craig Roberts

There are elements of the left that would rather see the world destroyed than see President Trump move towards peace with Russia, especially if tensions were successfully reduced and Trump got some credit for it. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.com:

For some time I have pointed out the paradox of the American liberal/progressive/left being allied with the CIA, FBI, military/security complex and deep state. Now leftist Ann Garrison has noticed the paradox of this alliance. She concludes that the left has lost its mind. https://www.globalresearch.ca/we-love-the-cia-or-how-the-left-lost-its-mind/5653450

Indeed, it has.

Out of its hatred of Trump the left has united with the forces of evil and war that are leading to conflict with Russia. The left’s hatred of Trump shows that the American left has totally seperated from the interests of the working class, which elected Trump. The American left has abandoned the working class for the group victimizations and hatreds of Identity Politics. As Hillary put it, the working class comprises the “Trump deplorables.” The Democratic Party, like the Republicans, represents the ruling oligarchy. Continue reading

The American Left: RIP, by Paul Craig Roberts

The American left once championed some worthwhile causes. No more. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

Once upon a time the leftwing of the political spectrum was committed to the advancement of the working class and its protection from political and economic abuse by the owners of the means of production. Consequently, the leftwing was politically potent and reached a pinnacle of power when Henry Wallace was selected by Franklin D. Roosevelt as his third term vice president. Despite his wealth from the company he founded, Wallace stood for the farmer and the working class.

The Democratic Party power brokers refused to accept Wallace as the vice president candidate until FDR told them he otherwise would decline the presidential nomination.

Wallace was Roosevelt’s and the Democratic voters’ choice for vice president in Roosevelt’s fourth term. But Wallace’s progressive views had alienated the party bosses, Wall Street bankers, anti-union businesses, and America’s British and French allies with his support for labor unions, women, minorities, and victims of colonialism. When he called for the emancipation of colonial subjects and for working with the Soviet Union in the cause of peace and working class justice, he sealed his fate. Despite a Gallup Poll released during the Democratic national convention in July 1944 showing that Wallace was the favorite with 65% of the vote and Roosevelt’s announcement that if he were a delegate, he would choose Wallace, the party bosses chose Harry Truman who was preferred by only 2% of Democratic voters.

This was a turning point in US politics and world history. If the people had prevailed over the corrupt Democratic party bosses, Wallace instead of Truman would have become the first postwar US president. Most likely, there would have been no Cold War, no Korean War, no Vietnam War, no NATO, and no decades of mutual distrust between the US and Russia that today threatens life on earth.

Moreover, in place of today’s highly skewed income and wealth distribution toward the very rich fraction of one percent, there would be an equitable distribution that would support a strong consumer market instead of declining real incomes and debt expansion that threatens economic growth, business profits, employment, and high equity values.

To continue reading: The American Left: RIP

The Left’s Descent to Fascism, by Charles Hugh Smith

Charles Hugh Smith treats the Left’s descent into fascism as a fairly recent development, but it’s not. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were fascists by most definitions of the word, including Smith’s. From Smith at oftwominds.com:

The Left is morally and fiscally bankrupt, devoid of coherent solutions, and corrupted by its embrace of the Corporatocracy.

History often surprises us with unexpected ironies. For the past century, the slide to fascism could be found on the Right (conservative, populist, nationalist political parties).

But now it’s the Left that’s descending into fascism, and few seem to even notice this remarkable development. By Left I mean socialist-leaning, progressive, internationalist/globalist political parties.

What is fascism? There is no one tidy definition, but it has three essential elements:

1) State and corporate elites govern society and the economy as one unified class.

2) This status quo (i.e. The Establishment) seeks to impose a conformity of values and opinion that support the dominant narratives of the status quo via the mass (corporate) media and the state-controlled educational system.

3) Dissent from any quarter is suppressed via mass-media ridicule, the judicial crushing and silencing of whistleblowers, and all the other powers of the central state: rendition, extra-legal imprisonment, political gulags (in our era, disguised as drug-war gulags), character assassination, murder by drone, impoverishing dissenters via firings and blacklists, and on and on.

The Left is now the political wing of the corporatocracy. As Phillipe Poutou, a Ford factory mechanic from Bordeaux who is the sole working-class candidate in France’s presidential election, so deliciously pointed out, the Left and Right status quo candidates are indistinguishable in terms of their self-serving corruption and elitism:Mechanic-Candidate Bursts French Political Elite’s Bubble (NY Times)

Here in the U.S., the self-serving Democratic Party elites operate within the Corporatocracy structure, in which the state protects and funds private-sector cartels; the two intertwined and self-reinforcing elites manifest and enforce state policies.

To continue reading: The Left’s Descent to Fascism