I have given up reading Paul Krugman or Charles Blow in the Times op-ed pages since the Julie Principle applies: they are reliable dishonest left-wing hacks, and it’s silly to waste time criticizing them for doing what they will always do. I have almost reached that point with Michelle Goldberg, last vivisected here, but her column this week was interesting. She actually criticized her fellow travelers for siding with Hamas after the horrific sneak terror attack on Israel. Not only that, Goldberg, a knee-jerk wokester if there ever was one, was moved to question progressives generally, writing in The Massacre in Israel and the Need for a Decent Left,
“…the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.”
“Progressive Jews” like Goldberg. Funny, I just think of her as an integrity-challenged, progressive liar and fool. Anyway, she goes on in part,
Conservatives reading this might take a jaundiced satisfaction in what some surely view as naïve progressives getting their comeuppance. But part of what makes the depravity of the edgelord anti-imperialists so tragic is that a decent and functional left has rarely been more necessary… It is not just disgusting but self-defeating for vocal segments of the left to disavow those universal ideas about human rights, declaring instead that to those who are oppressed, even the most extreme violence is permitted….Perhaps such hideous dogmatism shouldn’t be surprising. The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty; they are one reason movements on the left so reliably produce embittered apostates. Plenty of leftists have long fetishized revolutionary violence in poor countries, perhaps as a way of coping with their own ineffectuality….
The most sympathetic reading of the online leftists playacting as the Baader-Meinhof Gang is that their nihilism is a function of despair. As Leifer pointed out, even before the killings in Israel, it was a grim time for the American left, as the elation of the Sanders campaign and the revolutionary hopes of the Black Lives Matter movement gave way to backlash and retrenchment. “When the left loses, it enters into a cycle of self-marginalization,” he said….On social media, some scholars and activists are repeating the line “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” suggesting that the homicidal spree we just saw in Israel is not a departure from their ideology but the embodiment of it. I suspect they will come to regret it if people take them at their word.
By valorizing terrorism, these voices on the left are effectively choosing to stop contending for power in a serious way — a slow and grinding process rife with setbacks — and indulge instead in messianic projection.
Well bless her heart. (“The revolutionary hopes of the Black Lives Matter movement”? You mean like discriminating against whites, replacing merit with racial spoils, using violence as a political tool, destroying urban law enforcement and, of course, making lots of money? Those hopes?)
Ethics Alarms 