On January 3rd, 2017, in Chicago, Ill., four black young people – Brittany Covington, 18, her sister Tanisha Covington, 24, Tesfaye Cooper, 18, and Jordan Hill, 18 – brought home their white, mentally disabled schoolmate, also 18, and tortured him for hours while shouting “F*ck white people” and “F*ck Trump”. Then, they demanded a $300 ransom from the victim’s mother and posted a video of this atrocity on YouTube. There are many other vile details to this story but their importance pales in comparison to the hypocritical reaction of a large portion of the media, some public figures and many social justice warriors.
Scrupulously observing the liberal linguistic superstitions, the majority of the media reports which I have read did not dare mention the race of the young sadists while at the same time publishing their very explicit photographs. CNN’s host Don Lemon dismissed the event as not evil, just a result of “bad home training” (as if it were a case of peeing on the toilet seat). The New York Times buried the story of the crime on page 17 of its January 4th edition; even though the article called it an “apparent racial attack,” the incident did not qualify for the Times’ weekly compilation of “hate crimes and harassment around the country since the election of Donald Trump” published one day later. Worse still, a CBS radio report, while remaining technically factual, managed to create an impression that some white Trump supporters tortured a helpless mentally ill black man (1).
The shrill denial of the social justice mob was even more pathetic. “Calm down my white friends… your white privilege is showing. y’all carry on”; “Hmmm…lets see what white people are fake outraged over this morning #BLMKidnapping”; “White people cannot suffer racism, it’s an actual impossibility if you understand WTF racism is”; “Black people die at the hands of white terrorists everyday. stfu” – these are some examples of the callous, patronizing or just plain stupid tweets issued by people who certainly consider themselves nice, tolerant, unbiased and rational (2). But such duplicity is nothing new for the Left. In fact, it is its birthright and cornerstone.
When we take a long, hard look at the history of the struggle between the Right and the Left, we cannot help noticing – if we are honest about it – that the Left’s claim to the higher moral ground usually rests on hypocrisy and double standard. Despite its many grave and obvious sins, especially in its extreme political forms, the Right is seldom found guilty of this particular vice. Thus, unlike Stalin, Hitler did not try to disguise his brutal realpolitik aims under the noble-sounding verbiage about the progress of humanity and liberation of the masses. Incidentally, Stalin had killed substantially more people than Hitler, albeit by different means and without racial prejudice – he was a truly egalitarian mass murderer. Yet in popular perception, fueled by the overwhelming liberal slant in official historiography and the mainstream media, Hitler is evil incarnate while Stalin still retains quite a few shreds of his benevolent “Uncle Joe” disguise. The ongoing trials of war criminals project this bias into the realm of politico-judicial praxis: while even the lowest Nazi camp guards, now in their nineties, are still being prosecuted and sentenced to fairly long prison terms, not a single Stalinist (or a Communist, for that matter) functionary has ever been put in the dock, no matter how homicidal were his or her actions in the past (3).
Historical instances of this double standard are numerous. For example, the Spanish Civil War was triggered in 1936 by the inability (or perhaps unwillingness) of the democratically elected Republican government to stop the atrocities committed daily in the streets by the extreme Left and the anarchists. Political opponents and priests were slaughtered and churches were burned, even in Madrid, a few blocks away from the parliament building, yet the government did nothing, thus forcing an already disgruntled group of army officers to initiate a coup d’état. This act of self-defense was immediately presented by the Left as an assault on democracy itself and the Spanish Civil War was turned into an iconic event in the leftist mythology (4).
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine physician and Marxist revolutionary, is still considered a ‘good guy’ and even a role model in the “progressive” circles despite the fact that he was personally responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of political executions in Cuba and South America. Nevertheless, his present-day admirers are finding all sorts of excuses for his murderous behavior, or simply ignore it altogether while wearing T-shirts and buttons with his heroically staring-into-the-glorious-future image.
Unsurprisingly, Che also helped create the totalitarian regime in Cuba with its secret police, labour camps, hellhole prisons, and the comprehensive surveillance of the population. As we all know (or as we all should know), the same thing had happened practically everywhere under the rule of the Left – in the Soviet Russia, Republican Spain, Maoist China, the Soviet Block countries, North Vietnam, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and so on. But this elephant in the room remains deeply camouflaged. Nowadays, the hip social justice warriors simply don’t care if their past and present idols drip with blood and engage in all sorts of violence as long as they provide free education and public health care. Many such people often wear the red star somewhere on their clothing even though the swastika as a fashion accessory would fill them with horror and disgust. Just the same, the practical difference between them and neo-Nazis is very small indeed.
As for tolerance, it is no longer defined by Voltaire’s apocryphal but noble saying, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” Now it is Herbert Marcuse and his “liberating” or “discriminating” tolerance that is being practiced by the Left (that is to say, by Western governments, Western universities and Western mainstream media.) In his 1965 essay Repressive tolerance, Marcuse defined this new understanding of tolerance simply as “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left” (5). Tolerance is thus intolerance – this would be simply absurd (or a quote from Orwell’s “1984”) if it hadn’t been said and received with absolute seriousness.
Why does the Left need to rely so heavily on deception, hypocrisy, and plain lies? The motives are complex but one reason stands out – the liberals’ irrationally optimistic evaluation of human nature. Olga Tokarczuk, a contemporary Polish writer and one of the standard bearers of “progressivism” in her country, has summed up very well this hopelessly naïve attitude:
“The conservative assumes that people are more bad than good; he believes that only external conditioning, prohibitions, rules and laws, including the power of tradition, are able to keep the man in proper moral order. The leftist believes that, deep down there, the man is after all good, that we only need to leave him alone and he will spread his wings. It is better to trust, support, sympathize and let him be free” (6).
And when this “wonderfully optimistic philosophy of the Left” (Tokarczuk’s words again) starts malfunctioning in real life, when the man refuses – due to his instincts or his freedom – to blindly accept such egregiously unempirical dogmas, the Left is forced to resort to the “external conditioning, prohibitions, rules and laws” – just what the Right has been prescribing all along. Of course, the Left cannot admit this and the masquerade of deception, hypocrisy, and plain lies begins. Racism works only one way, intolerance is tolerance, murder is peace. All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than the others. Thus the “sunny ways” (7) of the Left run through the swamps of mendacity and over the rivers of blood.
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Mariusz Wesolowski
January 2017
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Footnotes:
(3) A very recent exception to this rule is the sentencing of Alexandru Visinescu, 90, a Communist Romanian camp guard, to 20 years’ imprisonment on February 10th, 2016 (see https://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/jailing-of-elderly-former-prison-commander-means-more-romanian-communists-will-answer-for-crimes).
https://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/jailing-of-elderly-former-prison-commander-means-more-romanian-communists-will-answer-for-crimes
It was also in Romania that its Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu had been executed, together with his high-profile wife, during a popular uprising in 1989. However, these events are so far completely isolated. For example, the organizers of, and participants in, the so-called Katyn massacre of more than 10,000 Polish officers in the Soviet Russia in 1940 – a war crime if there ever was one – have never been prosecuted although many of them had been still alive after the perestroika. One of its main instigators, Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign minister of the USSR under Stalin, also known as the signatory of the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov pact with the Nazi Germany in 1939, died peacefully in his bed, at age 96, in 1986. Salomon Morel, a Jewish Communist partisan, Stalinist official and a sadistic commander of the camp for German civilians at Świętochłowice, Poland, in 1945, was sheltered by the State of Israel from Polish demands for his extradiction as a war criminal until his death in 2007. Ironically, he had been receiving his state official’s pension from Poland for many years after his immigration to Israel in 1992.
(4) And it still remains so, as witnessed by the apologetic media reactions to the last year’s 80th anniversary of its outbreak, even though we can easily learn about its actual reality – the continuous, brutal extermination of real and perceived opponents, crippling infighting between various political factions in the Republican camp, poor military planning, the transfer to the USSR of the entire Spanish gold reserve (never to be seen again), and finally a street battle between the Republican army – which by then had turned against its own government – and the Communists in Madrid. A truly pathetic and sordid story indeed. For the comprehensive and objective treatment of the subject, see Anthony Beevor’s “The Battle for Spain,” (a revamping of his earlier and rather unexceptional 1982 account), Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006, or the older and truly magisterial “The Spanish Civil War” by Hugh Thomas (Penguin Randon House, revised edition, 2001). Avoid any publications by Paul Preston who is just a highly biased mounthpiece for the British Left.
(5) See https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm .
(6) Quoted from the Polish text of the interview with Olga Tokarczuk at https://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,18999849,olga-tokarczuk-laureatka-nike-2015-ludzie-nie-bojcie-sie.html
(7) “Sunny ways” is how the Canadian Liberal Party is fond of describing its policies.
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O autorze:
Mariusz Wesolowski – (ur. 1954), absolwent polonistyki i historii sztuki Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, od roku 1982 mieszka w Kanadzie.
