Will The Real Left Please Stand?
Will the Real Left Please Stand?We miss you. Where have you gone? You were there, and suddenly poof! You’re no longer there. In your place is quite another Left, a left discourse and association that has more than a whiff of a once respected, reliable, right-on elevation of human thought, echoing the catch-words and the buzz that used to animate all of us who claim to care about our fellow human beings, but one that is clearly distorted, corrupted beyond understanding.
Something like the conscious Left that existed at the rise of Communism, which swore support to Stalin and Soviet Russia, that great failed experiment that cost millions of lives before it could be declared for the monstrous ideology that it truly was, and left in the dustbin of history, but for a few stolid hold-outs here and there in dusty disarray and economic collapse.
My Left, the conscientious and sincerely humane political field that I was spoon-fed as a child in my parents’ earnest efforts to rise above the torrent of blind hatred that left their extended family a pile of ashes after the Holocaust, doesn’t appear to at all resemble that which I see before me today. My version, if that is what it was, cared about the welfare of people, strove to ensure that fairness prevailed and it revelled in an egalitarian, socially-responsive outlook on life.
In Canada, Tommy Douglas was the exemplar of the kind of Left that my parents exposed me to as a child, the Left that informed my father, that caused him to solemnly promise his child that when I attained to his age at some future date, war as a means to settle disagreements between nations would have become an unused rusty memento of a leaner time in mankind’s evolution. At that time, he said, people would be ready to accept one another as equals. There would be no political disquietude.
He was certainly wrong. The Left that aligned itself with a Communist dictatorship that maligned everything that people held most dear, that felt the sacrifice of millions of lives was acceptable for the higher purpose of achieving their socialist egalitarian ends, where the masses would strive to produce goods and services and take home equal pay irrespective of profession or rude labour, and the political elite would have their well-deserved limousines and dachas forgot about human nature.
That particular Left must have felt dreadfully betrayed. Not the Left which realized what an error it had made in its innocence, believing that people could and should be cajoled, persuaded to participate in a grand experiment where everyone was equal, and mind and body resourcefulness merited equal recompense, and there would be no hunger or want, and everyone’s basic needs would be looked after in an atmosphere of universal satisfaction.
Unfortunately, that might work for automatons, which was obviously what Stalin & Co. set out to produce, but it failed miserably for enhancing and enabling the lives of human beings. So the Left that campaigned to produce workers’ unions to protect the vulnerable in a capitalist society from unprincipled exploitation and worse, turned its attention back to what it does best; pursuing government to look after the interests of people, not corporations, and it became a part of government to bring us universal quality education and health care.
The Lunatic Left looked about for other distractions, something to really get their teeth into, other groups with which it could align itself, more exciting and protractedly-intense relationships to battle the establishment, the capitalists, the imperialists. This was when the moderate Left realized, one supposes, that there wasn’t that much separating the vicious Fascism of the Left from that of the Right.
So where is my Left now, the political party I have voted for all of my life, that ideology of fairness and equality which embraced those ensconced in their worlds of academia and those in blue-collar jobs alike? It seems the lunacy that infected the left-brains of those who supported fanaticism, whether Left or Right, has gone on to bigger and better things in our modern era. Now we see large public-service unions responding to the siren call of religious fanaticism, but only one religion in particular.
We see university associations agitating for censure against a legitimate democratic state encircled by hostile paramilitary forces whose purpose they obviously relate to: the espousing of virulent anti-Semitism in the guise of ‘criticizing Israel’, and battling the scourge of ‘imperialism’.
We see the evolution of backroom alliances between socialists, unions, ‘anti-war’ movements and just incidentally, ethnic- and religious-based protagonists whose raison d’etre is the destruction of the State of Israel; groups popularly known as Islamic extremists, or terrorists. But of course the designation of terrorist is a capitalist plot; people who blow up airliners and entice children to destroy themselves as suicide bombers are misunderstood fighters for liberty against a class enemy.
Under the umbrella Canadian anti-war organization, the Canadian Peace Alliance which included groups such as the Toronto Stop the War Coalition, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, and a few Canada-based Muslim groups, Canada presented the largest international contingent of Islamist supporters at a Cairo gathering that included the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Islamists, fanatical Muslims, jihadist emissaries take note, you have support from Canada, the land of social democracy and freedom from oppression of any kind. From Canada, with love. The question is why did it take so long for the popular press to pick up information about the junket? Why did none of our news outlets care enough to inform their readers that Canadian citizens who enjoy a high standard of living, of education, of freedom, of access to reliable news see it as their duty to travel a world away in support of groups whom their own country labels terrorists and takes legal steps to outlaw?
It isn’t as though we haven’t been forewarned. Canada has uncovered the presence of its own breed of anti-Western, anti-democratic, jihad-loving adherents of Islamic fanatics. We have among us progressively moderate Muslims, Canadian citizens, who have signalled to Canadian authorities that these fundamentalist groups in Canada seek to suborn our way of life.
Their warning of the presence of religious reactionaries bent on spreading fearsomely deadly havoc have gone unheeded. It is not the Canadian way to ‘interfere’, as though this is simply a matter of one faction of a religious group in disagreement with another, crying foul for no good cause. We’ve been through this before, most notably two decades earlier, when the government and our federal policing agencies failed to protect Canadian citizens, and the result was a tragedy that took the lives of hundreds of Canadians.
Political Canada likes to ‘protect’ its ethnic groups, to encourage them to feel completely at home. Sufficiently so, it would appear, that some elements within those groups feel sufficiently encouraged to have their new country reflect the divisions and hatreds that exist in their original homes. And they perpetuate those hatreds, fan the flames of anger and bitterness and agitate for violence. These are not mere quaint ethnic attitudes; they represent deadly intent.
The same Canadian fellow travellers that went to Cairo to give aid and comfort to the Islamist terrorists gathered there feel kinship with the rigidly theocratic Government of Iran, despite that the Islamist country has the world fearful of its acquiring nuclear weaponry, despite (or perhaps because of) its declared intent to wipe Israel out of existence. Iran has murdered trade unionists, student activists, feminists, socialists, homosexuals, ethnic minorities and journalists. But they’re okay, Jack.
So, all right. Where is the Left I thought I knew and respected and for which I’ve cast my vote over the past 50 years of my life? If the NDP has queried the association of CUPE with the Canadian-Cairo contingent we haven’t heard anything of it. If the NDP has sought to distance itself from the overtly anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, anti-West activities of the ‘anti-war’ groups eager to defend and assist the activities of tribal murdering Islamists, has it been on the Q.T.?
The Left and the NDP scream loud and clear when they feel their agenda is being taken lightly. I need some refreshing; what, exactly, is their agenda of late?
Labels: Canada, Heroes and Villains
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, May 12, 2007
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