NOVANEWS
by Mary Rizzo
WRITTEN BY RUTH RIEGLER
On Syria, the Western ‘anti-war’ left, the Galloways, the Pilgers, the Fisks, their peers and their fans, are once again embarrassing themselves and humanity and again proving why there is no longer any significant grassroots working class socialist movement. While railing – rightly – against Western governments’ infinite hypocrisy and selective support for dictatorship and tyranny as and where expedient, the posturing pseudo-radicals have forgotten about their own equally limitless hypocrisy and equally selective support for dictatorship and tyranny. They have become the exact mirror image of all they claim to despise; affluent, morally selective dinner party revolutionaries who view Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité as passé.
Universal brotherhood has been consigned to the ideological rubbish dump, with brotherhood now selective, reserved only for nominally anti-imperialist totalitarian regimes and the elites that benefit from them. Just like the Western governments they claim to oppose, the pseudo-radicals selectively align themselves with brutally oppressive totalitarian regimes whenever expedient. They are in truth not anti-war or anti-imperialism and tyranny, but only anti-Western-backed wars, imperialism and/or tyranny; Western tyranny bad, non-Western tyranny good. Orwell had their number a long time ago.
The pseudo-radicals’ hypocrisy is also being more and more clearly exposed on Palestine; while claiming to be fervent anti-zionists and supporters of Palestinian freedom, they have had less than nothing to say about the Assad regime’s use of Israeli-made weapons to kill Palestinians in Syria, about its (ongoing) slaughter of over 500 Palestinians in the past few months, about its targeting of Palestinian camps or its attempts to blame Palestinians for the revolution, just as they’ve had nothing to say about the massacre of tens of thousands of Syrians.
There’s also their head-spinningly rapid change in attitude to the Muslim Brotherhood – which is apparently to be lauded in the form of Hamas, but is now cited alongside Al Qaeda as a hideous and terrifying threat in Syria, once again displaying their ignorance of the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as their usual woeful ignorance of the revolution itself. Meanwhile, the pseudo-radicals’ frequent warnings of the involvement of theocratic extremists in the revolution might be slightly more plausible (despite again having little or nothing to do with the revolution) if it weren’t for their exaltation of the regime in Tehran…
At the heart of the pseudo-radicals’ profoundly inhuman hypocrisy lies a distinctly colonial-era elitism that the officials of the British empire would have felt right at home with; there is a withering contempt from these supposed leftists for the non-Western proletariat (and not much empathy for the Western working class either), more especially when the masses under nominally ‘anti-imperialist’ tyrants dare to oppose the leadership. Only those brutal regimes and the elites that benefit from their patronage are worthy of the pseudo-radicals’ respect, nay adulation, while the wishes of the masses are dismissed and derided, once again exposing the totalitarianism groupies’ supposed radicalism for the shameful sham it is.
If they’re feeling particularly hospitable, these contemporary standard-bearers for leftist ‘thought’ might dismiss the masses in Syria rising up against a tyrant, who has maintained totalitarian rule through what the CIA has acknowledged as the most effective torture network in the world (its reason for selecting Syria as the preferred torture destination for War on Turr prisoners), as being tragically misguided fools taken in by Western media propaganda. In the elitist worldview of the pseudo-radicals, members of the working class, particularly the non-Western proletariat, are a credulous and childlike homogenous peasant mass incapable of independent thought, feeling or agency. The pseudo-radicals, as always, hold themselves to an entirely different standard, of course – they and their families should not have to live under autocratic totalitarian rule (it’s noteworthy that not one of the Tehran fan club, including its cheerleader George Galloway, has ever chosen to base themselves there, despite constantly extolling its superiority to the hideous West), but it’s jolly good for the unwashed masses, who lack their own sensitivity and need for basic freedoms.
Of course, the pseudo-radicals haven’t entirely lost their taste for mouthing revolutionary platitudes; witness their Toytown ‘Occupy’ revolution-that-wasn’t, rightly derided by the majority in Western nations as one more extended student sit-in for the well-off, with the same old slogans and the same old incoherence: ‘’We want something or other and we want it now, or we’ll, er, camp out and hold tai chi sessions!’’ When they witness true revolutions, however, the pseudo-radicals show their true, profoundly reactionary colours, siding with those rising up against true tyranny only as and when it’s ideologically expedient to do so and otherwise siding with the oppressors. So long as these callous elitist fakes and phoneys continue to be the loudest voice of the ‘radical’ left, it will – deservedly – continue to have little or no political influence at all.
