I have often made a distinction between liberals and leftists, and will continue to do so.
One of my most pleasant conversations at the CNN event in Washington was with a former Biden official (lower-level) who was your old-style liberal. He wasn’t angry. He didn’t hate conservatives–a rarity these days, I admit–and as far as I could tell, was just as committed to making our country and the world better for everyone as I am.
We disagreed on means, not ends. I genuinely like talking to such people, and know that there are many more of them than you would think if you spend too much time on social media or paying attention to politics.
Leftists, though, make no bones about hating people with whom they have disagreements. It is their thing, going back to the birth of the modern Left in the French Revolution. Leftism traipses from one bloody revolution to the next, reveling in the bloodshed as a cleansing ritual.
Symbolic of this bloodlust, the Left valorizes men like Che Guevara, who oversaw a concentration camp and the liquidation of people he considered enemies of the Revolution.
‘Crazy with fury, I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls into my hands. My nostrils dilate while savouring the acrid odour of gunpowder and blood.’
The Left’s fascination with cruelty, murder, and terrorism is a constant, most recently seen in their full-throated embrace of Hamas and “decolonization.” By now, we are all familiar with the pro-Hamas faction of the Democratic Party, the Hamas apologists in the Pravda Media, and the hatred that has flowed toward Jews on college campuses and on the streets of Western cities.
But the embrace of revolutionary violence is not exclusive to anti-Israeli activism. Many of those same Leftists want to see similar events around the world. Luigi Mangione became a popular hero on the left within hours of his crime, and Seth Mandel has a story in Commentary about the “decolonizers” embracing the Islamic terrorists who just committed a massacre in Kashmir.
full post on the Kashmir terror attack and the dehumanizing effect of death-cult decolonization among Western intellectuals: https://t.co/Q0D6RIhEQZ
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) April 28, 2025
Why American Leftists would have much of an opinion about Kashmiri/Pakistani/Indian politics might seem to be a mystery, but I have my suspicions–Islamic terrorism seems to be their bag ever since the Left discovered that Osama bin Laden was their type of guy. A fellow “decolonizer.”
On April 22, Islamic terrorists stormed across a tourist spot in Jammu and Kashmir and killed 26 people, often confirming the victims were Hindu before executing them in front of their families.
The reaction from a range of anti-Semitic influencers and campus groups was instantaneous: They took a brief holiday from Jew-baiting to justify the Muslim slaughter of Hindus under the blood-soaked catchall of decolonization. Some blamed Israel directly, in classic Protocols of the Elders of Zion fashion, others reveled in the fact that both Jews and Indians have shed blood at the hands of Islamists. A chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, one of the more extreme and violent campus groups, attacked Indian students for objecting to the massacre of Hindus.
In general, as some commentators noticed, the pattern followed Oct. 7 step-for-step, as left-leaning activists celebrated the mass murder of innocents and then immediately began protesting against the victims.
Welcome to the world made and sustained in no small part by Western academia.
The idea that conflicts over Kashmir are about Hindu colonization of Muslim lands seems weird for several reasons, not the least of which is that the Muslims colonized northern India, not the other way around. Historically speaking, Islam is a religion of conquerors, not the religion of the oppressed. The idea of Muslim oppression is, relatively speaking, rather new and based on the fact that conquered people pushed back, often with help from others–mostly Christians.
The Ottoman Empire was founded on conquering territory that was not generally Muslim. Ask the Greeks, who were pushed out of the Anatolian Peninsula, what they think. Istanbul used to be Constantinople–the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire (which was Greek-speaking) until the Ottomans conquered it after more than 1100 years of Christian rule.
None of that matters. What matters is violence and “revolution.”
Decolonization or settler-colonial “studies” is the political arm of a global death cult, with universities providing some connective tissue to otherwise disparate terrorist gangs.
“For the field called settler colonial studies,” Adam Kirsch notes in On Settler Colonialism, “the goal of learning about settlement in America and elsewhere is not to understand it, as a historian would, but to combat it.” In this view of the world, there is no such thing as an immigrant, strictly speaking: “Because settlement is not a past event but a present structure, every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population is, and always will be, a settler.” Therefore, “Settler, in this view, is not a description of the actions of an individual but a heritable identity.”
The result is a firm belief that lots and lots and lots of people must be murdered. That’s how you get the shocking results of a poll conducted after Oct. 7, which found that of those aged 18-24, 66 percent said Hamas’s slaughter could be characterized as “genocidal in nature” but 60 percent said it “can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians.” As Kirsch notes, this means “more than half of college-age Americans seem to believe that it would be justified for Palestinians to commit a genocide of Israeli Jews.”
The key to understanding the Left is to quit looking at it through a purely intellectual lens, quit taking seriously their claim to search for equity, justice, or whatever word you want to use, and see it through the lens of POWER. Leftism is about grasping for power, and as Mao said, “power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” All those words, pretty or ugly, that the Left uses are guttural grunts, not meant to persuade but to prepare the ground for violence.
Unfortunately, a lot of Americans can’t grasp that fact, not because they are stupid, but because we are Americans without the experience of mass political violence. We have had it pretty good, so we tend to dismiss university professors and students when they promote violence. They simply can’t mean it, can they? They have tenure or good jobs awaiting them!
Unfortunately, many of them do mean it, and many others tolerate it. That’s how we have millions clapping for Luigi Mangione and Congressmen explaining, “I don’t approve of violence, but…”
