A number of people have suggested I read this Substack essay by Richard Pollock, a left-to-right changer who was an Alinskyite leftist radical back in the 60s and 70s. My impression on reading that one essay is that he’s something like David Horowitz, although Pollock doesn’t describe what caused his change (a story in which I’d be especially interested).
The main thrust of Pollock’s essay is to explain that today’s radical demonstrators have been trained according to the Alinskyite rules of their elders in the Movement – the Movement being leftism in general. The basic rule is that truth doesn’t matter – “truth” is a shape-shifter that requires no consistent principles other than dedication to the left and the cause. That’s why the contradiction between, for example, upholding the rights of gay people and supporting those who would throw them off roofs can be safely ignored. It simply doesn’t matter to the left.
This isn’t really news (see this post of mine from 2009), but it’s always good to remind people. That 2009 post contains a quote from Hilton Kramer (written in 1984) that I reproduce here. It speaks of “Stalinism” but it is true of radical leftism in general, including its current manifestations:
It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying—and not only to others, but first of all to themselves—a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically. For their loyalty is to something other than the truth. And no historical enormity is so great, no personal humiliation or betrayal so extreme, no crime so heinous that it cannot be assimilated into the ‘ideals’ that govern the true Stalinist mind which is impervious alike to documentary evidence and moral discrimination.
No crime so heinous that can’t be assimilated into their “ideals.” That’s a perfect description of what’s happening with the pro-Hamas crowd – although these days I might take issue with the idea that they all know the actual truth about what Hamas is and what Hamas does. I think many really are “useful idiots” – or ignorant youths who have been carefully taught by many leftist mentors who feed them lies. By the time they get to the point of demonstrating for Hamas, the lies are so entrenched that “documentary evidence” to the contrary is merely brushed away as lies.
That’s why I often use the term “Orwellian reversal” to discuss the pro-Palestinian propaganda. It’s a characteristic of the left in general, and preys on the uncurious young who swallow it whole. And why are these young people so eager to believe? I think that for many it takes the place of religion or of love of family, and it gives them a feeling of structure, meaning, and community that they haven’t gotten until now.
Which leads me to offer another quote I’ve posted on this blog many times before. It’s from Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
The pro-Hamas demonstrators are circle dancing. Their teachers have taught them lies and they believe those lies, but even evidence of truth will not sway them from the compelling and magic and satisfying dance.