Conform or Die

For John, BLUF:  I am not sure the left can hold it together.  The path of catering to an ever increasing number of "minority" groups will eventually pit one against the other, although before that happens some will trip themselves up over trying to cater to all groups, which will not be possible.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Left-Wing Cannibal Holocaust

Under the heading "ZEITGEIST", Writer David Cole, and Taki Magazine, look at what is happening "on the left".  The dateline is 2 January 2018.

Here is the lede plus four:

Her name was Nari and she was the tallest Korean girl I’d ever seen. Six foot, at least.  It was 1996 and we were on our second date when she started talking politics.  Naturally, I assumed she’d be leftist.  She was a student at UCLA…’nuff said.  But I wasn’t prepared for just how leftist she was.  “I plan to devote my life to hegemony,” she told me over dinner.  I asked her what she meant by that.  “At school they call me ‘Red Emma,’ after Emma Goldman.  But I’m far more radical than she was.  She believed in free expression, the right of the oppressed to find their own voice.  That’s a mistake.  We need hegemony.  One party, and one set of ideas, enforced vigorously, with swift action taken against any non-hegemonic thoughts or expressions.  Everyone needs to be in lockstep, or we can’t move forward.”

I’d grown up surrounded by leftists, mostly Jewish, and almost all cut from the Emma Goldman cloth.  In other words, people who at least paid lip service to the notion of free thought and expression.  I’d never before encountered someone who I could so clearly envision running a Stalinist gulag or a Maoist reeducation center.v Someone who wanted to enforce “thought hegemony,” and who wanted to visit that nightmare upon not just the ruling class, but the “oppressed” as well.  And it startled me how quick she was to brag about it.

These days, Nari is a degreed academic (of course) who runs a think tank at a major U.S. university.  I don’t know if she’s still battling for her beloved hegemony, but I do know that the ideas she espoused that night have steadily grown in popularity among American leftists.  Mind you, leftism has always been marked by purity purges.  Communism, the definitive expression of leftist ideals in the 20th century, was as brutal to its own adherents (and to its supposedly beloved “oppressed”) as it was to its “reactionary” enemies.  The party loved nothing more than to continually police its own for signs of “counterrevolutionary thought,” sending incorrect thinkers to reeducation camps, or sometimes just executing them outright.  This practice of seeking ideological purity found its logical conclusion under the Khmer Rouge, which routinely put children in charge of labor camps and death squads, due to a belief that the very young were pure and uncorrupted by “reactionary” ideas.

The Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cambodia…hegemony.  One party, one goal, one way of thinking.

“With fewer and fewer fresh victims to bully, the left is being forced to attack its own.”

While the Progressives, or at least the Democrats, see the second half of 2018 developing into "the happy times" ("Die Glückliche Zeit"), it is possible that they will end up, as the author suggests, as a time of cannibalism.

Time will tell.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff