A Radiant Future of Hatred and Genocide

Postmodern progressivism and primitive fascism find common ground.

One of the battlefields on which Hamas fought to liberate “Palestine”

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On the face of things, American progressivism’s support for Palestinian nationalism and Hamas makes no sense. Socialists for Sharia? Feminists for Palestine? Gays4Gaza? Seriously? On every issue sacred to the ideology of the progressive Left, Hamas stands opposed. The group’s misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and hatred of every liberal principle are glaring. What’s more, they accurately reflect Palestinian culture and society as a whole. Feminists may be for Palestine, but if the sisters had to live in Gaza or the West Bank, they’d find themselves shorn of their rights and reduced to the status of chattel.

It seems that the comrades work overtime to suppress these unwelcome realities. They prattle of “Freedom for Palestine,” but should a Palestinian state ever be established, it would be one of the most unfree polities on earth, in thrall to a primitive, seventh-century variant of fascism. How this lines up with the oft-expressed progressive vision of a Radiant Future is, shall we say, not too obvious.

Yet the alliance between the progressive Left and radical Islam is an undeniable reality. We must presume, therefore, that common ground exists between the two movements, however dissimilar they appear at first glance.

In an article for National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy suggests where that common ground is located: in a deep, visceral hatred of Western civilization and culture:

The ne plus ultra for sharia supremacists and leftists is the extirpation of the established order. Yes, they have very different ideas about what should replace that order; but that’s an argument for later (at which point progressives would find themselves in the unenviable position of the appeaser after the crocodile is done devouring everyone else). For now, it is a marriage of convenience, a joint war of conquest against Western civilization.

Or to put it succinctly: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!”

McCarthy nails it with this observation that “anti-Zionism” is the intersection where Western progressives and radical Islamists meet. That the Jews are foreign interlopers, a tumor on the Arab and the wider Islamic body politic, is a radical Islamist doctrine that finds its echo in the Newspeak of postmodern progressivism, which describes Israel as a racist, white supremist, imperialistic, apartheid, settler-colonialist entity that is oppressing “brown people” on behalf of the wider West. Hamas and Gays4Gaza thus find themselves on the same side when it comes to the Jewish state: It is illegitimate, wicked and should be destroyed along with its Jewish inhabitants.

All this, of course, is nothing but antisemitism. But whereas Hamas is candid about its hatred of Jews, Western progressives feel the need to dress up their bigotry with the fancy words and terms listed above. They piously declare that they have nothing against Jews per se—it’s Zionism, Jewish nationalism, that they oppose. Whatever plausibility this claim once bore has been blown away since October 7, as the antisemitism of the broad Left emerged into the open. People who find excuses for such atrocities as the brutal slaughter of children and infants are not really making fine ideological distinctions. On the contrary, they’re betraying a dirty little secret about themselves: that they’re in thrall to a nihilistic fantasy of redemptive violence.

This is nothing new. Back in the Thirties, when a considerable percentage of the Western Left was crushing on Stalin and his Workers’ Paradise, there were many who thrilled to the brutality with which the Kremlin Mountaineer was “building socialism.” In his celebrated essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell caught this vibe:

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

Some things haven’t changed much since 1946, have they?

It's obvious that the Jews have been selected by the Left as scapegoats for everything that the Left despises. Also obvious is the fact that progressives care nothing, really, for the Palestinians—it’s perfectly okay with the comrades if that cohort of oppressed brown people continues to be crushed under the heel of an Islamist death cult. As long as they keep repeating “Justice for Palestine!” all that negativity will dissipate. But “Palestine” is merely a trademark. And the products it markets include tyranny and genocide, hatred and petty spite.