Blind in One Eye

For the Left it's always Franco but never Fidel, Somoza but never the Sandinistas

To Russia with love and screw Reagan: the nuclear freeze movement

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People quite frequently do the right thing for the wrong reason, a case in point being the Democratic/progressive stand on the Russo-Ukrainian War. With certain exceptions, the comrades support the Biden Administration’s policy of support for Ukraine in its fight against a ruthless aggressor. And they excoriate Donald Trump and his supporters for their opposition to the President’s policy and their admiration for the odious V. Putin.

It has often been suggested that MAGA’s stand against Ukraine is traceable to its hatred for Biden, Democrats and progressives: What those horrible people support must be bad. This is no doubt true. Seldom remarked upon but equally true is the converse: The comrades support Ukraine because, as they believe, the Ogre Trump and V. Putin are blood brothers. They may dislike the Russian strongman, but the positively loathe the Prince of the Golden Escalator.

After all, it’s not as if the American Left has a proud tradition of standing up against dictators and their misdeeds. In the Sixties and early Seventies, the New Left and many Democrats sided with the dictatorial North Vietnamese regime against their own country and its allies. Eventually they got their way—and a genocidal massacre followed. To this the stalwarts of the antiwar movement turned a blind eye. Those few, like Joan Baez, who ventured to criticize the brutality of the North Vietnamese regime in the wake of its victory, were furiously denounced by their erstwhile comrades.

The broad Left’s desperate crush of Fidel Castro lasted for decades, indeed until his death. Cubans who fled to this country and hated the man who was grinding the land of their birth under his combat boots, constituted the one “Latinx” group not admitted to the hallowed circle of BIPOCdom. On the contrary, they were slandered as counterrevolutionaries and heretics who had the audacity to vote Republican because they couldn’t’ stomach the Democratic Party’s equivocal attitude toward Fidel.

The list of gangsters, thugs, and tyrants whom the American Left has embraced or simply overlooked is a long one, stretching back to the Thirties, when luminaries like Edmund Wilson found so much to admire in Stalin, the Kremlin Mountaineer. Even the hideous North Korean regime, which is the closest that humanity has come to George Orwell’s nightmare vision in Nineteen Eighty-four, has had its apologists in this country, for instance Noam Chomsky. Any Central American insurgent with a red star on his cap is automatically a freedom fighter. Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh and Chile’s Salvador Allende, a prize pair of authoritarian goons, are lauded as saintly democratic leaders who were turned out by fascists with American assistance.

 And of course, Democrats, progressives and leftists treated the post-Stalinist Soviet Union with kid gloves. The dissolution of the so-called Cold War consensus in the aftermath of the Vietnam debacle put hawkish Democrats like the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson on the endangered species list and by the turn of the century they were all but extinct. The New Left’s narrative of American imperialism went mainstream. It was said that the Cold War was a product of American paranoia and misbehavior. On the other hand, many excuses were found for the less palatable features of Soviet behavior, such as its brutal domination of the satellite states of central and eastern Europe. Sovietologists advanced arguments that the Soviet Union had moved beyond Stalinism, had stabilized itself, socially and economically, and that it was, in Bismarck’s formulation, a satiated state.

Though the Left hated Richard Nixon, they loved his policy of détente. And when Ronald Regan came along with his idea that the Cold War was there to be won, they tossed blood clots. The buildup of American military power in the Eighties was denounced as a provocation that would lead to war. The Polish labor union and its heroic leader, Lech Walesa, came in for criticism, as did the leaders of the independence movements in the Baltic States. These people were said to be fostering instability, which was no doubt true. The fact that the stability being threatened was that of a totalitarian regime with a bloodstained record was not remarked upon.

At no point since the end of the Vietnam War has the broad Left in America taken a stand against tyranny and oppression in the large. Only the tyrannies of the Right have been up for strident condemnation: Franco but never Fidel, Somoza but never the Sandinistas. In some progressive venues these days, Trump’s a fascist, Netanyahu is committing genocide, but Hamas is a gallant band of freedom fighters and those moderates inside the Iranian regime are extending the hand of friendship.

But in my ear sounds the cry: Yeah, but what about the Right? What about MAGA? Well, what about them? Does the one-eyed hypocrisy of the natcons, their stupid embrace of Putin, their vile abuse of Zelensky, excuse the terrible record of the Left—which, as noted above, has been almost a century in the making? I think not. As it happens, I’ve excoriated the natcon/MAGA Right: see below. But today my subject is the hypocrisy of the broad Left, made all the more insufferable by the moral preening that accompanies it.