The fictitious Left

The fictitious Left

Olavo de Carvalho
Diário do Comércio, 5/5/2009

Among liberals and conservatives, in Brazil and the rest of the world, only a few have a clear view of who is one's enemy and how to fight him. The majority fights only against an idealized Left, a trompe l’oeil fabricated by the Left to be consumed by their adversaries as a stupefying, paralyzing and incapacitating drug. The model of this ruse is a copy of something that existed historically:  a humanitarian, democratic, anti-communist Left, only separated from the Right by a different conception of the means - more statist than capitalist - to be used with the goal of realizing values that were, in the end, the same ones from the other side - liberty, human rights and a decent life for all.

Although vaguely inheriting the reformism of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky – the “renegade”, as Lenin called him –, this Left had only became a prominent actor in the Western media during the Spanish civil war, when the murderous violence started by the Stalinist command against their own ranks served as an alert call to many leftists, making them understand that communism was at least as destructive as nazism. The Ribbentropp-Molotov pact of August of 1939 had completed the delusion. Some had switched sides completely, becoming conservatives. Others, refusing any loyalty to the Soviet government, but not denying the socialist ideal, ended up integrating the social-democrats and workers' parties and becoming good allies of the conservatives in the fight against communism, but continuing to fight them in the ground of social policies. George Orwell and the philosopher Sidney Hook are famous examples. The first one became, with his books Animal Farm and 1984, one of the greatest creators of the anti-communist language, designed to make a parody and implode the communist jargon. The second one was the main organizer of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, the only serious enterprise ever attempted - in 1949-50, with the help of CIA - to reunite anti-communist intellectuals and offer some resistance to the Soviet's massive culture attack started thirty years before.

It is not necessary to say how much the existence of a prestigious anti-communist Left had annoyed the Soviet establishment. The policy of “pacific coexistence” inaugurated by Nikita Kruschev had as one of its main purposes to reintegrate the army of stragglers into the communist strategy. The success of this operation was complete. Already in the 70s, as the writer Vladimir Bukovski would find out in the Moscow archives, virtually all of the social-democrat media on Europe was subsidized and controlled by the KGB (v. Jugement à Moscou. Un Dissident dans les Archives du Kremlin, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1995). In the United States, infiltrated and dominated by both undercover and declared agents of the revolutionary Left, the Democrat Party, which until the 60s worked as the ideal refuge of the anti-Soviet leftists, had drifted more and more to the Left, until it assumed the flag of the most radical and intolerant anti-Americanism. The bibliography that documents this transformation is abundant, not leaving any reasonable excuses for the self-proclaimed specialists in foreign policy to ignore the phenomenon, as ours had ignored it in whole. See, for example, David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party, How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and the Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party, Nashville, TN, Nelson Current, 2006; James Piereson, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, New York, Encounter Books, 2007; Phil Kent, Foundations of Betrayal. How the Liberal Super-Rich Undermine America, Johnson City, TN, Zoe Publications, 2007.

The transfiguration of the American moderate Left in an agent of the radical Left has reached its apex with Obama's presidency, who ostensibly protects terrorist organizations and criminalize any conservative resistance, at the same time it that continues to display the conventional signs of democratic progressiveness (v. http://truth11.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/former-presidential-candidate-alan-keyes-has-given-perhaps-his-most-dire-warning-yet-saying-that-the-obama-administration-is-preparing-to-stage-terror-attacks-declare-martial-law-and-cancel-the-2012/, http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=494798, http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=490720 and http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=).

In Latin America, the incarnation of the "moderate Left", the Worker's Party, is discreetly the coordinator of the Foro de São Paulo, that is, the maximum strategist of the revolutionary violence in the continent.

In summary, the democratic, civilized Left, loyal competitor of the conservatives, does not exist anymore as an independent political force. Financing and hiding terrorist and subversive movements everywhere, and imposing under a different guise the same policies that would be rejected by the people if presented with the communist label, the "moderate Left" is an enemy even more powerful to the conservatives than the card-carrying communists themselves, who would not have any power at all without the former.

The difference between the two Lefts is that one is willing to share power with the conservatives, according to the regular democratic rotation, while the other is not content to win these adversaries in the elections, but attempts to destroy them completely, marginalizing, criminalizing and expelling them forever not only from the politics but from social life, if not their very physical existence. The other difference is that the second Left is the only one that exists in reality;  the other, only in the residual imagination of the Right.

If the Left still makes use of the beautiful image of democratic moderation created in the battlefields of Spain, it is only to fool their enemies. However, if one continues believing in its existence and imagines that is fighting loyal adversaries when in reality one is fighting murderers and revolutionaries, this is something that comes from an unforgivable intellectual and moral cowardice, which is suicidal as any other kind of cowardice.