Plight Makes Right

The line between left-fascism and right-fascism gets blurrier every day. I refer to the recent proto-Kristallnacht in Venezuela. I am not of the belief that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are synonymous, but there is no doubt that the left has been cheerfully exploiting if not subsuming the latter sentiment under the guise of the former for some time. This shouldn't be all that surprising. The left's attitude to Jews may be summarized by a line from a Leonard Cohen song: "You loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win." Leftism is a Christian heresy, and as such attributes automatic virtue to the beaten party. As the Jews in general, and Israel in particular, stopped being so beaten and learned to do some beating themselves, the left transformed the Jew on the crucifix into the Palestinian on the crucifix; with the added bonus that there was a large cultural mine of Jew-as-crucifier motifs to draw on. That the Palestinian on the crucifix would be happy to crucify the Jew if their places were switched does not affect leftist thinking. For leftists, whoever has more power is automatically in the wrong, and whoever has less power is automatically in the right.

This makes the current alliance between disaffected leftists and disaffected Islamists all the stranger. Leftists back the Palestinians because they are victims; Islamists back the Palestinians because they are Muslims. The Iranian revolution also began as an uneasy alliance of convenience between leftists and Islamists. Yet once the Islamists took power, the leftists were persecuted and exiled. The alliance was always uneasy because one side, the left, opposed the Shah for the sake of being a dictator; the other side, the Islamists, opposed the Shah for the sake of being an insufficiently Muslim dictator. Dictatorship itself was not the problem for them. Similarly, the Islamists don't have a problem with persecution of minorities (Iran's persecution of Bahai's, to give one example), they have a problem with persecution of Muslim minorities. This is particular so because Muslims have traditionally never been minorities in non-Muslim countries, so even the idea of a Muslim minority is offensive to them. Leftists have not been able to grasp the concept that some minorities, some beaten parties, are not content to wear a crown of thorns forever; they don't oppose power, they oppose not having power.

How then does left-fascism arise, when fascism is distinguished by idolization of the strong? The answer can be found in the human capacity for self-delusion. The vandals of the Venezuelan synagogue no doubt thought of themselves as protecting the weak (the Palestinians) from the strong (the Israelis), even though in actual fact they were terrorizing a small and weak group (Venezuelan Jews) from the standpoint of the strong (the ruling party). Similarly, the Soviets imagined themselves protecting weak peasants from strong oppressors as they persecuted the kulaks (in actual fact slightly less poor peasants). The difference between minority and majority, oppressor and oppressed is often a matter of perspective. Israel looks like a powerful oppressor when the map is simply of it, the West Bank and Gaza; when the map is zoomed out to include the surrounding, larger Arab countries, it looks much less powerful. Yet the question of who is comparatively weaker and thus more deserving of sympathy leads to a pageantry of competing victimhoods that does not settle the question of who is in the right, because losing does not equal being right.

I must add that winning does not equal being right either. Rather than might makes right or plight makes right, I prefer the ideal of noblesse oblige. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defines it thusly: Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly. From this perspective I may be critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, or France's treatment of Algerians. However, this is because those nations hold themselves to a higher standard than say, Iran does with its minorities. Left-fascists feel normally despicable acts are justified if the aggressor has some claim to be oppressed; right-fascists feel normally despicable acts are justified if the aggressor has some claim to be naturally superior. However, under the ideal of noblesse oblige, it is not that a majority is automatically wrong and a minority is automatically right, but that a civilized majority is marked as such in part by how it treats its minorities. That being said, as Muslim countries have extremely poor records when it comes to treatment of minority groups, regard for noblesse oblige requires one to ask: when the Muslim population of France is bigger than the non-Muslim population, will it conduct itself as nobly?

If the answer is no, this creates a number of political and ethical problems which the left is not equipped to deal with. The sometime feminist view that burqas are actually liberating from the tyranny of the male gaze is one such muddled response. Another is that Islamophobia is equivalent to anti-Semitism; a comparison which is useful up to a point, that point being that Jews were never in a position to become numerically dominant in Christian countries with low birthrates. Since leftists are resentful of all claims to nobility, they are loathe to recognize how dependent they are on the noblesse oblige of the society they criticize. When they lose sight of this they lose sight of the elementary fact that there is always a majority and a minority in any given society, and some majorities treat minorities better than others. Thus a leftism consistent in its concern for minorities would, for instance, criticize Israel while taking into consideration that its checkered noblesse oblige is better than Hamas's complete lack. More typical is Hugo Chavez worship: a left-fascism which is completely different than right-fascist Augusto Pinochet worship because, of course, Chavez is opposed by the Americans and has darker skin.