The hard left has always claimed the high moral ground by portraying itself as the advocate of the have-nots of the earth. The labels shift, from “proletariat” to “third world” and, more recently, the “99 percent” (no less) of the global population. With such grandeur of purpose, the radicals of the world fiercely take on their favorite evils, namely what they call the “oligarchies,” the “one percent,” and, of course, “imperialism.”
Whenever and wherever a leader or political movement touting such a shibboleth takes power, the members of the hard-left, self-proclaimed revolutionaries, rally cheerfully and uncritically in support.
We have seen this happen repeatedly since the Bolshevik revolution led first by Vladimir Lenin and carried forward by his pupil Joseph Stalin. The “Father of Peoples” mesmerized the hard left until the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, held in 1956, admitted that Stalin had committed despicable crimes.
In the name of the struggle to bring forth socialism, so-called progressive intellectuals of the caliber of Chile’s Pablo Neruda and France’s Paul Eluard elegized Stalin's glory. The French poet and Communist militant Louis Aragon went further still and wrote a vibrant defense of the gulag.
Such intellectuals, and more generally large swaths of the radical left, did not care about the large number of Communists who fell prey of Stalin’s purges, and still less about the totalitarian nature of Soviet socialism, even though its atrocities were decried at those times by their peers André Gide (France) and Panait Istrati (Romania). Stalin was building the first society freed from capitalism, and thus the duty of every revolutionary was to support him.
Subsequently, in the post-World War II period, at the time of the ideological and geopolitical rivalries between the Soviet Union and Mao Tse-Tung’s China, the self-styled revolutionaries would favor one or the other of those tyrannical regimes. Little concern was expressed when, instead of carrying forward the ideals of economic and social progress that the hard left claims to fight for, those regimes engendered misery, famine, oppression, and brutality against former Communist comrades accused of being renegades, revisionists, or counter-revolutionaries.
The hard-left empathy for the winner-takes-all leader was at work, too, at the time of the decolonization of Africa and Asia. Ethiopia’s Mengistu, Uganda’s Amin Dada, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, and other standard-bearers of “Third Worldism” could do as they pleased. They could massacre political opponents, rape defenseless women, and torture former anti-colonialist fighters, and the hard left’s praise would shower impassively upon them. Those tyrants were bringing forth a Third World liberated from colonial and neocolonial interferences, and thus it was the duty of every “revolutionary” to support them.
The hard left’s craze for the revolutionary ruler reached new heights with Fidel Castro.
After Castro took over power in Cuba, hundreds of former freedom fighters against the right-wing dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista were shot to death by the firing squads of the revolution or sent to rot in prison. The most prominent case was that of Huber Matos, a key figure of the revolution, who served a 20-year prison sentence for having merely questioned the dictatorial turn taken by the revolution he had fought for. The hard left shamelessly stood by the Castro regime’s side without expressing the slightest solidarity toward former comrades who had fallen prey to Cuba’s Communist regime.
Another obnoxious example of the hard left’s infatuation for Communist Cuba relates to its lack of reaction against the connivance between Fidel Castro and Argentina’s right-wing military dictator, Jorge Rafael Videla. Official papers declassified in 2014 brought out information showing that the two regimes had secretly and regularly supported each other in international forums by voting against, and ultimately blocking, draft resolutions intended to condemn the human-rights violations committed by either of them.
While that weird diplomatic intercourse went on, Videla’s regime relentlessly played an active and crucial role in Operation Condor – an infamous international entente among anti-Communist military dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970s that was aimed to persecute, kidnap, torture and ultimately kill leftist activists.
The hundreds of Castroite revolutionaries murdered by the so-called “incontrollable forces” that operated in the Dominican Republic during the 12 years of rule of President Joaquin Balaguer (1966-1978) received no greater consideration from their Cuban idol than had the victims of the Operation Condor. Indeed, during a trip made to that Caribbean country in 1998, the Lider Maximo of Latin America’s revolutionaries paid a visit to former President Balaguer, and both leaders exchanged compliments as though nothing ever happened.
How did the revolutionaries react? They continued to condemn both Operation Condor and Balaguer’s 12 years in power, but have not expressed the slightest criticism of the controversial attitude of their idol. Castro pioneered socialism in Latin America, and thus it was the duty of every revolutionary to support him in whatever he may did or said.
The same indolence toward former comrades who have since become victims is currently at work with regard to the so-called Bolivarian Revolution initiated by the late Hugo Chavez under the inspiration and guidance of the Castro regime.
Such indifference has also manifested itself in today’s Nicaragua, ruled by the “progressive” and “anti-imperialist” Daniel Ortega. There, the former guerrilla warrior Ernesto Cardenal (who played a more prominent role than Ortega himself in the fight against the right-wing dictatorship of the Somoza family) is currently harassed, politically and judicially, by the very regime he had contributed to install. And yet, with rare exceptions, the hard left ignores the predicament of that former comrade and takes the side of Nicaragua’s president. Daniel Ortega is a vital member of the Bolivarian axis, and thus it is the duty of every revolutionary to support him.
And then there is Venezuela. There you have Luisa Ortega Díaz, the country’s attorney general, appointed by Hugo Chavez himself and a prominent member of the Bolivarian Revolution since its beginning. Since fleeing her country to escape repression, Ortega Diaz has been denouncing what she calls the “state terrorism” established by the current president, Chavez’s designated heir Nicolas Maduro.
Even the main ideologue of Hugo Chavez’s 21st Century Socialism, Chavez’s personal friend Heinz Dieterich, has called out the fiasco of the Bolivarian Revolution whose theoretical foundation he worked so hard to build. Yet the hard left has utterly dismissed his criticisms and instead keeps invoking ludicrous explanations for the Venezuelan chaos (such as a hypothetical and never-proven “economic war” concocted by the “Empire”). Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s designated heir, is the helmsman of the 21st Century Revolution, and thus it is the duty of every revolutionary to support him.
Last but not least, we may recall the vigor with which the hard left in the 1960s and early 1970s took to the streets and called for the respect of the right to self-determination of the people of Vietnam in their struggle against so-called U.S. imperialism. Today’s revolutionaries, however, show no solidarity whatsoever for Vietnam in its ongoing standoff with China regarding the latter’s hegemonic designs over the South China sea. China is the main economic and geopolitical rival of the Empire, and thus it is the duty of every revolutionary to support Beijing.
In his book The Treason of the Intellectuals, written in 1927, the French political essayist Julien Benda decried how “the crushing of the weak by the strong aroused, if not the approval, at least the indulgence” of self-proclaimed do-gooders. Benda’s 90-year old reproof perfectly applies to the hard left’s addiction to self-betrayal. Time after time, its adherents side with oppressive regimes at the expense of the most minimal critical thinking and the most minimal consideration for the suffering endured by former comrades under those regimes.
