Still, Ms. Lu’s optimism is undaunted. She concludes that “however the end game plays out, the IDF should soon have its victory.” I sincerely pray that she may be right. One must hope that Hamas’s Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, is wrong to believe that it is Hamas who is actually winning despite the major losses it has clearly suffered. After all, all it has to do, says Sinwar, is “declare a historic victory by outlasting Israel’s firepower and claim the leadership of the Palestinian national cause.”

It is in that context that one must evaluate Ms. Lu’s view that “there is no reasonable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem that does not involve two sovereign states.” Fair enough. But the question is: when and in what circumstances? Definitely not now, argues Israeli historian Gadi Taub. In a powerful article published February 12, 2024, in Tablet Magazine, Taub writes that “compelling as it is as a debating strategy, or a form of self-therapy, [the two-state formula] is no solution at all … a noble dream … but just that—a dream.” A lifelong liberal, he had shared that dream with many other Israelis until October 7, which was the nation’s wake-up call, a living nightmare for all but a negligible number of the mislabeled “woke.”

Palestinian self-rule is undoubtedly preferable to most alternatives. But as the former head of the East Jerusalem mission of the Quartet (consisting of the US, EU, UK, and Russia) Envoy Robert Danin told reporters on March 1, 2024:

[Palestinians] don’t want the Israelis there, but they don’t want the Palestinian Authority either; the PA doesn’t care about Gaza. They don’t want Hamas either. They want to have a voice for themselves.

Will that voice be allowed to be heard? For unless and until it does, any two-state solution is predicated on premises that are at best dubious and at worst delusional.

Recent surveys indicate that a majority of Palestinians support Hamas and approve of the October 7 massacres. These include the populations under the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) jurisdiction, which they detest as corrupt and weak. Hence, the Biden administration’s plan to put the PA in charge of Gaza is utterly unrealistic, argues Taub. “There is no such thing as a ‘revitalized’ Palestinian Authority, because there is no one who wants to ‘revitalize’ it in such a way as to make it conform to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s sales pitch.” Under the circumstances, Israelis “believe that turning Judea and Samaria into another Hamastan to satisfy those who see the massacre as an inspiration and its perpetrators as role models would be suicidal. Who in their right mind would inflict the ensuing bloodshed on their partners, children, friends, and parents?” For Ms. Lu, therefore, to argue that the only way to peace “probably will not be possible without a good-faith commitment on Israel’s part to work towards a two-state solution,” must be seen in the proper context.

Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration proclaimed that the British government “view with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in their homeland,” the Jews have hoped that their two-thousand-year-old exile would finally end. They sought to live alongside their neighbors as best they could. Yet in all that time, writes Taub, “there never was a Palestinian leadership ready to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state. That is a constant fact of life in the conflict.” Israel never denied the Palestinians a right to govern themselves. By contrast, “the Arab side has rejected any and all partition plans starting with the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, and all the way through the various American mediation plans and Israeli offers, and those offered by Israeli leaders.” Israel’s “land-for-peace” strategy, whereby it relinquished territory it had acquired after pushing back Arab military attacks in exchange for accepting its right to exist, was an utter failure.

Ms. Lu concludes her article by reminding her readers that “we should bear in mind that citizenship, and the basic rights and freedoms that go with it, really aren’t the kind of thing that a person should have to earn.” A commendable ideal, without a doubt. One shouldn’t have to earn rights that America’s founders, invoking the key commandment of Genesis, declared self-evident. But since when have basic rights and freedoms not been earned at the steep price of its defenders’ lives? Since when has freedom, that most fragile of human blessings, not had to be earned again and again?

Palestinians have yet to be given a chance to enjoy those rights by those who use them as cannon fodder, expropriate their food and medicine, and reduce them to misery. Fellow Muslims on Iran’s payroll have shown them far less empathy than do Jewish medical personnel who save Palestinian lives in Israeli hospitals, and soldiers who seek to keep Palestinian civilian casualties at a minimum while fighting to free innocent Jewish hostages, including women, little children, and grandparents, who are severely maltreated in captivity.

Basic rights and freedoms must never be taken for granted. When lost, recovering them is hardly guaranteed. Americans would do well to remember that, because whether we realize it or not, we too are in the line of fire. Iran’s leadership considers Israel merely the Little Satan; Big Satan is none other than America. The growing alliance of this barbaric Islamist regime with Russia, China, and North Korea, all of which deny their own populations the most basic rights, does not bode well. Israel is currently fighting not only for its own survival but also for ours.

The post Noble Dreaming appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Islamist Jihadists appeal to the only “true” reading of the Koran; whoever contradicts it is an infidel who deserves death. “Martyrs” who die executing the sentence are instantly admitted to Paradise. The hard left also rejects debate, albeit by embracing contradiction. “Motion itself is a contradiction,” declared Karl Marx’s patron and disciple Frederick Engels in 1877. As defined by Marx, later embellished by V. I. Lenin and Mao Zedong, contradiction must actually be stoked to expedite the putatively inevitable march of history. Never mind that inevitability would seem to contradict the notion of human intervention. Contradiction leads to confusion, which stokes conflict and violence. Finally, after the Apocalypse-Revolution, comes Paradise. On earth, in heaven, why quibble?

No ideology, however, has persisted longer than Jew-hatred, or anti-Judaism, now generally known as antisemitism. With their stubborn insistence on worshiping their own way and maintaining their traditions, Jews have been mistrusted and persecuted ever since being expelled from their homeland by the Romans in 70 AD, who destroyed the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

Judaism does not advocate conquest; rather, each Passover Jews have prayed for God to return them to Zion. The best educated and more secular, especially in Western Europe, held out hope that assimilation would permit them to be patriotic citizens of the states where they lived while observing Jewish practices in their homes. And for a brief time, they did gain a degree of acceptance. Accustomed to hard work and a culture of education, predictably, they thrived. 

Starting in the nineteenth century, however, they experienced a precipitous rise in discrimination, especially in Austria and Prussia. This led many Jewish intellectuals to wish they were no longer at the mercy of a hostile majority. By the century’s end, the idea of having their own country seemed possible, if not, indeed, necessary.

On April 1, 1890, Nathan Birnbaum gave that idea a name: Zionism. Referring to the movement to recreate a national home in the Jews’ ancestral land, it lay dormant for six years. And then, Theodore Herzl wrote The Jewish State. A year later, in 1897, he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The Jews were ready to resettle—but without a shot being fired. There were too few of them.

The contrary was true of revolutionary anti-Zionism, even before the term was coined. Predicated on irreconcilable antagonism, the germ of that toxic ideology had already been sown, ironically, by a Jew, one who had succumbed to the deadly pathology of self-hatred. In 1844, Karl Marx, the grandson of great rabbis, famously declared that “the God of the Jew is money.” In the ominously titled essay, “On the Jewish Question,” he provided the answer: the Jew had to “be abolished.” A century later, that nearly happened.

Bolshevik Jihad: Made in Germany, Implemented in Soviet Russia

The conflation of Judaism with money-worship and capitalism would eventually provide the ideological glue linking Islamist Jihadism with Communist anti-Zionism to achieve their common aim: the eventual destruction of liberal capitalist democracy. But the connection would not be made until the early twentieth century, and almost by chance, thanks to the Kaiser advisor and renowned Orientalist, Max von Oppenheim.

A converted Jew from a distinguished family of bankers, Oppenheim had long sought to forge an alliance between Germany and Turkey. Eventually, he found a partner in the Ottoman Minister for War, Enver Pasha, who on August 2, 1914, signed a secret defense alliance with the German Ambassador. World War I had begun; they would fight side-by-side. On November 11, 1914, Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V urged all Muslims to join the Jihad. His speech had been written in Oppenheim’s think tank. The call went nowhere then, but the torch would soon be taken up in Moscow. 

A brilliant strategist, Oppenheim was fully aware that Russia’s exiting the war would benefit Germany. Realizing that the Bolsheviks’ February 1917 toppling of the czarist regime provided an unexpected opportunity, he decided to send Lenin and his entourage from their exile in Zurich back to St. Petersburg. Having arranged for the train, he also provided a hefty sum to help jumpstart the new government. Ironically, the trip had been bankrolled by fellow-Bolshevik and friend to both Lenin and Enver, Alexander Lvovich Parvus (Israel Lazarevich Gelfand). The opportunistic Enver proved eager to cooperate with the Soviet regime. With Lenin’s support, he was hired to direct its Asian department. 

Since Lenin was mostly focused on concentrating power in his own hands, Jihad was not a priority. But according to historians Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz: “Enver would persuade Lenin to support an Islamic religious revolt based on a plan drawn up for the Kaiser.”

Lenin understood the power of political Islam. Thus the Soviet effort to coopt Muslim, African, Asian, and other Third World populations to join the Communist camp began almost immediately. In September 1920, the Communist International (Comintern) organized a conference, billed as “a congress of … workers and peasants of Persia, Armenia, and Turkey” calling itself the Congress of the People of the East. Its goal was a “holy war [Jihad] for the liberation of all mankind from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist slavery, for the ending of all forms of exploitation of man by man.” Both the Congress Chairman, Grigory Zinoviev/Hirsch Apfelbaum, and its co-organizer, Karl Radek/Karl Sobelsohn, had been members of Lenin’s Zurich “family.” 

Radek would also help negotiate the April 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, whereby the Communist state and Germany would renounce all territorial and financial claims to one another’s territory. These negotiations advanced Oppenheim’s vision of using Jihad for political purposes. They also, unwittingly, secured the basis of the Green/Islamist-Red alliance. As Laurent Murawiec explains in The Mind of Jihad, “Out of these talks also grew the Bolshevik Jihad.”

Adapting Marxism to Islamism, a remarkable feat of conceptual gymnastics, is testimony to the genius of the dialectical template. The revolutionary strategists effectively simplified “the complex phenomenon of ideological adaptation and change,” explain Alexandre A. Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, by taking advantage “of the propensity of some human rights groups to see in Marxism the answer to their local demands and dilemmas.” 

Zinoviev and Radek, alongside many others, were murdered by Stalin’s KGB in 1939 on trumped-up charges of espionage. Increasingly antisemitic, the Communist dictator’s pact with Hitler that year was not merely tactical. Stalin had no problem demonizing money-loving Jews. As carefully documented by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, only his death in 1953 prevented the most massive slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, this time in the USSR. Stalin indeed supported United Nations General Assembly’s November 29, 1947, resolution, which established two states in what was then known as the Palestinian Mandate; he had expected that Israel would aid communist penetration of the Middle East, but that hope evaporated soon after May 15, 1948. The Jewish state was born. After the Holocaust, Jews had been determined: “Never again.” It provided the fuel for a nearly miraculous victory against overwhelming Arab attacks that had followed the partition. 

But Israel was now facing an additional enemy: the USSR, whose war on Zionism began in earnest at Stalin’s bequest. The KGB fine-tuned dialectical anti-Zionism, boosting the terrorist leadership with arms and financial aid.

Anti-Zionism Weaponized in Moscow

The Soviet propaganda department decided to revive the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1903 under the auspices of the Russian Secret Police, the Okhrana. Though long discredited as a forgery, it had already been disseminated throughout the world by American car-maker Henry Ford. Purportedly “minutes” of a secret speech among the Elders, or Sages, of Zion, it allegedly demonstrates their conspiracy to run the world by dominating money and communications. 

In 1951, the KGB’s chief of foreign intelligence brought the Protocols to Bucharest, for Romania’s secret police to translate and disseminate throughout Western Europe. “It had to be done secretly, so no one would know that the publications came from the Soviet bloc,” writes former Romanian chief of foreign intelligence General Ion Mihai Pacepa. Soon “the Securitate was spreading the Protocols around the Middle East as well.” 

Fast forward to 1960. The Soviet leadership established the Patrice Lumumba University, ostensibly to help “developing nations,” in fact a Kremlin grooming school. The third largest university in the USSR, distinguished alumni included Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, whose 1982 dissertation (in English “The Other Side: The Secret Relations between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement”) questioned the existence of gas chambers and numbers of Jewish victims. Abbas accuses the Jews of colluding with the Nazis: “The Zionist movement … even placed obstacles in the way of efforts made by Christian groups or by non-Zionist Jews or a number of countries that saw fit to find a solution to this humanitarian problem.” Anti-Zionists are masters of the “Big Lie.” 

Similarly, in 1962, Ahmad Shukairy (appointed head of the PLO in 1964) termed Zionism “a blend of colonialism and imperialism in their ugliest form.” He recommended that the UN “exterminate” the Zionism movement. Then immediately after the Israeli military prevailed against a much larger combined Arab army in just six days, the USSR took to the world stage. On June 19, 1967, Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin presented the theme of the relationship between Israel and Nazism for the first time at the UN.

On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly voted to advance “the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination.” Israel had become enemy number one for a majority of the UN’s membership.

By 2015, the Assembly had condemned Israel 140 times; Iran, 7; North Korea, 8; China, Cuba, Libya, Qatar, and a few other dictatorships, zero. Most Western democracies routinely abstain, deferring to the Soviet-orchestrated “Unaligned” bloc alongside the international NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and most Western media. Only rarely have US ambassadors, with the notable exception of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, defended Israel. By the 1960s, a new generation in the Free World, mostly ignorant about the Holocaust and geopolitics, were rejecting their own culture. Primed by academics who presented the Vietnam War in Marxist terms as an imperialist crusade against a colonized people’s liberation army, they pitted white colonizers against exploited non-whites. The Communist Vietcong were likened to American Blacks. So when Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967, almost overnight David became Goliath. The reversal proved a decisive catalyst for the New Left. Progressives suddenly “discovered” the Palestinians, as Berlin-based historian Paul Hockenos put it. Here was another victim of world capitalism. After all, since “Israel’s staunchest allies just happened to be Washington, Bonn, and the right-wing Springer group,” it followed that Israel belonged to the vast capitalist/imperialist conspiracy. 

White Israel vs. Black Palestinians

“The Palestinians’ liberation struggle fit squarely into the students’ Third World paradigms and critiques of colonialism,” writes Hockenos. “The Palestinians were heralded as valiant freedom fighters.” A radicalized leftist audience had made common cause with a resentful Arab-Muslim constituency, due in part to a highly effective “massive Soviet anti-Zionist campaign that entered a particularly active stage in 1967,” writes Kennan Institute scholar Izabella Tabarovsky. “Designed by the KGB and overseen by chief Communist Party ideologues, …. [it] succeeded at emptying Zionism of its meaning as a national liberation movement of the Jewish people and associating it instead with racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism, and apartheid.” 

It succeeded. “Anti-Zionism in the 1970s and 1980s,” writes Robert S. W. Wistrich, increasingly began to look like the leftist functional equivalent of what classical antisemitism had once represented (in the interwar period) for the fascist Right … [thus] steadily emerging as the lowest common denominator between sections of the Left, the Right, and Islamist circles.” 

Some leftists, among them Paul Berman, began to understand. Days before 9/11, he wrote in The New Republic: “The New Left’s vision of a lingering Nazism of modern life was suddenly re-configured, with Israel in a leading role. Israel became the crypto-Nazi site par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but had instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms. What better disguise could Nazism assume than a Jewish state?” In 2006, critical theorist Judith Butler (who, incredibly, is Jewish), made it clear: “Understanding Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.”

How better to attack the liberal democratic cabal that keeps underprivileged colored people in poverty, apartheid, and misery? In June 2021, Gaza Strip leader Yahya Sinwar told Vice News he wanted “to remember the racist murder of George Floyd. George Floyd was killed as a result of racist ideology held by some people. The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by Israel against the Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and in the West Bank.” By the time the quote resurfaced on October 18, 2023, the narrative had made even further inroads into elite culture, especially the academy. Indeed, “academia may be even friendlier to Hamas than [is] the leftist political world,” writes Lorenzo Vidino in the Wall Street Journal on November 3, 2023. “Hamas is more than a terrorist organization intent on killing Jews and eradicating Israel. It is also a savvy international political player that has used the West as a staging ground for an influence operation aimed at policymakers, public opinion, and Muslim communities.” 

Western ideologues have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations in using liberal concepts to illiberal ends. Progressives, using postmodernist jargon, have managed to insinuate radicalism deep into the American cultural mainstream. It is reminiscent of Communist propaganda: the “parallel between … contemporary critical theories and the Marxism-Leninism of my Soviet youth has received new proof,” wrote Natan Sharansky on October 31. Not only Israel but “the United States is also fighting a war for its survival,” writes Sharansky. “American universities crossed a red line in the aftermath of October 7. The struggle for campuses is therefore a struggle for America and its values—for an America that is liberal, that supports free speech and human rights, and that protects all of its citizens, regardless of race or creed, from vicious, lawless assault.”

He titles his article: “Never Again is Now.” 

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Yet for all that good fortune, a point or two needs to be clarified. Early in the review, for example, Professor Schaefer endorses my thesis that the liberal idea has been betrayed, but he adds a caveat: “She underestimates the philosophical novelty of the specifically modern liberal tradition originating in the teaching of John Locke, whose influence is clearly seen in the Declaration. She goes so far as to suggest that the ‘honor’ of inventing liberalism might rather belong to Roger Williams because of his espousal of broad religious toleration than to Locke.” Actually, I was simply citing, not necessarily endorsing, W. K. Jordan’s opinion that Williams “surpassed John Locke” and Vernon L. Parrington’s view that he was “a forerunner of Locke and the natural rights school.” I would not presume to rank Williams among the Olympiad of political theorists.

No mere scholarly quibble, the issue is especially important at a time when too many public intellectuals are busy underestimating Locke’s contribution to America’s founding. I heartily share Professor Schaefer’s admiration for Locke, and for good reason: we are both University of Chicago alumni and former students and admirers of Joseph Cropsey, whose writings on Locke as well as Adam Smith are true classics.

A second, more arresting concern follows Professor Schaefer’s thoughtful overview of my discussion of a group of brilliant, if often neglected, liberal Jewish intellectuals—including Frank Meyer, Frank Chodorov, and Eugene Lyons—who helped William F. Buckley articulate and market what they called “the New Conservatism.” But Professor Schafer adds: “Curiously, however, Pilon never discusses the neoconservative movement of a couple of decades later, whose leaders included numerous Jewish intellectuals and social scientists like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer.”

Here too, a clarification is in order. Strictly speaking, Professor Schaefer is correct: I do not discuss the “neoconservative movement” in so many words. But contrary to this potentially devastating criticism, I did include lengthy discussions of Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and other intellectuals usually labeled neoconservative.

Full disclosure: many “neocons,” as they are un-affectionately labeled by their adversaries, happen to be among my closest friends and longtime colleagues. After creating the United Nations Assessment Project at the Heritage Foundation in 1981, the year the formidable Midge Decter (Podhoretz’s wife) joined its board, I collaborated closely with the US Mission to the UN. It was then a who’s who of “neocons,” mostly Jewish liberals, Commentary contributors who had become disillusioned with the anti-Americanism and hypocrisy of the 1960s and ‘70s. As they turned even further right than other disillusioned radicals who in 1954 founded Dissent Magazine, there was hell to pay.

One Dissent contributor later admitted that the magazine “and its circle in the early 1970s invented the term [“neoconservative”] to denigrate the right-moving intellectuals who wrote in Commentary and the Public Interest.” The label first appeared in print in a Fall 1973 article by Michael Harrington titled “The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics,” soon shortened to “neocons.” The epithet was obviously resented by those it sought to denigrate. Indeed, in 1979, the mild-mannered Irving Kristol quipped that he was “the only living and self-confessed neoconservative, at large or in captivity.” He often said that he was simply “a liberal mugged by reality.” While eventually resigned to the label, he still denied that it described a movement; it was merely a “persuasion.” Others continued to resist it.

Resorting to deceptive political warfare, Harrington accused “neoconservative ideologues [of] bas[ing] themselves on what they regard as the data of the sixties, but they do not take into theoretical account how the limitations of the period permeate their evidence and skew their conclusions.” The opposite was true. His erstwhile friends had responded to evidence provided by sociologists like Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and others, indicating that liberal goals were being undermined rather than advanced by tactics promoted by progressives on “theoretical”—Marxspeak for “ideological”—grounds. “Invented as an invidious label to undermine political opponents, most of whom have been unhappy with being so described,” wrote Lipset, the word was a rank slur. “An insult, along the lines of ‘running dog’ or ‘fellow traveler,’” fumed Jonah Goldberg, one of those thus insulted. He added: “Or perhaps the ‘neo’ was intended to conjure ‘neo-Nazi,’ the only other political label to sport the prefix” at that time.

Many resisted the loss of their identity as liberals. Politically savvy, “they understood the strategic disadvantage of any sort of conservative label,” wrote James Nuechterlein in Commentary, “and they wanted to maintain proprietary rights to an honorable tradition to which they felt deep ties and affection.” In this they resembled conservatives like Herbert Hoover, who balked for years at being labeled a conservative by progressive political enemies; he considered himself a liberal. So too did Senator Robert Taft and many other Republicans.

The tide, however, appears to be turning, as more self-described liberals join the ranks of the reality-mugged. Many share Ruth Wisse’s revulsion for her Harvard colleagues’ arrogant leftism. Their smug “assumption that their positions are obviously true and beneficial,” she writes in the July 6, 2023, issue of the Wall Street Journal, is “one reason I stopped thinking of myself as a liberal. Conservative views are nowhere more necessary than in an institution of learning that is charged with conserving the republic.” Perhaps some will feel more comfortable with conservative liberalism. A seemingly oxymoronic term, it better embraces the complexity of America’s founding creed—for the Founders were liberals who faced reality without having to be mugged by it.

This is a conversation that I owed my readers, and I thank Professor Schaefer and Law & Liberty for having prompted me to elaborate on this important topic.

The post Jews and the American Creed appeared first on Law & Liberty.

But the irony didn’t end there: “America piled on top of this paradox another one of the opposite kind,” namely, the ineffable novelty of its enterprise. Hartz writes, “It had been a story of new beginnings, daring enterprises, and explicitly stated principles….The result was that the traditionalism of the Americans, like a pure freak of logic, often bore amazing marks of antihistorical rationalism.” Hartz is referring to the revolutionary constitutions of 1776 “which evoked, as [Benjamin] Franklin reported, the ‘rapture’ of European liberals everywhere.” The concept of a written constitution thus transcended even the British experience with common law liberalism, thereby becoming “the darling of the rationalists—a symbol of the emancipated mind at work.” The secular rationalists evidently failed to appreciate not only the Founders’ respect for experience and tradition but also their common embrace of Athens and Jerusalem, which they considered fully complementary.

That was how they understood the system of natural liberty. “Liberalism,” by contrast, is of recent vintage. Was the original commitment to what eighteenth-century British thinkers referred to as “the system of natural liberty” rationalist, traditionalist, conservative, radical, universalist, nationalist, democratic, individualistic? Clearly, or rather unclearly, it was none and all of the above. Eminently practical men, the Founders were convinced by facts that freedom is both efficient—that is, conducive to the maximum aggregate prosperity—and right. The impetus was thus profoundly moral and spiritual, based on the principle that each of us had been endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. That we were all equally unequal—in talents, abilities, and personalities—was to them self-evident.

Over the course of many decades, however, this vision gradually eroded in America specifically, thanks to Progressives such as John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson. As early as 1927, Ludwig von Mises wrote in Liberalism in the Classical Tradition that “the doctrine of liberalism is different today from what it was [in the days of Adam Smith], even though its fundamental principles have remained unchanged.” Three and a half decades later, he would add in a second preface: “In the United States ‘liberal’ means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.”

At the end of World War II, von Mises would join a group of like-minded economists and philosophers who took it upon themselves to address what they considered an existential threat to civilization from anti-liberal totalitarianism, whether of the Nazi or Communist variety, lest mankind self-destruct. Their deliberations would result in what came to be known as the Mont Pèlerin Society, the most distinguished member of what Matthew Continetti has called the  “‘conservative movement’ [by which] I mean the network of institutions, publications, and individuals that sprang up in the middle of the 20th century to defend political and economic freedom against the challenges of bureaucratic centralism at home and Soviet totalitarianism abroad.”

Except that the Society’s very name deliberately avoided ideological labels, declaring itself committed to inquiry and discussion “among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the free society.” Though principally devoted to defending free markets, it also denounced “the historical fatalism which believes in our power to discover laws of historical development which we must obey, and the historical relativism which denies all absolute moral standards and tends to justify any political means by the purposes at which it aims.” Put more succinctly, the target was progressivism and its ideological twins, whether situated on History’s putative right or left side, up or down, red-hued, black, or green. And no, its members emphatically refused to abandon the liberal label. They deeply resented its hijacking by ideologues committed to its erosion, if not its destruction on the road to serfdom.

So wrote one of the Society’s most dynamic organizers, the diminutive intellectual giant Milton Friedman, in his introduction to the Liberty Fund’s 1981 reprint of the New Individualist Review: “Two organizations in particular served to channel and direct [the post-World War II resurgence of interest in classical liberalism]: the Mont Pèlerin Society, founded in 1947 primarily as a result of the initiative of Friedrich Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom did so much to spark the resurgence; and the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, founded in 1953 by Frank Chodorov, a freelance writer and journalist and a dedicated opponent of collectivism.”

Both Friedman and Hayek wrote essays titled “Why I am Not a Conservative.” The Austrian-born Hayek was especially loath to adopt a label that in Europe connoted a reactionary and mercantilist mindset, insisting that for his philosophy, “the rightful and proper label is liberalism.” In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman identified with the nineteenth-century liberal who “was a radical, both in the etymological sense of going to the root of the matter, and in the political sense of favoring major changes in social institutions. So too must be his modern heir. We do not wish to conserve the state interventions that have interfered so greatly with our freedom, though, of course, we do wish to conserve those that have promoted it.” True liberal conservatives were never violent. But neither were they timorous and afraid of change—on the contrary, they embraced change, innovation, and inclusion, provided it was uncoerced. That proviso made all the difference.

In no way was Friedman’s idealism solipsistic, monadic, atomistic, or asocial. Quite the contrary: freedom, he insisted, only makes sense in relation to other people. Taking “the individual, or perhaps the family, as our ultimate goal in judging social arrangements,” freedom is meaningless on a solitary island. Political democracy, moreover, must not be understood merely as an electoral system, which is impractical except on a small scale—other arrangements require some sort of representation. Thus in many ways, the most democratic of social arrangements is actually the market, which serves as a sort of “system of proportional representation” that allows each person to “vote” for the goods he prefers and can afford. At bottom, “[p]olitical freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is the power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority.” That seems clear enough, no isms required.

Frank Chodorov fully agreed. The eleventh child of a Russian Jewish immigrant peddler in New York, Chodorov had started a new magazine in 1944, Analysis, which “looks at the current scene through the eyes of historic liberalism, unashamedly accepting the doctrine of natural rights, proclaims the dignity of the individual and denounces all forms of Statism as human slavery.” Throughout his quixotic career, Chodorov never abandoned that stance. For him, individualism was perfectly consistent with religious faith. He wondered “what will happen to the Judeo-Cristian tenet of the primacy of the person?… In the darkness and the stillness of universal Statism, will it be whispered that once there was a world built on the faith of the human being in himself and his God?^”

That said, Chodorov, Hayek, or Milton Friedman would undoubtedly have had no objection to being included in an anthology compiled recently by Hannes H. Gissurarson, professor of political science at the University of Iceland, featuring two dozen theoreticians under the label “conservative liberalism.” Ranging from St. Thomas Aquinas to David Hume, Frédéric Bastiat to Edmund Burke, William Graham Sumner to Robert Nozick, the singularly motley crew nonetheless share a common vision: “While they may present various kinds of arguments for their positions, from divine command, human reason, social utility, natural evolution, moral intuition, and common consent, these positions are all in the end based on a choice, which is a commitment to, indeed a celebration of, Judeo-Christian Western civilization.”

Opposed to the rationalism of the French Revolution, most of those gathered at Mont Pèlerin agreed with Hayek that “true liberalism has no quarrel with religion. I can only deplore,” he would write later, “the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism.” Rather, “what distinguishes the liberal from the conservative…is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be confused.” Jefferson, as well as Hamilton, would have cheered.

Louis Hartz describes this extraordinary outlook as Hebraism—which, unlike “Hebraic,” is not restricted to a sect or religion—intimating the idea of “the Chosen People.” For there is little doubt that Americans had believed themselves unique in a manner similar to the ancient Hebrews, not as recipients of extra largesse so much as being tasked with momentous responsibilities. They understood that treating one another with respect, in conformity with the supreme covenantal premise, was more likely to lead to peace and prosperity than if they did not. Falling so dismally short of that ideal by failing to outlaw slavery from the outset—admittedly a practical impossibility at the time—only confirmed the truth of this suspicion.

European rationalists, argues Hartz, had underestimated “the sober temper of the American revolutionary outlook [nurtured by] the high degree of religious diversity that prevailed in colonial life.” It was the same diversity implicit in the Torah’s injunction that humans spread across the globe and create many nations that, according to Hartz, “saturated the American sense of mission, not with a [neo-]Christian [post-Enlightenment] universalism, but with a curiously Hebraic kind of separatism.” Ironically, this attitude “inspired [Americans] with a peculiar sense of community that Europe had never known.…We are reminded again of Tocqueville’s statement: the Americans are ‘born equal.’” And also of the Torah, where we learn that humanity was saved after the flood, and from Noah’s descendants “the whole world branched out” across many lands “each with its language—their clans and their nations.” (Genesis 9-10)

Indeed, the paradox embraced by the system of natural liberty reflected, at bottom, the paradox of surviving in society: at once a monumental challenge and a salvation, it would test the limits of empathy. It takes but a modicum of common sense to grasp that loving oneself does not exclude loving others. Though egocentrism comes first—each baby instinctively oblivious to all but its own survival—maturity soon teaches the virtue of transcending oneself. The solipsist, a hapless Narcissus, sooner or later sinks into bottomless nihilism. But while the Greek mythological figure merely drowned himself, the psychopathic solipsist can drown an entire civilization. To save it from its discontents, a return to the original liberalism respectful of both reason and sentiment, fact and faith, is this generation’s principal challenge.

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Don’t count on the mainstream media to explain what is happening there. Here is how a New York Times July 28 editorial by Ernesto Londoño skillfully spun the July 11 uprisings: “When Cubans, spurred by a severe economic crisis, erupted in a rare wave of public rallies, government critics on the island and abroad hoped the act of defiance would force the island’s authoritarian rulers to embrace political and economic reforms.” And who were those rabble-rousers? “State-run media outlets denounce demonstrators as vandals and looters.” We have them here too; though admittedly, this does sound excessive: “Police officers have gone door-to-door making detentions, human rights activists and protesters said.” Economic crises can certainly cause lawlessness.

Two days later, Reuters duly echoed the narrative: “Thousands took to the streets, angry over shortages of basic goods, curbs on civil liberties, and the authorities’ handling of the pandemic.” Never mind that one cannot “curb” what doesn’t exist. Nor is simple anger what makes you walk into the firing squad pointed at your people’s heart for six decades. This isn’t journalism; it’s whitewash.

In reality, the Cuban protests were explosive: “Simply unprecedented,” declared  Sebastian Arcos, associate director of Florida International University’s (FIU) Cuban Research Institute (CRI), at a CRI conference on July 21. “It is without a doubt a watershed moment in the history of Cuba.” For while there is a “deepening economic crisis compounded by a health crisis and, of course, Covid,” the demonstrations were not “grievances for economic issues or local government issues. They were openly, politically radicalized against the regime,’’ declared Arcos. “The chants for freedom, down with [Cuban President] Díaz-Canel, down with Communism. The population doesn’t believe the narrative [of the Cuban government] anymore.”

Just watch one of the countless videos circulating on social media, which captured an 81-year-old woman yelling at a cell phone camera: “For over 60 years, we’ve been lied to and cheated, and this must end. We’re taking off the cloak of silence.”

That is the best metaphor to describe what is going on in Cuba today, writes Hilda Landrove in the progressive NACLA Report on July 27. “The significance of these protests cannot be exaggerated; they are the biggest and most radical expression of discontent in a 62-year process that the ruling elite call a revolution, although little remains of the original revolutionary impulse except the name.” The cause of the current disaster is the same as Venezuela’s and every other leftist dictatorship, explains Landrove: “A soviet model of economic control has concentrated wealth in the hands of government-run corporations, exacerbated unstable living conditions for much of the Cuban population, and hindered non-state controlled economic growth, including sustainable popular and community economies.”

A Mesoamerican Studies Doctoral candidate at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a Cuban culture organizer, Landrove understands and loves her people: “These protests are rooted in an enduring tradition of resistance, dissent, and opposition to the equally long-standing totalitarian Cuban government. Since November 2020, the 27N and Movimiento San Isidro (MSI) movements have changed the island’s political landscape and civil society by insisting on ‘the right to have rights.’ The state responded to those efforts by intensifying repression and criminalizing dissent.”

Her target audience? Look at the title: “With Cubans Speaking Out, How Will the Left Respond?” It is her progressive colleagues whom she accuses of rank hypocrisy. Even as life on the island worsens, “the image of Cuba, as the lighthouse of the Americas and a model for many anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements, has remained intact.” Accusing  them of an “ongoing voluntary blindness” and double standards, she lashes out furiously: “Time and again, we Cubans that live in Latin America have felt compelled to explain, usually to deaf ears, the systemic crisis of education and health, the collapsed social security system, and the unstable living conditions that most of the population suffers.” Focusing on the North American embargo may be useful as “an ideological marker but few really understand from a legal standpoint what has affected the Cuban economy.” Far from being caused by the embargo, “the island’s economic downfall is a result of the powerful elite’s iron grip and stockpiling.”

American economic sanctions—which, incidentally, exempt food and medicine—were explained by John Suarez, executive director of Center for a Free Cuba, on July 31: “American companies, due to the Castro dictatorship’s monopoly over the economy, can only sell to the regime. The dictatorship is the one exploiting Cubans. For example, American companies sell chicken to Cuba for $1 per kilo and the Castro regime turns around and sells it to Cubans in government stores at $7 per kilo pocketing the difference for the Castros.” No wonder that, as Landrove points out, “[d]aily life in Cuba has become unbearable for a majority who don’t have dollars and are unable to shop at stores that accept this currency. Stores operating in local currency are often unable to stock essential products.”

But most to blame are “[t]hose who call themselves the Latin American Left today [who] will have to decide what to do with their words, which conceal the spectacular fall of the narrative of a submissive people and a benign government. Will they continue to empty their words of meaning or uphold their principles?” But what exactly are those “principles”? Their roots were sewn in the 1960s—the heady days when radicals conspicuously genuflected before the communist model. Writes former leftist Bryan Burrough in his seminal Days of Rage: “Apocalyptic revolutionaries represented a strident new voice in the [radical] movement . . . [whose] favorite blueprint was the Cuban Revolution, their icon Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Castro’s swashbuckling right-hand man.”

These included members of the Weather Underground, Black Panther Party (BPB), and May 19th. Some became terrorists—notably Joanne Chesimard, a.k.a. Assata Shakur, former member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA, an offshoot of the BPB) that was devoted to armed struggle. Until her escape from a New Jersey state prison in 1979, Shakur had been serving a life sentence for the 1973 murder of a U.S. state trooper.

This brings us to today. Shakur eventually reached Cuba, which granted her asylum in 1984. She is still there, and on the FBI’s most wanted list. So too is Charlie Hill, former member of a militant group called the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), which sought to create independent black nation in the American South. Hill, along with two other men, stands accused of killing a policeman in New Mexico in 1971. Another is fellow RNA member Cheri Dalton, alias Nehanda Abiodun, sought for her involvement in the armed robbery of an armored truck in New York in 1981, in which two policemen and a security guard were killed. Is it any wonder that their former colleagues, fellow radicals variously pardoned and hired to teach in universities, activists in organizations such as Black Lives Matter, would be reluctant to antagonize the Cuban government?

”Fair enough,” concedes University of Texas professor Jorge Felipe-Gonzales. But he thinks there is more to it: “the organization [BLM] is using the Cuban movement to criticize the U.S. government and its foreign policy,” he argues in the July 17 issue of The Atlantic. It praised former President Barack Obama for lifting sanctions against Cuba, which his successor later reversed, and which the Biden administration has been slow to amend. Cubans—and particularly Black Cubans—are suffering. The Cuban judicial system is prosecuting the protesters with sentences of up to 20 years.” Laments Felipe-Gonzales, “BLM, of all organizations, should be aware that Cubans can’t breathe either.”

Perhaps it is; but whom does BLM hold responsible? Its website “condemns the US federal government’s inhumane treatment of Cubans.” Read on: “Since 1962, the US has forced pain and suffering on the people of Cuba by cutting off food, medicine and supplies, costing the tiny island an estimated $130 billion. Without that money, it is harder for Cuba to acquire medical equipment need to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines and equipment needed for food production.  This comes in spite of the country’s strong medical care and history of lending doctors and nurses to disasters around the world.”

That the “strong medical care” shares with “lending doctors and nurses to disasters around the world” top prize for stale mythology appears not to matter. Even the BBC reports the findings of Prisoners Defenders, a Spain-based NGO that campaigns for human rights in Cuba linked to the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) opposition group, indicating that “doctors on average receive between 10% and 25% of the salary paid by the host countries, with the rest being kept by Cuba’s authorities.” What is more, starting in 2020, Human Rights Watch has denounced Cuba’s treatment of its health workers as virtual slaves. Health workers who “abandon” the missions to which they have been assigned, for example, are subject to a de facto entry ban to Cuba of eight years. In November 2019, the UN special rapporteurs on contemporary forms of slavery declared that the working conditions reported to them, including from first-hand sources, “could amount to forced labor.”

None of this seems to have been noticed by the BLM establishment. But it will be increasingly harder to ignore the truth now that the whole world is watching. As former dissident and former Czech Ambassador to the UN Martin Palous, Director of the Václav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy, told the hundreds of participants at the July 21 FIU conference: “This is not only about Cuba. It’s about the future of democracy in the world. We have an obligation to help, and we have a chance to help. This is a transatlantic issue and certainly a global issue.”

Arcos underscored the importance of this moment: “What we saw in the streets of Cuba and in the streets of Miami is that there has been a generational shift. Younger people have taken the cause of freedom and have made it theirs. They have demonstrated that they have the passion, and they have the interest.” The leaders of this new movement are “a cross-section of Cuba and they are younger, darker and female. Young people and women especially have played an incredible role” in these demonstrations.

In neighboring Venezuela, opposition leaders have praised the pro-democratic movement in Cuba, added Astrid Arraras, professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations. It was summed up by Carlos Saladrigas, an entrepreneur and president of the Cuba Study Group: “This is not the beginning of the end,’’ he added. “We are seeing a vindication of openness and communication. None of this is going to be resolved in a day. We need to think of this as a process.”

This process, however, must start with facing the truth. That is why Landrove’s message, addressed to her friends on the left whatever they may call themselves—socialists, Marxists, progressives, liberals, whatever—is particularly powerful. They will have to decide where they stand, “how they define revolution, people, sovereignty, freedom, and what type of world they want to build when they use these words.” Absolutely. Words with respectable pedigrees have been repurposed with Gramscian-Leninist cynicism into their precise opposite, while progressives do not flinch as history marches backward to slavery.

The Castro dictatorship and most of the American media call the U.S. economic embargo a “blockade,” flying in the face of U.S.-Cuba trade statistics over the past 20 years. What does exist, reports the Center for a Free Cuba, is an “internal blockade” on Cubans imposed by the regime. Its website provides ample details. Also, do pay attention also to Cuba’s cozy relationship with Iran, which was re-established in 1979. On June 18, for example, the president of the Assembly’s International Relations Committee, Yolanda Ferrer, gushed on Twitter about welcoming Seyed Mohammad Hadi Sobhani, from the Islamic Republic, to discuss their “solid bilateral relations.”

To ignore reality and use words disingenuously is bad enough. But Landrove has one more request: “And they will also have to decide when to stay silent, because silence in the face of injustice is complicity.”

While examining their conscience, they would be well advised to read Against All Hope, the 1986 prison memoir of Armando Valladares, the nation’s Solzhenitsyn. The book ends by describing an orgy of blood, when suddenly a man emerged, “raising his arms to the invisible heaven and pleading for mercy for his executioners.” He was summarily gunned down. But his image stays indelibly etched in the reader’s mind. Let us not forsake him and his brave people.

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Literally out of the blue, the brightest blue ever to grace the New York skyline, came the killer planes. Nothing would be the same again after that horrific September morning—or so everyone said, as the nation went numb with fury and incomprehension. But what did it mean? Aside from the usual imagination deficit that afflicts the over-satisfied and overfed, Americans lacked the conceptual categories needed to make sense of that sort of threat. For over a decade after the Iron Curtain crumbled, Francis Fukuyama’s comforting “end-of-history” narrative, described in The National Interest in 1989, had prevailed. Proclaiming “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” it declared that ideology was finished, and the good guys had won. The “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” had eliminated all rival political systems. Those “ideas in the sense of large unifying world views that might best be understood under the rubric of ideology” had been refuted. Evidently, not everyone got the memo.

Not for the first time had mankind imagined itself to have buried “history” for good, to be replaced by an ideal, “rational” new world order. Nor would it be the last. As I explain in my book The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom, the yearning for a post-apocalyptic order devoid of divisive ideologies, when a “final form of human government” wins out worldwide, has ancient roots and persists to this day. Though Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, was more nuanced than his essay, while he concedes that rationality has not fully triumphed yet, he nevertheless still holds out hope for eventual salvation on earth. He blames nationalism and ethnocentrism on the “irrational” desire to feel superior to others, a predilection he calls megalothymia (from the Greek “thymos,” meaning a sense of self-worth, or “recognition”). Specifically, nationalism is “not fully rational because it extends recognition only to members of a given national or ethnic group”—naturally, one’s own.

Similarly, Friedrich Nietzsche observed that for men throughout history, the desire to feel superior to—and exercise power over—others is intense and seductive. This “kind of strength that excites fear was considered preeminently divine: here was the origin of authority; here one interpreted, heard, sought wisdom.” But it is not irrational, nor even a-rational, if it achieves the intended effect of mesmerizing others, as it generally does. Reason is not always positive: it can lead to both good and bad; which is why very smart people can, and often do, perform the devil’s work. Conversely, not everything that is not rational is necessarily bad, quite the contrary. Paradigmatically love, while compatible with reason, transcends it.

The Evils of Hubris

Fukuyama would have been better served to use a different word from Greek antiquity to designate the yearning for recognition, power, and superiority. That word is hubris: mankind’s tragic flaw. Hubris may be perilous, but not irrational: it is essentially evil. Camouflaged in deceptively benevolent and lofty rhetorical garb, it can be seductive. But make no mistake: if modern versions look different from the old, the roots are ancient, the effects nearly always deadly.

“In Greek tradition,” writes Luciano Pellicani, “hubris is the excessive arrogance of man in the face of the gods, the desire to be as and more than the gods, the refusal of man’s finiteness. On the basis of [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s well-known theory that ‘man is fundamentally the desire to be God,’ hubris is inevitably a natural and constant temptation.” Thus:

[h]e is condemned to live an insensate life and destined to be the food of time… [Man] aspires with all his might to live in a transfigured world. This is the existential source of all religions of salvation and all metaphysical needs. It is also the source of the revolutionary spirit and its demiurgic project to reshape the totality of being. In other words: the objective of revolution is the divinization of humanity.

Indeed, the self-divinization of humanity lies at the heart of modernity as it evolved in the West. Pace F.A. Hayek, it is the species’ fatal conceit and not the pretense of knowledge. Dubbing this yearning for divinization as merely irrational won’t help us either understand or address it head-on.

It certainly lies at the root of the putatively divinely-inspired Salafist-Islamism that gave rise to al-Qaeda, the global jihad responsible for the Apocalypse of 9/11 which continues to threaten civilization, occasional setbacks notwithstanding. “For al-Qaeda, Islam is revolution not just in the sense of an insurgency but an ideological and political sense as well,” writes Michael W. S. Ryan, citing al-Qaeda strategist Abu Ubayd al-Qurashi’s summons to holy war against the West. Engaging in a sustained, well organized, long-term struggle must be based on classical guerrilla warfare, writes al-Qurashi. Small wonder that he finds inspiration in “Mao Tse-tung [who] in his writings about the revolutionary war focused on the fundamental relationships between war and politics.” Just as Mao had been driven by hubris to control the fate of his countrymen—and of others—no matter what the cost in lives and suffering, so his Islamist disciples wage war against the so-called “infidels” convinced of their quasi-divine superiority.

Al-Qaeda and its offshoots have not been defeated despite the trillions spent and lives lost in the effort. Quite the contrary, writes Bruce Hoffman: it is “a movement whose long-term strategy is showing alarming signs of coalescing.” Hoffman also agrees with the Worldwide Threat Assessment that the intelligence community presented to Congress on February 13, 2018, that “its affiliates are getting stronger” as well. And “this isn’t happening simultaneously, independently or serendipitously—it’s part of an overall global strategic plan that al-Qaida is stubbornly pursuing.” Yet nearly two decades after that black day in September when the odor of death filled the nation and the world, we have yet to understand what happened, in historical context. For that, however, we need to have a better grasp of the particular ideas, not only the subconscious drives, at the root of global conflict, including our own preconceptions that prevent us from seeing ourselves candidly, with a minimum of wishful thinking. And to appreciate the kind of world that Salafi-jihadists are seeking to establish, we have to understand the utopian temptation.

Twisted Meanings

But that takes words. And considering how the language of public discourse has been twisted and turned to the point that ambiguity now reigns supreme, this is no easy task: more often than not, we end up talking past one another. We still live in a post-Babel world as much as ever, if not more. And failing to understand one another, we hardly understand ourselves. The biblical story needs to be revisited. Once upon a time, though once again….

As recounted in Genesis, initially “all the world spoke a single language and used the same words.” Having settled in Babel, men sought to construct a great city there, “with a tower that reaches to the heavens,” which then and now implied both literal and sacred height. God naturally noticed, and worried that “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them” should they succeed: it was the same worry He had expressed after the first couple defied His admonition against eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. It was time for another lesson. God thus preemptively dispersed humanity and “made a babble of the language of all the world.” Better to babble than to imagine that heaven could be reached by mere humans.

The babble has only worsened since, words routinely being twisted to suit political ends, as inflammatory rhetoric advancing misleading ideologies proliferate. We now have “democratic” nations that hold sham elections; totalitarian theocratic “republics” that are monarchies in modern garb; and “left vs. right” is no clearer than “red vs. black” (or blue, for that matter). So too “green” is the color of both Islam and the environmental movement, a coincidence that should concern them both. Even if we never attain the clarity of plainsong, we can seek to reduce the cacophony—if only to prevent unwittingly self-inflicted injury. Most important, we must prevent the demise of man’s most precious gift: individual freedom. For without liberty, man is mere animated clay.

The philosophy based on that principle has traditionally been called liberalism. It originally consisted in the promotion of political and economic liberty, referring to the equal protection of life, liberty, and property through limited government. In the early days of the twentieth century, however, the term’s meaning was subtly but quite deliberately changed by proponents of Progressivism. When they proclaimed freedom (a term they generally preferred to “liberty”), self-declared “Progressives” had in mind principally an end to economic inequality, soon known as “social justice.” The philosopher John Dewey would thus famously write, in Liberalism and Social Action (1935), that activist government and social reconstruction had “virtually come to define the meaning of liberal faith.” Dewey had turned the concept precisely on its head. Poor Adam Smith must be exasperated as he turns in his grave watching Dewey and his Progressive colleagues obfuscating the concept of “natural liberty.” The semantic subversion had begun.

Thereafter, the original liberals would often be called “conservatives,” and more recently, “neoliberal.” Under siege and in retreat, some of them (e.g., Milton Friedman) have tried to resist relinquishing the name that best captured their philosophy by describing themselves as “classical liberal,” or even Whigs (like Hayek); others (notably Frank Meyer) sought to take refuge in what they call “new conservatism,” and a sizeable number consider the term “libertarian” least confusing. The all-too-common accusations of “fascism” by progressive-liberals occasion howls of pain from their unwitting targets. As the current partisan political discourse suffers in almost equal measure from ignorance and venality, the ensuing cacophony delights America’s enemies even as it poisons the domestic debate. In the verbal dueling by expletives, the contestants all lose. Meanwhile, the war on freedom is being won by proxy, its foes watching gleefully from the sidelines.

It had been a smart, indeed brilliant, move by the Progressives to appropriate the label. For since the Declaration of Independence is the iconic liberal document of the American Revolution, its aura implicitly blesses all who supposedly fall under it. Accordingly, today’s progressives (having dropped the capitalization during consecutive rebootings) continue to bathe in its radiance, meanwhile relegating conservatism to inertia: “disposed to preserve existing conditions.” Deceptively anodyne, “conservatism” is thus indelibly scarred by the ignominious imprint of timidity and opportunism. Consider its synonyms: obscurantism, dogmatism, reaction, illiberalism, opposition. Nor is “traditionalism” much better, for even that is relative: traditions have notoriously checkered pedigrees. Never mind that most “conservatives” in America today are dedicated to the American revolutionary tradition and its commitment to liberty.

Calling all Fascists?

No wonder the general public is confused when Russian kleptocrats, Chinese censors, Islamist defenders of stoning, and white supremacists are labeled “conservative” alongside the intellectual heirs of John Locke and the Founders. Since “conservative,” moreover, is often used interchangeably with “right-wing”—capitalizing on the common reading of that term as equivalent to “racist,” “fascist,” and “Nazi”—as soon as someone is thus pigeonholed and smeared, the cards are solidly stacked against any kind of sensible discussion. Such profound conceptual squalor cries out for major semantic housecleaning.

In a debased political culture, smearing is bound to become an equal opportunity pastime. Journalists and politicians of various stripes compete for first prize, and both constituencies win. Writes Peter S. Goodman, former New York Times economics editor, now editor of the International Business Times: “Political hacks trade in the labels of right and left because it allows them to manipulate the public with shortcut phrases.” Their enablers are lazy journalists who like pernicious “labels that perpetuate division” because these sell papers, generating “the sort of tension that feeds narrative.” Ultimately, charges Goodman, “left and right are the props of the cynical class who use them to convey a sense of sophistication in place of the messy, difficult work of finding things out, uncovering truths and reckoning with social problems in their fullest human dimension.” If only more members of the media would share his integrity. To say nothing of politicians.

Goodman is right that “no ideological position can be counted on to deliver the facts.” And without facts, there can be no civilization. There certainly cannot be dialogue. Similarly, Crispin Sartwell denounces “the arrangement of positions along the left-right axis… [as] conceptually confused, ideologically tendentious, and historically contingent. And any position anywhere along it is infested by contradictions.” In a word, the axis is “bogus.” Excommunicating a specific set of words, of course, does not resolve conceptual disagreements that are real, and dangerous.

Addictive Utopias

But labels aside, what must strike even, or rather especially, the ordinary observer unencumbered by academese is that autocracies of whatever stripe, whether secular or theocratic, tend to promise utopian goals: an end to conflict, to inequality, to sin, venality, etc.—fill in the blank. At the same time, they oppose dialogue and outlaw pluralism and generally demonize democratic self-rule as evil and/or anachronistic, which must be systematically opposed by any means, if not outright destroyed. Meanwhile, their leaders naturally expect unquestioning, whether real or simulated, adulation. It may seem ironic that the same people who consider themselves the most progressive of democrats should often find allies in virulently anti-Western kleptocracies. What they appear to have in common is a yearning for a heaven-on-earth devoid of strife, inequality, antagonism, and above all, selfishness. In other words: a utopian millenarian ideology that defies reality, ignoring facts. (At least this is true of the naïve; the disingenuous are another story.) Utopia is like heroin: the euphoria is ephemeral, illusory, and deadly.

In The Concept of Freedom, published in 1962, Frank S. Meyer traces the idyllic vision all the way back to Pharaoh Akhenaton who ruled in the 14th century BCE; it was revived in the Hellenic world a few centuries later, then followed by Gnostic sects of early Christianity:

The myth of the Tower of Babel, like the historical record of the reign of the Pharaoh Akhenaton who attempted to reconstruct Egyptian society in a single generation, testifies to so early an existence of the belief that men can create a perfect world.… Always since, it has been endemic as an underground aspect of Western thought, appearing now and again in the Utopianism and millenarianism of some medieval heresies….. Every revolutionary movement of the last two centuries…ends by deifying the state it has captured and theologizing the concept of the state.

Concludes Meyer: “The dominant ideologies of the 20th century… are the latest forms taken by this Utopian attitude.”

Were Meyer alive today, he would add global Salafi-jihadism to the list. Recent studies reveal the full extent of the continuity between the modern version of jihadism and Western millenarian utopian ideologies or political religions. As a result, in the twenty-first century, affinities between otherwise disparate anti-Western states and organizations have led to threads of cooperation that pose exponentially greater danger to civilization and freedom, as suicidal fanatics gain access to the latest technology.

But external threats aside, the enemy that should most concern the West lies within. Fukuyama explained in an interview published in October 2018: “What I said back then [1992] is that one of the problems with modern democracy is that it provides peace and prosperity but people want more than that… liberal democracies don’t even try to define what a good life is, it’s left up to individuals, who feel alienated, without purpose….” Fukuyama is right about that; but when people who instead of being grateful for the benefits of freedom become ready prey to peddlers of political religions that promise to eliminate greed and envy, they endanger civilization itself. Demagogic promises of substantive “equality” come at a steep price, namely, the erosion, if not abolition, of the genuine formal equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence: the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If these rights were self-evident to our Founders, they are hardly so today. But that should come as no surprise, as the ever-realistic, great little giant Milton Friedman knew too well. “The battle for freedom,” wrote Friedman in his 1994 re-introduction to Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, “must be won over and over again.” It’s our turn now.

The post Back on the Road to Nowhere appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Vladimir Bukovsky had already made history in 1978, when his autobiography, To Build a Castle, revealed how psychiatric torture was routinely used against dissenters like himself in the Soviet equivalent of Hades. Bukovsky has done it again with an exposé called Judgment in Moscow, consisting of top-secret archival materials the wily former dissident was able to obtain during the chaotic days of the early 1990s, as the USSR was disintegrating. 

When it was published in Europe in French and Russian, the book was almost an instant bestseller. The treasure trove Bukovsky uncovered includes conversations between the Soviet leader Alexei Kosygin and his cabinet about the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and the Kremlin’s support for Middle Eastern terrorists, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev’s sabotage of the European Community and the pseudo-liberalism of Gorbachev’s “perestroika.” 

In 1992, using a portable computer with a handheld scanner (a miracle of Japanese technology), Bukovsky surreptitiously smuggled out thousands of pages before being discovered by the authorities and denied further access. But by then, he already had enough for a monumental tome that will change how we view both history and the present.

Chances are you haven’t read it. The reason is simple: It has taken nearly a quarter century for it to appear in English. Implicitly reinforcing the book’s subtitle, “Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity,” Random House backed out of its contract when Bukovsky refused to rewrite “the entire book from the point of view of a leftist liberal.” Most important, he was told to omit all mention of media companies (notably ABC, the BBC, and many others, including the film director Francis Ford Coppola’s company) entering into agreements with Moscow to publish articles “under the direct editorial control of the Soviets.”

Never mind that everything—including all the agreements and all the archival data—is scrupulously documented. At issue was the entire narrative of the Cold War. Random House’s senior editor argued that it would “also surprise American readers to learn that such ‘liberal’ foundations as Ford, Rockefellers, etc., gave ‘billions’ to the peace movement. This simply isn’t true and will lead Americans to mistrust your argument in general.” 

Alas, it is all too true. What is more, the transcripts demonstrate that the “peace movement” was at bottom a sophisticated and far-ranging propaganda effort designed to weaken Western defenses. And while some of the Western participants were merely naïve, some knew exactly who paid them and why. Today at last, thanks to a group of volunteers who worked tirelessly for several years, and a small California publisher (Ninth of November Press) willing to buck the media establishment, Judgment in Moscow is now accessible to English-speaking readers, in Alyona Kojevnikov’s fine translation. It will now be much harder to ignore.

Revolutionary Pipeline

We shouldn’t be surprised that Gorbachev, the USSR’s last leader, encouraged his fellow Communist Party members and officers of the KGB to set up joint ventures with Western businesses. “Starting with laundering party funds and transferring the resources within their grasp (old, oil, rare metals),” writes Bukovsky, “these malevolent, mafia-like structures grew like a cancer, absorbing all ‘private’ enterprise in the countries of the former USSR.” The cancer has only spread since then. 

Bukovsky also uncovered a large “special file” containing requests advanced by various Communist Parties (notably those in Argentina, Panama, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Cuba) for Soviet intelligence, counterintelligence, and military training, along with weapons and other assistance. For example, a memo responding to the Communist Party of El Salvador dated July 23, 1980, tasked the USSR’s Ministry of Civil Aviation to arrange the delivery of between 60 and 80 tons of Western-manufactured firearms and ammunition from Hanoi to Havana, “to be passed on to our Salvadorean friends via Cuban comrades.” All expenses were to be charged “to the state budget as gratis aid.” 

Similarly, assistance for Palestinian terrorists, “for which there were [and still are] vehement denials of any connection by the Soviet leadership and its western apologists,” finds support in such documents as this memo from the head of the KGB to general secretary Leonid Brezhnev: “In accordance with the decision of the Central Committee of the CPSU, on 14 May 1975 the Committee for State Security gave trusted KGB intelligence agent, W. Haddad, head of the external operations section of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a consignment of foreign-produced arms and ammunition.” It concludes: “W. Haddad is the only foreigner who knows that the arms were supplied by us.” Now we all do.

USSR’s Diplomatic and Scholarly Enablers

Some documents Bukovsky confesses he never expected to see, especially those involving the founding and subsequent work of the prestigious Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, known as the Palme Commission. This commission, formed in 1982 as a joint East-West effort to examine international security issues, included members from the East, the West, and the Third World. Among its Western delegates were prominent political figures such as former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, former British Foreign Secretary David Owen, and Egon Bahr, the former key aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.  

That it served as a Soviet instrument of propaganda was manifest. What proved shocking in the extreme was that Vance, Owen, and Bahr were fully aware that most of the commission’s recommendations “reflect[ed] the Soviet position on the key issues of disarmament and security in direct or indirect form,” as the Soviet delegate Georgy Arbatov reported to his Kremlin bosses. As a result, they “tried to avoid wording which would be an exact repetition of Soviet terminology, and explained in private conversations that they had to beware of accusations that they are following ‘Moscow policies.’” 

Comments Bukovsky: “As God is my witness, ‘paranoid’ though I may be, I never would have expected such cynicism, especially from Dr. David Owen.”

A catalogue of covert crimes, conspiracies, and subversion by self-serving hypocrites, the book has this question at its heart: “Are such concepts as good and evil, lies and truth, applicable to these people?” Bukovsky confesses: “I don’t know. Keep in mind that in communist newspeak such words, just as many others familiar to our ear, had a completely different meaning. The very ideas of ‘reality’ and ‘actuality’ meant something completely different in an ideological context.” What was done or not done on any given day “was known only at the top of the pyramid of power . . . . And if ideology could not rule through the law, then it becomes above the law, ruling from behind its back, as it were.”  

The secretiveness was, as it were, no secret; yet few had the courage to denounce the Soviet Emperor’s wretched nakedness.

If their own people were not fooled by propaganda and disinformation, the same cannot be said of Western journalists and other members of the elite. Some were unwilling to risk shaking their own belief in socialism’s superiority. For example, rather than castigate Gorbachev for trying to conceal the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and thereby putting at risk the health of millions, Western sympathizers chose to come away believing only that nuclear power plants are dangerous and should be opposed. 

To reach the widest possible audience with its version of what happened at Chernobyl, the Central Committee revved up an enormous machine of disinformation by the KGB’s International Department, the entity that is the main target of Judgement at Nuremberg.

Known as “active measures,” dezinformatsia relies on a whole system of “agents of influence.” Distinct from outright KGB operatives, these agents acted under varying motivations: “Some disseminated Soviet disinformation out of purely ideological motives, some to repay an old debt to that authority or because they expected a reciprocal favor or service, while others simply knew not what they did.” Among them were Sovietologists from universities in the West who were dependent on the regime for permission to travel to the USSR, on which rested their professional credentials. Conversely, Soviet citizens could not travel abroad without the approval of the KGB, which naturally expected something in return. 

Gorbachev Championed European Integration

But what about the much-touted liberalization of the 1980s? A sham. “Beyond doubt, glasnost and perestroika were a diabolical invention,” declares Bukovsky. Was Gorbachev a great “liberal”? Not according to the minutes of the Politburo meeting that was held on March 11, 1985, which show that he was the most cautious official present. What is more, his winning a “struggle for succession [as general secretary] is but one of many myths the Western media consumed without a second thought.” In fact, Gorbachev was unanimously elected general secretary.

Later, the wily leader’s decision to “pardon” some dissidents, which did much to earn him accolades from naïve Westerners, had been conditioned on their changing their tune—as many did. Meanwhile, an international seminar on human rights that was to be organized by the Glasnost Press Club (the real opposition) was forbidden by Alexander Yakovlev, the Politburo member and godfather of glasnost. Gorbachev’s regime used “the same KGB, the same ‘measures,’ the same abuse of power,” albeit in sheep’s clothing. Bukovsky has to admit that “not even Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan saw this.”

Finally, in the last chapter, comes evidence suggesting that the Iron Curtain did not fall entirely by chance. Minutes from a July 6, 1989, meeting between French Prime Minister Francois Mitterand and Gorbachev indicate that the two men had just agreed to an eventual European convergence, though hoping it would take at least another decade.  The idea was not to allow “freedom” but to simulate it, and control it.  

“The fall of the Berlin Wall and the following reunification of German came as no surprise to Moscow,” writes Bukovsky, “and did not herald a catastrophe for their ‘friends’ in the GDR [East Germany]. Immediately after [East German dictator Erich] Honecker was deposed, his successor Egon Krenz (formerly supervisor of the Stasi for the East German KGB) hurried to Moscow to report the details of the successful conspiracy to Gorbachev (1 Nov. 1989).” To which Gorbachev responded, regretfully: “I had reasonably good relations with E. Honecker, but he seems to have recently gone blind. If only he had accepted the necessary political changes on his own initiative 2-3 years ago, everything would be different now.” 

Morphing into a Post-Communist Feudal State

Maybe not entirely different. Certainly no one denies that history took a very different turn than that. And those high-level discussions resonate today: the plans and the strategy, the alliances both existing and planned. (“We have more active contacts with social circles in the USA than Europe”; we need to create “a regrouping of scientific forces. The forces are there, they just need to be regrouped.”) True, Gorbachev’s survival plan eventually went awry, for in 1991, Moscow itself succumbed, and Gorbachev lost power, for “deprived of a pivot, the country simply disintegrated into separate parts, controlled by the party mafias” that dominated regionally. The USSR had morphed into a post-communist feudal state, as “the ‘new’ political elite that had floated to the surface turned out to be the old nomenklatura which had had time to adapt itself to new conditions.” The oligarchs of today were seasoned in the putrid cauldron of yesterday. 

Echoing Judgment at Nuremberg, Judgment in Moscow (with the notable difference that nothing in it is fictional) implicitly becomes its ironic converse. That a judgment of the Marxist-Leninist tyrants in a manner comparable to their Nazi counterparts never took place was not merely a magnanimous gesture by the West to forego gloating over its alleged victory. Rather, it reflected, and reflects, the ways in which the West may not have won after all, any more than did the Russian people. 

If a trial had taken place when the Iron Curtain fell, the defendants would have had to include not only the criminal junta in the Kremlin but their co-conspirators, witting and unwitting, flirting with socialism and untruth in the decreasingly “free” world. 

But at least now we have the evidence—and in English.

The post The Current Russian Kleptocracy’s Roots Uncovered appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Marc Thiessen asks a fair question in his Washington Post column of August 20: “If Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib can boycott Israel, why can’t Israel boycott them?” It can, and it did. Predictably, most commentators resorted to default mode and blamed Israel. Even Thiessen argues that “it has given [Omar and Tlaib] a much bigger platform from which to attack Israel.” As if that were possible.

Just as predictably, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) upped the ante: She asked Israel’s interior minister Aryeh Deri to be allowed to visit her grandmother, now in her nineties, because “this might be my last opportunity to see her.” Deri called her bluff: Tlaib could go.  His only condition was that she not engage in activities supportive of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign. Since on July 23, the U.S. Congress had condemned BDS in a 398-to-17 majority, as “destructive of prospects towards peace,” this didn’t seem too much to ask.

But of course, Tlaib’s trip wasn’t about her grandmother. She immediately tweeted: “I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in” – whereupon some grand words follow, none of which include any reference to familial affections.

Nor was the congresswomen’s trip about “visit[ing] and experience[ing] our democratic ally Israel firsthand,” as AIPAC (the American Israel Political Action Committee) argued in the their defense. Having just sponsored a congressional delegation in early August consisting of 41 Democrats and 31 Republicans, AIPAC knew that the two could easily have “experienced Israel” alongside their colleagues.

But the militant lawmakers had another agenda: meeting with Palestinian Authority officials. Both Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer and former Israeli Deputy UN Ambassador Arye Mekel described their itinerary, organized by the Palestinian organization Miftah which also sponsored the trip, as a “BDS circus.” There is no mystery surrounding Miftah’s role in promoting BDS as “a broad movement, threatening the very legitimacy of the Zionist state.”

And who, you may well ask, is Miftah, the organization that was to have facilitated Tlaib and Rep. Omar’s (D-Minn) visit to Israel? The answer is extremely troubling.

Miftah and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

An article posted on its website, for example, exhorts Palestinians to escape “the trap of denial and self-deception that prevents us from freeing ourselves from the devastating bear hug of the blood ritual” – a reference to the age-old libel that Jews use Christian (or, in the Middle East, Muslim) blood in the Jewish Passover matza. It gets worse: “The Jewish control of the American mass media is the single most important fact of life, not just in America, but in the whole world today. There is nothing — plague, famine, economic collapse, even nuclear war — more dangerous to the future of our people.”

Anyone familiar with the history of antisemitism will recognize here echoes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1903 under the auspices of the Russian Secret Police, the Okhrana. Purportedly “minutes” of a secret speech among the Elders, or Sages, of Zion, it allegedly demonstrates their conspiracy to run the world by dominating money and communications. Though in 1921 The London Times exposed it as a rather crude forgery, by then it had already been translated into every European language and sold widely – including, indeed especially, in the United States.

Starting in 1920, Henry Ford financed an enormous international campaign to publicize the shameless rag, along with sympathetic commentaries, in a compilation called International Jew, which he had translated into sixteen languages. Though he eventually apologized in 1927, after recognition of its fraudulent origin, irreparable harm had been done. Adolf Hitler kept a photograph of the “heroic American, Heinrich Ford,” and Alfred Rosenberg, the “official” philosopher of the Nazi party, published his own commentary on the Protocols in 1923. When the Nazis took power in 1933, some version of the forgery, with or without comments, was easily available.

The USSR Steps In

After Hitler’s demise, it did not take long for Stalin to take over. He fully understood the propaganda value of the Protocols and was ready to use it against the West, especially once it became clear that after its founding in 1948, Israel would not become a Soviet satellite. With solid backing from Karl Marx, who in his 1844 essay on the “Jewish Question” argued that “the God of the Jew is money,” Stalin declared American capitalism and Israel as ideological Siamese twins.

By 1951, the Soviet international campaign had started in earnest. Soviet General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who became the first chief of the KGB’s foreign intelligence unit, brought the Protocols to Bucharest, for Romania’s secret police, the Securitate, to translate and disseminate throughout Western Europe. But “it had to be done secretly, so no one would know that the publications came from the Soviet bloc.”  Before long, writes former Romanian chief of foreign intelligence General Ion Mihai Pacepa, “the Securitate was spreading the Protocols around the Middle East as well.”

The narrative of a worldwide capitalist-Zionist conspiracy helped the Soviets, eager for Arab clients, no less than Osama bin Laden and his ideological father Sayyid Qutb, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. But “this belief in the fantasies of the Protocols is not limited to Qutb and his fundamentalist believers, writes the great historian of antisemitism Robert Wistrich. “To this day, it remains absolutely mainstream in the Muslim world.” Indeed, “the Protocols reach an Arabic-speaking mass audience of hundreds of millions through popular television series, sermons, the press, and the Internet.”

The Real Target

The antizionist campaign is not only, perhaps not even primarily, about Israel and the Jews. The ultimate target is American constitutional, democratic liberalism. Explains Robert Wistrich: “Israel increasingly became a surrogate target for those reluctant to take on the might of the United States,” resulting in “a growing convergence in the demonization of both nations.” “In the minds of their adversaries,” he continues, “the United States and Israel have come to symbolize in recent years a whole cluster of threats – including globalization, neoliberal capitalist exploitation of the Third World, ethnic intolerance” and other assorted evils.

Miftah’s website is a good example. For even while conceding the Protocols’ fraudulent origin, “in a way, the lies have fulfilled themselves.” The author warns that “if America gets into a really deep economic depression, might not Jewish names… come up?” Another article adds that while “it seems that even though the document has been repeatedly condemned as counterfeit, no one has ever denounced the ideas, and tactics exposed in the document or its purported aims,” praising Henry Ford for having “risked his life and reputation to warn his country about what he believed was an evil taking root in the United States named Zionism.”

Make no mistake: Ilhan and Rashida’s trip was not about experiencing our democratic ally first hand, about aged grandmothers, or even about the hapless Palestinians. Ultimately, it is about America.

The post It’s Not about Israel or Grandmothers, It’s about US appeared first on Law & Liberty.

The more naïve supporters of tomorrow’s Women’s March on Washington were apparently surprised by the anti-Semitism of its main organizers. They shouldn’t have been; this has been a story for nearly the entire existence of the movement that was born during Donald Trump’s inauguration. Tamika Mallory, a fan of Fidel Castro, has been “thank[ing] God” for hardcore anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan for a while now. Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel of Tabletmag reported last month that, according to several people present at an organizational meeting with Mallory and co-organizer Carmen Perez, the two expressed the view “that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people” and “claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade.” The Palestinian American activist (and co-chair of the original march) Linda Sarsour is famous for her 2012 tweet that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

Certainly the more woke among Jews of the political Left—the National Council of Jewish Women, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, If Not Now, and other groups—knew this perfectly well. Continuing to staunchly support the Women’s March, they have joined the Jewish Voice for Peace in condemning the uproar against the march as an “opportunistic attempt to break up a strong and growing cross-movement coalition by rehashing a painful conversation that has been happening in progressive spaces since Farrakhan first assumed leadership of Nation of Islam.” Farrakhan, yes; “right-wing Zionists” like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, no. Simple.

This would come as no surprise to the premier scholar of anti-Semitism, Robert S. Wistrich, whose last book before his untimely death in 2015, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel (2012), represents “the closing of a circle after four decades of reflection about the complex interaction between Socialism and the Jews, the Jewish involvement in radical movements, and the phenomenon of antisemitism as well as anti-Zionism on the left.”

Copiously researched (his sources span 12 languages), From Ambivalence to Betrayal is a kind of compendium of all of the scholar’s previous work. It is also deeply personal. Wistrich, who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and University College London, dedicated his life to documenting the wrong turn taken by his own idealistic co-religionists. He was born in 1945 in Soviet Kazakhstan, where his father, a former “fellow-traveler” of the Polish Communist Party, had been exiled along with his wife, a socialist sympathizer. He experienced Soviet communism and, later, Western socialism, after the family moved to France and then England. After a stint as a college radical, he ended up writing a doctoral thesis at the University of London in the mid-1970s focusing on Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. A series of superb studies of the Left followed, crowned by A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism—From Antiquity to the Global Jihad (2010), which secured Wistrich’s preeminence in this field.

The Supposed “Cult of Money”

Going back in history, the European Left, especially in France and Germany, was profoundly anti-Semitic to begin with, “as part of its atheistic critique of religion and its populist anti-capitalism,” Wistrich says. But beyond that, he demonstrates with scrupulous intellectual honesty how much modern socialism owed “to militant Jews who were among its initial creators, leading practitioners, and most fervent apostles. Jewish intellectuals, in particular, brought to the Socialist ranks their acute critical intelligence, unabashed rationalism, devotion to justice, and high ethical ideals.” The road to serfdom had been paved with the noblest intentions and Talmudic acumen.

Wistrich’s historiography demonstrates definitively how Marx’s identification of bourgeois capitalism and the Jews’ supposed “cult of money” guaranteed that the messianic secular dream of collective redemption at the heart of leftist ideology would be ineluctably linked to the annihilation of Judaism. Declaring contemptuously that “the bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew,” Marx predicted that “as soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible.” No wonder that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, credited Marx with revealing to him the solution to the world’s ills. Abolishing the “empirical essence” of six million Jews would be a good start.

To be sure, the conflation of Judaism with usury had long preceded Marx. Martin Luther had updated ancient Jew-hatred with renewed venom; two centuries later, the poison infected none other than the “enlightened” Voltaire. That witty (and famously stingy) philosophe contemptuously accused the Hebrews, that “ignorant and barbarous people,” of having “long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition,” only to be outdone by his German contemporary of sometime Jacobin persuasion, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In 1793, Fichte accused the Jews of constituting, of all things, “a powerful state . . . continually at war with all the others, and that in certain places terribly oppresses the citizens.” If “the Big Lie” had yet to become a tool of statecraft for the Politburo, few claims can rival this one for sheer absurdity.

By the 19th century, the image of Jews as a Volk (nation) afflicted with terminal egoism, and obsessed with commerce and business, had become commonplace. The radical journalist Ludwig Borne’s assault on the “money-devil” after 1808 fed the rising tide of “progressive” Jew-hatred in Germany. Thus the practice of linking Jews “with the all-devouring Moloch of Mammon,” observes Wistrich, became increasingly prominent in socialist writings after 1840. The first German socialist, Moses Hess, writing in 1843, went so far as to identify “the Jewish Jehovah—Moloch” and the Christian God with human sacrifice, capitalistic cannibalism, and social parasitism.

Yes, both Borne and Hess were Jewish. And yes, they shared Marx’s hostility to their ancient culture. But Marx the philosopher succeeded in creating the ideological superstructure, by mixing the militant atheism and opposition to private property of the anti-Semite Bruno Bauer with Ludwig Feuerbach’s materialist metaphysics, which reduced all action to economic determinism. Marx’s sinister inverted alchemy would turn gold into dust. And (eventually) soap.

How could this descendant of a long line of rabbis claim that “The God of the Jew is money”? This “ugly and baseless libel,” writes Wistrich, stems from Jewish self-loathing. Even the anti-Semitic sociologist Werner Sombart, who a century later sought to hold Jews responsible “for the entire development of modern financial capitalism—especially its less appealing features,” recognized the admirable tradition of learning, discipline, sobriety, and varied talents of the Jews. Marx never did; his conviction that abolishing private property would bring utopia on earth overshadowed the horrific real-life effects of his toxic ideology. An intellectual murder-suicide defined his apocalyptic vision.

By the 1880s, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been thoroughly infected with anti-Semitism. Most if not all SPD members of all faiths believed that the Jews deserved the contempt of the German masses as payback for the “murderous role” their usury had played under feudalism, abusing the peasants. Ironically, what they saw as the real threat was philo-Semitism, or expressing sympathy for Jews, for it implied protecting the ruling class, and was therefore “the last ideological disguise of exploiting capitalism.” Many socialists fervently believed in a politically unifying role for anti-Semitism—that it would coalesce into an anti-bourgeois uprising, as a catalyst to the great Marxist upheaval. Besides, they “obviously realized that defense of the Jews was not a vote-catching cause in Vienna.”

Marxist Jews obviously could not accept the racial aspect of anti-Semitism, for were they not themselves living proof that “de-Judaization” (the purging of all Jewish characteristics) was possible? Yet by endorsing the ideal of a world without Jews as such, they implicitly endorsed the hatred. Convinced universalists, they rejected all “superstition,” their own ancestral tradition above all, in exchange for communism.

Proletarian Revolution as a Substitute Religion

None did so more fanatically than the true architect of the Soviet state alongside Vladimir Lenin: Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Trotsky. “Marxism would become for him a kind of revolutionary religion, an Idea of captivating power, subsequently embodied in the dictatorship of the Party,” writes Wistrich. This devotion “had an apocalyptic edge in the defiant belief that history would justify all the sacrifices required to bring about a new social order of harmony and justice.”

Yet Trotsky was no fool. Like the other Bolsheviks who were Jewish, he was aware that rejecting one’s Jewish roots did not change how one was perceived by one’s comrades. Russian anti-Semitism had become deeply engrained, especially after the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903, allegedly the transcript of a conversation among Jewish leaders to take over the world by controlling the press and world economies. Though denounced in the London Times in 1921 as a bizarre, clumsy forgery (by the tsar’s secret police), the Protocols remains the single most influential anti-Semitic tract of all time. It proved useful in the time just after the Russian Revolution, during the young USSR’s outreach to the Muslim world inaugurated at the infamous 1920 Baku conference. At Baku, the revolutionaries, in seeking Muslim allies, called for a “holy war” (jihad) against the West and against “Zionist imperialist oppression.” To this day, Hamas cites the Protocols to justify its policies of attacking Israel and the Jews.

Except for its short-lived support for Israeli statehood, which Wistrich calls nothing but “a shrewd chess move” by Stalin that he expected would aid communist penetration of the Middle East, the Soviet Union led the campaign against Israel and the “imperialist” West. The campaign only intensified with time, and the Protocols were still being distributed as the USSR’s end drew near, at the 1990 Writers’ Congress in Moscow.

The evidence painstakingly documented here, of the extent and effectiveness of Soviet political warfare, will astonish even the best-informed reader. Nor is it surprising that this campaign would outlive the fall of the Iron Curtain. The myth, inaugurated by Stalin during the anti-Semitic show trials of 1952, has penetrated the Left’s DNA.

The Marxist-Islamist Ideological Axis

What Wistrich calls “the Holocaust inversion of the Left, which execrates Zionism as a form of Nazism, is still very much with us today.” He lays out the baneful formula this way: “capitalism begat fascism which begat imperialism which begat Israel and its proxy Zionism—the ultimate form of racist domination—sponsored, of course, by the ‘Great Satan’—the United States of America.” Holocaust inversion depicting Palestinians “as ‘the Jews of today,’ has been especially resonant in Germany (and in Europe more generally) as a way to escape any responsibility for the Nazi past,” he writes.

The Jews of today would do well to have a look at From Ambivalence to Betrayal, unwelcome though its news might be, especially to those (a majority, in the United States) who lean left. For the betrayal is ultimately of ideals, which are noble in many respects, but utterly unrealistic. Supporters of the Women’s March such as the Jewish Voice for Peace, whose members describe themselves as “proud to be part of a diverse and growing progressive and leftist movement in the United States,” see themselves as “part of the global movement for justice in Palestine.” The movement they are really part of is that of murderous enemies of both America and Israel.

Wistrich’s conclusion is as timely as ever: “Anticapitalist antisemitism underpinning radical antizionism is an integral part of the Marxist-Islamist ideological axis which seeks to redeem the contemporary world from the sinister ‘plots’ of American imperialism and the yoke of Zionist oppression.” The common roots of the socialist Kool-Aid sold at inflated prices on Western campuses, often by Jewish professors, and reality-inverting Islamism are manifest. Naïve marchers may never understand; the rest of us simply cannot afford not to.

The post The Left’s Anti-Semitism Problem: A History appeared first on Law & Liberty.