Woke progressives of the intersectional left feel obliged to be “allies” of the Palestinians against their Israeli “oppressors,” so it was not too surprising that so many of them are leaping to the defense of Hamas after that terrorist organization invaded Israel. Most of them engage in “bothsidesism,” deploring the violence on both sides while stressing the misdeeds of Israel.
Apologists for Hamas were saying, “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” That is, the project of undoing “colonialism”–the Leftist trope about Western powers taking over indigenous people’s lands, which is what they accuse the Jews of doing–will take more than just words. It will take violence. It will take killing people. It will take terrorism.
This reminds me of something a Marxist intellectual said about a different case of shocking violence by a group he considered to be oppressed: “This is what revolution looks like.”
To be sure, at the heart of Marxism is the promise of violent revolution, which has inspired blood baths in Russia, China, Cuba, Cambodia, and other bastions of Communism. Post-Marxism too, which replaces Marxist class conflict with conflict between other groups (races, genders, sexual identities, cultures, etc.) can also be revolutionary in the non-metaphorical, violent sense.
Jonathon Van Maren sees the current pro-Hamas sentiment among Western leftists as a reminder of that fact. He has written an article for The European Conservative entitled “‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” with the deck, “The leftists have decided to tell us precisely who they are. It is important that we listen.” An excerpt:
We have now been told, in explicit terms, what ‘decolonization’ is really all about. We know what leftists mean when they say it; we know that they will defend raping women, butchering children, and abducting Holocaust survivors under the guise of liberation. The alleged intellectuals calling people ‘settlers’ and using land acknowledgements and demanding that our leaders use their rhetoric aren’t just cosplaying as revolutionaries—when push comes to shove and sobbing teenage girls are abducted and babies are shot to pieces, they’ll co-sign. As Tristin Hopper of Canada’s National Post put it:
What’s happening is a “tell.” If a university or a union can endorse or excuse the mass slaughter of revellers at a music festival, how can you possibly trust them on any other issue? And then you realize how many other issues we trusted them on.
We’ve heard this rhetoric before. But now we scroll past statements on decolonization to videos of innocents being tortured, and we know what they mean—and it’s just starting. In the days to come, many of these hostages will likely be tortured and beheaded. Hamas terrorists will bathe in blood for the cameras. And when that happens, many of our journalists and professors and so-called intellectuals will be right there to explain: This is just what decolonization looks like.
And the Federalist‘s John Daniel Davidson, in his article Israel And Hamas Are Embroiled In A Zero-Sum Religious War, And So Is The West, connects this mindset to other issues:
Those who marched in the streets, who signed pro-Hamas student statements, who posted memes online praising Hamas are not, by and large, antisemitic neo-Nazis. They are left-wing zealots, BLM and LGBT activists, the woke grandchildren of radical Baby Boomer politics, brain-washed by “anticolonialism” propaganda, which they regurgitated before a watching world.
This should not surprise you. The people who cheer the beheading of babies are of course those who also cheer the slaughter of babies in the womb. They are, like Islam itself, post-Christian, and their morality, like the morality of Hamas, is decidedly pagan. That means they do not believe in universal human rights or inherent human dignity. They do not believe in the Christian doctrine of imago Dei and the moral imperatives that flow from it. They do not believe in objective morality or truth. They reject the Christian precepts that constitute the basis for Western civilization.
These are the barbarians who reside beyond the gates of the Christian West. They believe only in power, and they will do whatever they can to gain it. Once they have it, they will exercise it as they see fit, unconstrained by questions of right and wrong, or notions of justice and morality whose premises they reject. They will not have qualms about their own hypocrisy or inconsistency. Appeals to compassion and mercy will fall on deaf ears.
These are the same people, after all, who insist that “words are violence” and that debates and free speech and even jokes must be suppressed because of the “harm” they cause to vulnerable and marginalized people. If you say a man cannot become a woman, they want you to be fired, to be silenced, to lose everything. If you say we must not castrate and mutilate children in the name of gender ideology, they want your own kids to be taken from you. Confronted by the wholesale slaughter of women and children, the decapitation of babies by armed men, they respond with a shrug and a meme. They do not care about violence as such, they simply want to be the ones to wield it.
Photo by Montecruz Foto (CC BY SA)
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