A reader writes:

Regarding your piece today on the First World Left (as well as the Truthout article you shared re: Ilhan Omar), one silver lining to the ascendance of progressives — whatever their many fundamental shortcomings, as you rightly note — is the current opening up of dialogue surrounding (previously unquestioned) bipartisan support for Israel. Something that was long-verboten a few months ago has suddenly been forced into mainstream discussion.

From what I’ve seen just hopping around online, this is indeed a huge rift that’s developing within the Democratic Party. I see progressives shocked at and creeped out by the Democratic establishment’s thuggish attempt to silence dissent, with some clearly beginning to regard them not simply as a stodgy old guard to be dragged into becoming more progressive, but as just as monstrous as the Republicans. This is purely anecdotal of course, but I’ve seen some ostensibly progressive commenters use words like psychotic and evil to describe them.

Irrespective of anything else that may happen, this seems like an important development, and something that perhaps had to come from the Left. It’s easy to dismiss paleocons and far right figures as anti-Semites (especially since some of them obviously are); it’s a lot harder to get away with the same accusations here. I imagine this will ultimately combine with the growing sentiment to throw Saudi Arabia under the bus as well. It’s only natural after all, if they are indeed serious about opposing authoritarian, right-wing governments as a matter of foreign policy.

Anyone who is hated by Bill Kristol, Howard Dean, Meghan McCain, and Alexander Reid-Ross all at the same time must be doing something right.

A reader offers the following observations on Tulsi Gabbard, the crime of retroactive wrongthink, and liberal imperialism.

As someone who grew up deeply enmeshed in the Fox News Republican / “Christian conservative” milieu of the 90s/00s — and who then doubled down on the belief in war and American hegemony as a solution to the world’s problems as an explicit, self-described neocon in my mid-teens (I read Irving Kristol, Douglas Murray, Robert Kagan, etc.) — there are few (maybe no) things in contemporary American politics more disappointing to me than the lack of a principled anti-war left.

Imagine my dismay as I slowly realized over the course of Obama’s first term — as a newly-minted libertarian/anarchist, now strongly anti-war — that the idealistic, wimpy peacenik Left I had heard so much about and made fun of as a little Republican shit, didn’t really exist in America anymore, and that the anti-war protests I remembered from the Bush years were basically its last gasps of relevancy in the American political scene.

Everything since then (from Obama, etc.) has been lip-service to an inherited legacy they no longer deserve to be associated with.

Of the current crop of 2020 Dem candidates, it’s nice to hear Sanders speaking out against intervention in Venezuela (bringing up the history of American intervention in Latin America during the CNN town hall recently) or to speak out against America’s support of the Saudi regime’s war in Yemen. But can we really trust Sanders not to buckle if he were to become President, like Obama (and now Trump) before him?

And the one candidate who actually makes a less interventionist (not even completely non-interventionist) foreign policy a central plank of her campaign platform, Gabbard, faces either media criticism or blackout for those views (from the establishment Left) — or, perhaps even more crippling to her chances — absolute hatred and disavowal over anti-LGBT baggage from her past — such as her support for conversion therapy, and her calling civil union (not even gay marriage) advocates “homosexual extremists”.

Despite Gabbard’s views changing since then, it is telling that that cannot be forgiven (despite her totally reasonable excuse that she grew up in a very socially conservative household and, several steps further, was the daughter of a loony family values-type activist father). Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton style warmongering is not even something that needs to be forgiven or given much thought at all; in fact, liberal interventionism is now the default, respectable position of the Democratic mainstream.

Anyway. It’s a real shame. And it makes me sad.

Maybe something unexpected will happen once the debates start, and war will end up becoming a central question of the race as a whole (similar to how Trump essentially forced the topic of illegal immigration into center focus for the 2016 Republican primaries, which then forced the other candidates to either differentiate themselves from Trump’s anti-immigrant positions, or become more Trump-like themselves on that issue). I’m not going to hold my breath though.

Orania is a South African Afrikaner commune that is economically self-sufficient and has no police or prisons. Predictably, they are attacked by the Left with the usual “racist” and “fascist” labels.

But if racists want to escape a non-racist society, they should go for it, just as if communists want to escape a capitalist society, they should do so. One of the biggest points of contention that I have with most conventional leftists, including apparently left-anarchists, is over the issue of freedom of association. Freedom of association means the right to associate in a racist way, a communist way, an atheist way, a religious way, etc. It means the right to exclude redheads, meat eaters, television watchers, short people, or rock music fans. It means everyone involved can be required to be gay or required to use drugs.

More…

I sometimes get asked, “You criticize and attack everyone and everything. But what are you actually for?”

Good question. I’ve written half a dozen books, hundreds of articles and essays, given dozens of lectures, and done hundreds of radio, television, and internet interviews related to this question.

I reject the legitimacy of states, ruling classes and empires everywhere, in the grand anarchist tradition.

My ideal anarchist mass movement would be something like this:

We would have organizations, federations or parties (like Hezbollah, the CNT-FAI configuration in Spain, or the international Pirate Parties in Europe today, to cite a few potential models) that would be an umbrella for all anarchists, and related cousin ideologies and movements. Its principal focus would be opposition to Atlanticist imperialism with support for self-determination and indigenous peoples’ movements worldwide. It would push actual anarchist economics and not the other bullshit (neoliberalism, “free market conservatism,” social democracy/Fabianism, or Marxism/Leninism). And it would take authentically libertarian positions on “social issues” (i.e. individual sovereignty, free association, and decentralized pluralism) rather than SJW crap. It would “attack the Left from the left” while reaching over to the center with class politics, and to the “far right” with libertarian-decentralist-populist issues (e.g. gun rights, ‘political correctness,’ religious liberty, homeschools, alternative medicine, the right to form voluntary ethnic and religious communities, etc). And it would cultivate a federation or network of fraternal organizations worldwide for the purpose of global revolutionary struggle against the “globalists,” imperialists, international capitalism, banksters NWO, ZOG, Illuminati, lizard people, or however one wishes to classify the common enemy.

As for the alternative, as Hans Hermann Hoppe says:

“Rather than supranational political integration, world-government, constitutions, courts, banks, and money, global social democracy, and universal and ubiquitous multiculturalism, anarchist(s)… propose the decomposition of the nation-state into its constituent heterogenous parts. (Unlike) their (classical liberal and Marxist) forbears, (anarchists) do not seek to takeover any government. They only want to be left alone by government, and to secede from its jurisdiction to organize their own protection. Unlike their predecessors who merely sought to replace a larger government with a smaller one, however, (anarchists) pursue the logic of secession to its end. They propose unlimited secession, i.e., the unrestricted proliferation of independent free territories, until the state’s range of jurisdiction finally withers away. To this end-and in complete contrast to the statist projects of ‘European Integration’ and a ‘New World Order’-they promote the vision of a world of tens of thousands of free countries, regions and cantons, of hundreds of thousands of independent free cities…and even more numerous free districts and neighborhoods, economically integrated through (voluntary association and temporary autonomous zones). If and when this alternative…vision gains prominence in public opinion, the end of the… ‘End of History’ will give rise to a …renaissance.”

This airing we have Keith Preston joining us. Keith is the managing editor of AttacktheSystem.com and the host of the “Kick the Puppy” online podcast series. Keith is an analyst at Press TV, author at Black House Publishing and a former instructor of sociology. We analyze current Middle-Eastern conflicts as well as U.S. domestic political faction dynamics. We then discuss anti-modernism as outlined in one of Keith’s books: an overview of authentic, historic “conservative” or “right-wing” thinkers (i.e. anti-modernists). What most people (particularly Americans) think of as “the right” is actually the “right-wing” of liberalism, not the historic right. ~

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