The Left and Totalitarian Ideologies: Fool 'Em Thrice, Shame on Them--Again

The Left, writes Daniel Greenfield, were clueless when it came to Communism and Fascism. Ditto for Islam, he says:

The left is incapable of engaging with Islamism as an ideology, instead it reduces the conflict to a struggle between colonial and anti-colonial forces, showing once again that the left’s worldview is usually at least fifty years out of date. Mapping colonial and anti-colonial conflicts over a map of Mali, where the anti-colonial forces are represented by the slave-owning Tuaregs and the Arab and Pakistani Jihadis invading an African country, makes very little sense, but that is all that the left knows how to do. 

Their response to the Clash of Civilizations has been to include Islamists in the global rainbow coalition of minorities, gays and gender theorists, indigent third world farmers, transsexuals, artists and poets, sex workers and terrorists; without considering what the Islamists were or how they would fit into this charmed circle. 

The left views the Islamists as just another front group to be used. The Islamists see the left the same way and in Iran, Egypt and Tunisia, the Islamists have a better track record of getting the better of the left. But the left never learns from history. It never questions its outdated Marxist fisheye view of events or realizes that the Industrial Revolution, feudal peasants and the banks are not a metaphor for absolutely every struggle that takes place anywhere in the world. And so the left dooms itself to repeat again and again the history that it refuses to learn. 

Rather than deal with Islamism, the left persists in fighting phantom wars against nationalism, capitalism, militarism, colonialism and imperialism...

The Left today reduces everything to a matter of victim and victimizer, with the West doing the lion's share of the victimizing. That reduction works perfectly for the Islamists, who are able to sneak in much of their agenda by making non-Muslims feel guilty and therefore willing to stifle freedom, including free speech, that linchpin of all freedom, in the name of  "accommodation" and "human rights".