My latest video essay:
by Glen Wallace,
What happened to the Western Left? They gained the reigns of power, that's what happened. From the McCarthy era through the Vietnam War era, the Western Left was the underdog and largely oblivious to the inherent nefarious nature of Leftism. Because they were oblivious, the underdog Left could maintain a blissfully ignorant take on Leftism. But since then, a 180 degree turn has occurred, whereby the Left has taken control of the Deep State and revealed the genuine nature of the Left.
When referring to the 'Left' from America's past, you are referring to what was really an illusion. A much more genuine characterization of The Left can be found in Stalin's Gulag and his political purges along with the former East Germany's Stasi thug political police who relied on one third of E German citizens to act as citizen spies on the other two thirds of the population, ratting out anyone who dared criticize the Politburo. The Soviet Bloc politics; now that was genuine Leftism, which is why today's woke Left takes on the characteristics of the despotic Soviet era politics; but that's the way the Left has always behaved. And the 'flower children' hippies of the late 60's weren't politically Left or Right either, they were something altogether different; much closer to being a religious movement than a political movement.
The terms 'Left' and 'Right' likely originate with the French Revolution of 1789 where the Jacobins, who wanted to overthrow the Monarchy sat to the left of the speaker of the French Legislative Assembly, while the Monarchy defenders sat to the speakers right. But once the Jacobins got hold of power, they were utterly brutal. It's a common misconception that only the wealthiest French men and women lost their heads to the guillotine during the revolution's reign of terror. A vast number of commoners lost their heads also, often based solely on the word of one of the many citizen spies ratting them out for the slightest infraction such as merely saying a kind word about the defunct monarchy; such citizen spying resulting in merciless repercussions for political dissidents and was later to be replicated by the Leftist East German government.
So, the earlier era Western Leftists were really rather naïve and clueless about the true nature of Leftism as it was being practiced authentically in the Soviet Union with its forced labor political prison camps known as Gulags and East German Stasi hunting down political dissidents. What is going on now in the US and other Western nations is a merely a dose of reality of what real Leftism is all about and should be a wake up call to distance ourselves from it and not be a call to "Make America Left Again." #left #progressive #leftism #marxism #marxist #soviet #despotic #despotism #woke #wokeism
