A Physicist Investigates the Left Reviewing ‘Left Imperialism: From Cardinal Richelieu to Klaus Schwab’. by Daniel Greenfield
https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-physicist-investigates-the-left/
“All branches of Leftism, including Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Statism, Marxism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and National Socialism” share a common ancestor, Gary Gindler argues in his new book, ‘Left Imperialism: From Cardinal Richelieu to Klaus Schwab’.
Blending political philosophy and a history of ideology, ‘Left Imperialism’ dives into the origins of the globalist leftist movements and their fundamental opposition to American conservatism.
The Left has been on an apocalyptic collision course with America and the free world for its entire existence, but ‘Left Imperialism’ traces its evolution as an ideology from local class warfare to a global movement, from seeking socialism within a nation to global socialism that permeates the world as a network of ideological institutions dominating the planet.
A former Soviet physicist who helped pioneer the Russian internet, Gary Gindler has long been a voice of reasoned political analysis in this country. And in ‘Left Imperialism, he delves into the waves of political change and the larger transformative ideological phenomena behind them.
Gindler focuses his analysis on the supreme power of the state over the individual and the clash of power relations between the government and the governed. From high taxes to state control and then ownership of private enterprises, the power of the state expands, like a balloon filling with air to simultaneously dominate the space within its sphere and to crowd out everything else. Socialism invariably leads to totalitarianism because the assertion of control is foundational to its agenda which requires organizing society through the manipulation of people and institutions in order to achieve its desired economic outcomes.
Some leftist movements, Gindler notes, may take different approaches and strategies in their choice of control mechanisms. Some for example may tax income while others control enterprises, but without the ability to determine economic outcomes, their theories cannot be implemented and their existence therefore has no function and carries no purpose.
The obsession with extending that control is not confined to nations, but to all spheres of human activity, to culture and competition, but even across the unknowable fourth dimension of time.
“Redefining the past—including the destruction of the past—has become a norm nowadays,” Gindler observes. “Note that both the Left and the Right cannot foretell the future, but the Left complicates matters by making the past unpredictable as well.”
Gindler defines the Left as producing “directionless” mutations in social evolution and the legacy of failed Marxist and Communist schemes for the betterment of society make all too obvious that this is true. And thus the Left cannot permit itself to know the past, let alone be able to accurately predict the future. Like an addict, it must exist in the rush of anticipated future pleasures, in the intellectual challenge of envisioning its schemes as historically inevitable, to avoid bumping up against the realities of the past and the present. Never mind the actual future.
The Left believes that there is a right side to history and that it knows what that side is, but history is not a finished product, but a collision of forces in which its role is largely destructive, rather than constructive, bringing eras to an end, more than ushering in ‘brave new’ ones.
“The Left symbolizes a philosophy of dissonance when stated objectives, operating methods, and end results conflict with one another. That dissonance is a fundamental feature, not a bug, of Leftism,” Gindler writes, describing the Left as “an ideological autoimmune disease”.
Not only the destructiveness, but the self-destructiveness of the Left, has been noted before. And historically leftist regimes invariably implode in one form or another. Leftist ideologues, when given free rein, turn on each other in an endless purge, similar to that of the French Revolution, the early years of the Soviet Union, or the current infighting in the American Left, unless they are interrupted by a strongman figure, a Stalin, capable of bringing them into line.
Furthermore, the Left tends to appeal most deeply to certain personalities who are both anarchic and megalomaniacal, seeking absolute and total license, as well as absolute and total power over others. The dissonance at the heart of leftist ideas, that Gindler describes, may also speak to the dissonant personalities that embrace them, deliberately confusing ends and means, pretending to liberate when they enslave, and to destroy what they claim to save..
In ‘Left Imperialism’, Gindler contends that the destructiveness of the Left is due to its inherent intellectual, strategic and philosophical conflicts. And that those inherent conflicts are tearing apart the movement, uniting it around little more than its ‘oppositionism’ to everything else.
“The mosaic of heterogeneous groups under one Leftist umbrella has reached a critical mass. The farther society moves away from Marx’s predictions, the more modifications and generalizations of the dogma are needed, and the more intense the internecine warfare is. Different cohorts of ‘oppressed victims of capitalism’ cannot find common ground with other ‘oppressed victims’ or a broad spectrum of abundant self-appointed victims. Anti-conservatism is the solitary umbilical cord that allows the modern Left to show at least an illusion of unity,” he argues.
Intersectionality, meant to provide a hierarchy of victimhood, has been shown to be a fraud. And the only remaining enduring hierarchy is the revolutionary imperative that drives leftism with its need to overturn everything that is. That may be why the Left has come out for Hamas. In my own Victim Value Index, I have argued that the overriding factor is “disruptiveness” and that “those who are most disruptive go to the head of the line.” This is in line with a movement that claims to be creating when it is actually destroying.
While the hope that the Left will destroy itself is not the most optimistic of possibilities, it remains a fact that it must inevitably destroy itself. In ‘Left Imperialism’, Gary Gindler sketches his own theory of the possibilities of conservatism as a positive and constructive force that drives social evolution rather than subverting it as the Left does. And as such, Gindler combines his intellectual and philosophical history of the development of political ideas with a painstakingly categorized taxonomy of their implications on modern events. And it is a thesis that is ultimately optimistic.
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