The Left’s Veneration of Monsters, Secular & Religious

Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.

If you want to understand why the Western Left has long been sympathetic to the objectives of Communist totalitarian regimes — and, more recently, to the ideas of Islamic supremacists as well – the new and updated edition of Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate should sit atop your reading list. Glazov is a superb explicator who has thought long and hard about his subject matter, anticipating every conceivable question or objection that his readers might raise, and then guiding them on a journey into clarity and understanding.

In United in Hate, Glazov observes that for more than a century a seemingly endless parade of prominent leftwing thinkers and opinion shapers – renowned for their reputedly soaring intellects – have allowed themselves to be seduced by the hollow promises of impossible utopias. He notes, for instance, that Western leftists throughout the 1900s naively “supported one totalitarian killing machine after another” as they “venerated mass murderers such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro and Ho Chi Minh” – all while “habitually excusing their atrocities” and “blaming America and even the victims for the crimes.” This veneration of genocidal monsters, Glazov notes, continued unabated into the 21st century when, in response to 9/11, “the left danced with celebratory glee on the ashes of Ground Zero and gave its affection to the blood-soaked killing fields of jihad.” And more recently still, in the wake of the barbarities that Hamas inflicted upon Israel on October 7, 2023, “the open glorification of jihad terror groups became a dispiritingly common feature of the political discourse in the West.”

Glazov elaborated on this theme in a recent interview with Michael Lauber of X America News, where he stated: “What I do in United in Hate is I show the leftist romance with Communism [through] the fellow travelers and political pilgrims. I show the history. They traveled to those monstrosities, the fellow travelers, they traveled to the Soviet Union to worship Stalin and Brezhnev, etc…. And then the fellow travelers went to China and worshipped there. They went to Cuba. They went to all kinds of places, and there was a love affair with the Communist world. And then … there was the fall of the Soviet Union … and the left was just defeated. They were so depressed because they really need to worship at the altar of tyranny. And then, slowly but surely, Islam began to replace Communism in terms of what the Left got very excited about. And so it was especially after 9/11 that … so many prominent leftist figures were in euphoria in terms of Ground Zero, because what Ground Zero represents to them is the destruction of the old world, the destruction of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And you need that destruction, because what you do is you destroy the old earth, and then you build your utopian paradise on the ashes.”

Glazov explains that because the Western socialist Left detests the United States and its capitalist economic structure, it seeks to facilitate that structure’s downfall by any means necessary — including the formation of whatever alliances may serve to advance that ultimate objective. This includes the Left’s seemingly unlikely alliance with fundamentalist Islam, which unambiguously rejects virtually everything for which the socialist Left professes to stand: respect and tolerance for other cultures and faiths; the defense of civil liberties; freedom of expression; freedom of thought; religious liberty; democracy; women’s rights; gay rights; and the separation of church and state. Indeed, there could be no stranger bedfellows than Western leftists and Islamic fundamentalists. Yet they have been brought together by the one overriding trait which they do share — their belief that the U.S. and its close ally Israel are the very embodiments of evil on earth and must consequently be destroyed. Leftists embrace Islamists, and vice versa, because both groups operate from the foundational belief that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Extending his analysis far beyond merely describing the alliance between the Left and Islam, Glazov proceeds to explore the psychology underlying their seemingly inexplicable union. The leftist “believer,” he notes, typically embarks upon his “totalitarian journey” as a way of trying to assuage the “spiritual emptiness” he feels due to his “acute sense of alienation from his own society,” which he despises. “He admires whomever his own society disapproves of and fears,” writes Glazov, and “fantasizes about building a perfect society” that may serve as a refuge for himself and his fellow, self-identified “victims of capitalism and American imperialism.” In this “fantasy society,” the leftist believes he will finally “fit in” with other people who, like him, “lust for destruction” and harbor an “apocalyptic mindset” that reflexively rejects the status quo and embraces the famous dictum that was highly favored by Marx himself: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” This shared desire to remake the existing world anew unites the Western leftist and the Islamic supremacist.

United in Hate further describes the radical “believer” as someone so desperate to inject meaning and purpose into his otherwise somber existence, that he frequently “lust[s] for his own self-extinction” and “craves martyrdom for the idea.” As a real-world illustration of this mindset, Glazov cites an incident where the Sixties counterculture icon Jerry Rubin, reflecting on his own previous participation in a potentially deadly physical confrontation with police officers during his radical heyday, had thought to himself in that perilous moment: “Well, this is as good a place to die as any.” And of course, in very recent times we have witnessed a similar impulse animating the actions of leftwing agitators like the now-famous Minnesotans Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

If both Islamists and Western leftists regard America as the Great Satan, they view Israel as the Little Satan – a nation that, as Glazov puts it, has “come to symbolize all that is despised by Islamists and leftists alike.” “Jews are seen as being synonymous with the oppressive structures of corporate capitalism and globalization,” writes Glazov, “and Israel is both the outpost of Western values in the Middle East and an ally of the United States in the terror war.” Giving voice to their reflexive Jew-hatred, leftist and Islamist anti-Semites relentlessly peddle the absurd charge that Israel is an “apartheid state” that subjects its Arab neighbors to systematic “genocide” in the setting of an “open-air concentration camp.” “While Islamists hate America in part for supporting Israel, leftists hate Israel for its alliance with the United States and for sharing its principal values,” Glazov explains. “This is why anti-Semitism has become so conveniently enmeshed with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-globalization.” In short, says the author, “Jews have become the replacements for the ‘class enemy’ of the communist era.”

United in Hate is replete with anecdotes, quotes, and hard facts which demonstrate how Islam and the radical Left stand shoulder-to-shoulder in their war against traditional Western values. Leftists may privately find the unmistakable bigotry and intolerance of Muslim radicals repugnant, but their desire to rid the world of what they view as the depredations of the U.S. and Israel overrides this revulsion and beckons them to forge the union that Glazov lays bare. Anyone who reads United in Hate will be well armed to combat the rhetoric and spin that tend to dominate the anti-American, anti-Israel narratives of conventional leftwing “wisdom.”