Book Review: Norman Berdichevsky, 'The Left is not always Right'

 Norman Berdichevsky has written an important book on the perversion and rather useless innuendo around the political terms 'Left and Right'. In 'The Left is not always Right', Berdichevsky lays out the reasons why the definitions of the political 'left' or 'right' have little real meaning. For instance was spend-happy statist G.W. Bush, who doubled the US national debt over 8 years a 'right wing' politician or a statist intent on expanding government – by itself a definition of 'leftism' ? Bush was clearly not 'right wing', nor a 'conservative', yet the media applied both appellations to the 2 term President with left-wing devotees conflating Bush with Hitler. It might surprise the robots of the 'left' that Hitler enacted national socialism and statism and was the exact opposite of a classical conservative. The left is indeed mostly wrong, especially in its definitions, depictions, conflations and demonizations.

Berdichevsky is an American Jew whose family fled the constrained and unfree lands of Eastern Europe – fertile lands and easy fodder for the theology of national socialism. He is a writer with over 200 publications in various countries and languages and is an editor at the polemical site the New English Review. His book should be read in conjunction with Goldberg's work 'Liberal Fascism' which outlines why Marxist-Left wing theology is in fact Fascist. [Goldberg's book is reviewed here.] As Berdichevsky writes, the Left-Right dichotomy so embraced by many Marxists and Socialists is the theology of simpletons and ignoramuses:

“The exhaustive documentation in ‘Liberal Fascism’ of the presidential careers and administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as well as the detailed analysis of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin and those who were their original supporters and detractors left many of Goldberg’s critics with egg on their faces. Many were simply totally ignorant of the facts and had to be reminded how their many misconceptions all stem from the same simplistic acceptance of the straight line or semicircular Right-Left Measuring Tool, based largely on economic and trade policy introduced in the last days of the French monarchy before the 1789 Revolution and its immediate aftermath of republican rule and the purely abstract and wholly arbitrary parliamentary seating arrangements that were introduced at the time.”

“Influenced by the exaggerated tilt towards the Liberal side of the political spectrum, too many Americans invariably accept the emotionally loaded doctrines of political commentary that Left= good and Right = bad in much the same vein as Orwell’s Dictatorship of the Pig in Animal Farm that four legs = good and two legs = bad.”

Orwell indeed. The media and their supportive sheep bleating out the stupidity that being a Left-wing zealot is good and the Right is bad. Obey, submit, shut up. Sounds a lot like Islam.

The mindless support of the American and European Political Left for radical and “revolutionary leaders” in non-Western developing countries has preferred to ignore or “explain” the enormous contradictions between those regimes and leaders they have supported as “progressive” and the accepted jargon of political science discourse that “LEFT” means enlightened, beneficial to the working class, liberal, secular and internationalist.

And

In American political discourse, “Fascist!” is the ultimate epithet bandied about and frequently hung around the neck of those who value constitutional safeguards, parliamentary traditions, have deep seated religious convictions or believe in a strong military stance to defend the United States or RESOLUTELY opposed Communism.  

Pace Berdichevsky, a pagan-fascist construct based on the cult of Muhammad cannot be named for it is. Better to call it a 'religion' and hope that it simply goes away before it kills too many Unbelievers:

“Of course, the only reluctance to use the term "Fascist" by a large segment of Left-Liberal opinion in America today is where it is most strikingly accurate – Islamo-Fascism, a term that describes the enemies we, Western civilization, Israel, Spain, Denmark and democracies from India to Australia and even moderate Arab/Muslim states such as Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia and Lebanon currently face. China and Russia face this same threat as well but prefer to ignore it and pretend that it is only directed against Israel or the Western and capitalist societies.”

Historically of course the cadre of Marxists and Socialists were virulent supporters of Hitler's National Socialism and Russian-Chinese-Cuban Marxist-Socialism. At least they are consistent. They also venerate that insipid clown Gandhi, who wanted to return India to the neo-lithic period:

“Prof. Bluefarb reminds us that a similar proposal was made by another of the Left’s great idols, the spiritual father of pacifism, Mohandas Gandhi during World War II, in which the Mahatma—“Great Soul”—urged the Jews of Germany…..”To go gladly to their deaths, and thus gain the moral sympathy of the world.” Similar proposals today, coming from those who claim that we in the West are responsible for Muslim grievances, are no less absurd. They think and act under the assumption that 1,400 years of aggressive Muslim expansion cannot be called provocation but only reactions to it by those under attack.”

Gandhi in fact demanded that Britain and the civilized world simply surrender to Hitler and accept fate. What a hero. He would say the same today about Islam. It was Gandhi's insistence on destroying the British Raj which resuscitated the Moslem Jihad against the infidel Hindus and Buddhists in India:

“If we are to learn anything at all from history, it is that the Islamist concept of jihad was unequivocally understood as “violent holy war” against the infidels and not subject to interpretation. It remains a political weapon that has been used quite similarly by the last Ottoman Caliph, the Taliban, the Iranian mullahs, Al-Qaeda and rival extremist Sunni and Shi'ite clerics in Iraq today. It is still attractive to much extremist opinion in large parts of the Arab world, Chechniya, the Sudan, Pakistan and even in Indonesia. Its attraction throughout the 20^th century for those autocratic and dictatorial European leaders who sought to become “Protectors of Islam” and “borrow” it, was to exploit its violent and evil appeal for their own purposes.”

Islam like National Socialism venerates the theology of the cult. The great leader. The Umma or community which might be a nation, a class, or simply the group of 'believers'. The use of violence to achieve political objectives. And of course the merger of church and state, in opposition to enlightened civilized Western society.

“The false and often irrelevant dichotomy of LEFT vs. RIGHT obscures the basic similarities uniting the two wings of political thought at their extremes that glorify and deify abstractions such as THE leader, party, race, church or class that embody THE NATION. Both ideologies at their extremes grant ALL POWER to a demagogic leader who, once in power, promises either to save the people from poverty, restore their heroic traditions and glorious past, redeem the nation and restore its historic borders, or wipe away the humiliation and the privileges of the "ruling class." Every demagogue whether labeled as a Rightwing or Leftwing dictator throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa has made the same appeal and it is always predictably anti-American, anti-Capitalist, anti-Jewish and anti-Israel.”

This is a well-researched book and should be read by anyone who has an interest in current politics and who wishes to know more about the divide – false and mendacious as it is – which lies between the 'left and right'. The real struggle is of course between the communal which denies free-will, and the individual who possesses free-will.