The certainty of your virtue will lead you into cruelty
Ah the way the left loves to devour its own. Nick Cohen says it has to do with the left’s self-image as the home of all righteousness.
Anyone who saw Gordon Brown and his aides in action, or watched the student left ban speakers for disagreeing with them, has found the myth of leftwing decency hard to swallow. But it has taken the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn’s “new politics” to finish it off.
Police are investigating a death threat madeagainst Neil Coyle, the Labour MP for Bermondsey, after he voted to allow the RAF to attack Islamic State in Syria. His colleague Diana Johnson said the abuse of Labour MPs who supported the action was horrendous. “‘Murderous cunt’ is one of the terms I have seen.”
…
Corbyn has ensured that everything the left once said about mainstream conservatives can be thrown back its face.
You want sexism? Long before the Syria vote, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper complained of misogyny, and not just from the Mail, which was more interested in Kendall’s “lithe figure” than her politics. You expect that from the Mail if you are a woman on the left. Indeed, you expect it if you are a woman on the right or any place in between. Cooper spoke with feeling at the Labour women’s conference about the shock she and Kendall felt at finding it in the one place she never expected it: the left, whose decent adherents called them “witches” and “cows” for opposing the great Corbyn.
Why? Self-righteousness, Nick says.
Brecht understood that the certainty of your virtue will lead you into cruelty. Leftwing men can treat women appallingly and leftwing agitators can mimic the language and tactics of the far right. They are so convinced of their righteousness they cannot admit their faults.
Leftists would behave better if they stopped acting like teenage vegetarians and found the honesty to acknowledge their kinship with the rest of compromised humanity. The Corbyn generation shows no sign of doing it. And it ought to be obvious by now that Labour people will be their targets.
Brecht’s communists spent as much time fighting social democrats as Nazis in the 1930s. The Corbynites’ real enemies are not Tories, whom they rather respect for standing up for the interests of their class, but Labour MPs who fail to show the required radical virtue and betray the leftwing cause. They don’t mutter darkly that there will be “no hiding place” for Tory MPs who voted in favour of bombing Isis. They don’t scream that Conservative women are “witches” and “cows”. They don’t deliver death threats to David Cameron.
Their virtuous hatred is righteously reserved for their own side and its ugliness will destroy the myth of leftwing decency more thoroughly than the right ever could.
This is the best. The bit you used for the title deserves to become a proverb.
Ideologues almost always hate collaborators (real or imagined) more than their avowed enemies. Often, there’s not much you can do to an ideological enemy – he doesn’t care what you think, so your hatred is meaningless to him; he doesn’t want anything you have, so you have nothing to withhold as punishment for defying you. The sense of impotence can be maddening. It’s so much more exhilarating to turn on your erstwhile colleagues for impurity of thought or insufficient zeal. At least then you’re assured that your blows are felt.
In a way, an enemy is necessary. If you’re the hero of the story, you require a villain to contend against. The more evil the villain, the more heroic you are. But a collaborator is worse than a villain – a collaborator is a betrayer. A collaborator pretends friendship and solidarity only to get close enough to stab you in the back when you’ve foolishly lowered your guard. You suffer not just pain and loss at the hands of a collaborator, but also humiliation, which is intolerable to those whose self-image is wrapped up in righteousness. The only possible response to such an ego insult is complete annihilation.
Sometimes people criticise others for doing exactly what they do themselves. Their enemies charge them with hypocrisy, which may be true but they are actually completely unaware.
Sometimes the criticism is itself an example of what they are criticising (in others). Politicians of all stripes do this, as do atheist/feminists and practically anyone engaged in political argument.
But this exegesis is one step too meta for me. I can’t work out if you are applauding this ghastly man’s unwitting self-immolation or pointing it out, or pointing at the same faults he identifies in your own opponents or confessing to them yourself.
Having said that, I’m glad for you that you found a more congenial home than FtB towards the end.
You mean, am I blithely unaware that many people think I fit the description as well as anyone?
No, of course I’m not.
You mean, am I blithely unaware that I’ve done quite a bit of self-righteous rebuking myself?
No, of course I’m not.
You mean, do I agree I’m as bad as any of them and worse than most?
No, I don’t.
‘Brecht’s communists spent as much time fighting social democrats as Nazis in the 1930s.’
Probably more time. See Arthur Koester’s account of the 1932 elections. Crushing and negating non-Stalinist progressives was held FAR more important than preventing a Nazi takeover, which was seen as a sort of apocalyptic harbinger of The Revolution.
And Salon is suggesting ‘letting the Republicans win’ from exactly the same logic.