But Leftists reject, in principle, the rejection of others. Excuse me, Others. The Other. You know that hallucination that all the Imperialists that were not Communist had that their culture was fundamentally superior, because they did not UNDERSTAND The Other?
So all the South Vietnamese killed by the North Vietnamese were evil, because either they didn’t exist, or because they were complicit in imperialistic atrocities. You know, the kids blown up on playgrounds by suicide bombers, or intentional mortar attacks on civilian populations: their lives are unimportant.
What MATTERS was that we dropped a lot of ordinance, and killed perfectly innocent, perfectly peaceful, loving gentle human beings and that makes me ANGRY. I HATE what America did. It was all so WRONG.
You see how that works? You enter into a, say, 2nd graders mind, simply eliminate from discussion everything that detracts from the simplicity of the equation, and THEN, THEN, you get to feel the hate, feel the burn, feel the righteous anger billowing out of you.
Returning for the third time to this disgust experiment, it seems to me that one could argue that their cognitive psychopathology–specifically their inability to access, recognize and express their anger productively–causes a literal nervous system miswire in the systems of Leftists.
Their hate becomes directed in all the wrong places. Ho Chi Minh became a Communist around 1919, and helped co-found the French Communist Party. He joined the Communist International–the group working the world over to subvert sovereign nations and deliver them to the tender mercies of Communism–shortly thereafter. He spent much of the 1930’s in Stalin’s Russia. His agents, rather than fighting the Japanese, spent most of the Japanese occupation killing actual Vietnamese nationalists. When they beat the French in the mid-1950’s, they embarked nearly immediately on a campaign of class warfare, in which every tenth person, at least, in the North was killed or imprisoned. They confiscated all private property they wanted, and instituted a totalitarian regime. A vote would have been meaningless, since nobody in the North was free to do as they chose. 100% of North Vietnamese would have been reported as favoring reunification.
Then they started invading the South. Oh, I could go on, but don’t feel like it.
The point I want to make is that NO ONE on the Left has learned what in my view is the only correct lesson, which is that we made a HUGE mistake handing the South over to the North. It was wrong on every possible level. Maybe we never should have been there–this is a separate discussion–but having lost so much, given so much, virtually NOTHING was needed to protect it.
But people who NEED hate cannot accept this. Changing their minds would be exposing themselves to the raw viciousness they have allowed to fester within them, and force them to realize that far from being morally superior, they are actually nasty beasts who feed on human death and destruction, while lying to themselves and the world about it.
This is what I mean by Cultural Sadeism.
Edit: For leftists, who are AOH’s? As a general rule, anybody who is opposed by anyone who would be their natural ally. For example, they supported the North Vietnamese precisely because they opposed America. If they are rich, they hate the rich. If they are white, they hate whites for their alleged racism. If they are black, they either become white like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, or are irrelevant.
The old saw is that the enemy of my enemy is my friends. In Lefto-Land, the enemy of my friend is my friend.
It is not hard to see a profound self loathing of a psychological nature under all this.
In psychologically healthy introspection, you balance the good with the bad. You try to tell the truth as well as you can. You freely admit mistakes and errors, but also grant strengths and good decisions.
There is no effort to do this on the part of the Left. It is all good/bad. It is all Manichean, in precisely the way Western imperialistic thought is alleged to have operated.
And I must of course introspect and ask if I, too, am doing the same thing. I don’t think I am. Thought systems can be understood, even if one must grant they apply perfectly to no one.
And in the particular case of Leftism one must see that it is DEFINED by conformity. Any group which values being like all other members of the group can be spoken of in the aggregate without too much damage to the truth, in my view.
And when I speak of conformity, I don’t mean conformity of a tribal sort, seen the world over for most of history, where you do what your ancestors did. I mean conformity of an emotionally craven sort, which is willing to change on a dime whenever the wind blows.
That’s enough venting for now.