The Left: transfiguring the disaster

Olavo De Carvalho
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 21 July 2008

Every time the Left wants to impose a new item of their program, they say it is the only way to cure certain maladies. Invariably, when the proposition wins out, the maladies it proposed to eliminate become worse. The normal thing to do under such circumstances would be to lay the responsibility for the disaster on the Left. But this never happens, for at once the original legitimizing argument disappears from the repertoire and is substituted by a new system of allegations, which celebrates failure as success or as a historical necessity that could not be avoided.

No one will understand the first thing about the history of the 20th century — or the beginning of the 21st — if they do not know this retroactive justification mechanism by which the Left makes the people work for non-declared goals that would scandalize them if they knew their identity and that can only be reached through the indirect route of dangling the carrot in front of the donkey’s nose. Some examples will make this clearer.

When the Communist Party released its program for the destruction of the "bourgeois" family institutions, laying the groundwork for what would later be "sexual liberation," its main allegation, elaborated by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, was that homosexuality, sadomasochism, fetishism etc. were fruits of repressive patriarchal education. Once the cause were eliminated, these deviant behaviors would tend to disappear from the social scene.

Well, the last remnants of patriarchal values were expelled from western education between the seventies and the eighties, and what did we see right afterwards? The dissemination, on an apocalyptic scale, of the same behaviors they promised to eliminate. Once the results were obtained, these behaviors started to be celebrated as healthy, honorable and meritorious, and all criticism of them is now frowned upon — sometimes even under penalty of law — as an intolerable abuse and attack against human rights.

2) When the international Left started to fight for the legalization of abortion, one of their main arguments was that the great number of abortions was due to the prohibition thereof, which facilitated the action of charlatans, crooks and all kinds of untrained individuals. Legalization, it was promised, would force the abortion to be performed under medically acceptable conditions, thereby lowering the number of cases.

What was the result? In the first year, the number of abortions in the USA went from 100 thousand to 1 million, and it never stopped going up to this day. At least 30 million babies were already sacrificed, while at the same time, the apologists of legalization, instead of admitting the fallacy of their initial argument, now celebrate the fact, working to eliminate and criminalize any criticism of the new state of affairs.

3) When the North-American left devised the policy of quotas and indemnification known as "affirmative action," they alleged it would diminish crime in the black community. After the new policy was made official, the number of crimes committed by black men against white men arose significantly, according to statistics from the FBI. What did the apostles of this "affirmative action" do then? Did they recognize that to reinforce the feeling of racial identity was to stimulate prejudices and racial conflicts? Nah. They celebrated the increase in hostilities as progress in democracy.

4) When, in an attempt to destroy the North-American tradition of considering education a duty of the community, the churches and the family rather than of the State, the North-American left demanded bureaucratization of teaching, one of its prime arguments was that juvenile delinquency could be controlled only by an educational action of the State. Under Jimmy Carter, in 1980, the USA had for the first time a Department of Education and uniform teaching programs.

Two decades later, delinquency among children and adolescents is not only growing much faster than before, but has also adopted the public schools as its headquarters, which have now become danger zones, to the point where, at the beginning of the year, the Mayor’s office in New York was privatizing its schools because of the impossibility of controlling the violence inside them. In answer to that, what did the left do? Did it admit failure? No. It is fighting for State uniformity of teaching on a world level.

5) In Brazil, the only way of lowering violence in the rural areas, so said the Left, was to give land and money to the MST (Movimento Sem Terra, or Landless Movement). Very well, the land was given — it was the greatest distribution of land in all human history, with lots of money behind it. Violence has not lessened: it has increased a lot. Does the Left admit its mistake? No. It organizes violence and celebrates it as the attainment of a new historic stage in the fight for socialism.

The examples could be multiplied ad infinitum — and notice I deliberately avoided mentioning extreme cases that occurred inside socialist countries themselves, such as the collectivization of agriculture in USSR, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China, the Cuban Revolution, etc., sticking to facts originating in the capitalist world.

The promise of salvation, transfigured into disaster and followed by a change in the discourse to legitimize it, has been, in sum, the constant and essential modus agendi of the international Left for a century, and we see no sign of any leftist mentor having any conscience problems with this. Au contraire, all of them continue to promise the solution to maladies, while having readied in their portfolios the future legitimization of the enlarged maladies.

They promise to lower drug consumption through liberalization, to control corruption through “participative budgeting,” to repress delinquency through the disarming of civilians or through Leninist “alternative law,” which incriminates the social status of the defendant rather than his criminal act. They know perfectly well where this all will take us — but they also know that no one would support them if they announced aloud what they truly desire.