It’s always about control through deception.
“...................It would be difficult to recall, for example, the number of times I [David Horowitz] have been introduced on conservative platforms as “a former civil rights worker and peace activist in the 1960s.” I have been described this way despite having written a lengthy autobiography that exposes these self-glorifying images of the left as so much political deceit. Like many New Left leaders whom the young Mrs. Clinton once followed (and who are her comrades today), I saw myself in the 1960s as a Marxist and a revolutionary. What was idealistic about exploiting an issue like civil rights, for example, to achieve the destruction of the social order that made civil rights possible?
New Left progressives like Hillary Clinton and Acting Deputy Attorney General Bill Lann Lee were involved in supporting, or promoting, or protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad like the Vietcong and criminal radicals at home like the Black Panthers. We did this then — just as progressives still do now — in the name of “social justice” and a dialectical world-view that made this deception seem ethical and the fantasy seem possible.
As Jamie Glazov, a student of the left, has observed in an article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies terrorist Kathy Soliah: “if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology and hatred with a concern for the ‘poor’ and the ‘downtrodden,’ then there will always be a ‘progressive’ milieu to support and defend you.” Huey Newton, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Bernardine Dorhn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Mumia Abu Jamal, H. Rap Brown, Rigoberta Menchu and innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their criminal careers.
There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists — and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to an audience that was not politically left. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades refer to themselves and their pasts in similar settings today.
But they are lying. When they defend racial preferences now, for example, a principle they denounced as “racist” and fought against as “civil rights” activists then, even they must know it.
The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity, and often, therefore, without realizing that they are. The necessity for lying arises because it is the political lie that gives their cause its life.
Why, if you were one of them, for example, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role as part of humanity’s vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth they could not “understand” and that would only servie to hold them back?
If you believed that others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as part of a “vanguard.” You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the same horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the army of the saints.
That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a redeemer. To feel anointed. To be among the elect. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism of all.
That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in the process. That is why they don’t care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than any injustice they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their “mistakes,” why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.”.......
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Progressive%20Narcissism.htm
Thanks!