Has anyone noticed an indifference in the precincts of the far left to the fatalities of September 11 and the horrors of Saddam Hussein? Right after the Sept. 11 attack, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called it "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos."
Eric Foner, an ornament of Columbia University's Marxist firmament, trivialized the attack by announcing himself unsure "which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."
Norman Mailer called the suicide hijackers "brilliant." More recently, it appears that none of the millions of anti-war demonstrators have a bad word to say about Saddam Hussein nor an iota of sympathy for those oppressed, tortured, and murdered by his regime. Instead they vent fury against the American president and British prime minister.
Why is the left nonchalant about the outrages committed by al-Qaida and Baghdad?
Lee Harris, an Atlanta writer, offers an explanation in a recent issue of Policy Review, the Hoover Institution's journal. He does so by stepping way back and recalling Karl Marx's central thesis about the demise of capitalism resulting from an inevitable sequence of events:
Business profits decline in the industrial countries;
Bosses squeeze their workers;
Workers become impoverished;
Workers rebel against their bosses; and
Workers establish a socialist order.
EVERYTHING here hangs on workers growing poorer over time which, of course, did not happen. In fact, Western workers became richer (and increasingly unrevolutionary). By the roaring 1950s, most of the left realized that Marx had got it wrong.
But rather than give up on cherished expectations of socialist revolution, Harris notes, Marxists tweaked their theory. Abandoning the workers of advanced industrial countries, they looked instead to the entire populations of poor countries to carry out the revolution. Class analysis went out the window, replaced by geography.
This new approach, known as "dependencia theory," holds that the First World (and the United States above all) profits by forcefully exploiting the Third Word. The left theorizes that the United States oppresses poor countries; thus Noam Chomsky's formulation that America is a "leading terrorist state."
For vindication of this claim, Marxists impatiently await the Third World's rising up against the West. Sadly for them, the only true revolution since the 1950s was Iran's in 1978-79. It ended with militant Islam in power and the Left in hiding.
Then came Sept. 11, which Marxists interpreted as the Third World (finally!) striking back at its American oppressor. In the left's imagination, Harris explains, this attack was nothing less than "world-historical in its significance: the dawn of a new revolutionary era."
Only a pedant would point out that the suicide hijackers hardly represented the wretched of the earth; and that their objectives had nothing at all to do with socialism and everything to do with, no, not again! militant Islam.
So desperate is the left for some sign of true socialism, it overlooks such pesky details. Instead, it warily admires al-Qaida, the Taliban, and militant Islam in general for doing battle with the United States.
The left tries to overlook militant Islam's slightly un-socialist practices, such as its imposing religious law, excluding women from the workplace, banning the payment of interest, encouraging private property, and persecuting atheists.
This admiring spirit explains the Left's nonchalant response to Sept. 11. Sure, it rued the loss of life, but not too much. Dario Fo, the Italian Marxist who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature, explains: "The great [Wall Street] speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is 20,000 dead in New York?"
The same goes for Saddam Hussein, whose gruesome qualities matter less to the Left than the fact of his confronting and defying the US. In its view, anyone who does that can't be too bad, never mind that he brutalizes his subjects and invades his neighbors.
The left takes to the streets to assure his survival, indifferent to both the fate of Iraqis and even their own safety, clutching instead at the hope that this monster will somehow bring socialism closer.
In sum: Sept. 11 and the prospect of war against Saddam Hussein have exposed the left's political self-delusion, intellectual bankruptcy, and moral turpitude.
The writer is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Militant Islam Reaches America. Pipes@MEForum.org