Every Leftist Cause Begins as Humanitarianism and Ends as Terrorism

“Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; – the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!”

—A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Every leftist cause is founded on empathy.

The quintessential leftist, no matter how much blood eventually spatters his hands, starts off by caring a great deal about other people. His heart bleeds for the oppressed, the workers and the peasants, for racial and sexual minorities, and for all the oppressed peoples of the world.

The ideological fashions may change but the story is always told the same way.

Somewhere there is an oppressed group to be liberated. And he, she or they is the one to fight for their liberation. Along the way that exquisite sensitivity which may lead an upper class Ivy Leaguer to learn all about the customs and suffering of black transgender men in Detroit or Hamas terrorists in Gaza congeals into an equal insensitivity for the suffering of his targets.

And then people die. Sometimes it’s those he considers the oppressed or the oppressors. Usually both. The humanitarians become terrorists and their revolutions lead to tyranny.

The opposite of tyranny isn’t revolution just as the opposite of empathy isn’t a lack of caring. They are both circles. Revolutions make tyrannies and empathy leads to cruelty. While there is a small subset of humanity that genuinely lacks empathy, most of the ideological bloodshed of the last century and this one was committed by men and women who cared far too much.

Those who care too much will eventually care enough to kill.

That is the argument that has been made in defense of every murderous leftist cause and is currently being made for Hamas. If you really care about the suffering in Gaza, you too would set yourself on fire or burn Israeli families alive in their homes. If you really care, you won’t care.

Genuine humanitarians can exhaust themselves caring too much. But those are the types of people who stay up nights helping others. Some of this type can be recruited into leftist movements, but the average leftist is a deeply insincere humanitarian who cares about others only as a vehicle for developing an identity and asserting it on a public stage.

Leftists genuinely do care a lot. They care about rising oceans, polar bears, women in hijabs, men in dresses, drug dealers in the ghetto and eco-terrorists in prison, racist highways and dead terrorists, and if you think of something that they don’t care about yet, they will soon.

As long as it fits the larger agenda of asserting their will over society from a moral high ground.

That is why they also don’t care about the horrifying death toll among young black men from crime, how many Muslims are being killed by Muslim governments or the state of the gay rights movement in Marxist dictatorships. If the state of oppression does not conform to the narrative of external social oppression to be overthrown by a liberation movement it is useless to the political movement and to the individual ego of the aspiring freedom fighter.

To a genuine humanitarian, the oppressed are an end, but to a leftist they are a means. A leftist cares a great deal about a coal miner until he votes for Trump or a black man until he runs as a Republican. Or until, even through no fault of his own, like the coal miners and steelworkers for whom leftists once bled, he is replaced by a new pathway to the ultimate revolution.

It is not truly the workers and peasants, the transgenders and the terrorists, whom the leftist cares about. They humanize, articulate and personalize the revolutionary mandate whose purpose is not to save, but to destroy everything about a world that doesn’t care as much.

The more the leftist cares, the worse the atrocities he can justify with his boundless caring.

That the caring rarely leads to anything useful is the entire point. Empathy for the leftist is a narrative point. Really fixing anything robs him of his motivation. That is why the standard leftist position is that black people are as oppressed today as they were under segregation. If they were to admit that black people were equal and free, what would they do with their time?

Successful leftist movements seize power. They fix nothing and repair nothing because caring is a means for the individual ego and the collective one. Every leftist is a heroic freedom fighter who wants to be the king. He pretends he wants to save the world when he’s out to rule it.

Leftist violence is not the outcry of the oppressed, but the mandate of the oppressors.

That is why every leftist cause begins as humanitarianism and ends in terrorism. Humanitarianism and terrorism don’t contradict each other, they complement one another. There could be no terrorism without humanitarianism. Terrorism is not an accidental sidetrack, but the next phase of a three step process that then ends with tyranny or defeat.

When a leftist starts caring about something, it will, given enough time, end in mass murder.

It’s not because he can’t feel your pain, it’s because he’s too busy feeling someone else’s pain so he doesn’t feel yours when he comes after you. Much as the best way to drown out a signal is with noise, the best way to drown out empathy is with lots more empathy.

The leftist cares about so many people and things that he can’t feel anything when it comes to his real targets. Human suffering has become so much noise that he picks and chooses which strands to isolate and listen to based on ideological grounds. Leftist empathy doesn’t sensitize, it desensitizes by design. Given a large enough palette, the leftist can vandalize art, bomb events and assault people because he’s trying to save millions, billions and the entire planet.

But the only one he’s really trying to save is himself from his own boring mediocrity.

The upper class leftist revolutionary, unable to accomplish anything of worth or become anyone of note, sets out to subjugate the world. His empathy for people whom he has never met instantly makes him a wiser and deeper person. And before you know it, he’s cheering Hamas.

And it’s all because he cares so much.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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