2012/03/23

"Authoritarian leftism" support for despots

Remember Lenin's 1920 essay, Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder? Nicholas Kozloff describes a similar disorder: What he calls the "authoritarian left" is so convinced that the enemy of my enemy is my friend — the "enemy" being western capitalism — that writers like Alex Cockburn and Robert Dreyfuss find nice things to say about Muammar Gadaffi and Bachar Al-Asad, and even Noam Chomsky refrains from critical analysis of the crazed Bolivarian Hugo Chávez. That means they're having trouble distinguishing "left" from "right."

The authoritarian left goes awry: From the Arab Spring to Latin America - Opinion - Al Jazeera English