The Left, Islamism, and a Moment of Truth?

The Left, Islamism, and a Moment of Truth?

Allyson Christy

Rising influences like Bhaskar Sunkara and the socialist magazine Jacobin that he founded in 2011, and the appearance of advantaging current perils of a faltered American Left, seek to embody unification of young enthusiasts and older adherents to socialism, communism, Marxism, activism, and the like. Tactics have nonetheless and long seemed to embrace, embolden, and manipulate selected demographic pawns—minorities, immigrants, gender egalitarianism, youth and elderly constituents, generating political and economic compunctions, and all which urge the core of activism and society’s disadvantaged towards envy and confliction. The list further includes, but is not limited to, the LBGT community, sexual and reproductive issues, children, education, wage and labour, poverty, environment, and even animal rights activism. Such societal elements represent campaigning tactics the Left has traditionally advanced, together with apposite conditioning strategies often cloaked with progressive ideals.

The Left has cleverly managed to champion selected and relevant pawns, encompassing core and poignant connections relative to stirring misgivings, expanded politicking, and a continued influx of adherents by fanning conflagrations of emotionalism and partisan frictions. The tactical aim has seemed to indubitably sow seeds of revolutionary configurations for decades. Furthermore, such discernments may evoke the resilient thrusts and therefore similarities, at least with doctrinal juxtapositions, to elements of the Bolshevik Revolution. Moreover, Trotsky once inferred sufficient contradictions within any class of society¾henceforth, plausible raisons d'être for conspiracies, as for example, a minority progressing “a movement of the majority.” Such quintessential approaches may thereafter be recognised to entreat institutional conversions.

The current surge at challenging this clever and expansionist utopian movement lies within the timely core of anti-democratic ideals and a cunning assault infiltrating the borders of Western societies. Islamism, saturated with extremism and its explicit incitement of turmoil, making use of sweeping religious propagandas, unassimilated migrant penetrations and recruitment avenues to radicalism and terror, is concurrently anchored within proximate crossroads of Western encroachment. Preponderant dictates of Political Correctness (PC), however, substantially safeguard and similarly enable this increasing initiative of tension, discord, and violence. Synchronised with modern-liberal undertakings that hold Western society politically, socially, morally, and culturally captive despite the appearance of perfectionistic intentions, PC as a subduing tool has instead, amassed and therefore imposed a constricted mind-set upon society at-large. Exploiting impassioned propaganda and manipulative regulators has shaped a framework of communicative limitations that steadily precludes frank and open debates.

Wielding power by exploiting ardent codes that galvanise social causes and underdog defences, in essence, conveys methodical contexts that instead, may suppress underscoring fervent hypocrisies and impending realities of border and state security risks. As thus, systematic undertones of advancing superficialities may furthermore compromise crucial focuses against rising challenges to democratic societies in the long-term. Stymying free speech in general, exceptionally affecting university campuses and commonly blocking the attempts of opposing public discourses consequently weakens the diagnostic reckoning and resistance against plausibility for Islamist impingement.

Why? Playing emotional cards alongside definitive and legal exploitations of racism and Islamophobia, and concomitant to well-crafted hijackings of social justice issues encircles the dispositions of institutional public conscience. How so? Vis-à-vis poverty, welfare, education, treatment of children, women, the elderly, immigrants, hate contexts, and so forth¾for these societal elements, it must be reminded, have been slyly manipulated over decades through emotionalism. Indeed, Trotsky expounds upon a similar framework in The History of the Russian Revolution, as holding the bourgeoisie abled to possessing not only land and property, but “...education, the press, a network of strategic positions, a hierarchy of institutions,” of which may additionally link to modern do-gooding, liberal pop-cultural and political dispositions. Having thus evolved across similar and contemporary institutions may likewise indicate analogous patterns of causation that are further underscored to propitiating, and even quelling frustrated Western temperaments.

Broadening this exploitation internationally, the parallel to open borders, globalisation trends, terrorism, immigration movements, refugee and humanitarian struggles, has seemed to serve Leftist-driven underdog manipulation and to incline wilful racist and Islamophobic labelling strategies that stifle discourse and garner otherwise, sympathetic and indebted advocates. Furthermore, misleading or exaggerated distortions linking pivotal accusations of racism—hence, straying from the actual racist definition, have long enflamed passionate tensions in the West, replete with increasing harassment against challenging dialogue and overflowing with double standards. Islamophobia is comparably both coined and somewhat elevated to the acclimatised ethos of discourse suppression, which brandishes further dissonance against free thought and speech—ever more with legal implications and challenges. Yet, the rising tide of political Islam as a prevailing socio-political and increasingly cultural force, may not merely threaten the heart of Western civilisation. Ideologically opposed to democratic autonomies, radical Islamic antithesis to democracy and non-Muslim societies may in turn, profoundly undermine those gainful strategical inroads of the rose-coloured utopian inclinations that are analogous to modern liberals, globalists, and socialists.

One and the other, leftist ploys and rising Islamism, make use of each side for their intended manipulations, exploitations, and decisive similarities to effecting ideological impositions onto society. Thus, any similitudes may eventually culminate to open antagonism. Who then, will win? What will ensue relative to nationalistic guardians of Western civilisation? Who will be blamed for the cunning submissions to PC pressures that continue to intensify with such latent potency out of the residual Western social movements of prior decades? Collective progressivism may have accelerated political pawn strategies, thereby ushering sensitive social issues with ardent policymaking, obliging a PC climate of dominion upon politicians and society at-large. Furthermore, the tightening of a resultant chokehold on institutional merits of education, economy, free speech, open discourse, and classical liberalism may just, after all, resound certain ideals of conspiracy and semblances of the preceding era of Trotsky.