{"id":91859,"date":"2023-04-14T11:16:05","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T16:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=91859"},"modified":"2023-04-14T11:17:16","modified_gmt":"2023-04-14T16:17:16","slug":"91859","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=91859","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The Left continues to whitewash its crazy, violent, and authoritarian history.<\/a><\/p>\n

About a week before Jeff Sharlet\u2019s\u00a0new book<\/a>\u00a0<\/u>,\u00a0The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War,<\/i>\u00a0was published in March, a new video was uploaded on YouTube. It was\u00a0a short documentary<\/a>\u00a0<\/u>from 1983 of when Harry Belafonte, an iconic American singer and actor, visited East Germany to perform in a concert promoting\u00a0communism<\/a>\u00a0. The \u201cWorld Peace Concert\u201d was run by East Germany\u2019s communist youth organization. Belafonte gave his blessings to the Soviet-sponsored campaign promoting unilateral Western disarmament.<\/p>\n

The Belafonte concert is barely mentioned in\u00a0The Undertow<\/i>, a collection of essays and reporting by Sharlet, an award-winning journalist who teaches at Dartmouth College. Indeed, little of the Left\u2019s history of flirting with authoritarianism is mentioned at all. Instead,\u00a0The Undertow<\/i> argues that a bunch of crazy right-wingers, including militia groups, are bent on conflict with the Left. They want a second civil war, Sharlet claims, and those who stand up to oppose them are American leftists, portrayed as Christlike figures of light and wisdom.<\/p>\n

While announcing the Right has a strong and growing MAGA force that is armed and dangerous and itching for battle, Sharlet smothers any proof that the Left is violent and crazy. His book, which opens with a long and loving profile of Belafonte, fails to mention the singer\u2019s hardcore leftism.<\/p>\n

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Not even Belafonte tried to airbrush his beliefs. In his memoir, Belafonte wrote: \u201cI remained not just liberal but an unabashed lefty. I was still drawn to idealistic left-wing leaders \u2026 who seemed to embody the true ideals of\u00a0socialism<\/a> .\u201d<\/p>\n

Belafonte was friends with the communist singer Paul Robeson. He praised Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, writing that the latter has \u201ca strong grasp of Latin American history and of the fine distinctions in law between Venezuela and its neighbors.\u201d Belafonte called former President George W. Bush \u201cthe greatest tyrant, the greatest terrorist in the world.\u201d He was a Marxist \u2014 pure and simple.<\/p>\n

None of this is reported in\u00a0The Undertow<\/i>. Instead, Belafonte is portrayed by Sharlet simply as an inspirational civil rights leader \u2014 \u201ca radiant man\u201d who was friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and who remains a political visionary. Sharlet’s book is pure agitprop. It condemns conservatives and treats even the most violent and despicable leftists as, quite literally, messianic. In his essay about Occupy Wall Street, for example, the 2011 leftist street protests that resulted in stinky unbathed bodies and reports of sexual assault, Sharlet claims he felt like Jesus Christ \u2014 well, sort of: \u201cI feel like one of five hundred title Christs, if by Christ you allow me to refer not to divinity itself but to one of its more wholly human representations, Andres Serrano\u2019s 1987 photograph\u00a0Piss Christ<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Say what?\u00a0Piss Christ<\/i>\u00a0is a notorious piece of garbage \u201cart\u201d that was created when Serrano placed a crucifix in a jar of his urine. To Sharlet, this is the icon worth emulating: \u201cAppreciating what happened at Liberty Park [in New York\u2019s Occupy Wall Street] requires a mental shift akin to the one necessary to see\u00a0Piss Christ<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 an image of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist\u2019s own golden urine \u2014 as not blasphemous but a strange breed of beautiful. I don\u2019t mean ideologically beautiful, some baroque idea one admires for the complexity of its inversions. I mean gorgeous. Breathtaking, breath-giving, at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

This may be the clearest distillation of modern leftism ever committed to paper. It has the religious piety that surrounds liberalism\u2019s self-regard but maintains its “woke” street cred by attaching itself to blasphemous \u201cart.\u201d We are like Jesus, but it\u2019s the Jesus who hates Jesus. It\u2019s perfect in its performative incoherence.<\/p>\n

Sharlet\u2019s main essay, \u201cThe Undertow,\u201d takes on the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Central to the story is Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was killed by a police officer on that day. Here is Sharlet\u2019s description: \u201cBabbitt, shot for her trouble, was a fool who pursued her own death.\u201d She was also, he claims, made into a symbol by the Right: \u201cAshli Babbitt was processed, made productive, almost immediately after her death, transformed right away into yet another flag, like a new tarot card in the deck of fascism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA fool who pursued her own death.\u201d What cold, despicable words. You can both think the Jan. 6 riot was an ill-advised disaster and question why Babbitt was shot and killed. But Sharlet, just like Belafonte and the communists he entertained and bankrolled, wants a world in which asking such questions gets you tossed into prison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Left continues to whitewash its crazy, violent, and authoritarian history. About a week before Jeff Sharlet\u2019s\u00a0new book\u00a0,\u00a0The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War,\u00a0was published in March, a new video was uploaded on YouTube. It was\u00a0a short documentary\u00a0from 1983 of when Harry Belafonte, an iconic American singer and actor, visited East Germany to perform … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-scratch-a-lib-find-a-tyrant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91859"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91862,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91859\/revisions\/91862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}