by Alyssa A. Lappen
Right Side News | March 10, 2009
Review: United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror (WND Books, 2009), 239 pages.
In 2000, I noted a near-total mainstream news blackout on hateful Islamic ideological drivers of violence and jihad. I then began migrating from financial journalism to covering Islam and the Middle East. At first I believed colleagues were ignorant of services translating statements and articles from Arab, Urdu, Pashtan and Turkish clerics and media. A bevy of rude, angry replies to my letters, however, disabused me of that naiveté. Rather they suffered from an almost universal animus to facts—and to educating the public on underlying factors.
I simply could not understand.
Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate provides the first genuine insight I’ve yet found into this phenomenon. This brilliant historian and Ph.D. in U.S., Russian and Canadian foreign policy identifies a sort of psychotic dementia opposed to liberal humanism and the Socratic method. The diseased worship various Utopian ideologies, and are adamantly determined to reconstruct them on earth, regardless the costs in human life. Taking a page from everyman philosopher Eric Hoffer, Glazov labels them “believers.” These political theory ultra-advocates all possess one psychological characteristic—parallel to a genus, or DNA strand, and rooted in denial—a virulent, apparently communicable hatred for human imperfection, and therefore everything and everyone of the real world.
Neither believers nor their secular faiths are all identical. Yet deadly, duplicate attributes afflict all forms of Communism—engendered by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Pham Van Dong, Mao Zedong, and Daniel Ortega—and political Islam. Believers all suffer acute alienation from society, total blindness to it—and the inability “to rise to the challenges of secular modernity,” establish real, “lasting interpersonal relationships or [internalize] any values that help him find meaning in life.” (p. 6)
Even nearly two decades after the Soviet Union’s defeat, Glazov finds that believers continue to threaten Western civilization. Now, they have married their animus for humankind to Islam’s longstanding, toxic war against individual freedoms and its renewed, current-day jihad against the West.
After defining their ailment, Glazov reviews believers’ shocking prominence—and intense commitment to the communist death cult. Wooden-legged drug user, “satanic sexual orgies” aficionado and U.S. outcast, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, witnessed Ukrainian mass starvation in 1933, for example. Yet he reported the situation to be “not famine but abundance.” Peasants appeared “healthier and more cheerful” than anticipated. Their markets overflowed with “eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter.”
Journalist Anna Louise Strong covered Washington state’s 1916 Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) riots, became a World War I pacifist and in 1921 traveled to Poland and Russia, and metamorphosed into a Stalinist, immune to 1930s arrests and murders of her friends. In the 1950s, Strong migrated to China, where she died in 1970—still defending Mao’s bloody cultural revolution.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw, likewise “revered Stalin.” In 1931 his Soviet minders’ introduction of two train station waitresses “intimately acquainted” with his plays convinced him that Russians were more literate than Britons. Visiting Potemkin village prisons built to fool idiots like him similarly persuaded Shaw that ordinary English delinquents exited prison as “criminal types,” while Russia made such people ordinary men.
Few Kurt Weill fans may realize that Three Penny Opera collaborator Bertolt Brecht doubled as a dedicated Marxist, opposed to free expression. Art was meant “not to serve beauty or any other aesthetic value; [but] to destroy the old order and thereby enable the birth of the communist utopia.” Intellectuals were all scum, “parasites, professional criminals, informers….” The more innocent, the more they deserved to be shot. Brecht even said there “must have been enough evidence” to arrest his lover Carola Neher, who was never seen again.
These famous believers were followed by a long line of deniers—including Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Jean Paul Sartre, Abbie Hoffman, Shirley McLaine, Mary McCarthy, newsman Dan Rather, author Gunther Grass, producers Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg, actors Ed Asner and Michael Douglas and many famous others. None ever knew “real economic hardship” or lacked material comfort, educational opportunity or social advancement. Yet these “new left” devotees—like Students for a Democratic Society terrorist William Ayers, President Barack Obama’s political mentor since circa 1995—all longed to redistribute wealth from evil capitalists to sainted “have-nots,” with typical sangfroid for the deadly consequences.
Longing for submersion into a communal whole, indeed their own deaths, believers flocked throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to adulate mass murderers in Havana, Hanoi, Beijing and finally Managua. They denied victims of Castro’s vicious racism and homophobia—80% of them black, and Cuba’s 18%, post-1959 population decline; horrors and mass murders at Hanoi’s Cu Loc (nicknamed the “Zoo” and “Cuban program”) and North Vietnamese villages; mass starvation and murder in China; and malnutrition, begging and mass abuse in 145 Nicaraguan settlements, outside of which, Ortega ordered soldiers to ask no questions and shoot everyone on sight.
With the fall of communism, the believers migrated to yet another death cult—-jihad as exemplified in virtually every Islamic terrorist organization under the sun. In Islam, Algerian radical Ali Benhadj notes, “If faith… is not watered and irrigated by blood, it does not grow. It does not live. Principles are reinforced by sacrifices, suicide operations and martyrdom for Allah.”
Islam commands Muslims to commit violent jihad. “Myriad Koranic verses emphasize the importance of fighting unbelievers,” Glazov notes. For example, the “famous Verse of the Sword,” (Chapter 9: Verse 5) nullifies all non-violent passages and instructs Muslims to seek and obtain global “hegemony.”
Unfortunately, Glazov reaches this discussion, in Part III of his book, only after seeming to suggest that the current jihad arose from Nazism and Communism. He also subsequently suggests that Islamic hatred of Jews is partly an outgrowth of European anti-Semitism. In both instances, Glazov mistakes. Mohammed himself initiated Islam’s virulent hatred of Jews and Judaism, as becomes eminently clear in Dr. Andrew Bostom’s brilliant Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. Moreover, Islamic affinity for Nazism was an outgrowth of Islamic ideas, not the other way around: Hitler himself identified with Muslim thinking and numerous Nazis later converted. But these objections are slight.
Glazov correctly notes that Islam, as always practiced and taught today, is rooted in jihad ideology. He also recognizes that Western Marxist believers identify strongly with Islamic adoration for “purification through mass death,” although they don’t actually understand Islam at all. Just as Marxists denied every horror perpetrated by the Marxist regimes and heroes they worshiped in previous eras (which Glazov describes in detail). No, their rigid secular view of everything today prevents them from comprehending that Islamic violence “has absolutely nothing to do with economic inequality, class oppression, or Western exploitation.” They demonstrate “an obvious and profound racism,” Glazov observes: They consider Muslims and Arabs inadequate “to understand their own circumstances.” Muslims frequently explain jihad as the natural result of Koranic directives to make Islam a global empire. Yet, believers always reject their explanations—as if one cannot seriously expect Muslims to understand their own theocratic, imperialist ideology.
Perhaps Islam can be reformed, as Glazov posits—and a dedicated few do hope to turn Muslim minds away from hatred and violence. “Human rights is not negotiable, even for God,” says one moderate Muslim I was recently privileged to meet. “Otherwise, Islam is a only a cult.” But that would be news to stubborn mainstream media, who (considering Glazov’s reflections) look married to the same Marxist belief and denials that drove Walter Duranty and Anna Louise Strong.
Those few cannot change what is hidden, unrecognized, unknown—and largely denied by their potential Western allies, however. The success of a handful of Muslims fighting impossible odds to promote secular Islam and reform their co-religionists’ thinking requires gargantuan efforts.
Glazov’s book is therefore critical to everyone who cares about the survival of Western civilization. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Clearly, only public pressure can force the news media to pull up their window shades and shine the necessary light on Arab and Muslim ideological hatred of everyone not like them. And this book could help raise the pressure.
————————————-
Alyssa A. Lappen, a freelance investigative journalist, is a former senior fellow of the American Center for Democracy, former senior editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance and former associate editor of Forbes. Her work has also appeared in FrontPage Magazine, the Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, Human Events, Midstream and Revue Politique. Her website is http://www.alyssaalappen.org/.
All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.
Alyssa A. Lappen is a U.S.-based investigative journalist. She is the former Managing Editor at the Leeb Group (2012-2017); a former Senior Fellow of the American Center for Democracy (2005-2008); and a former Senior Editor of Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991).
She served six of her 12 years at Forbes (1978-1990) as an Associate Editor. Ms. Lappen was also a staff reporter at The New Haven Register (1975-1977).
During a decade as a freelance, her work appeared in Big Peace, Pajamas Media, Front Page Magazine, American Thinker, Right Side News, Family Security Matters, the Washington Times and many other Internet and print journals. Ms. Lappen also contributed to the Terror Finance Blog, among others.
She supports the right of journalists worldwide to write without fear or restriction on politics, governments, international affairs, terrorism, terror financing and religious support for terrorism, among other subjects.
Ms. Lappen is also an accomplished poet. Her first full-length collection, The Minstrel's Song, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in April 2015. Her poems have been published in the 2nd 2007 edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and both 2007 issues of Wales' award-winning Seventh Quarry: Swansea Poetry Magazine.
Dozens of her poems have appeared in print and online literary journals and books. She won the 2000 annual Ruah: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry chapbook award and has received a Harvard Summer Poetry Prize and several honorable mentions.
Brotherhood Unmasked
Sunlight is the best disinfectant
by Alyssa A. Lappen
Right Side News | March 10, 2009
In 2000, I noted a near-total mainstream news blackout on hateful Islamic ideological drivers of violence and jihad. I then began migrating from financial journalism to covering Islam and the Middle East. At first I believed colleagues were ignorant of services translating statements and articles from Arab, Urdu, Pashtan and Turkish clerics and media. A bevy of rude, angry replies to my letters, however, disabused me of that naiveté. Rather they suffered from an almost universal animus to facts—and to educating the public on underlying factors.
I simply could not understand.
Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate provides the first genuine insight I’ve yet found into this phenomenon. This brilliant historian and Ph.D. in U.S., Russian and Canadian foreign policy identifies a sort of psychotic dementia opposed to liberal humanism and the Socratic method. The diseased worship various Utopian ideologies, and are adamantly determined to reconstruct them on earth, regardless the costs in human life. Taking a page from everyman philosopher Eric Hoffer, Glazov labels them “believers.” These political theory ultra-advocates all possess one psychological characteristic—parallel to a genus, or DNA strand, and rooted in denial—a virulent, apparently communicable hatred for human imperfection, and therefore everything and everyone of the real world.
Neither believers nor their secular faiths are all identical. Yet deadly, duplicate attributes afflict all forms of Communism—engendered by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Pham Van Dong, Mao Zedong, and Daniel Ortega—and political Islam. Believers all suffer acute alienation from society, total blindness to it—and the inability “to rise to the challenges of secular modernity,” establish real, “lasting interpersonal relationships or [internalize] any values that help him find meaning in life.” (p. 6)
Even nearly two decades after the Soviet Union’s defeat, Glazov finds that believers continue to threaten Western civilization. Now, they have married their animus for humankind to Islam’s longstanding, toxic war against individual freedoms and its renewed, current-day jihad against the West.
After defining their ailment, Glazov reviews believers’ shocking prominence—and intense commitment to the communist death cult. Wooden-legged drug user, “satanic sexual orgies” aficionado and U.S. outcast, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, witnessed Ukrainian mass starvation in 1933, for example. Yet he reported the situation to be “not famine but abundance.” Peasants appeared “healthier and more cheerful” than anticipated. Their markets overflowed with “eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter.”
Journalist Anna Louise Strong covered Washington state’s 1916 Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) riots, became a World War I pacifist and in 1921 traveled to Poland and Russia, and metamorphosed into a Stalinist, immune to 1930s arrests and murders of her friends. In the 1950s, Strong migrated to China, where she died in 1970—still defending Mao’s bloody cultural revolution.
Playwright George Bernard Shaw, likewise “revered Stalin.” In 1931 his Soviet minders’ introduction of two train station waitresses “intimately acquainted” with his plays convinced him that Russians were more literate than Britons. Visiting Potemkin village prisons built to fool idiots like him similarly persuaded Shaw that ordinary English delinquents exited prison as “criminal types,” while Russia made such people ordinary men.
Few Kurt Weill fans may realize that Three Penny Opera collaborator Bertolt Brecht doubled as a dedicated Marxist, opposed to free expression. Art was meant “not to serve beauty or any other aesthetic value; [but] to destroy the old order and thereby enable the birth of the communist utopia.” Intellectuals were all scum, “parasites, professional criminals, informers….” The more innocent, the more they deserved to be shot. Brecht even said there “must have been enough evidence” to arrest his lover Carola Neher, who was never seen again.
These famous believers were followed by a long line of deniers—including Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Jean Paul Sartre, Abbie Hoffman, Shirley McLaine, Mary McCarthy, newsman Dan Rather, author Gunther Grass, producers Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg, actors Ed Asner and Michael Douglas and many famous others. None ever knew “real economic hardship” or lacked material comfort, educational opportunity or social advancement. Yet these “new left” devotees—like Students for a Democratic Society terrorist William Ayers, President Barack Obama’s political mentor since circa 1995—all longed to redistribute wealth from evil capitalists to sainted “have-nots,” with typical sangfroid for the deadly consequences.
Longing for submersion into a communal whole, indeed their own deaths, believers flocked throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to adulate mass murderers in Havana, Hanoi, Beijing and finally Managua. They denied victims of Castro’s vicious racism and homophobia—80% of them black, and Cuba’s 18%, post-1959 population decline; horrors and mass murders at Hanoi’s Cu Loc (nicknamed the “Zoo” and “Cuban program”) and North Vietnamese villages; mass starvation and murder in China; and malnutrition, begging and mass abuse in 145 Nicaraguan settlements, outside of which, Ortega ordered soldiers to ask no questions and shoot everyone on sight.
With the fall of communism, the believers migrated to yet another death cult—-jihad as exemplified in virtually every Islamic terrorist organization under the sun. In Islam, Algerian radical Ali Benhadj notes, “If faith… is not watered and irrigated by blood, it does not grow. It does not live. Principles are reinforced by sacrifices, suicide operations and martyrdom for Allah.”
Islam commands Muslims to commit violent jihad. “Myriad Koranic verses emphasize the importance of fighting unbelievers,” Glazov notes. For example, the “famous Verse of the Sword,” (Chapter 9: Verse 5) nullifies all non-violent passages and instructs Muslims to seek and obtain global “hegemony.”
Unfortunately, Glazov reaches this discussion, in Part III of his book, only after seeming to suggest that the current jihad arose from Nazism and Communism. He also subsequently suggests that Islamic hatred of Jews is partly an outgrowth of European anti-Semitism. In both instances, Glazov mistakes. Mohammed himself initiated Islam’s virulent hatred of Jews and Judaism, as becomes eminently clear in Dr. Andrew Bostom’s brilliant Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. Moreover, Islamic affinity for Nazism was an outgrowth of Islamic ideas, not the other way around: Hitler himself identified with Muslim thinking and numerous Nazis later converted. But these objections are slight.
Glazov correctly notes that Islam, as always practiced and taught today, is rooted in jihad ideology. He also recognizes that Western Marxist believers identify strongly with Islamic adoration for “purification through mass death,” although they don’t actually understand Islam at all. Just as Marxists denied every horror perpetrated by the Marxist regimes and heroes they worshiped in previous eras (which Glazov describes in detail). No, their rigid secular view of everything today prevents them from comprehending that Islamic violence “has absolutely nothing to do with economic inequality, class oppression, or Western exploitation.” They demonstrate “an obvious and profound racism,” Glazov observes: They consider Muslims and Arabs inadequate “to understand their own circumstances.” Muslims frequently explain jihad as the natural result of Koranic directives to make Islam a global empire. Yet, believers always reject their explanations—as if one cannot seriously expect Muslims to understand their own theocratic, imperialist ideology.
Perhaps Islam can be reformed, as Glazov posits—and a dedicated few do hope to turn Muslim minds away from hatred and violence. “Human rights is not negotiable, even for God,” says one moderate Muslim I was recently privileged to meet. “Otherwise, Islam is a only a cult.” But that would be news to stubborn mainstream media, who (considering Glazov’s reflections) look married to the same Marxist belief and denials that drove Walter Duranty and Anna Louise Strong.
Those few cannot change what is hidden, unrecognized, unknown—and largely denied by their potential Western allies, however. The success of a handful of Muslims fighting impossible odds to promote secular Islam and reform their co-religionists’ thinking requires gargantuan efforts.
Glazov’s book is therefore critical to everyone who cares about the survival of Western civilization. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Clearly, only public pressure can force the news media to pull up their window shades and shine the necessary light on Arab and Muslim ideological hatred of everyone not like them. And this book could help raise the pressure.
————————————-
Alyssa A. Lappen, a freelance investigative journalist, is a former senior fellow of the American Center for Democracy, former senior editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance and former associate editor of Forbes. Her work has also appeared in FrontPage Magazine, the Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, Human Events, Midstream and Revue Politique. Her website is http://www.alyssaalappen.org/.
All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.
Related Posts
Alyssa A. Lappen
Alyssa A. Lappen is a U.S.-based investigative journalist. She is the former Managing Editor at the Leeb Group (2012-2017); a former Senior Fellow of the American Center for Democracy (2005-2008); and a former Senior Editor of Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991). She served six of her 12 years at Forbes (1978-1990) as an Associate Editor. Ms. Lappen was also a staff reporter at The New Haven Register (1975-1977). During a decade as a freelance, her work appeared in Big Peace, Pajamas Media, Front Page Magazine, American Thinker, Right Side News, Family Security Matters, the Washington Times and many other Internet and print journals. Ms. Lappen also contributed to the Terror Finance Blog, among others. She supports the right of journalists worldwide to write without fear or restriction on politics, governments, international affairs, terrorism, terror financing and religious support for terrorism, among other subjects. Ms. Lappen is also an accomplished poet. Her first full-length collection, The Minstrel's Song, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in April 2015. Her poems have been published in the 2nd 2007 edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and both 2007 issues of Wales' award-winning Seventh Quarry: Swansea Poetry Magazine. Dozens of her poems have appeared in print and online literary journals and books. She won the 2000 annual Ruah: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry chapbook award and has received a Harvard Summer Poetry Prize and several honorable mentions.