The B Vocabulary: The Western Left and Its Sterile ‘Field of Ideas’ | Ramzy Baroud

[Tace]

Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust

June 24, 2015

Over the year, I realized that the term "left" is not exclusive to a political ideology, but a mode of thinking championed mostly by self-tailored "leftist" western intellectuals. I grew to dislike it with intensity.

But that has not always been the case.

My father was a communist, or so he called himself. He read the translated work of great communist and socialist thinkers, and passed on to me his own reading of what a socialist utopia could possibly be like. Living in a squalid refugee camp in Gaza, locked in by a heavily militarized sea to the west, and various Israeli "death zones" everywhere else, a proletarian utopia was a great idea, where the peasants and the workers ruled unhindered.

Of course, there was a reason that made the fantasy particularly meaningful. Before the establishment of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine, most Palestinians, who constituted the majority of the refugees after the war of 1948, were fellahin -- or peasants. Following their forced expulsion into refugee camps, lacking land to cultivate, they became cheap laborers, especially after the war of 1967, where all of Palestine was colonized by Israel. No collective anywhere in the Middle East experienced such historical tension in a relatively short period of time as did the Palestinians.

My family, like numerous others, became peasants-turned-workers; in fact that marking became part of the refugees' collective identity.

more

http://worldnewstrust.com/the-b-vocabulary-the-western-left-and-its-sterile-field-of-ideas-ramzy-baroud

[Scootaloo]

1. I think Ramzy may be making an erronious conflation here

Wherein "western Left" is the same thing as political parties such as American Democrats and British Liberals, and the milling herd of hipster liberals for whom issues are fashion accessories.

Case in point:

"Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?" I was asked by numerous leftists as if the inane question, which reflects more ignorance than inquisitiveness, is a talking point, handed down and repeated without thinking.

I've seen this line from people who anoint themselves "liberals" (even a few of our friends here in I/P) but have never met a leftist who is so myopic as to chuck it out there.