Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.
When ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas‘ first appeared, the Obama era was only beginning, Obama’s ‘New Middle East’ was still far on the horizon, and the ‘Iran Deal’ had yet to be dealt. What made Jamie Glazov’s magnum opus so remarkable was how thoroughly it not only recapitulated the ugly history of Communism, but anticipated what was only an emerging alliance between two terrible ideologies united by their hateful mutual ambition to destroy civilization as we know it and love it.
Even as it connected the dots between the two totalitarian ideologies, ‘United in Hate’ also helped conservatives bridge the Cold War era and the 9/11 period. Many conservatives were struggling to understand the nature of the new Jihadist enemy and how it differed from the old Communist foe. The Carter and Reagan era flirtations with the Afghan ‘Mujahadeen’ was only one manifestation of deeper links that had been built with the Saudis, the Pakistanis and other players in Al Qaeda during the Cold War, and some conservatives continued to defend Islam.
Even though the Obama era is in the rearview mirror, the situation today is not so different.
Some conservatives view Islamists as ‘natural allies’ against ‘woke’ leftists the way that some foolishly believed that Islam was a natural opponent, rather than a partner, of Communism. In doing so, they ignore much of history, including the vital role Communists played in spreading and supporting Islamic terrorism, and the Marxist-Islamist riots taking place in major cities now.
Including in Minneapolis.
That is why the return of ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas‘ is badly needed. The book’s vital dive into the bloody murk of Communist brutality and evil, and the ideological underpinnings of Islamic mass murder, is supplemented by a new section of Oct 7 which chillingly and recently brought Marxists and Islamists together with the common aim of not only destroying Israel, but America, and the entire civilized world (the Columbia University pro-Hamas encampment insisted it was “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization”) that connects it to the current events of the moment.
And from Minneapolis to the Hamas riots, the moment couldn’t be more relevant.
“The believer has filled the void left by communism’s disappearance with radical Islam. Instead of living vicariously through the oppression imposed by the KGB or the Red Guards, the believer now satisfies his yearnings through the violence perpetrated by suicide bombers,” Glazov warns in ‘United in Hate’. “We can see a balance in this scale. The less brutal an ideology is, the less interest the average believer has in it and the less praise he is inclined to give it. By contrast, when the death cult is in full gear, the believer supports it most strongly.”
That is what we have seen in the embrace of the BLM riots, the riots for Hamas and now for illegal alien murderers and pedophiles in Minneapolis. The more evil and violent the cause, the more enthusiasm there is for it. Hamas became far more popular after Oct 7. The BLM race riots and the riots in defense of illegal aliens only took off once they became truly violent.
That’s why the abortion rallies petered out and #NoKings recorded sizable crowd sizes, but no real enthusiasm and fire. It’s why the violence of Jihad will always attract the most leftist support. Nothing today can quite compare to the untarnished brutality and genocide of Islam.
That is why Islam and the Left are natural allies. Both seek to realize a utopia ‘tabula rasa’ through revolutionary violence. Violence in this scenario is not just a means, it’s an end in and of itself, a cleansing ceremony that transforms the world, and makes the otherwise unworkable communes and caliphates seem more real, while excusing the inability to maintain them.
What cannot be achieved can always be exterminated. And that is what the triumphs of Communism and Islam come down to, not triumphs of civilization, but conquest and destruction. A new and better world never came into being, whether it was given 70 years in the USSR or over 1,000 years under Islam, Homo Sovieticus and Homo Islamus led only to barbarism.
Those on the right who seek to make common cause with Islam are either fundamentally naive about Islam or are telling on themselves about what sort of new world order they envision.
The destruction of America, specifically, and Western Civilization in general, ‘unites’ the two terror ideologies profiled in ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas‘. Both Marxism and Islam represent warped religions, heresies promising a kingdom of heaven on earth that is to be realized through the gross material agency of the sword, not by heaven.
America is everything they resent and are jealous of. Its perfect imperfection must be shattered and torn apart so that everyone can see once and for all that their way is the only right one.
As Glazov writes in ‘United in Hate‘, radicals “gravitate toward genocide because believers consider themselves higher life forms, their inferiors become not only expendable but necessary waste… this is where the Western Left and militant Islam (like the Western Left and Communism) intersect: human life must be sacrificed for the sake of the idea.”
The pursuit of the ‘idea’ killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Just as it licensed the murder of thousands in Tehran. Reasonable causes, right or wrong, fight for realizable benefits, from territory to individual rights, but the fanatical causes depicted in ‘United in Hate’ fight for the supremacy of their ideology, and whether they are Nazis and Communists or Marxists and Islamists, horseshoe theory draws them together, at least for a time, because their governing monad is ideology, the transcendence of the real by the unreal, the limitations of the world by the unlimited will of the ego through the medium of unlimited power to build a new world order.
What we call ‘extremism’ is really the desire to unmake the real world for an unreal one.
That is why the reemergence of ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas‘ is worth celebrating. A book too long absent returns now at just the right time.
