Toxic “Debates” On The Quasi-Religious Left
The Left’s targets are not the Right, but other Leftists, liberals and that wholly inadequate term: progressives. Woke MAGA attacks its enemies on the Left, Woke Left attacks other people on the Left.
“Bless me father for I have sinned, it has been three weeks since my last confession. These are my sins…”. I haven’t uttered that religious mumbo jumbo in forty-five years, not since the tender age of 13. Children brought in to debase and demean themselves with invented sins to men who in many cases were child abusers. One of the most prolific in that sense Fr. Maguire heard confession in my parish, fortunately I was not one of his many victims. At that age I had little to confess, so I would just tell them I had cursed if I was short on sins.
I turned my back, not on Catholicism, but on religion per se, ALL religions with no exceptions. They are ALL what Marx termed religious superstition. I walked away from it and embraced rational thought, ideas and became a socialist. Little did I think back then that by middle age, some of those around me on the Left would adopt religious practices as a central part of their activism. But I was wrong.
Religion requires blind faith, irrational thought, a rejection of inquiry and a moralistic view of the world. People are not wrong, but rather they sin. There are no disagreements but rather blasphemy, heresy, and sin. The options when you sin are Confession, Repentance, Making Amends and if you refuse to repent or even acknowledge your behaviour or thoughts as sinful, then you are punished: social, economic ostracisation and when they held greater sway even banishment from the town. Enter the modern Left.
I should point out, lest some quasi-religious type reading this does not understand. You can only sin, if you buy into the religion itself. The Left’s targets are not the Right, but other Leftists, liberals and that wholly inadequate term: progressives. Woke MAGA attacks its enemies on the Left, Woke Left attacks other people on the Left.
There was a time when in discussions you would be told that you were factually wrong about a matter and it would be pointed out to you and you could go back and forth discussing the facts. Or someone might say that despite agreeing on the facts of the matter, you were wrong in your analysis for various reasons. Not anymore. You have sinned. They tell you that your position is because you ARE… insert whatever moral failing you can think of after the suspensive dots. Fall foul of them and you are banished or in modern parlance Cancelled. Christian mythology tells us of the famous cases in their book of fairy tales, the Bible, where people were banished. The first two were a romantic hippy couple communing with nature, taking delightful walks through lush gardens. They ate an apple and were banished, their son Cain murdered his own brother and he got banished. The quasi-religious Left have a similar attitude, all sins great and small shall be punished with all the fury of a Fire and Brimstone preacher.
And to this modern Left we have all sinned. The new religion has an interminable list of sins and you deny them at your peril. At least with the Catholic Church, you could count the main ones: Seven Deadly Sins, Ten Commandments to be broken. Some of the others are numerous especially the thought sins. Yes, sleeping around was a sin, desiring to do so was also a sin. Your innermost thoughts and desires were as bad as your public actions, something as simple as envy or lying could get you killed by the “righteous”. “They are gossips, scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness and rebellious towards their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know the just decree of God that all who practice such things deserve death, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:29-32).[1] Any similarity to whole sections of the modern Left is not accidental. The Left has a long list of thought crimes, not just those where you publicly express your views, but where some pop psychology charlatan tells you what you are really thinking, or you know someone who has said the wrong things.
The Left like the Christians have a concept of Original Sin, one you cannot escape. There are various ones, one of the most common is White Privilege. Whites suffer less ill-treatment at the hands of the police etc, but trying to win an argument by saying “That is your white privilege speaking” is reactionary drivel. It adds no new information to the debate, no new analysis. All it does is shift the topic to the innate sinfulness of one of the participants.
Not being tortured by the police is not a privilege it is a right that should be fought for all, and people of all races do get tortured. In practice the right exists in law, but its application is another matter. Some of the most high-profile cases in Britain were of whites: Irish people like the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and so forth. Did they have white privilege when they were being tortured? Some reactionaries would say they did. When white British soldiers murdered white Irish people on Bloody Sunday in the streets of Derry in 1972, which group of whites enjoyed privilege? And how would I know beforehand? Maybe, it wasn’t so much privilege that let the soldiers run amok but their role in supporting British imperialism in Ireland that was at play.
Blacks are 4.9 times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites by the British police. England and Wales have a rate of 9 searches per 1000 compared to 8 per 1000 in the north of Ireland.[2] But telling white youths who have been stopped and searched that they enjoy some privilege is not exactly a recipe for a united fight against police harassment.
If you are Muslim in India, you are statistically more likely to be a victim of state violence than Hindus. Do the Left in India ask people to check their Hindu privilege? I doubt it. Given Japan’s imperial history and its murderous campaign of rape and pillage, do Koreans and Chinese people get to tell them to check their Japanese privilege. You can go down this rabbit hole and it leads to some very troubling situations. Would the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi have been prevented if someone had told Hutus to check their privilege or would the legacy of Belgian imperialism have played out as it did in anycase?
Some might not be convinced, but this original sin tripe comes up time and again in other contexts. There are antisemites who despite the tens of thousands of anti-Zionist Jews protesting the genocide in Gaza claim that all Jews are responsible and benefit from it. Try making the case for White Privilege whilst denying Jewish Guilt at the same time and see how many contortions you have to do, whilst winning gold for mental gymnastics. Am I being unfair? I don’t think so. It is the same reactionary nonsense, just lots of people on the Left who talk of the original sin of White Privilege would be uncomfortable with the comparison to the equally reactionary nonsense of Jewish Guilt. If you are Jewish it does not follow you are a Zionist or benefitting from the genocide, and well the rest is obvious. I do say some would be uncomfortable because this Jewish Guiltnonsense crops up amongst some who claim to be on the Left.
This original sin has spawned an entire industry of grifters, one of the most industrious being Robin di Angelo author of the book White Fragility. She is herself white, middle class and grifting on the backs of the grafters whose interests she claims to advocate for. She discovered a niche market in selling indulgences for original sin and made a fortune out of it.
One of the problems with the concept of course is that it doesn’t seek to build solidarity, but “allyship”, so the working class do not struggle together, but middle class grifters like Di Angelo make a fortune out of managing their “allyship.” Her book sold very well and her corporate courses did even better. You can invent any number of “privileges”, white, British, French, Hindu, Buddhist in Sri Lanka, etc. None of them will help you fight against the ruling class, nor will they even do anything about racism as they are not meant to. They are meant to be an obstacle to actually fighting against it.
There are real implications for this sort of nonsense. As Haider Asad points out in his book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, in response to organising against police violence, organisers in Oakland had decided to relegate not just whites but also the immense majority of migrants in the US: brown people.
At marches many of us attended in Oakland, the rallies were led by politicians and nonprofit bureaucrats who warned of white “outside agitators” who might try to instigate violence. They said that only black people should take the mic; that only black people should take leadership roles; that black people should be at the front of the march, with white “allies” last and “brown” people allowed in the middle.[3]
This is a racists’ dream in reverse and does nothing to mobilise against racism and police violence. It is moralistic nonsense and it would discourage whites from getting involved and would encourage brown people like Asad who is second generation Pakistani from joint action with black people. It would now in the current context of ICE raids, be hugely problematic.
There is an alternative of course. When Fred Hampton the murdered Chicago Black Panther Leader united Latinos (Young Lords), poor whites (Young Patriots) who had migrated from the South he said to them, “We have a common class enemy let’s fight them together.” He didn’t say “Hey Cracker, check your white privilege.” The US government feared him, the FBI feared him, the plot to murder him went right to the top, to Hoover.[4]
Moralistic points were even raised in relation to Syria. Bashar Al Assad was an evil man therefore he must be overthrown by the West or their proxies. Under no circumstances should he be overthrown by locals with a different agenda to the West as that might not go the way the West wants. When allegations of the use of chemical weapons were raised, the Left went into overdrive. Anyone denying it was automatically an Assad supporter deserving of our opprobrium and cancellation. The courageous journalist, the late Robert Fisk went into Douma almost immediately after the supposed chemical weapons attack. It didn’t happen and two of the OPCW inspectors who said so were hounded out of their jobs, with one of them taking a case against his employer and winning.[5] Fisk said so at the time and was outcast by most of the Left (at this point I really should put Left in inverted commas). He went to the site of the supposed attack and interviewed people there.[6] He was pilloried at the time and years later he was vindicated, but by that time the Left were consumed by other sins, like religions, they have fads in the demons and witches they seek to exorcise from amongst us.
Campaigns are launched against companies and countries. But they are not serious, calls for boycotts are thrown around like confetti at a wedding. There is one for everyone in the audience. For a boycott to work it must meet some minimum standards. The demands must be achievable and there must be a plan of action to force a change in policy by the state or the company. When that change happens, the boycott is lifted. But most boycott calls are just moralistic virtue signalling and those who call for them have absolutely no intention of trying to make them succeed. The BDS campaigns have tried to be somewhat more focussed and targeting specific companies demanding specific actions like the withdrawal of rentals in the West Bank by booking.com. Something similar happened in the past in relation to Apartheid South Africa. But most are not like that and if you were to follow every boycott called for, then you would have to sit Buddha like under a tree telling the world how virtuous you were. The Ethical Consumer page lists ratings for over 40,000 products and brands.[7] Try and point this out and you will again suffer the wrath of the righteous. I am all in favour of effective boycotts. One of the most effective boycott campaigns in Britain and Ireland was against Coca Cola in relation to the murder of trade unionists in Colombia. Sections of the Left actually organised on the side of the company, spending trade union funds in whitewashing the company’s record. And that hasn’t stopped them virtue signalling how moral they are in relation to other boycotts.
Even on environmental issues you will find the Left engages in moralistic rubbish. Though they all agree that capitalism is destroying the environment, they will spend more time tut tutting your individual choices, whilst hiding their own from public view, blaming the destruction of the Amazon on you taking more than five minutes in the shower. Lifestyle choices as part of a wider campaign can have some effect, individual actions don’t and you can go full vegan, but that won’t stop the 50th largest consumer of oil in the world in its tracks. The US military doesn’t run on carrots. All the moralistic condemnation of eating meat (and yes, we should eat less) won’t stop Iran from being bombed and it wouldn’t have stopped the genocide in Gaza and though you are free to adopt your own personal lifestyle choices, that is what they are. They are not the cutting edge of the struggle against climate change.
I could be wrong about all of this and the issues raised. But how would I know? How would anyone know? Well, you would marshal the facts, analyse them, then discuss them not only with people of a like mind but people who take issue with your analysis. But therein lies the problem with the quasi-religious Left, you can’t ask questions. There is no room for a doubting Thomas. No room for any discussion. The quasi-religious dogma, like more formal religious creeds is not unassailable, therefore you must be prevented from even discussing it. Following this article some will cancel me, none of those will make any cogent arguments against it, though it would be a welcome change from current practice were they to do so. I live in hope.
This article was originally published on the author's Substack.
[1] I have used the Vatican’s online version of The Bible. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/_INDEX.HTM
[3] Asad, H. (2018) Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. Verso. New York & London. para 8.26
[4] See Hass, Jeffery (2010) The Assassination of Fred Hampton. USA. Lawrence Hill Books.
[5] Aaron Maté (30/03/2026) In blow to Syria cover-up, dissenting OPCW inspector wins case at international tribunal.
[6] Independent (17/04/2018) The search for the truth in the rubble of Douma – and one doctor’s doubts over the chemical attack. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-chemical-attack-gas-douma-robert-fisk-ghouta-damascus-a8307726.html
[7] See https://www.ethicalconsumer.org
