What do Left and Right Mean Today?

UPDATING 2-22-2009 see at bottom

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

Comments on the meaning of "left" and "right" today. Do they mean anything? Has today"s Left become the natural heir of yesteryear's "right-wing" Judeophobes?? What's the diff between today's Left --most of it-- and yesteryear's Nazis?? My thoughts here were prompted by a discussion on Augean Stables.

These labels like "left" & "right" can be very elastic in meaning. Marx after all was intelligent and well-informed, without my necessarily agreeing with his noxious theories. Unfortunately today's Left is exceedingly ignorant, and often proud of it, and often incapable of reasoning. What else does post-modernism mean if not deliberately overlooking or minimizing empirical facts and rejecting reason??

Today's "left" calls itself such without having any link or even knowing what the Marxist criteria of analysis were, it seems. After all, Lenin defined imperialism as finance capitialism, grosso modo. The definition can be questioned, but that's what Lenin said. Now, who has really big capital today yet is not criticized as imperialist? Good guess. Yes, it's the Arab oil sheiks. They possess billions and billions, just like American, European, other Western and Asian rich. But nobody notices the degraded labor conditions in Kuwait and the rest of those Persian Gulf emirates and in Saudi Arabia that are imposed on foreign workers coming in from Pakistan, India, Bengladesh, Philippines, etc. If that situation were given the attention it deserves, it would arouse outrage and indignation in the West, but it is precisely the "left" that ignores it. They would rather attack Israel for making it more difficult to smuggle rockets into Gaza.

That's how we know that we are dealing with Judeophobes, that Judeophobia is their prime motivation, not any loyalty to what used to be considered socialist goals. They focus on wrongs done by Jews, real or invented, and overlook wrongs done by the Jews' enemies. Of course, there's a lot more to say on this issue. Maybe we'll come back to it.

UPDATING2-22-2009 A historical sketch of how the British Empire and the Communists both contributed to building up Arab nationalism & 20th & 21st centuryIslamic jihad
[print version - full version with comments], Jerusalem Post 2-18-2009.
Previous post on Emet m'Tsiyon about Bolsheviks for jihad & genocide.

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.