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Left Right, Left Right- forward March. We can do better than that !

By Hassen Lorgat

The article The global right turn: How the left has fragmented – Chuck Stephens  supposedly sets out to talk of the rise of the right and the fragmentation of the global left. His concluding chant is under the banner of the crusades as he hankers after “Reconquista Crista”.

In his analysis, Stephens chucks in a host of electoral victories and defeats to argue that the Left has been decimated. I agree that the Left has been in decline but not on the facts posited and definitely not based on electoral political trends in Germany, Romania, South Africa and the US. Furthermore, Hungary, Italy and Holland already have Alt-right leaders, it was pointed out.

To bolster  his claim that the Left is running out of steam he lists many faults:corruption and waste, state capture and lawfare, economic mismanagement, wokism (gender equality or what he calls defunding the police, gender modification of minors, men competing in women’s sports) and so on. I fear that Stephens is superficial in his critique.

Sticking to formal politics permits Stephens to omit the Labour Party of the UK, although he mentions that the victory of this denuded, pro-austerity Labour Party as a Left that is being challenged by Nigel Farage et al now and in the next elections. This is not the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn. Keir Starmer’s Labour is right wing and stands in contrast to what Corbyn would have done – fight to end to genocide in Gaza and pro human rights and support for working class families and worker rights. Starmer’s “changed” Labour Party has promised to be both pro-worker and pro-business (an impossibility) and shies away from upholding international human rights law.

Staying with a formal electoralism, his commentary is based on eurocentric tastes and ignores that with all its shortcomings the LEFT has won many elections.  Bolivia returned the Movement Toward Socialism to power in the first presidential election since Evo Morales was ousted (2020); thereafter Pedro Castillo, the leftwing teacher won Peru’s presidential election and the army (still controlled by the Right) had to connive and eventually jail the man. In Chile a former student leader Gabriel Boric,was elected in March 2022. We must all be aware of the leadership of Colombia’s  Gustavo Petro who was a former guerilla leader became President in August 2022 and former trade unionists and former president Inacio Lula da Silva returned to office in 2023. Lula had defeated Trump double, far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro in an election.

All things considered it is true that rightwing forces have met and planned at a global level whilst the left seems to have given up the big picture narratives. We have been navel gazing whilst the right has attacked the media, higher courts, schools of learning and individual and collective human rights by enabling the rich and squeezing the poor further.

Gdansk Declaration Solidarity for Democracy

Before the South African national elections, some African rightwing groups met in Poland in June 2023 committing themselves to work against what they saw as the slide into authoritarianism. Their document was called the Gdansk Declaration Solidarity for Democracy,and included many groups that were opposed to the traditional liberation movements. Not surprisingly representatives from UNITA (Angola), Renamo (Mozambique), United Democratic Front (Malawi), National Unity Platform (Uganda), Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Foundation (Liberia), All for Rwanda (Rwanda), met with the then Editor-in-Chief, Daily Maverick  Branko Brkicas well as Geordin Hill-Lewis (Mayor of Cape Town, South Africa) and the director of the Brenthurst Foundation Greg Mills.

A year and a bit later, It would appear that their concerns were slides to authoritarianism when it emerges from the left formations, and not those they so ardently back. They dare not criticise Donald Trump and others and not only is courage in retreat but basic human decency, justice and fair play.

The biggest weaknesses of Left oriented parties is the failure for these groups to assert their own politics and visions to the public or largely working class and poor people.  In the USA the Democrats under Vice President Kamala Harris tried to be Trump light ignoring the real issues of gun violence, absence of health care for all, deep poverty and marginalisation in many parts of the US and thus I was not surprised they lost. You cannot beat the man by playing his game and under his rules.

Another simplistic tool employed in the article is to see the Left and the Right as fixed cardboard cut-out images or typologies. The Right wing, Stephens writes,  won the  “trifecta” – the White House and both houses of Congress is an embarrassment of compassionate conservatives.  They are in hiding because of the rampant authoritarian rule that opposes civil rights and liberties of individuals and groups. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republicans behave openly -like the imperialists – something I imagine, eats into the corpse of Mark Twain every few minutes.

There is no decency that even former US president Joe Biden has said that the USA has become an unreliable ally and partner. In an interview with the BBC he stated ¨that democracy is under its greatest threat since World War Two and described Trump as a modern-day appeaser.¨ The bullying of Zelensky was  “beneath America” the attempts to grab Greenland, Panama and Canada he called confiscation, he did not dare to say it is old style colonialism and imperialism.

But Biden and his predecessors both Republican and Democrats, were not angels. The invasion of Iraq, the uncritical support for the genocidal Israeli regime was not under Trump…there has always been this trend or carried the white man’s burden – which meant stealing and robbing poorer nations. At times this conduct was called colonialism, later globalisation but Twain was clear it was imperialism.

The rightwing backlash or is it a blow-back (?) is not a result of wokism, but a rear guard attempt to fight to preserve white supremacist ideology and power in a changing world. Archbishop Tutu believed in the wisdom of a rainbow nation, and Trump would have been in his firing line and the weakneed leaders of Europe. As you know, Tutu spoke truth to power at home and abroad.

To end the writer harks back to a white Christian racism to a crusade. Stephens writes that “it would appear that another “Reconquista Crista” is underway.  The first one was when a coalition of Moors and Arabs invaded the Iberian Peninsula. …But with the help of a strong resistance movement ….some support from Charlamagne, this was gradually reversed.  The Muslims were forced back to North Africa.”  What is the intention of this reference? Why invoke an anti Islamic or anti Muslim intellectualism trope? Amongst Muslim rulers today, many are so rightwing and Trump knows as he has their ears and he theirs? As you can see the world is more complex than you have portrayed it.

And since you opened the door with your crusading imagery which I wonder whether it was an attempt to intimidate some readers or to engage in a fruitful discourse. Either way, it was misplaced and leaves me with only one recommendation for you: read Tariq Ali’s  Islam Quintet by Verso. Ali is a leftwing international scholar and prolific author, with titles ranging from contemporary politics to historical fiction. These five books hopefully will open your mind and deal with high points of Muslim rule where collaboration with Jewish scholars and scholars from all over the world is not what Trump and Netayahu would believe in their narrow minds. The region known as Al-Andalus, had greater degrees of tolerance and zest for learning  — something sadly lacking today.

Books, libraries and centres of learning were widespread, and one scholar Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 81.wrote thus:  “so numerous were the private libraries [in the Muslim world] that one writer has estimated that, as of 1200, there were more books in private hands in the Moslem world than in all libraries, public and private, of western Europe.”

The reconquista also brought with it forced conversions and book burnings. In Castile muslims were ordered by law to convert to christianity or be expelled whilst books of learning including Islamic books were often confiscated or burned. This was lawful or in the US an executive order but the decree of 1526 was a decree against islamic texts which saw thousands of arabic manuscripts burnt. We can do better than harking back to that .

Let me give the last word to Tariq Ali who was honoured with a Granadillo in 2010 by the Cultural Festival of the city of Granada, Spain awarded for his novels known as the Islam Quintet. His speech captures the concerns we raised in this debate. He writes that

“in the realm of culture–music, literature, theatre–there are attempts to convey some of what has been lost: a Europe where once there was a co-existence of many cultures and traditions that created a unique synthesis in philosophy and literature. In the realm of world politics nothing has been learnt. 

The Reconquest  of the 15th century has been replaced today by a process of Recolonization. A million Iraqis died after the occupation of their country; giant US bases have been built to keep American soldiers in the country indefinitely. Afghanistan has been occupied for over eight years (and including by troops from your country). Might this have something to do with a widespread belief in the Muslim world that the Crusades are not yet over?”

Hassen Lorgat
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