“Why does the left love tyrannical regimes?” asks Edward Lucas, one of the few journalists who begin to understand international politics.
Yet this question is phrased incorrectly. It’s not just the left that suffers from such perverse affections. It’s also the right. It’s also the middle ground. It’s modernity in general.
Mr Lucas specifically talks about the West bending over backwards to do trade with China, which he correctly describes as another “evil empire”. Much of Mr Lucas’s article is about showing that China is indeed both evil and an empire.
The case he makes is unassailable, with many cited facts leading to the ineluctable conclusion: “The rule of law in China is a farce. Torture and other abuses are endemic. The justice system is a tool of the Communist Party.”
However, replace ‘China’ with ‘Russia’ and ‘the Communist Party’ with ‘the KGB junta’, and the conclusion will be just as true. However, while China’s useful idiots generally reside on the left, Russia’s sub-species mostly roam on the right.
To be sure, following the rape of the Ukraine, Western governments imposed some mild sanctions on Russia. But pressure is growing throughout the West to repeal or at least soften them. This pressure is exerted by the right, and it’s every bit as shrill and pervasive as anything the left screams about China.
The arguments for trade with China are mostly economic, as opposed to being only partly so in relation to Russia. That’s why the China-loving left has a broader appeal than the Putinista right.
If support for China is, say, 20 per cent ideological and 80 per cent economic, with Russia it’s roughly the other way around. But what I call Western ‘totalitarian economism’ is a factor in both cases. Both totalitarian politics and totalitarian economism are children of the Enlightenment, even if the latter was born on the wrong side of the blanket.
Because the Enlightenment severed the metaphysical roots of our civilisation, the tree withered and its fallen fruits rotted on the ground. Supposedly perpetrated in the name of reason, the Enlightenment destroyed reason by replacing spiritual ratio with materialistic rationalism. Falling by the wayside was the essential sustenance of our civilisation: faith, charity, honour, spiritual and intellectual pursuits.
All such realities were perverted, destroyed and replaced with virtual caricatures. As an almost immediate result, the West lost its founding raison d’être, forming a vacuum that nature abhors and people try to fill.
If Western reason had seen search for truth as the aim of life, the materialistic rationalism of the Enlightenment threw up money to act in that capacity. For the first time in history the economy assumed a starring role in life’s drama, a new development that was ushered in and then post-rationalised by new thinkers.
In that sense, there isn’t much difference among the benign Adam Smith, the evil Karl Marx, the matter-of-fact Max Weber and their retinues of followers and acolytes. When it came to replacing Western truth with totalitarian economism, they were all culpable. (Thus Weber: “Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life.”)
Economy in general and trade in particular became deified or at least idealised. The British led the way, touting, along with material gain, the civilising and redemptive effect foreign trade can have on tyrannies.
Since then Western trillions, packaged as either trade or aid, have poured into the coffers of every diabolical tyrant of modernity, from Lenin to Hitler, from Stalin to Mao, from Putin to Xi Jinping – with utterly predictable results.
Not much civilising effect is in evidence. What is in evidence, amply documented in the past and rapidly piling up at present, is unbearable oppression, suppression of every known liberty, torture, assassination, unprecedented levels of corruption, millions murdered in the recent past and thousands being murdered at present, a world torn apart by two world wars and teetering at the edge of a third one.
But all that is happening in either the geographical or temporal elsewhere, while the profits brought in by trade with monsters are here and now. That’s the vindication of our vulgar post-Enlightenment modernity, and what better vindication than money can anyone want?
Add to this the gravitational pull of Chinese communism keenly felt by the left and the ideological attraction of Putinesque fascism giving the more ignorant parts of the right a tingling penile sensation, and one can understand why tyrannical regimes are thriving.
One could argue – in fact, I do argue in just about all my books – that all modernity, regardless of its professed ideological hue, gravitates toward tyranny definitely and totalitarianism probably. This isn’t a transient symptom but a systemic defect.
If the West’s traditional political and economic power was vectored from centre to periphery, devolving to the lowest sensible level, post-Enlightenment modernity has reversed that direction. Political power is now concentrated within central government, while its typological economic equivalent, the giant corporation, has usurped economic power.
China, Russia and similar regimes are merely extreme, rather than sole, manifestations of this tendency. They spread the kind of poison for which the West no longer secretes an effective antidote – its endocrine glands have atrophied and totalitarian poison is coursing through it veins.