What If the Brownshirts Were Brown People?

By Rich Lowry

Monday, May 13, 2024

 

If there’s one thing the Left is absolutely committed to opposing, it is fascism.

 

It hurls the epithet “fascist” at its political enemies all the time and constantly warns of incipient fascism.

 

The pro-Hamas protests, though, have made it clear that there is a loophole in the Left’s anti-fascist commitment that is so blatant that even a variant of national socialism could, in theory, waltz through it.

 

Put aside the Nazis in power, who took over a modern European state and became synonymous with industrial-scale evil. Let’s instead, for the sake of argument, consider something like the Nazis of the 1920s and 1930s — the street fighters and agitators with a deep sense of grievance and seemingly delusional ideological ambitions — and situate them differently.

 

What if such a party were still just as deeply illiberal, violent, and antisemitic but also a stateless third-world movement that branded itself as part of the resistance to Western imperialism? What if it was made up of brown people who were opposed either to other brown people or to white people (or people who could be wrongly portrayed as white)?

 

It’s not so hard to imagine — it wouldn’t be that different from Hamas. The terror group kills its domestic political opponents, glorifies violent struggle, and hates Jews with a thoroughgoing passion.

 

Yet, these repugnant qualities haven’t been enough to discredit it with much of the anti-Israel left.

 

The moral matrix by which the woke Left judges Hamas is a perverse one. The pairs of opposed categories by which the group is judged aren’t democrat versus authoritarian, law-abiding versus bloodthirsty, or tolerant versus antisemitic, all of which put Hamas in a very poor light. No, the categories are brown versus white, third-worlder versus Western, and Jew-hating versus Zionist, all of which work in the terror group’s favor.

 

This is how you get in the elite precincts of America a thriving protest movement that either supports Hamas or is willing to look past its criminality.

 

This blind spot is analogous to how the Left regarded Stalinism in the 1930s. Not everyone on the left was a Communist or a fellow traveler, but there was a sense that the crimes of Communism were at least committed in pursuit of a good cause — in the service of equality and the building of a fairer and more just society.

 

By the same token, for the contemporary Left, Hamas has the right enemies and worthy aims, even if perhaps its methods are regrettable.

 

Once upon a time, the antisemitism of Hamas would itself have guaranteed its disrepute. But the status of Jews has shifted in the moral imagination of the Left. Once, the Jew was the ultimate outsider; now, via Israel, he’s supposedly at the center of so-called white settler-colonialist civilization.

 

From one point of view, there’s nothing that should be appealing to the Left about an Islamic-supremacist organization that hates gays and is wholly opposed to pluralism, not to mention that it engages in grotesque acts of terror. This is a movement of the right, not the left. Its saving grace, though, is that it arrays itself against the “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist” Zionist project.

 

So, sure, it may be an Islamo-fascist organization, but it nonetheless overlaps with progressive values regarding decolonization, anti-racism, and opposition to the primacy of Western civilization. What is Hamas but a group that takes Frantz Fanon out of the seminar room and into real-world tunnels and bunkers?

 

It’s not enough simply to crusade against the Western order, by the way. Vladimir Putin, for instance, leads a white, Christian society that is, arguably, part of the Western world, or related to it, and so his violent challenge to the West gets no sympathy at all (nor should it, of course.)

 

In sum, the Left doesn’t oppose brownshirts as such; rather, it asks whether they are brownshirts for white supremacy or brownshirts for anti-colonialism. If they’re the latter, there is no amount of illiberalism or extremism that it isn’t willing to countenance, up to and including that of a movement as hideous as Hamas.