Daniel Greenfield | GATESTONE | July 1, 2024
Pictured: French revolutionary Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre (1758-1794) being executed by guillotine after the French Revolution. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)
Those who care too much will eventually care enough to kill.
“Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; – the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!” —A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Every leftist cause is founded on empathy.
The quintessential leftist, no matter how much blood eventually spatters his hands, starts off by caring a great deal about other people. His heart bleeds for the oppressed, the workers and the peasants, for racial and sexual minorities, and for all the oppressed peoples of the world.
The ideological fashions may change, but the story is always told the same way.
Somewhere there is an oppressed group to be liberated. And he, she or they is the one to fight for their liberation. Along the way, that exquisite sensitivity which may lead an upper class Ivy Leaguer to learn all about the customs and suffering of black transgender men in Detroit or Hamas terrorists in Gaza congeals into an equal insensitivity for the suffering of his targets.
And then people die. Sometimes it’s those he considers the oppressed or the oppressors. Usually both. The humanitarians become terrorists and their revolutions lead to tyranny.
The opposite of tyranny isn’t revolution, just as the opposite of empathy isn’t a lack of caring. They are both circles. Revolutions make tyrannies and empathy leads to cruelty. While there is a small subset of humanity that genuinely lacks empathy, most of the ideological bloodshed of the last century and this one was committed by men and women who cared far too much.
Those who care too much will eventually care enough to kill.
That is the argument that has been made in defense of every murderous leftist cause and is currently being made for Hamas. If you really care about the suffering in Gaza, you too would set yourself on fire or burn Israeli families alive in their homes. If you really care, you won’t care.
Genuine humanitarians can exhaust themselves caring too much. But those are the types of people who stay up nights helping others. Some of this type can be recruited into leftist movements, but the average leftist is a deeply insincere humanitarian who cares about others only as a vehicle for developing an identity and asserting it on a public stage.
Leftists genuinely do care a lot. They care about rising oceans, polar bears, women in hijabs, men in dresses, drug dealers in the ghetto and eco-terrorists in prison, racist highways and dead terrorists, and if you think of something that they don’t care about yet, they will soon.
As long as it fits the larger agenda of asserting their will over society from a moral high ground.
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