Every time I think we've hit Peak Left, the left goes one better. Or to paraphrase Michelle Obama, when they go low, we do a series celebrating an ideology of mass murder.
While at the New York Times, that's been Communism. The old red lady has a series trying to reconcile Communism with modern lefty trends like environmentalism and feminism. And Islam.
"What Killed the Promise of Muslim Communism?" asks the Times.
Same thing that killed the promise of kale and New Coke in a blender. Or the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Communism is an atheistic utopian movement that believes in killing and subjugating everyone. Islam is like that. Except without the atheism. You can see a certain conflict here. And by "you", I mean anyone who isn't a leftist. Because leftists can't see obvious conflicts like this. Just beautiful genocidal dreams that might have been.
For a brief moment after the Bolshevik uprisings of 1917, it looked like revolution might be waged across vast swaths of the world under the joint banner of Communism and Islam.
Almost as promising as the Hitler-Stalin pact.
From Egypt and Iraq to India and the Indonesian archipelago, Islam became a rallying call against European colonialism and imperialism.
And rallying to Islamists and against Jews. And rallying to Nazis. But such pesky details get in the way of the left's beautiful dreams.
But as we now know, Communism and Islam failed to coalesce into a lasting alliance. By the onset of the Cold War, they seemed irrevocably opposed.
It's sad when death cults fall out.
Socialist influence within the Sarekat Islam was already evident at the movement’s congress in 1916, where the Prophet Muhammad was proclaimed to be “the father of Socialism and the pioneer of democracy” and “the Socialist par excellence.”
He certainly excelled at wealth redistribution.
In Java and elsewhere, “Islam” provided a banner for Muslim merchants to contest economic encroachment by non-Muslims
Translation, it allowed Muslims to engage in the racist persecution of non-Muslims, especially the Chinese.
Islamic parties were uncomfortable with the Communists’ insistence that independence from Dutch colonial rule also upend aristocratic privileges and bring about the establishment of Socialist forms of ownership over land and industry. This conflict extended into the early post-independence period. Islamic organizations actively participated in the anti-Communist pogroms of 1965-66, which destroyed the P.K.I. and left hundreds of thousands of casualties across Indonesia.
This is how the leftist--Islamist alliances always end. With Islamists butchering their leftist useful idiots. There's a lesson here for the New York Times. But you can bet it'll be too pushing propaganda for Linda Sarsour's next appearance to ponder it.
One effect of the failure of revolutionary forces to mobilize under the joint banner of Communism and Islam was to deeply divide Muslims, weakening their capacity first to fight colonialism
Somehow colonialism was force than Communism and Islam which had individually killed millions.
A full century after the Russian Revolution, the failed alliance between Communism and Islam continues to shape the politics of the Muslim world.
Oh what might have been...