By Chris R
For the purposes of this article, by ‘Left’ I mean the political, cultural and social organisations, networks and groups inhabited by trade unionists, activists, campaigners and party members including, not exhaustively, the Labour Party, trade unions and trades councils, groups such as Stop the War, the People’s Assembly, Extinction Rebellion etc; all the comrades, colleagues and friends with whom we have worked, marched, leafletted, campaigned and picketed for decades, and from whom, since the end of March 2020, we have become progressively alienated – in short, the entire socialist/labour movement/Left/progressive bloc. It’s a huge category and admits some anomalies but the differences are compensated for by its constituents’ unanimity of opinion on the covid question.
When the ruling class declared open war on the masses in March 2020, the national lockdown – it was actually a lockout – was met by the labour movement and the Left not with resistance and militancy but compliance and submission.
The Left was cleverly outmanoeuvred by Boris Johnson at the beginning of the crisis. By feinting in favour of ‘herd immunity’, he secured the support of ‘progressive’ opinion for a lockdown policy that was the plan all along. ‘How dare they refer to us as a herd? We are not cattle,’ cried the Left intelligentsia, as they dutifully stayed in their quarters and waited for their injections.
Almost to a man and woman, the Left swallowed the state-corporate narrative about SARS-CoV-2 and supported lockdown policies, differentiating itself from the government line only by demanding faster, harder and longer lockdowns in line with the insane ‘Zero Covid’ agenda.
‘Social distancing’, the quarantining of healthy people, face masks, invasive swabbing – there wasn’t a single anti-human behavioural proscription that the Left didn’t support.
The Left willingly participated in the ‘track and trace’ surveillance racket, enthusiastically shifted its activism online (all meetings being run off Deep State-infested Big Tech platforms), agitated and advocated for the replacement of real wages with state dependency and, most grievously, demonstrated the highest form of comradely compliance with the diktats of the emerging biosecurity state by rolling its sleeves up for four rounds – so far – of experimental injections.
At the dawn of a brutal new phase of the class war, the Left sided with the oppressor. It flunked its biggest challenge in a hundred years. Not since the entire European Left – with the exception of the Bolshevik faction – swung behind the war parties in 1914 has the movement made such a disastrous misstep.
Where was the Left when it mattered?
As the lockdown crisis unfolded in spring and summer 2020, the Left was silent on all the big issues that mattered. The deliberate creation of mass unemployment, routine abuse of police powers, suspension of elections, totalitarian restrictions on freedom of movement, thousands of ‘collateral’ deaths, intensified surveillance – none of this elicited so much as a murmur of protest. This almost inexplicable ignorance has persisted right up to the present day, almost three years on from the first lockdown. There isn’t time or space to comprehensively detail the Left’s failures during this time, but dishonourable mention should be made of the following examples:
- In May 2021, Sean O’Grady, associate editor of the Independent wrote: ‘This is what we do about anti-vaxxers: No job. No entry. No NHS access.’ In December of that year, Anne McElvoy in the Evening Standard described the unvaccinated as ‘a lethal liability we can ill-afford.’ Neither these nor similar obscenities in other ‘respectable’ newspapers were denounced by Left journalists, or by the National Union of Journalists for that matter.
- A campaign is underway to reinstate the 40,000 care home workers who lost their jobs because they wouldn’t submit to the experimental injections. These people are heroes of the labour movement. But Unison isn’t leading the campaign. The unions were also conspicuous by their absence during the NHS100k campaign, a grassroots, worker-led movement against a vicious Tory policy which would normally be a no-brainer for the labour movement.
- The Left’s proud tradition of internationalism stayed squarely at home as unvaccinated minorities in Lithuania and Austria faced exclusion from society under neo-fascist Covid regulations. No vigils or petitions, no solidarity hashtags. Even industrial action wasn’t enough to engage the Left’s interest – the Morning Star expended not one word of coverage on the Italian dockworkers’ strikes in opposition to the ‘Green Pass’ system. These were huge acts of working-class militancy that enjoyed broad popular support in Trieste and other ports but were presumably not significant enough to make it into the pages of the People’s Press.
- Over the years, the various ‘Stand Up To’ campaigns have managed to stand up to Racism, Trump and UKIP but they clearly didn’t think it worth getting out of their seats to oppose vaccine apartheid.
The problem wasn’t that the Left didn’t protest during the lockdown period but that it protested about anything except the most pressing issues of the day. It got out on the streets for George Floyd but was unmoved by the dubious death of John Magufuli.
The George Floyd protests, incidentally, provided a sobering visual representation of the natural posture of the Left in the Covid era: muzzled and on its knees.
The Left protested about the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act but had nothing to say about the even more repressive provisions of the Coronavirus Act or the wholesale application of intrusive surveillance technologies via ‘track and trace’.
The Left swung in behind Reclaim the Streets but was silent over regulations that restricted the free movement of the public and the forced masking of children in schools, a diabolical policy openly sought by the NEU.
Again and again, the Left tilted at the wrong targets.
In the meantime, the heavy lifting was being done by early anti-lockdown protesters in the spring and summer of 2020, who were routinely battered and arrested for their pains.
Though hugely significant, these protests were small enough for the Left to ignore; when they became the mass mobilisations of summer 2021 onwards, ignorance was replaced by slander, as evidenced by a priceless piece of intellectual contortionism from Socialist Worker in January 2022 entitled ‘Anti-vaxx marches – a warning from the right’. The article claimed that the NHS100k campaign was being used by shadowy far-right entities to legitimise a movement driven by conspiracy theories rooted in anti-Semitism.
The Morning Star’s Peter Frost weighed in that same month, accusing the White Rose sticker outfit of being a cabal of extreme Roman Catholic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists and depicting ‘anti-vaxxers’ as ‘what the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich described in the 1930s as “people in trouble” – the raw material of fascism.’
Right and Left, right and wrong
This trope – gullible people with grievances being used by nefarious actors in the pursuit of far-right agendas – has been a frequent feature of Left discourse over anti-lockdown/anti-mandate protests. It’s a lazy default response to a social movement that has had the temerity to emerge and flourish without reference to the Left. There is no respect paid to the individual agency of protestors who have arrived at their positions through lived experience and intellectual enquiry.
The Left’s fanatical opposition to anything that can be construed as right wing, or mendaciously characterised as right wing, enabled it to sit out the biggest mass movement of modern times.
Anything that contradicts the Left Covid consensus is right wing. Criticism of ‘settled science’ is right wing. Arguments against the legitimacy of lockdowns are right wing. Refusal to be injected with an experimental synthetic gene technology is right wing. Campaigning and protesting against any of this is right wing. Million-strong London marches were right wing. The Canadian trucker convoys and New Zealand freedom camps were right wing. Nurses campaigning against vaccine mandates were right wing.
To the obedient Left way of thinking, anything that contradicted that state-media Covid narrative, whether received direct from source or mediated through Left influencers, was right wing.
Many of us have gone beyond the Left-Right paradigm but, conceding that it still has substance, there are, of course, right wing elements in the freedom movement. It’s a mass popular movement representing the people in its broadest manifestation. But if the freedom movement is not far right, on Covid the Left has definitely been far wrong.
In fact, its response to popular uprisings in Italy, Canada, the UK and New Zealand and many other countries suggest that if there is one thing the Left hates more than poverty, injustice, racism and war, it’s the working-class taking matters into its own hands.
The utterly skewed balance between Left activism during the covid period and the real popular uprising was made plain in London in June 2021.
A huge freedom march shared street space with People’s Assembly, Kill the Bill and Extinction Rebellion demos. The contrast in numbers was staggering – up to seventy times more people were on the freedom march than the People’s Assembly demo – but just as impressive were the political aesthetics. The colour, diversity, energy, anger and humour of the freedom marches made the rituals of the traditional Left event suddenly seem lifeless and flat. The freedom marches were mass people’s events. They were fresh and vital and heterogeneous. They were joyous occasions. It was a sudden revelation, striking because of its sheer bloody obviousness: this is what a genuine popular uprising feels like.
Uncuriouser and uncuriouser
The Left’s failure hasn’t just been a failure to act. The Left has failed to be curious. It has failed to read dissenting narratives. It has failed to use its critical faculties. It has accepted everything it has been told about covid at face value.
Leftists have asked no questions about infection fatality rates, the PCR test cycle thresholds, the reporting of covid deaths or the prohibition on early treatment protocols; they have shown no hesitation in shoving swabs into their facial orifices, have expressed no doubts about the efficacy or desirability of mask wearing and have had no concerns over the speed with which the ‘vaccines’ were put into circulation. Every tenet of the state-media narrative has been accepted without thinking.
The Left has asked no questions about the role of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, EcoHealth Alliance and GAVI in setting the covid narrative or looked into the significance of Event 201; it has refused to acknowledge the absurdity of Neil Ferguson’s ‘modelling’ and shown no interest in exploring the circumstances surrounding the deaths of John Magufuli and other African leaders who challenged the dominant covid narrative.
The Left has also exhibited no signs of consternation over the routine censoring and banning of dissenting opinions on social media, presumably because all the censored and banned scientist, academics and writers were right wing.
All this important, troubling and downright fascinating subject matter sits way beyond the narrow field of Left inquiry.
Now, as the unfolding public health disaster of the experimental injection programme has moved even Piers Morgan to reflect on the illegitimacy of his previous stance on the ‘vaccines’, the Left apparently has no interest in looking at the data on excess deaths, negative vaccine efficacy or rampant myocarditis in young people. It has no ears for the warnings of Dr Aseem Malhotra or Professor Angus Dalgleish; worse, it has abjectly failed to show even the feeblest flicker of solidarity with the thousands of victims, dead and alive, of the jabs.
Shame on the Left!
It has missed out on the opportunity to be part of something magnificent. Dismal as the last three years have been, the flowering of new forms of activism has been wondrous to behold. Millions of people have organised, agitated and campaigned, many of them for the first time in their lives. There has been a thrilling surge in new modes of thinking. The global freedom movement, in all its diffuseness and diversity, has been a living school of revolutionary theory and practice. Millions of people have woken up and they will never go back to their old ways of thinking. But all of this has taken place outside of the precincts of the Left.
The Left has persisted with its customs and practices when all around it a new revolutionary world is being born. Suddenly these customs and practices look tired and worn. How dreary the Left press looks compared to The Light, for example! The Light is everything a proper radical paper should be – disputatious, unorthodox, lively, original, provocative, inspirational and brave. It has thousands more readers than the Morning Star and Socialist Worker combined and its analysis of ruling class power is more incisive and acute.
The Morning Star and Socialist Worker do not routinely write about central bank digital currencies, the Technate, the Medical-Industrial Complex or the World Economic Forum. They haven’t undertaken any analysis of the economic underpinnings of the covid programme. Work of the quality produced by the likes of Iain Davis or Fabio Vighi is alien to their pages. The Morning Star and Socialist Worker are no more radical than the Guardian, the Independent or the BBC. These otiose organs of pseudo-progressive opinion continue to toil in a self-referential circle, their backs turned to the emerging new reality, whilst a rising generation of journalists, analysts and commentators provides inspiration and intellectual ammunition for a growing global movement which owes no debt to the Left and has no reason to regret its absence from the struggle.
The current outbreak of industrial action is a response to an economic crisis caused to a great extent by an insane policy that the Left applauded in 2020. It is three years too late. Faced with the biggest attack on the working-class in modern history, the Left exchanged the red cap of liberty for the blue face mask of compliance and abandoned the field. After such a catastrophic failure of judgement, the question is not whether the Left in its present form can recover but whether it should continue to exist at all.
In Part 2 I will examine some of the fundamentals of contemporary Left thinking that might explain why and how it failed to respond correctly to the covid challenge, including a horror of ‘conspiracy theories’, a pernicious anti-industrial mentality, and, amongst the intelligentsia, alienation from productive economic work.
Disturbing to read that Peter Frost, journalist with the Morning Star quoted Wilhelm Reich in a piece denouncing the White Rose sticker campaign. Reich was not a psychiatrist, but the inventor of a form of psychotherapy (orgonomy) which uses character analysis and manipulations of the physical body (applying pressure to muscle groups etc) to dissolve stuck trauma/childhood wounding patterns and the defenses against feeling held pain, which Reich termed ‘armouring.’ and theorised is endemic in populations due to health distorting conditions of modern living and child rearing. The entire body of Reich’s work was a radical challenge to the established order, with the overarching theme being freedom of the human being and how to achieve it. He advocated for practices like natural birth, breast feeding, and parenting styles which fulfill children’s biological and evolutionary needs and were neither authoritarian nor permissive., as well acceptance of teenage sexuality (a great taboo at the time).His theory of ‘what he deemed emotional plague characters & outbreaks is more relevant today than ever.
‘Every so often, the emotional plague develops into an epidemic just like any other contagious disease, such as the bubonic plague or cholera. Epidemic outbreaks of the emotional plague become manifest in widespread and violent breakthroughs of sadism and criminality, on a small and large scale. One such epidemic outbreak was the Catholic Inquisition of the Middle Ages; the international fascism of the twentieth century is another.’ https://anarchy.org.au/anarchist-texts/reich-emotional-plague/
I recommend, ‘Listen Little Man’ and ‘The Mass Psychology of Fascism’ also.
Reich was eventually incarcerated in a US prison, where he died prematurely, after mass book burnings of his works there. If Reich were alive today, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind which side of the covid conformist/ dissenters side he would be on!
I have to laugh about this and how it applies to all of you sheep out there: Had to laugh myself silly about this one – now I don’t pay to read The Washington Post so I don’t get to give on of my invariably snide remarks
Health reporter Lena H. Sun builds her own indoor air purifier to reduce the spread of pathogens. Sun, who has been covering the coronavirus pandemic for three years, said she wants to gather safely and more often with friends and family.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/01/13/air-filter-diy-covid/?utm_campaign=wp_to_your_health&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_tyh
The truth of the matter is there is zero need to fear a virus, irrespective of what sort it is – the fear is pushed out there to nudge you into being vaccinated and brought into the synthetic mRNA vaccinated fold, forever what purpose that might be – non human’s you – no longer human with zero “human rights”
The simple reality, irrespective of if you are vaccinated or not is my free salt water cure.
Go outside, fill your lungs with air, enjoy the spectacle of the seasons and show the world you don’t give a shit about Covid anything, because the virus and the vaccines are deliberate efforts to rob you of your freedom and kill you off as quickly and conveniently as they can, by keeping things normal as normalcy keeps you feeling safe and you can’t see the cracks which are starting to appear.
30 years never had a virus or bacteria infection = never ill: Mix one heaped teaspoon of salt in a mug of clean warm water – cup a hand and in stages, sniff or snort the mugful up your nose spitting out anything which comes down into your mouth. If burning sensation, you have a virus and the salt solution is disinfecting it, so wait 2-3 minutes until burning sensation goes away, then blow out your nose on toilet paper and flush away, washing your hands afterwards. Do my free salt water cure morning, noon, night or more often if you want, until it feels like you are flushing with water only – job done. 3 minutes idea to job done – simple. No virus, no Covid or Long Covid in your head possible. You cannot catch Covid, you have to catch a Coronavirus first and let it become Covid in the nasal passages of your head, later transported down into your body in the one liter of snot, or mucus, we each produce daily – the engine oil of the body. Vaccines – what for – I never have any. My method is like using a fire hose to put out a fire. It takes 3 minutes to prepare and do with salt and clean water and over the 30 years I and others have been doing it, it has NOT killed or injured ONE PERSON, unlike those synthetic mRNA vaccines, ALSO verified by Alberta Medical University – Canada. Do it – you will be amazed at how quickly it destroys colds and flu in the nasal passages of your head. No infection, no Covid possible. Spread the word to everyone please. Neti pots are like using a garden sprinkler to put out a house fire. your life, your choice!! AND free!!
Interesting, tho kinda messy & invasive no? I’ve just used H2O2 3% food grade in a small spray bottle, if enclosed in busy areas just spritz at back of throat. Does the same job as salt water just easier to use & carry with you.. Also when I did have covid (before using the h202) I took homeopathic remedies to great effect, all symptoms gone within a few days. Main ones used – Anas Barb, gelsemium, eupatorium, phosphorus & bryonia. Worth having these or a kit at home. Never been jabbed never will. Wouldn’t trust pharma CO’s as far as could throw them. Basically they’re Drug pushers looking for lifetime customers nothing more.
Many thanks, Chris R for this provocative challenge, Certainly it chimes with how I am thinking and how I am feeling after fifty years of describing myself as being on the Left, albeit increasingly alienated by its underlying authoritarianism. Only this last week I started to pen a piece arguing that the COVID years witnessed an intensification of the Class War, a conscious attack on the personal and political autonomy of working people by a ruling class intent on retaining its power at all costs. I don’t think it’s completely rendered redundant by your incisive analysis so I’ll keep scribbling, inspired by your thoughts. If it’s repetitive so be it. There’s a case for repeating oneself in the face of wilful denial.
On something of a whim, I posted the following on New Year’s Day.
https://chattingcritically.com/2023/01/01/in-the-new-year-unite-and-fight-for-humanitys-sake/
The absence of reaction to much that I have written over the last few years, other than perhaps embarrassment at my ‘infantile populism’, says much about the professional and academic Left’s distance from how many ‘ordinary folk are experiencing the world. Or perhaps I protest too much, a desire to be in critical dialogue was perhaps never historically a central plank of the Left’s politics.
If you want to read more always membership free (see Christine’s substack on Steve Kirsch’s substack) about what a Con Job Moderna’s Covid deliberately infectious virus patented by them in 2013 with 4 other Covid patents was, plus the US Law 2013 which passed a Law (conveniently and at the same time) that anyone synthetically mRNA vaccinated is no longer human and “all” human rights are lost, because the synthetic, manufactured (not naturally occurring in the human body) patented mRNA and RNA vaccines go in the blood supply past the blood brain barrier and into the inner workings of the body in the billions of lipid packages, containing 99% Graphene Oxide, mRNA particles, nanotechnology and parasites which can only be seen at a cellular level with an electron microscope in each injection which you can read here (BUT also see my comments in the blurb after his articles, updated today) : https://www.drrobertyoung.com/post/transmission-electron-microscopy-reveals-graphene-oxide-in-cov-19-vaccines?postId=65f9aadb-2379-4417-9eb3-a004a21185a4&utm_campaign=b3a34a84-a591-4cf4-9787-5d8db389a3cf&utm_source=so&utm_medium=mail&utm_content=2d54d484-1d88-4312-a3e9-a8fc7b547ae5&cid=8bec1d4c-3773-415a-83c2-1694daa095a4 then you get the depth of what is going on here – deliberate, planned genocide of our species – and my way to kill the nanotechnology – however there is a risk to everything so consider your option first – start to turn the tide and hold those behind this physically accountable – kill them off – no CCTV around no DNA traces left.
Thank you, Tony. I think that the more that this matter is written about, discussed and debated the better and I look forward to reading your contribution to the developing narrative. Your point about the distance between the academic/professional Left and the common experience of the people is spot on and explains the speed at which said Left was left behind by the heterodox, vital and responsive popular movements that arose in response to the ruling class’s assault starting in March 2020; sadly, that section of the Left at least is so lacking in self-awareness it still hasn’t figured out that has been both outflanked by the enemy and rendered obsolete by the resistance. Best wishes, Chris
That is an excellent summary. Thank you!
Excellent and many many thanks – lest we forget indeed! This is powerful and needs to ‘go viral’ – I hope it does
Well, I’m doing my bit and have been since 2019 – yet here we are and it is early 2023 and how many of you have ever heard of me before this or the simple free cure I have been expounding since 2012 when I got my first online computer?
There is no point saying “we” if that means you sit at your keyboard and do nothing else. If you believe in any part of what I have said, begin my free salt water cure immediately and whenever you think you might have caught an airborne infection and pass my free salt water cure onto everyone who you know and tell them to pass it on too – I don’t want credit for it – I am about saving lives, not destroying them – we are in World War 3 and our enemy is deeply entrenched in our individual and very existence – like the virus they would have you believe exists – but they are the virus and we need to identify them and root them out and kill them, any way we can – do unto them as they are doing, have done and will continue to do to us n exterminating us, but do it first.
Thanks Rix, I appreciate your kind words.
Many even on right believe that left movement is funded and manipulated by the capital at the highest level after Lenin and Trotsky disappeared from the scene.
Absolutely spot on. I am ashamed of what has become of the Labour Party. Where is the intellectual left in our universities who should have been driving the research, the analysis of what has happened to us?
I’d say Blair/Brown/Mandelson destroyed most of the ‘old left’ and that certain figures were probably deliberately got rid of. They were a threat to the global corporate takeover. Starmer continues the process.
The Morning Star covered the overthrow of Jeremy Corbyn. I’ve seen better/less bad COVID coverage in the Spectator. Funny old world.
With a ‘Sir’ who is a member of the Trilateral Commission leading what was once the workers’ party, I imagine Brown and Blair couldn’t be happier with the way their project has turned out.
That was a good article.
Being of a libertarian communist/Anarchist persuasion [for 30 years] I am somewhat pleased at the refusal of Trotskyite entryists to hi-jack this movement.
Formerly politically naïve authentic members of the working class are attending meetings and are generating and developing their own primitive class analysis of society.
In Manchester anyway.
With the WEF being a kind of political embodiment of the ruling class/elite.
There does seem to be just about enough of “us” to short cut things along a bit.
Eg Prof James Woudhuysen
https://togetherdeclaration.org/product/together-live-event-manchester-thu-12-jan-2023-this-is-going-to-be-painful-the-cost-of-lockdowns-crisis/
They give themselves away to those familiar with “Marxist” buzz words.
You would have thought that supporting 70,000 or so [healthcare] workers facing the sack would be an unconditional ‘red line’; but I was accused of marching with the fascists for doing so by an SWP paper seller.
I appreciate the reference to the literature supporting the SWP position.
It is the greatest disgrace for the left since 1914.
Although it should be noted that Mensheviks also opposed the first world war and attended the Zimmerwald conference.
This from a completely hostile ‘Lenin’ with anti- Menshevik notes.
http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/TPI17.html
This article reflects my feelings and experiences over the last 3 years perfectly. Well done for calling out the Morning Star – a controlled opposition if ever there was one. How it came to be run by neo-Maoists would make for an interesting future LLS article (hint hint). It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they were found to be in receipt of CCP funding!
Neil (above) remarks he’s seen better COVID coverage (than the MS’s) in the Spectator. Me too, thanks to Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic site, the place I also first heard about THIS site. These past few years have certainly made for some pretty strange bedfellows! It’s true what they say about there being no Left/Right paradigm any more. It’s straight up Authoritarian/Libertarian now!
The Conservative Woman also has better covid coverage than the Morning Star or Socialist Worker. It’s a big bed and strangely comfortable even though most of the occupants are sleeping on the right-hand side!
Thank you for a well reasoned and incisive analysis. However, in defense of my fellows on “the Left” – I feel compelled to point out that since the vast majority who identify as “left” or “progressive” here in the U.S. can’t seem to figure out “how to define” – “what a woman is” – clearly they can’t be expected to know what something as nuanced as “what class warfare is” either. I mean let’s be realistic. Constantly virtue signally about perceived “micro-aggressions” and one’s own “pronouns” is a pretty much full-time job that leaves relatively little time to recognize – much less engage with – actual material “reality.” In fact I dare say that from the current “left” perspective here in the States – that if a biological male complete with penis, gonads and a beard can “be a woman” deserving of unfettered access to formerly women’s only spaces like rape shelters and women’s locker rooms – than certainly mindlessly supporting the most authoritarian, draconian assaults on civil liberties can be construed instead as somehow valiantly – “fighting fascism.” In an era in which both mammalian biology and language have proved quite incredibly malleable in the minds of my associates on the American “Left” – barring a reclaiming of “material reality” itself – I fear we are doomed to some new “Post-Modern” version of “freedom” – one which stripped of all real-world meaning already increasingly resembles all the authoritarianisms of old. Looking forward to part 2.
The sea change was the official collapse of the ex-USSR. The Left in the West became fake from that point onwards as it adopted capitalism lock stock and barrel. The permanent war economy with Yugoslavia in the 1980’s, the permanent refugee economy with the adoption of mass replacement migration then the permanent vaxx depopulation agenda adopting Big Pharma ..
The conflict by NATO against Russia will bring us back to the fundamentals once more without the fake left.
The “transgender” propaganda is an extreme conclusion of the postmodernist corruption of the Left. Very wealthy interests have been funding this trans movement – and this has been evident from the clearly biased reporting throughout the mainstream media in which this utterly fictional and frankly illogical demographic is always portrayed as “helpless” and “hated” etc. The well-reasoned arguments against allowing predatory (and frankly psychotic) males to enter the spaces not only of women but of traumatised women are never allowed to be aired on the mainstream and are instead shouted down as “hate speech”.
Furthermore, the undermining of basic words such as “male”, “female”, and “gender” itself is a major blow against language itself as Orwell brilliantly predicted in the appendix of his “1984”.
The “Left” compliance under – and indeed enthusiastic support for – the fascist grab facilitated by the manufactured covid narrative was most emblematically demonstrated by the Socialist Equality Party and its internet adjunct the World Socialist Web Site. From the beginning, this site, which I had dutifully followed for years, relentlessly backed the covid tale and. as you note, could only be distinguished from the mainstream media by the fact that it pushed even harder for restrictions.
Absurdly, the WSWS tried to present the lockdowns as a triumph for the workers which had been forced on the governments by “wildcat strikes” throughout various countries. Anyone who can recall the UK miners’ strike of the 80s knows that this is patent nonsense. Back then, the miners went on strike for a grim and gruelling year after which they were defeated. But a few of these “wildcat strikes” supposedly forced governments to shut down their entire economy after what could only have been at most a few weeks?
And throughout these last 34 months, the WSWS has been unceasingly driving through covid horror pornography, with all the customary charts and accompanying pseudo-scientific drivel. Knowing their rigorous policy of vetting comments before publishing them, I posted a few brief critical observations but they eventually banned me.
But their true betrayal only became fully – and obnoxiously – clear when they opposed the Canadian convoy protest. This protest was viciously quashed with attacks on the bank accounts of the protesters, a matter which ought to have driven the WSWS into paroxysm of justifiable rage. Instead, this wretched site attacked the protesters by denouncing them as “far-right”, “reactionary” etc.
I have come to the conclusion that this SEP formation has always been controlled opposition and I extend that judgement to every major official “Left” organisation. Furthermore, since it has only been the official “Right” who have launched a critique against the covid narrative, I feel the entire Left/Right spectrum has been a very consciously used piece of political theatre whose aim was to link all covid scepticism with “The Right/Reaction/White Supremacism/anti-Semitism” etc.
“After such a catastrophic failure of judgement, the question is not whether the Left in its present form can recover but whether it should continue to exist at all.”
The answer is no, although strictly speaking that answer is redundant. This “Left” does not exist and hasn’t for some time. It is a mirage and a highly dangerous one.