Noam Chomsky, who now appears to be a mountain man and/or an escaped inmate from a home for elderly and infirm haberdashers in the Catskills, has recently said that there is only one “statesman of stature” who has deescalated the Ukraine war. That man? Donald J. Trump. Yet, as 2cb noted, Chomsky also called Trump “Hitler” when he was in power. Chomsky’s mind is not Swiss cheese; he is perfectly consistent—although, superficially, it appears otherwise.
The right often attacks the left for inconsistency. This is the right’s proverbial “autism”—its factual and logical side, its desire not to be contradictory. So the right will become exasperated that the left simultaneously demands increased immigration from Somalia—for tribal Muslims—and supports gay rights; surely, the right says, this coalition is contradictory—the traditional Somali Muslim is not keen on gay rights, the average homosexual is wary as regards traditional Muslims; especially if they are to influence society to a great extent, or even his local area.
The rightist “autist” response is to say: “Typical leftism, typical contradictory nonsense. The left is silly and feminine and emotional, this is why they demand contradictory things. What you need to do is be more logical, mate.” I am not sure whether this is rhetoric or whether rightists—particularly conservatives—actually think this is true; if they do think this is true they are naïve. In fact, the left is entirely logical and consistent in its demands.
I know this because I was in a Leninist party. What do Leninists do? They do everything to break the system—anything is permissible to achieve socialism—and so you find anything to discredit or break the system. You rag it and pull it this way and that, expose the system’s contradictions and problems until it breaks. So, though you are an atheist, if an Orthodox priest offers some refreshments to strikers on the picket line and the police whack him on the head with a truncheon during a mêlée you are 100% there to support the priest to embarrass the police and turn the system’s religiosity against it—if a liberal atheist university professor has his godless discussion circle closed down you are 100% there to support his free speech, since you want the Church’s influence reduced in the university to weaken the system.
Chomsky is not a Leninist, but he is a Machiavellian realist—he uses the Leninist strategy because it works; and he is lucky because the system is substantially corrupted, so it already gives him patronage and offers him de facto support—in a healthy system, a man like Chomsky would have been shipped to Alaska to chop wood with bare hands on the axe in his twenties. So when Trump rolls up Chomsky decries him as “Hitler” because he knows Trump strengthens the system—yet when the system is in a war abroad Chomsky wants it to lose, because when a country loses a war that destabilises the system and opens the possibility for revolutionary activity.
People as diverse as Enoch Powell and Jack Kerouac pointed this out. Powell pointed out that the left supported immigration to create a race problem that did not exist in Britain so as to create opportunities and the pretext for revolution—and, sure enough, we have riots and terrorist attacks and endless “discrimination” debates. Kerouac said that the hippies—the ‘68ers—just wanted to cause chaos and then become “commissars of chaos”. Kerouac said this while drunk on the William F. Buckley show; and Buckley, being a preening narcissist, just smiled condescendingly at the drunk Québécois—and perhaps that is the problem in part, professional conservative narcissists are too “clever” to notice what is really up. They prefer to fuss over the formal rules of the game, debate rules and minor traditions, rather than get to the meat. In short, the left—the wider left uses the Leninist strategy—remains perfectly consistent, if you care to look deeply enough into the matter.