My Great Escape from the Far Left

About 6 years ago I was at the Freshers’ Fair at the University of the West of England helping out at a club.  I was wondering around when a smiley man walked up to me, said something about a meeting very quickly when I was only half listening and left.  I look down in my right hand and found that the smiley man had very expertly slipped off a flyer for the said meeting in my hand.  It was a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) meeting on the subject of solving the impending credit crunch.  Right then I could vaguely describe myself as a socialist and I was extremely bored that day, so I decided to attend the meeting.  The meeting was at the end of the day anyway and I had time to kill before the bus arrived.

 I walked into the small meeting room in the Students Union somewhat reluctantly and smiled and said “hello” politely to the others attending.  There were about 3 other attendees, I assumed the organisers had been expecting a few more.  Yet despite the turnout the same man who handed me the leaflet bounced into the room with the same smile.  He looked around the room and nodded in greeting and then started the meeting.  The table was a rectangular conference table running length ways left to right.  I sat on the side closest to the door next to the head, he sat opposite me.  I did wonder after I left the meeting whether he regretted that decision later.

 For the first 10 minutes a so myself and the participants listened as we would listen to a lecture.  Now and then keeping eye contact with the speaker and looking out of the window at other times.  The speech sounded predictably enough.  “Capitalism is in a worldwide crisis”, “this system of greed can’t last any longer” blah blah blah!  I found myself starting to get more and more impatient.  Paradoxes and inconvenient truths in far leftist ideology started to swirl around in my head.  If they hated this system so much why did the speaker in front of me rely on the fruits of that system?  If the contradictions of capitalism so obvious why hasn’t the SWP come up with a persuasive alternative?  If the SWP believe in a system based on sharing, couldn’t they have started within their own party?  But by bit I felt myself getting more and more irritable.  And then I had a road to Damascus moment.  A moment of complete realisation of the truth, that I didn’t believe anything that was being said.  I took advantage of the informal nature of the talk and started to challenge the speaker.  I started subtly at first and then sunk in the knife as I became more and more unsatisfied with the answers to my challenges.  It came to a head when the speaker praised the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.  His face fell when I asked the question “Can you really call someone a ‘man of peace’ if they tried to take over the government by force? (or words to that effect), and I knew I had crossed a personal Rubicon.  

As I stood up at the end of the meeting I felt strangely relieved.  I shook the speaker’s hand, much in the way boxers do after knocking each other’s brains in.  He spoke first thanking me for coming and for my “contributions”.  I murmured a thank you.  Then while still shaking my hand he invited me for a drink downstairs at the bar with his Army of the Proletariat.  I was just about to seize the opportunity for a free drink before I scurried to my bus when I heard the man say something I will never forget.  “At the end of the day you need to pick a side.”  I am not sure if it was just what he said but the way he said it. With the enthusiasm and glazed look of a fanatic who has not considered for one microsecond that they may be wrong.  That put the nail in the coffin for that encounter and the previous 7 years as a “wacko commie” as a good friend colourfully described me.

No matter where I looked I started to feel cheated and annoyed by the causes and campaigns and the cynical and arrogant people who pushed them.  I went to an anti-nuclear weapons rally in London, only to find that the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (CND) had cheerfully folded it in with a march larger Anti War demonstration.  I was furious.  I was undecided on Iraq or Afghanistan, yet here I was counted among the Anti War numbers when I was here for something else. Much later I got leaflets from the CND cheerfully informing me that they are also against nuclear power, which I agreed with, and fully expected us to support this campaign seemingly without question. I spoke out against Kate Hudson when she appeared at a Liberal Democrat Conference’s fringe event, ignoring the wrath of one of her heavies.  It was daunting at first to confront my far leftist demons, but it eventually felt liberating to prevail over them.

My views like many other peoples’ were and still are influenced by events.  My political awakening took place during the most extreme event of our times, the 9/11 attacks in the US.  This event and the political and emotional fallout from it convinced me that I had to learn more.  And so I did, hovering up knowledge about current affairs domestic and foreign.  My family, most notably my maternal side were Labour leaning so I guess it is no surprise that I started from the left side of the fence.  In many ways the War on Terror early years were the perfect environment for a generation of socialists and other assorted lefties.  The left in the UK were just starting to come to the realisation that centre leftist Tony Blair could be just as slippery and untrustworthy as his centre right counterparts.  The US had an almost cartoonish US President, none other than George W Bush.  A tense international situation was made worse by lightning invasions of entire countries.  After Afghanistan and Iraq there were serious concerns about other dominoes falling on the Axis of Evil map, with god knows what following after.  Michael Moore was chirping along with his books and films.  Outbursts of racism towards Muslims excited the conscience of many leftists.  My long held affection for the US was shaken and nearly shredded by ongoing railing by the far left against my former adoptive country.  Constant propaganda followed by an extremely biased documentary about Israel made me start to look at the US with real suspicion.

 So what changed this far leftist trend?  In a nutshell I grew up.  That isn’t to say that in my view all people are destined to go rightwards until they hit Sarah Palin-ville.  I know several far leftist people that are older than me and seem to be travelling the other way.  For better or worse I changed as a person and this was my personal journey.  I no longer trusted the almost zealot like disregarding of other people’s views that characterised the circles I followed.  I have a natural curiosity for alternative views and have a knack of making friends whose views differ from my own.  I no longer saw conservatives as somehow intrinsically evil, even if I still didn’t agree with them and wanted to find out more about them.  Besides Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’ speaks about knowing the opposition as much as you know yourself.  And finally I had enough of the bare faced lies of the extremist left.  In Cuba I listened to a tour guide talking to myself and my family.  He made it sound as though the entire CIA had invaded the country, when I knew many Cubans themselves had fought against a suffocating regime.  Later on he confided with us that he was desperate to leave.  I argued endlessly with Communists online whitewashing the human rights abuses of the Soviet Union.

 

Ultimately I felt staying in the far left would turn me into someone I didn’t want to be: someone who was constantly angry, convinced they had nothing to learn and ultimately very lonely.  I think I am a passionate person when it comes to injustice and certain causes, which may have contributed to my near embrace of Communism.  But in the end I came to the conclusion that truth has to come with passion.  If you turn your back on the truth you are completely lost.