The Left’s Bizarre Hero Worship of Despots
A couple of days ago, I discovered — what to me, at least — was an outrageous post on X (formerly Twitter). It offered photos from Iran taken before the 1979 revolution animated by AI, and the comment ran in part: “This is what Iranians are fighting for: the opportunity to live in a normal country with our Shah back.”
Iran’s Shah? Really? The pre-revolutionary Shah is already dead, so this presumably refers to his nominal heir. Nevertheless, if you are a proper student of history, you know better. The Shah’s regime was one of corruption and torture, oil profits but a capital often choked with car smog.
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed for some time various tweets and posts extolling the mythical virtues of Idi Amin, casting him as a hero of Pan-Africanism. Yep, Idi Amin, the deranged dictator who had hundreds of thousands murdered in Uganda.
And a friend told me how she was horrified to discover that one of her favorite podcasts keeps having guests on who depict Vladimir Lenin as a positive figure, while talking about the need to dismantle capitalism and envision a post-capitalist world. In each of these instances, my friend reports, “the hosts never challenge the whitewashing.”
What is going on? Some leftists, liberals, and progressives are embracing the most despicable autocrats of the past, even as sensible leftists struggle against the reality-show insanity of autocrat Donald Trump. As a historian, I find this daft. As an individual who leans left, who believes in progressive values and socialism, I find it deeply offensive.
I also think it’s a phenomenon that’s incredibly dangerous, but I’ll get to that later.
This will be a long one, kids, but I like to think it’s worth it. That’s because context matters.
The State C’est Shah
Let’s talk first about the tweet I mentioned off the top and consider the post in full: “They used AI to animate real photos taken in Iran before Islam took over in 1979. Iran used to be a normal country before Sharia Law. This is what Iranians are fighting for: the opportunity to live in a normal country with our Shah back. Iran’s past will be her future.”
We already have a problem with “before Islam took over.” Because Iran has had a clerical class that’s operated in the political landscape for centuries. The statement is as moronic as claiming “Islam took over Turkey thanks to Erdogan,” but it plays well to the cheap seats, the ones occupied by those hostile to the current regime but who can’t be bothered to check any basic historical facts about the country.
In the post, you get a series of lovely photos, completely out of context, making it appear as if Iran was this wonderful, perfectly blissful nation, with people always smiling. We are told Iranians want this again, “a normal country with our Shah back. Iran’s past will be her future.”
Except that past was far from any idyll. In Iran: A Modern History, Abbas Amanat notes: “By the middle of the 1960s … the Pahlavi regime had managed to dismantle nearly all semblance of independent political organization.”
SAVAK, the Shah’s sinister secret police, preyed on critics of the despot and anyone who pushed for reforms. It’s interesting how online today, you find tweets claiming SAVAK somehow got a bad rap. The truth is it was probably much worse than what was publicly known at the time. Though SAVAK agents were trained in modern interrogation techniques by the CIA, their methods of torture were medieval and sadistic. These included rape, dripping acid into a victim’s nostrils, using a cattle prod in the rectum, and their favorite technique was the bastinado, beating the bare soles of a victim’s feet.
Abbas Amanat again: “Following directives of its master, [SAVAK] was suspicious of any initiative independent of the Shah, and it was an agency devoted to silencing not only Marxist guerrillas, and other activists on the left, but anyone who publicly criticized government policies and the regime’s corruption and failures, or the conduct of the Shah and royal family.”
The Shah himself admitted in an interview with 60 Minutes in 1976 that SAVAK agents operated in the U.S. to keep an eye on Iranian exiles and when asked if they tortured Iranians, lied without missing a beat. In the segment, Mike Wallace quoted a report to an amused Shah how the CIA itself considered him a “brilliant but dangerous megalomaniac.”
It is not surprising then to discover that the individual who made the post on X never lived in that gorgeously splendid Iran (as it never existed), nor in the real one of 1978 when SAVAK agents were running around. She is Goldie Ghamari, whose family left Iran in 1986 when she was one years old, because, according to her, someone tried to assassinate her father. And the more you look into her record, the more you realize she does not have sound judgment on history, human rights… and a few other things.
Ghamari enjoys a substantial following on X, but for anyone outside discussions of Iran, it’s easy to forget who she is. She used to be a Member of Provincial Parliament for Ontario’s Conservatives under Premier Doug Ford. That is until Ford kicked her out of caucus after she met with the notorious far-right provocateur and thuggish yob from Britain, Tommy Robinson. Ghamari claimed after the predictable uproar that she didn’t know Robinson’s background.
Then the choices here are: a) You’re happy to meet with Islamophobic, far-right felons; b) You’re so clueless as a self-declared “human rights activist,” you can’t even tell the players or when you’re being played.
Ghamari also got her law license suspended after she engaged in professional misconduct.
If you’re paying attention, you might point out, “Well, wait, Ghamari is a Conservative.” True. But her sham paradise of pre-revolution Iran implies a country of progressivism: in the photos she uses, women have short skirts, and their hair needs no hijab. The fashion styles are Western, and it’s a time when Western influences were allowed in. Ghamari has a pinned tweet of one of her speeches in the Ontario legislature referring to how her parents “wanted to live in a free and democratic country.”
But the one thing Iran was definitely not while under the Shah was democratic. In fact, he was installed in the first place by a coup engineered by the CIA and Britain’s MI6 to replace the democratically elected left-wing premier Mohammed Mossadegh. The hope was that the shah would be more sympathetic to American and British interests, especially when it came to oil.
Conflating Iran’s monarchy one way or the other with leftist politics seems to be a thing these days. As I draft these words, there’s a national strike in Iran by truck owners and drivers, and it’s been going on for days, but American news broadcasts only want to talk about Trump and a possible nuclear deal with the Iranian regime. Yet on X, you see cut-and-paste tweets claiming: “Iranian workers are rallying behind a national call for freedom led by HRH Reza Shah Pahlavi. This is a movement beyond economics — it’s about reclaiming Iran. Unions of the world, hear this call.”
There is something absurd in the notion of a former crown prince trying to attach himself to the traditionally left-wing tactic of a national union strike. The Shah suppressed labor unions and put those still around under his thumb. Nor is his son, Reza Pahlavi, a man born to privilege, any pal of “just folks” working people.
“Pahlavi’s associates and followers have started a regime of oppression in exile even before getting to power in Iran,” writes analyst Reza Parchizadeh. “They have assaulted non-Pahlavist protesters during anti-regime demonstrations abroad, ran campaigns of harassment and intimidation against journalists and democracy activists, pushed IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps] talking points about political prisoners and Iran’s ethnic minorities and welcomed all kinds of nefarious regime affiliates, including antisemitic IRGC members, among their ranks.”
So, any leftist or progressive tempted to see this man as a champion of their rights should read Parchizadeh’s column.
States of Blood
Meanwhile, there is a steady stream of tweets and posts that try to make Idi Amin into an icon of African independence. For instance, a person in Nigeria — so, not even a Ugandan who might learn the truth from neighbors, parents or grandparents — posted in 2020, “Idi Amin championed the cause of Afrikan liberation & self determination for black people. [sic]” Someone else posted only a couple of days ago that he was “the best president Uganda ever had.” Old interview clips of Amin denouncing Israel are finding a new popularity online thanks to Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians.
It is beyond revolting to try to reinvent this murderous psychopath into a hero of Pan-Africanism, which from its significant days in the 1930s, was a progressive, anti-capitalist movement, articulated by great intellectuals like C.L.R. James and George Padmore. Amin was no intellectual — he was a thug who could barely read and who brutalized his own people, warping tribal politics to get power and keep it.
The gory sadism perpetrated on Amin’s thousands of victims is jaw-dropping. When archbishop Janani Luwum spoke out against Amin’s government, his “bullet-riddled” body was “dumped at the mortuary of a Kampala hospital,” as Martin Meredith writes in The State of Africa. When the body of one of Amin’s former wives turned up dismembered, Amin was informed and expressed no shock at all. He then ordered the limbs to be sewn back on the corpse so it could be viewed by family members, but he used this occasion to humiliate them in front of TV cameras, ranting, “Your mother was a bad woman. See what has happened to her!”
A detailed view of life under this monster comes from Henry Kyemba, who served as the country’s Minister of Health and who fled the horror show for London, where he wrote A State of Blood: The Inside Story of Idi Amin. In his book, Kyemba recalls:
“It was during my leave that the massacres in the army really became a public horror. Amin’s troops were no longer killing people by the score but by the hundreds. It was impossible to dispose of the bodies in graves. Instead, truckloads of corpses were taken and dumped in the Nile…The intention was for the bodies to be eaten by crocodiles. This was an inefficient method of disposal. Bodies were frequently swept to the bank, where they were seen by passersby and fishermen. At Owen Falls … many also floated into the still waters to one side, near the power station. Once, while driving across the dam at Jinja, I saw six bodies, revoltingly puffed up and decomposed, floating in the waters.”
One estimate puts the death toll of Amin’s regime at around 300,000 victims.
Yet those who glorify Amin on social media chalk up any criticism to “Western lies,” even though Kyemba is a Ugandan who served his country and was there. Such delusional thinking is a slap in the face to all the Ugandan witnesses and survivors and certainly a demented take on Pan-Africanism.
Why on earth then would anyone want to reinvent the Shah of Iran or Idi Amin as progressive heroes?
I can only think it is because it’s easy. It is far easier to go with the scraps and bits of information you get from television, social media posts, casual café remarks by friends and schoolmates than to bother cracking open some books. We have come to a dangerous point in our global consciousness where most people think of reading now as work rather than pleasure. It is easier to say, “I think…” or better still “I feel,” which takes you completely off the hook because you don’t have to justify feelings; you don’t need to cite sources or justify a feeling’s logic, as by definition, they have none.
The reinventions of these figures are expressions of personality cult. The Shah could wrap himself in the supposed “grandeur” of monarchy, and from old footage on YouTube of his celebration of the Persian Empire in 1971, you get idea of the outrageous waste of funds and the nauseating excess that fueled one man’s narcissism. Similarly, Idi Amin in the 1970s was an African Trump who spewed whatever came into his head, awarded himself military decorations, and declared himself “Conqueror of the British Empire.”
So, it is ironic that when we come to Lenin, there is no personality cult involved. But a dangerous mindset is at work just the same to preserve and utilize a fictionalized Lenin.
The Revenge of the Understated
I mentioned earlier a podcast episode about “Climate Leninism.” An American professor and a British lecturer appeared on Upstream’s In Conversation after they knocked out an article that argued:
“The call for a revolutionary party may seem like the all-too-familiar answer to the impasses of capitalist democracy. But Climate Leninism cannot mechanically apply Lenin’s political prescriptions. Climate Leninism must mean something more expansive. It must be situated within and draw from the entire tradition of revolutionary thought and struggle that has positioned itself as a continuation of the Russian Revolution. This includes anticolonial revolutionaries who, in Fanon’s words, found that they must ‘stretch’ Lenin and the lessons of the revolution.”
Now: to be clear, I am all for fighting capitalism and its relentless greed that is driving us closer and closer to the abyss with climate change. But are you fucking kidding me with this bullshit of drawing from the “lessons of the Russian revolution?”
What is disingenuous here — what is indeed intellectually dishonest — is to treat Lenin as a wellspring of revolutionary ideas as if he were a neutral philosophical figure, as if we were talking about the musings of Spinoza or Rousseau. And the ultimate lesson of the Russian Revolution is that it was a failure. The virtual slavery of the Russian peasant was replaced by an equal if not more repressive system of labor drudgery, imprisonment, censorship, forced conscription and intimidation.
These academics got a cheerful welcome on this podcast, just as other Marxist-Leninists were given generous time to blather away on an episode of an associated podcast known as Rev Left Radio. I transcribed this excruciatingly dull minute so that you don’t have to listen to it. One guest says:
“But that’s the geo-political context in which Lenin was writing. Namely in World War One, and this new stage of capitalism called imperialism. Now from a Marxist-theoretical perspective, Lenin was building on the works of Marx and Engels, of course, extending their analysis to address the material conditions of the early 20th century, using the tools of Marxism itself, namely historical and dialectical materialism. And this is a crucial aspect of Marxism that we can never lose sight of. It is a living, evolving process that develops alongside the phenomenon it’s attempting to comprehend and ultimately combat.”
If you break this “explanation” down, you realize it’s gobbledygook. Imperialism, whether Marxist-Leninists like it or not, predates what any BA Economics student can define as modern capitalism — and by centuries at that. The guest here is actually clearer than most Marxists, but he still laces his speech with jargon only the faithful can try to understand, like dialectical materialism (and the minute you offer a simple definition for that, the ever-pedantic Marxist will contradict you).
We’re told Marx and Lenin were working with a “living, evolving process”… which is bullshit. Marxist-Leninist theory is at its base a religion, treating its longed-for outcome of a workers’ paradise and the “state withering away” as an inevitability. Well, churches are full of those waiting for the Rapture.
I personally learned the method of this con-job back in high school in Winnipeg when a couple of classmates were die-hard Marxist-Leninists. You’d see them on weekends, standing on windy street corners and trying to sell their movement’s pitifully printed newspaper (back then color printing was expensive, so you ended up with black and white and maybe one touch of red on dull gray newsprint). My home city was one of the birthplaces of Canadian radicalism, but by the time these chuckleheads came along, the glory days of the Winnipeg General Strike and its Communist stalwarts were long over.
You’d argue A, and they would retreat into opaque orthodoxy B, C, or D, quoting passages from their Russian secular prophet. I was told: You simply don’t understand what Lenin wrote. Oh, sure! Of course, the Soviet Union failed under Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, but that’s because Lenin’s doctrines weren’t properly understood and implemented. Very convenient, very condescending.
To talk to a Marxist-Leninist about the 1930s famine in Ukraine is like challenging a Catholic priest over child molestation and being told you have to read the Catechism first.
And of course, no one ever talked about Lenin as a person. It would be nice to forego for once the literary autopsy on what he wrote and examine what he actually did, how he behaved. Well, let’s go into that because it’s important.
You see, there never was a personality cult for Lenin because Lenin had no personality. In his monumental history of the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy, Orlando Figes profiles the Bolshevik leader, noting how Lenin didn’t smoke or drink, treated his wife more like a secretary than a spouse, treated literature with contempt, and lived in puritanically grim surroundings. “Lenin had no place for sentiment in his life,” Figes writes and offers a revealing quote. “I can’t listen to music too often,” he once admitted after a performance of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. “It makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people… But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.” Yet “when it came to putting himself at physical risk, Lenin always had been something of a coward.”
I have always remembered Bertrand Russell recounting how when he met the dictator of Russia in 1920, Lenin recalled for him that he once whipped a mob into lynching rich landowners “from the nearest tree,” and laughed with delight.
This is the hero of the acolytes of Climate Leninism. Those who want to extol his grand theories conveniently forget that it was on Lenin’s watch that the sinister secret police known as the Cheka grew in power. Here is Figes again: “The knock on the door in the middle of the night, interrogations and imprisonment without charge, torture and summary executions — here were the methods of the Cheka. In the words of one of its founders: ‘The Cheka is not an investigating commission, a court, or a tribunal. It is a fighting organ on the internal front of the civil war… It does not judge, it strikes. It does not pardon, it destroys all who are caught on the other side of the barricade.’”
And it’s worth pointing out that these modern admirers of Lenin on podcasts are American. They clearly have no clue what it was like to live under an Eastern European repressive regime.
Bertrand Russell did. He traveled in 1920 to check out the great Marxist-Leninist experiment and wrote in the second volume of his autobiography that the time he “spent in Russia was one of continually increasing nightmare.” It’s worth quoting one passage in full:
“I have said in print what, on reflection, appeared to me to be the truth, but I have not expressed the sense of utter horror which overwhelmed me while I was there. Cruelty, poverty, suspicion, persecution, formed the very air we breathed. Our conversations were continually spied upon. In the middle of the night one would hear shots and know that idealists were being killed in prison. There was a hypocritical pretense of equality, and everybody was called tovarisch, but it was amazing how differently this word could be pronounced according as the person addressed was Lenin or a lazy servant. On one occasion in Petrograd (as it was called) four scarecrows came to see me, dressed in rags, with a fortnight’s beard, filthy nails, and tangled hair. They were the four most eminent poets of Russia. One of them was allowed by the government to make his living by lecturing on rhythmics, but he complained that they insisted upon his teaching this subject from a Marxian point of view, and that for the life of him he could not see how Marx came into the matter.”
Trotsky, who wrote a whole book justifying the murder of enemies, called Terrorism and Communism (the title was translated in early English editions as The Defence of Terrorism), has also been airbrushed by followers into the “good” Bolshevik who ultimately lost against the “bad” Bolshevik Stalin. In his short book, he writes:
“If it is a question of seeking formal contradictions, then obviously. we must do so on the side of the White Terror, which is the weapon of classes which consider themselves ‘Christian,’ patronize idealist philosophy, and are firmly convinced that the individuality (their own) is an end-in-itself. As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the ‘sacredness of human life.’ We were revolutionaries in opposition and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.”
So much for “situating” climate change thought within the “lessons” of the Russian Revolution.
Fleeing the State of Delusion
The passage quoted above shows in a nutshell why I have always despised Marxist-Leninism. Like Russell, I consider it a philosophy of hate, one that seeks to pit one segment of society against another. Those who follow it tend to use Communism and Socialism as interchangeable terms, and they’ve done incredible damage to the proper appreciation of Socialism as a philosophy that supports cooperative, shared use of production and resources.
But as you can see, the Lenin fans are a different creature than those airbrushing Iran’s Shah or Uganda’s Idi Amin. For “Eco-Leninists,” it’s necessary to bury Lenin the Man (and sometimes Trotsky) in deep thickets of revisionist political theory. But how depressing that this nonsense infects the environmental movement and progressive leftism in general!
In a way, it is not new. You can make a case that Napoleon was the first modern leader to build his own personality cult, and while historians can rightly argue he did some good things, such as bringing in the more enlightened provisions of the Napoleonic Code, plus introducing a central bank and the metric system, you can’t escape the facts that Napoleon still put slavery back in Haiti and ripped Europe apart through years of needless, expansionist war. And yet Bonapartists enjoyed a political longevity that influenced French politics well after he was put under the dome of Les Invalides — usually not for the better of the country.
That is what you get when you reinvent a despot without context or adopt an ideology from a despot without remembering who he was. And today, we have leftists and supposed progressives doing it again.
How can proselytizers for such evil men — and some are well-regarded academics — fail to see how they undermine the Left’s credibility? The ultimate checkmate for any discussion of these figures is the body count they each racked up.
The Muslim fanatics of the Ayatollah Khomeini could point with ample evidence to what SAVAK did. The most cynical white supremacists of today now invoke the barbarisms of Idi Amin. The high priests of neo-liberalism and the blow-dried idiots of Fox News can bark, “Stalin!” or “Lenin!” and smear any effort to talk about socialized medicine or greater environmental controls.
It shows a bankruptcy of political imagination when the misguided try to reinvent three dictators from the past century to sell human rights and more enlightened governance of our planet.
Such oblivious hero worship tips off the reactionary, fascist types that you’ll buy anything. And you’ll buy anyone with charisma, whether today or decades later. Hell, you’ll even buy the cold, clinical opportunist who can’t elevator-pitch you (Lenin was reputedly not a great orator), but who still offers you a tempting ideology, perfectly malleable and adaptable for the exigencies of the moment.
Right now, today, leftists, liberals, and progressives are being attacked, slandered, smeared, hunted the world over.
The last thing they need is for idiots to dig up old wolves and sew them into sheep costumes.
Yes, it is human nature to look for paragons, but it’s far more useful to develop arguments. And if you must reference the past, at least do the proper homework so you find the real heroes who fought capitalism and tyranny.
