Photo by Bruno Pires
The title of this piece is not entirely accurate; or in a manner more arcane than it seems on the surface, it is.
We typically visualize self-hatred as a crippling lack of confidence, as a meekness arising from refractory doubts about one's self-worth. We think of someone who looks down on themselves first and foremost, whose pursuit of personal legitimacy is the most striking feature of their personality.
This is often true in a private context, on the level of the individual. But even then, when the troublesome feelings are caused by things external to the self or the family, arising from socioeconomic factors such as lack of wealth or social capital, feelings of worthlessness can be directed outward at one's family and community, a method of absolving oneself as the source of worthlessness; 'I wouldn't be this way if I wasn't made this way, if I hadn't been born here in this family.'
In the context of the colonial and the racial, we cannot think solely of a simple internalization of hatred and worthlessness engendered by racism. No one wants to bear the burden of being 'inferior', no one wants to be stuck in an 'inferior' status. Overwhelmed by powerlessness in the face of the colonial and imperial structure, they find a way around having to contend with their fate that does not involve having to actually fight it.
We are in strange times, with the seemingly inexorable rise of rightwing movements the world over. In the west, the rightwing has a stable structure, a recourse to centuries of chauvinism. The situation is more complicated in the global south, grappling with on-going humiliations and a subordinate status in the world order.
In order to contend with their reality, third world reactionaries often co-opt the language of social justice and postcolonial theory. They use cynically in their dealings with imperialist nations intellectual frameworks that they vehemently reject when deployed in the domestic context.
This is not a serious position taken by revolutionary-minded people against the imperialist world system; often the reactionaries believe the system is fine, just that their status within it is unacceptable.
But their appropriation of these terms, this framework, gives them immense rhetorical and psychological power over the average citizen of their nations. Reframing even reasonable social critique as colonialist hubris has been an amply successful tactic, helping to keep old systems of oppression and irrationality intact and unquestionable.
Surely, the left must answer this. They must take back these terms, these frameworks and educate the masses on their actual meaning. They must teach them to differentiate between fair social critique and racist, orientalist pablum.
Well, they would, if they didn't quite simply hate the masses themselves.
The serious and organized left is quite dead in South Asia. The formal communist parties are barely relevant, clinging to power in a select few areas, even there corrupted by trickles of rightwing venom. The liberal parties are always a step away from tripping into that venom headfirst, their moral righteousness undercut by their conduct.
So what is left to challenge the flood of rightwing nationalism?
Um...well, have you tried calling a right-winger a racial slur between posting about Stranger Things?
In the vacuum left by committed political activists, there have arrived a breed of online snarkers. What they lack in substance, they make up for in zingers. They mitigate their lack of political relevance by whining endlessly about things they won't work to change and sneering at the unwashed masses who are too stupid to know what they know, believe what they believe or even like what they like.
Often anglophone and relatively well-placed on the socioeconomic ladder, they profess communist beliefs but seem to fall short of fully espousing them, mired in a fatalistic attitude regarding their respective country and its people.
Poisoned by a carefully crafted irony and cynicism, they not only fail to rescue what has been appropriated, oh so successfully, by the rightwing but they reject and mock it, turning their ire towards leftists who try to engage with those ideas sincerely and critically.
Egregiously, they sometimes turn into reality the claims of racism made by rightwingers, validating accusations of inferiority, carrying water for racist and orientalist attitudes, under the guise of championing 'objective truth'.
The mind boggles as you watch these people conduct themselves, seeming less like human beings and more like characters from an obnoxious american cartoon (it may very well be what they model their personalities on).
What are they driven by? What explains their blackhole existence? What is the end-point of their perversion of 'leftism'?
The first is quite easy to answer, though many of them may howl in indignation. The rightwing accusations of leftist self-hate aren't totally spurious. At least in the case of this breed of leftist, a lot of the bile they spew is internalized racism, manifesting as simple hatred and rejection of the bulk of their people and anything to do with them.
By setting themselves apart, by putting themselves above everyone else with their political beliefs (however mutilated) or taste or speech et al, they save themselves from coping with the full psychological impact of racism. 'I am not like them, I am merely unfortunate to be born among them' is the subconscious thought, not unlike that of anguished diaspora trying to survive amidst white supremacy.
This brings us to the second answer. Insofar as these people are usually comfortable by the standards of their country, more powerful than the average citizen, they are also politically impotent. This fact does not escape them. They are infuriated by it.
I cannot say whether deep down they believe they are owed political power on the basis of their superior socioeconomic status, that they do not have to struggle for and earn it, but they have a certain indignation seemingly conditioned on the belief that their position is the common sense one, that anyone who goes against it is fundamentally irrational and irredeemable.
This causes them to dehumanize and other people who, through struggle and education, could potentially be won over, cutting them off from even the possibility of power, leading to a malaise that rots their personalities so that their sudden presence in any discussion has a detrimental, spoiling effect.
But perhaps this is only part of the explanation. Perhaps there is an element to this conduct that can be explained by a subconscious attempt at imitating the right: their dismissal of conventional ‘social justice’ lingo and concerns, their vociferous anti-intellectualism, their casual use of slurs and inflammatory language. Of course, this ends up being just that, an imitation, with none of the right’s success to match it.
Maybe there is a yet more pathetic, but hopeful, explanation: these are relatively young people and their behavior is the result of their lack of maturity, a clumsy political consciousness that is more concerned with appearing cool than with being substantial and effective. They will eventually grow out of it. But this explanation is marred by the fact that not an insignificant amount of these people are in their mid to late 20s or even their 30s.
Finally, we come to the third answer.
One should hope that the end-point is nothing, that these largely internet based irritations die out where they originated, scarcely affecting the real world. But the internet of today is not the internet of even a decade ago; the bifurcating line between internet and physical reality had been fading for a while and, with the shockwave of the pandemic, has ceased to exist altogether.
The internet is now the arena where political battles are fought, where politicians pour a significant amount of their campaign resources, where slogans are created and disseminated. The right has mostly outpaced the left in utilizing this new tool that can reach millions with the press of a few buttons.
They are shaping the new generation, whose main source of information is social media, inculcating them with their ideas, their version of history, their version of reality.
The impression you make with your online presence today is important, and the impression being made by the snippy-left is less than appealing. Who wants to join a disorganized gaggle who seem to offer nothing but sneering contempt, who not only have no solutions to your issues but cannot even identify them or will not, in many cases, even acknowledge they exist?
And even if they are not *all* that's left of the left, even if they do not represent true leftist thought, they are often the most visible.
Thus, there is a consequence, the end-point: the smearing and weakening of the left, new blood continually repelled. In this condition, it's difficult to even conclusively dispel a floating rw falsehood, let alone chip away at the right’s overwhelming power.
This piece is not a plea for change. It cannot pierce the stubborn arrogance of the demographic whose flaws it gapes at. If it pricks even one of them and makes them self-reflect, it'd be a miracle.
This was little more than a study that cannot offer solutions.
But perhaps it can help us, us hapless overly sincere leftists, make sense of things when one of these people pounces on us, ready to purge their frustration and show off their cynicism to their friends.
And maybe the horseshoe theory has just a tiny bit of truth to it, after all; the most effective way to react is to shake your head in bitter amusement, just like you would at right-wing trolls.
Thank you to my friends for reading this piece while it was being drafted and providing feedback, and thank you to my dear bf Sith for proofreading it.