I’ve noticed a peculiar phenomenon prevalent with the liberals. They have an inclination to diminish the complexity of those they perceive as adversaries by reducing them to caricatures or dehumanizing representations.
For instance, they liken Xi to Winnie the Pooh, depicting him in a manner that belittles his position and influence. Similarly, Putin is portrayed as a mad king, exaggerating his power and malevolence for dramatic effect. They characterize Russians as orcs, implying that they are inherently evil and lacking in humanity’s essential qualities of compassion and reason.
This trend seems to suggest a reluctance among liberals to engage with opposing viewpoints on their own merits, instead choosing to dismiss them outright or diminish their significance through caricatured representations. This approach may serve as a form of psychological defense mechanism, allowing individuals to avoid the discomfort and cognitive dissonance that can arise from confronting unfamiliar or challenging ideas.
A group, claiming to champion values such as empathy, inclusivity, and respect for diversity, appears to be engaging in a peculiar behavior: dehumanizing their opponents by reducing them to caricatures or diminishing their complexity. This trend is as a form of naked hypocrisy.
I don’t recommend dehumanizing anybody, not even our oppressors, but my interest in that is not so much for engaging their viewpoints as it is for seeing our oppressors realistically. The very same Axis personnel who committed horrific atrocities against thousands of innocents could also still give the impression of being well adjusted, polite, neighbourly people, at least when they were off‐duty. I remember reading somewhere about psychologists who tested surviving Axis war criminals but failed to find signs of insanity.
Dehumanization serves a purpose for anticommunists because it encourages them to shoot first and ask questions later (if ever). They’re less likely to feel pangs of conscience as long as they see their targets as inhuman, thereby continuing to do their jobs. There have been some exceptions in history, like Milovan Popović, but generally speaking anticommunists find it easier, faster, and less expensive to simply imprison or massacre us than address the root causes of our grievances.
This guy’s a liberal, but I like this quote from a book:
Granny Weatherwax and a priest are in an argument.
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that–”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”
The reaction of Liberals to the question “did you watch the Putin interview?” is telling.
It’s a severe degree of groupthink. Everyone knows Putin is a power hungry egomaniac with limited capacity for rational thought, so there’s no point in wasting an hour consuming obvious propaganda.
Once something has been established as ‘what the good guys think’, a Liberal doesn’t dare question it because it would diminish their reputation in the minds of other liberals.
It also keeps them safe from having to confront their core contradictions. For example, there’s a huge proportion of libs supporting Palestine now, but wind the clock back a few years and they were sagely approving the condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-semite. Ask them about Corbyn now, and they’ll stand by their condemnation, or wind it back to ‘he was problematic’, and they’ll get angry and defensive if you continue to press at that inconsistency.
Exactly, liberalism is a highly insular cult that encourages adherents to have as little contact with the outside world as possible lest people get infected by wrong ideas. It’s pretty clever in a way because it’s much easier to get people to simply self censor than to actually engage with other points of view and articulate coherent arguments in favor of your ideology.
I don’t think this has much to do with liberalism. howmany leftists, might be more politically correct for me to use neo-nazis as the example but whatever, have you talked to who say things like navalny is a nazi, all ukrainian troops are nazis, the free syrian army are isis, also isis is isis, israelis are nazis, kulaks were parasites, or the most classical one germans were nazis. just seems like people in general prefer to be against caricatures and comically evil people rather than humans
Tribalism isn’t exclusive to liberals of course. However, my main point was that liberals love to collapse complex geopolitical issues into oversimplified tales of “us” versus “them” by creating infantile caricatures that are devoid of any meaningful analysis. Communists will consider ideas on their actual merits, and when we reject ideas we can give detailed explanation of why we consider a particular idea to be harmful.
from my personal experience the need to collapse as you describe it stems moreso from the geopolitical position the societies of these liberal countries find themselves in moreso than the nature of their political ideology. it is in order to convince themselves of the need to continually take actions to protect their own interests and preferential position. I imagine it was probably pretty similar within nazi germany toward their opponents or within the soviet union against nazi germany. this is something I feel a lot of americans don’t exactly realize. anti-americanism is not as pervasive across the world as you may be led to believe and is definitely not at the same level of hate you’ll see with americans regarding china or other examples. this was especially weird to me when I first heard the song Eve of Destruction with the lyric “And think of all the hate there is in Red China” because the chinese really do not hate americans they just want to work together with them for mutual benefit. same sentiment was heard when putin gave his now famous interview with tucker carlson
Because it’s all sports to liberals. They have no stake in anything they believe in. Foreign presidents might as well be polytheistic trickster gods to them. They call Xi Jinping a cartoon bear in the same way someone in medieval Iceland would spit three times to keep dwarves away. Liberals believe their criticisms of Putin and Xi are heard by the respective parties and somehow weaken them.
They dehumanize their enemies because their enemies aren’t real, tangible opponents for them. All their battles are in the realms of their own imagination. There’s a good quote I’ve always liked from the German Ideology where Marx is dunking on Max Stirner.
Thus we see what holy motives guide Saint Max in his transition to egoism. It is not the good things of this world, not treasures which moth and rust corrupt, not the capital belonging to his fellow unique ones, but heavenly treasure, the capital which belongs to God, truth, freedom, mankind, etc., that gives him no peace.
Liberals believe their politics are over abstract concepts like truth, freedom, and mankind, not tangible things like people and capital.
Contempt for the enemy had been generated by the demonisation of the Ethiopians through the state‐controlled media; the dapper, dignified and highly acclaimed Ethiopian Regent who had charmed the crowds and been given a royal welcome by King Victor Emmanuel and Mussolini on his official state visit to Rome in 1924—the Emperor to whose imperial court Italian diplomats had long been proud to be accredited—was transformed by Mussolini’s propaganda machine into a caricature.
Haile Selassie was now a hideous, subhuman creature with an enormous beaked nose and gigantic deformed feet—a monstrous potentate ruling with revolting brutality over a horde of ignorant savages, who for their own good needed to be forcibly subjected to what Rome called ‘Italian civilisation’.
Many of the Blackshirt volunteers swallowed the propaganda, and against such a background the [Regio Esercito] commanders’ numerous written instructions for suppression of the local population through the spreading of terror, and demands for ‘merciless rigour’ and ‘the destruction of everything’, rapidly created a culture of brutality and impunity. It is not surprising that Italians who might not have been predisposed to abuse the Ethiopians often did so with enthusiasm, as can be seen from some of the photographs in this volume.
(Source.)
That’s a good insight, liberals often have to resort to creating straw man caricatures precisely because they can’t produce convincing critiques of the ideas they disagree with. Likewise, focusing on abstract concepts moves conversation away from tangible things whose merits can be evaluated in a meaningful way. They’re not interested in having an honest debate about the merits of their ideology, they take it as axiomatic that it’s inherently correct.
I dunno, politics in “liberal democracies” seems to be a whole lot of spectacle and aesthetics and if any good policy manages to happen its almost an afterthought. So I can’t view what a liberal does as hypocrisy as what they’re doing tends to be in support of “attracting attention to themselves and their pet causes” and “appearing to care about something”.
