“No Enemy to My Left”

vol. 7.13.26

If you are the leader of a revolutionary movement dedicated to the future overthrow of an existing government, you instinctively welcome all new combatants who wish to join your ranks. The theory goes—you extend this welcome to the new combatants, no matter how antithetical their core beliefs might be from your own because the first and primary objective is to take power. The differences in philosophy can be worked out after the existing government is vanquished, or so the theory goes.

In his brilliant history lesson, The Forgotten History of Muslim Socialism, Cliff May at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, makes a remarkable corollary. He draws attention to the new wave of Islamic socialists gaining elective office in the U.S., Zohran Mamdani, Aber Kawas, Rashida Tlaib, Darializa Chevalier, and the Islamic Marxists of the past century who destabilized and then took over, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria., and, strangely enough, even Russia.

May records that, in 1917, Sultan-Galiev, a Tartan chieftain, from the central Russian city of Kazan joined the Bolsheviks. He preached those Muslim people, colonized by the Russian Empire, were a kind of proletariat. This became known as Muslim National Communism.

The Bolsheviks took the idea further. Portraying themselves as the world’s foremost anti-imperialists while simultaneously absorbing the Muslim territories of the deposed Russian empire, they littered Central Asia with posters recruiting Muslims for the Red Army. Thousands blindly joined. 

This alliance didn’t last long. In 1923, Sultan-Galiev became one of the first senior Bolsheviks purged from the Communist Party for the crime of “bourgeois nationalism.” Stalin had him shot in 1940.

May writes, “In 1954 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Arab nationalist socialist who invoked Islam when it suited him, jailed and executed leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose mission was then, and is today, the reestablishment of an Islamic caliphate.” 

The fusion of Islam and Marxism envisioned by Sultan-Galiev found full acceptance in Pakistan and Libya. May writes, “Zulfikar Ali Bhutto founded the Pakistan Peoples Party in 1967 under the slogan “Islam is our faith, democracy is our polity, socialism is our economy.” After taking power in 1971, he nationalized banks and heavy industry, arguing that socialism reflected Islam’s commitment to social justice.”

In Libya, dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in 1975, published his “Green Book” which proposed a theory that rejected both capitalism and communism, in favor of what he called an authentically Arab alternative. It was a state that was socialist in its economics and Islamic in its legitimacy. We know what the Libyan people ultimately decided to do with Gaddafi’s legitimacy.

We cannot omit from this list Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. May writes, (He was) “named after Vladimir Ilich Lenin by his Venezuelan Marxist father. Trained in Moscow, he joined the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In the 1970s he became known as Carlos the Jackal, among the deadliest terrorists in history. 

Captured in 1994, he was sentenced to life in a French prison where, in 2003, he wrote Revolutionary Islam, calling on “all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even atheists” to accept Islamist leadership. From his jail cell, he argued that Islam was the only force capable of confronting the West after the Soviet collapse. He praised bin Laden and called 9/11 a “lofty feat.” And he converted to Islam.

Finally, we come to Iran. The Tudeh Party, Iran’s communist party founded in 1941, backed the 1979 revolution They calculated that the ruling mullahs would be useful tools in the larger war against American power and influence. 

As May puts it, “It was a bad bet. In 1983, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s government arrested the Tudeh’s leadership en masse, made General Secretary Nur al-Din Kianuri go on television to read a forced confession of treason and “espionage,” and banned the party outright. By the mid-1980s, the socialist/communist allies of Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries were all executed, imprisoned, or driven into exile.”

May concludes,” The Islamic socialist experiments produced dead-end economies, one-party repression, and, in most of these states, Islamist movements turning against the socialist regimes that had once claimed to speak for them.”

While the American Democrat politicians practice their strategy, only whispered within their inner circles, which they refer to as No Enemy to my left, they do so at great peril. History shows, when they achieve their goal of complete power and one-party rule, a single faction, the Islamists or the Marxists will emerge on top. Then the winning faction will imprison or murder their former comrades-in-arms. Totalitarians never change.