OUT ON A LIMB: Leftists Will Never Self-Reflect, And They Will Never Apologize For The Horrors They Inflict.
They’ll conveniently forget any of it ever happened, and they’ll aggressively gaslight Americans into believing that it never happened, too. Through their control over institutions like the media and academia, they can memory-hole practically whatever they want, just as they’ve already done with scandals like Russiagate and with the worst excesses of the Covid era.
Finally, they’ll convince themselves that rather than a string of necessary evils required to defeat the reviled conservative oppressors, their atrocities were a positive good — finally liberating America and ushering in an age of left-wing utopia.
The citizens of the former Soviet Union didn’t “wake up” to all the horrors of their regime. They still deny the Holodomor, the abortion rate remains extremely high, and the government has offered little in the way of an acknowledgment or apology for the brutal gulag system. The Soviet Union didn’t fall because the Soviet citizenry woke up one day and suddenly regretted all the terrible things that had been committed in the name of the communist regime. They finally turned against the Soviet system once its intrusiveness and incompetence became too inconvenient in daily life, but there was no grand self-reflection. You can look at every communist, socialist, or “democratic socialist” regime of the last century, and you’ll see this exact same pattern.
Like the Soviets, some (emphasis on some) of the leftists of today will only begin to turn against leftism (if at all) once it starts to negatively affect them personally, but they’ll never grapple with the historic horrors wrought by their movement. Because the horror is the point.
See also: British historian Eric Hobsbawm, an unapologetic Stalinist to the bitter end at age 95 in 2012. “Hobsbawm himself made this quite clear in a now famous and much quoted interview with Michael Ignatieff that conducted in 1994. What you are saying, Ignatieff asked, is ‘that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?’ Hobsbawm immediately gave a one-word answer that says it all: ‘Yes.’ No wonder Roger Kimball refers to him as a ‘repellent figure.’”