Why Lefties and Islamists Believe the Way They Do

What is communism? asks Krzysztof Szczawinski on X. No, it’s not the “bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union.” No, it’s not “a discredited economic theory”.

[Instead, it’s] a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper -- a civilizational war against truth itself[.]

Then he goes on to give us two words that the Poles invented to describe life under communism:

Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] -- a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood[.]

And

Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] -- a deep, performative hypocrisy[.]

I’m sure he’s right. Only I believe that all politics amounts to a Big Lie, and utterly irradiated with hypocrisy.

But wait. Here is Hussein Aboubakr Mansour telling us “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crisis” or “How the myth of crisis imprisoned Arab (and leftist) political thought.”

I discussed it at length on my Substack.

Mansour tells the story about how Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, a Sunni cleric, [was] sent to Paris in 1826 as chaplain to the first Egyptian student mission. Five years later he published An Overview of Paris. Then he opened a school “where generations of Egyptian officials learned to turn French administrative and legal prose into Arabic.”

At the beginning, the Arabs didn’t have narrative fiction, didn’t have sentences, didn’t have punctuation and paragraphs, didn’t have a bunch of words that you need to describe life in post-industrial revolution Europe. So the first generation of western-educated Arabs learned it all in the culture of post-revolutionary France under the influence of left-wing radicalism.

No wonder Arabs are all total radicals committed to revolution and fundamental transformation, just like our leftie friends.

And no wonder that radical Islam is today joined at the hip with radical European leftism. It all makes sense.

Then in our century, in 1948 Constantine Zureiq gave us the nakba, the catastrophe. And a few years later came our good friend “Sayyid Qutb, the founding theorist of Islamism.” “The movements Zureiq and Qutb unleashed, secular Arab nationalism and jihadism, spent the following decades at war with one another”[.]

In this new ideology everything was a “crisis.” Nothing new there. That’s what the French Revolution and Marx and our beloved wokies are all about: permanent crisis.

And Mansour advises us that:

Crisis is the secular form of apocalypticism… In Scripture it is Judgment…

Now I am going to go off the reservation of received wisdom. Because I am so wise.

It seems to me that apocalyptic religion, apocalyptic secular ideology, apocalyptic communism, apocalyptic environmentalism are all selling the same soap. The world is ending unless you follow and obey Us.

Now, let’s go back to Krzysztof Szczawinski, and the question of communist lying, and let’s back off suggesting that communism, Islamism, and even many Christian sects are all about The Big Lie.

I think that all these folks are doing a very human thing, which is to collapse the inevitable uncertainty and tragedy of life on this Earth into a Faith of Certainty and solve their fear and uncertainty with the knowledge that they have discovered the only one and true answer.

You can see the temptation programmed into all these ideologies -- good, bad, or indifferent. They provide, for any human, a resolution to all problems. All you have to do is Believe! And follow the Leader.

Now I believe that we cannot know the One True Way, because there is no One True Way. I believe that this Universe in which we live -- if it is a Universe -- is a mystery. If there really was a Big Bang, and if there really is a One True Way, and if there really is a moment in the future when all will be well, or not, we don’t have a clue. And my faith is that we never will.

Will our lefty friends lead us into a Wilderness of Woke? We don’t know. Will radical Islam burn down western Europe and kill all the lefties, after they and their lefty friends have killed all the Christians? We don’t know. Will Elon make us interplanetary and will it make a dime’s worth of difference? We don’t know.

Will AI destroy the education system and the administrative state? Don’t get your hopes up.

I say that there has never been a saving faith that has the answer to life, the universe, everything, and there never will, and I believe that the beginning of wisdom is to understand this, and yet to live your life in confidence and courage and faith that things will turn out all right. And if things don’t turn out well for you, maybe they will turn out well for your children. I believe that the source of all problems is the real Termptation: to reduce life to a single faith and diminish humans into obedient followers of a Great Leader, be he mortal or demonic or divine.

Your mileage may vary.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/why-lefties-and-islamists-believe-the-way-they-do/