The left devour their own

In the latest re-run of Racefail09, Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick are being demonized for insufficient leftism – primarily Barry Malzberg, previously a leading leftist of Science Fiction, who, in his younger days, was substantially influential in imposing the then new and rigidly boring political orthodoxy on science fiction and fantasy. Now in their seventies, they failed to quite keep up with the latest orthodoxy, falling two or three years behind the latest feminist line. Or rather they were in their seventies. They are now, like Winston Smith at the end of “1984”, pre-dead.

In my post Always Betraying and Always Betrayed I point out how the conservative movement is always destroyed from within by betrayal, but leftists suffer more from this than anyone. The conservative movement is destroyed, the leftist movement is strengthened, but leftists personally and individually are destroyed. You know how the arch villain drops one of his loyal minions into the piranha tank, and all the other minions are inspired to be twice as loyal? That is leftism. When Aristide personally with his own hand gouged out the eyes of one his loyal minions, his non political minions joined the revolution against him, but his politically sincere minions were inspired to be twice as loyal and twice as sincere. Similarly Stalin, though Stalin, unlike Trotsky, was not so crass as to get his own hands covered with the disgusting body fluids of his fellow leftists, instead having his minions torture each other.

But I get away with stuff, Neill Blomkamp, the writer/director of District 9, gets away with stuff. From the trailer of his movie Elysium, it looks like waves of subhuman illegal immigrants overwhelm the remaining nice, technologically advanced parts of earth, turning the city of tomorrow into a third world garbage heap and forcing the elites to flee into space. Hard to tell from the trailer, but just as “District 9” was about the end of white rule (the prawns, metaphor for the blacks, were abandoned by their betters to fester in their own filth), looks like “Elysium” is about illegal immigration.

The further you are from the left, the less likely you are to be mau maued for insufficient leftism. Real reactionaries, like Neill Blomkamp, are doing fine, while Barry Malzberg, one of the architects of the reinvention of science fiction and fantasy as a repetitious megaphone screaming trite propaganda with the volume turned up hard, is pre-dead.