My Long Journey Home From the Left. By Elizabeth Nickson at Absurdistan.
The withdrawal and its consequences:
Decanted from the cultural left, I had to re-educate myself. It meant ten years, longer, of reading and thinking to the point where I despaired of ever making a living again.
Many of us have experienced that time now — when you have lost all your friends, all your income sources, and half if not more of your family treats you as if you are covered in ants. I had a mate, I had some equity, I had a supportive mother, but that basically was it. Any therapist disliked you on principle, so that door was closed. I remember going to one and at one juncture she said Trump was a psychopath, and that was that. Being a writer and reader I was habituated to solitude, I had terriers, we spent a lot of time climbing mountains and swimming in cold cold water.
Her lefty past:
I was never in left-wing politics, but I was more than a foot-soldier in the cultural left. Every newspaper, film, play, book, piece of art or music and all legacy journalism draws solely from the ideas of the left. We swim in it. It forms our reality and it is entirely false, fictitious, barely glances at reality. It is the second of two reasons, kids are self-styled noble socialist warriors. The other being their appalling schools.
I met many grandees: agents, famous musicians, actors, and film, play, book writers. Producers and publishers. People whose names you would recognize. I mean I had dinner with Al Pacino and gave a lunch for Princess Diana. I spent one New Year’s Eve with just the stunningly beautiful 90s breakout star Terence Trent D’Arby, me and my two best friends. I spent a week at Neil Young’s ranch in California and partied with Elvis Costello, and all those, but Diana, were purely social, with ‘friends’. Hundreds more work related.
Every individual, every single one, was a socialist, which is to say, they believed in capturing the wealth of the ‘rich’ and redistributing it fairly. As they thought fit.
The only difference between them and me was that by the time I was 30 I knew their ideas fully expressed, led to catastrophic bankruptcy across the board. They had no idea, no grasp of history, they lived in dreams. The left’s goal is always to break human reason, and when it comes to culture workers, it has effectively done so.
And then there’s the public opprobrium:
When I first started writing into the ideas of the right, I was policy-ignorant. I had a weekly column on the op-ed page of a national broadsheet. I needed ideas. The blowback was instant. Hate mail upon hate mail. Death threats, written, phoned in, email. Stalkers. One rich madman who moved to the island, a mile through the forest from my house, proceeded to make my life miserable for twelve years. “Everything you think is wrong”, he emailed through my newspaper’s email. He was going to reeducate me, or kill me. He was going to hire people to come to the island at night, creep up to my house, kill me, and vanish. He had the money and the limitless confidence to do just that. Two court cases and finally he died of pneumonia from life-long alcoholism. He was a trader, had a seat on the exchange.
I lost every connection in publishing, newspapers, magazines and books. No one would read anything I wrote, no one would answer calls. I was covered in ants. Not that I tried. …
Wake up!
We are facing something very dark and very bad, and despite various dismissals from people on the right, the Democrat party is undergoing a Marxist takeover. I take it seriously.
We’ve invited in millions who want what we have and will take it anyway they can, and our economy has been so broken by corruption and the mind-blowing stupidity of green/climate policies, we have stolen the lives of two generations.
A vast cohort is forming that wants to throw it all away, junking the furious, bitter sacrifice and devotion of 100 generations. Every single one of us was birthed from heroes and heroines who stood up to the evil of their day, survived and pushed us forward just a little bit. The cultural left has hid that heroism from us. …
When cracks of truth first appeared for her:
Time [Magazine] hurled me into hundreds if not thousands of interviews with politicians, artists, deposed kings and princes, scientists, torture victims, blood-soaked IRA chiefs, crooks and Nobel Prize winners. These encounters established a larger reality for me and hairline cracks appeared in my world view.
I became European bureau chief of Life magazine and one day Nelson Mandela’s lawyer, Ismail Ayoub, walked into my office and offered me the rights to Nelson’s autobiography. Tout London wanted to know how an obscure Canadian girl with no political heft got the rights to Long Walk to Freedom. There were a couple of reasons; Mandela was familiar with Life which had long treated him as a hero, and one of Time’s South African stringers was a one-time lover of Winnie. The clincher, I suspect, was that I had met Joe Slovo, and was friends with his daughter. I was safe.
When Nelson was released, I went to Soweto, and while waiting for our meetings I interviewed the wives of the men who had been in Robben Island with him. One day I had lunch in a tiny bungalow, owned by a woman whose brother attended. His face was badly scarred, he was missing an eye, and more than a few teeth. One shoulder had been broken and twisted and he couldn’t walk without a lurch. He said he had been tortured by the ANC in Zambia. I said, you mean the South African police or the military. No, he said, by the ANC; at one of their camps, he disagreed with their methods and ideas. He was not a communist, but had leadership potential, so they broke him. I didn’t believe him.
After Time, I wrote a book about the CIA’s mind control experiments in Canada. My English agent was a socialist, despite his childhood as the son of a wealthy Jewish peer. My publishers, both in the UK and Canada, two of the most august literary editors working at the time, were left of center, as were the staff. Because I had met Prime Minister Thatcher, they would ask: “Why was she so popular? What do they see in her?” People who voted for the right were deemed to be primitive and lacking virtue and the allegiance to Thatcher from “the people” confounded them. I am ashamed to say I agreed. In the world in which I lived — literature, theatre, film, design — everyone saw the right as devoid of compassion for the less advantaged. Exploiters all. And profoundly racist.
Change came rapidly. The catalyst was my father saying at a family dinner in Vancouver, when I was at the magic age of 40, that I reminded him of my great-great-grandmother, who declared in 1850, at the age of 20, that marriage was slavery, and set off to see the world. …
I began to comb my way through the family papers which were lodged in tiny libraries all through eastern Canada and the U.S. And immediately fell into a kind of trance from which I have not fully awoken.
The first thing I discovered was that they were Christian. And I mean very, very Christian. This was unnerving since on the intellectual left, faith in God, and particularly Christ, signifies a weak mind. But these people were anything but weak. They had been town, church and infrastructure builders from the time they arrived in 1630…. They also fought for the Indians …
The tiny museums through upper New York State and the Niagara peninsula had thousands of documents, photographs, letters, diaries, all original source material. To my dismay, however, none fit the narrative we were aiming for. Evidence of my great-great-grandmother’s oppression did not exist. She was not oppressed, she was free to do what she liked. Free to travel, not marry, and support herself by her own hand. The women of her family were decidedly not of the whining pathetic Susanna Moodie archetype so beloved by Margaret Atwood. They were mightily strong. They loved pioneering, and when they saw a problem, they damn well solved it.
This simply would not do for a modern publisher. There was none of the barbarism expected of those unenlightened times. Instead it was a 400-year history of a family who, like all the other families they knew, constituted a parade of virtue and strength. By 1900, there had been so much enthusiastic breeding and pioneering, a vast cousinage reached through every sector of the culture, stretching from sea to sea in both Canada and the U.S. Finally one of the librarians, after another afternoon of my obsessive digging for dirt, declared in frustration, “Look, they were good people.” …
Now:
It was now clear to me that our contemporary story tellers were telling lies. They had utterly corrupted our idea of our country and culture, religion and past. They misread the very ground of human character. They had taught us that with few exceptions, we came from exploiters, oppressors of natives and blacks.
All the “great” writers of our time read to me now as depressives caught in an almost demonic fiction, charlatans who had seized the criminal and disaffected and made of them the norm that must be defeated and replaced by another system. And that system was inevitably command and control socialism.
Ten years after the ANC took over South Africa, Oxbridge scholar R.W. Johnson moved home to South Africa and started a think tank. Joe Slovo, I discovered through reading his research, was an assassin, who ran torture/re-education camps in Zambia and who ranged through Europe neutralizing any African potential leader black or white, who could stand in the way of the communist party in the new Africa. I had set my lodestar on evil.
hat-tip David Archibald
