Ave, John!

Dr. John Pepple is a self-proclaimed "self-critical leftist." On his blog, I Want a New Left, Pepple frequently complains that self-criticality is missing on the Left, which seems to want to have its cake and eat it, too, and to apply a double standard to the people it opposes, letting itself off the hook for the very sins that it accuses the right of committing. Pepple's latest post discusses irredentism and revanchism. I had heard the first term but had forgotten what it meant, and I know the second term only because I know French: revanche is French for revenge (although it has other meanings as well).* In a post titled "Revanchism and the Postmodern Liberal Mind," Pepple calls certain leftists to the carpet for their loud silence when it comes to criticizing the obvious revanchism that is evident in Islamism:

Anyway, my main reason for mentioning this essay [by Carlin Roman, Chronicle of Higher Education] is how strange it is that it appears now rather than after 9/11. While Romano talks about how most scholars shy away from the topic of revanchism, those of us in the Resistance (see here) are well aware of it, because we have often heard it from the Islamists. For example, a few months after 9/11, Osama bin Laden gave a lengthy statement in which he claimed (among other things) that al-Andalus (i.e., Spain) really belonged to the Muslim world and not the West. Yet, this elicited no comments from anyone in academia, particularly the Collaborationist wing (again, here). So, Romano’s theme could be applied to himself: he himself shied away from discussing this example at the time, and he is now shying away from it in his current essay (which contains no mention specifically of Muslims, though it did mention a problem between Spain and Morocco without going into any details).

Hey, guys, why did it take you so long to get to this topic? Apparently, it’s ok to bring it up with respect to Putin, but it wasn’t with respect to Osama bin Laden and the Muslims. But why? It’s apparently because when it comes to Muslims, the left’s normal faculties suddenly get frozen down. Things they should have been talking about were instead talked about by people on the right, so that is where many of us who were disturbed by what was happening gravitated. Why bother with the left? They had nothing worthwhile to say.

Read the rest on your own.

---

*Irredentism is the hegemonic attitude taken by a corporate entity, like a country, that wishes to claim other parties or lands as its own because those parties or lands have, it is argued, always belonged to it culturally, historically, ethnically, etc. (See definition here.) Example: China's claim, after taking over Tibet, that Tibet has always been Chinese—a fine example of real imperialism. Revanchism is an attitude, also often hegemonic, founded upon revenge: we will take over your land to undo a past injustice—usually a military conquest (see here). A North American example of revanchism might be the belief, among many Mexicans, that there will be an eventual Reconquista (reconquering, reconquest) of United States territory as revenge for the taking of territory from Mexico.


_