Russia Begins Controversial Psychiatric Evaluation of Captured Ukrainian Pilot

[The Magistrate]

54. For Some, Sir, To Be A Leftist Is To Be Opposed To The United States

Whoever opposes the United States, or is opposed by the United States, is therefore right and good, and deserves left support. Suitable rationalizations will be supplied as necessary.

A complicating factor is that a good many on the left, particularly those who have been long at it, feel powerless and isolated, even failures, and these are ideal psychic conditions for hero worship and idolization of a strong man, for identifying with such a figure can assuage such feelings and make one suffering from them feel whole and on top.

It concentrates, I suspect, among persons who came of age in the 'hottest' period of the Cold War. People raised in the fifties and sixties were raised amid a strictly Manichean propaganda to believe the U.S. all good, the Communists all evil. Anyone with much sense found themselves sooner or later disabused of the notion the U.S. was all good, and some on that discovery simply reversed polarities rather than examine the structure of thought necessary to believe one side all good and the other all evil. Accepting that no side is particularly good, and that rather than range with light against darkness, one must sort through shades of grey and degrees of twilight and shadow, is not a comfortable thing to do, and some, to put it bluntly, funked it....