There is something persistently seductive in the specter of revolutionary violence. It beckons not only the downtrodden, as Marxist mythology would have it, but also the educated and the privileged. The bloodied banner of revolution – no matter how soaked with tyranny – continues to enchant a particular kind of progressive mind. It is a seduction not of the body but of the soul – a spiritual longing to be cleansed through the fire of someone else’s destruction.

Frantz Fanon, a man of immense insight and considerable darkness, captured this impulse with chilling honesty. In his book The Wretched of the Earth, he describes violence not merely as a tool but as a cleansing force, one that “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction.”

For Fanon, killing was not just permitted – it was therapeutic.

Baptism of violence

This theology of violence offered the Western radical a kind of secular baptism.

What the church once promised through the cross, the revolutionary now promises through blood. Liberation was not to be a process of political evolution but of existential rupture. In his rage, the rebel does not merely overthrow; he purifies. And so, in place of universal values, the activist class enshrined the revolutionary myth as its central creed.

Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
What matters is not whether a regime imprisons poets or murders dissidents, but whether it does so under the banner of “anti-imperialism.” Nowhere has this betrayal of moral clarity been more visible than in the Left’s infatuation with explicitly authoritarian regimes.

When Joseph Stalin’s purges swept through the Soviet intelligentsia – killing millions and turning half of Europe into a prison – prominent Western intellectuals such as Walter Duranty dismissed the evidence. They praised what they called “progress.” When Mao’s Cultural Revolution destroyed an entire generation of Chinese youth and annihilated the country’s cultural heritage, Western radicals wore his image on T-shirts. Jean-Paul Sartre, never one to be hindered by fact, described Maoist China as “a model of civilization.”

In 1978, as demonstrations swept through Iran and threatened to upend the Shah’s rule, French philosopher Michel Foucault traveled to Tehran. He sought to understand the deeper forces driving the collapse of Shah Reza Pahlavi’s powerful regime.

Captivating divergence

What captivated Foucault was not merely the political upheaval but the revolution’s apparent divergence from familiar ideological templates – whether Western liberalism, Eastern socialism, or Marxist revolution. He coined the term “political spirituality” to describe what he believed was an entirely new form of collective awakening.

But what Foucault encountered was not the birth of a novel political philosophy but rather the rise of Islamism – rooted in Shia notions of martyrdom and divine authority.

From Paris, he chronicled the events with enthusiasm in the French media and even met Ayatollah Khomeini while the cleric was still in exile. Yet when it came to critiquing the emerging theocratic regime, Foucault failed to apply the same scrutiny he had reserved for Western democracies. He remained conspicuously silent as the new Islamic Republic began violently suppressing dissent, curbing women’s rights, and promoting antisemitic ideology.

Foucault’s reluctance to criticize became more evident when French feminists pressed him on the regime’s treatment of women. Rather than engage with their concerns, he dismissed them, accusing critics of reinforcing Eurocentric biases and overlooking what he saw as a grand historical struggle – one that demanded setting aside individual grievances to challenge the global dominance of capitalism and its European roots.

In this, Foucault remained consistent: Even the brutal criminalization of homosexuality in the Islamic Republic did not shake his enthusiasm for its spiritual-political promise, despite the fact that his own freedoms as a gay man were safeguarded in the very Western societies he so often condemned.

Even today, the legacy lives on. Che Guevara – a man who personally oversaw executions in Cuban prisons – is immortalized in campus murals and protest art as a hero of justice. Not because he built anything of worth – he did not – but because he symbolized a struggle. The revolution, in this telling, never fails. It is only ever betrayed.

To understand this phenomenon, one must first recognize that revolutionary despotism is not a bug in the progressive imagination – it is a feature.

The allure lies in the promise of moral purity, achieved not through reflection or restraint but through purgation. The enemy is not to be debated, but liquidated. The world is not to be reformed, but remade. It is not enough to win; one must annihilate the old order in its entirety – its traditions, its hierarchies, and its memory.

In this context, the despot becomes not merely a ruler but a redeemer. Stalin, Guevara, Khomeini – these are not political figures in the eyes of their admirers. They are messianic symbols, avatars of vengeance. Their cruelty is forgiven – admired, even – so long as it is visited upon the “right” people: the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, and the Zionists. If the gulag is populated by the enemies of progress, then the gulag becomes, in effect, a temple.

This is not a uniquely Western affliction, but it reveals something uniquely broken in the Western conscience. I say this as a secularist because it is important to understand where we have gone wrong.

The modern West, having disenchanted itself from its own traditions, searches for meaning in mythology. One of the most enduring is the myth of revolutionary virtue – the belief that history moves in moral arcs, and that violence in the service of equality is not merely permissible but righteous. 

When this belief encounters the realities of revolutionary regimes – economic collapse, repression, censorship, mass graves – it does not dissolve. It adapts. It blames the embargo. It blames the policy of restraint, and it blames the victims.

Symbol of resistance

The case of the Islamic Republic of Iran is particularly instructive. Here is a theocratic regime that hangs women, executes homosexuals, censors dissent, and funds genocidal militias across the Middle East. One might assume it would be the object of fierce condemnation by the progressive world.

And yet, for some on the Left, Iran remains a symbol of resistance – against Israel, against America, against “Western hegemony.”

That it is a totalitarian theocracy matters less than whom it opposes. The logic is tribal, not moral. In this tribal calculus, the moral categories of right and wrong collapse into the political categories of oppressor and oppressed.

If the Islamic Republic is opposed by the West, it is absolved. Its crimes vanish beneath the banner of “anti-imperialism.” And so, once again, the progressive conscience finds itself kneeling not before the victims of tyranny but before its architects.

This is not merely a failure of judgment. It is a form of intellectual – and perhaps spiritual – corruption. It reveals that the modern Left, in large part, has abandoned the liberal tradition that once anchored it. 

New creed

It has instead adopted a new creed: not that power is inherently sinful, or that oppression is always wrong, but that power is illegitimate unless it emerges from a revolutionary source – and that oppression is tolerable so long as it claims to punch up. This worldview does not judge regimes by how they govern but by whom they claim to represent. It is not interested in liberal democracy but in narrative.

Thus, a socialist autocrat who starves his people is preferable to a democratic capitalist who enriches them. A religious fascist who opposes “the West” is preferable to a secular conservative who aligns with it. The defining sin is not tyranny. It is the wrong kind of alliance.

The danger of this mindset is not confined to university campuses. It seeps into foreign policy, media coverage, and public morality. It explains why many Western commentators can look upon a massacre committed by Hamas and wonder aloud what “context” we must consider before condemnation. 

It explains why journalists refer to the Iranian regime as “conservative” but never as “totalitarian.” It explains why the BBC refuses to use the word “terrorist” for a proscribed terrorist organization. It explains why the same activists who rally against racism at home march alongside those who chant for intifada abroad.

What they worship is not the revolution’s outcomes but its aesthetics. The raised fist. The burning flag. The keffiyeh. The mural of Che. These are not political statements – they are liturgical symbols. 

Modern despot

The modern revolutionary despot, with his rifles and slogans, offers a substitute for transcendence: a cause that redeems, a struggle that sanctifies. He grants the Western progressive what neither church nor state can give – the feeling of moral grandeur without the burden of moral responsibility.

However, history – that brutal accountant – keeps a different ledger.

The revolutionary states of the last century have left behind a record not of justice but of ruin. Tens of millions dead. Entire cultures shattered. Freedoms crushed beneath the wheel of ideological fervor. And still, the next generation returns to the altar. Why?

Because revolutionary despotism promises not just power but purpose. It speaks in absolutes. It offers clarity. In a fractured world, that clarity is intoxicating. But the price is always the same: human lives, stripped of dignity, sacrificed to the dream of purity.

The tragedy is not that despotism exists – it always has, and likely always will. The tragedy is that it continues to find such eager disciples.■

The author is a writer and political researcher. He works at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI).