An anon comments on an interesting phenomenon whereupon people yearn for heroes of a bygone age, and how it might explain a lot of modern political behavior and even the recent riots in the US:
I was reading a history of the USSR recently and there was a passage from a woman who had been a Komsomol member of the 1930’s, at the height of Stalin’s purges. She talked about how she, and all the others her age, who had been born after the revolution, felt a great deal of frustration that they had missed out on partaking in the revolution. So when Stalin started his purges, revealing “enemies” of the state everywhere, she and the others her age enthusiastically joined in, because this was their chance to take part in safeguarding the revolution. They felt like they were now part of it. Those Komsomol teenagers denounced their teachers, their parents, their friends, all due to that desperation to be part of the revolution they’d grown up idolizing, to see themselves standing alongside Lenin and Stalin, according to the history they had been presented at least.
This is relevant because the modern left finds itself in exactly the same position. They grew up idolizing the heroes of the civil rights movement, people just like the Dr King the protester mentioned above. They want so desperately to be part of that movement, despite the fact that things have obviously moved on since then. So just like the young communists shying at Stalin’s imagined enemies, so do the modern leftists make out every tiny transgression to be worse than apartheid. It’s the only way they can feel like they’re part of that movement.
I’ve often noticed SJWs and people on the far left talking about being on “the right side of history”, frequently in a rather haughty manner. The anon’s analysis listed above puts the usage of the phrase in a new light, and explains, at least to me, why that phrase seem to be subconsciously preferred by so many of them.
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Temple of Zagan 