A consistent feature of the British socialist Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has been support for Islamists and Third World dictators. Corbyn himself has dined with his “friends” in Hamas and Hezbollah, and saluted the Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro. Andrew Murray, one of his consultants, is a sympathiser with the Juche regime in North Korea. Yasmine Dar, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, is an admirer of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Chris Williamson MP, Corbyn’s longtime supporter and friend, is a big fan of the Castroite regime in Cuba. And Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s Director of Strategy and Communications, was formerly a Guardian columnist, of whom the leftist commentator Brian Whitaker once wrote:

[Milne] views international politics almost entirely through an anti-imperialist lens. That, in turn, leads to a sympathetic view of those dictatorial regimes which characterise themselves as anti-imperialist. It’s the same with Islamist movements where they oppose Western-backed regimes…

To understand this curious phenomenon it is necessary to return to the West after World War Two.

First World Failure, and Third World Hope

By the end of World War Two, Western communists had all but abandoned hope in Western revolution. Soviet communism was an obvious catastrophe and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Clement Attlee’s reforms in the US and Britain had stripped more radical leftists of their support base. France and Italy, perhaps, offered more potential for the Left but, even there, communists tended to evolve into mainstream social democrats. And so radical leftists refocused their energies on cultural activism in their own nations and anti-imperialist activities abroad.

By this time, the European empires had all but collapsed. There was little hope for them, and nor should there have been. Burgeoning independence movements were becoming popular, and horrifying events such as the Bengal Famine had done much to discredit European rule. A bipolar world order emerged, with the United States as the most powerful Western force in international affairs. Rather than engaging in explicit empire-building it tended instead to support sympathetic governments against the Soviet Union and its communist allies. Leftists had, it must be said, justifiable complaints with this. The US propped up unambiguously appalling tyrants in Guatemala and Indonesia and entangled itself in a disastrous and brutal war in Vietnam. More recently, leftists correctly opposed the hubristic interventionist recklessness that led to the horrors of Iraq.

The anti-imperialist Left’s mistake has not always been its opposition to Western policies, it has been its reflexive idealisation of the West’s opponents. To some extent, one can explain this as a consequence of an instinctive sympathy with the underdog. With the exception of the Soviet Union, opponents of the United States and other Western powers have been comparatively poor and weak, and dependent on resilience and resourcefulness.

The problem, as anybody who has owned dogs knows, is that small dogs can be at least as vicious as their larger cousins, and that they can also bully dogs who are smaller than themselves. The veteran left-wing journalist John Pilger was moved to rhetorical tears by the “poorly armed, audacious” Iraqi “resistance,” but neglected to notice that their homemade bombs were eviscerating civilians in mosques and marketplaces as well as the American, British, and Iraqi soldiers he believed were legitimate targets.

But compassion for the oppressed is not sufficient to explain this odd phenomenon. There are people on the Left who believe that revolutionary movements in the Third World are not just underdogs but saviours—more committed, more courageous, and more principled than the old, weak, pampered liberal capitalist West.

Theirs was a romantic and revolutionary ideology that drew heavily upon Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. Born in the Caribbean island of Martinique, Fanon became a fierce opponent of European imperialism and an advocate of pan-African struggle. In the conclusion of his book, Fanon wrote: