As pro-Hamas protests sweep U.S. campuses across our nation, a curious phenomenon has surfaced: a large number of the protesters are wearing not only the keffiyeh, but also the COVID mask.  Why is this, exactly?

The keffiyeh-wearing is not much of a mystery.  The protesters are clearly making a statement of solidarity with Islamic jihad in general and with Hamas terror in particular.  But the COVID masks add an intriguing twist.  Some of the mask-wearers themselves maintain that they are trying to “stay safe” — in what they believe is the ongoing COVID “pandemic.”  Other observers have postulated, however, that this is an effort by the protesters to hide their identity.

There are possible elements of truth in both of these reasons, but beneath these layers, something much deeper is going on — and it involves a powerful impulse that serves as the foundation of leftist utopianism itself.           

We would do well to reflect upon the manner in which the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China imposed unisex desexualized dress on its citizens.  The tyranny perpetrated this as a ruthless war on gender differences and individuality in the name of “equity.”  And this war involved a calculated assault on the possibilities of private attractions, affections, and desires.

The central reality to gauge here is that unisex/desexualized dress satisfies leftists’ morbid pining for enforced sameness.  It is crucial, in their world, to erase physical as well as emotional differences and attractions between people.  In the utopian endgame, humans must all be replicas of one another and be devoted to the cause, the revolutionary state, and to its all-knowing administering of “equality” and “social justice.”

It is no surprise, therefore, that Western leftists were enthralled with the Maoist social engineering experiment.  I have documented this in my book United in Hate, where I show how fellow travelers who journeyed to worship at the altar of the Maoist killing fields flew into ecstasy upon witnessing the unisex clothing.

Let’s recall a few examples:

American leftist academic Orville Schell adored China’s enforced mode of dress the moment he witnessed it. In his book, In the People’s Republic, he praised the “baggy uniformlike tunics” and wrote admiringly how “the question of the shape of a person’s body is a moot one in China.”

Schell was excited that physical attributes were subordinated in intimate relationships. He wrote that the Chinese had

succeeded in fundamentally altering the notion of attractiveness by simply substituting some of these revolutionary attributes for the physical ones which play such an important role in Western courtship.

 Schell also noted approvingly that “the notion of ‘playing hard to get’ or exacerbating “jealousies in order to win someone’s love does not appear to assume such a prominent role.”  American actress Shirley MacLaine joined Schell in being deeply enamored with China’s totalitarian puritanism. Like all leftists, she would have surely viewed any restriction on women’s attire or sexual impulses in her own society as patriarchal and capitalist oppression, but for the Chinese people, the suffocation of unregulated love and sex was a magnificent thing in her eyes. In her book, You Can Get There, she wrote:

I could see for myself that in China you were able to forget about sex. There was no commercial exploitation of sex in order to sell soap, perfume, soft drinks, soda pop, or cars. The unisex uniforms also de-emphasized sexuality, and in an interesting way made you concentrate more on the individual character of the Chinese, regardless of his or her physical assets, or lack of them. . . . Women had little need or even desire for such superficial things as frilly clothes and make-up, children loved work and were self-reliant. Relationships seemed free of jealousy and infidelity because monogamy was the law of the land and hardly anyone strayed. . . . It was a quantum leap into the future.

For French leftist Claudie Broyelle, meanwhile, one of the key accomplishments of the Maoist revolution was the cancellation of the “privatization of love.” In her book, Women’s Liberation in China, she gleefully stressed how love in China was now to be expressed not through personal and selfish capitalist avenues, but only through “revolutionary commitment.”

Broyelle noted with profound satisfaction that good looks were no longer important for Chinese women. Unlike the sexualized image of women in Western advertising, she boasted how, in China, there was a different image:

On wall posters, in newspapers, on the stage, everywhere. It is the picture of a worker or a peasant, with a determined expression and dressed very simply. ... You can see her working, studying, taking part in a demonstration.

Schell, MacLaine, and Broyelle never, of course, spoke of the brutal truths that stared them right in the face. They didn’t dare to ask: How could jealousy possibly arise, or infidelity be practiced, in a society where privacy did not exist and infidelity would land you in a concentration camp at best, and get you executed at worst? What if a Chinese citizen chose not to forget about sex and made his lack of forgetfulness evident? And what if a man or a woman wore clothes that did not deemphasize his or her sexuality? What would happen to them? It is clear, of course, why these leftists never asked these questions — and why they also never visited a Chinese concentration camp to investigate who was imprisoned there, how they were suffering, and why.

The yearning for totalitarian puritanism that was witnessed among leftists in Maoist China does not mean, of course, that leftists are non-sexual. To the contrary, many of them are highly sexually promiscuous and also passionately active in promoting promiscuity. The issue here is what cause is being served. Women’s “sexual self-determination” is, for instance, adamantly supported by leftists if it enables their war against their own host democratic-capitalist societies — and if it can hurt the Judeo-Christian tradition. But if a totalitarian adversarial society is stifling women’s rights in this context, then leftists vehemently support that oppression, since they typically worship the particular tyranny in question, and gleefully welcome the threat it poses to their own host society — which they hate and want to destroy.

It is important to remember how, some fifty years ago, the terrorist group Weather Underground not only waged war against American society through violence and mayhem, but also encouraged promiscuity — while forbidding private love — within its own ranks. This constituted an eerie replay of the sexual promiscuity that was enforced (while private love was outlawed) in dystopian novels such as We, 1984, and Brave New World. All of this is precisely why the radical left and Sharia supporters detest Valentine’s Day — since it is a day devoted to the love between a man and a woman, a bond that dangerously threatens the totality.

And so we begin to understand why, just as the devotion to totalitarian puritanism played a central role in the left’s solidarity with Maoist China (and with other vicious Communist regimes), so too it serves as a core component of the left’s current romance with Islam — which at this very moment involves campus pro-Hamas protesters bowing to Allah.

Indeed, Maoists’ unisex clothing rules find their parallel in Islam’s mandate for shapeless coverings — to be worn by both males and females. The collective “uniform” symbolizes submission to a “higher entity” and cancels out individual expression, mutual physical attraction, and private connection and affection. And it becomes obvious how the COVID face-coverings fit this totalitarian matrix perfectly.

Thus, just as Orville Schell, Claudie Broyelle, and Shirley MacLaine were enchanted with the enforced Maoist dress that attempted to desexualize Chinese citizens, so, too, the new generation of leftists solemnly genuflect before the Islamic hijab, niqab and burqa — and also before the “pandemic mask.” The Islamic and COVID coverings, like the Maoist uniform, attract leftists by virtue of not only how they negate individuality and personal connection, but also how they reflect humans being mandated to wear them in a tyrannical setting. Longing to submerge themselves into a totality where even their own choices will be negated, leftists are always drawn to a totalitarian entity within which they can lose themselves. And it is in this twisted paradigm that these lost individuals — who suffer from an immense feeling of alienation — finally feel connected to something. They finally belong.

As I document in United in Hate — and in my work Jihadist Psychopath — all of these forces explain why leftists today are on the side of the Sharia-enforcers who persecute and kill women who dare to not wear hijab. To be sure, it is transparently evident why leftist feminists in particular callously turn their backs on murdered Muslim girls such as Aqsa Parvez and Mahsa Amini — and heartlessly ignore, for instance, the suffering Iranian women and girls who are today imprisoned, raped, and killed for Islamically covering themselves.

And so, there is no real mystery about what is transpiring on U.S. campuses today.  The left is simply continuing its Maoist cultural revolution and, therefore, just dutifully obeying the rules of Sharia and “pandemic safety” that it cherishes with such sacred devotion.

Thus, the pro-Hamas protesters on campus today are not really wearing masks because they want to “stay safe.” It is, and always was, about something much deeper than that. They are bowing to the totality. Worshiping at the altars of Sharia and of the COVID cult is a magnificent blend for these true believers; it’s a delicacy to be savored. In their seething hatred for humans, and in their unquenchable lust to control who and what humans are, the self-appointed social redeemers of our time are waging war on what makes us human — and on their own self-hating and self-reviling selves.

The leftist enterprise has always been a death wish — a suicidal odyssey to shed oneself of one’s own unwanted self and in that process to blur oneself into a collective totalitarian whole. And it is in this despotic swamp that they find their purpose, meaning and sense of belonging.

Today, what we are witnessing on university campuses is just the next logical chapter of the harrowing progressive tale. The pro-Hamas protesters are simply just fine-tuning their leftist journey, and their masks simply represent how successfully — and hauntingly — they are achieving their self-abhorring goal of self-annihilation.

Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S., and Canadian foreign policy. He is the editor of Frontpage Magazine, the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling, United in Hate and Jihadist Psychopath, and the host of the web TV show The Glazov Gang.  His new book is Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America. Follow him on Twitter: @JamieGlazov and GETTR: @JGlazov - and contact him at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.

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