The eternal target: Why the left is ALWAYS the first to be silenced

Across continents and centuries, one depressing magic trick keeps performing itself. Whenever people in power ( or those trying to get into power) feel even the slightest tremor under their feet, they reflexively point to the left and go, “Start with them, they’re always a safe warmup act.” The scenery changes, the costumes change, but the instinct stays as reliable as a fire alarm with a dying battery.

As historian Timothy Snyder observes in On Tyranny, “The symbol of the twentieth century is the circle of people who agree to perform a lie. The symbol of the twenty-first century is the circle of people who agree to disregard the victim.” He may as well have added a footnote saying “and watch who gets cast as the victim first.” It is almost always the left. History does not even bother to hide it. In the United States, the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920 saw thousands of anarchists and immigrant communists rounded up and deported. Historian Adam Hochschild notes this set the tone, showing that “the first victims were radicals.” Germany in 1933 followed the script with terrifying efficiency. The Nazis did not start their nightmare rollout with a general public sale. They began by rounding up communists and socialists. Richard J. Evans reminds us in The Coming of the Third Reich that “The first concentration camp at Dachau was intended not for Jews but for Communists and Social Democrats.” A detail history teachers should probably repeat louder.

This pattern found fans across the world. Indonesia in 1965–66 saw a US backed military regime kill between 500,000 and a million communists, trade unionists, and suspected leftists, a massacre so awful it somehow skipped whole chapters of public memory. In Argentina’s Dirty War, left wing students, unionists, and Peronist militants were targeted by the junta, which “disappeared” up to 30,000 of them. Chile’s 1973 coup followed the same bleak logic. Pinochet’s tanks crushed a democratic government that had dared suggest redistribution, and Santiago’s stadium morphed into a prison and execution site for leftists. Colombia has spent decades quietly becoming the most dangerous place in the world to be a union leader, with over 3,000 assassinations since 1986. You would think that number would spark more alarm, but the world has developed a knack for not noticing leftists being killed.

And now? The method adjusts itself like a chameleon with a media strategy. Authoritarian regimes still reach for bullets and prisons because subtlety has never been their strong suit. Hybrid democracies go for harassment and surveillance. And the “civilised” democracies of the world prefer the scalpel of ridicule, which leaves no blood and barely any fingerprints. Much easier for everyone involved, except the people being mocked.

Why is the left always the canary in the coal mine?

Because of what it insists on talking about. The left organises the masses, demands redistribution, and speaks in the universal language of morality freedom, justice, dignity. It says these words like they still matter, which drives elites to distraction. Arundhati Roy once said, “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.” The powerful prefer their publics unseeing and unaccountable. The left tends to interrupt that.

THE UNFORGIVABLE SIN: WHY POWER FEARS THE LEFT

The left is not feared for its tactics, which vary wildly and often involve more meetings than anyone should experience in a lifetime. It is feared for the deeper claim beneath it all: that the current hierarchy is not inevitable, not natural, and certainly not just. That solidarity might actually work. This idea is radioactive to people who benefit from the status quo.

Fred Hampton captured the spirit before he was assassinated. “We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism with solidarity.” That one sentence explains why he scared the powerful so much more than any weapon ever could.

Nelson Mandela said something similar at the Rivonia Trial. “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.” This is not a replacement hierarchy. It is an actual vision of equality, which explains why those invested in inequality found it threatening enough to cage him for decades.

The left insists the problem is structural. Not a single bad apple. The orchard is rotten and needs replanting. Bell hooks captured this mix of realism and imagination: “To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” That is exactly the sort of thinking authoritarian projects try to smother. Imagining alternatives is step one in building them.

Suppression follows a familiar choreography. First mockery, then delegitimisation, then restriction, then repression, then violence. Each stage makes the next feel reasonable. Historian Ruth Ben Ghiat writes in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, “Authoritarians don’t take power and then become corrupt. They are already corrupt and use that corruption to take power. The first thing they do is dismantle the legal system and the independent media, the two institutions that can hold them accountable.” And because the left tends to be the loudest about accountability and redistribution, they become the obstacle authoritarians swat first.

A GLOBAL PATTERN OF CONTAINMENT

Look around and the ritual repeats itself, just translated into the local dialect of disdain.

• In the United Kingdom, containment is accomplished through caricature. Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership calls its left flank “unelectable” or “extreme,” as if the ghost of 2019 personally haunts them. The Conservative Party uses culture wars like party trick confetti, calling the left “woke warriors” or “radical socialists.” Reform UK, under Nigel Farage, has perfected a populist routine that frames left wing concerns from climate to social justice as the obsessions of “eco zealots” and “out of touch elites” who allegedly hate normal people. The tabloids treat left wing MPs like punchline machines, branding them “snowflakes” performing “student politics.” The goal is simple. No tanks. No bullets. Just embarrassment until the left looks like a fringe hobby.

• In the United States, demonisation is the tool of choice. The left becomes “socialists” or “radical Marxists,” even when suggesting painfully normal ideas like healthcare. Some Democrats play along, labelling progressives “too radical,” as if the phrase came pre-printed on their stationery. Journalist Masha Gessen explains that extremist rhetoric works by making compromise impossible, forcing people into corners where status quo defenders appear calm and reasonable. Conservative media repeats caricatures daily, while mainstream outlets often treat leftist ideas as fringe even when polls say the opposite.

• Across Europe, leftists are slotted into the “chaotic” or “anti national” box. In Latin America, leaders like Argentina’s Javier Milei dismiss the left as “populist failures,” giving cover for violence against unionists. In Asia, leftist politics are treated like a security hazard, with Indian Maoists labelled “terrorists.” In Africa, left movements get branded “obsolete” or “foreign influenced.” Slavoj Žižek once joked, “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.” Many governments solve that problem by stripping the left of its language first.

The continuity is almost comedic in its predictability:

• Indonesia: mass killings.

• Argentina: disappearances.

• Chile: bullets.

• Nazi Germany: prisons.

• Colombia: assassinations.

• UK: ridicule from Labour, Conservatives, and Reform UK.

• US: culture wars.

Different masks. Same ritual. Contain solidarity. Undermine redistribution. Keep the hierarchy intact.

When the left gets kicked first, it is not a coincidence. It is the canary choking. It is the alarm starting to ring. The same people mocking “wokeness” today will aim at someone else tomorrow. Snyder warns, “Antifascism became a crime before the police state was fully built.” That warning may as well be printed as a public service announcement.

Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, describes how elites use crises to force through policies that would never survive democratic sunlight. To do this, left wing resistance must be neutralised early. “The strategy of the shock doctrine is to use moments of crisis to impose radical free market programmes on countries that would never accept them in democratic times.” It is hard to shock a country while people are standing in the way.

Defending the left from this orchestrated sidelining is not about endorsing every policy. It is about defending a principle. Pablo Neruda summed it up simply. “You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.” The left, in its best form, is that springtime. That human urge for justice.

So when we see solidarity mocked, when dignity is painted as dangerous, when debate quietly mutates into dehumanisation, we should recognise the sound. It is scaffolding going up around democracy. The attack on the left is never the endgame. It is the test run, checking how much rot the public will accept. History has been screaming this warning for a century, but humans are champion forgetters.

Martin Niemöller’s line, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist,” is not just a dramatic flourish. It is a literal field manual for authoritarian creep. The danger does not arrive like a marching band. It arrives quietly, in the compromises we shrug through.

Defending the left early is not partisanship. It is the simple act of locking the door before someone walks straight in.