SWEDEN has decided to drop the concept of Islamophobia. The reasoning is almost embarrassingly simple for every adult in the room - a phobia is by definition an irrational fear, and if you force all critical observations into that category, you are no longer fighting hatred - you are shutting down a conversation. The Swedish authorities have now officially recognized this and put it in writing.
Good for them.
It's a first step into tackling reality as it is.
Anyways.
I understand the loss this leaves. It was a good word. Mostly because it worked for as long as it did.
And precisely because it worked, I think we owe each other a replacement. Language IS power, as the progressives taught us, and we should take that lesson seriously. I would therefore like to propose that we introduce a new concept into our political and cultural conversation, namely -
'extreme-leftophobia'.
Let me explain the term precisely, because precision matters in these things.
Islamophobia worked by embedding a question into the very structure of the word itself - is your concern rational or irrational? And since it is always harder to prove your rationality than to discredit it, the conversation not infrequently ended with the person asking the questions being the one who lacked insight, empathy, or both. It is elegant, really. A single word that shifts the burden of proof completely.
Extreme-leftophobia is built on the same principle - but contains an additional logical beauty I would like to highlight.
Because unlike Islamophobia, where there actually exists something called Islam, there is no such thing as an "extreme left." It is a logical impossibility. The left is not a political position like any other - it is a moral scale moving in a single direction. The further along that scale you travel towards leftism, the more you know, the more you understand, the deeper your empathy, the closer you come to loving humanity in its full complexity. This is not political analysis. It is a fact embedded in the language itself. Progressive means something moving forward. Toward what?
Of course - toward the better. 🤓🤷🏼♂️
And that means, naturally, that you cannot travel too far in that direction. There is no outer limit to "the good."
And of course history offers no counterexamples. The Soviet Union, Mao's China, the Khmer Rouge - these were not cases of extreme leftism. This has been confirmed. They were betrayals of the left. Corruptions of the left. Perversions of the left. Which is to say, when you follow the logic carefully, they were right-wing, really.
The logic is consistent, once you commit to it.
The phrase "extreme left" therefore does not describe a real position - it describes a condition in the person saying it. A condition of irrational fear toward people who have simply come further than themselves. A fear of the more understanding, the more inclusive, the more just. Which is to say -
A fear of the better human being.
And now we finally have a word for it.
Anyone who from this point forward uses the term "extreme left" will naturally be registered as a carrier of this fear - just as anyone who described the influence of Islamist movements on European institutions as "problematic" would have suffered from the other one. Both concepts offer the same advantages - they require no documentation, they cannot be disproved, and they shift the conversation from the content to the person speaking.
The only thing the two terms do not share is the small detail that Islamophobia describes a fear of something that actually exists.
But we all agree to overlook that.
Don't we?
😁🤡
❤️🔥🪽
