The cult of revolution is only one side of the crisis. There is another, quieter betrayal that unfolds not in manifestos and murals, but in diplomatic receptions and billion-dollar endowments.
The West’s crisis is not merely one of foreign policy, but of perception—of how easily it confuses virtue with rebellion or credibility with wealth. Today, this crisis manifests in two distinct but deeply related ways. First, the enduring romanticization of revolutionary violence, especially among the progressive classes—the belief that tyranny, when born of resistance, is somehow noble. Second, the normalization of authoritarian soft power, where regimes like Qatar use Western institutions—media, academia, diplomacy—to promote an ideology fundamentally hostile to Western values. This article examines both: first, the revolutionary myth, through its long seduction of academia then, the strategic myth, through Qatar’s careful exploitation of liberal tolerance for illiberal ends.
There is something persistently seductive in the specter of revolutionary violence. It beckons not only the downtrodden, as Marxist mythology would have it, but also the educated and the privileged. The bloodied banner of revolution—no matter how soaked in tyranny—continues to enchant a particular kind of progressive mind. It is a seduction not of the body, but of the soul—a spiritual longing to be cleansed through the fire of someone else’s destruction.
Frantz Fanon—a man of immense insight and considerable darkness—captured this impulse with chilling honesty. In The Wretched of the Earth, he describes violence not merely as a tool but as a cleansing force, one that “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction.” For Fanon, killing was not just permitted—it was therapeutic. Liberation is not a process of political evolution but of existential rupture. In his rage, the rebel does not merely overthrow; he purifies. And so, in place of universal values, the activist class enshrined the revolutionary myth as its central creed.
What matters is not whether a regime imprisons poets or murders dissidents, but whether it does so under the banner of “anti-imperialism.” Nowhere has this betrayal of moral clarity been more visible than in the Left’s infatuation with explicitly authoritarian regimes.
When Stalin’s purges swept through the Soviet intelligentsia—killing millions and turning half of Europe into a prison—prominent Western intellectuals such as Walter Duranty dismissed the evidence. They praised what they called “progress.” When Mao’s Cultural Revolution destroyed an entire generation of Chinese youth and annihilated the country’s cultural heritage, Western radicals wore his image on T-shirts. Jean-Paul Sartre, never one to be hindered by fact, described Maoist China as “a model of civilization.”
In 1978, as protests in Iran erupted into a sweeping movement, Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, left for Tehran. His aim was to grasp the forces behind the fall of Shah Reza Pahlavi’s heavily armed regime. Foucault’s fascination with this “revolution” stemmed from its departure from established ideological models—Western, Eastern, bourgeois, or Bolshevik—presenting what he perceived as something profoundly unique. He introduced the concept of “political spirituality” to capture what he observed. Yet what Foucault ultimately encountered was not a novel intellectual breakthrough, but the harsh reality of Islamism and Shiite martyrdom.
Foucault eagerly wrote about the revolution in the French press and even managed to meet Ayatollah Khomeini while the latter was still in exile in Paris. Yet he seemed either unwilling or unable to apply the same critical rigor to the nascent theocracy of the Islamic Republic as he had to Western civil society. Despite the Islamists’ violent repression of dissent, their imposition of patriarchal control over Iranian women, and their institutionalization of antisemitism, Foucault remained silent. His criticism only surfaced when feminist Iranian exiles in France confronted him over his failure to speak against the regime’s disenfranchisement of women. He rebuked them, accusing them of “reinforcing Western prejudices against Islam” and failing to grasp the historical imperative—“sacrificing personal concerns for the unique opportunity to liberate the earth from capitalism’s damnation and its European legacy.” In this regard, one cannot accuse Foucault of inconsistency. Even the imposition of the death penalty for homosexuality in the mullahs’ state failed to deter his fervor for “political spirituality,” despite enjoying his own sexual freedom in the supposedly coercive bourgeois regimes of the West.
Even today, the legacy lives on. Che Guevara—a man who personally oversaw executions in Cuban prisons—is immortalized in campus murals and protest art as a hero of justice. Not because he built anything of worth—he did not—but because he symbolized a struggle. The revolution, in this telling, never fails. It is only ever betrayed.
To understand this phenomenon, one must first recognize that revolutionary despotism is not a bug in the progressive imagination—it is a feature. The allure lies in the promise of moral purity, achieved not through reflection or restraint, but through purgation. The enemy is not to be debated, but liquidated. The world is not to be reformed, but remade. It is not enough to win; one must annihilate the old order in its entirety—its traditions, its hierarchies, its memory.
In this context, the despot becomes not merely a ruler but a redeemer. Stalin, Guevara, Khomeini—these are not political figures in the eyes of their admirers. They are messianic symbols, avatars of vengeance. Their cruelty is forgiven—admired, even—so long as it is visited upon the “right” people: the bourgeoisie, the imperialists, the capitalists, and the Zionists. If the gulag is populated by the enemies of progress, then the gulag becomes, in effect, a temple.
The case of the Islamic Republic of Iran is particularly instructive. Here is a theocratic regime that hangs women, executes homosexuals, censors dissent, and funds genocidal militias across the Middle East. One might assume it would be the object of fierce condemnation by the progressive world. And yet, for some on the Left, Iran remains a symbol of resistance—against Israel, against America, against “Western hegemony.” That it is a totalitarian theocracy matters less than whom it opposes. The logic is tribal, not moral. In this tribal calculus, the moral categories of right and wrong collapse into the political categories of “us” versus “them.”
If the Islamic Republic is opposed by your political opposition at home, it is absolved. Its crimes vanish beneath the banner of “anti-imperialism.” And so, once again, the progressive conscience finds itself kneeling not before the victims of tyranny, but before its architects.
This is not merely a failure of judgment. It is a form of intellectual—and perhaps spiritual—corruption. It reveals that the modern Left, in large part, has abandoned the liberal tradition that once anchored it. It has instead adopted a new creed: not that power is inherently sinful, or that oppression is always wrong, but that power is illegitimate unless it emerges from a revolutionary source—and that oppression is tolerable so long as it claims to punch up. This worldview does not judge regimes by how they govern, but by whom they claim to represent. It is not interested in liberal democracy, but in narrative.
Thus, a socialist autocrat who starves his people is preferable to a democratic capitalist who enriches them. A religious fascist who opposes “the West” is preferable to a secular conservative who aligns with it. The defining sin is not tyranny. It is the wrong kind of alliance.
This explains why many Western commentators can look upon a massacre committed by Hamas and wonder aloud what “context” we must consider before condemnation. It explains why journalists refer to the Iranian regime as “conservative” but never as totalitarian. It explains why the BBC refuses to use the word terrorist for a proscribed terrorist organization. It explains why the same activists who rally against racism at home march alongside those who chant for intifada abroad.
What they worship is not the revolution’s outcomes, but its aesthetics. The raised fist. The burning flag. The keffiyeh. The mural of Che. These are not political statements—they are liturgical symbols. The modern revolutionary despot, with his rifles and slogans, offers a substitute for transcendence: a cause that redeems, a struggle that sanctifies. He grants the Western radical what neither church nor state can give—the feeling of moral grandeur without the burden of moral responsibility.
Qatari Soft Power
But the cult of revolution is only one side of the crisis. There is another, quieter betrayal—no less corrosive—that unfolds not in manifestos and murals, but in diplomatic receptions and billion-dollar endowments. This is the myth of strategic partnership, where authoritarian regimes speak the language of reform to gain access to the institutions they ultimately seek to erode. No regime has played this game more skillfully—or more cynically—than Qatar.
That a small, authoritarian petrostate—governed by hereditary rule and flush with gas wealth—has positioned itself simultaneously as an ally to liberal democracies and a benefactor to Islamist movements, is not some diplomatic masterstroke. It is a mirror held up to the West’s own confusion.
Qatar is not merely a state with an unfortunate list of friends. It is the strategic nucleus of a global ideological network: the Muslim Brotherhood’s most loyal sponsor, Al Jazeera’s proprietor, and Hamas’s chief patron. If the Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological mothership of Islamism—offering the moral vocabulary, political architecture, and apocalyptic imagination that animate jihadist movements—then Qatar is an executive producer.
One must understand that Qatar’s foreign policy is not incoherent; it is duplicitous by design. It wears the suits of Western diplomacy while funding the saboteurs of its civilization. It hosts American troops at Al Udeid Air Base while giving airtime and refuge to clerics and terrorists who preach to attack those troops. It funds American universities while financing the indoctrination of children in Gaza. These are not contradictions. Qatar understands how desperate Western democracies are for strategic stability and energy deals—and how easily they’ll look the other way. It knows that by speaking the language of soft power and pluralism, it can join the community of civilized nations while undermining it from within.
It is precisely because Qatar has mastered the language of human rights, modernization, and regional dialogue that it becomes such an effective vessel for Islamist power projection. Unlike the crude tyrants of the past, the Qatari regime markets its ideological project through the backdoors of media, education, and humanitarian aid. It funds mosques and NGOs across Europe. It builds curriculum in American universities. It hosts think tanks and influencers. All the while, it embeds the ideological grammar of the Muslim Brotherhood into the bloodstream of political discourse.
None of these contradictions appeared to raise alarms—until President Donald Trump backed a plan for the White House to use a Qatari-funded luxury aircraft as Air Force One. Suddenly, the contradictions could no longer be ignored. The question now should not solely be whether this was appropriate of a U.S. president, but whether those expressing outrage are prepared to confront their own complicity in Qatar’s ideological influence. Will universities return their Qatari endowments? Will NGOs and professors rethink their partnerships? Or are we simply watching the problem unfold in real time—where the outrage isn’t grounded in principle, but in tribe?
History, that brutal accountant, keeps a ledger. The tragedy is not that despotism exists—it always has, and likely always will. The tragedy is that it continues to find such eager disciples willing to add their names to a record not of justice, but of ruin.