Saddam Hussein was one of the most prolific mass murderers of the 20th Century, and, as a result of a disastrous & strategically incompetent war, an entire generation of people has grown up falsely believing that overthrowing dictators is more evil than the dictators themselves.

People that aren’t old enough to remember 2003 don’t remember that liberals who supported Iraqi democracy also opposed the war, but their arguments have been mostly memoryholed, often in favour of the reactionary dictator apologism of the hard left.

The result is often that young, left leaning people are totally ignorant of the facts and history of conflicts in the Middle East, and immerse themselves solely in so-called “anti-imperialist” agitprop that routinely dehumanises and denies agency to Middle Eastern civilians.

People are proud of their ignorance. They don’t need to learn about Dujail or Halabja, because they know all they want to know about Iraq from the false WMD claims. They then apply this lesson to all conflicts in the Middle East, from Libya to Syria, with zero need to learn more.

There are few more anti-intellectual movements in the world than dogmatic anti-imperialism, an ideology that instructs its adherents to ignore the voices and views of local populations in favour of pro-regime conspiracism regurgitated by cosplaying revolutionary communist clowns.

The end result of this anti-intellectualism is a vast movement of conspiracism and war crimes denial that has deeply embedded itself in the Western left, and the total abandonment of any semblance of a progressive foreign policy emerging from this vacuum.

Nobody in their right mind is calling for war with China, but there are Stop The War Coalition political officers actively engaged in a campaign of Uyghur genocide denial based on an ideological disposition to deny humanity to groups oppressed by states hostile to the West.

I have found the perfect distillation of this entire mentality in one tweet, written by an Australian war crimes revisionist. As I said, they revel in their own ignorance, they wear it like a badge of honour. They are as pathological as anti-vaxxers.