>>64148209
>>64148506
I don't know exactly how it played out in Northern Ireland, but in a lot of countries, the left could take up a leading position (politically) in anti-colonial movements. They were both hostile to the traditional laws and norms in their own societies (anti-conservative), and were socialists or communists, and they could also be the most militant about "kicking out the foreign robbers." It's like: the Western governments are imperialists and they've taken our shit, and we're taking our shit back. That was the attitude. You could have Palestinian leftists try to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy in 1970 because they saw the Hashemite dynasty as feudal conservatives in cahoots with Western imperialism. This fit together in the ideology. In Ireland, the left-wing people in the IRA, or the ones who split from it and formed their own groups, saw Ireland vis-a-vis Britain in similar terms.

But it's much weirder now, because Hamas is an Islamic revivalist group that was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and which is highly socially conservative. It's part of this Islamist trend that really kicked off in the late 1970s, 1980s. This was mirrored in Iran, and there were leftists who participated in the revolution and then got annihilated by the clerics later in the 1980s. Hamas' original charter is an exigesis about how materialism and atheism are Jewish plots to destroy Islam. They sound like conspiracy theorists and are talking about the role of Jews and Freemasons during the French and Russian revolutions.