#MeToo, BLM, climate change, trans rights, Palestine: today’s activists repeat a familiar script

Every time a woke movement hits its peak and begins to recede, the energy seems to pause. Centrists and conservatives breathe a sigh of relief and declare: Wokeness is over! But it never is. The energy hasn’t disappeared, it has simply migrated to a new home.

The chants repeated ad nauseam by today’s activists are often lifted directly from
Cold War propaganda; slogans whose origins and aims most of them do not understand.

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Until last weekend, no one had heard of punk-rap duo Bob Vylan. Then, during a set at the Glastonbury Festival, frontman “Bobby Vylan” worked up the crowd to chant “Death, death to the IDF”. A backlash ensued. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the act as “appalling”, police launched a criminal investigation and the US State Department revoked the duo’s visas.

While dismaying in its viciousness, the episode itself wasn’t novel. Whether the cause is #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, climate change, trans rights or Palestine, today’s activists repeat a familiar script. As historian Izabella Tabarovsky has written, “The anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist prattle of today’s college students feels like deja vu.”

The rhetoric on display at Glastonbury often is described as “woke” but the term itself offers little real insight. What we’re dealing with is not a fixed ideology but a moral grammar, a way of dividing the world into opposing forces. According to this grammar, life is split between oppressed and oppressor, the pure and the corrupt, good and evil. There is no neutral ground, and anyone not with us is with them.

This moral grammar has attached itself to a series of causes across the past decade, many of them seemingly unrelated. It first emerged in pop-feminism, where the demonisation of men became an edgy fashion statement. Just a few years ago it was trendy in some Melbourne circles to wear earrings that said “Kill All Men”.

The energy then migrated to Greta Thunberg’s climate protests, recast as a call for “climate justice” and sustained through international school strikes. From there it moved into Black Lives Matter, peaking in 2020 with mass demonstrations and riots described as “mostly peaceful”. In London, protesters held signs reading “Hands Up: Don’t Shoot”. (In Britain most police do not carry firearms.)

More recently, this same energy has fuelled trans rights activism, visible in the rise of pronoun declarations in email signatures and LinkedIn profiles. (As I write this, trans flags are waving on Sydney’s main streets.) Now the energy has shapeshifted again, this time into the pro-Palestinian movement and widespread demonisation of Israel.

Every time a woke movement hits its peak and begins to recede, the energy seems to pause. Centrists and conservatives breathe a sigh of relief and declare: Wokeness is over! But it never is. The energy hasn’t disappeared, it has simply migrated to a new home. I’ve argued previously that young women, in particular, are key drivers of this cultural energy, propelled by a heightened sensitivity to harm and the influence of consensus-driven friendship groups.

But gender is only one part of the pattern. The moral grammar that underpins wokeness has been with us for generations. It’s the same logic that animated revolutionary movements from the Bolsheviks to the Red Guards to the Khmer Rouge. It never truly disappears. It recedes, lies dormant, then returns whenever a younger generation becomes sufficiently disillusioned. As Michael Corleone put it: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

The anti-Zionism expressed in Bob Vylan’s “Death to the IDF” chant struck many as an appalling act of hate speech – including Starmer, who publicly condemned it. But to Tabarovsky it’s all depressingly familiar. Raised in the Soviet Union, Tabarovsky experienced state-sponsored anti-Semitism first hand. Russian Jews like her were banned from emigrating, barred from certain professions and universities, and had their religion and culture systematically suppressed. They also were branded in official propaganda as enemies of the state.

Bob Vylan frontman ‘Bobby Vylan’ works up the Glastonbury crowd last weekend. Picture: AFP

Now a scholar of Cold War propaganda, Tabarovsky has shown how the Soviet Union embedded anti-Zionism into the moral DNA of the Western left. It wasn’t a fringe belief; it was a carefully exported ideology, designed to endure.

Beginning in 1967, Moscow launched a sweeping campaign of “active measures” aimed at portraying Israel as a fascist outpost of Western imperialism. Soviet-aligned front groups such as the World Peace Council organised international conferences, passed resolutions and fed anti-Zionist narratives into leftist circles worldwide.

These efforts culminated in 1975 with UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination” – effectively codifying Soviet propaganda into international law. In the West, sympathetic groups such as the International Organisation of Journalists and the World Federation of Democratic Youth, along with outlets such as Tribune (the Communist Party of Australia’s official newspaper) helped amplify the message under the banner of social justice.

Campaigns by organisations such as Australia’s Campaign for International Co-operation and Disarmament reinforced the framing of Israel as a colonial aggressor. These weren’t organic, grassroots movements; they were part of a calculated effort to embed anti-Zionism into the moral and political vocabulary of the Western left. By the end of the 1970s, as Tabarovsky notes, “reflexive anti-Zionism had become a litmus test of belonging and unity in the struggle on the global left”.

A #MeToo march in Hollywood, California in 2017. Picture: AFP

The extensiveness of this campaign was confirmed in a 1986 CIA report, declassified in 2007. It detailed how the Soviet Union used an extensive propaganda network to influence Western peace groups, student organisations and trade unions. Most participants had no idea they were part of a co-ordinated influence operation.

According to the report, “front organisations” acted as “conduits for Soviet themes”, exploiting the gullibility of the Western left to launder Kremlin narratives. Journalists, academics and activists were recruited – knowingly or not – to spread anti-Zionist messages “under the banners of peace, solidarity and justice”.

Tabarovsky describes this form of anti-Zionism as “zombified”. Its slogans are not original; they are tired tropes and libels that refuse to die. The chants repeated ad nauseam by today’s activists are often lifted directly from Cold War propaganda; slogans whose origins and aims most of them do not understand.

The Soviet campaign was not about justice for Palestinians or even about Jews. It was about undermining the West by corrupting the meaning of our own language. Through deliberate disinformation, the Soviets inverted the moral vocabulary of the West: democracy became hypocrisy, capitalism became exploitation and freedom became domination. Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, was cast as an oppressor. And Jews were portrayed as Nazis.

Just as cultural energy in the West has moved fluidly from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter, climate strikes, trans activism and now pro-Palestinian fervour, we can trace a similar rhythm in the revolutionary waves of the 20th century. These, too, promised justice, redemption and the cleansing of a corrupt world – only to collapse beneath the weight of their own moral absolutism.

Australians march in Adelaide in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protests in the US in 2020. Picture: Getty

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 promised liberation for workers but quickly descended into mass arrests, purges and famine as ideological loyalty replaced the rule of law. Two generations later, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long convulsion in which teenage Red Guards destroyed temples, denounced teachers and tore apart their own families. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia and declared the start of “Year Zero”, its vision of agrarian socialism leading to the deaths of nearly two million people.

Each of these revolutions shared a common grammar: a sense of absolute moral clarity, a desire to root out internal enemies and a belief that justice required purification. Their language was different, their geography varied, but their structure and psychology were the same. Like today’s activists, their adherents believed they stood on the right side of history, that neutrality was complicity and redemption could be achieved only through total commitment.

In each case, the fervour eventually burned itself out. But revolutionary energy never goes extinct. It waits for the next generation disillusioned enough to take it up again. Cultural movements of the past decade, though far less violent, run on the same emotional circuitry as the most destructive revolutions of the 20th century. They offer belonging, clarity and a sense of moral purpose along with the seductive thrill of joining a righteous vanguard.

It may be that this energy, in the second decade of the 21st century, has not yet peaked. On the contrary, it may be only beginning. More and more young people feel they have no economic future. If the next generation becomes disenchanted enough, they may not demand reform but revolution. And when this energy is finally harnessed by left-wing economic populists – when it shifts its focus from race, gender and sexuality to class, to elites, landlords, property owners and professionals – that is when liberal societies will once again find themselves in real danger.

Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette.