Posted on 08/15/2006 8:59:06 PM PDT by Reagan Man
Blind animus for President Bush is insufficient to explain liberals' refusal to acknowledge the reality of a cruel and imperialistic jihadist push worldwide. Nor is it simply liberals' unwillingness to work with Republicans and conservatives that render them incapable of serious and active participation in the War on Terror. It is that by so doing, liberals would be forced to upend the world view and social philosophies that have animated them since the early '60s.
At stake is their identity as individuals, what they do, what they believe, the need for their journals, indeed their sense of moral superiority and their hierarchy in society and policy making. Worse for them, their whole social milieu is dependent on maintaining the artificial and cocooned world they have created for themselves. The philosophic underpinnings of “their world” are frontally challenged by this new jihadist reality, one that cannot be controlled, maneuvered or finessed by their propositions of how life works. It is much more convenient to deny jihad’s eagerness to kill us all, including them, than to deconstruct the ersatz world they have built for themselves.
As with those in the mid-1800s unwilling to accept the transformation from an agricultural era to the new era of industrialization, most elitist liberals refuse to admit the reality of the new jihadist era since it makes irrelevant the entrenched ideas upon which they have grown rich and sassy for the last half century. At stake is their status. It is similar to the advent of the early automobile period when buggy-whip manufacturers would not reconcile themselves to a new reality rendering what they did outdated and unnecessary.
Jihadism is not a reaction to American, Israeli or Australian foreign policy. It is organic, a conventional and historic reading of the Koran as understood by many imams. Jihad is one of Islam’s authentic traditions, predating the birth of America and Israel. They seek to conquer, to create a global Islamic caliphate. Our survival depends on their defeat, total defeat. This will be accomplished not by the professional negotiators and liberal sociologists but by the force of an army, a courageous and unfettered military.
Those schooled in the liberal “it’s society’s fault” outlook when pontificating on domestic crime have for decades proclaimed “it’s America’s fault” when evaluating every atrocity found worldwide. Liberals “understand”!
To acknowledge the peculiarity of the jihadist reality undermines those in the “understanding” business. They are, now, antiquated and counterproductive, since it is not their assumptions that anymore matter but the generals and the fighting man. Liberals would rather deny truth than forfeit their heretofore prominent position at the decision table.
The fanciful and “smart” musings of Thomas Friedman and the New York Times set are valid only if jihadists are morphed into your routine troublemakers placate-able with a concession here and there. There is no serious place for liberal negotiators such as Judith Kipper and some of the smarmy know-it-alls at the Council of Foreign Relations unless the true unyielding nature and goal of Islamofascism is denied. Their journals, writings, royalties, and center of attention among the chattering class depends upon treating jihadism as something “to be reasoned with,” when it is clearly not.
Many of today’s powerful and boisterous liberals are wealthy and university schooled and consider themselves “the nice people,” sensitive, morally superior, smarter, and above such things as war. This is their identity, the passport to their social fraternity. They have constructed above-it-all lives, fashioning a sub-culture beyond the reach of life’s messiness. They live as if everything were predictable and within their control. Through negotiation, life is risk-free.
To acknowledge the true face of Islamofascism and its aims would mean having to concede the necessity of phone surveillance, tough interrogation, common sense profiling, a reliance on the CIA and a strong military -- all things they were taught to disdain. Better to deny reality than relinquish the badges and accoutrements of their internalized identity as “superior.” Besides, how un-cosmopolitan and un-transnational to be in the corner of America, especially when anti-Americanism is cool and fashionable, indeed today’s facile path to liberal “worldliness”.
Some of this crowd are, by nature, cowards and appeasers, brazen only when taking on people and institutions they know will never harm them, such as Bible-believing Christians, President Bush, and the American military. Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch, for example, and other “human rights” imposters have grown celebrated and well-funded by establishing a set of official guidelines for what is permissible for Western powers during war. But their central motivation is to emasculate the strength of the West to win an armed conflict.
Everything, if carried out by the forces of freedom, constitutes, in Roth’s view, a human rights violation. In an article he published two weeks ago, he unearthed an international law “interpretation” that made illegal just about anything Israel chose in defense of its territory and citizens -- as he has done all along in America’s War on Terror. His message to Israel and America: Lose.
As with the Nazis and Communists before, Roth and cohorts are using an elaborate set of legalities to outlaw and subdue those wishing to remain free when fighting those wishing to rule over them. They are outlawing our defense of ourselves. Many “enlightened” liberals wishing to control our fate quote him because it provides them the “moral” tools with which to stymie our efforts. This is made possible only by minimizing the true threat of jihadism and accusing America of being the creator of and fueling the jihadist movement. No doubt, CBS’s Mike Wallace, Ahmadinjad’s new admirer, falls in this category.
Anti-Semitism also plays a role. Those on the left not wishing the state of Israel well, and those who do not like Jews, are reluctant to side with the anti-jihadists. To do so, they must first cast them not as jihadists ideologically and theologically hell-bent on destroying the West and Christians but simply as an aggrieved group of Moslems whose grievances should be redressed and placated. I am sure that Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh loved America, but their dislike for Jews was overriding and made them declare that Hitler could be reasoned with.
Deliberate delusion born of self-interest; ignoring reality out of self-importance; the inability of relics “in the know” to renounce what is no longer true; selfishness over love of country: All of these are reprehensible character traits. When practiced by too many, a civilization dies.
He puts the nasty Liberal worldview into sharp focus and reveals it's multiple malignant tumors.
The insanity of the modern left is not a conspiracy, and no one is minding your imaginary control room. They watch insightful BBC documentaries about how the US went facist, rather than reading Adorno. They get their pop psychology from glossy magazines and self help books, not from reading Marcuse. The people reading Adorno these days are conservatives. Liberals could not get through Minima Moralia, it would make their head hurt and they do not remotely have the background required to understand a tenth of it. They don't know Gramsci either, you have to tell them who he was.
Parties and ideologies run on autopilot, as the disorder in the heads of the dons emerges in the world a hundred year later. If it were an intellectual debate it would be easy to discuss their sources with them, but they have no idea who they are. Not the bum at the bus station, not any imaginary rank and file, the elite, the MIT and Harvard grads with money and power.
The Jacobite's rebelled against the English Parliament which had recently gained power and had decided the ruling Kings succession lines. Jacobite's thought Kings should be chosen by birthright. This led to a few failed Jacobite uprisings in the early 1700's, which ended up sending a lot of Jacobite's to the early United States. In fact the first prison ships from England came to the United States with quite a few Jacobite's as prisoners. After the US revolution in 1776, the English then sent their prison ships to Australia. Religiously Jacobite's were composed of Catholics, Quakers, Church of England and Church of Scotland.
Toward the end of the 18th Century (1790's), the French Revolution occurred and that is when the Jacobin Club formed and gained its greatest power during the 'Reign of Terror'. Wow strange coincidence. War on Terror. Reign of Terror. Maybe that is our choice.
We have come to a fork in the road.
To the left is the Reign of Terror.
To the right is the War on Terror.
We must choose our paths.
Liberals avoid conflict even when it is necessary.
Their mindset would not have survived before American supremacy started shielding them from the realities of Darwin awards.
BUMP
Yes, I think you are right. Of course I am not totally sure, but it looks to me like many of these dirt bags are on the side of the terrorists, so naturally they hate us all. I can assure you, I do not have a whole lot of warm fuzzy feelings for them either.
*
I do believe that the elites on the left, especially academia, operate out of a consensus which is so dogmatic as to be almost Orwellian or even Stalinist in an intellectual context. No, the Adornos and the Gramscis of the movement did their work too well and the poison has already permeated the culture but there is no password or secret handshake.
But in every leftist movement there has always been the party insiders and useful idiots.
This is an extraordinary thread. The conversation that it represents is the most critical and seminal for ending the tyranny of leftist ideology. The moral and intellectual backruptcy of liberalism has reach crisis proportions. There is no longer room for the madness of neo Marxism in any democracy.
Great post!!!
That's not the argument I was trying to make--If we continue to view followers of Islam as the cartoon of the bearded, wild-eyed fanatic screaming "Jhihad" who wants nothing more than to kill Americans for the sake of killing Americans (because they hate our Freedom or somesuch)or because they just want virgins in the afterlife, we will fail.
I was replying specifically to a certain post, but that may as well apply to the article itself: monolithically (it says) Islam wants to destroy America. Monolithically, Islam opposes democracy. Monolithically, Liberals hate America.
We need to be smarter than this.
As for the line about rendering unto Caeser--the way that I've always understood it, Jesus was speaking about paying taxes & saying that the money is Ceasers--it has his face on it--give it back to him, while the taxpayer is in the image of God & needs to render up to God his life & soul. Love of money is the love of Caeser, love of life is the love of God.
Super duper Bumperoo!
Brilliant article!!
So you think the Nazi Party should be legal in Germany ?
It's simpler, I think. The prospect of such determined evil is quite terrifying. People can produce a great deal of self-delusion in the attempt to avoid feeling as scared as reality justifies.
By the way, did you read the article? Did it seem familiar? Sounded kind'a like you, didn't it?
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