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Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
Posted on 02/01/2016 1:24:05 PM PST by servo1969
The left's greatest intellectual error is its conviction that the world can be divided into a binary power struggle in which both sides agree on the nature of the struggle, but disagree on the outcome.
For leftists of a certain generation, it was class. Marx began the Communist Manifesto by laying out a primal class struggle throughout human history. For Marxists, everything in the world could be broken down to a class struggle with the wealthy oppressors on one side and the oppressed on the other.
It didn't matter that this model didn't fit a reality in which Communists leaders came from wealthy backgrounds and their opponents were just as likely to be poor peasants. To the left, everything is defined by the model. Reality is an inconvenience that is suppressed with gulags and firing squads.
Today the variable is identity politics. Everything must be intersectional. There are those who stand on the right side of history, in favor of abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration. Everyone who isn't on board is a racist, even if they're black or Latino, a sexist, even if they're female, or a homophobe, even if they're gay. Once again, reality doesn't matter. The binary struggle is the model for everything.
The left believes that there is a binary struggle over the future of humanity with only two sides. It does not understand how the right actually thinks and it has no room for understanding equally compelling belief systems that operate outside this model.
That's where Islam comes in. Or doesn't.
The left has never been able to understand religion. It's not so much secular or atheistic as it is consumed by a compelling belief system of its own which leaves no room for religious conviction.
It cannot understand anything in terms of what it is. It can only understand things in terms of itself. The left cannot understand religion on its own terms, only in terms of how the religion fits into the left.
Unable to understand religion, the left assigns it a place based on its alignment in the struggle. Is it a reactionary force that supports the existing order of a progressive force that opposes it? Is it working with the ruling classes or the oppressed? Is it on the side of the left or on the side of the right?
Islam is racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which has become the left's closest Islamic ally, was politically influenced by Nazi Germany. Its leaders were outraged by the end of the Caliphate's feudalism and maintain extensive business networks around the world. They incite riots against minorities and seek to establish a theocracy.
If there's any Muslim organization that should be a textbook reactionary, fascist and fundamentalist group, it's the Muslim Brotherhood. But instead the left cuddles up with the violent hate group. Why?
Because the Muslim Brotherhood in the West is aligned with their progressive causes. Therefore it can't be reactionary. If the Brotherhood were aligned with conservatives, then it would be the enemy.
And so liberals don't care what the Koran says. The Koran means nothing to them, just as the Bible means nothing to them. Religion is either on the side of social justice or it isn't. Since Muslims are part of their glorious intersectional rainbow coalition, then Islam must be a good religion.
It's that stupidly simple. And no amount of Koran quotes will change that.
There's a strong element of cynicism here. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. But there's also a deeper inability by the left to understand Islam and any ideology outside its worldview.
The left reacted to the rise of ISIS with frantic incoherence. They literally could not understand what made the Islamic State tick because it didn't fit any of their political models. ISIS couldn't exist, yet there was no way to deny that it existed. And so lefty pundits and politicians gibbered that they were nihilists who believed in nothing, even though no one blows themselves up because they believe in nothing.
Muslim terrorists don't kill people because of Allah, the Koran or the Caliphate. It doesn't fit the model. They kill, because like all Third World peoples victimized by colonialism, they are oppressed. A Muslim terrorist doesn't kill Jews or Americans because the Koran commands the Believers to subjugate all non-Muslims. A Muslim migrant doesn't sexually assault German women because the Koran allows him to.
These are all reactions to Western oppression. The Muslim oppressors are really the oppressed.
But the Islamic State killed other Muslims to establish a Caliphate ruled by Islamic law. The oppressed Muslims were suddenly acting like evil Western oppressors. And if Muslims could be oppressors, then the whole binary model the left had been using to explain the world comes tumbling down.
When the left comes up against inconsistencies in its binary model, it doesn't revise the model, instead it tries to understand why people are behaving so irrationally that they don't fit the model. Why don't poor rural whites vote for the left? It must be talk radio and racism. How can there be conservative minorities? False consciousness. Also Thomas Sowell and Stacey Dash aren't "really" minorities.
Islam and Muslims are fundamentally outside the left's model. They are part of their own binary struggle between Islam and everything else. They have their own "right side of history".
Islam and the left both claim to have "perfect" systems that can create a utopia... after a whole lot of killing. They are aligned with each other, yet unable to understand each other because their worldviews have no room for anything outside their perfect models. Leftists despise fundamentalists and Islamists despise atheists and yet here they are working together while ignoring what the other believes.
The left cannot process the idea that religion transcends politics. At best, leftists see religion as a subset of politics. And since Islam conforms to their political axis, it must be progressive. But to Muslims, politics is a subset of religion. Politics cannot transcend religion because it is an expression of religion.
Leftists do not understand religion and therefore they cannot understand Muslims. They see Islam as another religion to be brought into its sphere of influence to promote social justice to its followers. They cannot understand that Muslim clergy will not become preachers of social justice or that Muslims kill because they genuinely believe in Allah and a paradise for martyrs. These ideas are alien to them.
The alliance between Islam and the left brings together two narrow-minded worldviews. The left cannot recognize that Islam wants something other than gay marriage, abortion rights, a $15 minimum wage, Green Jobs and all the rest of its endless social justice agenda because that would put it on the same side as the Republicans and the rest of the right. And that clearly isn't so either.
The left need not give up all of its beliefs to understand Islam. But it would have to abandon its binary thinking and recognize that there have been and are other struggles in the world than the one it defines. And this the left is unwilling to do because a binary struggle is what makes its worldview so encompassing. If its worldview doesn't encompass the world, then it cannot demand absolute power.
The left cannot accept that its great struggle is really a disastrous sideshow in a larger civilizational conflict or that its agenda is not universal, but the product of a particular intellectual strain that has little application outside its own bubble. And so it will go on rejecting the truth about Islam, because learning the truth about Islam would not only destroy the alliance with Islam, but would also destroy the left.
Matt Bracken’s “Tet, Take 2” explains this better. Worth a read.
Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
I'm not so sure the Left misunderstands islam. Maybe they do understand it, and they applaud in it the things they condemn in the groups they oppose. Maybe they actually believe in some sort of Manichaean principal where there are "evil people" (the ultimate example being the "rednecks") and "good people" (groups with "otherness"). Maybe they actually believe that all acts of the evil are evil, and those same acts by the "good" are good simply because of who does them.
But this raises another question which I've asked a blue zillion times. Why is the Western Left so different from its non-Western confreres? The Western Left practices self-hatred and deification of "the other." The non-Western Left does not hate itself or idealize "the other" . . . it idealizes itself. If whites who hate their "white privilege" are left wing whites, then an example of a left wing Black should be someone who criticizes Black behavior like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams or James Meredith. And likewise if white racialists like Sam Francis, Jared Taylor, and V-Dare are "right wing," then logically the NOI, the Black Panthers, and the "palestinians" should be so regarded as well.
But we never see this. We see self-flagellating hippies apologizing for goose-stepping fascist soldiers in North Korea while accusing their own western militaries of "fascism."
I hope someone explains it to me one day.
Then the white male devil corrupts them by perpetrating visions of the Madonna or capitalist imperialism and that is why the peaceful people are now violent, angry, out of harmony with nature.
Entiende? Capiche?
Of course the angry and resentful "non-Western indigenous pipples" get all their philosophy from dead white European males--Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Darwin, Marx, and Gramsci. They shuck off all their traditional beliefs in supernatural and spiritual realities and give themselves over in their entirety to these white European aliens, all the time screaming how "proud of their culture" they are and how much they reject all Western thought. And most conservatives never call them on it.
They will give those to the butt humpers in Afghanistan.
Yeah, I see those signs as he hate me and mine and those like me and wants to import haters to kill me and mine and those like me (meaning good American citizens) which is the only reason he and his love the hating murderous thugs. Of course he doesn’t realize that they hate him and his, too and are only using him and his as a means to an end, which would be the end of not only me and mine and those like me, but also to him and his and those like him. (Make sense? Kind of a lot to write on a sign.)
So the liberal’s way of thinking is kind of like the YK2 millennium bug...
It’s an intriguing theory. They’re certainly obtuse and limited in intellectual scope.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Winnah, winnah, chicken dinnah!
Clubbed it.
The old Kremlin alliance with the left-wing Arab nationalist socalists, who had very little in common with ISIS and AQIM, is as dead as a dodo. What remains is very pragmatic and situational.
bump for morning
ping and bump
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.To get on or off the Greenfield ping list please reply to this post.
As usual, Dan nails it.
Greenfield exposes the extreme naivety of progressivism. Adherents of liberalism claim everyone other than their special selves is stupid. In fact it is they who are stupid. Liberalism does not engage in rational thought. It is not built upon intellectual discipline.
Progressives and secular humanists can't see Islam as an existential threat and are blind to their errors.
Many thousands of years of human history are documented and explained in terms of prophesy and expectation in every culture.
As secular left disallows the written records of humanity as primitive ignorance they expose their own deficits of understanding reality.
That their espoused world-view has no basis or foundation for 'good' or 'evil', or purpose or even rationality itself demonstrates that their presuppositions are fundamentally irrational and incoherent. That they can be found to be instinctively acting as if there really is good and evil, or reasoning (distorted as it may be at times) even though they cannot account for morality or rationality from their own world-view is evidence that in reality they are made in the image of God. By nature, they do know the truth but do not want to acknowledge God as Creator. Romans 1.
Cordially,
Bfl
Actually it’s much more simple than this.
The left has been conditioned into accepting multiculturalism and moral relativism at all cost.
It has nothing to do with religion, political ideology or the enemy of my enemy is my friend crap. They don’t proactively think in those terms.
If you ask a liberal directly they will tell you flat out “That is their Culture and we need to respect that”. They will also tell you that it would be wrong to judge their culture simply because it doesn’t conform to ours.
My Daughter asked some of her college classmates (pure liberal ideologues) about the “culture” in China and how they will kill a new born infant female because they would rather have a son. These self proclaimed do-gooders literally disconnect from their own morality in order to defend the “Chinese Culture”.
The left believes that “their” morals are a western construct that should never be held above any others.
This is why the left defends Islam.
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