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Denial, to the nth degree
The Bush followers at FrontPage Magazine descend ever deeper into fantasy. “ISLAMO-FASCISM AWARENESS WEEK,” they trumpet in huge letters at the top of their main page. Underneath that headline is the subtitle: “The President is afraid to use the word ‘Islamo-Fascism.’ Students on American campuses are not.” It takes a particular type of mental divorce from reality to hold an “Awareness Week” about a phenomenon, “Islamofascism,” that does not exist, and to castigate people, namely the president of the United States, FP’s favorite person in the whole universe, for not talking about this non-existent phenomenon. Indeed, just as liberals must hype a virtually non-existent white racism into the pervading force in America life, in order to cover up and excuse the fact of black violence (see previous blog entry), pro-Bush conservatives must build up the fictional entity “Islamofascism” into the main threat facing the world, in order to cover up the actually threatening reality of Islam. The need that drives the liberals and the “conservatives” is the same: to conceal from consciousness the truth that a non-white or non-Western group is not like us, and therefore that all people are not the same and are not assimilable into our culture. The belief in Islamofascism is the key. If Islamofascism exists, as a wicked thing distinct from the Muslims’ religion of Islam, then the Muslims are oppressed people living under an alien ideology, like Eastern Europeans living under Communism, and once they free themselves from that ideology they can become regular people again, like the Eastern Europeans. But if Islamofascism does not exist, then the Muslims’ religion is itself the wicked thing, and Muslims are our eternal adversaries, and the dream of a Single Universal Humanity is finished.
Thus, by holding on so fiercely to the fiction of Islamofascism, the neocons demonstrate that they care more about maintaining and protecting the liberal universalist dream than they do about protecting the West from its enemies. And that explains the imaginary “war” they promote with such fanatical fervor—this non-existent war against the non-existent Islamofascists, even as they support the continued mass immigration of our real enemies, the Muslims, into the West. And to accommodate themselves to that immigration and the changes it is bringing, they are even starting to take the view that sharia is ok so long as it’s advanced peacefully. The neocons’ primary purpose is not to defend America and the West, but to keep liberalism alive, and central to that project is the maintenance of the belief that Muslims are just like us. Of course, their openness to Muslims ultimately dooms liberal society and liberalism, but true liberals—that is, liberals who do not subordinate their liberalism to the well-being of a concrete society and people—never think in those terms. They keep pressing the liberalism forward, until all concrete goods are destroyed. Email entry |