The left’s response to Geert Wilders, and its destiny

(Note: in this entry a reader asks how I reconcile my statement that the left seeks power, with my prediction that the left will ultimately submit itself to Islam, and I reply.)

Prior to his appearance at the Harvard Club this afternoon, Geert Wilders last night addressed a student group at Temple University in Philadelphia, and the hostile reception, as reported by the hostile Philadelphia Daily News, could not have been more different from the Harvard Club luncheon where he received repeated applause.

Mark A., who sent the item on the Temple University talk, writes:

I don’t know where to begin, but my mind was blown by the fact that the “Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance” were protesting Wilders’s speech and appearance. Do they want sharia law?

If this isn’t grounds for restricting the franchise, I don’t know what is.

LA replies:

David Horowitz, who was with Wilders at the Philadelphia event, also expressed wonder at the Harvard Club at the fact that feminists and homosexuals attack the man who is trying to protect Western countries from the religion that requires the brutal suppression of women and the execution of homosexuals.

But of course this “contradiction” in the left has been manifest for many years. It’s time for conservatives to stop being surprised by it and draw conclusions about it instead. The left seeks to overthrow whatever it sees as dominant, successful, happy, and our own, and to raise up whatever it sees as marginal, oppressed, miserable, and alien. White Western Christian democratic society is dominant, successful, and our own, therefore it must be toppled, and the left will reflexively side with anything that threatens to topple it.

Didn’t Horowitz write a book called Destructive Generation, about the left? What part of the word “destructive” do Horowitz and other conservatives not get? The left seeks to destroy our civilization. Ultimately there is no positive good at which the left aims, including the left’s own supposed goods of equality and freedom for all. Therefore it should not be surprising that leftists welcome, or refuse to oppose, the entry into the West of a force that will destroy not only the mainstream, “oppressive” Western culture, but the leftist aspects of modern Western society as well, including feminism and homosexual rights. In its heart of hearts, the left doesn’t believe in feminism and homosexual rights. It believes in the destruction of the West. Feminism and homosexual rights are the means by which they have sought to bring about that destruction. And since the destruction promised by Islam will be even greater than the destruction brought by feminism and homosexual rights, when push comes to shove the left will choose Islamization over feminism and homosexual rights. Even Bruce Bauer, a rare anti-Islamization homosexual, is so hostile to Christianity and conservatism that I think in the end he will side with Islamization against anything that smacks of Western traditionalism.

Finally, let us remember that Wilders calls outright for the end of Muslim immigration. Why are American conservatives surprised at the left’s opposition to Wilders, when the conservatives themselves have never supported Wilders’s call for the end of Muslim immigration?

Mark A. writes:

Interesting. But I can’t reconcile this with your theory that everyone wants to be dominant. If the Left welcomes Islam, are you implying that the Left will eventually be satisfied submitting itself to Islam?

LA replies:

Good question. The short answer is yes. And I would say that this is not a contradiction.

Let’s look at it this way.

The liberal whites, feminists, and homosexualists want to be dominant. They want to crush non-liberal whites, they support anything that will help accomplish that, and they will suppress any effort by non-liberal whites to fend off a danger like Islam.

At present, they do not see Islam as a danger to themselves. They cannot conceive of such a danger. This is because liberals see reality through the filter of the liberal script. In the liberal script there are three classes of characters: (1) the bigoted whites who oppress and exclude nonwhites and non-Westerners; (2) the enlightened whites who combat the bigoted whites and include nonwhites and non-Westerners; and (3) the nonwhites and non-Westerners. In this script, the only moral agents are the bigoted whites, who are morally evil, and the enlightened whites, who are morally good. The non-Westerners and minorities are not moral agents; they exist only to be the victims of the bigoted whites or the beneficiaries of the liberal whites. It is impossible for the liberal whites to conceive of nonwhites or non-Westerners as a threat, because they don’t see them as moral agents. In the liberal construction of the world, non-Westerners exist only to be touchstones of Western sin or virtue, and the very notion of a non-Western threat is impossible.

The script expresses the liberal drive for liberal goodness, and for power over society, in which the liberals demonstrate the virtue that makes them worthy to be rulers by the non-discrimination they display toward minorities, and the contempt and disgust they express toward bigoted whites.

But this situation is not stable, because the inclusion of non-Westerners gives them more and more power. Over a period of time, it will become evident that the respective groups of non-Westerners, and in particular Muslims, are not just passive objects of white goodness or white evil, but are moral agents with an agenda of their own, an agenda supremely threatening to liberals. The liberals will deny this at first, but gradually it will become undeniable. But even when they stop denying the truth about Islam, the liberals will still be morally incapable of siding against the Muslims who threaten them. Rather than behave like the bigoted whites, they will surrender, passively or actively, to the Muslims. Rather than being defenders of a Western society they despise, the liberals will choose to serve as functionaries of a Western caliphate, as I’ve written here and here. They will join themselves to the newly dominant power.

But what about the feminists and homosexuals, who would be directly threatened by the ascendancy of Islam? Rather than defend themselves against he sacred Other, they will let themselves be subdued or killed. For them, non-existence would be preferable to admitting the truth about the Other, preferable to defending the West, preferable to defending themselves.

Thus, ultimately, the liberals’ power drive will end in their loss of power and even in their destruction and death. But that end is yet far off. They do not see it now. For the present, they seek power. When they realize that their power and even their lives are threatened, it will be too late for anything except self-sacrifice to their god, who will resemble the god of the Aztecs more than the pale Galilean.

To put this in Seraphim Rose’s terms, the first and mildest stage of Nihilism, Liberalism, denies higher truth, which unleashes self-glorification and a drive for power which are seen in the third stage of Nihilism, Vitalism, which leads ultimately to the last stage of Nihilism, the Nihilism of Destruction.

LA continues:

We have a famous literary model for the behavior of liberals I predicted above: Rubashov, the protaganist of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. An old Bolshevik who is falsely accused of crimes against Stalin, Rubashov in the end embraces his own unjust execution, as an expression of his loyalty to the Great Cause.

N. writes:

The spectacle of the “Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance” protesting against Geert Wilders leads me to the notion of creating a bogus organization, complete with web site: “Feminists for Sharia.” It would not be at all hard to come up with bogus quotes close enough to current feminist cant in support of hijab, of women as chattel and of course genital mutilation.

Shouldn’t cost too much. It would flush out of the underbrush those feministas who really do support sharia, too.

LA replies:

Great idea. It reminds me of that professor in the ’90s who, as I remember, wrote an article that was a parody of poststructuralism, it was pure nonsense, and got it published in an academic journal, and then revealed the hoax, much to the journal’s embarrassment.

October 22

Mark P. writes:

Wow … is brilliant and disturbing … and it makes a lot of sense.

There is another element to consider. What happens when liberals see the “bigoted” whites they are fighting against convert to Islam en masse … and then use Islam against the oh-so moral liberals? After all, is it really that unlikely for millions of Christian evangelicals or white males, seeing the writing on the wall, to convert to Islam? How will the liberals react to former “rednecks” demanding, with their Muslim brothers, that women be put into burqas or homosexuals be killed? What force will liberals muster against that?

Heck, I actually enjoy telling my liberal friends how much better I would be doing if America was a Sharia state. After all, a heterosexual white-male convert to Islam like me has a lot less to worry about under Sharia law than the majority of liberals. The changes in employment and marriage law alone would be beneficial.

Mark A. writes:

I think this is relevant to our discussion last night because it shows that while NOW was silent during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, it now speaks out against Letterman. The distinction? Applying your analysis, NOW saw Clinton as one of their own helping to defend the minority class, while it sees Letterman, for whatever reason, as a member of the bigoted white-male class.

Great post last night. Very, very interesting.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 21, 2009 05:00 PM | Send