Why the left cannot see its own doom at the hands of the Islam it embraces
(Note Oct. 26: many comments have now been added to this entry.)
For those who haven’t read it, I recommend my two part reply to reader Mark A. on the feminist and homosexual left’s refusal to support Geert Wilders in his efforts to stop the growing power of Islam in the West. In my first reply, I argue that the left’s overriding impulse is not to advance feminism and homosexual rights, but to destroy our “oppressive” society; and, since Islam is even more antithetical to our oppressive society than feminism and homosexual rights, the left welcomes Islam, even though Islam will oppress feminists and homosexuals.
Mark A. then asks how I reconcile that statement with my recent comment that “Everyone wants to be superior,” i.e., that all groups want to be the dominant group. If the left wants to dominate, why would they willingly allow the West to be taken over by a religion that will crush the left? My answer is that liberals-leftists understand the world in terms of a liberal “script” that associates all evil with non-liberal whites; the script, focused exclusively on the evil of whites, makes it impossible for liberals and leftists to conceive of the idea that any non-Western or nonwhite group could be a threat to themselves. Only non-liberal whites can be a threat. The leftists are thus incapable of grasping the fact that their Long March to overthrow the oppressive white power structure and to Third-Worldize our society must lead to their own destruction as well.
Comments posted October 26, 2009
EK writes:
The greatest threat to the left is religion. You have noticed that the very same people who are for abortion are against the death penalty. The obvious reason is that capital punishment smells biblical.
That in itself the greatest threat.
The great surprise is that the Muslims who are religious are the chosen tool of the left to destroy the Judeo-Christian West. It may well be because unlike other religions Islam is intolerant of any other religion under penalty of death—that guarantees the total destruction of Christianity and Judaism-
The left does not feel the threat inasmuch as Islam gained it strength via communist and Marxist terrorists mostly trained or schooled in Russia including Arafat—Saddam Hussein -Nasser ,etc
LA replies:
You wrote:
The great surprise is that the Muslims who are religious are the chosen tool of the left to destroy the Judeo-Christian West- it may well be because unlike other religions Islam is intolerant of any other religion under penalty of death-that guarantees the total destruction of Christianity and Judaism-
This is brilliant. It strikes me as a new explanation for the alliance between the left and Islam. Of course, anti-Christians in the West (e.g. Edward Gibbon) have often been pro-Islam; they saw Islam as less “other-worldly,” less sexually moralistic, less dogmatic and theologically complicated than Christianity. And obviously anti-Semites such as the Nazis have sometimes been pro-Islam, because Islam is anti-Jewish. But the idea that the modern anti-theistic, anti-religious left would support Islam because Islam alone of all religions aims at the destruction of all religions (other than itself) is a new insight.
One STDV writes:
You said:
My answer is that liberals-leftists understand the world in terms of a liberal “script” that associates all evil with non-liberal whites; the script, focused exclusively on the evil of whites, makes it impossible for liberals even to conceive of the idea that any non-Western or nonwhite group could be a threat to themselves. Only non-liberal whites can be a threat. The liberals are thus incapable of grasping the fact that their Long March to overthrow the oppressive white power structure and to Third-Worldize our society must lead to their own destruction as well.
I don’t have anything to add. Just want to note that that this is exactly right. I’ve been preaching this for years, good to know that others see this lunacy as well. Calling it a “script” is a great characterization of their viewpoint.
Paul K. writes:
You wrote: “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.”
I think there’s something else going on here as well, something that you wrote at VFR four or five years ago that impressed me a great deal. As best I can recall, you wrote that, underneath it all, liberals don’t believe that anything they do will ever actually destroy the blessings of Western civilization that they enjoy—political stability, military security, prosperity, law and order, tolerance, common decency, etc. Liberals have no interest in what created those conditions and take them for granted, like the ground we stand on. If liberals understood that these blessings were achieved uniquely by white people and a culture rooted in Christianity and the Anglo-Scottish enlightenment, and that they can be very easily lost, they would no longer be liberals.
Jeff W. writes:
I very much liked your response to Mark A. The left is so driven by hatred and lust for power that they are absolutely blinded by it.
That’s what makes it so hard to understand them. In order to try to see the world through leftist eyes, one first has to generate within oneself the requisite hatred and power lust, then imagine oneself to be blinded by it. This is nearly impossible for a Christian like myself.
People always project their own emotional states onto others. leftists think that white bigots are seething with hatred directed toward them. White Christians who are targeted by the left think that leftists must be reasonable, normal people. If they are normal, then it follows that the reason they are agitated must be that their stated grievances are legitimate.
Because of that misperception, conservatives dig their own graves as they try to reason with or compromise with the left.
A reader writes:
We’re on the same page here. I’ve often told my homosexual friends that they should be the last people to welcome (and urge on) the current changes in American demographics and politics, since their being considered “normal” was entirely due to white people.
Deogowulf writes:
I think you have pretty much hit the nail on the head, if you don’t mind my saying. Wonderful stuff.
Ferg writes:
I believe your view of the left is accurate up to a point. The average liberal does indeed miss the point, however, I do not think the left leadership is all that vacuous. They know what they are doing, and will be brutal in the extreme when it comes time to eliminate the Islamic threat to themselves. The left leadership of the West is no different from that of Lenin and Stalin. They will kill and imprison all who oppose them with abandon. They see themselves at the top of the ruling socialist bureaucracy, while beneath them toil the poor benighted non white workers, happy in their egalitarian utopia. Egalitarian except for the top twenty percent who are more equal than the rest of humanity. I believe the left leadership knows they cannot pull this off with a large white majority in this country so they must first eliminate that. Then as the saviors of the downtrodden nonwhites they can move forward into the world according to Lenin. The current social structure of Mexico is along these lines, as are many in Latin America. Latin immigrants to this country will have no trouble adjusting to this order, the Muslims will either go along to get along, or they will be eliminated for the good of the State, Nothing is ever allowed to interfere with the good of the State under socialism.
Kathlene M. writes:
The liberals believe that inherent human goodness, something which all people except evil non-liberal Christian/traditional whites possess, will save the world. They simply don’t believe society will self-destruct. Life will become like that line from “Imagine” where all the world will live in peace. The increasing chaos around us will continue to be blamed on evil non-liberal traditional/Christian whites wherever they’re found.
Liberals believe that expert, scientific facts and verifiable data (a.k.a. “truth”) will abolish irrational religious systems. What they fail to see is that, in their future utopia, facts and truth will be easily manipulated and based on ever-changing beliefs from imperfect humans. The belief in human rationality will ironically lead to a more irrational society. No one will know what is true anymore. Trust of government, science, authority, and leaders will decrease. Society will be comprised of millions of non-believing skeptics where no one, except a tyrannical leader or group, has any “moral” authority over them.
Last night I watched Dr. Richard Besser and Charlie Gibson discuss the polls on ABC News showing that, despite people’s fears of the H1N1 flu, half of the respondents said they would not get the vaccine. Dr. Besser remarked that this shows how people just don’t trust the government or science. The solution: people need to be educated about what’s true and what’s fiction. But people don’t trust precisely because truth cannot be distinguished from fiction anymore.
Daniel Henninger wrote correctly in the WSJ (under the title “We’re All Balloon Boys Now”) that:
“With fakery everywhere—some of it amusing, some of it not funny—people’s ability to know where things fall on the spectrum between fact and falsity becomes so compromised that they retreat into a shell of cynicism about everything…. Now, with more people decked out in protective coats of cynicism, it’s gotten harder for the pols to sell their grand schemes.”
All the re-education in the world won’t be able to cure this..
Canadian leftist Ken Hechtman writes:
Funny you should say that. I was just talking about this one with Robert Locke who wrote to me:
The irony is the feminists are too dumb to realize how brutal this is for women.
Sexual permissiveness generally is just one long triumph of the male appetite.
I’ll offer you a bet: there will be publicly-traded companies providing prostitution within 15 years.
I wrote back to him:
I don’t know the whole story about this, I just know bits and pieces, but I understand that the NDP [Canada’s leftist New Democratic Party] got the feminists to sign off on polygamy so that the Muslims would sign off on gay marriage. It might take years but I’m going to keep digging on that one until somebody tells me the whole thing.
I saw a Mark Steyn piece recently where he noted that the NDP was the party of Sharia and gay marriage at the same time and Jack Layton was the best in the country at that kind of interest-brokering politics. That annoyed me. “The best there is” implies there’s someone else in the country who could have done it at all. There isn’t. If there was, I’d know the guy’s name. I’d have his private phone number. I’d know what he drinks.
Any idiot could have passed gay marriage over Muslim objections. We had the votes going in. But to get the Muslim lobby to turn 180 degrees in a year? Nobody else could have pulled that off.
And I won’t take your bet. One of the Nevada brothels will go public long before 2024.
October 29
LA writes:
Alan Roebuck has a followup to this entry, called, “Calling liberals to repentance.”
Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 23, 2009 08:39 AM | Send