Liberals would rather be mass murdered by terrorists than discriminate

In an earlier entry today we discussed how some liberals would rather be murdered by criminals than carry and use a firearm to protect themselves. I would add that some liberals would rather be murdered by Muslim terrorists than use even the mildest and most rational discriminatory measures to defend themselves. The below is from an April 2007 entry entitled “The ultimate proof of the VFR view of liberalism.” First comes a quotation from Norwegian blogger Bjorn Staerk:

Brave is sitting down calmly on a plane behind a row of suspicious-looking Arabs, ignoring your own fears, because you know those fears are irrational, and because even if there’s a chance that they are terrorists, it is more important to you to preserve an open and tolerant society than to survive this trip. Brave is insisting that Arabs not be searched more carefully in airport security than anyone else, because you believe that it is more important not to discriminate against people based on their race than to keep the occasional terrorist from getting on a plane. [Emphasis added.]

I then commented:

Now how have I defined modern liberalism? As the belief that non-discrimination is the highest and ruling value of society. And here is that belief wrought to its uttermost. For Bjorn Staerk, non-discrimination is higher than life, it is higher than the duty to stop murder, it is higher than the duty to protect the innocent, it is higher than right and wrong, it is higher than the survival of society itself. Non-discrimination is God, a god who allows no other values to co-exist with himself, a god who is absolutely supreme and alone.

He or it is, indeed, a god much like Allah. The god of liberalism is revealed as the twin of the god of Islam. With the important difference that the end of Islam is the absolute submission of the West to Islam, while the end of liberalism is the absolute submission of the West to Islam.

I recommend the entire discussion.

- end of initial entry -

December 29

Jim Kalb writes:

This is so very odd. Willingness to sacrifice all for an ideal of what life should be like is normally admirable, even when the ideal is fallacious. In this case though the ideal is nihilistic: rejection of distinctions and assertions as such, since the point is that discrimination and maintaining your own existence in the face of opposition (i.e. self-defense) are intolerable. So we have an example of self-sacrifice for the sake of denying the positive value of determinate existence. That’s too complicated for me.

LA replies:

I agree it’s a remarkable paradox. But since the end of liberalism, consistently applied, is the destruction of all particular existence (because all particular existence discriminates at least implicitly against that which is not itself, and discrimination is the greatest evil which must be eliminated), doesn’t it follow that liberals would want to allow their own particular existence to be destroyed?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 27, 2012 04:45 PM | Send