The truth sinks in that liberals do not believe in self-defense, and thus do not believe in protecting the innocent
James N. writes:
Your observation, “Liberals would rather be killed than defend themselves,” is to me the most disturbing thing to come out of the Newtown horror.
I have always understood your point about liberals’ drive to national “suicide” as sort of a metaphor, a shocking assertion to make a point. [LA replies: I did not mean it as a metaphor, not in 1990 when I came up with the title, or now.]
But since Newtown, I have spoken with or heard from liberals who agree, more or less, with the insanity of Ta-Nehisi Coates. A number of teachers, for example, have expressed opposition not only to lethal force using firearms, but to ANY preplanned, organized force to defend their students. A letter from one of my children’s schools asserted “a home with a gun is still the most dangerous thing for a child”. Commenters at the Washington Post and elsewhere have savagely attacked the licensed gun owners of Westchester and Rockland Counties who objected to the Soviet-style intimidation of their local paper, uttering paranoid fantasies about the need to be protected from their armed neighbors, the danger to their children from having a play-date at one of the listed homes, and other absurdities.
It’s not homicidal maniacs using unrighteous force to accomplish evil designs that bothers our liberals—it’s also the righteous use of physical force, of any kind, in service of the good. It is unclear (in the present time) whether they would also object to the use of force, including genocide, to accomplish the construction of their utopias, but history is not at all reassuring on this point.
The response of the American left to this event has jolted me like nothing else I can remember. I have a new mental landscape regarding these people and what they may actually be capable of.
I believe that anyone who would NOT have shot Adam Lanza dead at the moment his crime began, given the opportunity and the means, is actually clinically insane. And those people are running the country.
They may not want my guns BECAUSE they want to kill me. But it would be a lot easier for them to do so, were they so inclined, once I was disarmed.
Which is why it must never be allowed to happen.
- end of initial entry -
Alex B. writes:
“Living armed” for a liberal would mean conceding that there are people who may need to be killed. But this would destroy the very foundation of everything in which a liberal believes—the premise that discrimination is the ultimate evil.
Killing someone in self-defense is the ultimate act of discrimination. It means you have made a conscious decision that his life is less valuable than yours, to the point that he can be killed just so you can live. His life is so much less valuable than yours, in fact, that this decision can be taken not by some infinitely wise organ of the State but by you, right on the spot, in a split second, based merely on his single action the motives for which are unknown to you. But this is unthinkable, because all people are equal, and equally good.
The liberal doctrine may be based on a patently false and illogical premise, that all people and all behaviors are equal, but after that, everything that is built upon that nonsensical basic belief conforms to impeccable internal logic and can be explained by that basic credo. That’s why liberals don’t see the madness of their maddest positions, such as refusing to use lethal force to protect their own children from torture, rape and murder.
Plus, of course, they are not really crazy about children, or they would have more of them and abort fewer. Or, you know, be willing to sacrifice some of their beliefs to save children’s lives, instead of the opposite.
LA replies:
Excellent comment, which leads me to ask the following:
How many conservative websites discuss liberalism as the logical application of false ideas, rather than as (which is the usual conservative view of liberalism) the illogical or bad-faith misapplication of true ideas?
Steve H. writes:
I have a slightly different take on the liberal self-defense insanity under discussion. Yes, it’s true that a sensible man using deadly force to defend self or family is committing an act of discrimination, but that’s only the conscious face of what’s going on in the transaction. Not only is he proclaiming his own sense of value and entitlement to the predator’s, he establishing a model of heroic action via force. THAT is what terrifies liberals, whose deepest fear is that they will have to feel badly about themselves.
They do not merely themselves decline to defend, they seek to prevent you and me from defending. They know they are physically and psychologically unable to defend themselves. Force, even their own used against a predator, makes them physically ill. They are trying to re-define the world so that in this century, unlike all the centuries in previous human history, it is okay to be a coward. Hey, they believe, really, c’mon, there’s nothing wrong with fearing confrontation, especially physical confrontation, to the extent that you cannot imagine yourself as a partner to it and its presence not only weakens your muscles, your bowels and your mind. If Tyrone enters your house with a knife and comes at you, and you put a slug from a .45 into his cerebral cortex, the liberal knows that he could not have done so. He knows he would have fled upstairs and that whatever Tyrone did with his knife, he was physically unable to stop it.
But he doesn’t want to have to feel bad about himself. He wants it to be okay, because violence is wrong. More, he wants it said that he did the right thing, the moral thing, in not ending another human life; you, with your damned gun and macho stylizations, you’re the brute, never mind that you were as scared as he was in Tyroneland, you’ve never done a heroic thing in your life: you just feel your own life and your wife’s and your kids’ are worth protecting. You’re that old-fashioned thing called a man, and he loathes that. He would prefer to remove that possibility from your options, because his malignant self-love demands that no one represent something he is incapable of doing.
In short, I have always believed that liberalism is an elaborate fantasy edifice by which the cowardly justify and rationalize themselves. It’s therapy for the gutless.
D. Edwards writes:
James N. writes:
“The response of the American left to this event has jolted me like nothing else I can remember. I have a new mental landscape regarding these people and what they may actually be capable of.”
The Benghazi murder of our ambassador and other of our citizens led me to James’ view of the current political climate prior to Newton. The liberal reaction to the Newton massacre only reenforces that this view is correct.
LA replies:
How specifically did the Benghazi event change your views?
Alan M. writes:
James N said: “It is unclear (in the present time) whether they would also object to the use of force, including genocide, to accomplish the construction of their utopias, but history is not at all reassuring on this point.”
As a civilization, we forget that all law is backed by the threat of force to ensure compliance. The left is more than happy to use force to achieve their goals and they do so every time they utter “There should be a law!” They want to use force to remove our right to defend ourselves. They want the government to not only have a monopoly on the initiation of violence but also a monopoly on the use of violence for defensive purposes. Through this path, their will can run rampant without fear of retaliation. Posing as the high minded, moral, and enlightened ones, they pretend they are against the use of force while hiding the fact that increase the use of force in our society every day. Their “verbal” fangs, which are bared more and more these days, are backed by actual fangs that are wielded indirectly. Once they feel strong enough, they will be more than happy to use blatant violence for their ends. We are merely in a tactical phase of their use of violence. History is replete with events supporting this. The increasing frequency of verbal calls to violence shows that they are feeling safer to express in public who they are in the secret of their souls.
KO writes:
Alex B. makes one point with which I profoundly agree but another about which I am dubious. His first sentence about liberals not wanting to concede that some people may need to be killed is excellent; I think the operative word is “concede.”
This, however, is the line whose truth I doubt: “It means you have made a conscious decision that his life is less valuable than yours, to the point that he can be killed just so you can live.”
Most conservatives should instantly balk at the implication that a liberal has even one ounce of conscience—even in the liberal’s own mind. Sixty million Americans just voted in a president who campaigned on a promise to keep women free to kill their unborn children for exactly the reason given above (among other much more common reasons). [LA replies: I disagree. The liberal logic in the case of abortion is different from that in the case of self-defense. The unwanted foetus is not seen as a person but as a piece of tissue, and therefore the operating concern in the liberal mind is simply a matter of woman’s self-autonomy. The anti-discriminatory logic in the case of support for abortion is that women should be as free as men not to have a baby. The anti-discriminatory logic in the case of opposition to self-defense is that all human beings, even those who are using force to take your property or your life, have an equal right to life.]
Furthermore, here in Britain at least, if there is any public concern at all that the concept of “brain death” may be being manipulated to facilitate the harvesting of one person’s organs for the benefit of others then it is being kept firmly under wraps.
In my opinion, the fact that liberals do not want to “live armed” (as a matter of principle rather than preference) is because they want only to appear to be more compassionate than conservatives because it helps their rhetoric. The same rhetoric that is then used to advance the so-called “culture of death.”
LA replies:
Let’s repeat Alex B.’s comment which you reject:
“It means you have made a conscious decision that his life is less valuable than yours, to the point that he can be killed just so you can live.”
I think Alex’s comment is incisive: liberals reject deadly force used in self-defense because it is a supreme and ultimate expression of the unequal and discriminatory use of power. They reject capital punishment for the same reason: it is a use of deadly force which treats some people as worthy of living and others as worthy of dying. No one—whether an individual or the state—should have that kind of power over human beings.
December 30, 10:50 p.m.
Alex B. writes:
And this internal logic is why liberals never concede a single point of their ideology, no matter how trivial, and never will. They can’t afford to. If all their beliefs are ultimately based on a single fundamental principle, then conceding any one of them would mean conceding that fundamental principle, and then their entire belief system collapses.
Because of this, the liberal belief system can never moderate itself, can never reform. It can only—which we are seeing now—become more extreme and radical with time as its adherents discover more and more bizarre, but entirely logical, corollaries to their basic principle, such as taxpayer-funded contraception (and then abortion) for all women, or inadmissibility of self-defense. When enough of these corollaries become the nation’s laws and generally accepted principles, society will collapse.
For any conservative who has ever argued a simple, self-evident point with a liberal and “lost,” it’s difficult to see the logical nature of the liberal belief system. How can it be logical if its proponent sticks his fingers in his ears and starts singing la-la-la when you tell him that two plus two makes four? So the conservative simply decides that liberalism is a mental disorder. It very well may be; you’d expect a person with a normal brain to realize that if his core belief leads to a requirement that he not defend his children when they are threatened with rape and murder, that belief at least merits re-assessment. But such a primitive view of liberalism is why conservatives, to this time, haven’t learned anything about the true nature of the enemy.
Or maybe it just suits conservatives to believe that liberalism is illogical and a mental disorder. It removes the need for them to dig deeper into liberals’—and their own—core beliefs, and the danger of discovering how close they really are.
LA writes:
I hope readers have an idea of how fulfilling it is for me, as the author/editor of this site, to receive comments of the quality of Alex B.’s. The other comments in this thread have also been top-notch.
Alex B. replies:
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to discuss these matters via your excellent site, Larry.
Your pointing to the belief in unconditional equality as the core principle of liberalism has made possible a far better understanding of the force that has so “fundamentally transformed” the West over the last few decades. It just made everything click.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 29, 2012 12:15 PM | Send