Thursday, July 19, 2007

WITHOUT A BLINK

Victor Davis Hanson made a very astute observation recently in his Work and Days column at Pajamas Media discussing the nature of our enemies:

Apparently what gives these pre-modern fascist killers a pass from widespread Western censure is their purported impotency—as long as their grotesqueries don’t match 9/11 we have the luxury to blame-game Guantanamo, still puff up about the black hoods at Abu Ghraib, and spout off about Halliburton—while having latte uninterrupted by Ahmed and his suicide vest.

But should the latter be able to penetrate all of cowboy George Bush’s nightmarish anti-constitutional measures like wire-tapping the phones of terrorists, locking them up in Guantanamo, or pursuing them with provisions of the Patriot Act, then these measures will suddenly be reinvented as shockingly too little when all the “intelligence” made it clear that we were in jeopardy. Yes, I think after the next attack the media will go, without a blink, from the dangers of a police state and Gulag-US to the negligence of open borders and poor terrorist tracking.


Interesting to note that what "gives the pre-modern fascist killers a pass" is the post-modern rhetoric and dogma of the left. It is precisely this inherently psychologically dysfunctional cognitive strategy that is able to shift, "without a blink" from one subjective conviction to its exact opposite without a shred of self-awareness or mental dissonance.

Minds under the postmodern spell are simply not capable of appreciating the irrationality; nor are they capable of even appreciating the irony of their contradictory discourses .

There is a common pattern in the lefts childish rantings: a subjectivism and relativism that comes across in one breath; alternating with a dogmatic absolutism in the next. In other words, it is a waste of time to look for sense or logic in their incessant adolescent demands.

In an earlier editorial, Hanson pondered the question: Why radical Islam, and why now?
There is still another reason for the rise of Islamists: They sense a new hesitation in the West. We appear to them paralyzed over oil prices and supplies and fears of terrorism. And so they have also waged a brilliant propaganda war, adopting the role of victims of Western colonialism, imperialism and racism. In turn, much of the world seems to tolerate their ruthlessness in stifling freedom, oppressing women and killing nonbelievers.

If I may offer a medical analogy, there are many diseases that do not manifest themselves unless one or more prerequisite conditions are also present in the individual. For example, Karposi's sarcoma is a deadly malignancy that is extremely rare, but which occurs much more frequently and spreads more rapidly in those individuals who are taking certain drugs to treat AIDS. The drugs suppress the immune system, thus giving a biological carte blanche to the development of the sarcoma.

Radical Islam, like Karposi's sarcoma, has manifested itself today and is spreading rapidly for pretty much the same reason, having been given an ideological carte blanche by the political left. The left's postmodern rhetoric with its political correctness and relativistic multiculural fantasies have managed to suppress and otherwise short-circuit the natural defense mechanisms of Western civilization.

Radical Islamic ideology is itself an unexpected combination of several toxic memes that have come together in ideological harmony over the last 50 years. Several beats of this harmonic confluence are the inherent contradictions of Islam itself--a purportedly "peaceful" religion that is actually historically based on military conquest and coercion of belief through jihad; which has been carefully synchronized with the failed totalitarian ideologies of the last century, communism and socialism.

The totalitarians of the left-- who are the remaining outposts of communism and socialism in the world are thriving in academic and "intellectual" circles in the West; together with the Islamic fanatics of the world, they have created a postmodern symphony whose caucophonous music only facilitates the descent into emotionalism, hysteria and murderous suicidality.

Without a blink, the left switched from their lipservice championing human life and liberty to championing those whose main desire is to suppress it and bring all of humanity into submission. The left labors under the delusion that they are "freedom-fighters" and "reality-based" in the same way that any psychotically disordered brain stands firmly and resolutely against reality.

The psychotic has a biological basis for their delusion. The left has a parallel ideological basis that brings about the same dysfuntion.

Postmodern philosophy and rhetoric that embraces "political correctness" and all the multicultural bull that flows from it, was the "prerequisite condition" that facilitated the rise of the Karposi-like malignancy of radical Islam, and gave it carte blanche to spread and kill.

Appreciating the intellectual and moral rot of the postmodern political left is key to understanding why radical Islam has managed to garner a completely unexpected amount of traction in today's world.

Not only is Iraq an important battlefield in the war on terror, it is also a key front in the philosophical war between those who support reason, reality and truth; and the army of useful idiots who make up today's postmodern political left.

Both fanatical ideologies--the one which underlies the barbarism of the Islamofascists and the one which is the foundation of today's political left-- must be defeated by the forces of good, everywhere they have taken root.

Our first intellectual goal is to make them blink.

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