The title of today’s essay is a translation of a term I came across on a French blog, possibly coined by Robert Heurtebise, the blogger there: Islamogauchisme.
Islamoleftism refers to a basically incoherent yet psycho-socially viable and prevalent ideological disposition among Western Leftists with regard to the problem of Islam.
As I have argued many times on this blog and on its sister blog, Jihad Watch Watch, the inability of the modern West to notice the menace of Islam, to analyze it rationally, and then to take appropriate action based on that rational analysis, is a problem that transcends Leftism: it is due to the growth into mainstream dominance of a sociopolitical ideology I and others call Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC). Because of the mainstream dominance of PC MC, our collective irrationality about Islam afflicts not only our Leftists, but also the vast majority of people on the Center and Right.
However, that said, this does not mean that there are absolutely no differences in flavor and style among those on the Left, those on the Right, and those in (or hovering around) the Center. While it is undeniable that the vast majority of people on the Right and Center are pretty much idiots about the problem of Islam, they tend to be less egregiously outrageous about their PC MC idiocy than are most Leftists.
To render our critique of Leftism more precise, we may identify four types of Leftist with regard to PC MC and the problem of Islam, each tagged with my guesstimate of their statistical representation among Leftists as a whole:
1) Leftists who are partially savvy about Islam, but still cannot seem to go all the way to the logical conclusion to which such savviness points (5% at best)
2) Centrist-style Leftists who do not share the views of the Radical Left and who are unremarkably ordinary votaries of PC MC and are therefore approximately similar to people of the Right and Center who are also PC MC (35%)
3) Mainstream Leftists who would claim to be moderate and therefore would claim to reject the views of the Radical Left but who nevertheless have had their hearts and minds infected by many of the Radical Leftist views through a process of semi-conscious percolation, which usually involves a filtration and therefore relative attenuation of what is being assimilated—resulting in what might be called “Radicalism Lite” (45%)
4) Radical Leftists who hate the entire West and are either incoherently and hypocritically abstaining from going all the way to actual violent Revolution in the name of the Gnostic Utopia they otherwise fervently believe in, or do in fact go all the way either in spirit or in concretely material terms (15%).
It is to the approximate majority (60%) among Leftists represented by the latter two—#3 and #4—that the term Islamoleftism most pertinently applies.
As far as a closer analysis of the relationship of these Islamoleftists to Islam, we may say their axioms reveal a paradoxical structure, which resolves either on the side of a hypocritically parasitic incoherence, or on the side of an outright Revolutionary Gnosticism. Furthermore, the distribution of these two resolutions of the paradox is not static: many Islamoleftists who remain suspended in their untenable incoherence for a long time may radicalize further at some point in their lives and essentially join the Gnostic Revolution, whether in spirit or in more concrete terms of either passive enabling or more active hands-on support.
Here are some of the ways the Islamoleftist paradox manifests itself:
1) professed relativism about absolute truth / self-righteous certitude about its own truths;
2) professed relativism about Good and Evil / self-righteous denunciation of Western evil (and particularly Judaeo-Christian and American evil);
3) professed support of liberal social values / support—or at least unacceptable whitewashing and defense—of Muslims who are outrageously regressive and anti-liberal;
4) professed insouciance about religion and theology / support—or at least unacceptable whitewashing and defense—of Muslims who are more obsessively zealous and fanatical about religious conservatism than any other religious people on Earth.
and
5) professed values of Pacifism / a Che-Guevarism that at best excuses the militant violence of “oppressed” Third World peoples, and at worst positively justifies such violence while at the same time condemning all military and law enforcement violence in the West irrespective of whether it is done in arguably justified self-defense and pursuit of justice or not.
Among the more radicalized Islamoleftists, there is a clearer basis in an ultimately non-paradoxical and quite logical (if pathologically irrational) hatred of the West, with a consequent desire for a transfigurative Revolution along the lines of Marx/Stalin and/or Hitler and/or the Fascists. Here there is furthermore a recognition (perhaps only semi-consciously on the part of many of them) of the essential consanguinity between their own Gnostic Utopianism based upon the project of the immanentization of the eschaton, on the one hand, and the eschatologization of immanence which is at the epicenter of the classically Gnostic ideology of Muslims, on the other hand.
The less radicalized Islamoleftists differ from their more radicalized brethren only in degree, not qualitatively, and manage to retain that pathological quality through the common human psychological mechanism by which a person retains and does not reject ideas & feelings that are fundamentally incoherent because they contradict other ideas & feelings relevant to the way he lives his practical life: the less radicalized Islamoleftists, thus, continue to feed parasitically off the structures and system of the very West they are otherwise, in heart, thought and speech—if not indeed in deed—undermining and betraying. In their pathology, they have long ago crossed the line from constructive criticism to destructive criticism: and the current, increasingly fashionable paradigm for that destruction is a crystallizing, albeit still inchoate, symbiosis of Islam and Leftism.
8 comments:
Interesting how the Islamic crescent happens to be the leading character in this 'Coexist' banner. The Copts, Maronites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Zoroastrians, Bahai, Barber Infidels and a whole lot of other peoples could speak volumes about this 'co-existance'.
How do you apply the concept of Ethnocentrism as againts the concept of Cultural Imposition regarding Islam's so-called "co-existence?"
shedrifts, thanks for your question -- I'm not sure I understand your question, but I will do my best: I would say that the ideal of a multi-cultural society, where people of different cultures can expect to be treated fairly and equally under the law, is an ideal that Islam opposes, because Islam and Islamic law are based on a cultural supremacism: Muslims are superior, all other peoples are inferior.
This becomes complicated by our own Western dogma of PC Multi-Culturalism (PC MC), which takes the good ideal of a multi-cultural society and twists it into an extreme, such that we force ourselves to "respect" other non-Western cultures even if they have evil laws or even if they are dangerous to us. Thus, Western people under the sway of PC MC cannot think outside their box and rationally conclude that Muslims follow an evil ideology that poses a threat to us.
It hit me when I stumbled on this site, forget about the story on the page, it's the site per se.
http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin/articles/ali_ceremony.html
It hits me rather, I know that you are the king of grammar. LOL
You got it right the first time -- it should be "it hit me", LOL.
The Harvard wedding article you linked was interesting, and nauseating how that woman is so careful about tiptoeing around the Islamic cultural requirements, when the whole thing is a tapestry of how to keep women unequal.
Also, she was only able to do this because she did it in America -- if she had tried in any Muslim country, she would have been arrested at best, probably lynched violently by a mob at worst.
And also, it was the first and only time a woman officiated at a Muslim wedding. At this pace, Muslim change is so glacial, maybe by the year 3008 they will stop preventing Muslim women from going outside the home alone or with non-relative male friends!
The leftists who seek to erase national borders and replace the nation-state with world government--where/how do they fit in your analytical system? Is there not an affinity between them and the ummah? For example, bin Laden, in his missives and videos, makes a point of referring to places by calling them out by their geographical features, eschewing country names. Your thoughts?
Emerson Twain,
Your question would trigger a complexity difficult to manage in a fairly brief reply, but I'll do my best.
The Leftist idea of "seek[ing] to erase national borders and replace the nation-state with world government" of course reached its apogee with Communism (with roots going back to the Enlightenment and Napoleon's logical extension of the French Revolution into a revolutionary imperialism).
I see Communism, however, as only one expression (albeit the grandest so far in modern times) of a larger more amorphous pathology, which one could call "Leftism". Leftism, in turn grows out of a broader, deeper pathology in Western history, which Voegelin called "modern Gnosticism" -- a perennial tendency to rebel against the imperfections of life and replace them with perfection, either through an escape to a trans-Cosmic realm (ancient and medieval Gnosticism) or to transfigure the world through imperialistic and/or revolutionary means (usually crucially including violence).
Utopianism is I think a more central feature of Leftism that makes its adherents warm up to Islam; the trans- or supra-national aspect of one world government is just a logical extension of this. (However, there are significant currents within Leftism that are opposed to what they see is a neo-con "Globalism" that seeks to obliterate cultures; so it's more complicated on that account, let alone others.)
Utopianism by itself would not be sufficient to explain Leftism's affection for Islam: there is a parallel current of romanticization of the Third World "Noble Savage" coupled with a morbidly excessive self-criticism of the West (again, a logical extension of rebellion against imperfect sociopolitical structures elevated to an existentialist alienation seeking assuagement and final release through revolution). For most Leftists, we see this zygote (of self-hatred and adoration of the Other) attain extraordinary degrees of irrationality, when their self-hatred & love of Muslims tends to trump their liberal values: thus Muslims can be documented saying, and doing, horrible things about women, gays, cultural minorities, freedom of expression, sexual freedom -- and yet the Leftists continue to coddle and protect those very same Muslims, and furthermore go the extra mile by attacking those who seek to expose the grotesquely anti-liberal nature of Islam! This Leftist exculpation of anti-gay, anti-women Muslims is truly breathtaking -- but, alas, all too common.
The geopolitical scientist Alexandre Del Valle has pointed out the consanguinity between the "Red" revolutionaries and the activist Muslims -- reaching its symbolic pinnacle in the conversion to Islam of the famous quasi-Communist terrorist of the 80s, Carlos the Jackal, and his book he has written in his French prison in which he fantasizes about a World Revolution in which the Left joins Islam.
Most of my essays here, and on my other blog (Jihad Watch Watch), however, are more concerned with what I consider a more pressing problem than Leftism per se: Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC), which in my view is a kind of watered-down generalization of Leftism into the mainstream throughout the West, particularly with regard to Western mea culpas (excessive self-criticism), an irrational sentimentalization of Third World cultures, and most of all, an inability to condemn Islam. PC MC is a kind of "Leftism Lite" -- and as such, it has been able to permeate and influence Western societies far more effectively than a purer stronger Leftism would have been able to.
PC MC's influence on people of the Right and Center is the real problem, for this enables it to become the dominant mainstream -- and with regard to hindering our collective will and wits with regard to the menace of Islam, it is in my view the pre-eminent problem of our time.
Post a Comment