In my previous essay, The Logic of the PC MC Paradigm, I explored one particular mechanism, albeit broadly manifested and complex, of the PC MC paradigm—namely, the logic by which PC MC Westerners ignore the violence of Islam and even perversely become more deferential toward Muslims the more that Muslims are violent.
This, of course, does not sound logical; but I am here distinguishing logic from reason. Madness often has its own logic, and follows its own rules. It is thus within its closed system not illogical, even if it is irrational with respect to reality outside its closed system. If you want to kill yourself and let your family die—or if, through some torturously simplistic naivete with disastrously misplaced good intentions, you make reckless decisions that put you and your family in mortal jeopardy—then the thought processes and concrete procedures based on them can well be logical; but their ultimate motivation and goal will nevertheless be irrational. The same dynamic operates with the larger topic under consideration in that previous essay—the suicidal thought processes and policies based upon them of the West in the face of an Islam Redivivus.
Similarly, a microcosm of that dynamic is evident from the way the PC MC West frames the ongoing Israeli-Islamic conflict. I shall now adumbrate some key points as well as some of the key axioms upon which the framework of that logic—that irrational logic—depends:
1. Muslim jihadists fighting in combat are endowed with the romanticized aura of Che-Guevarist “freedom fighters” resisting “oppression”.
2. This Che-Guevarist “resistance” acquires sympathy and justification by drawing upon the deeper and broader aura of the Noble Savage of the Third World who is a perennial victim of the inept, corrupt, and/or evil white West (both Colonialist and now post-, but still crypto-, imperialist; especially when considering the U.S.A.).
3. This elevation of the Third World Noble Savage, and simultaneous denigration of the white West, in turn draws on a deeper self-criticism by Westerners of their own West that goes far beyond rational criticism to a self-hatred of morbid degree, a self-hatred whose psychological, intellectual and spiritual wellsprings lie in various forms of Gnosticism. Its modern roots—psychological, intellectual and cultural—go back at least to the 17th century.
4. Gnosticism depends upon transforming the existential paradox of human being into a confrontational contradiction that divides the Cosmos, the social realm, and the Self into fanatically inimical halves of Good and Evil. The modern Western Gnostic has furthermore designated most Western institutions and aspects of culture as Evil, and has located Good only in special arcane cultic organizations with a membership limited to a restricted minority who alone possess the “true knowledge”—a “true knowledge” that invariably goes against the grain of both conventional wisdom and most intellectual and philosophical traditions. In three monumental cases in the 20th century, this type of the cultic minority has become the impetus for mass movements resulting in horrific disorder: Communism, Nazism, and Fascism. (In none of these cases were the mass movements as fully willed by the people as the global mass movement of Islam is by the vast majority of Muslims: more often than not the sociological dynamics depended on a complex concatenation of state-imposed terror and propaganda symbiotic upon a corroded public pedagogy due to broader and deeper processes of the protracted reconfiguration of the West as its trauma of the dissolution of the intellectual and existential order of Christendom and new pressures from secularism and societal and technological progress exerted themselves.)
5. The modern West is not ruled by modern Gnosticism (thanks in great part to the Allies who won World War 2 and who later helped to hasten the collapse of Soviet Communism), but over the past 60-odd years has come under the mainstream domination of a kind of “Gnosticism Lite”—through the intermediate process of a “Leftism Lite”—which retains certain features of modern Gnosticism and weaves them incoherently with the texture of an otherwise good, reasonable and common-sensical web of opinions, feelings and logic that are part of the secular outgrowth of the healthy tradition and healthy progress of the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian West.
6. Israel over this same past 60-odd years, and all the more so as we approach our present (escalating post-911 in curious symbiosis with an equally increasing Islamophilia and/or Islamophobophobia), has become identified with the white West, and thus falls under the spell of axioms described in points #1-4 (and as further illuminated in subsequent points below). In somewhat more precise terms, Israel has more or less been thrown under the bus by the West in the same way as the West has been betraying another part of it which, like Israel, has been valiantly and perennially struggling against Islamic Jihad: Serbia. And this is because, according to the perverse central axiom of PC MC which has become the dominant and mainstream paradigm by which the West thinks geopolitically, the white West is bad and brown Muslims are good. The analytical illumination and explication of this central axiom becomes evident, though perhaps not exhausted, from a reading of all eleven points listed here.
7. Because of #6, whenever Israel defends itself—whether in outright battle or in protective measures of institutional and structural self-defense—the data of those actions of self-defense
is filtered through the PC MC paradigm and out the other end is excreted the judgements that Israel is at best the unfair aggressor, and at worst is behaving like an immoral tyranny against the precious poor Noble Savages, the “Palestinians”, supposedly coming perilously close to the “slippery slope” toward genocide and other unethical collective measures against them.
8. By a perverse logic, the non-Western peoples most hallowed to inherit the mantle, post-911, of the aggrieved and “oppressed” Third World Noble Savage, have been the Muslims. And the more that Muslims engage in qital—the physically violent form of jihad, whether that be riots, lynchings, terrorist razzias, guerilla attacks or more formal military engagements (where they can, at least, in the Horn of Africa, or in the Balkans)—the more the PC MC West endows them with the aura of the Che-Guevarist “freedom fighter” engaged in a romantic “resistance movement” against "imperialist oppression".
9. According to the various logical mechanisms spelled out in points #1-8, Israel has become the honorary white Western “imperialist aggressor”, while the “Palestinians” are the aggrieved brown victims of that “oppression” consisting of the “racist apartheid” of the Israeli government and its crypto-genocidal ambitions against the “Palestinians”—who thus have to “resist” as best they can. No matter what these “Palestinians” do—whether that be firing thousands of missiles at Israeli civilians over the span of a year, or whether they indulge in scores of grotesquely fanatical suicide bombings against Israeli civilians as they have over the past three decades—the data of what they do is filtered through the PC MC paradigm and out the other end is excreted the judgements that Israel is an unfair, or even evil, “oppressor”, and the “Palestinians” are poor helpless victims of that “oppression” who have been driven to “desperation” and so any acts of violence they perpetrate, no matter how heinous, are reinterpreted as “understandable”, with the onus on stopping this “cycle of violence” put largely, if not wholly, on the side of the Israelis. By an interesting twist to the already perverse logic, Israel has been cast as “neo-Nazi” or “Zionazi” blatantly by the more radical Leftists and radical right-wingers the more they partake of their Gnostic darkness, while residues of this grotesque twist lurk among many of the less radical Leftists and even PC MC. Meanwhile, the “Palestinians” (and, pari passu, all Muslims) have become the “new Jews”, endowed singularly with the halo of being the premier potential victims of “another Holocaust” at the hands of an increasingly “Islamophobic” West.
10. Another point of interest of that filtering process by which the data is interpreted is that it tends to filter out most, if not all, of the specifically Islamic content of the “Palestinian” “resistance” (as it does, pari passu, of the “resistance movements” of Muslims elsewhere around the world—e.g., southern Philippines, southern Thailand, northern India, the various “Stans” of the former U.S.S.R., the Horn of Africa, northern Nigeria, the Balkans). This is an interesting, incoherent wrinkle to this PC MC mechanism, since according to PC MC elsewhere, there is nothing wrong with Islam and Islamic culture, so why suppress its presence here?
11. There are different levels or layers of anti-Israel antipathy in the modern West, ranging in order of pathological virulence from modern Gnostic anti-Judaism, to Leftist anti-Semitism, to PC MC anti-“Zionism”. Modern Gnostic anti-Judaism may manifest itself in either radical Leftism or radical right-wing ideology (though most often the former). Leftism of course has deep roots in modern Gnosticism—with the latter’s forms in Communism and Nazism—, but represents basically an attenuation of its pathological virulence, and a consequent residual rapprochement with the unavoidable and perennial limitations of imperfect reality. This does not mean that Leftism is harmless. It continues to try to accomplish the impossible—and in so trying, harms individuals and society in many diverse ways—, notwithstanding that its goals have been considerably decaffeinated from its modern Gnostic source. And while PC MC in turn represents a further watering down and decaffeination process from Leftism, it has more or less inherited the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that lurks in Leftism, derived in more pathologically virulent strains in turn from modern Gnosticism. These three levels or layers are not necessarily always three distinct phenomena: in various individuals or institutions, one may see an interpenetration of two or all three of them; and even in the same individual, depending on the issue under consideration (or perhaps depending on the mood or the medication of the individual in question), one may see now a PC MC attitude, now a Leftist attitude, now a modern Gnostic attitude. In broad sociopolitical terms, however, it is safe to say that the West currently is under the mainstream dominance of PC MC, and not its stronger, more robust pathogens, Leftism or modern Gnosticism—which again is not to say that the more pathologically caffeinated strains do not at odd times lend their virulence to this or that issue now and again. Certainly, the election of Obama, with his profoundly massive associations with Leftism proper, and some extending deeper into the darkness of radical Leftism and below that into modern Gnostic Revolution against the West, represents a powerful infusion of caffeine into the bloodstream of the Body Politic which, at the very least, will ensure the comprehensive solidification and intensification of the prevailing mainstream dominance of PC MC. (This, in turn, will likely serve to provoke a tectonic reaction against it, over time, during the coming decade and after, as the essential health of the West reasserts itself.) What this means for the U.S.-Israel relationship under the Obama Presidency (likely to last two terms) will be reasonably predicted as a very slow but sure augmentation, cleverly masked by Obama as a realistic and unremarkably ethical centrism, of the anti-Israel impatience seen under Clinton and Bush, and the transformation of that impatience into, at best, a pressure on Israel, to a degree heretofore unseen, to more or less commit suicide; or at worst, an attempted facilitation—indirectly, of course—of her murder at the hands of the Muslim world.
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