Midway on the road of our life
I found myself in a darkened wood,
where the right way became deserted.
Alas, how can I put into words how thorny it was,
this jungle of a forest harsh and strong,
even thinking about it scares me still!
-- Dante, first lines of the Divine Comedy
About midway through our current Western sojourn in the first decade of this new century and new millennium that began with a Big Bang of its own, set off not by inexplicable particle physics nor by God but by murderously fanatical Muslims, a Jihad Watch regular expressed the baffled frustration that I think was typical at the time – and continues to be typical.
The JW regular I quote was one “darcy” (alas, no longer posting comments there anymore, as far as I can tell), posting on March of 2008, five years ago from where we now sit, and, as she says, six and a half years after 911:
It's just incredible.
6 1/2 years later we're bending over backward as to how much we can do for the Barbarians who mass-murdered thousands and thousands and thousands of our citizens.
Why? WHY?
Other Jihad Watch regulars expressed similar sentiments in other threads around the same time:
Can someone tell me again:
why is Islam able to be legally practiced in the United States???
asked "pythagoras" rhetorically, and "Elric66" answered:
You got me. Its incompatible with democracy. My only guess is the US has a deathwish.
You got me. Its incompatible with democracy. My only guess is the US has a deathwish.
A few days later, another JW regular, "savsiv" observed:
There must be some kind of selective amnesia suffered by our leaders or just plain dementia. I do not understand their reasoning process!
And another couple of days later, "descendantofacrusader" wondered, scratching his head in bafflement:
Just why Christians would condone and thereby legitimize a theology and political system that is decidedly anti-Christian is completely beyond me.
Lest my readers think my trip down memory lane characterizes only the learning curve of the Counter-Jihad five years ago, I'd counter by noting that I continue to see pretty much the same thing up to this day.
Indeed, I noticed that Robert Spencer himself along with former FBI agent John Guandolo both indulged in this bafflement during the former's recent video interview of and discussion with the latter on a topic most relevant to this whole sordid mess: the deep and broad infiltration of Muslim Brotherhood operatives in American institutions and government. At a certain point in their hour-long discussion, both Spencer and Guandolo wondered how it could be that the American government has become so deeply enmeshed with, and compromised by, precisely the wrong kinds of Muslims (even assuming there exist any "right" kind legitimately on our side).
As I've argued before, this bafflement is unnecessary: there is a reasonable explanation: PC MC. And there is a logic to PC MC. When, however, we in the Counter-Jihad persist in being baffled, we seek some kind of explanatory release -- and then we may find the only resolution of the bafflement would be (other than mass stupidity, which only begs the question) some kind of conspiracy theory involving an evil cabal of dastardly Elites, who have superhuman powers to influence Western governments; for which the only recourse, apparently, would be to hunker down in preparation for some quasi-apocalyptic Mad Max scenario of Civil War throughout the West.
So, what is this reasonable explanation I mentioned? What is this logic of PC MC that would answer the baffled question asked by Spencer and Guandolo and so many other civilians of the Counter-Jihad? It has many parts, which must be adumbrated:
1. Ethnic people can't do anything substantively wrong.
2. The West is worse than non-Western cultures, and even though we are superior (here the logic breaks down, but that doesn't faze the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist), we alone should be held responsible for any bad things we are deemed to have committed -- and furthermore, most bad things in history and in current affairs are ultimately the fault of the West.
3. Muslims are an ethnic people (or a wonderfully diverse tapestry of ethnic peoples).
4. It is worse to criticize Muslims too much than it is to suffer massacres which some of them continue to commit and plot, and which too many among their international community seem to countenance, if not positively enable or support.
5. The problem of Islamic terrorism cannot be a pandemic problem; it must be only the work of a Tiny Minority of Extremists, while the vast majority of Muslims must be decent harmless people we have to accept and embrace into our societies without suspicion, and while their Islam must be deemed to be a respectable decent "world religion" reflecting, again, their ethnic culture, by definition axiomatically irreproachable.
Given these five central axioms of PC MC, an additional vector occurs, in three steps:
1) As the the official governments of the PC MC West have been defending their societies against the ongoing, and metastasizing, threat of Islamic terrorism -- a threat even they cannot deny (though they will try to monkey with the language to whitewash in Orwellian fashion the Islam connection) -- and as they continue their policy of whack-a-mole to try to keep a lid on an Islamic terrorism that is popping up increasingly all over the globe, they cannot help but notice, increasingly, a fact acutely discomfitting for them: Ostensibly, there seem to be way more extremist dangerous Muslims than their own paradigm dogmatically permits.
2) In desperation, then, they have sought the goodwill and advice of Muslims to help them fend with this seemingly unstable situation that portends a horrific catastrophe looming.
3) Now, in this situation, the only Muslims pro-actively activist enough to become available to be soliticited for such advisory roles happen to be deeply riddled and compromised with associations with extremism and terrorism, as has been amply and meticulously documented by Robert Spencer, John Guandolo, Andrew Bostom, and Frank Gaffney (to mention just a few).
Conclusion:
I.e., because the West does not want to believe that the problem of Islamic terrorism is metastatic and systemic, and therefore wants desperately to believe it only reflects a Tiny Minority of Extremists, it recoils from the reasonable induction that would be inferred from the growing mountain of data about Islam and about Muslims that has become clearer and clearer with each passing year.
Once we fully understand this logic and absorb its implications, we should no longer be baffled. The overarching problem and predicament we are in basically may be described metaphorically: In fear of what they semi-consciously know to be the case -- that the problem of Muslims is far broader and deeper than they would like it to be -- they are assiduously burying their heads in the sand on the banks of De Nile.
So, midway in the confusion of our Age of Inhibition (as Hugh Fitzgerald referred to our Western cultivation of obstinately timid myopia in the face of the danger of Muslims), we do not need to feel lost and hopeless. We have, as Westerners, a guide like Dante's Cicero: We have our reason, and we can and must use its light to persuade enough of our fellow Westerners, comfortably benighted in their pleasantly self-righteous feeling of being ethically superior to those of us who sound the tocsin against the muezzins of Islam, to shake off their snooze-alarm somnambulism and wake up to smell the Arabic coffee, thence to become the nucleus of a Western Revival of our former, once common, sense.
4 comments:
we do not need to feel lost and hopeless. We have, as Westerners, a guide like Dante's Cicero: We have our reason, and we can and must use its light to persuade enough of our fellow Westerners
A few years ago, I was having some success along those lines -- mostly with members of the Republican Party.
Now that the GOP has tossed aside the idea that there is an Islamic threat, one that is inherent in Islam, I'm having no success -- and losing clients in the process, too.
It seems to me that far too many people are more comfortable in following a political party than in thinking for themselves.
Has Islam won? It seems so to me -- in the short term, anyway.
I wonder if a similar thing happened in Spain during the time that Spain fell under the boot of Islam and remained there for some seven centuries.
Remember the words of Rafael Patai? "The West has a fascination with all things Araby." I wonder if that fascination is a factor too -- today, that is.
That "fascination" is certainly a part of our Western historical DNA, and has surfaced and resurfaced in various permutations. I'm sure the Spanish Occupation involved that. However, recall that after 1492, the West for a good 100 years rallied around to fight Muslims on a scale that was nothing short of a World War, with a stunning victory at Lepanto in 1571. However, that victory was short-lived, as Muslims again began to retake large parts of the Mediterranean and to continue their terror attacks all along the southern coastline of Europe. During this time, I've learned from the history of the anti-Islam fervor of the great Spanish poet Cervantes, written by an obscure French historian, Émile Chasles, that a curious dynamic played out, over the centuries: As Muslims continued to ravage the West with piracy, predations, and terror attacks along the coastlines (sometimes penetrating in to sack towns inland) -- and recall that although Muslims lost Spain in 1492, they gained a spectacular victory in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople -- they generated over time a kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among Westerners -- an ongoing fatigue, ennui, nausea; not to mention physical and economic dislocations here and there -- causing quite a few Westerners to jump ship and join the other side, either as mercenaries for hire, or as converts.
I would not say we are in exactly the same predicament now as Europe was then, for many things are different now (including centuries of sophistication and cultural wisdom accrued after much blood, sweat and tears in the past 500 years). But one cannot deny that an aspect of that "relationship" between the West and Islam continues as a hangover, and as the reminder of a suppressed nightmare that used to plague us, now renewing with a vengeance to disturb our complacent IslAmnesia we have cultivated in the past 300 years during which we became so astronomically superior and Islam shrivelled into a backward rump of its former self.
http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2012/09/tilting-at-windmills.html
http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2010/01/western-amnesia.html
There are indeed many similarities between now and then.
What point is there in knowing history if a civilization will not learn the lessons of that history?
We are heading into a new Dark Age -- and, as a civilization, denying that this disaster is even happening.
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