Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Battle Lines
March 28, 2004
We who are about to pontificate salute you, Wretchard of Belmont Club:
...Anecdotal evidence suggests that many in the Left, at least, believe that the GWOT is a war on them. America, not Osama Bin Laden is the putative enemy, and their fire is directed accordingly.[...snip...]
Answers in the affirmative normally rest on the presumption that the Left is engaged in a protracted Gramscian program of Western civilizational suicide in which Islam serves as a convenient means of attaining quietus. For those who truly subscribe to this theory, it is the Left not Islam which is Western civilization's strategic enemy. The inevitable implication of this concept is that the principal battlefield in the Global War on Terror is not Iraq or Afghanistan, but the newsrooms of the major Western cities.
[...snip...]
Answers in the negative are predicated ironically on the malignity of the Left itself. According to this view, the Left desires, not a Gramscian extinction but power above anything else. The power to regulate all aspects of human existence, all human relations, all cultural attitudes, all state authority. And while the Left might make temporary alliance with the Jihadis, the attainment of ultimate power requires an eventual liquidation of the Jihad. There is only room for one scorpion in a bottle.
[...snip...]
There remains a third answer. That the existence of these two great religious totalitarianisms -- one secular only in name and the other religious only in dissimulation -- is required for their mutual defeat. It relies on the observation that both the Left and Islamism react together to produce an extremely toxic combination which neither could have achieved alone. It takes some reflection to remember just how far both the notions of Islamism and Leftism have moved since September 11. The former was an unknown towards which the man in the street would have been indifferent while the latter was a kind of eccentricity, rough yet without danger. Neither will be again. Both have mutated in interaction or perhaps have become that which they really were.
Both are struggling for the space in which conservatism can never go and for the prize which no sane man ever covets: the dominion of souls. Without their mutual presence either could have occupied a kind of cultural sanctuary in which they would brood, proof against interference from people with simple day jobs. Together they guarantee that their places of safety, every media outlet, every school and every place of worship will be transformed into arenas of unparalleled ferocity -- to the possible benefit of the world. Is the Global War on Terror necessarily against the Left? We shall see. We shall see.
Dear readers, it doesn't get any better than that. Go read the whole thing. Your Curmudgeon differs in only one regard: he believes all three propositions Wretchard examines to be true.
At the inception of World War I, one of the greatest man-made disasters on record, socialist thinkers in Britain, France and Italy whooped with delight. George Bernard Shaw remarked that the world had become completely plastic; the time had come to make of it what we would.
As we know, socialism requires so great a degree of power over all human affairs that it inevitably extinguishes individuality itself. It is incompatible with any degree of freedom, however slight. Since Man is free by nature, starting in the processes of his brain and spreading thence to all he does, for socialism to endure it must either remake or destroy Man. Thus, the intrinsic political dynamic of a socialist order is for the do-gooders to give way to the "benevolent" social engineers, and for these to surrender in their turn to the more ruthless redesigners of Man himself, and finally for him to whom nothing matters but power to reign over all.
It is a constant of human history that, wherever and whenever a proto-totalitarian movement has arisen, it's formed alliances of convenience, often not acknowledged as such, with any other anti-freedom campaigns already in progress. "No enemies on the Left" is a formulation with which we have all become familiar. Now and then, the unwillingness of our domestic socialist spokesmen to condemn the evident viciousness of such as Fidel Castro or Kim Jong-Il can be used to taint their representations of benevolence. Lenora Fulani fell to this in a memorable interview with Larry King during her 1988 presidential campaign, when, despite his repeated barbs, she adamantly refused to criticize Castro's suppression of Cuban freedom of speech.
The Fulani-King exchange was a pointed reminder that socialism is a totalitarian scheme. Regardless of their intentions, all socialists demand total power over Man. How else could they fit us to the Procrustean bed they have made for us?
Such an objective is so completely incompatible with the nature of Man that, without the tactical alliances the Left always makes with more topical anti-freedom groups, it would be impossible to attain. The Bolsheviks did not rise to power by triumphing over the Russian Empire on their own; they participated in a multi-party struggle that destroyed the imperial regime without erecting anything of substance in its place. Then they assisted the other factions in destroying one another, while their theorists and activists streamed into the country from their other enclaves in Europe. As the "last men standing," they were able to assume command of the country in the chaos that resulted.
All of Islam's theocosmogony to the side, its usefulness to the Left in wearing away our edifice of freedom is undeniable. For one thing, Islam's instantiations in other countries, both political and cultural, are fodder for the apostles of multiculturalism. For another, Islam propounds so complete a system of dominance that most men of good will are unwilling to compare it to any "lesser" agenda of regimentation; it makes our domestic Leftists look good. For a third, as matters stand, Western societies are unable to bar their doors to an influx of immigrants solely because of their "religion." For a fourth, our necessary response to Islam's violent attitude toward other creeds and social systems provides leftists with specious justifications for accusing the West's defenders of tyranny, even though it's the Left's own program of control that's the real thing. It's hardly necessary to go on from there.
However, it remains the case that the Left cherishes some sorts of latitude, at least for itself, to which Islam is as rigidly opposed as it is to all others. Sexual freedom is one example; artistic license is another. Thus, while the jihadis are a temporarily useful tool in destroying freedom "in the large," the Left could not tolerate them once the libertarian-conservative ethos that protects personal liberty, private property, and individual initiative has been overthrown.
Each of these monstrosities alone would present a formidable foe, simply for its ruthlessness. Together, they appear tactically to be much the worse...yet the tensions between them offer the defender of freedom an opportunity not to be missed.
The key lies in forcing them closer together.
Enforcing a greater intimacy on ultimately incompatible systems exacerbates the frictions between them. Each is forced to confront the ultimate unacceptability of the other. The "common enemy" recedes from thought, and the once-valued ally becomes the principal opponent to be overcome. But more than that, if the common man, he of the "simple day job," only lightly engaged with the great ideological and philosophical struggles of the day, can be brought to see that these two dissimilar systems of thought have as their common enemy the extinction of Western structures of freedom, and must perforce have comparable objectives in all other things, he can be mobilized into the defense of the liberal democratic order as he could not have been in any other way.
This is a military thinker's approach to the assessment of a political or cultural movement. It doesn't begin with guesses at motives and deduce the enemy's tactics from them; it starts with observations of tactics and directions, and infers the enemy's motives and objectives thereby. It's a style of thought that doesn't come naturally to most people, but it is sounder in theory and more reliable in practice than the more common pattern.
The risks are large, perhaps larger than they've ever been before. But risk is a price one must pay for any significant opportunity. The opportunity here is immense. Let's seize it.
Your Curmudgeon suggests that this essay on the aims of Islam is a proper companion to the current one, which provides substantiation for his underlying thesis.
| <<- Auctorial Shortcomings | "If You Can't Be Careful..." ->> |
