| « | Apologies! |
»
|
|
Saturday, January 29, 2005
The Advance Of The Death Cults
There are some ideas that simply refuse to cease engendering. Some are parthenogenetic: merely happening on them causes an unending fount of implications to spring forth. Others require cross-pollination: they must travel through others' minds, gather compatible seed, and return thus fertilized before their progeny will emerge.
Long, long ago, at a Website now defunct, your Curmudgeon posted an essay titled "The Convergence Of The Death Cults." It drew only modest attention at the time, but one of its readers was Pascal, whose particular concentrations turned its acorn of a thesis into a mighty oak. To this day, when your Curmudgeon and Pascal get together on the phone, the themes of that essay are the first thing they discuss.
Ideas travel; the stronger and more urgent the idea, the farther it will range. Thus, when Pascal pointed your Curmudgeon at this recent Belmont Club posting, it came as little surprise that prodigious analyst Wretchard had been infected by the "converging death cults" meme, albeit in another guise.
Concerning the Wahhabi desecrations of Somali graveyards recently come to light, a reprise of Wahhabi desecrations of graveyards in Kosovo, Wretchard writes:
The grave desecrations are an obvious illustration of Orwell's dictum that "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Like the destruction of the Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan, their effect is [to] remove any recollection of a creed or way of life that may have preceded Wahabism.
And subsequently:
An ongoing campaign to impoverish culture and thought was a pillar of the totalitarian 1984; something which was achieved largely through the censorship of language resulting in a bowdlerized dialect called Newspeak. We would recognize it instantly as modern 'political correctness'; and it is not surprising that the Wahabis would use the technique as well to create 'a people without fashion, without culture, without identity'.
First and most obvious, the desecration of graveyards inculcates in a people a grotesque, destructive disrespect for the past. For the past, as it relates to the present, is about the words and deeds of those who have preceded us. If their bones are not worthy of a peaceful repose, what does that imply for their words and deeds?
Second, the Wahhabis have linked this practice to their creed, and to its furtherance in the world. Insofar as Wahhabi Islam is granted the status of a religion -- a status it deserves no more than Nazism did -- this dresses a gruesome practice in a religious shawl, automatically triggering the "tolerance reflexes" of those who worship at the altar of Cultural Relativism. Your Curmudgeon will note, not for the first time, that these oh-so-tolerant ones have little patience for Christianity. Indeed, they're frequently to be found in High Dudgeon over the Catholic Church's refusal to normalize homosexuality and Catholic Charities' refusal to include abortion funding among its employees' health benefits.
But third and most critical, the very persons most likely to shout, "Other cultures, other ways!" are also the most likely to oppose American attempts to protect peaceable victim groups from the violence and degradation militant creeds inflict upon them. It's perfectly logical, once one has classed the concept of individual rights as a notion bound specifically to Western culture, that other places need not honor.
Many of these tolerant souls, Gentle Reader, are engaged in an extended campaign to kill you.
Just now, the Northeast is suffering a cold spell of unusual severity and depth. It's already taken several lives: the lives of persons living near the subsistence line, who could not afford the fuel required to heat their homes adequately. But the very persons who oppose "American imperialism" in defense of the lives of Somalis, Afghanis or Iraqis, will fight to the death to prevent expanded oil exploration in Alaska, or in many promising offshore oil beds -- exploration whose consequences could lower the price of heating oil substantially for decades to come. Not only does this consign the indigent elderly of the Northeast to frigid death, it also routes billions of dollars into the pockets of men who fund Wahhabism and Islamic terrorism generally: the worst men in the world. It puts a cruelly ironic mark under their frequent protests, aimed at the corporations that develop life-saving drugs and medical devices, that "human life matters more than corporate profit."
Are these death cults advancing? Are those who approve them swelling in numbers or strength? The evidence is troubling. Saudi-funded madrassas are multiplying throughout the West, and all of them teach Wahhabism of the most violent form. The Saudi ambassador to the Netherlands has demanded the expulsion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali immigrant, from the Dutch legislature, specifically because she condemns Islamic maltreatment of women, yet the Dutch government has not replied in any way. That Miss Ali is herself under Islamic sentence of death, has been the target of at least one assassination attempt, and must speak from concealment troubles the Saudi vermin not at all. American leftists are becoming ever more strident in opposition to the liberation and democratization of Iraq. Worst, with a substantial majority in both houses of Congress, President Bush can't get the ban on oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge lifted on a mere 2000 acres out of the 18,000,000 acres protected. Republican legislators, nominally adherents of an ideology of growth, development, and individual freedom, are too frightened by our domestic environmentalist death cult to stand firmly against them.
Perhaps they're right to be afraid. Here on Long Island, environmentalists have burned down houses and wrecked businesses. In the Northwest, the spiking of trees and sabotaging of logging equipment, which creates enormous hazard to life and limb, is routine, such that many logging camps must be patrolled by platoons of armed guards. It was a radical environmentalist who assassinated Dutch political figure Pim Fortuyn.
Death cults are natural allies. They all want the same thing. That American death cultists are joining hands with Islamic death cultists should be no surprise. Beware that the former don't begin to actively assist the latter in crossing the oceans that have long been our first line of defense.
Comments
There probably isn’t all that much exploitable petroleum in Alaska - in the National Wildlife Refuge, anyway - but the point is no less valid: when the choice is stated as being between “nature” and humanity, there is no shortage of people who will cast their lots for caribou and permafrost.
Of course, the government already has third-generation fuel cells that could produce 100 mpg, but is keeping them under lock and key at the request of the oil companies, alongside the Fish carburetor and a shelf full of perpetual-motion machines.
Posted by CGHill on 01/29/2005 at 01:29 PM
