Aided by the MSM, it has been bewildering how they seemed to be cutting their own throats just to spite George Bush.
Armed And Dangerous describes this cult of suicidalism, otherwise known as the modern leftist/progressive movement:
The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West’s will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.Read it all, and find out such gems as the connection of Existentialism to suicidalism.
But al-Qaeda didn’t create the ugly streak of nihilism and self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West’s intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western intellectual life.
Consider the following propositions:
-- There is no truth, only competing agendas.
-- All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
-- There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
-- The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
-- Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
-- The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
-- For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
-- When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.
These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism, multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, “political correctness” to name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call them by their right name: suicidalism.
As an aside, I recall getting the the "existentialism" unit in high school English class, and though I couldn't put my finger on it, I rejected with rage the stories we had to read, finding something about their espoused worldview deeply wrong. I felt vaguely as if I were being told a cunning, malicious lie by the existentialists, that sought to tear down all that I held to be good of our Judeo-Greco-Christian heritage.
The essay concludes:
The Communist atheists of Department V understood that Christian self-abnegation tends to inculcate a cult of self-sacrifice even among Westerners who are themselves agnostics or atheists. All the propagandists had to do was make the case that the value of self-abnegation applies to culture as well as individuals. By doing so, they were able to entrench the idea that suicidalists are morally superior to non-suicidalists.So don't fall for it!
They did this so successfully that at least one major form of Western self-abnegation seems to have developed as a secondary phenomenon: “deep environmentalism”. I can’t find any sign that this traces back to the usual Stalinist suspects, but it is rather obviously a result of generalizing suicidalism not just to culture but to species.
I think it’s important to understand that, although suicidalism builds on some pre-existing pathologies of Western culture, it is not a native or natural development. It is an infection that evildoers and their dupes created and then spread as part of a war against the West; their goal was totalitarian control, and part of their method was to talk the West into slitting its own throat.
Al-Qaeda’s goal is the restoration of the Caliphate and the imposition of shari’a law on the West so that the Dar al-Harb is abolished and absorbed into the Dar al-Islam. In other words, totalitarian theocracy. Western suicidalists have transferred their allegience from Communism to Islamofascism without a hitch. They’re doing their best to see that we lose — and their best is rather more effective than any bombing campaign.
Thus, to defeat al-Qaeda, stopping the suicide bombers is not sufficient. We must recognize, condemn, and reject the suicide thinkers as well.
We're still fighting the commies. The author rejects the kneejerk claim that this is all just conspiracy theory nonsense, citing this source on the Seduction of the Liberals. I'd also include the previously secret Venona Project that decoded soviet messages in the 1940s, showing that indeed communist agents had infiltrated the government just like McCarthy claimed and that Alger Hiss was guilty guilty guilty.
Who was behind the peace movement and the nuclear freeze in the 70s and 80s? The KGB. Who is behind the anti-war effort now, funding International Answer? The World Workers Party, which is a front for the remnants of the KGB.
Remember that thing called the Cold War that threatened to blow up the world? It wasn't a fiction.
It was real.
And those commies didn't just vanish in 1989.
They made their Long March into academia, the media, and other mainstream powerful institutions such as the ACLU.
(How else to explain, for example, the ACLU's incoherent positions of crusading militantly for atheism under a twisted deliberate misinterpretation of the 1st Amendment, while simultaneously ignoring completely the 2nd Amendment to bear arms? They are not honest actors, but have a definite anti-American agenda.)
As I've tried to explain before, leftists wish to create a utopia by exerting powerful social control via a collective over the individual. This leads inevitably to mass murder and oppression.
History is clear on that point.
What the leftists have done is hijacked social progressive causes, getting the so-called "liberals" on board, and in fact conflating the two concepts. Therefore leftism has acquired a patina of virtue, by being associated with progressive thought.
But it was a Faustian bargain. Liberals succumbed to the lure of expedience, in that the state power wielded by leftists promised to bring about the social change -- the social justice -- they desired. Others, like Noam Chomsky, just wished to get their "hand on the lash" when the New Order came about.
For example, not long ago, I discovered someone had posted one of my articles about Nazis being leftists (that drew from here; see sidebar there) to another message board, but commenters dismissed it, pointing out Hitler wasn't very socially progressive. They missed the point entirely! It has provided great camouflage to the movement that wishes to destroy our Western culture by being associated with civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, animal rights, environmentalism, and so on.
But that's all just a pose, as their alliance with islamists, who are against all those things (but for collective social control), proves decisively.
And those "deep environmentalists" mentioned above -- they are deeply disturved, evil people. I've personally heard some of them actual wistfully wish for some natural disaster -- preferably of our own making -- to kill off about 5 billion people, so the rest could live in harmony with Gaia.
That's just staggering! The coolness with which they wish to destroy not only all of civilization as we know it, but billions of innocent lives...just for the benefit of their deranged fantasies about how the apparently-sentient Earth would be happier!
Apparently they imagine they'd be among the survivors. Actually, scratch that, some of them wish to die for the sake of the environment and hope we will joing them: The Voluntary Human Extinction Project!
This is truly a disease that we must cure.
Liberals must be rescued from leftism and communist propaganda.
This suicidalism must be stamped out!
