Although the mind is an incredibly complex structure, much of the time the ideas that animate our defenses are really rather simple, for all that they are also unacceptable. As Samuel Abrams once remarked in a wonderful paper "Insight, the Tiresian Gift", the things we can't bear to know about ourselves are often very simple: I love this persons; I hate that person; I want to have sex with this person: I want to kill that person. Depending on the object of our passions and the strength of our passions, we often must erect sophisticated structures, know as psychological defenses, in order not to know that the person who is the object of our passion is a forbidden object. We construct elaborate defensive structures to defend against knowing that we are frightened of something, enraged at something else, enraged and frightened at the same time. We hide our baser desires under layers of obfuscation so as to avoid knowing too fully about our less acceptable wishes.
It often seems to me that much of the political philosophy of our modern elites is an elaborate defensive structure designed to hide from the believers their essential human flaws.
The vicious attacks in Mumbai, which included particularly sadistic attacks on innocent Jews, the hunting down of Westerners, and the indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds has given the international elites another opportunity to show their mettle. As Carolyn Glick notes, the MSM was careful from the start to avoid doing anything that might direct our attention to the identity, the strategy, and the ideology of the culprits. By rationalizing that the Islaimsts were merely responding to various insults and deprivations, the by now long familiar equation of Islamic terrorism being caused by ___________ (Israeli, Hindu, American, English, Spanish, et al) oppression, the multiculturist left with their descriptions of murderous villains as simply alleged gunmen of unknown ethnicity and religious affiliation, have hamstrung the West from understanding the war that is being waged upon us:
The jihadist-multicultural alliance
THE SECOND truth about the global jihad that the Mumbai attacks exposed is that there is nothing that jihadists can do to make the multiculturalists stop defending them. And there is nothing effective that democratic governments can do to defend against the jihadists that multiculturalists will deem acceptable. This is the case because multiculturalists cannot accept the fact that the jihadists are waging war against the West without disavowing multiculturalism itself. And since they will not disavow what has become their religion, they will never be convinced that they must stop defending jihadists.
Barry Rubin hints at the problem for the Western elites who need to obscure that we are currently engaged in a war we did not seek with those who oppose and hate the modern world in which they cannot compete:
India and Israel: The parallels
This is the kind of threat and problem Israel has been facing for decades. What are the lessons for India from Israel's experience?
First, India needs and has the right to expect international sympathy and help. It will get sympathy but will it get help? Once it is clear that other countries must actually do something, incur some costs, possibly take some risks, everything changes.
If the terrorists came from bases or training camps in Pakistan, India would want international action to be taken. Pakistan must be pressured to close such camps, stop helping terrorists and provide information possessed by Pakistani intelligence agencies.
But will Western countries make a real effort? Are they going to impose sanctions on Pakistan or even denounce it? Will they make public the results of their own investigations about responsibility for the terror campaign against India?
NOT LIKELY. After all, such acts would cost them money and involve potential risks, perhaps even of the terrorists targeting them. Moreover, they need Pakistan, especially to cooperate on keeping down other Islamist terrorist threats, not spread around nuclear weapons technology too much and cooperate on maintaining some stability in Afghanistan.
As Barry Rubin suggests, those members of the international community who have not yet been attacked by Islamic terrorists or who do not see themselves as being on the front lines, will offer little more than words of support. To many, appeasement can convincingly seem like prudence, as long as their rationalizations are in place. After all, if Islamic terrorism is merely a nuisance and can be adequately fought via the criminal justice system, then the great risks and costs attendant on an actual, internationalized response can be avoided.
There are two important ideas being defended against by these maneuvers.
First, the idea that multiculturalism, a core component of the left's ideology, has failed. This knowledge would bring into question the entire house of cards structure that many on the left use to support their image of themselves as good, kind, caring people (even as they hate the right wing bigots and haters they caricaturize.) If multiculturalism is a failed ideology, then it may well be that some cultures are superior to others and that Western Civilization is not the bane of all existence but, with all its flaws, the greatest triumph of man's social development. Multiculturalism is rarely challenged by the centrist or right leaning elites because it serves their purposes as well, a point I shall elaborate upon shortly.
The second idea is more personal and more deeplydistressing. The multicultural left has never (with very are exceptions) been willing to do anything more than "talk the talk." Actually putting their own ideology into practice themselves, walking the walk as it were, requires a kind of moral courage that is conspicuously lacking on the left. And in a fundamental way the moral cowardice of a left that is unwilling to challenge its own assumptions and beliefs is mirrored by a moral cowardice on the right that is frightened of the implications of the reality they cannot bear to face.
For if we are in fact in a war with radical Islam, at some point, a point which may well be rapidly approaching, our elites will need to address questions that have been avoided for a very long time: Can an open and free society exist with a large population of unassimilated and hostile Muslims within its borders? Can free men remain free when all the passion and courage has been drained away by comfort and self-abnegation? When people no longer feel their own culture is worth defending, can the virtues that make modern civilization worth supporting stand against those who hate the modern world's freedoms?
Our elites have avoided these questions for good reason. The answers will cause terrible pain and suffering, while requiring some significant reflection upon, and modification of, our current laws and rule sets; yet by simply avoiding the tough questions and "kicking the can" down the road, when the questions must finally become unavoidable, the answers will be that much more painful. Paradoxically, if our elites could find a unified way to confront the evil of Jihadi Islam, we might well be able to avoid the worst. For, finally, the question that is at the heart of our present conflict with Islam is a simple one: Can we induce the Islamic world to police themselves and cleanse themselves of the hatred and violence that they have so successfully promulgated? If not, the Muslim world can only become more disconnected, more filled with hate sanctioned by their religion, and more at risk for crossing a threshold that will lead to the unimaginable.
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