When we form our internal images of other people, the thus formed "object-representations" actually involve the fusion of multiple mental images of the person. Children who fail to be able to perform this integrative and synthetic function develop profound psychiatric disturbances. When a child who has been able to form such images is stressed, as by severe trauma, they show a tendency to "split" the object-representations. In classical Psychoanalytic terms, this unconscious tendency to re-split the object, often into an "all-good" and an "all-bad" object is called "splitting" and is a defensive maneuver that allows a person to retain some investment in the important person as a "good" object.
In extreme cases, the splitting is so great and includes the self-representations to such a degree, that a state of dissociation occurs. A dissociative state represents such a severe split in a person's consciousness that whatever happens during the state ("fugue states") is unavailable to the conscious mind when the person is no longer in that state. Such splitting of consciousness is an extreme reaction to intolerable internal conflicts. It represents a failure of the mind's adaptive abilities to compensate for incompatible mental states.
It appears as if significnat portions of the West are suffering from dissociative states.
Captain Ed posts about the German reaction to the recent attempt by two men, one of them a Lebanese man now in custody, to set off mass casualty attacks on German trains. He suggests Europeans Starting To Understand Nature Of Islamofascist Enemy and includes this:
Perhaps the Germans convinced themselves that Islamofascists only hated America, and that as long as they remained publicly neutral on the war, terrorists would bypass them in favor of more attacks on America and Britain.
This obviously has failed, and for obvious reasons. Radical Islamists do not just hate America -- they hate Western culture and its freedoms. They hate sexual expression, voting, secular humanism, modern art, pork, the exposure of skin on women, and the economic success of others. Any nation which exhibits these characteristics will find themselves in the crosshairs of al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups. Appeasement works just as well as it did in the 1930s, a lesson the Germans should understand better than almost anyone.
Maybe the Germans will start taking seriously this war and the forward strategy of the US to engage and kill terrorists where they live rather than where we live. We're not going to just sit around and try to catch them in the act of killing us, and hope our timing is good. That strategy has shown itself over and over again to be a loser, and the Germans have provided just another example of this.
In another post, on Market-Based Profiling, the esteemed Captain discussed the recent events described by The Daily Mail as Mutiny as passengers refuse to fly until Asians are removed. Ed suggests:
These incidents have started to spike in the wake of the successful exposure of a massive plot in the UK against the airlines. British travelers have decided, ironically, that the government has not done enough to screen for terrorists and have lost confidence in air service as a result. This will lead to dramatic market reactions; either people will stop flying, or they will take security into their own hands. The perceived lack of security will make it harder for Muslims to travel (the British reference to "Asians" usually means Pakistanis or Arabs).
....
Is that fair? Hardly. However, the unwillingness of the governments in both the UK and the US to provide systems of screening that instill confidence in the flying public has led to these incidents. They will continue and increase while screening systems insist on playing political correctness games instead of focusing on real threats as the Israelis have done for decades. As I wrote earlier this week, the US has an experimental program attempting to create a similar system; it should get expedited and expanded as soon as possible.
Except for the hard left and those who have had their minds addled by Political Correctness, it has become clear who is threatening terror attacks against the West. Yet today's New York Times carries a highly disturbing report from Londonistan:
British Law Against Glorifying Terrorism Has Not Silenced Calls to Kill for Islam
From his home on the northwest edge of this city, Muhamad al-Massari runs a Web site that celebrates the violent death of British and American soldiers. It is visited by tens of thousands of people every day, he said.
Mr. Massari maintains the Arabic-language site, tajdeed.org.uk, in the face of a strict new law aimed at curtailing violent speech and publishing. Just last week, the Council of Holy Warriors, a group affiliated with Al Qaeda, posted a declaration on the site praising a suicide bombing in Iraq that killed or wounded 55 people.
“If you kill our civilians, we kill your civilians,” Mr. Massari declared during an interview.
Mr. Massari’s Web site, and his public remarks, appear to violate of the Antiterrorism Act of 2006, which makes it a crime to glorify or encourage political violence. Inciting violence has long been illegal here but the new rules, drawn up after the London subway and bus bombings in July 2005, are intended to be much tougher.
The Times article quotes a number of other charming Islamists, one of whom goes so far as to sanction and encourage not only attacking Bush and Blair, but bankers, as well!
“You are attacking our people in Muslim countries, in Iraq, in Afghanistan,’’ Mr. Ahmet said, referring to the British and American governments. “So it’s legitimate to attack British soldiers and policemen, government officials, and even the White House.”
Mr. Ahmet, a 42-year Briton of Cypriot descent, went on to include bank employees as legitimate targets “because they charge interest,” which he says is in violation of Islamic law.
Mr. Ahmet said he is aware of the new law, but that he could not shirk his duty to defend Islam, which he believes is under assault by Britain and the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. He says he often addresses his followers, who he says number 3,000.
“If you are going to kill a Muslim, then I will do everything in my power to kill you,’’ he said.
It has been clear for quite some time a significant portion of the Western elites have been incapable of clearly discerning what is going on around them. Too many believe that it is our behavior, or the insistence on Israel of their own survival, that is inflaming the Islamic world. They discount the efforts, far too successful, of the Islamists to pander to the tribal instincts of their fellow Muslims and provoke a clash between Islam and the West. David Warren points out that Tony Blair gives a terrific speech and says all the right things but then somehow acts as if he didn't hear himself:
Witness Tony Blair's recent speech to the World Affairs Council on August 1, in Los Angeles.
He defined the enemy as: "A movement that believed Muslims had departed from their proper faith, were being taken over by Western culture, were being governed treacherously by Muslims complicit in this take-over, whereas the true way to recover not just the true faith, but Muslim confidence and self esteem, was to take on the West and all its works."
....
That speech of Mr Blair's is among the few truly worth reading from our political masters, and for the point I have quoted. But what follows from it is not quite what Mr Blair prescribes. For his mind is still mostly in 2001.
Since then, the enemy's strategy has succeeded. It is getting less and less useful to claim that we are defending a "moderate Islam" that can accommodate the West, against a "fanatical Islam" that can't. The enemy has succeeded in making the issue, Islam versus West.
The plot develops with the progressive takeover of the world Islamist movement, by the ayatollahs of Iran; and has been further thickened by the huge propaganda victory that Iran's client, Hezbollah, has just won over Israel. This has had and will continue to have the same effect on Muslim mass psychology as the Al Qaeda terror attacks. It shows the most virulent and aggressive forms of Islam to be triumphing -- to be, in effect, the wave of the future, the standard around which all Muslims may rally. It leaves all those who reject this standard not in the position of "moderate Muslims", but rather in that of isolated and irrelevant or treasonous holdovers from some "Western imperialist" past.
David Thompson, whose article, BAD FAITH, should be read in full, documents some of the distance between Islam as it presents itself, through its holy words and spokesmen and Islam as imagined by those in the West who cannot face their own fears and contradictions. Interestingly, one of the best examples of a Western Dissociative state, cited by David Thompson, comes to us from the Dalai Lama, who shows that even the wisest of men can become confused about the distinction between reality as it is and reality as they wish it would be:
During a recent visit to San Francisco, the Dalai Lama told a group of religious leaders that "[Islam is] like any other tradition -- same message, same practice. That is a practice of compassion." Certainly compassion and horror can be found among adherents of any religious ideology, whether because of those beliefs or despite them. But there is a difference between monstrous acts that ignore or invert the exhortations of a religion's founder and monstrous acts that are entirely in accord with that founder's stated vision.
There are boundless examples of such cognitive dissonance reaching the level of dissociation. (One stand-out: suggestions by Israeli officials that talks with Assad could be conceivable; would this be after or before they finish re-arming Hezbollah and establish their own merry band of terrorists for their next round of genocidal attacks on Jews?)
Dissociative states are unstable structures; a society can only hide from danger for so long before a successful attack gains the attention of a hitherto quiescent populace. At that point something will break.
One more thing: tomorrow is August 22.
Recent Comments