ShrinkWrapped

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled

In the last century evil ideologies emerged which denied human nature and were consciously devoted to enabling the emergence of a "New Man," Utopia to follow.  These ideologies were socialist in nature and required that those who were not "part of the solution" would need to be removed so that the Utopian socialist vision could be realized.  We remember one of the versions of socialism, National Socialism, (collectivism based on ethnicity rather than class) as the most profoundly evil system, one based on the genocide of innocents.  Yet, while Communism has been responsible for more death and destruction than Nazism, the Left has managed to obscure its historical roots in genocide and retains the moral high ground in much of its posturing.

"The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.* [...] They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust."**

- Karl Marx

*Marx. People's Paper. April 16, 1853

**Journal of the history of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1, 1981

Genocide is a necessary component of any ideology that professes to believe in the need for the development of a "New Man"; certainly the modern Left would prefer to raise consciousness by education (and coercion), but when their desire for power is thwarted by "counter-revolutionaries", the only answer is to destroy their enemies.  Note how the rhetoric of the (true believer) radical environmentalists has become increasingly eliminationist as the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming has been increasingly repudiated. 

The idea of improving the volk by eliminating undesirables is an old belief of the Progressive movement and goes back to its roots.  It usually surprises Liberals-by-Temperament when they are told that Planned Parenthood, for example, explicitly promoted abortion and birth control in order to rid society of undesirables:

How Planned Parenthood Duped America

At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.

This does not mean that all Leftists, or any Liberals-by Temperament for that matter, support genocide.  Almost all would be horrified to accept that those most committed to their ideological preferences, inevitably must support evil once they accept that their end (saving the planet, protecting the people from [projected] enemies, ensuring dominance for one's ethnic or religious group) justifies any means. 

The greatest threat facing Civilization today is the alliance between the Left and Sharia Islam.  Most Liberals-by-Temperament have bought into the belief that Islam is under assault by the Right wing in this country.  The lack of anti-Islamic hatecrimes (whose numbers are dwarfed by anti-Semitic hatecrimes) does not impact this belief, a belief actively being promulgated by apologists for, and collaborators with, genocidal Islam.  Patrick Poole summarized the state of the "stealth Jihad" for Pajamas media last week:

2010: The Year of Islamist Infiltration

While the domestic terror trend has continued unabated, elements of pre-violent, or rather stealth, jihad are taking firm root in our government, military, judicial, and educational institutions, without the slightest opposition from the Obama administration and our homeland security agencies. In fact, if we’ve seen anything this year, it has been the willingness of government officials to lend their support to aid this stealth jihad.

The failure to recognize the “civilizational jihad” being waged against us is a bipartisan problem. Driven mainly by Muslim Brotherhood front groups and pushed by non-violent Islamist organizations in the West, the threat remains badly underrated by our national security establishment. But it was placed front and center by the report titled “Sharia: The Threat to America,” issued by the Team B II panel of national security experts including former CIA Director Jim Woolsey and former DIA Director Lt. Gen. Ed Soyster.

His summary, offered after voluminous documentation of the ways in which radical Muslims have insinuated themselves into our government, is telling:

This list is not exhaustive. Certainly more examples could be cited. The Obama administration’s failure to understand the problem of Islamic radicalization and terrorism is fundamental, fueled with an outreach-to-anyone-at-any-cost policy that is perhaps best typified by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s July statements that his foremost mission was to improve relations with the Muslim world. What these twelve examples demonstrate is that our national security, intelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic establishment are utterly defenseless before the stealth jihad that is attacking the heart of our Western society.

If 2009 was the tipping point for domestic terror, 2010 is sure to be remembered as the year that the “civilizational jihad” continued apace. Hopefully in 2011, it will be clear to at least some of our political, civic, and religious leadership that a dramatic change in national policy is urgently needed.

In my opinion, our President is more ideological than the usual Liberal-by-Temperament and is quite comfortable with totalitarians and murderous thugs; he barely can rouse himself and his administration to criticize atrocities committed by the varied thugs who comprise much of the International Community, ie the UN, is tolerant to a fault of attempts to limit the freedoms of individuals, whether at home or abroad, and is facilitating the spread of pernicious ideas that can serve to enable International Law, with all its limitations on speech and behavior in the name of combating bad thoughts (hate speech), to supersede American Constitutional protections for the individual.

The current war being fought between the regressive and repressive forces allied with political Islam and Western Civilization will not be fought with massed armies on battlefields; it will not even be fought primarily in terror-counterterror struggles; it will be fought in the realm of ideas; ideas, which when they finally are allowed to come to their fullest fruition, mandate the death and enslavement of millions in service to the perfect ideology. 

If we close our eyes to the battle that is already underway, just as we have been blinded to the past, we will lose.

The film I have embedded below is long and painful to watch.  It is a worthwhile antidote to those who imagine that their ideology (whether a modern pathology like Socialism or an ancient scourge returned like political Islam) justifies any and every horror inflicted upon its (real, imagined, or manufactured) enemies: [HT: Dr. Sanity, who is once again blogging regularly.]

The Soviet Story

“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now…

The current Left-Islamist alliance is the heir to the Communist-Nazi (and concomitant Nazi-Islamist) and post-WWII Communist-Islamist alliance of WWII.

The evil that is/was an inextricable aspect of Communism and Socialism has been effaced from our historical memory.  It has been a remarkably effective whitewash; just as remarkable is the current self imposed blindness of the West to the evil that infects Islam.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

-Verbal, aka Keyser Soze

Its Their Nature II

In Its Their Nature I discussed how the character of a culture can fail when its elites adopt impossible standards for the societal ego ideal.  An example from the life of George Soros, a man who has devoted himself to increasing freedom but has evolved into believing that West Civilization, exemplified by Israel and the United States, is the greatest danger to freedom in the world today, sparked a fair amount of discussion.  It is clear that our character is being tested by the current times in fundamental ways.  What of our enemies?

The people who speak in the name of Sharia supporting Islam, whether radical Sunnis in al Qaeda or Hamas or radical Shia in Iran or Hezbollah, have summed up their Cultural Ego Ideal in a simple statement:

We love death more than you love life!

In the bizarro world of radical Islam, murdering one's enemies while killing oneself is reason for eternal glory and acclaim.  The highest aspiration of a Palestinian child is to be a Suicide murderer and the highest aspirations of his parents are attained when he blows himself up killing infidels, whether Americans, Brits, Israelis, Hindus, et al.  (Their list of enemies of Islam are very long and often include those who follow a version of Islam of which they disapprove.)

Sadly, most Americans remain woefully ignorant of the beliefs propagated throughout the Islamic world: (Report courtesy of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.)

THE OPEN RACISM OF THE FUTURE STATE OF PALESTINE

During a meeting with the Egyptian press in Cairo at the beginning of August, Mahmud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, and the man on whom the United States and Europe have placed all of their hopes for peace, revealed what was at the back of his mind with regard to the Jews and the nature of the regime he plans to set up in the future State of Palestine. The official demands of the Palestinians for a settlement are known: Israel’s agreement in advance to withdraw to the borders of 1967, a freeze of construction in the territories including Jerusalem, the division of this city, including the Old City, which must become part of the Palestinian Authority, the solution of the problem of the “refugees” in conformance with Arab demands and Resolution 194 of the General Assembly of the U.N.).

When considering the possibility that a third force, such as NATO, could be given the responsibility of overseeing the implementation of the planned agreement, Mahmud Abbas imposed a condition: that there should not be a single Jewish soldier and any Israeli. “I am ready to accept a third party which supervises the implementation of the agreement, NATO forces for example, but I will not accept the presence of Jews in these forces or a [single] Israeli on the Land of Palestine.”

Anti-Semitism is the Mother's milk of Islamic radicals:

International Union of Muslim Scholars calls to destroy Israel

The International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) has said the only solution for the Arab- Zionist conflict was “comprehensive resistance against the Zionist enemy with the aim of liberating all of the occupied Palestine,” local Arabic newspapers reported.

IUMS chairman Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, who opened the Union’s permanent headquarters in Doha, expressed gratitude to HH the Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani for granting the facility.

The IUMS warned of sectarian and doctrinal conflicts among Muslims, which it said would serve “only the Zionist and American interests”.

The Union described Palestinian issue as the central problem of the Muslim Nation and as the most dangerous against its future, Rohama reported.

Here is the actual statement of the IUMS.

Qaradawi is possibly the most influential Sunni religious figure in the world.

Although anti-Semitism is the apotheosis of Islam's hatred, fear, and genocidal rage at the other, we cannot take comfort in the knowledge that so much of their discourse is directed at Jews.  Their hatred of Christians is only marginally less, as witnessed by the ethnic cleansing of Christian communities that go back over a thousand years in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian Territories, or the current straits in which the Egyptian Copts find themselves.

Islam's love of death is complicated by our fecklessness; since Islam is a "perfect" system, any problems with the world must be due to external forces arrayed against it.  There is no tradition of self reflection or self criticism in Islam and as a result there is an extremely limited potential for self correction:

Muslims Project Islam's Worst Traits onto Israel and the Jews

Sometime back, I noted that Muslims have been projecting the worst aspects of Islam(ism) onto the Copts, Egypt's Christian minority.  This raised more questions: Is Islamist projection onto the Copts a unique phenomenon? Do Muslims project against other non-Muslims? Is there a trend?

To answer this question, it seemed logical to begin with how Islamists approach their archenemy: Israel and the Jews.  Thinking this may be difficult to prove—it is one thing to hate your enemy per se, another to project unconsciously your worst traits onto them—I expected this might require some research.  I went to MEMRI and, lo and behold, in mere minutes, came across three blatant examples.  Consider the following excerpts, especially the italicized portions:

On September 7, Egyptian cleric Abdallah Samak made the following remarks on Al Rahma TV: "The Jews are known for their merciless, murderous, and bloodthirsty nature… The number one characteristic of the Jews – which appears in the Bible – is that they are always prepared for combat. They believe that it is their fate and destiny to be in a state of perpetual war. This is not what we want. We are seekers of peace and security. We seek to spread love. But we are dealing with a people, a society, that believes that its destiny is linked to war. The number one characteristic of the Jews is that they are a people that believes that its destiny is linked to war. They cannot live without war. They can only live if they attack others. They can only live through annihilation, revenge, and mercilessness."

In fact, the notion of "perpetual war" is straight out of Muslim doctrine and history—best recognized by the word "jihad"—and has no corollary in Judaism or any other religion.  Even temporary truces are permissible only when Muslims are weak and incapable of going on the offensive: according to sharia, once Muslims are strong enough and have proper leadership (e.g., a caliph), they are obligated to expand the realm of Islam through offensive jihad until, in the words of the Koran, "all religion belongs to Allah" (8:39). History unequivocally attests to this approach.  Moreover, while the Old Testament certainly contains many allusions to violence, these are of a historical, as opposed to doctrinal, nature. Conversely, Koranic verses dealing with violence have been codified in sharia and thus have a juridical and perpetual quality (note the word "until" in the most violent passages of the Koran, e.g., 9:5 and 9:29; see here for more on the differences between Judeo-Christian and Muslim violence). Finally, by quickly adding that Muslims "do not want" perpetual war, but instead seek "to spread love," Samak reveals that, immediately after evoking "perpetual war," Muslims naturally came to his mind, betraying a rather telling train of thought.

Raymond Ibrahim's article is well worth your time; read the whole thing. 

In my series on The Arab Mind I wrote at length about the elements that led to the kinds of skewed developmental pathways that summed easily to an Honor-Shame paradigm.  An Honor-Shame culture can take two different pathways.  In the Japanese approach, one accepts responsibility for faults and pays for one's transgressions against the people's Honor.  In Japan failure can lead to suicidal despair but does not threaten the entire Group (family/clan/religion/ethnic group) with a calamitous loss of Honor.  The Muslim Honor-Shame paradigm went in a different direction.  In the Muslim version no man of power ever accepts responsibility for failure; it must always be assigned to others, in part, because a loss of Honor by the Leader puts the entire family and clan at risk of destruction.  Once the failure is disavowed and projected (Externalized, or when done on a more pathological level, Projected) the resolution is to destroy the one who now bears the dishonor.  In this way a woman who has been raped is seen to have dishonored the family and must be killed to restore Honor.  In this system, Israel and the Jews, with the help of the Americans who they control, contain all of the disavowed hatred and dishonor of the Palestinians and thus a monster who murders children is a hero.

It took a hundred years and more, and a great deal of bloodshed, before the West understood the value of self reflection and self correction.  There is no indication that the Arab world will voluntarily take on such a difficult process, a process necessary for them to undergo if they are to join the modern world as anything more than spoilers.  When a people are committed to externalization and projection, only the force of inimical reality can redirect their attention inward.  In the Psychiatric Hospital we can administer powerful drugs which help the patients give up their compensatory delusions; there is no such treatment for sick cultures.  Either the Islamist trend in the Muslim world will burn itself out in the next two or three generations as Islamism confronts and fails in the modern world or one of two outcomes is likely.

1) As time goes on the Muslim world will be increasingly walled off and kept away form the civilized world.

2) A great enough atrocity (would it require losing a Western city or two?) would up the ante to such an extent that the Arab World would face an ultimatum that would force them to begin the difficult task of reformation.  Such an ultimatum could include mostly words but may also include demonstration projects less welcome, more intense, and of shorter duration than the current projects in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I suppose a third outcome is possible, but unlikely: we could simply surrender.

Passionate Intensity

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming -- William Butler Yeats

In the aftermath of the Turkish inspired Gaza "Humanitarian" incident, Israel has been attacked with a frenzied passion not seen since the days of the Third Reich.  A great many words have been written attempting to make sense of the reactions of the sophisticated, mostly liberal, European and American elites, which have at times mirrored the mindless rage of the Palestinians and their enablers.  Two of the more important discussions are worth highlighting.

Walter Russell Mead has written a much linked post discussing the recurrence of a, perhaps naive, facilitation of atrocity, by those who Stalin once referred to as "useful idiots":

Goo-Goo Genocidaires: The Blood Is Dripping From Their Hands

When ‘Understanding’ Becomes Collaboration

Worse, some of the ‘good guys’ sympathized with and made excuses for the bad.  Germany was resentful and bitter, they said, because the Treaty of Versailles was unfair.  Let Adolf Hitler have his ‘reasonable’ goals of reuniting ethnic Germans under one roof, and Germany would become a peaceful and satisfied country, a bulwark of European order.  This sounds crazy now, but it was the conventional wisdom among the intelligentsia and literati (except for the Communists and their closest sympathizers) during the 1930s; this is why voices warning of war like Churchill were so isolated.  War was so destructive, argued the false prophets of fake enlightenment, that only a madman would start one.  And while Hitler was alarming, the apparatus of the German state was sane.  There were moderate Nazis, with limited goals; given western forbearance, wise concessions and enough time, the moderates would edge the Nazi radicals out of power.

That was the standard refrain about Germany from 1933 through 1939 and at every crisis or turning point academics and journalists stepped forward to plead for patience and to predict an imminent triumph of the ‘moderate’ Nazis over the ‘radicals’.  In the meantime, anti-Nazi rhetoric and boycotts in the West only empowered Hitler and united German opinion behind him. Give him the Saar, Austria, yes and the Sudetenland: sooner or later he would calm down and the world would be at peace.  When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming that simply by giving Hitler the Sudentenland (the then-German speaking part of Czechoslovakia that happened to include the country’s mountainous border areas and natural defenses) he had won “peace in our time”, nobody was happier than the fatheaded peace clergy — unless it was the enlightened class of journalists and professors who set the tone for upper middle class enlightenment at the time.

It was the same thing with Stalin.  Half of the peace movement was in love with Communism; the other half thought that poor Stalin had no choice but to be brutal and tough because he was surrounded by hostile states.  Recognize Stalin, trade with him, stop calling him nasty names.  Treat him with dignity and respect, they said, and everything will work out for the best. There had been plenty of sympathy for Stalin in the West during the thirties — even as he was carrying out mass murder on a scale that poor Pol Pot could only envy, Stalin never lacked for apologists and defenders among the chattering classes in those countries where they were still permitted to chat.

It is a remarkable and inescapable conclusion when reading Walter Russell Mead's review of the history of such a strain in the body politic to recognize how history is repeating.  Substitute Hamas, or Iran, or Hezbollah, or Turkey for Russia and Germany and the sense of deja vu is profound.  Consider our current "Peace movement":

It is just not true, historically speaking, that ‘peace movements’ lead to peace or, for that matter, support policies that will bring peace.  More often than not, the opposite is true.  Winston Churchill was a grizzled old British imperialist of the worst kind, but if Britain had listened to him instead of to its peace campaigners in the 1930s there most likely would never have been either a World War Two or Cold War.  We can be very grateful that Ronald Reagan and the NATO leadership turned a deaf ear to the nuclear freeze movement; had those besotted idealists had their way the Soviet Union and the Cold War might be still with us today — along with nuclear arsenals much larger and much more dangerous than anything the US and Russia now have.

Not so long ago we had a word in our society for tiger-strokers: people who thought that if you soothed the savage passions of irrational dictators by treating them with respect and giving them treats then the dictators would become less dangerous.

We called them ‘appeasers’.

Professor Richard Landes addresses an important question concerning these people, many among the most privileged in the West, who appear to be collaborating with those who would enjoy nothing more than to cut their heads off:

From Useful Idiot to Useful Infidel: Meditations on the Folly of 21st Century “Intellectuals”

So why would a late 20th century progressive sympathize with, support, run interference, even lie and deceive, for a movement that manifested all the worst traits of totalitarian megadeath from the 20th century – the cult of death, the embrace of nihilism, paranoia, and genocidal hate-mongering? At least the fellow travelers of the early and mid-20th century had a noble ideal for which they carried out their campaigns of misinformation. But now, we have intellectuals from a wide range of fields running interference for Islam, even in its most regressive forms.

And of course, at this asymmetrical stage in the war that Global Jihad wages against the West, nothing is more critical to the capacity of Jihad to mobilize – to recruit, indoctrinate, train, and deploy – its forces than a cognitive victory in which its targets in the West are kept in the dark about its real intentions. And given the yeoman job that apologists like John Esposito, Noah Feldman and Juan Cole perform in this sense, I think it worthwhile to use the expression “useful infidel” for this new breed of fellow travelers. Nothing is more useful to Jihadi ambitions to subject the entire world to Sharia than non-Muslim intellectuals who insist that Islam is a religion of peace that is perfectly consonant with democracy, and that the terrorists represent a tiny, marginal, deviation from true Islam.

I want to argue that this astonishing paradox – Islamic Jihad is the last thing one would expect reasonable, progressive intellectuals to support – strips away the pretence of naïve good intentions that the older “useful idiot” used to plead. Once we confront the “irrationality” of useful infidelity, and realize the urgency of trying to understand a phenomenon that pushes us in the direction of cultural, even civilizational suicide, we must confront the underlying (self-destructive) emotions.

...

Demopaths and their Dupes

It seems to me that the phenomenon of useful idiocy revolves around a particularly dysfunctional relationship, that between demopath and dupe. Demopaths arise in response to democratic cultures, which they target in a cognitive war suited only to assaults on such societies, that is, ones that embrace principles of a human right to freedom. They themselves embrace authoritarian principles of dominion by force, what Lee Smith has chronicled so chillingly in his latest book, The Strong Horse. Their line of attack: “you (democratic target) do not live up to your commitments; and in particular, you violate our (demopathic belligerent) rights in preventing us from participating in your democracy.”

The key to demopaths is their hypocrisy: they have no commitment to democratic values or human rights. On the contrary, they despise these values, and they have no intention of, once in power, respecting the rights of others. Their motto: “Use democracy to destroy democracy.”

Richard Landes argues that at least some of the genesis of such "useful infidels" stems from cognitive dissonance (the inability to tolerate the collapse of their world view when the Communist Utopia finally and unmistakably failed in 1989), envy (of Jews and Americans, successful cultures and successful peoples) and unacknowledged fear (of Islamists and their rage.)

Both Walter Russell Mead and Richard Landes have made important contributions to understanding how so many in the West can be willing, to paraphrase Lenin, to sell the Islamists the knife with which to behead them.

I would add an additional element. The superannuated Progressive sophisticate in the 21st century, as his forebears before him, prides himself on his distance from the primitive.  Passion in recreational sex is idealized but passion in defense of one's Civilization and its accomplishments is beneath them.  Yet passion, while it can be hidden, does not disappear and die.  In the progressive, passion  lives on vicariously through the idealized "noble savage."  If Rousseau's noble savage was never more than a caricature, it was a caricature that expressed a deep, even primal, yearning for a return to a state of innocence and passionate engagement which the modern man felt was lacking within himself.  If there is no God, there is no passion in religion.  If there is no divinity in man, he is merely a beast and all his passions must be simultaneously denied and expressed in carefully hidden and externalized ways.  Today, the"noble savage" is the Palestinian and the Jihadi.  These are people who are free to express the most primitive passions, and they are held as innocents at the same time.  In this view, they have been driven to extremis by the depredations of the evil, fallen West.  If one is beaten by such savages, it is understandable; they were driven to it and in reality are simply "nobles savages" fighting for the basic rights we take for granted and have denied them.  After being nearly beaten to death by a mob, "journalist" Robert Fisk expressed these sentiments beautifully:

UK journalist beaten by Afghan mob

"It doesn't excuse them for beating me up so badly but there was a real reason why they should hate Westerners so much.

"I don't want this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no reason. They had every reason to be angry - I've been an outspoken critic of the US actions myself. If I had been them, I would have attacked me."

Passionate rage is powerful and exciting.  Fisk could never express such rage simply for his own sake or for the sake of his country; that would be unseemly, unsophisticated.  Yet he could easily express such rage vicariously through those who are willing to express their inchoate rage freely and without reservation or guilt.  For those who are emotionally stunted and crippled by their anomie, such noble passions are admirable.  As a bonus, such passion is generally accepted, within  their social milieu, as entirely appropriate if directed at the hated and envied Jews and Americans.  As a bonus, the Jews and Americans will rarely even murmur a word of protest, let alone threaten your life.  You can even pretend you are "speaking truth to power" and receive a frisson of pleasure at your temerity, without having to actually risk anything at all!

In a civilized nation, we must  learn to tame our passionate rage, the pleasure we gain from destruction and terror.  Those who do not find compensating, more sublimated outlets for their aggression, may find themselves peculiarly susceptible to the siren call of the passionate intensity of the imagined "noble savage."  Thus are "useful infidels" formed, from the intersection of the personal and the political.

As Richard Landes and Walter Russell Mead both recognize, and  as the great poet once noted, in such grim times events take on a momentum of their own and the outcome is unlikely to be promising.

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The New Millennial Mania

Recent conceptions of Mania have likened it to a Seizure Disorder.  In this construct, an unstable groups of cells in the Cerebral Cortex become highly excitable and begin to fire with an increased frequency and intensity.  As they stimulate all of the neurons with which they have synaptic connections, these neurons are recruited into an ever widening network of neurons firing at elevated rates and intensities.  In a Seizure disorder, the network rather quickly becomes disorganized and the neural functioning becomes grossly impaired.  The result is a disorganized firing of neurons leading to loss of consciousness and uncontrolled stimulation of the end organs (muscles) which results in the typical spasmodic twitching of the Seizure victim.  In Mania, such elevated firing rates and intensities overwhelms the baseline neural activity which causes disturbances in sleep, appetite, and energy level/expenditure, as well as impairing the higher cognitive functioning of the brain.  As a result the manic patient loses his ability to accurate perceive and test reality.  In other words, he misunderstands reality in ways which are characteristically pathological.  The Manic patient, whose antic behavior brings him into conflict with his loved ones and often with authorities, perceives the efforts of others to control his behavior as persecutory.  He is typically quite irritable and irrational, in the worst case ready to fight at a moment's notice, and often becomes overtly paranoid and delusional.  At that point the person has usually become a danger to himself and/or others and must be hospitalized for the protection of himself and the greater society.  No amount of reasoned and rational debate can convince the patient that his psychotic weltanschauung is disordered.

On occasion, large groups of people exhibit behaviors that, if found in an individual, would be understood as Manic and Paranoid.  Throughout human history there have been periods marked by seemingly psychotic and bizarre actions sweeping through entire populations.  These Millennial movements usually take place during times of severe societal stress but are only predictable in retrospect. [HT: Richard Landes]

A World Gone Mad

I  hesitate to go as far as Melanie Phillips, who labels the growing, frenzied international vilification of Israel "a global pogrom in the making." No, it seems to me more like widespread loss of sanity. The general hysteria, not just in the Islamic world but in Europe and the Americas too, brings to mind the words of the late British historian Norman Cohn, written more than a decade ago:

There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."

We now seem to be witnessing such a period of insanity, and it may well change the course of history. While the trend has been gaining momentum for some time, it took a grotesque distortion of Israel's operation against the Gaza flotilla to reveal the level to which much of the international community has sunk. One of the pinnacles of lunacy came from Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who, without blinking an eye, told reporters over breakfast in Washington that Israel's action was Turkey's 9/11.

...

None of this [exculpatory evidence- SW] makes any difference to the raving hordes that are storming the Israeli embassies, drowning out Israel's voice in the universities and flooding the airwaves and thousands of opinion columns in the press with their delirious portrayal of Israel. To them, facts seem to be a nothing but a distraction, and no evidence from Israel will change their mind. At the moment, even friends appear to have been bitten by this bug.

In a world gone mad, to be right is not good enough - we need to be smart. Israel needs to immediately establish its own independent commission of inquiry. In fact that should have been Prime Minister Netanyahu's first public announcement after the flotilla operation. By delaying the announcement, Israel has lost valuable points once again.

There are going to be very difficult times ahead for Israel. We need to reduce our conflicts with the international community to the ones that are most critical for our survival, and stick to them.

What is happening in the Muslim World is nothing less than a Millennialist movement in Islam.   Shia Islam has always been a Millennialist sect; the extremist group in charge of Iran, followers of the Twelfth Imam, believe that by precipitating the final clash between Good and Evil they will set in motion events leading to the emergence of the Twelfth Imam from the well in which he has been hiding for 1000 years and the Caliphate will be restored.  One plausible explanation for Turkey's recent moves presenting themselves as an authentic protector of the besieged Palestinian victims, is that by so doing Turkey will be able to wrest the leadership of the Muslim world from the Shia Persians, with whom the Turks have been at odds for several hundred years.  At the same time, by enabling the Iranian nuclear program while demonizing the Israelis, the Turks support Muslim solidarity while creating conditions that rationalize their need for their own nuclear program, in public to protect against the hated Jews, in private to offset the hated Persians.  However, there is a problem with riding the tiger of Millennialism:  [My comments are in parentheses.]

Millenarianism

Fourth, millenarian ideas have qualities which makes them tend to form the nuclei of narrative communities. The believers in the millenarian story have a role to play in the story, and so to accept the story is to feel that one is, or should be, part of the community of believers. Non-believers are not part of the community. But, in such situations, there is a natural tendency to think that everyone who is not part of the community is an enemy of the community, and since the real enemy is the Adversary, they are (at least) the Adversary's tools. [Community=The Ummah] ...

Fifth, there is an element of positive feedback at work. [Millennial movements must grow, ie recruit new members, or begin to die out, extinguish.  Since the movement si sustained by a manic passionate intensity, it cannot last indefinitely.] ...

Sixth, millenarian movements are not sustainable, for the simple reason that the millennium is not now at hand, and never has been. [Emphasis added- SW] When this becomes apparent --- and the human capacity for wishful thinking is not so great that it won't, eventually, become apparent --- something has to give. Either the movement ceases to be millenarian, or it collapses qua movement, leaving behind, perhaps, a few die-hard followers who keep finding reasons why the glorious day should be just a little more remote than they thought.... (Logically speaking, the failure of all previous millenarian expectations doesn't mean that they will necessarily be disappointed in the future. By definition, however, at most one of them could succeed.) The first five considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, to many other kinds of movement, like novel political ideologies; this one does not.

Taking these things together, we reach the conclusion that, in order to become large, a millenarian movement must grow very rapidly, if it is not to be killed off by disillusionment, but that this is hard, because many mechanisms work against rapid growth, particularly the rapid growth of a small movement. But under what circumstances will those inhibitory mechanisms not apply?

Read the rest of Cosma Rohilla Shalizi's post for some further discussion of Millenarianism, including its roots and the conditions that foster its spread.  Consider that the current conditions are ripe for such a movement.  Modernism has brought the failure of the Muslim world into unmistakable focus.  The presence of a Jewish state, run by dhimmis, in land once formerly part of the Dar al Islam, is a constant reminder, a constant irritant, to the Muslims whose pride and honor are damaged more everyday by the insult of Israel's continued existence.  The passions being aroused in the Middle East are not amenable to reason or reality.

Further, and more chilling, the wild fire of anti-Semitic Millenial rage flowing through the Umma, cannot be quenched as long as Israel continues to exist.  This means that the existence of Israel represents an existential threat, on many different levels, to the versions of Islam being promulgated by the Shia and Sunni Millennialists in the Middle East.  The pressure must intensify against Israel.  Iran is certainly playing their part, as their genocidal, eliminationist rhetoric escalates.  If Israel cannot be destroyed by the Iranians, and soon, the spasms of passion and rage will either dissipate or need to be re-directed against a more available opponent. 

Israel's best hope is to hunker down and play defense.  They may well be forced into making the terrible decision to protect themselves from an existential, nuclear attack (though so far, it appears that Iran does not yet have the capacity to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.)  Israel must not be drawn into another War it cannot win.  The more time that passes without an Iranian nuclear attack, the more likely it is that Israel will weather the storm.  The more time that passes, the more likely it becomes that the Millennial passions now at play will burn out; the manic episode will pass, and all will be able to breathe a sigh of relief.  Israel must work on its defensive missile screen, Iron Dome and derivatives, protect itself as best it can, and wait.

For the Umma, the lessons of Psychiatry and Neurology should be understood and recognized: The aftermath of a Seizure is a period of confusion and enervation; the aftermath of a Manic episode is a Depression.

Using a Scalpel: A More Refined "Samson Option"

Over the last few years we have learned that the best way to protect ourselves against terrorism is to target the leaders of the terrorist groups.  Generally the leaders of such groups desire martyrdom, but primarily for their followers.  The leaders of such groups typically cry (to paraphrase St. Augustine) "Dear Allah, let me become a martyr... but not yet."  Even when the leaders do desire martyrdom, removing the leaders means that they are replaced by terrorists with less knowledge, sophistication, and ability.  Killing Imad Mughniyah did not destroy Hezbollah, but has eroded their ability to commit terrorist acts out of the area.  (That Hezbollah has become a powerful paramilitary force is another matter entirely.)

It is incontestable that Israel cannot destroy its enemies, even with overwhelming conventional force.  It must, therefor, find an alternative approach.  It may be that Israel can maintain its deterrence by threatening the destruction of Mecca, Medina, the Dome of the Rock as Geoffrey Britain suggests (and I would add the city of Qom and a number of other sites on the "holiest sites of Islam" list for greater deterrent effect)  but it may ultimately prove to be impossible to confidently deter Islam when it finds itself faced with an existential threat (which  is what modernity and the existence of the state of Israel represent to Islam.) 

Consider a near future scenario:

By 2020, Islam has become so emboldened that it has become unmistakable to most people in the West that Geoffrey Britain was correct; the problem is Islam and Islam and modern liberal society are incompatible. 

Israel's existence hangs by a thread.  It is increasingly being abandoned by its friends, who still need Arab oil and fear the fifth column in their midst.  It has never been able to solve the moral conundrum that a first strike use of Nuclear weapons poses and its deterrent capabilities have steadily eroded as it has never been able to master the Information War in ways which disarm its foes.  In 2020, for the first time, the number of people emigrating from Israel is greater than the number immigrating to Israel.  The future looks grim:

It is early spring, 2021 

In a magnanimous gesture applauded by the global community (this is fiction, so bear with me) the Israelis announce that they are going to release every Palestinian prisoner convicted of terrorism over the course of two weeks in March  of 2021.  The Americans and Europeans, committed to the chronically moribund "Peace Process" applaud the release and commit to re-convening the long eclipsed Final Status talks.  Finally it appears that the Peace Process will resume and that the Israelis, whose intransigence has been determined to be the primary cause of the failure of the Peace Process, have become committed to Peace.   A new dawn in the Middle East appears to be (once again) at hand.

The fact that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, along with the rest of the HISH alliance (Hezbollah/Iran/Syria/Hamas) remain committed to the destruction of Israel and that genocidal propaganda remains a staple of Palestinian (along with Arab and  Iranian) media continues to be ignored as an inconvenient Israeli raised obstacle to Peace and as such has not been a matter of concern since the days of the Netanyahu administration.  With the news of the prisoner releases, the Palestinians and their allies are more convinced than ever that history is moving in its favor and that the hated Jewish state will soon be destroyed.  At the same time, paranoid conspiracy theories abound throughout the Middle East; the theories escalate and become increasingly fantastic as no one can believe the Israelis would release deadly enemies with no promise of peace, yet as the first prisoners arrive home to hero's welcomes, the idea that Israel may finally be surrendering due to exhaustion and because of the superior will of the Palestinians takes hold throughout the once occupied territories and throughout the Middle East.

Meanwhile, for the Western powers, the media are filled with the news that the new Labor government of Israel is ready to deal and a break thorough is at hand.  All assure that genocidal ravings are simply the background noise of the Middle east, not to be taken seriously.

Unbeknown to most of the participants, however, two major developments have occurred which render the Israeli behavior somewhat less than the suicidal acts that the Israeli and American right believe.

Each of the released prisoners, as part of one of his last meals, has unknowingly ingested, disguised as a grain of rice, a tiny nanobot which comes complete with an RFID and wideband transmitter.  Each nanobot is designed to not only relay real time information about its subject (including sounds in the ambient environment) but to become part of a seamless mesh network with each of the other nanobots now carried within each of the former prisoners.  For the weeks prior to their release the Israelis have been testing and bringing on line the computer network designed to integrate the immense amount of information that will be generated by these bots.

At the same time multiple squadrons of stealthed UAV's have taken off from an open field in Northern Israel.  Additional squadrons have been released near the border of Gaza.  Yet another set of UAV squadrons were already set aloft from the deck of an Israeli submarine in the Persian Gulf.  Each squadron is carrying a payload consisting of a multitude of "mosquitoes", "centipedes", "spiders" and, "wasps".  Once over their target, the UAV's all release their payloads and what appears to be nothing more than balloons drift down toward the surface, only to burst at various heights above their targets.  The bugs then drift, glide, and fly to their assigned locations (with specific locations unimportant since there are so many bugs that the coverage will be excellent) and begin to silently go about their deadly business.

One further data point: each of the nanobots and each of the bugs is equipped with a range of toxins designed to mimic various fatal conditions including cardiac arrests and intracranial hemorrhages and leave no trace on autopsy toxicology.

In the ensuing weeks and months a number of spectacular terror attacks are thwarted.  A planned cruise missile sneak attack from Southern Lebanon is noted prior to launch and coutner-measures deployed which destroy the missile and the launch crew.  A number of high ranking Hezbollah and Hamas members suffer mysterious deaths and several Iranian Mullahs along with the leader of Syria's intelligence agency also succumb.  Rumors of Israeli secret weapons, ray guns, biological agents, and other more fanciful inventions take off across the Middle East.  Paranoia escalates within the HISH alliance who have very good reason to believe they have been infiltrated by Israeli agents.  Massive purges take place as internecine warfare breaks out while the Israeli spies are sought out.  Many are executed though none have any actual connection to the Mossad.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffers a fatal heart attack, the Israelis announce that this is what happens to all tyrants and anti-Semites.  Several Rabbis announce that the mysterious deaths of so man of Israel's enemies in such a short period of time are signs of G-d's displeasure at the anti-Semitic ravings of our enemies.  The pace of attacks against Israel diminish as none are successful, save the rare "lone wolf" events.  Program directors at state run Arab media organizations also have been suffering the same mysterious illnesses and deaths.  The level of anti-Semitic agitprop begins to diminish as articles appear in the Arab press describing secret Jewish rays able to kill those who threaten Israel from a distance; such articles are occasionally based on suggestions from Israeli sources but more often occur to the writer de novo.  The pattern of suspicious deaths of leading anti-Semites does not go unremarked.  Eventually the Middle east quiets down. 

In this scenario the Israelis are able to wield a scalpel to remove the Cancerous stem cells from the Arab body.  The bugs and nanobots act as a powerfully enhanced immune system for the Jewish state.  Vigilance will be required for generations but the accelerating pace of technology means that those states and societies which have a lead in technology today will find their lead increasing exponentially against their competitors and adversaries.  The Arab world has existed for a thousand years as a culture based on extraction; for too many Arabs work is a dirty word and innovation is against Allah's will.  Such a  society cannot compete in a high tech environment.

Finally Peace comes to the Middle east through the workings of Jewish magic.

A Time of Testing

The news out of the Middle East is dispiriting.  Israel has suffered a major defeat in the information war being waged against it.  Among Israel's friends the reactions ranges from anger at the Israeli government for botching the response to the aid convoy to appropriate concern that Israel Does Not Understand 4GW.  The soldiers who boarded the Turkish ship were inexcusably unprepared by their military/political superiors for the violent reception they met.

Yaacov Lozowick points out the ecology of Israel's existential crisis:

We need to step back and remind ourselves of the broad picture of the concentric circles at whose center we live.

The outer circle is the utter hatred large swathes of the Muslim World bear towards the idea and reality of a Jewish state. As a demonstrator in Istanbul shouted, there can be no Jewish state in the Arab world: what bothers him about the siege of Gaza is that Jews are in the position to impose it, not it's particular details. (The irony of Turks hating Jews for infractions of human rights or international law is striking).

The next circle are the Westerners of various stripes who also wish Israel gone, and reject the right of the Jews to be a nation. Many of the hate-motivated Muslims are willing or eager to engage in violence. Most of the Westerns haters aren't. They prefer to spew their malice at places like the Guardian, as documented daily by CiFWatch, or at many similar cesspools. Some, however, go further: Gerta Berlin, for example, a spokesperson of the Free Gaza Movement which collaborated in launching the flotilla, tells proudly that she's been active in Palestinian causes since the early 1960s, when Gaza was occupied by Egypt, not that she cared. She and her ilk are enemies of Israel, and will hi-jack whatever narrative holds out promise of damaging Israel. Today it's Gaza, before that it was Jenin, and next it will be... whatever.

Then there's the very large circle of cynics idealists and the lazy. The cynics are epitomized by, say, China. The Chinese don't care about international law or morality. They care about power and China. When working with Israel fits their purposes they'll do so gladly; when not, not. In neither case will they be motivated by the conditions in Gaza, to which they are utterly indifferent unless there's an angle for Chinese profit.

The idealistic and lazy typically rely on an international media that has been repeatedly "played" by those forces inimical to Western Civilization and as a result tend to buy into the narrative of brutal (White) Western oppressors and innocent and desperate (brown) victims; this allows the aggressors to start each engagement with a decisive advantage.  Further, the early pictures and video come prepared with a ready narrative (built in the weeks prior to the incident)  which leaves the conventionally more powerful defender at a significant disadvantage.

All of this is unified by the international Jihad being waged by Islam and their allies on the Left against Western Civilization.  Andrew McCarthy discusses how Jihad is being waged in America, The 'peaceful' Jihad in America; the "peaceful" Jihadis leverage the violent Jihadis to advance their ideology.  As usual, Israel serves as the "canary in the coal mine" but where Israel goes, the United States soon follows.  Once Israel has been rendered incapable of self-defense, American efforts to safeguard our country will be further eroded in ways which make a successful defense of civilization itself problematic.

Barry Rubin tries to use reason and reality to fight this war: Sympathy for the Devil and the Gaza Sea Confrontation: How Can Helping a Repressive Fascist, Genocide-Intending Hamas Regime be Noble?  It is certainly important for supporters of Israel and Western Civilization to know the facts as clearly as possible but it seems to me we are well past the point where facts are going to sway public opinion in any significant way or advance the cause of Peace or Victory over those forces of barbarism that threaten us.

Richard Fernandez, perhaps remembering his Three Conjectures, believes that eventually the reality of this global war will become unmistakably real:

The Consolations of Philosophy

Both cases [the Gaza flotilla and the Cheonan sinking] demonstrate that nothing is more paramount either to the establishment nor to the politically correct sections of the media than the maintenance of a lie. For the lie is in the service of the greater good. High reasons of policy will be invoked to explain why the truth should not be so. But the extreme reliance on fantasy by parts of the Western establishment goes well beyond surrounding a kernel of the truth with a “bodyguard of lies.” Instead it is the lie itself which is guarded by even more falsehoods.  Gradually and inexorably, an entire political class has staked its existence on continuation of falsehood. The greater good is the fiction. Deception has become a necessity in itself.

As a result, any moderately well informed individual knows that there is no Islamic extremism, nor even terrorism. There are only man made disasters. Everybody knows that we can borrow our way out of debt, that the welfare state is the sustainable wave of the future; that Egypt has no border with Gaza through which it can provide supplies if it wanted; that the UN has kept Hezbollah from importing hundreds of missiles into Lebanon; that the thought of a handful of Jews has kept hundreds of millions of oil-rich Muslims from attaining prosperity; and that Global Warming is the main danger facing the planet Earth. That these assertions are untrue hardly matters; that they are indisputable is what seems to count. For who shall dispute them?

Reality might. And therein lies the problem.

Here’s what is going to happen with one hundred percent certainty. All of these lies will explode with considerable force in the faces of political establishment. Nothing can prevent it. Just as reality eventually exposed the hollowness of the financial bubble and showed that nothing was “too big to fail,” eventually it will demonstrate to our extreme cost, that no lie can be maintained forever. That is the real reason anyone should really care about what happened on the “peace flotilla.” We are as corrupt as a preacher in a whorehouse. It ain’t what we don’t know that will hurt us, it’s what we know that ain’t so that will drive the dagger into our hearts.

In 2010 we have been knowingly at war with radical Islam, now referred to using euphemisms designed to deny that very fact but recognized as such by anyone paying attention, for almost 10 years.  Radical Islam (with very little demurral from "moderate" Islam) has been at war with the West since the 1940s, more openly since the 1967 Middle East War, and most directly against America since 1993 (the first WTC bombing.)   Europe is, as has been their wont, determined to be the last crocodile by tossing Israel over-board.  Our current administration, convinced by the European style facile rationalization popular at elite Universities, is either confused, has ambivalent leanings, or is simply disinterested in understanding our current peril and as a result facilitates the growth of Islamist ideology. 

[In any local situation, the choice of submission to the Islamists versus alliance with the West must now be filtered through a lens of American neo-isolationism.  The local thugs will win every time in this calculation.]

Israel can not win this war by using conventional means.  It is a civilized community living in the middle of a population of sociopaths and lunatics.   As Max Boot points out, Israel Can Win Every Battle but Still Lose the War. 

I can see no way out for Israel in the near term.  It is rapidly being delegitimized and made a pariah.  The best, perhaps only, way to protect oneself from sociopaths (the Islamist leadership) is to threaten them with an overwhelming response.  Sociopaths desire to live and the Islamist leadership give every indication of desiring to live and continue to wield power, whether as a Prince in Saudi Arabia, a Mullah in Iran, or a heroic Hezbollah or Hamas Resistance fighter in Damascus.  Only if the leadership are convinced that their well being is at risk will they be at all willing to rein in the lunatics who they send to murder and die.  The problem for Israel is now several fold:

Can Israel credibly threaten, sotto voce, a Samson Option?*

Will its enemies believe its threats?

Can a democracy make such a threat and convince itself of its necessity?

The logic of the Information War against Israel and the Iranian race to obtain nuclear weapons, combined with European animus and American insouciance, suggests that at some point, a willingness to use nuclear weapons in the defense of Israel will become a necessity if the state is to survive long term.  The more credible the threat of use is, the less likely it will become necessary.  Unfortunately, in the Middle East, there will always be those willing to test Israel's resolve to use all means at its disposal to confirm Never Again.

I fear we are moving perilously close to that test.

* The Samson Option will be a necessary deterrent for the next 10 years.  At that point the asymmetry at the heart of Israel's problems will be addressable and the Islamists will no longer have the advantage in unconventional war.  That makes the next ten years the most perilous in recent memory. I will expand on these ideas in a future post.

On the Necessity of Drawing Cartoons

Today is Everybody Draws Mohammed Day.  Nick Gillespie explains

Why We’re Having an Everybody Draw Mohammed Constest on Thursday, May 20:

Before the calendar page turns to Thursday, it’s worth meditating on the whys and wherefores of the contest, which was inspired by a jihadist death threat against the creators of South Park and was originally suggested by Seattle artist Molly Norris. Soon after asking everyone to draw the Prophet in solidarity with the arguably millions of people repressed by threats of theologically justified violence, Norris herself went into ideological hiding, suggesting instead that everyone draw another target of South Park satire: former Vice President Al Gore.

While Gore, who likes to credit himself with understanding the architectonics of cyberspace (if not creating them) and who way back when convened Congressional hearings to discuss the dread menace of satanic heavy metal lyrics (via con diablo, Ronnie James Dio!), is certainly worthy of the sort of ongoing abuse that only a fully distributed Internets can deliver, the obvious reason that Norris changed her target is real and potential violence.

Mark Steyn elaborates:

I initially had mixed feelings about Everybody Draws Mohammed Day. Provocation for its own sake is one of the dreariest features of contemporary culture, but that's not what this is about. Nick Gillespie's post reminds us that the three most offensive of the "Danish cartoons" — including the one showing Mohammed as a pig —were not by any Jyllands-Posten cartoonists but were actually faked by Scandinavian imams for the purposes of stirring up outrage among Muslims. As Mr Gillespie says:

It is nothing less than amazing that holy men decrying the desecration of their religion would create such foul images, but there you have it. It is as if the pope created “Piss Christ” and then passed it off as the work of critics of Catholicism.

So, if it really is a sin to depict Mohammed, then these imams will be roasting in hell. (Unless, of course, taqqiya permits Muslims to break their own house rules for the purpose of sticking it to the infidels.)

And Zombie describes this as nothing less than

The New Free Speech Movement

Islamic extremists still seem to think that banning Facebook or threatening to kill the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day organizers will somehow make the problem of blasphemy go away. They don’t yet understand that we in the West have spent the last 600 years not merely earning the right to be blasphemous, but more importantly creating a society and a worldview in which there is no such thing as blasphemy, because all forms of speech are permitted and religious bullies no longer get to determine what is forbidden.

Now get out your pencils and start drawing.

I would add that Radical Islam behaves as if it is the embodiment of Psychopathy: [All emphases added-SW]

Facing the Psychopath

Psychopaths are not, in fact, particularly good liars; they spin tales and get away with it because their listeners fail to confront them on the inconsistencies.  So, why bring Psychopaths into the mix when discussing the danger from radical Islam?  Unfortunately, those who follow the dictates of their Koran (whether it is simply one of many interpretations or the only interpretation, as insisted upon by the Islamists, is immaterial) are explicitly permitted to lie, threaten, cheat, do whatever it takes to dominate the infidel.  Whether or not the typical Muslim is a psychopath is not the issue; the issue is that Islam, as practiced in the public sphere, behaves like a Psychopath.  Note that it is often the apostate Muslim, most at risk from the reactions of their former co-religionists, who most acutely points out the failures (and questions the existence) of Moderate Islam and Moderate Muslims.

I suspect Dr. Steve will at some point discuss how the victims of the psychopath unconsciously collude with the Psychopath.  I touched upon this last week in Undercurrents where I described an analytic treatment that failed to progress until I recognized that I had colluded with my patient in avoiding her underlying rage.  She was not in any way a Psychopath, but the dynamics, of unconsciously appeasing her in order to avoid her rage being directed at me, is a sine qua non of interactions with the Psychopath.  (Take a look at the Iceman Interviews for a close-up peek into the mind of the Psychopath.  You will be fascinated, repelled and disturbed.  Imagine being in the room with the Iceman.)

No one likes to think of themselves as a coward.  It is damaging to one's self-esteem to imagine being craven and allowing one's fear to control one's actions.  That is why so many find ways to rationalize their surrender to the forces of intolerance and hate.  Our MSM, which has never shied away from attacking religious beliefs suddenly finds itself terribly respectful of religion when the religion involved is Islam.  The New York Times quite easily and repeatedly abandons its vaunted free speech principles when the free speech risks insulting Islam.  (And please note that it is taking less and less of an insult to arouse the rage of Islam.  We have gone from obnoxious cartoons to teddy bears in the space of just a few years.)

Radical Islam is fighting an asymmetrical war against the West and they are more than holding their own because so many of the Western elites and governments are more than ready to buy a brief respite for the cost of our fundamental freedoms.  Radical Islam is a losing ideology incompatible with modernity.  They sense it but we often act as if we do not appreciate what we have.  A unified front by America and the West would dispense with Radical Islam with minimal bloodshed and minimal drama simply by standing up for what we profess to believe in.  As Americans we should remember our roots:

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

-- Ben Franklin

The Fatal Illness and Impending Death of Multiculturalism

Many ideas that have motivated men become doomed well before the opinion leaders notice the inevitability of their decline and death.  For example, in June, 2007 I suggested that Anthropogenic Global warming had already peaked as a political issue:

The Beginning of the End for "Global Warming"

The "Global Warming" catastrophe has not yet occurred (safely established as >40 years in the future) but the first signs of the Apocalypse are scheduled for the next several years, when the danger will supposedly become irreversible.  We are much too sophisticated to prematurely ridicule the alarmists* but it is safe to say that the "Global Warming" crisis as a poltical issue has already passed its peak; its political utility will end with the 2008 Presidential elections and it remains yet to be seen how influential it will be as an election issue. 

[*The ridicule that Al Gore, John Edwards, and other energy profligate AGW alarmists have been subject to has been achieved the old fashioned way: They earned it.]

There are several signs that we have passed the peak of the "Global Warming" inspired hysteria and unmistakable evidence that as a serious political issue, it will have diminishing effects as time goes on.

Three years on it is safe to say that the AGW alarmists are laying low and that their glorious plans to leverage AGW into an international quasi-governmental structure designed to redistribute wealth are moribund.  We will surely hear less and less about AGW as time goes on. 

It is now clear that another treasured liberal idea, Multiculturalism, has passed its peak.  Multiculturalism is dieing; the dagger to the heart of Multiculturalism is the European Debt Crisis, which at its core is a crisis of liberalism and multiculturalism.

 Liberalism is a workable political philosophy under two conditions:

1) The majority of a population is composed of industrious, hard working individuals willing to tolerate relatively high levels of taxation to support those less willing or able to earn a "decent" living.  As time goes on, the definition of "decent living" (in other manifestations, known as a living wage or an ever rising poverty level above which everyone deserves to live) rises.  Today, people living in "poverty" in the West do not worry about food or shelter; rather they worry (if they worry at all) about obesity (apparently caused by lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables, if one is to believe various self appointed spokesmen), cable television and flat panel TV availability.  The ranks of the homeless are predominantly filled with people suffering from chronic Psychiatric problems, drug and alcohol abuse, and in small numbers, ideologically committed squatters.  (The latter are more common in Europe than America today.)

2) The economy is expanding.  With an expanding economy the cost of social welfare programs is absorbed by the productive with minimal discomfort.  Once a recession or slowdown occurs, the pain of paying the taxes required to support others' welfare becomes less tolerable.  If the slowdown becomes chronic, the always increasing needs of the "entitled" increasingly impinges upon the ability and willingness of the productive to maintain the social safety nets.

The European Debt Crisis represents a failure on both counts.  Its roots are in the Multicultural mindset that insists that all peoples and all cultures are equivalent.  Thus the Greek grasshoppers are assumed to be exactly as productive as the German ants.  Now that the Eurozone economies have slowed, along with much of the rest of the developed world, the needs of the entitled Greeks (soon to be followed by the Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, et al) are seriously impinging upon the Germans who are expected to pay the price to preserve the EU, a structure which embodies the fantasy of Multiculturalism.

All indications are that any recovery in Europe (and America) is likely to be anemic.  The boom times are over, at least until we get our financial houses in order, which could take many years especially if we continue to delay the day of reckoning.  With slow growing economies unable to painlessly maintain the welfare state from its excess abundance, the willingness of Culturally distinct populations to support Others will diminish.  The staggering loss in the recent regional elections by Angela Merkel's party is instructive.

The high water mark of Multiculturalism is behind us.  Non-assimilated populations who insist upon living off our largess or insist upon "biting the hand that feeds them" (in the case of homegrown Islamic terrorists) will find the larger population increasingly unwilling to indulge in the fiction that everyone's culture, even those that are manifestly less productive,  is perfectly and exactly equivalent.

If the Germans and the Greeks cannot find a way to assimilate, how can we expect people who are even more disparate to assimilate?  America has traditionally allowed anyone to join our club if they agreed to give up their old culture (not completely but in some essential parts.)  Those who desire only to transplant their old culture to a new setting will find themselves less and less welcome in the West.  As always the strongest backlash will occur in Europe, which has a long history of dealing with minorities in unpleasant ways.  In America we will be more circumspect and leave open the opportunity for anyone who wishes to assimilate and join us.  However, our derivatives of multiculturalism (Affirmative Action, Diversity) are going to fade from the scene one way or the other.  Either we will become a more meritocratic society or, I suspect as more likely, a parallel economy will continue to develop (see Resilient Communities) and the unproductive will be walled off, out of sight of the majority, behind (admittedly) leaky barriers. 

NB: The very liberal Roger Cohen agrees with me, though I doubt he appreciates what portends:

Europa! Europa!

No, the blame for the Greek mess lies much deeper: in allowing Greece into the euro in the euphoria of 2000 and then watering down the stability pact (deficits not to exceed 3 percent of national output) for France and Germany; in the current post-European German condition; and in the demise of any cohesive E.U. ambition as the British view of a loose trade pact rather than political union prevails.

Greece used to inflate away its inefficiency. It’s O.K. not to pay taxes if you can impose taxation in the form of devaluations. That became impossible with the euro, but the practices — of tax evasion and rampant corruption and 14 months’ salary — remained until the world woke up to the fact that Athens has a 13 percent deficit as well as a new E.U.-funded airport.

Europe now faces the choice Timothy Geithner faced in the United States over a year ago: costly containment or collapse. I don’t see a serious alternative to the $140 billion E.U. and International Monetary Fund Greek rescue; and an even bigger E.U. emergency funding facility should help shore up confidence. But the core problem — that the euro has bound vastly disparate nations in a halfway house where monetary and fiscal policy are not under unified direction — will fester.

It will fester in part because Germany has turned away from Europe. Merkel’s delaying tactics have been shameful, costly — and revealing. Solidarity of the European kind is now a dirty word in Germany (“The Greeks are stealing our money!” screams the Bild tabloid) when European solidarity was once Germany’s route out of post-war shame. There’s something a little obscene about Germans wagging a finger at all these Greeks who have crossed the road on a red light.

If solidarity goes, Europe goes. As Ivan Krastev, a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, put it to me, “Without solidarity, how do you convince Poles that Germans are prepared to die for them?

The arrogance of those who have for so long insisted that ideology could trump culture is astounding.

Civilizational Insecurity

In a comment to Surrendering to Army Ants, David Foster, the proprietor of Photon Courier linked to his post from last month, Sleeping with the Enemy.  (His link was to an introduction to the post on his blog; I have linked to the full post at Chicago Boyz.)  In his post, David discusses a forgotten novel:

Sleeping with the Enemy

Why has the western world shown such loss of will in defending itself from radical Islamic terrorism? Why, indeed, do substantial numbers of people–particularly those who view themselves as intellectuals–endlessly make excuses for dictatorships and terrorist movements whose values are completely at odds with their own stated values–and even romanticize these goons? I think some clues can be found in a forgotten novel by Arthur Koestler.

The Age of Longing (published in 1950) is set in Paris, “sometime in the 1950s,” in a world in which France–indeed all of western Europe–is facing the very real possibility of a Soviet invasion. Hydie Anderson, the protagonist, is a young American woman living in Paris with her father, a military attache. Hydie was a devout Catholic during her teens, but has lost her faith. She was briefly married, and has had several relationships with men, but in none of them has she found either physical or emotional satisfaction…she describes her life with a phrase from T S Eliot: “frigid purgatorial fires,” and she longs for a sense of connection:

David's essay is rich and deep, well worth your time.  Koestler joined the Communist party in 1931, in his mid-20s, but became disillusioned with the evils of Communism by the end of the 1930s.   In 1940 he published his devastating anti-totalitarian novel, Darkness at Noon.

As noted, The Age of Longing (which I have not read) was published 10 years later and did not achieve the acclaim of his earlier book.  However, the excerpts David Foster quotes illustrate Koestler's facility with language and ideas and the artist's ability to penetrate to the soul.  The story is complicated.  The heroine, Hydie, rejects a man who is appropriate in favor of a committed Communist, Fedya.  The characters are all awaiting the inevitable invasion of western Europe by the Russian army and Fedya is part of the Soviet vanguard:

At a diplomatic affair, Hydie meets Fedya, a committed Communist who works for the Soviet Embassy. She is powerfully attracted to him: things get physical very quickly and, from Hydie’s point of view, very satisfactorily. (Fedya is one of Koestler’s best-developed characters. His boyhood in Baku is vividly sketched, and Koestler–himself a former Communist–does a good job in showing how a political faith can become core to an individual’s whole personality.)

The affair blows up when Fedya humiliates Hydie sexually in a way that could only have occurred to a Dialectical Materialist–and, indeed, humiliation was not Fedya’s intent, he was “only” attempting the demonstrate to her the truth of Pavlovian conditioning as an explanation for human behavior. Hurt and furious, she pours out her heart to Julien…who now feels free to tell her the truth about Fedya, a truth he felt unable to divulge while Fedya was Hydie’s lover.

Fedya’s real job, underneath his diplomatic cover, is to collect lists of names–the names of the key people to be killed or imprisoned immediately after the Soviet invasion. Hydie is, of course, horrified, and is particularly appalled that so many people already knew about Fedya’s activities–and did nothing to stop them–while she was blissfully unaware.

Hydie is the epitome of the Western "useful idiot" but it is not her soft ideology that Koestler and David Foster emphasize but rather her reflection of the dissolution and dissipation of the Western idea.  David quotes Koestler, and adds his summation:

“Listen, please,” he said. “We have talked about these matters often before. You don’t like that we make scientific studies of human nature like Professor Pavlov. You don’t like revolutionary vigilance and lists on the social reliability of people, and discipline and re-education camps. You think I am brutal and ridiculous and uncultured. Then why did you like making love with me? I will tell you why and you will understand…”

“I am not a tall and handsome man…There are no tall and handsome men who come from the Black Town in Baku, because there were few vitamins in the food around the oilfields. So it was not for this that you liked to make love with me…It was because I believe in the future and am not afraid of it, and because to know what he lives for makes a man strong…Of course many ugly things are happening in my country. Do you think I do not know about them?…And what difference will it make in a hundred years that there is a little ugliness now? It always existed. In a hundred years there will be no ugliness–only a classless world state of free people. There will be no more wars and no more children born in Black Towns with big bellies and flies crawling in their eyes. And also no more children of the bourgeoisie with crippled characters because they grew up in a decadent society…I am not handsome, but you have felt attracted to me because you know that we will win and that we are only at the beginning–and that you will lose because you are at the end…That is why I was not afraid of your little revolver, because you can’t have the courage to shoot me. To kill, one must believe in something.”

Nevertheless, Hydie pulls the trigger…

One one level, this book is sort of a romance novel, with the theme “chicks like self-confident guys.” This is no doubt true, but emphasizing this point wasn’t Koestler’s main reason for writing Age of Longing. Koestler’s deeper theme is that the decline in religious belief in the West (and Koestler himself was certainly no traditional religious believer) has created a hunger for faith which will likely be filled by those who carry their convictions with great certainty.

I could simply quote the entire essay but suggest you go to his post and read the whole thing.  It has become trite to note the feminization of the West and the price we are paying for our insistence, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that all people are not just created with equal value (which is actually a fairly vapid idea once any reference to God is removed from societal discourse)  but that the absence of equal outcomes must denote societal disrepair.  These reflections of our commitment to Political Correctness are a measure of the soft collectivism that even the Republicans have adopted.  It is possible that the overt collectivist policies that the current Democratic leadership is pressing will evoke enough of a reaction to stop our progress toward a 21^st century quasi-Socialism, but what I find most interesting is that the "ground up" zeitgeist is increasingly at odds with the overt diminution of the rights and responsibilities of the individual.

Societies, as in Europe and parts of Asia, who transition from the potential of empowered individuals to a cheap narcissism risk demographic collapse.  If there is nothing more important than the self, sacrifices for another (ie, offspring) are unthinkable and undone.  They are then left with no ability or inclination to defend against the predations of more confident Collectives, an apt description of Islam in its current incarnation.  A warrior wiling to die for his beliefs is always more appealing to a young woman, who owns the future after all, than an effete, dedicated narcissist.

Pre-industrial Collectivism was the norm.  Tribes and ethnically homogeneous groupings were the rule.  Individuals were subordinate to the group ethos.  Gradually, as the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution matured, ie as increasing numbers of people became increasingly empowered, Collectivist solutions diminished.  In reaction to the excesses of Capitalism, Karl Marx introduced a new structure that leveraged the foundations of tribalism (deprivation and envy.)   Communism showed itself to be a monumental and monstrous failure in the most human terms; more people were murdered by Communism in the 20^th century than in all the religious (ie, tribal) wars before it.  If we add in the other 20^th century Collectivist ideology, Nazism, a tribal ideology based on race, he deaths attributed to our primitive tribalism in modern guise, numbered in the hundreds of millions.  the left was thoroughly discredited by its failures but the collectivist urge, based as it is on the twin human banes of deprivation and envy, can never disappear.  No matter how wealthy a society becomes, there will always be some who have less than others, and always some who have less than they desire.  Yet, in the 21^st century, there is a growing tension between the individual and the collective that is moving powerfully against the collective. 

Our technology, in its accelerating acceleration, is making each of us potentially more powerful than individuals have ever been before.  There will soon come a time when small communities, perhaps even individuals, will be able to live with all the accouterments of modern high tech existence, with minimal interaction with governing bodies and those who act in the name of the Collective.

It should not be a surprise that just at a pivotal moment when the rights, abilities, and responsibilities of the individual are set to make a quantum leap to a new level, we have a reaction form those who are most insecure about the future.  The Left continues to think of itself as the vanguard (no longer of the proletariat perhaps, but of the future course of society.)  They pride themselves on being  progressives, keepers of the future, yet the most progressive ideas today all involve empowering the individual.  

If we surrender to the siren call of pseudo-security, protected by a benevolent government from the vicissitudes of life, we will continue to descend into the morass of Civilizational Insecurity and will find ourselves less and less able to defend our liberties against those who would encroach upon them.  Many of our institutions have already surrendered (as for example, our failing and fading Mainstream Media who will almost dare never utter a word that might offend our enemies.)  It is likely that the next two election cycles will determine whether or not We, the People, are ready to follow.

From Holden Caulfield to Jihad Jane

Holden Caulfield was the literary embodiment of adolescent existential angst.  He was familiar to all of us who grew up privileged in America.  We were blessed with freedom and amazing wealth compared to every prior generation, but suffered from a paucity of meaning.  The baby boomers grew up in an era where God and country were slowly becoming less important and central than the aggrandizement of the Self.  The 1960s were a time where John F. Kennedy's stirring Inaugural speech on January 20th, 1961:

"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

Morphed into Grace Slick singing, in 1967's After Bathing at Baxter's:

Rejoyce

Steven won't give his arm
to no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
and I'd rather have my country die for me. [Emphasis mine-SW]

The processes that fed the anomie that led to the large scale "rebellion" of youth in the 1960s have not gone away.  As the Western elites have become more and more secular and entitlements and the entitlement mentality have grown (with Europe far in advance of America in their dissolution) hedonism has replaced selfless devotion as a major core dynamic.  "Just do it" is far easier to follow as a commandment than the original Ten Commandments.  Yet, the turn away form traditional religion means that for a significant cohort there is no replacement for the meaning derived form religion.  This is not to suggest that it is impossible to live a life imbued with meaning without believing in God or organized religion; it is to imply that living a life filled with meaning is more difficult without a Deity; the Existentialists have done us no favors by devaluing a structure that has worked for several thousand years.  As a result, once the joys of the hedonistic life have paled, there is often a turn toward spirituality to fill the void.

"Jihobbyists" No More: English-Speaking Western Jihadists Coming of Age

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of all the media attention in the latest criminal allegations against "Jihad Jane" is that Colleen LaRose of Pennsylvania is only the latest example of this odd emerging trend in homegrown terrorism. Indeed, LaRose is hardly alone in this category, whether we speak of London resident Samina Malik, an active user on jihadi social networking forums who busied herself with transcribing Al-Qaida training manuals into English during spare time at her job working in secure areas of Heathrow Airport--or Canadian citizen Beverly Giesbrecht (a.k.a. Khadija Abdul Qahhar), who was taken hostage by the Taliban during rather suspicious travels through North Waziristan. Both men and women who were once written off as hapless wannabes and mere "jihobbyists" are unexpectedly rising to the occasion, in often quite desperate bids to prove their total commitment to the cause.

These individuals are, more frequently than not, English-speaking with only a cursory knowledge of Arabic or the Middle East. Their pedigree is less than elite, and they lack the traditional connections back to Al-Qaida's central leadership. Yet, even Al-Qaida's senior echelon now openly recognizes the critical value of these potential "lone wolf" operatives. In several prominent publications--including both the latest video from American Al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn and the most recent official magazine from Al-Qaida in Yemen--the terror group has openly broadcast its pleasure and interest in the actions of such independent actors as Ft. Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan and Jordanian webmaster and CIA bomber Humam al-Balawi (a.k.a. Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani).

Without meaning in one's life, without the sense that there is a purpose to our existence that transcends our petty appetites, one can develop a terribly skewed view of the world.  If  the world is merely a result of chance and we are only born into comfort or deprivation because of random luck, guilt and rage are to be expected.  Instead of appreciating the bounty with which we are blessed, the anxious and uncertain young person views the unfairness around him and, in the absence of an overarching schema, invents one or adopts one.  At that point, since there is no Satan to supply the evil, it can only be a derivative of man's behavior.  From there, it is a short step to externalizing all one's discontents.  Scapegoating depends upon such Psychological processes.  If you see successful people and a vibrant society, where you do not feel you fit in anywhere, resentment and an exaggerated sense of grievance flow naturally from one's personal psychology to a(n imagined) societal induced anomie. 

Toady our young people, and those who have become fixated or regressed to more infantile positions, can find meaning in such attractive alternatives as the struggle for social justice or for the environment (both offspring of Communism/Socialism, ie collectivism) while others may find meaning in a return to traditional religion or to a new iteration of traditional religion; still others may seek out less restrictive religions (how many Catholics reject Catholicism because of its attitudes toward sex and procreation?) or find solace in a religion which is self confident (at least superficially, though it hides a deep seated sense of insecurity under its violet and aggressive bravado)  and growing in strength while filled with an absolute certainty, ie Islam.  By submitting to Islam, all the difficult questions and problems in life are resolved. 

Islamism offers a framework, an external structure, that supports the externalization of one's problems, and supplies a ready response to difficulties in one's internal and external life. 

John Robb reports on testimony before Congress that supports this as one of the predisposing factors in home grown terrorism:

Scott Atran, Terrorists, and Global Guerrillas

Last year, open source warfare received some exciting validation in the form of a scientific study that reached the cover of Nature Magazine (although the theory reached the pinnacle of scientific validation, nobody in the DoD noticed -- wow, seriously, is there anybody with a working brain still working there?).   Now Scott Atran, a sharp anthropologist that has been studying terrorism scientifically (although from his narrow area of specialization), has noticed some shifts in terrorist behavior  that align more closely to Global Guerrillas using open source warfare than traditional Jihadis.  Here's a summary from some Congressional testimony he recently gave.

...

Entry into the jihadi brotherhood is from the bottom up: from alienated and marginalized youth seeking out companionship, esteem, and meaning, but also the thrill of action, sense of empowerment, and glory in fighting the world's most powerful nation and army.

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Although lack of economic opportunity often reliably leads to criminality, it turns out that some criminal youth really don't want to be criminals after all. Given half a chance to take up a moral cause, they can be even more altruistically prone than others to give up their lives for their comrades and cause.

Read the whole thing; this relates to the alienated foreign born terrorists as well as the Western born.  While you are at it, check out Jim Hoft's posts on an American born al Qaeda who has not been conspicuous in the MSM:

Stunner. Al-Qaeda Killer Who Shot His Way Out of Hospital Is Former Dem Operative

Breaking: Al-Qaeda Killer & Dem Operative Worked at New Jersey Nuclear Plant

All societies have their marginalized individuals.  Such people have traditionally borne their failures and their inner despair by themselves.  By offering a way out of a life of failure and/or meaninglessness (since even materially successful people can suffer from inner  emptiness) radical Islam solves their internal and external, Psychological and social, problems.  Once invested in Islamism, one's life is suffused with meaning and nobility; such a Siren call has a powerful allure.