Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Unholy Alliance
Wretchard at The Belmont Club has another very good post today, called "The Last Throw." He is actually advancing an argument that was very well framed (and documented) in David Horowitz's recent book, "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left." Wretchard cites a Euro blogger who, in referring to the Left, notes:
From here Wretchard goes on to suggest that hatred is not the only emotion at the root of the Left today. There is also conceit:
As is frequently true, the comment threads that Wretchard's pieces generate are nearly as fascinating as the host's own posts. The trouble is they often run to a couple of hundred comments. I was lucky today, as at the time of my reading it was only some 65 deep! That can be counted manageable as the Belmont Club goes. "The Last Throw" has many interesting contributions by its readers; I chose to excerpt just two. If you want more you will just have to dive in yourself.
Here (from reliapundit):
And here (from frequent contributor Buddy Larsen):
They have only things to destroy, and all those things are personified in the US, in its very existence. They may, outwardly, fight for some positive cause: save the whales, rescue the world from global heating and so on. But let's not be deceived by this: they choose as their so-called positive causes only the ones that have both the potential of conferring some kind of innocent legitimacy on themselves and, much more important, that of doing most harm to their enemy, whether physically or to its image.
This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends' bets are now on radical Islam. What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America's superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.
From here Wretchard goes on to suggest that hatred is not the only emotion at the root of the Left today. There is also conceit:
Although Ascher describes the hatred of the Left as the sole surviving ember in the ashes, he left out the one other emotion which has still survived: conceit. If the Western Left is convinced of anything it is it can bend the Islamic world to its will once America has been cleared away. Samuel Huntington wrote that Islam was "convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power." But he might have been describing the Left, for whom recent history has been an unaccountable theft of their birthright; a little detail they will put right when America is vanquished.
...[A]ny honest Leftist must realize that his movement and its aspirations are rooted in the very West it seeks to destroy. Communist totalitarianism is the doppelganger of secular freedom; and the serpent in the garden must know that the desert, so hospitable to Islam, can only be a place of death for it. The Left may have embarked upon a journey of revenge. They will find suicide.
As is frequently true, the comment threads that Wretchard's pieces generate are nearly as fascinating as the host's own posts. The trouble is they often run to a couple of hundred comments. I was lucky today, as at the time of my reading it was only some 65 deep! That can be counted manageable as the Belmont Club goes. "The Last Throw" has many interesting contributions by its readers; I chose to excerpt just two. If you want more you will just have to dive in yourself.
Here (from reliapundit):
As their old false Gods have withered, the Left has turned to irrational anger to prop up their failed Leftist ideology. BDS [Bush Derangement Syndrome]is what fuels their total denial. Without BDS, the Left would have to admit that they were WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING - Vietnam; Reagan; low/flat tax rates; welfare; quotas; gun control; etc.. And that's a pretty tough thing to do - I know: I was part of the Left once. But I urge my old Leftie friends to try to abandon their old shibboleths - admit they were wrong, as I did - and join me and Bush in the good fight! IT'S VERY LIBERATING! (Pun intended!)
And here (from frequent contributor Buddy Larsen):
And [....] people who'll never see themselves as country-club Republicans, who vote Bush because he's really the free radical, concerned with the welfare of human beings, while the 'common man' his enemies care about is the common man that exists as a route to power. Like the 30s Marxists who'd gulag mama for the cause, the cause being, 'Let Me Rule'.
# posted by mds : 2:28 PM
