A Meeting on the Dark Side of the Moon

My friend Jeramayakovka wrote an interesting comment to my last post. Referring of the Islamist’s constant refrain of loving death more than life he wrote:

"In those Hamas remarks, I hear a strategic taunting based on raw willpower. The message is to win. And in order to win, to intimidate. A deathcult, if you will, but in service to a nuts-and-bolts strategy"

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To which I replied:

"Very thought provoking comment. The way insecurity and weakness flip-flop with determination and desperation is a very unstable dynamic.
Bottom line, I think is that while they are destroying themselves we have to spend our energy on minimizing the damage and death they cause... Hitler, after all destroyed himself, but the rest of the world waited far too long to begin helping him do it.
Thanks for making me think"

While I still think there is some validity to both J’s comment and my reply, on reflection I have come to see that there is a deeper, more elegant and (in a way) simpler truth. I have come to see that, granting that this is a stratagem, consciously applied, it is also a compulsion- an irresistible impulse. As such, it is also a clear-cut, unambiguous, text-book diagnostic symptom of the presence of fascism.

No, the love of death is not just a ploy or bluff. It is the central argument of fascism in action. In my post on totalitarianism and why the Jihadists are truly fascists, I quoted Louis Menand writing in the New Yorker:

“The distinctive feature of totalitarian societies is that everyone, including (in theory, anyway) the dictator, can be sacrificed in the name of a superhuman law, a law of nature or a law of history.”

Menand went on to quote Hannah Arendt:

“Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous,”

That is why they can (have to!) say they love death. That is what we are fighting- the meaninglessness and expendability of the individual.

Let's be clear. It is not just Sarah Philipps and 269 other innocent people on an airliner or three thousand people on a bright September morning, YOU do not matter in their system. No individual does- the concept of an individual with a life, possessions and any expectation of privacy is null and void.

That is why they disdain freedom and democracy, because under freedom and democracy you, the individual, matters the most. This also clears up a few questions that periodically plague us.

This is, for instance, what the far-left collectivist Progressives have in common with the Caliphate Islamists. It is precisely why, even though they are diametrically opposite each other on so many issues, they find common cause against those of us who love life and think we matter.

It is, maybe, even the ultimate explanation for Jew hatred among those groups. After all, the first assumption of Judaism is that God gives the individual the responsibility to behave as best we can. There is an expectation that what we do and how we do it matters- not just to God but to each other and the future of the universe. This is one of the wellsprings and strengths of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

It is as though, ill-equipped to compete intellectually, morally or economically with western democratic success, they have removed themselves from the planet of liberty and reason. There, on a close but barren moon they do a wary dance of cooperation. Unable to fully accept each other in the light of day, the Islamists went as far east as they could and the Leftists went as far west and they have met to form an alliance of ignorant conspiracy on the dark side of the moon. Agreeing to remain blinded to each other’s contradictions by the darkness there, they conspire against the free, green and hopeful world they envy and despise.

Addendum:
Please, don't forget my last post and that Sarah Philipps' Birthday is only two days away. I plan to place flowers and a copy of the signatures to the petitition on the monument in Newton Centre Park on her birthday and I would like it to be a lot bigger than it is now. So if you haven't yet signed this is you opportunity! Please, email this link to your friends and family too!

Welcome to Sderot

Here is a chilling formulation of something you already know to be true. It is from JINSA INFO Report #781.

“For Hamas, the key is to keep the rocket attacks below an understood threshold and Israel's response will be tolerable, precise and produce minimal collateral (Palestinian) damage. The Hamas pattern is to fire one, two or three rockets at Sderot. Wait a few days and do it again. Injure two, three, four Israelis. Kill one or two, but not more than that - this week. Increase the range and accuracy of the rockets incrementally. Hit Ashkelon, but just once. Then wait. Hit a shopping center, but if no one is killed, the Israeli response is unlikely to threaten Hamas rule. If Israel does retaliate, the world will probably be more annoyed by the "disproportionate response" than the original rocket attack.”

The report goes on with an interesting analysis of Israel’s military doctrine and how she is currently being forced by world opinion and the demopathic tactics of her enemies (internal and external) to fight outside the comfort level of her defensive doctrine. As I was reading, though, something was bothering me. I was still stuck on the seemingly more limited issue of the terror involved. Who are these people who are being killed by the rockets? How do they live knowing that, only if some, unspecified number of them of them are killed and maimed, will their government be moved to do something about the terror under which they live? This dangerous and painful situation is only partially a product of the Arab/Islamist dream of annihilation of Israel. It is made possible by a combination of ruthless internal enemies (e.g. the far left peace movement), clueless dupes (e.g. Olmert, Livni, et al) and shortsighted erstwhile foreign “friends” who do not understand the reality of the threat. This motley assortment of fools and instigators hold Israel’s defense establishment, her regard for her own citizens and, indeed, her very moral, civic, ethical and intellectual integrity hostage.

When Shirley Jackson's famous short story The Lottery was first published sixty years ago in the June 26, 1948 edition of The New Yorker magazine, it set off the most violent reaction the magazine had ever experienced. In the story, the reader is gradually drawn into a nightmare- as what seems to be a “normal” American farming village gathers for some sort of annual community gathering. There is a lottery involved and little by little it becomes apparent that it is a “selection process”. The reader’s curiosity gives way to bemusement as the author quietly seeds in ominous details that build a sense of foreboding. Then, near the end of the story there is a sudden shift to horror when we realize that the “slightly too” nonchalant dialogue and mysterious references have been leading up to the revelation of a sacrificial rite. One person in the community is chosen by lottery to be stoned to death- sacrificed for “the good of all”.

It is little wonder that the story caused the explosion of controversy that it did. A scant three years after World War II, the cataclysmic battle against totalitarianism, here was a story that hinted that the enemy was not dead, but could lie ever so close beneath the surface in the most unlikely of places. Is this lottery totalitarianism? I think it is. It is a society that holds itself hostage in a suicide pact. The eerily believable rationalization that the lottery must be carried out because the welfare of the group is everything- the individual is nothing- is the brutal signature of fascism.

The weird, unconvincing quality of the “reason” that stoning one member of the community to death is “for the good of all” is also a dead giveaway. It is true that an oblique reference to the sacrifice having a good effect on the corn is made but there is a dispiriting vagueness about it and nobody seems to endorse it convincingly. In fact, the agricultural pretext is really irrelevant. The central drama of The Lottery is the absence of individual human value. In my post about Islamofascism, I quoted Louis Menand (ironically, writing in the New Yorker), “official ideology can be, and usually is, absurd on its face, and known to be absurd by the leaders who preach it.” This is another hallmark of totalitarian systems. These lottery victims are the moral equivalent of suicide bombers, human shields and hostages. They have no power to achieve anything. Their own genuine emotions and aspirations are anathema to the system in which they live. Only their annihilation is of value. Every one of them is a martyr- most of them just aren’t dead yet. They are, in every sense imaginable, dead men walking.

I thought of this when I read JINSA report #781. The people of Sderot listen for the sirens all day and all night 365 days a year and all must wonder if today is the day that a rocket will come through the ceiling in a busy dining hall or a kindergarten classroom or a high school auditorium and finally be “enough” to force the government to use the power it has always had- but may not always retain- to eliminate the threat. They wait for the government to act. They pray for the rest of the world to recoil in horror. They face each day with bravery and hope. Just like the people in Jackson’s story, they are hostages.

Apologists, multiculturalists and advocates who try to convince themselves that the horror and savagery of Jihad is somehow lessened by pointing out the great (mostly ancient) achievements of Islamic culture are fond of pointing out that modern mathematics were made possible by the development of the concept of zero by Muslim mathematicians. This makes sense. It should be no surprise that one of Islam's last real contributions to human progress was the discovery of zero. It appears to me that, at least under the most fundamental application of their religion-as-political-system, zero is the human condition.

JINSA Report #781 concludes with this:

“It is hard to advocate large-scale military action against Hamas (or Hezbollah). The price will be high. But if Israel is waiting until a "Passover Massacre"-type terrorist attack and plans then to do what it knows it has to do, why wait? To wait is to give Hamas more time to import Iranian weapons, train its forces and build defenses - allowing the building a greater deterrent to IDF action out of fear of greater IDF losses completes the inversion of the defensive principles that have served Israel to well until now.”

Why wait, indeed. It is not just defensive principals that are inverted here; it is morality, integrity and simple logic. We know that Hamas has sworn to eradicate Israel. They say so freely.  

If there was outrage in 1948 over the publication of that short story, how could there not be outrage today when an Israeli government dares Hamas to kill one more Israeli and see what happens and when they do, dares them to kill another one. Over and over again the children of Sderot draw lots and when one of them is torn apart by ball bearings or has a leg blown off, what happens? Is it somehow “for the good of all” that they suffer?
Now the Israeli government has arranged a cease-fire insuring, not eventual peace but even more death and suffering. It is not even necessary to believe the predictions of JINSA on what a cease-fire means. Even if you refuse to see the Iranian shipments arriving and the burrowing and trenching of the fortification builders, there is no need to believe the analysts, only recall what has happened to every other cease-fire in that conflict. They have all been broken by the slaughter of innocent Israelis. It is as regular and relentless as the annual lottery in Jackson’s story. Who will be the first one to die when the cease-fire breaks? Is it worth it or is it as futile and empty as the annual sacrifice chosen by lot?

That answer must come from the Israeli government. When suffering appears endless and accelerating and you begin to doubt its value, the answer must provided out of action and dedication. Abraham Lincoln, speaking from Gettysburg a place of great violence and slaughter rededicated himself and his nation to a higher purpose when he said, “…we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” The Israeli government must reaffirm their purpose the same way, and they must not shrink from committing themselves to facing the realities and acting accordingly.

Do you believe that it is about The Nakba or The Occupation or The Settlements? Do you allow yourself the fantasy that there is a way to stop the madness- a sacrifice big enough to satisfy this ravenous cult?

Then what did the innocent victims die for on 9/11- or Madrid- or London- the Darfur? This is part of the same grotesque lottery that has been going on for 1500 years. In spite of the sacrifice of the innocent victims of 9/11, it is all too easy for us to deny that we are hostages too, but those “zero beings” from the Islamist void will not be happy to delete only Israel. They have "selected" them for annihilation first but it is nothing personal, you understand, just a sacrifice to prove there is no value to human life. There is no value to anything that does not affirm the spiritual vacuum of Islamism. It is not because they worship Allah, nor is it is that they believe Mohammed was a prophet. It is that they believe that he was the only prophet, that they know the absolute truth and that it is their mission to ignore (and destroy) all evidence to the contrary. If you believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they will not rest until they destroy you too.

The Jihadists are not interested in cease-fires or peace. They are happy to tell you what they want. They want the world to live under Shari’a law. They believe that anyone that doesn’t want that is sub-human and deserves to be killed. This is nothing less than another confrontation with the evil of fascist, totalitarianism, and that is a beast whose hunger cannot be sated with souls, nor can its thirst be slaked with blood. The lottery they are holding is to determine not if you will be destroyed but when you will be destroyed. We are all citizens of Sderot- its just that most of us don’t know it yet.

The Emergence of the Agélaste Left

Dear Reader,
That big post I've been promising has gotten to be so big, I've had to break it up and publish it in smaller bites. Here's one:

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

Hannah Arendt

I was walking my kids to school the morning after the last Presidential election when I witnessed an embarrassing spectacle. As my sons and I approached the school I saw a neighbor of ours, a young mother of two elementary school students, jumping up and down on a map of the United States that was painted on the asphalt of the school yard. She was shouting something. As we got closer I could see that she was jumping repeatedly on Ohio and shouting “I hate you Ohio!” over and over. She looked at me, and said, “I can’t believe they did this! Can you believe it?”

Well, actually, there were two things I couldn’t believe. The first, thing I found unbelievable was the violence she displayed. Violence? Well, yes, it was minor violence but it was pretty shocking in a symbolic way, shocking in much the same way that burning the American flag is shocking.

The other thing I couldn’t believe was her presumption.

Call me old fashioned; or just chalk it up to my being in the conservative minority in this very liberal, high income suburb that I live in, but I have always thought it was good form not to make a public display of my political opinions. Stumping in support of a candidate before the election is different; a respectful request for support for people and ideas you believe in is an honorable part of our civic tradition. But this was a bald faced assumption that as a person she assumed to be “good” I would be equally dismayed by the result of the election. I can tell you that I generally avoid that kind of assumption about other people and nearly every time I have let myself slip into it I have been embarrassed by the result. But embarrassment is only experienced by those who are willing to grant others the dignity of having their own thoughts.

In my last post I quoted Milan Kundera on Kitsch. I need to go back to Kundera and that same speech, his Jerusalem Address, once again to most accurately define what I found so offensive in this presumption. Kundera uses the word agélaste. Rabelais, he tells us, coined the word to denote people who do not laugh because they have no sense of humor and “…are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are.” My neighbor’s behavior, that morning fit that definition to a tee.
The moderate and progressive left for all its claims of good intentions and intellectual righteousness has for some time been slipping into a form of totalitarian fundamentalism. The totalitarian progressive left is, I fear an, as yet, undiagnosed epidemic among the upper middle class and the academic and political elites of Western Civilization. As with most epidemics, it has been hard to define in its early stages. In recent years however, it has begun to manifest itself in ways that are impossible to ignore.

For instance, why is there a marked and growing support for Islamism among the left-leaning sectors of the western countries? On the face of it, it makes no sense that a movement within the Muslim world that declares publicly that it wants to either kill or convert everyone else on earth to Islamism, which believes in slavery, misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism, gay bashing(and murdering!), religious intolerance (exclusivism, really), the teaching of hatred and murder to kindergarteners and the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians with terror should be lionized by people who profess to hold “humanitarian” ( or, at least, humanistic) values above all others. Why, too, does that same left-wing so despise Israel, a country founded in Democracy, having a strong socialist component, and which far out shines any of its neighbors in human rights and minority freedoms? The answer to this conundrum is one of the diagnostic markers that prove the existence of a totalitarian system of belief. When there are such obvious internal contradictions that are held by a self-identified group of people who police each other for the correctness of their thought without regard to the actual logical content of that thought it is totalitarianism. I discussed this in my post about Islamofascim. Here is part of a quote from a New Yorker Magazine article by Louis Menand that I used to illustrate the point. “The mysterious part of totalitarianism’s appeal—and here we return to the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen—is that its official ideology can be, and usually is, absurd on its face, and known to be absurd by the leaders who preach it. This is because the mob is made up of cynics; for them, everything is a lie anyway. And the masses’ hostility is free-floating. It has no concrete object: the masses are hostile to life as it is. The more extreme and outrageous the totalitarian ideology, therefore, and the more devoid of practical political sense, the more ineluctable its appeal.”

This is where the agélaste’s lack of a sense of humor turns lethal, for the hard core of any fascist system is the agélaste. Eliminating humor is essential to the totalitarian system. In His novel The Joke, Kundera has a Communist sympathizer saying, “No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.” A sense of humor would allow people to see the irony in the internal contradictions and turn laughingly away from it. The modern Progressive, leftist and liberal movements lack any real humor. What passes for humor in those precincts is actually more accurately classified as ridicule and mockery. While driving the other day I saw an excellent example, bumper stickers that read, “So Many Right-Wing Christians So Few Lions”. This is not humor. It is, rather, a kind of puerile, jejune attempt to wrap a hate message in a clever phrase and hurl it through the windshield of any car that had the misfortune to be driving behind. This is the very sort of message that the owner of that car would, no doubt, condemn utterly if it were aimed at any of the liberally approved minorities. How would he respond to- “So Many Black People, So Few Lynch Mobs”? I can’t see how one is any worse than the other. Political correctness, tone deaf “humor” and the conceit of “true belief”, are turning the mainstream left into a confederacy of Agélastes.

This by no means applies to all left-leaning citizens; there are many clear-thinking individuals on both sides of the center who can see these contradictions clearly enough to be troubled by them. For those with the good will and intellectual freedom to debate and consider the evidence on both sides, there is hope. If they can also avoid the paralysis that results from moral relativism they will be part of the solution of the problem. The problem arises from those who become devoted to anti-establishment worldviews to the extent that their individual intellect and discriminatory power becomes subservient to the intellectual framework of that “ism”. They come to believe that Jews and the corporate business world and government are somehow controlling their lives. They feel that in retaliation they have to support an extreme brand of progressive liberalism that is a true totalitarian ideology. In the grip of this reactive totalitarianism they no longer care about their own contradictions, as Menand pointed out above. This agreement to believe in and support the absurd is the binding energy that allows so many “liberals and progressives” to ignore the obvious contradictions between the values they profess and their sympathy for Islamism (and antipathy for Israel). As Voltaire wrote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.

Totalitarian systems loath each other but they hate the individual human being, his sense of humor and his free thought much more. That is why the Totalitarian left and Caliphate Islam find common cause with each other. In each of them, it is the system not the people in it or the ideals they hold that are important; the individual is an object of suspicion and disdain. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous,” The devotion to a strict fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran and the seemingly opposed devotion to the total and complete adherence to the intellectualized principals of the western left differ in their content but not in their disregard for reality and the complex nature of humanity.

This is why so many elite campuses are so inhospitable to Jewish and Christian speakers of any but the leftist point of view while they positively swoon in reverence over speakers from Islam who represent terror as an instrument of social control, the subjugation of women and death or conversion for all unbelievers. Even left wing speakers who do not toe the Agélaste Left party line are drowned out and not allowed to speak in today’s academia. Speakers of both the left and right who dare defy the intellectual Taliban of academia and support Israel or speak in support of American values are routinely harassed, drowned out and intimidated socially, academically and even physically. This is a universal characteristic of totalitarians of any stripe, they are more comfortable with other totalitarians, no matter how diametrically opposed their ideas, than they are with those who can see and point out the absurdity of their slavery to empty ideas and pathetic rationalizations.

It is no accident that Academe is a stronghold of the Agélaste Left. In the hothouse of tenure, and with loyal cadres of duped and inexperienced students who eagerly shout down any opposition, the modern University is the last and most secure refuge for bright but craven and bone-lazy “geniuses” who spin vivid verbal riffs on their wishful dreams of what the world is like even as they are entirely insulated from the harsh realities that the business people and workers they so smarmily patronize have to face every day. Socialism and Communism have failed everywhere they have been tried except in the hermetically sealed aviaries of academia. Year after year the tenured Macaws of the professorate gather their favorite toadies up into their own self-congratulating ranks and push the rest out into the “real world” for which they have conspired to keep them ill-equipped. Thinking independently in some regions of academia calls down a fate worse than death- expulsion into the market place where only production of goods and services for which others will pay money earns a living. This is how the elite corps of the Agélaste Left terrorizes its true believers to believe even past the point of self-destruction.

It is shocking but not surprising that the hierarchies of some of the mainline protestant churches have become hotbeds of the Agélaste Left. One need look no further than the Israel Divestment movements within both the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. To see that the hierarchies of these two once-great churches have been hijacked by leaders that are in step with the collectivist progressive hostility to the war on terror here and in the Middle East is to witness the greatest and saddest irony of all. It is shocking and ominous that decades of inter-faith bridge-building has been so swiftly undermined by this totalitarian wave of blind Agélaste Leftism among mainline religious leaders. The Agélaste Left leaders of these churches do not speak for the masses of Presbyterians and Episcopalians in the pews. There are strong indications that there is little grass root support for the attempt to handcuff Israel in her life and death fight with a foe that has sworn to destroy her and has openly promised to kill as many Jews and Christians as possible. Those leaders are merely trying to put words into the mouths of their flocks. What is worse, they do it in the name of God. Only to them, God apparently is a leftist who would rather see misguided even-handedness weaken the hand of an egalitarian, religiously tolerant, democratic and egalitarian country like Israel against the blood-thirsty onslaught of another totalitarian movement most of whose own people, when they are given the opportunity to choose, would rather live in America or Israel.

On the other hand, none of those on the left who reflexively bash America and Israel for “crimes against humanity” are crowding onto airplanes to go live under The Caliphate and Sharia rule either. I think it’s safe to say none of them would last a month in a country ruled by Sharia Law. Indeed, they would be lucky to only have their hands cut off rather than be buried up to their waists in the dirt and be stoned to death or have their heads sawn off with a bread knife in front of a video camera.

Neither do they give us a convincing picture of anything (within reason) that America or Israel could do to please them. Israel, they seem to feel, should lay down her arms and try to make a unilaterally disarmed peace with the Arab world- that Arab world that has sworn Israel’s destruction and is holding the Palestinian refugees hostage against her existence. That would please the Agélaste Left doubly. Israel would then be unable to stop the terrorists or interrupt their infrastructure; and then, shortly thereafter, there would be another genocide- the death of all the Jews in Israel- that they could condemn America for not stopping. If its one thing the Agélaste Left enjoys more than mourning dead Jews, it’s blaming America and finding fault with the very institutions that shelter them and their self-destructive antics from annihilation by the despots, terrorists and repressive maniacs they so lionize.

You know that they are the Agélaste Left because anyone with even a rudimentary sense of humor would see the irony of that!