Over the years I have read
various collectivist utopian novels, particularly those that envisioned ideal communist
or socialist societies, and dismissed them as unrealistic fables whose authors
had an agenda other than projecting their politics, short-changing their
readers on the political and economic facets and means of their tales. Among many
such novels, Edward Bellamy's talky Looking
Backward: 2000-1887, published in 1888, was the best of a literally unbelievable
lot. The most significant and ominous thing about Bellamy's novel is that for
many years it was a best-seller, trailing behind Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur.
It helped to popularize socialism in the U.S.
British Fabian socialist H.G.
Wells' The Shape of Things to Come (1933)
is of the Marxist utopian genre, in which a clique of airmen takes over an anarchical
world when governments have collapsed after a world war and plague, and is more
optimistic than his dystopian novel, The
Time Machine (1895). Although Wells predicted some events in Shape of Things with startling accuracy,
such as WWII and the U.S.'s war with Japan, the novel is unique in that the
airmen's dictatorship eradicates all religions, including Islam, the latter apparently
without much fuss.
According to Marxist
doctrine, or at least Friedrich Engels' version of it, socialism, once it has
converted everyone into cooperative manqués, would eventually morph into a
fully communist state, with the state itself "withering away,"
shedding the apparatus of government as a snake sheds its skin. This would
happen because society at that point would be driven unconsciously by some
Hegelian historical necessity. And then, somehow, beggaring examination of any
causo-connections, things would all work out effortlessly.
A Marxist utopia would be classless,
of course, having in its aggressive socialist stage extinguished by fair means
and foul "plutocrats" and the bourgeoisie. A purely Marxist society
would be egalitarian – "from each according to his ability, to each
according to his need."
If food is needed, it would
be produced. Somehow. It would be distributed without error or mix-up, somehow.
Truly communist farmers would automatically grow an abundance of consumables,
and truly communist truckers would distribute them to magical food collection
points ("markets" having been abolished).
If steel is needed, somehow
it would be produced, and fashioned somehow into a vast catalogue of
utilitarian objects. Everything needed for the comfort and leisure of men, from
clothing, kitchen ware, power, machines, medical services and so on, would be
available – somehow.
But, produced by whom? Well,
by the people, naturally, who would automatically fulfill every need. If you're
an average citizen of the stateless republic, you will not need to be told to
report to the local steel mill to help turn out ingots and pigs. There would be
no state agency or planner overseeing these matters, because the state will
have withered away. No one would direct labor to the right places. No one would
need to redirect or redistribute capital, either, because that cursed vehicle of
the old times, capital, would no longer exist. You would just know that you're
needed, somewhere, somehow.
In fact, money would not
exist. Money implies trade, which will have been abolished, as well. Everyone
will go around empty-handed, but lack for nothing. Food, clothing, and shelter
are all provided to you – somehow.
So, off you trot to the steel
mill. Do you know anything about producing steel? Do you have the technical
knowledge and the skills to perform the task? Who knows how it happened, but
you just have them. That's the glory of stateless communism. You're a universal
adept. You can do anything the collective requires you to do.
In the former era of
universal socialism, many men had to be cajoled or compelled to do things. In
the perfect stateless state of communism, they do things
"voluntarily," without prompting. You whistle while you work, as does
everyone else, content to work without compensation.
And I could only conclude, in
those spare moments, that the perfect communist state must be a society of
automatons, all programmed and driven by "historical necessity" and
"dialectical materialism," and that you, the citizen of this
stateless society, are but an insensate cipher, a pawn of some power that
magically causes all other men to "do the right thing" in
frictionless amity. You are a humanoid ant, a manqué, unburdened by a
volitional consciousness.
Now, no
liberal/leftist/Progressive who can read STOP signs and refrain from seasoning
his salads with rat poison believes down, down deep, in such Marxist hokum. No,
such a utopia conveniently remains a cloudy, shimmering fantasy in their minds,
absent of clear details and particulars, never to be attained. Much destruction
must occur first, and that is the primary obsession of the
liberal/leftist/Progressives today, to destroy what exists. Of course, those
mystical powers of historical necessity need a little help from them. They
revel in destruction. Destruction makes them feel useful.
And then came President
Barack Hussein Obama. He is a walking vehicle of historical necessity. Or so he
thinks, and so think all his supporters and the various claques of
liberal/left/Progressives in government and the MSM and advocacy groups. Like
everyone else, Obama is imbued with a volitional consciousness, and chooses to
do what he does. Which, except when he is on a golf course, is destroy. His
purported vision of a transformed America is as chimerical and fantastic as any
other collectivist's. Down, down deep, he knows this.
Today's
liberal/left/Progressives, one suspects, must necessarily dread the dawn of true
communism. In such a state, they would have nothing to do. They would be
unemployed.
Now, Islam subscribes to a
similar fantasy, too, and likewise is minus a clear program of how such a
society would actually function and survive. This is the global caliphate that will
have brought "peace" to everyone – that is the meaning of Islam being
a "religion of peace," in the same way that the United Nations is
touted as an "instrument of peace," "peace" being something
that destructive organization has never accomplished. All men, but most particularly
Muslims, will exist in a state of blissful, conflict-free comity.
Non-Muslims will behave
themselves and be content with their status as subjugated dhimmis and kaffirs,
obedient to the Islamic State and deferential to Muslims in all instances and
encounters. They willingly pay the jizya,
the Islamic "protection" tax. This impost, if one examines its
fundamental purpose, is a literal tax on your existence; non-payment of it will
be against Sharia law and cause your subsequent and swift non-existence. It is
based on the premise that a Muslim is a first cause, superior to non-believers,
and that your existence, as a dhimmi,
is dependent on his existence; a curious metaphysics of morals, not dissimilar
from the Mafia brand.
Moreover, terrorism and
violent jihad will cease in the global Islamic state; this is what tongue-in-cheek,
taqiyya-skilled Muslims mean when
they say they don’t condone terrorism.
And, as in the
liberal/left/Progressive's fantasy world, things will happen and work will be
done and no one will want for anything. Somehow. But, there's a catch. The liberal/left/Progressive
dreams of a post-industrial world that has inherited the standard of living and
technological marvels which the industrial, capitalist world made possible, but
without any of the repellent social mechanisms, such as trade, property rights,
individual rights, and so on.
Islam's perfect world, on the
other hand, tests the imagination. One can project little more than an
oligarchy of caliphs and sultans and muftis living luxuriously on the labor of
their submissive populations, and answering to some Grand Vizier or Mufti or
Caliph. As with the Catholic Pope (who will no longer exist), he will be
regarded as Allah's supreme representative on earth. One can't see in an
Islamic global régime oil tankers, high-speed trains, literature other than
Islamic literature, art, advances in medicine, or even skyscrapers, except for
the bizarre white elephants erected in Saudi Arabia and the various fiefdoms on
the Persian Gulf.
Perhaps those skyscrapers
won’t even exist, for they were erected with Sunni oil money (international jizya), and they might be blasted to hot
atoms by Iranian (Shi'ite) nuclear missiles.
Unlike the
liberal/left/Progressive fantasy world, however, which is expected to exist in
perpetuity, Islam proclaims that Allah at one point will call it a day and send
in his Twelfth Imam or the Mahdi to announce the end of all things, and to cause
the sun to rise in the West. There will be weeping and wailing and the gnashing
of teeth as "good" Muslims are segregated from "bad"
Muslims and all dhimmis and infidels
are sent immediately to hell. No one will be "left behind" because
the earth will cease to exist.
And that is the gist of the
equally delusional Islamic notion of utopia.
The "totalities" of
the liberal/left/Progressive notion of utopia and those of Islam are
fundamentally, and incontrovertibly, totalitarian.
There is no other way of looking at either projected utopia, or, at least, no
other way of treating the transitional phase between now and the attainment of
those utopias, which is socialism birthing a perpetual heaven on earth on the one
hand, and religiously imposed collectivism and some equally ambiguous but
temporary heaven on earth, on the other.
Why do Progressives,
liberals, and leftists love Islam? Why are Islamists not wholly reciprocal in
that love, and only grudgingly tolerate them? Why do Progressives, liberals,
and leftists refuse to identify Islamic doctrine as the cause of terrorist
attacks, and demonstrate in their denials contorted states of mind once only attributable
to schizophrenics and the mentally ill with multiple personalities?
John Rossomando, in his IPT
article of May 24th, "Media
Analysts Dodge Jihad Connection in Boston, London," cites numerous
examples of the behavior of politicians,
commentators and pundits and how they received the news
of the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15th and the broad daylight
murder of a British soldier in London on May 22nd. Even though the
one killer had shouted "Alluha Akbar!" while killing British Army
drummer Lee Rigby, and ranted about Islam on camera, they will not blame Islam.
Commentator
Michelle Malkin [of Town Hall] was singled out in the Media Matters post for
saying the videotaped attacker was "quoting chapter and verse, sura and
verse, from the Quran the justification for beheading an innocent solider
there, and of course they've targeted civilians as well."…Michael
Adebolajo said, "But we are forced by the Qur'an, in Sura At-Tawba,
through many ayah in the Qu'ran, we must fight them as they fight us," he
says.
Media Matters also called Fox
News "Islamophobic" in its coverage of the Lee Rigby murder. Media
Matters is funded by billionaire George Soros, who has subsidized a number of
anti-Western, anti-American Progressive and leftist blog sites that comport
neatly with their Islamic counterparts, such as Al Jazeera.
The New
York Times omitted reference to the attacker's invocation of Allah,
relegating it to page A7. ABC, NBC and CBS similarly omitted the Islamic reference.
Hours
after Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's names became public [after the Boston
bombing], The Atlantic's Megan Garber penned a column titled "The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?" in which
she suggested pinning the Muslim label on them reduced them to being
"caricatures" and "whitewashed" their humanity.
Rossomando notes in his
article the history of how the MSM and others have shied away from blaming
Islam for the terrorism, as well as statements by Islamic clerics who advocate
the kind of jihad that Lee Rigby was
the victim of.
By now, the reader may well
have deduced for himself that the reason why the liberal/left/Progressives will
not acknowledge that Islam is at the root of these terrorist attacks is that
there is an unspoken, almost Freudian symbiosis felt by the liberal/left with
Islam, that is, an unarticulated empathy for another totalitarian system. The
Progressive Movement, spawned in the late 19th century, made great
strides in the 20th with the steady passage of laws that
increasingly robbed men of their freedom with arbitrary, fiat law and
regulations, until today when there is hardly a human action or product that is
not regulated or constrained. This "progress" covers a range of laws
from the Income Tax Amendment to mandated nutritional information on food
packaging and countless measures in between.
The Progressives – a.k.a.
socialists – see Islam, with its head-to-foot regulation of Muslim behavior and
existence, as a friend and ally that will help them to vanquish capitalism and
Western civilization. That is their mutual end. "Moderate" Muslims assure
us that Western precepts of law and freedom can be reconciled with Islam. They
cannot. If Islam is doctrinally a totalitarian ideology, it cannot and will not
be reconciled with individual rights. Capitalism and freedom do not sanction or
advocate the forcible conquest of socialists and collectivists, unless the
latter initiate force against the former. Islam and Progressivism do sanction
and advocate the initiation of force.
Daniel Greenfield, in his May
24th FrontPage article, "Inside
Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out," emphasized this
point:
There
is a characteristic feature to tyranny. It isn’t the scowling faces of armed
guards or the rusting metal of barbed wire fences. It isn’t the black cars of
the secret police or the prison camps surrounded by wastelands of snow.
The
defining characteristic of tyranny is the diversion of power from the people to
the unelected elite. The elite can claim to be inspired by Allah or Marx; it
can act in the name of racial purity or universal workers compensation or both.
The details don’t matter, because in all instances, tyranny derives its
justification from the superiority of the rulers and the inferiority of the
people.
Oleg Atbashian, in his May 23rd
FrontPage article, "Inside
Every Liberal Is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out," a companion
article to Daniel Greenfield's, also notes the empathetic symbiosis between
secular statism and Islamic statism:
Progressive
Chauvinism is marked by a strong belief in the divine right of their kind to
hold all key positions in society for society’s own sake, forcing the “lessers”
to comply with superior progressive ways. Believing that their condescension
and pity towards the lower beings are a sign of benevolence and compassion,
they ignite with righteous anger whenever those ingrates dare be displeased
with their enlightened dominion.
The
chauvinist attitude, of course, is not limited to the left, but it is
characteristic of any expansionist totalitarian ideology throughout history. A
force that rivals Progressive Chauvinism in today’s world is Islamic
Supremacism – also known to its victims as the “religion of peace.” The
attitude is almost identical: in the book of Islamic Supremacism the meaning of
peace is the absence of opposition to Islam.
Islamic
Supremacists similarly dream of an ideal, egalitarian society of the future – a
global caliphate that will govern over a peaceful world populated by a Muslim
majority, while the remaining non-believers would be too intimidated to oppose
their Muslim superiors and prefer to pay the jizya – a special Muslim tax on
non-believers, or “protection money”- as a condition that they be left in
peace.
There is no such thing as
"moderate" socialism or Progressivism, either. "Moderate"
Progressives are otherwise known as Republicans, who cannot but steadily give
ground to the advancing, uncompromising, dyed-in-their-premises Progressives. These
watered-down Progressives must yield ground to their more militant and
consistent cousins because they cannot think of a single fundamental reason to
hold it.
Young John
F. Kennedy, touring Germany before WWII, expressed an admiration for the
Nazi régime. Remember that "Nazi" was shorthand for "National
Socialist." The Daily Mail reported on a new book coming out that details
JFK's penchant for things totalitarian:
'Fascism?' wrote the youthful president-to-be in
one. 'The right thing for Germany.' In another; 'What are the evils of fascism
compared to communism?' And on August 21, 1937 - two years before the war that
would claim 50 million lives broke out - he wrote: 'The Germans really are too
good - therefore people have ganged up on them to protect themselves.'
And in a line which seems directly plugged into
the racial superiority line plugged by the Third Reich he wrote after
travelling through the Rhineland: 'The Nordic races certainly seem to be
superior to the Romans.'
The future president's praise is now embarrassing
in hindsight - a few years later he fought in World War Two against the Nazis
and his elder brother Lt. Joseph Patrick 'Joe' Kennedy, Jr. was killed.
And when he became President, JFK formally introduced Fascism, or National Socialism, into the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson, his successor in office, pulled an Otto von Bismarck on the country, and introduced the full-scale welfare state.
Clare Lopez, in her May 24th
Gatestone Institute article, "The New, Improved
Axis of Jihad," ends her discussion of how the various jihadist and
supremacist organizations have reformed for a more aggressive and organized offensive
against the West:
Reportedly,
more than 2,000 targets "including
public places, government buildings and military installations"
already have been selected and cased. Separate but parallel reporting indicates
that the "go" order may already have been transmitted from Tehran to
the al-Qa'eda and Hizballah cells inside the U.S., placing them essentially on
autopilot status. Of course, all of Kahlili's published warnings have been
passed in full detail to U.S. security agencies, but the threat from this Axis
of Jihad remains critical and poses a serious threat to America's homeland
security.
Effective
measures from America's national security leadership are urgently needed. Those
measures must begin with an honest acknowledgement of the precepts and
objectives of the enemy threat —that is, as they are derived from the doctrine,
law, and scriptures of Islam—and should include a comprehensive strategic
counterjihad plan as complete as the Axis of Jihad's plan.
The "honest
acknowledgement" Lopez refers to is an acknowledgement that Islam is an
ideology whose doctrine, laws, and scriptures are as antithetical to freedom -
and indeed to life - as were the doctrines, laws, and precepts of Nazism and
Communism. But politically correct mindsets in government have not only
emasculated any effective measures against the Islamic onslaught, but also have
emboldened the killers. States that sponsor terrorism must be ended, and that
includes Iran and Saudi Arabia. Until then, Americans and Westerners will be at
the mercy of their killers.
Islamic "culture"
is root and branch antithetical to freedom. It requires submission not only of
one's physical body, but of one's mind. Secular totalitarians who have bothered
to examine the character and tenets of Islam see this and appreciate it. One
could say that our wannabe overseers are so jealous of the totalitarian nature of
Islam that they wish it well, and are eager to ally itself with a system that
ultimately must eradicate them, too, along with non-believers, recalcitrant
infidels, and apostates.
It is a jealousy sired by envy,
as well, of the thoroughness with which Islam converts individuals into obedient,
selfless serfs in mind and body, something which liberal/left/Progressives have
found difficult to achieve in their best Marxist and fascist indoctrination and
propaganda efforts.
Hmmm. With this trajectory, we probably do not need to worry much about global population or climate issues... In such a future, freedom minded people, should they live, would be the terrorists of the totalitarians.
ReplyDeleteOscar
Ed Cline can always be counted on to provide an elucidating analysis on any given topic he chooses to tackle. This time, like Paul Revere, he warns of the enemy within. Let’s hope his hail is finally heard loud and clear or else America was we know it, will not last much longer. We will become like England, France, and Sweden, under siege by Muslims but lacking the moral courage to defend itself.
ReplyDeleteEd, I just came across this quote in "The Devil We Don't Know," by ex-Moslem Nonie Darwish. I'm sure you will appreciate it.
ReplyDelete"The fundamental tenets of Islam are built on the submission of all Muslims, especially women. It is thus impossible to give women and even men their human rights without discrediting Islam itself or leaving a watered-down version of the religion and stripping it of its tenets of sharia, jihad, and an ambition to rule the world. To do that will end Islam, and Muslims know it." (p. 149)
Grant: Thanks for the quotation. I'm sure Nonie Darwish would like to read Islam's Reign of Terror, especially the philosphical aspects of it.
ReplyDelete