Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 10
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9
The Soviet Union is no more. Its principal inheritor, Russia, is not the big player it once was. Restoring Russia’s lost grandeur by propping up tacky dictators on its borders against the Soviet populations Russia has itself shed, is a far cry from what the KGB had accomplished with far-flung populations. The American Left gave every indication of being ripe for the taking already eleven months before the USSR collapsed, during and in the aftermath of the First Gulf War (January – February 1991), when, although no national anti-war movement emerged, American intellectuals both decried the war and vilified the United States, on the one hand, and lamented the lack of a national anti-war movement, on the other. Twelve years later, by March 2003, when the Second Gulf War broke out, the demoralised American Left could be and was mobilised against their own country and against their own interests. Note that this was a mere eighteen months after 11 September 2001, the second Al-Qaida attack on the World Trade Center. Its first attack on that same target had been on 23 February 1993, and a mere eighteen months after the seemingly self-consuming American nation was left unclaimed by the death of its primary subverter and hence first claimant, the USSR.
In short, for Islam, the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan gave jihad the boost that would carry it to 9/11, while the end of the Soviet Union itself mobilised jihad to claim the United States, a nation the KGB had orphaned from history and its own people had disowned. American ideologues and businessmen toasted the triumph of the free market over Communism, and failed to notice the ground slipping from under their feet.
If you are able to comprehend the mind that Yuri Bezmenov and his KGB comrades so successfully created in their victims, then you are well on your way to understanding the mind of the Muslim, a necessary condition for jihad, for what the KGB did to their target nations, every madrassa does to every child in their charge, only so much better and so much faster. The madrassas do not demoralise children, for there is as yet nothing to destroy, except potential.
By drawing attention to the terrorist act, they [Western observers] remove it from context, history, and etiology. They not only lose sight of the mind holding the weapon, but they ignore the mind moving the minds: “the mind of jihad.”
Of course, such a tactic applied to Islam serves to obscure evil and thus protect Islam. It is a tactic we've seen applied differently before, to obscure good and thus protect the British Empire at its worst, in the Australian penal colony:
One of the things that we’re starting to understand, is that convict Australia was much, much more political than we thought in the past. The whole way that the convict system was organised, …was designed to atomise the workers, [so] that you couldn't see collective action. …Their punishments were recorded on their own individual charge sheets. It's only in a computer age when we extract the contents of each individual charge sheet and start to line them up, start to line up the dates on which the offences occurred, that we see how many gang strikes there were, how many times that convicts refused to eat their rations, down their tools, ran away en mass. There was an intense, day-to-day political reaction against convict transportation.
"Transportation" was a euphemism for banishment. A reassessment of the established "Australia as a nation of convicts" narrative is underway, so much so that a history is emerging of a land settled not by wrongdoers, but by people done wrong. We do not need to bear the fantasy of Islam being a "religion of peace" for 180 years. In a computer age we can extract the contents of each individual charge sheet and line them up, line up the dates on which the offences occurred, so we see how many jihad mass murders there are, how many Muslim gang rapes of barely pubescent girls, how much zakat goes to terrorists, just how deep, how extensive and how comprehensive the jihad system is. There is an intense, day-to-day sedition against the state of freedom.
The one totalitarianism that actually does seek to destroy all life on earth, and strains every fibre of its being to that end, is the one that the demoralised, i.e., the Left in the West insists is a “religion of peace”, and they do all they can to protect its votaries against “Islamophobia”. Capitulation to Islam is a preserve upon which facts and reality shall not encroach. This inversion of reality and its pressing into service as the framework from which to hang all perception, is nothing other than faith. It wears different clothes to the faith that posits supernatural gods, but faith it is nonetheless. A full-blown secular religion, multiculturalism, is constructed upon it, complete with dogmas and blasphemies, high priests and heretics, and of course, ostracism. Reason and facts are as anathema to multiculturalism as they are to any faith. It is an all-consuming religion, "a complete way of life," hard at work “decolonising” the past, the present, the future, language and the mind. It is totalitarian, and in its "woke" version, fascist. George Orwell describes this phenomenon in Nineteen Eighty-four.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day-by-day and minute-by-minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
The past of Islam is one drenched in blood, misery and backwardness. Its ages were only as golden as the loot is could steal. Prior to colonialism, every people within striking distance of an Islamic emirate or caliphate knew that Muslims launched jihad warfare against their non-Muslim neighbours every year. To be deluded about this is to soon be dead. They were in constant danger of having their cities laid waste, their womenfolk raped, their women and children enslaved, their caravans robbed, their ships pirated, their treasure stolen and their lands scorched.
Colonialism and the US marines put and end to this barbaric scourge that had plagued the world for centuries. In the intervening two hundred years, Islam's would-be victims have forgotten what Islam is, how Muslims regard them and what they have in store for them. Just because Muslims were prevented from launching jihad does not mean that the jihad imperative has ceased. Through the centuries it has waxed and waned with the interplay of contingencies, but it has never gone away. Islam has not changed, because nothing changes in Islam, ever.
Muslims, through their premier fascist organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, have been pursuing an increasingly deadly charm offensive that has grown bolder and more brazen over the century since its formation, taking full advantage of ground that had been prepared by its industrialised totalitarian ally-rival, Nazi Germany, for the latter’s own subversive purposes, in the same way as it boosted its jihad against Israel on the back of the Soviet creation of the Palestinians for that fascist state's own cold-war purposes. The Muslim Brotherhood could gain sympathy for Muslims on the back of decolonisation, the US Civil Rights Movement and significant American antipathy towards their own society in response to the Vietnam War, e.g., the idea that “Islam is the religion of the black man,” and the not insignificant conversion of descendants of black slaves to Islam, the only active practitioner and promoter of slavery today.
Muslims resumed their jihad warfare on non-Muslims from early in the twentieth century, when their beloved caliphate ceased to exist, especially in India, and intensified their efforts in the Middle East encouraged by the accomplishments of Weimar Germany, boosted to fever pitch by Nazism, and finally driven into a frenzy by the re-establishment of Israel on territory conquered from the defeated Ottoman Empire. By the time the noble savage had evolved in the minds of the Western intelligentsia into the colonial peoples, and, particular to our interest here, the Arabs, and later, specifically Muslims, the intelligentsia found themselves in a deep moral crisis. The writing of Islam’s now-forgotten past came to masquerade as moderateness, even reasonableness, in the Western Left’s scramble for moral cover in the face the carnage of jihad terrorism. Their Muslim protégés had gone on killing sprees that were certainly savage, but far from noble.
When Islam resumed its reason d’être of subjugating the entire world to Shari’a through jihad until “all religion is for Allah,” the Western defenders of “the oppressed” immediately set about putting clear blue water between “Muslims”, Third World victims of Western imperialism and oppression, and those monstrous people who give Muslims a bad name and drag their wonderfully exotic religion into ill repute. A typical example is this kind of thinking is Melanie Phillips, who manages to turn Islam's recent past on its head:
To a large extent, it ["Arab Zionism"] is the result of a revolt against the religious extremism that the Arabs themselves exported to the rest of the Islamic world.
This extremism developed after World War I. When world leaders carved up the Middle East following that war and the related collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab Muslims originally supported the return of the Jews to their ancestral home in Palestine.
In 1918, Sherif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic Holy Places in Arabia, referred to the Jewish people as Palestine’s “original sons” returning to their “sacred and beloved homeland.”
This support, however, was transformed into murderous enmity by the rise of Islamism—extremist political Islam. This arose in the early years of the last century as another result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which had hitherto held political Islam in check.
The godfather of Islamism was the Egyptian Sayed Qutb, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who drew with fanatical literal-mindedness upon Islamic religious texts and their theological enmity towards the Jews. In his 1950 diatribe Our Struggle With the Jews, Qutb declared that the Jews were the adversary of God, conspiring to penetrate governments all over the world to “perpetuate their evil designs” including a plan to take control of all the “wealth of mankind.”
According to the scholar of Islam Robert Wistrich, Qutb’s invective turned anti-Semitism into the marker of Islamist movements. Throughout mainstream Muslim society, it made the Jews into a metaphor for Western domination, immorality and a threat to the integrity of Islam.
Islamism was imported by the British into Mandate Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s in the person of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. His virulent anti-Semitism merged Islamic theological enmity towards the Jews with Nazi racial Jew-hatred.
Now, however, ...the Gulf states are turning away from Islamism as a losers’ charter.
Islamists view modernity as the lethal enemy of Islam and believe that behind modernity are the Jews.
Hers is part of an unseemly process of semantic acrobatics to protect the fantasy of Islam from the reality of Islam and the fantasy of Muslims from the reality of Muslims. Some of the underlined in the above passage is historically wrong, e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood was not founded by Sayyid Qutb, but by Hassan al-Banna, Tariq Ramadan's grandfather, in 1928, when Qutb was twenty-two. Other underlined texts are deliberately misleading, such as, "Islamists view modernity as the lethal enemy of Islam and believe that behind modernity are the Jews." This is a repackaging of Hassan al-Banna's comment in a 1948 interview with John Roy Carlson, in which he said:
We aim to smash modernism in government and society. In Palestine our first duty as Moslems is to crush Zionism, which is Jewish modernism. It is our patriotic duty. The Koran commands it.
Phillips cannot tell her readers that the comment is from the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, for that would contradict the earlier placing of the implausibly young Sayyid Qutb in that role. She also cannot link the comment to the Qur'an, as al-Banna clearly does, because to do so would undermine the "Islamism" thesis. The Qur'an is not an "Islamist" text; it is an Islamic one. Those who revere it are Muslims, not "Islamists". She would also be in danger of exposing that the only people peddling the "Islamism" thesis are those who wish to obscure the nature of Islam.
This is the last thing the Muslim Brotherhood want. Anyone who might suggest such a thing to the fascist organisation would find themselves in very serious trouble. Besides, it is precisely the Muslim Brotherhood taking power in Egypt under Mohamed Morsi that woke up ordinary Egyptian Muslims, as opposed to "Islamists", to the horror that is their religion, Islam, horrors an entire Western cadre would separate off as "Islamism," to protect the fantasy that people like these ordinary Egyptians are Muslims, and those who engage in jihad mass murder are not Muslims, but "Islamists".