Individualism, Islam and the Leftist Insurrection
By William A. Mayer
What the left and radical Islam have in common is a clear intention to subvert traditional Western civilization.
Whereas Islam seeks a violent external overthrow as opposed to the left which has now taken the back door approach – both philosophies seek to impose a theocracy - the former seeking to impose one modeled on a rigid anti-Christian 10th century model while the latter a more modern but still anti-Christian one based upon its own religion of secular humanism and moral relativism.
As divergent as they appear at first blush, they really only differ in means. – one openly violent and almost studiously unthinking, the other cold, calculating and internally subversive.
At their heart both are anti-individualistic, and this recognition is very important because it is individualism that is the greatest enemy of a coercive state.
Capitalism is individualism expressed economically, providing a flow of goods and services based upon enlightened self-interest.
The crusade by the left against individualism takes many forms but in the current climate it is most readily observed being caught in the act of substituting group rights for individual rights.
It seeks, for example, to remove the specific individual right to keep and bear firearms in lieu of a supposedly overriding group right – in this case a specious one based upon deliberate misinformation – that sees its security diminished in proportion to the number of privately held legal firearms.
If one looks deeper, it is actually a mechanism whereby individualism is subordinated to ideas that are, by their very nature, destructive to personal liberty and freedom.
It used to be said that the freedom to swing your fist ended where the other fellow’s nose began, but it has progressed far past that now antique notion.
The freedom to even consider using marginally offensive language against protected groups – let alone actually swinging a fist - now falls within the purview of thought crime, wherein the state of ones mind regarding the status of another becomes paramount, often aggravating the matter involved to felonious proportion.
As an example, on Tuesday Dec 3, Pennsylvania Governor Mark Schweiker signed a bill that gives homosexuals statewide legal protection from "verbal harassment" and many critics feel the legislation could be used to gag church leaders who have the temerity to quote passages from the Bible dealing with homosexuality
The ultimate goal of the left is to eventually erect a coercive socialist state - and since it became clear, at least since the purges of Stalin, that the so-called workers of the world were in no mood to voluntarily embrace totalitarianism - a less frontal, more cerebral assaultive method has been concocted.
What needs to be understood is that the left has intentionally and deliberately declared and fomented the culture war, modeled upon an outline set forth by Antonio Gramsci, a little known but highly influential radical Italian communist [radical to the extent that he was to the left of Trotsky] because he realized that Western culture - so heavily infiltrated by Judeo-Christian ideas - would never allow Marxism to flower voluntarily, despite their having declared solidarity with the proletariat.
Gramsci realized that undermining and replacing the culture was paramount in furtherance of the socialist agenda.
That Gramsci has such marginal recognition outside the Marxist intellectual class belies the power of his ideas within the community that directly has put them into action and since the second world war the Communist Party of Italy has been feverishly translating Gramsci into 30 different languages, content that exposure would fertilize the withering seeds of their ideology.
“Today, there exists only one form of revolutionary solidarity: to win. It therefore demands of us that we should not neglect any single element that might put us in a condition to win…This [proletarian] revolution also presupposes the formation of a new set of standards, a new psychology, new ways of feeling, thinking and living that must be specific to the working class, that must be created by it, that will become 'dominant' when the working class becomes the dominant class.”
Gramsci called the power of culture to influence and shape action, hegemony. He reasoned that because this is a product of the collective whole it was at that level that societal attitudes needed to be dealt with in order to effect the changes that they desired - seeking to - block by block - create a culture more supportive of a utopian state.
The promotion of the hip-hop generation/Hollywood pop ethos - bereft of Judeo-Christian ethical considerations - is merely the latest and most successful effort that the left has rolled out towards that end.
What Gramsci correctly observed to be the motive force behind the process of changing the direction of society - manipulation of the symbols and motifs - has been employed since the sixties under the banner of “marching through the institutions.”
The targets are obvious, the law and judiciary, education, religion, the permanent governmental bureaucracy, the non-profit foundation apparatus and of course the media.
In some large measure they have been successful with this Trojan Horse approach, having won the first round because of the blind sided nature of the attack - but their penetration though reasonably wide is in reality quite shallow and extremely geographically biased towards both coasts, which just happen to be the primary media centers - drawing similarly minded individuals like rotting carrion draws scavengers.
Conservatives have a natural disadvantage in this fight in that they tend to resist the cadre mentality so prevalent among the left but you can see some real progress and inroads have most assuredly been made.
Probably the clearest example of this was demonstrated on November 5. The fact that a “minority” president was able to marshal his forces in such a manner as to now control both Houses of Congress as well as the executive branch is historic by contemporary political standards.
911 was huge psychically in bringing this about. It forced the polity to soberly plumb the depths of moral depravity created by a half century of increasingly socialistic anti-individualism. A bitter medicine yes, but far less injurious than the disease for which it is prescribed.
From united governance will come judicial appointments that hew much more closely to strict constructionism than at any time in the recent past, a very good thing.
If Bush can manage to retain this and even build on his thin but real majority in two years there will be a real opportunity to repopulate the bureaucracy in places like the Department of State which now serves as a hidey hole for Clintonistas who have been forced to ground.
As for the think tanks, the 501c3 charitable trusts and the rest of their ilk, the future is less encouraging. As we have written here oft times in the past, grand old institutions like the Rockefeller, Ford and Mott foundations have been literally captured by the collectivists and are being used to fuel further conflict along the cultural fault lines and nothing on the horizon seems to loom large in reversing this trend.
On the media side we have three huge victories, the rise of conservative talk radio – the importance of which is validated nearly daily with shrill attacks and calls for outright censorship coming from the Democrat leadership – the ascension of Fox News whose slightly right alignment drives latter day Bolsheviks crazy and the cottage industry which we here at PipeBombNews participate in, conservative/libertarian cyber communities empowering and giving voice to those who live in “flyover” country.
This trinity will serve as a pathway for similarly constituted enterprises, fostering an hegemony which can more strongly support limited government and liberty.
The churches are a sore point in the extreme and a breeding ground for lunatic excursions into xenophobia, social deviance and the like – the sight of South Korea Catholic priests blindly conducting an anti-American fasting spectacle just this week, the homosexual infiltration into the very corpus of the Church of Rome and the feel-good “modernism” of much of Protestantism give much pause for concern, as does the increasing liberalism of much of American Jewry.
Catholicism seems to have hit rock bottom ethically with a rebound towards traditionalism possibly the only direction to go. Absent anything of similar proportion forcing re-assessment, the Protestant church seems to be content dancing down the descending primrose path.
Fortunately the devout laity – the bedrock upon which organized religion is built – has successfully struggled to maintain a perspective far more conservative than what would be suggested by merely assessing the views of the governing hierarchies.
So, whither individualism?
As noted above, without creating a supportive counter zeitgeist - to employ Mr. Gore’s lapse into arcane German social science nomenclature - a real leftwing culture cannot exist.
Taking into account the cumulative effect of having a near 5,000-year head start with regards to an established ethical framework based upon Mosaic law, combined with the eye opening madness of the Twin Tower attack, it may be a long time before we ever again reach the nadir that coincided with the Clinton presidency.
We are by no means out of the woods and our progress so far may turn out to by fleeting but the dimension of the forest is now known and demarked and our victories are real and hopefully sustainable.