The only thing wrong with both Islam and the Left is everything.
Hey, I like this young H.L Mencken cove. The Padre Padrone so to speak, of two of my favourite people: P.J O'Rourke and Mark Steyn. The naturally radical and control freak moral vanity left and the naturally nihilistic and apocalyptic Islam, are now in a mutual rubby dubby session of each other's ideological totalitarian willies. For perverts who base their entire pathology on criminal perversion and junk from Hell uber-lies and completely imposing it on everyone else, it's only natural!
Via frontpagemag, United in Hate: The Lefts romance with tyranny and terror. Jamie Glazov.
“In a recent blog, I described how a courageous modern “traditional liberal” politician, Geert Wilders, aptly warns of the dangers posed by the ancient, but living totalitarianism of Islam, an entirely unreformed, and unrepentant religio-political system.
Why does the Left—from the more vociferous, to the (outwardly) sober—openly embrace, or rationalize, or at very best ignore and fail to condemn—the totalitarian scourge of contemporary jihadism, and all its accompanying “sacralized” Islamic ugliness: genocidal hatred of non-Muslims, Muslim “apostate” freethinkers, and women?
Almost immediately after Bolshevism emerged as an important political ideology, with real power, Bertrand Russell understood its similarity to Islam. He made the following comparison between Islam and Bolshevism in his 1920, “Theory and Practice of Bolshevism”:
Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam.
Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind not unlike the early successors of Muhammad.
Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of the world.
Three decades later, sociologist Jules Monnerot’s “Sociology and Psychology of Communism” (first published in French in 1949) opened with a chapter describing Communism as, “The Twentieth-century Islam.” Monnerot noted that like its religious antecedent, Islam, “Communism takes the field both as a secular religion and as a universal State.[emphasis in the original]” He concludes the comparison by observing this merging of religion and politics was a major characteristic of the Islamic world in its victorious period.
It allowed the head of a State to operate beyond his own frontiers in the capacity of commander of the faithful (Amir-al-muminin); and in this way a Caliph was able to count upon docile instruments, or captive souls, wherever there were men who recognized his authority.
The territorial frontiers which seemed to remove some of his subjects from his jurisdiction were nothing more than material obstacles; armed force might compel him to feign respect for the frontier, but propaganda and subterranean warfare could continue no less actively beyond it.
Religions of this kind acknowledge no frontiers. Soviet Russia is merely the geographical center from which communist influence radiates; it is an ‘Islam’ on the march, and it regards its frontiers at any given moment...
[I]t is not the first empire in which the temporal and public power goes hand in hand with a shadowy power which works outside its imperial frontiers to undermine the social structure of neighboring States. The Islamic East affords several examples of a like duality and duplicity. The Egyptian Fatimids, and later the Persian Safavids, were the animators from the heart of their own States, of an active and organizing legend, an historical myth, calculated to make fanatics and obtain their total devotion, designed to create in neighboring States an underworld of ruthless gangsters.
The eponymous ancestor of the Safavids was a saint from whom they magically derived the religious authority in whose name they operated. They were Shi’is of Arabian origin, and the militant order they founded was dedicated to propaganda and ‘nucleation’ throughout the whole of Persia and Asia Minor.
It recruited ‘militants’ and ‘adherents’ and ‘sympathizers’. These were the Sufis. As rulers their sympathies were recognized by other sovereigns in the same way that Stalin, head of the State, is recognized by other heads of States, and rightly, as the leader of world communism.”
Jamie Glazov’s trenchant, timely analysis United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror, elucidates how the contemporary Left—self-professed torch-bearers of “humanitarianism”—is so afflicted with moral and intellectual idiocy that it promotes, via activism, or apologetics—the genocidal aspirations of totalitarian Islam.
Glazov reminds us of Eric Hoffer’s seminal observations from “The True Believer,” contrasting those persons who possess “...a sense of fulfillment [and] think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is...,” with “...the frustrated [who] favor radical change.” Unfortunately, as Hoffer noted, the true believer’s desire for “radical change” is characteristically founded upon the nihilistic craving to “...be rid of an unwanted self...,” creating destructive mass movements which “...satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”
Hoffer’s paradigm is deftly expanded upon by Glazov to explain the contemporary phenomenon of Leftist support for jihadists and jihadism:
In rejecting his own society, the believer spurns the values of democracy and individual freedom, which are anathema to him, since he has miserably failed to cope with both the challenges they pose and the possibilities they offer. Tortured by his personal alienation, which is accompanied by feelings of self-loathing, the believer craves a fairy-tale world where no individuality exists, and where human estrangement is thus impossible. The believer fantasizes about how his own individuality and self will be submerged within the collective whole.
…As history tragically recorded, this “holy cause” follows a road that leads not to an earthly paradise, but rather to an earthly hell in all of its manifestations. The political faith rejects the basic reality of the human condition—that human beings are flawed and driven by self-interest—and rests on the erroneous assumption that humanity is malleable and can be shaped into a more perfect form.
"H.L Mencken vs the Red Menace.
In 1909, H.L. Mencken and Robert Rives La Monte exchanged a series of letters, which comprised a debate on socialism. The following year, they published the correspondence in a book called Men Vs. the Man: A Correspondence Between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist. Mencken explained that his own philosophy rested on "a firm belief in the beneficence and permanence of the evolutionary process."
As a confirmed social Darwinist, Mencken believed in progress, but not the man-made variety favored by La Monte. For Mencken, progress was "a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets ahead, in other words, by discarding the theory of today for the fact of tomorrow."
Mencken was not yet 30 in 1909, but he clung to social Darwinism for the rest of his life. He died in 1956; socialism lingered on until 1989, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. But these days, with laissez-faire capitalism once again under fire, latter-day La Montes are rooting for socialism to rise from its grave. So it seems timely to exhume Mencken's century-old critique. Below are several selections from Men Vs. the Man. (As Mencken liked to point out, life is unfair, so we are leaving out La Monte's side of the debate. The full text of the book can be read online.)
My Dear La Monte:
I am no apologist for the existing order of things. Like [Thomas] Huxley, I believe that the management of the universe is by no means perfect, but such as it is, we must accept it. If you point out that human progress, as I have defined it, involves the practical enslavement of two-thirds of the human race, my answer is that I can't help it. If you point out that a slave always runs the risk of being oppressed by a particularly cruel master, I answer that a master always runs the risk of having his brains knocked out by a particularly enterprising slave. If you point out that, by my scheme of progress, it is only the upper stratum that actually progresses, I answer that only the upper stratum is capable of progressing unaided.
The mob is inert and moves ahead only when it is dragged or driven. It clings to its delusions with a pertinacity that is appalling. A geological epoch is required to rid it of a single error, and it is so helpless and cowardly that every fresh boon it receives, every lift upon its slow journey upward, must come to it as a free gift from its betters--as a gift not only free, but also forced. Great men have fought and died for the truth for a thousand years, and yet the average low-caste white man of today, throughout Christendom, still believes that Friday is an unlucky day, still believes that ghosts walk the earth, and still holds to an immovable faith in signs, portents, resurrections, redemptions, miracles, prophecies, hells, gehennas and political panaceas.
The efficient man of higher caste makes it his rule to accept the world as he finds it and to work out his own salvation with a light heart. His joy is in effort, in work, in progress. A difficulty overcome, a riddle solved, an enemy vanquished, a fact proved, an error destroyed--in such things he finds the meaning of life and surcease from its sorrows. But the inefficient man, unable by his own hand and brain to cope with the conditions which beset and menace him, seeks refuge, soon or late, in the notion that the world is out of joint. Sometimes he concludes, finally, that the horrors of existence are irremediable, and then he is ripe for religion, with its promises of repayment in some gaseous paradise beyond the grave.
At other times he arrives at the idea that all would be well if there were some abysmal reconstruction of the scheme of things--some new deal of the cards, with four aces pushed his way. When this madness falls upon him he gropes about for a ready guide to the Utopia that arises nebulously in his brain. And thus it is that discontented, ignorant, helpless men subscribe to the poetical fancies of imaginative dreamers, and become single-taxers, Christian Scientists, Anarchists or Socialists.
The great objections to socialism, as a philosophy, are that it encourages and aggravates the feeling of martyrdom which burns in the breasts of all such incompetents, and that it inflames them, at the same time, with the idea that their discomfort is due, not to the operation of natural laws, which benefit the world by ridding it automatically and harshly of the unfit, but to the deliberate and devilish cruelty of their betters. Your true socialist is convinced, before everything else, that his personal existence is of vast and undoubted value to the world, and that the world, if it were not a swindling felon, would reward him handsomely for remaining alive.”
Via forbes com:
“Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was a newspaper pundit, literary critic, magazine editor and agent provocateur. He first rose to prominence as a Progressive Era dissenter who ridiculed the very notion of uplift as laughably naive. What ailed America, he announced, was "the lack of a body of sophisticated and civilized public opinion, independent of plutocratic or government control and superior to the infantile philosophies of the mob--a body of opinion showing the eager curiosity, the educated skepticism and the hospitality to ideas of a true aristocracy."
But neither Hitchens nor any other current pundit can truly fill Mencken's shoes, because none espouse the Sage's gleeful brand of social Darwinism, which animated almost everything he wrote. These days, anyone admitting to such mean-spirited views is relegated to marginal publications. Was Mencken's extreme elitism a pose, something he exaggerated for effect? Not according to Terry Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and author of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken.
"Mencken was every bit as heartless as he made out," Teachout said, via e-mail. "Not on an individual level--he was capable of great personal kindness--but everything that he wrote in Notes on Democracy should be taken seriously as an expression of how he thought the world worked. Another way to put it is that he believed that politics existed in order to block the otherwise inevitable operation of social Darwinism. For that reason, he didn't have any serious expectation that his ideas would ever be adopted in America: He knew that elitism has no appeal in a democracy."
"It's important to keep in mind, though, that Mencken was the furthest thing from a practical political thinker," Teachout added. "He was essentially a literary artist who played with ideas. This doesn't mean that he wasn't serious about those ideas, but it would never have occurred to him to think through how they might be made to work in the real world. That wasn't what he understood to be his job--he was a critic, period."
"I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men.
Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776 and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government and even to civilization itself--that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating."
“It is a typical "Dilbert" strip. The boss announces, "Our CEO has voluntarily slashed his pay from $6 million per year to $4 million. In a written statement, he said he wants to 'share the pain.' Do you feel better now?" A downtrodden intern replies, "I make my underpants from sandwich bags."
But that's office life, is it not? Bosses make obscene sums of money, while downtrodden cubicle slaves toil almost without reward. It might seem insane, but economists have a surprise for us: The insanity reflects nothing more than cool economic logic. There is method in the madness.
The ugly truth is that your boss is probably overpaid--and it's for your benefit, not his. Why? It might be because he isn't being paid for the work he does but, rather, to inspire you. In other words, we work our socks off in underpaying jobs in the hope that one day we'll win the rat race and become overpaid fat cats ourselves. Economists call this "tournament theory."
After all, managers find it hard to spot an excellent performance. It is a rare job where workers can be fairly paid according to some objective criteria.”
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