The Knife and the Pony
I was puzzling and pondering about the alliance between the Left and the Jihad. Having exhausting any historical cause or psychological cause, I conclude the cause is spiritual.
The inspiration of the imps in Hell, consumed with their wretched hatred of mankind, are the only thing sufficient to explain how Leftists can (for example) at once claim to support the rights of women, and bring the terror and majesty o the law to bear against writers (including, namely, Mark Steyn) for talking about honor-killings and female genital mutilation.
Tom Simon, one of the most intelligent writers it has ever been by pleasure to read, recently wrote in the comments here on the topic of this alliance:
I’m sure the match was made in Hell, but there is, unfortunately, a pseudo-rational basis for the unholy alliance. It is an outgrowth of Marxist thinking, though most of the people who subscribe to it don’t know that and have no idea they are practising Marxists, because of the stupid modern habit of jumping into an argument in the middle without any attempt to find out what axioms it is based upon.
Put as shortly as possible: All property is theft; therefore those who have no property are the victims of theft. Muslim countries are poor, therefore they are victims of those who are rich.
In slightly greater psychological detail: Discrimination (to the Modern Leftist) is the ultimate sin. All cultures, all behaviours, all plans and courses of action, all people and all nations, are inherently equal. Therefore, no matter what anybody does, they ought always to get equal results. This does not happen. Therefore, there must be some swindle going on — in some unseen way (‘systemic’ is the usual word), those who succeed are taking away success from those who fail. To you and me, who look at facts and evidence and reason, it is obvious that a man who works twelve hours a day at productive employment will do better than the man who spends those twelve hours drinking whisky. But to the Modern Leftist, there is a priori no reason to prefer work to whisky; therefore the man who works is robbing the drunkard.
Therefore, the Modern Leftist is committed always and everywhere to favour those who fail over those who succeed. It is a five-year-old’s view of reality, if five-year-olds were susceptible to paranoia and capable of advancing complicated conspiracy theories. If somebody has a pony, he took it away from somebody else, and that should be my pony, and I want my pony, I want my pony, I want my pony! The fact that ponies come from somewhere, and not everybody automatically has one, does not impinge upon these people’s consciousness. It cannot, because that knowledge contradicts the doctrine of equal results and is therefore thoughtcrime. The idea that actions have consequences, the idea of cause and effect, the idea that ponies are in limited supply and you have to do some particular thing to get one — these ideas are anathema; they are Kryptonite to the Modern Leftist mind, and they will contort their thoughts into the most idiotic forms rather than admit these things.
As I said, I have no doubt that the ultimate inspiration of this disease is diabolical in nature; but the vector is all too human. What is unutterably sad is that human beings are taught to operate their minds (I will not say ‘think’) in this way. Modern public education consists of little else; and it is chiefly through public education that the Gramscian ‘long march’ through the institutions to ultimate power has come to bear fruit.
My comment:
Bravo. Mr Simon, like everything of yours I have read, your words are lucid and brilliant. I cherish, for example, the sentence “What is unutterably sad is that human beings are taught to operate their minds (I will not say ‘think’) in this way.”
And yet my intellect is not satisfied with your explanation, because it does not explain the central mystery.
The central mystery is that if Marxists and Political Correctoids (as we might call those Leftists who adopt Marxist ideas and attitudes without knowing their sources) were motivated simply by envy, by wanting a pony (or, in this case, wanting a rainbow-powered hovercraft unicorn) their reason would tell them to adhere to the party promising them a unicorn, and to eschew the party not promising them a unicorn, but promising to behead them.
So it makes a sort of fatuous sense for a Political Correctoid to vote for a demagogue promising to despoil the rich and distribute wealth from the bottomless coffers of the state. The coffers are bottomless because money comes from nowhere without cause and effect. That is the way things work in Cloudcuckooland: economists say “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” and the Correctoid replies, “If we clap our hands hard enough, Tinkerbell will give us all free lunches!”
So the Correctoid adopts an attitude of unreality. (Even the phrase ‘political correctness’ is a reference to the difference between factual correctness, i.e. reality, and political correctness, i.e. make-believe.)
The Correctoid brings an excessive gullibility to bear on any demagogue who pretends that the laws of economics are optional, or, worse, are a conspiracy system. The prime moral commandment of the Correctoid system is a mutual agreement not to disturb the mutual deception, the game of play-pretend, as the demagogue and his victims, who also his enablers, mutually reinforce the mutual hallucination that they will not one day have to pay, either in gold or in blood, the bill when it comes due.
But I do not see how this fits in with the Correctoid lust and longing for torture and death at the hands of theocratic misogynistic sadist barbarians.
The Jihad is not offering the spoiled brats of the Left a unicorn, or a pony. They are offering everything the Left says they hate and fear from the Catholic Church: that is, the Jihad is anti-abortion, anti-homosexual, anti-women, strictly patriarchal, severely puritanical, abhorrently bloodthirsty, fanatically intolerant.
In short, the Jihad is the Leftist caricature of bigoted fascist rightwingism sprung to life. Everything the Left says they hate in me exists in reality in the Jihad, or more so.
So the conversation goes like this:
Left: ‘I want a pony!’
Right: ‘Left, you may have a pony, if you earn it.’
Jihad: ‘Left, I want to saw your head off with a blunt knife while singing the praises of Allah, after forcing you watch me sodomize your children and raping the headless body of your wife. Death to the Left! Death to the Great Satan!’
Left (in reply): ‘Three cheers for the Jihad! They are the good guys! Send human shield to protect them at the expense of our own lives! Grant them the protection of civilian courts! The Right is to blame for all the evils in the world! WE LOVE YOU JIHAD!’
You see? Even with your explanation, which I uphold and believe to be the truth, it is not a sufficient truth. It still just makes no sense.
Now, you might say that the Left is unaware of the Jihadist excesses, and does not know what they stand for, or what they believe, or how they act, or what the history of the West since circa AD 700 has been, or since circa AD 1930. And all that is true. A careful and well-practiced and nuanced ignorance and willful blindness, a bold unwillingness to confront, or even to be aware of, any fact, no matter how painfully obvious, is the hallmark and leitmotif of the Left.
They are justly proud of an ability to play play-pretend so hard, with their eyes squeezed so tightly shut, that not a single droplet of reality, howsoever tiny, can enter the rigid enclosure of their hermetically-sealed brains. They inflict the fate of Winston Smith upon themselves voluntarily, and love Big Brother with their immense talent at doublethink and groupthink in full play.
But this merely puts the question at one remove. If the Left are unaware that Islam is a religion bent on violent world dominion, violent suppression of women, violent extermination of the Jews, and violent annihilation of every human right and freedom the Left claims to cherish, why does the Left go to such marathonic and moronic efforts to become and to remain unaware?
The vastness of the propaganda machinery, the billions of dollars involved, the cooperation from Hollywood, from Academia, from Human Rights Commissions and lawyers and public opinion makers is simply staggering to contemplate.
So, no. The Left are surely ignorant of the truth, but it is a deliberate ignorance, bought at great costs and sustained with an astonishing discipline of effort over a long period. Why? What is the point of so much effort?
We know that the Left is suicidal. They wish the destruction of the civilization that sustains them, or, at least, they work for the destruction while claiming to work for the foundation of a utopia. This has always been their motive and their method. Leftists regret not having had been aborted; they look forward to being euthanized, preferably by being left to starve, Schiavo-style, slowly to death by indifferent nurses in their helpless old age, dying while crying for water.
But this goes beyond mere suicide. The Jihad wants to destroy the Leftist ideals, their minds, their souls, everything for which they stand.
What puzzles me, and what is not answered to my satisfaction is the question of why such efforts are being made by the Left to support an enemy of civilization even more hostile to the Left and to the announced goals of the Left than the sadistic, racist Nazis and the vicious, totalitarian Soviets?
Stalin indeed might have rewarded some of the useful idiots in the West who served his purposes, had he been successful. The Mullahs intend to inflict humiliation, torment, and death upon the useful idiots.
So why are they making themselves so useful? Why are they so idiotic?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
