The Religion Barrier

[Soldier4Christ]

 Compare Weimar culture to our current American cultural coarseness, excesses, and the overwhelmingly prevalent vulgarities on television, on CD, on radio, in films, in music, in computer games, in books, in classrooms, and expressed daily by the legion incivilities and lack of manners among citizens at large.  They are indistinguishable in principle.  Look how many “good” Americans long to escape from the presence of these “selfish excesses.”  The protestors of these “selfish excesses,” in large measure, come from the so-called “Red States,” i.e., people who compare favorably to the “good Germans” described by Dr. Peikoff.

 

        In this context, “selfish excesses” cause people to long for unselfishness and self-sacrifice as a moral alternative and ideal, often seen in religion.  However, today’s self-sacrificial ethics comes not predominantly from religion, but from Kant.  Kant picked up the principle from Augustine and his ilk.  Writes Dr. Peikoff:  “Kant is the first philosopher of self-sacrifice to advance this ethics as a matter of philosophical principle, explicit, self-conscious, uncompromised—essentially uncontradicted by any remnants of the Greek, pro-self viewpoint.”  (78)

 

        This morality of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany walks the streets of contemporary America and lives in many households:

 

“A man is morally the property of others—of those others it is his duty to serve—argue Fichte, Hegel, and the rest, explicitly or by implication.  As such, a man has no moral right to refuse to make the requisite sacrifices for others.  If he attempts it, he is depriving men of what is properly theirs, he is violating men’s rights, their right to his service—and it is, therefore, an assertion of morality if others intervene forcibly and compel him to fulfill his obligations.  ‘Social justice’ in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil.  Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships.  (The religious advocates of self-sacrifice accept the same viewpoint, but name God, not the group, as the entity whose wishes must be enforced.)”  (91)

 

Kant’s ethics destroyed individuality and the human sense of worth, his sense of self-esteem.  When Kant dispensed with reason, he reduced man to the level of a savage.  When he enshrined the ethics of self-sacrifice, he produced a savage who could now be ruled.  Man had become the equivalent, via Kant, of the “good Muslim.”  This is why there is such a sense of alliance between Nazism and Islam.  With reason and ego gone, blind force was all that was left.

 

 

~~~~~

EXPOSING AMERICA'S FIFTH COLUMN:

NAZISM, COMMUNISM, ISLAM

Part II

(Click here to reach Part I of this article.)

Converting an Entire Culture

 

        What is so frightening is knowing exactly how America is being Nazified and watching it move closer, inch-by-inch, with so few people either sufficiently aware of the process or even giving a damn, perhaps feeling secure in the notion that “It can’t happen here.”  Others actively push us to the left, seeking to destroy America and take us over.

 

Here is how it was done in Germany:

 

          “Wherever the German turned—to the left, to the right, to the center; to the decorous voices in parliament or to the gutters running with blood—he heard the same fundamental ideas.  They were the same in politics, the same in ethics, the same in epistemology.

        “This is how philosophy shapes the destiny of nations.  If there is no dissent in regard to basic principles among a country’s leading philosophic minds, theirs are the principles that come in time to govern every social and political group in the land.  Owing to other factors, the groups may proliferate and may contend fiercely over variants, applications, strategy; but they do not contend over essentials.  In such a case, the country is offered an abundance of choices—among equivalents competing to push it to the same final outcome.

        “It is common for observers to criticize the “disunity” of Weimar Germany, which, it is said, prevented the anti-Nazi groups from dealing effectively with the threat posed by Hitler.  In fact, the Germans were united, and this precisely was their curse:  their kind of unity, their unity on all the things that count in history, i.e., on all the ideas.”  (160)

 

Role of Education

 

       Of all of the ominous parallels, the most dangerous comes from education.  “Progressive education” almost single-handedly took down Germany, just as it is taking down America.

 

Remember that the progressive education of America came from John Dewey, one of the founders of the profoundly destructive American philosophy of Pragmatism.  Most people say “pragmatism” and think this means something good, such as being practical; however, its meaning is very different and very much worse than that.  Dewey came from Kantian and Hegelian intellectual roots.  In the following quotation, do not be thrown off the Nazi ideology by the name of the school, the “Karl Marx elementary school”; recall that almost every form of socialism is interchangeable in terms of fundamental ideas with any other form, regardless of name:

 

        “In the most famous Progressive institution of the Weimar era,…, the group (the child’s peers) became the arbiter not only of freedom but also of morality and truth.  Objective standards of performance were dropped.  ‘The judgment of the group is the standard by which the work and conduct of the individual is measured.’  As to any nonconformists in attendance, they soon discovered how much “peaceful tolerance” they could expect from their classmates.  In the Karl Marx school, notes [a writer], ‘anything but radical socialism among the pupils was for several years punished by the other pupils with violence and boycott.’

        “The socialists’ plan for undercutting the educational establishment was to replace one set of Hegelian disciples by another:  to fight brutal, mind-deadening authoritarianism a la Bismarck by means of gentle, mind-deadening subjectivism a la Dewey; to fight elitist romanticism by means of ‘democratic’ anti-intellectualism; to eradicate passionate collectivism (of a nationalist variety) by instilling in the children passionate collectivism (of a socialist variety).”  (171)

 

Does this make you think of American education today?  It should.

       

Consider these also when thinking of education.

 

    * “The harbingers of the era to come were the university students.”  (218)
    * “The Weimar students practiced everything they had learned.  Believing that objectivity is impossible, they did not try to reason about political questions.”  (224)  Did you hear even one Kerry supporter able to articulate any reason for his support for Kerry?  I heard nothing but some vaguely defined FEELINGS.
    * “Committed to action based on feeling, they responded to disagreement by unstopping their fury.”  (224)  Bush-supporting students have been mobbed and beaten, and their signs, displays, and materials have recently been literally destroyed by the unholy alliance on several campuses.  Leftists have linked arms with Muslims in pursuit of the same nihilistic ends.

 

        Weimar university students, almost all of whom were pro-Hitler, disrupted university classrooms, intimidated professors and students, and brawled openly.  The universities ceased to be centers of learning during the Weimar years because of their students.  As for the teachers, they were in fundamental agreement with the student thugs.  They and the administrations defended the students.  They took the low roads of political correctness and moral relativism.  Does this not sound familiar to American campuses?  Even by 1922, one German writer acknowledged, the German youth were “saturated with hatred.”  (225)

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Hatred Prevails

 

        When the abandonment of reason leapt from the ideologically corrupt German schools and universities to dominate the culture, guess what prevailed?  Emotionality.  And, what was the dominant emotion?  HATE.  Think of present day America as you read this:

 

“The poor hated the rich, the rich hated ‘the rabble,’ the left hated the ‘bourgeoisie,’ the right hated the foreigners, the traditionalists hated the new, and the young hated everything, the adults, the Allies, the West, the Jews, the cities, the ‘system’.”  (188)

 

Theirs became, just as ours is becoming, a culture of HATRED.  The name that describes their culture, and now ours, is “nihilism.”

 

Does the following seem familiar to you if you think of current American culture?  “The essence and impelling premise of the nihilist-modern is the quest for destruction, the destruction of all values, of values as such, and of the mind.  It is a destruction he seeks for the sake of destruction, not as a means, but as an end.  This is what underlies, generates, and defines ‘Weimar culture’.”  (207)

 

        Stop right here and let this sink in.  Think of the 2004 election campaign and its aftermath in America.  Think of how all of those on the Left, almost exclusively in the Democrat Party, used psychological projection to scream incessantly at the Right, constantly accusing the Right of exhibiting extreme hate.  Yet the Left, in their statements, in their behaviors, and in their writings, from nihilists on campus, to the journalistic media, to the Senate of the United States, are the ones who actually spew hatred, then and now.  Post-election, none of this has gone away; it has only paused--to catch its breath.

 

        Nihilism is so ubiquitous that it cannot be avoided.  While writing this, I saw a clip on television news of a well-known, though mediocre, female pop singer accusing President Bush, Republicans, and Americans in the Red States of being “Nazis.”  We hear the same all the time from the Left even though the election was settled decisively and fairly.  Talk about psychological projection!

 

        Think here of one other very important parallel regarding nihilism.  Think of Islam, Muslims, and jihadists.  Islam is pure nihilism and hatred.  Think of how jihadis and Leftists have been working overtime to make our culture look just like their nihilistic souls.

 

        “It took over a century for the ideas of the Kantian axis to be implanted in the German mind.  It took fourteen years for Hitler, relying on this preparation, to rise to the position of Chancellor.  It took six months for the new Chancellor to transform the country into a totalitarian state.”  (229)  The take-home point here is that America is almost out of time to prevent a similar disaster.

 

The German Intellectual Plague Comes to America

 

        How did the ideas of Weimar Germany come to America?  They came long before the birth of the Weimar Republic.

 

        Kantian ideas had been leaking into America as early as the time of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  They were meeting little opposition.  Why?  America’s founders were philosophically sophisticated, but they were not philosophers.  Instead of leaving a good, systematic set of philosophical principles for America to use, they left the end products of good principles, best represented by our Constitution.  What we needed was and is a full, explicit, basic philosophy that makes an America, creates its Declaration of Independence, and makes the Constitution of the United States possible.

 

        The critical mass came after the Civil War when German philosophy was imported almost wholesale into America.  With the rising prosperity of industrial America, families sent their youth to Germany for “finishing” for a year or so.  The youth in turn brought German philosophy back to America.  They became professors and intellectuals who created more like themselves, a process of intellectual cloning.  Indeed, they had been “finished off” very well.

 

These new intellectuals developed a sense of fundamental guilt about the nature of America and spread it around.  Their European ideas led them to conclude that America was morally wrong and must be reformed.  Rights, capitalism, and of course, the individual came under ceaseless attack.  These were post-Kantian, post-Hegelian “true believers” who adopted collectivism and self-sacrifice as moral imperatives.  Marxism was part of this German philosophical porridge.

 

        America’s defenders were tongue-tied.  They had never had a complete philosophic foundation to begin with.  They were no match for the true believers in German philosophy, especially Kant’s complete system.  The philosophical defenders of capitalism, such as they were (Bentham, Mills, Spencer), utterly destroyed any possible rational defense of capitalism, thereby hastening capitalism’s demise by making “capitalism” a dirty word, instead of the only truly virtuous system on the planet.

 

        Altruism originally came to us from Augustine and Aquinas via both the Catholic and Protestant churches, and it was refined in the 19th century by the French philosopher Auguste Comte.  From there, it made its way into common German culture where it predominated.  Altruism had long been a part of cultures everywhere.  Post-Kantians turned it into a crusade.

 

Transforming American Culture

 

        American universities developed Pragmatism as a philosophy, and Pragmatism enjoyed a destructive heyday from the latter quarter of the 19th century into the early 20th century.  Although not an ideological force for many years, pragmatism has dominated American politics and education for many decades, right down to the present.

 

“Progressives” arose as a movement late in the 19th century.  They embodied an amalgam of German philosophy, altruism, and Pragmatism.  So called “progressives” today melt in “moral” joy just thinking of all the so-called “reforms” of the late 19th century into World War I, including the bogus anti-trust movement (which has almost destroyed American business), the Food and Drug Administration, and a whole host of other so-called “reforms.”  They even elected their own “modern liberal” president, Teddy Roosevelt, who converted America to an imperial state and whose modern liberal cousin, FDR, converted America into a welfare state.

 

        The first of those to experience “progressive education” in the 1920s and 1930s matured to become the USSR-worshippers of the 1930s and 1940s, and the parents of the “goon generation” of the 1960s, the so-called “radicals.”  These 1960s radical nihilists now dominate the universities, deforming students and cranking out insipid primary and secondary “teachers.”  In addition, they clone themselves intellectually to keep the universities populated with their ideological fellows.

 

        This is how and why America reversed direction.

 

Opposition?

 

        Did anyone oppose these modern liberals?  The conservatives say they did, but they were and are pathetically ineffective.  They implicitly accepted the fundamental principles motivating the so-called “reformers,” particularly the ethics of self-sacrifice.  That made them philosophically impotent to oppose the rise of statism.  They retreated into faith as their defense and abandoned reason, which was their sole means for mounting an opposition.  As a result, modern liberals have had their way for decades, coming ever closer to the full, logical implementation of their ideas, with no intellectual opposition.

 

        With the collapse of socialism as an ideal and as a “cause” by mid-20th century, modern liberals’ ideas still did not go away.  They simply morphed from a moral crusade for communism and socialism into ever deepening nihilism, by passive drift and default, dragging the country down with them.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Deforming the Great American Subconscious

 

The great danger of the persistence of the American Weimar culture is that it progressively deforms the American character over time.  The longer it goes on, the more it strangles the residual good American character (the “great American subconscious”), which is its total opposite.  It has already drastically degraded America.  The only apparent “opposition” comes from so-called “neoconservatives” who just want their own version of big government and big statism, or old time conservatives who long for a theocracy.  Thus, collectivized unreason on the Left opposes collectivized unreason on the Right.  Now, adding to the mix are the Muslims with their virulent totalitarian, Nazi-like Islamic philosophy which tries to pass itself off as some benign religion by means of its well-known tactic of deception called taqiyya.

 

The 20th century philosophers of the West reached the complete logical terminus of Kantianism.  Philosophy completely disintegrated into schools of trivia and babble on the one hand and the total nihilism of existentialism on the other.  Philosophy made itself extinct as a functional academic discipline.  Today, our culture reflects the state of 20th century philosophy with its roots extending back across two centuries to Immanuel Kant.

 

    Intellectually bankrupt philosophy’s progeny are, however, living and well in America and Europe.  They are university professors and administrators, the elementary and high school establishment and unions, the print and broadcast journalistic media, entertainment media, and most politicians and bureaucrats.  They feed the populace cultural slop every minute of every day.  They are deforming America into their evil image.  After all, they have been fully “Nazified.”

 

Never forget that about half of American voters voted in the November 2000 and 2004 elections for Al Gore and John Kerry respectively.  Both are perfect Pragmatists and Leftists.  For half of us, America is almost out of time.

 

    David Horowitz reminds us that it was the “neocomms” who infused the culture with the “race card.”  Now, “racism,” to hear the Left tell it, is everywhere, in everything, dominating the entire nation and culture.  Racism enters every public discussion, and Muslims exploit this with great enthusiasm.  They work the intellectually corrupt Left and the morally uncertain middle and Right the way a skilled organist plays the Wurlitzer.  As a result, Islam is gaining the toehold in the culture that communism did in the 1930s.  Lawmakers and courts uphold those who charge racism, particularly Muslims, and always do so at the expense of American citizens.

 

While preparing this paper, I witnessed one of the worst examples of raw racism I have seen.  President Bush nominated his National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice to become the next Secretary of State of the United States of America, to succeed Colin Powell.  Both are black.  Ms Rice rose from the deeply segregated southern United States to become a concert pianist, a provost at a large California university, and National Security Advisor—because of her native intelligence and its determined rational application.  The American Left, who have pompously arrogated to itself the repository of concern for all matters racial over the past few decades, have attacked her as a big-lipped, stupid and ignorant, pick-a-ninny, even in political cartoons.  Have the Democrats and the rest of the Left condemned these overtly racial attacks?  Nothing has come from the self-important Congressional Black Caucus.  Nothing has come from the National Association of Colored People, although its former president properly condemned these attacks.  Nothing has come from the self-appointed but truly alleged black leaders.  The largely white Left journalistic media have been silent as have all of the Left senators who profess “brother-love.”  Through their silence, they assent.  All actively or passively seek to tear down Ms Rice in a flurry of hatred—because she is good.  That is nihilism.

 

    For the record, racism as any sort of government enforced policy has long been dead in America.  Power-lusters try to keep it alive by intimidating the morally uncertain, of which there are far too many.

 

“Political correctness,” multiculturalism, “social justice,” ubiquitous “racism,” hate, and the like were started by the Left, and their acceptance by the populace serve as excellent measures of cultural deformation.  Sadly, these ideas have percolated down to the level of the hamburger flipper and the “homeless.”  Schools at all levels have become paralyzed, and court and police functions are not far behind.

 

What astonishes me is that although Ominous Parallels was published in 1982, it is as fresh as if it had been published yesterday.  Unholy Alliance was published in 2004 and will be read for years.  Both books belong on your shelf and in your minds.

 

They tell you how your country is being taken from you.

 

It Can Be Stopped, Reversed, Even Cured

 

There is a permanent cure.

 

Getting to the correction of our drift as American Weimar into American Nazism, Leonard Peikoff states:

 

“What fundamental truths did the Nazis and the American collectivists and all their sources in the history of philosophy struggle to evade and annihilate?  The answer is contained in two concepts, with everything they include, lead to, and presuppose:  reason and egoism.  These two, properly understood and accepted, are the immovable barrier to any attempt to establish totalitarian rule.

“Reason destroys fear; egoism destroys guilt.  More precisely:  reason does not permit man to feel metaphysically helpless; egoism does not permit man to accept unearned guilt or to regard himself as a sacrificial animal.”  (302)

 

Dr. Peikoff identifies Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, as the antidote; she is the first completely systematic philosopher since Kant, and only the fourth in human history.  Hers is the only fully defined system of philosophy advocating reason and egoism, the only weapons effective against totalitarianism, including the foul pre-totalitarian Weimar-style culture and Islam, and the only ideas effective for a free society.

 

If you want that antidote, start with Ayn Rand’s tour de force philosophical novel, Atlas Shrugged, and Leonard Peikoff’s, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

 

If you want to oppose and defeat American Weimar; if you want America out of American Weimar; and if you want to defeat this terrible Fifth Column, this unholy alliance that is destroying you, your loved ones, your future, and your country, then go to the antidote and follow the words of Alexander Pope:

 

“A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.”

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

DECONSTRUCTING THE FIFTH COLUMN LEFT

 

REVIEW:  Explaining Postmodernism:

Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

By Professor Stephen R. C. Hicks[1], Scholargy Publishing, Tempe, 2004;

ISBN:  1-59247-642-2

         

          Postmodernism, and its favorite process called “deconstruction,” runs rife throughout contemporary culture, but much more visibly in academia.  It is the major impetus for the nihilistic atmosphere in contemporary culture.  These are the people working the “unholy alliance” with jihadists against America.

Nothing provides a taste for something like a living, breathing example.  A history student at UCLA provided an arch-typical example in Front Page Magazine, 17 February 2005.  Describing his history professor, Mary Corey, the student said, in part:

What I found in Corey, however, was a woman completely untouched by objectivity, or the desire to achieve it.  In her first lecture, she said, “If you think I’m going to be neutral, I’m not going to be.”  And in keeping with her testimony, Corey spent the next ten weeks giving a socialist rendition of history, with no regard for the many other sides of the account.

Her bottom-line version of recent American history was some cocktail of male hegemony, racism, class systems, and the vast right-wing Republican conspiracy.  Early in the quarter, she went on a rant against capitalism and the market system, which she defined as “the weird faith that everything will work out fine.”  “Capitalism isn’t a lie on purpose.  It’s just a lie,” she lectured us, “It’s easy for us to look back and say these people [who believe in markets] (sic) are dorks.”  And for the climax, “[Capitalists] (sic) are swine…They’re bastard people.”

The elements of postmodernism can be found in this student’s account, if you know what to look for.

          Were this some obscure academic’s discontents, we might disregard the student’s account.  However, this professor is not alone, and she “teaches” our young.  People of her philosophy dominate America’s universities and colleges, both on the faculty and in the administrations.  Tenure protects these soul-destroying “teachers.”  The recent kerfuffle about the University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill exposed another glaring example.  From these postmodernism-stuffed teachers, destructive thinking infects every discipline in our universities and colleges, including the “teachers colleges.”  From there, the toxicity percolates through the elementary and high schools.

          Their influence extends deep into contemporary culture.  For example, have you wondered about questions like these?

    * Why are so many professors and universities so profoundly anti-American?
    * Where did “political correctness” and multiculturalism come from?
    * Why is there so much negativism, including anti-Americanism, in journalism?
    * Why are modern liberals the way they are?
    * What happened to America’s founding principles?
    * Is there any hope for the future of our country and Western civilization?

After reading Dr. Hicks’ book twice—and both readings were utterly fascinating—I found answers to some and the route to answers for the rest.  Cultural corruption became more understandable than it ever had been to me.  Few books create intellectual excitement, but this one does.  Its contributions are so important that I have added it to two others to complete a triad of highly recommended books for those who want to understand the toxicity of contemporary culture and what to do about it.  The other two books are:  (1) Leonard Peikoff’s, Ominous Parallels and (2) David Horowitz’s, Unholy Alliance:  Radical Islam and the American Left, books reviewed on this site.  Two of these writers are professional philosophers, and the other is a professional writer who abandoned his Leftism decades ago to expose it.

 

Setting the Context

 

History is philosophy teaching by example.  (Lord Bolingbroke)

 

To understand postmodernism, it is necessary to do as Dr. Hicks does, begin with the philosophical revolution which caused postmodernism.  Happily, Dr. Hicks makes the central philosophical ideas of very difficult-to-understand philosophers easy to follow.  Readers should consult his book for details.

The history of the West is the history of the status of reason.  [Reason is the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses, using processes of inductive and deductive logic.]

If you think philosophy is dull, impractical, and irrelevant, Dr. Hicks will disabuse you of these notions.  You cannot digest this book and not open your eyes to a crystal clear view of much of current culture; you cannot still think that philosophy (or ideas, if you will) is not personally relevant to you and the lives of everyone you know.

Dr. Hicks begins with the Enlightenment which spanned most of the 17th century and all of the 18th century and gave birth to the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, science and technology, and America, the monument to Enlightenment ideas.  The Enlightenment raised reason to cultural dominance, a prominence not seen since Aristotle.  As reason spread, faith receded in cultural influence and importance.  The Enlightenment had been ignited by the Renaissance, which had been ignited by the rediscovery of the works of Aristotle, which unleashed reason into Western civilization.  Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and John Locke (1632-1704) were among the most powerful of a large number of Enlightenment intellectuals.

The advocates of reason found themselves unable to think their way out of philosophical criticisms of their opposing and seemingly irreconcilable positions:  (1) Knowledge from external sense data only (empiricists) versus (2) knowledge from only the internal mind (rationalism).  Anti-reason forces began interpreting this apparent breech as representing chinks in the armor of the defenders of reason, and providing an opportunity to re-enthrone Faith (acceptance of a belief in the absence of evidence or proof).  The opportunity took form within Europe in the latter half of the 18th century and became known as the Counter-Enlightenment movement.

In France, Jean Jacques Rousseau attacked reason, civilization, rights, and freedom.  He hated the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, and his writings inspired the worst phase of the French Revolution (the third, “guillotine” phase, 1793-4), it should be noted.  Rousseau, reminiscent of Islam, advocated putting non-conformers to faith and the state to death.  Rousseau’s notions of freedom and living the proper life pre-date the amusing anti-concepts of Orwell’s 1984, and it could have been Rousseau who inspired the inscription over the Auschwitz gate, Arbeit Macht Frei [Work makes you free], although almost any German philosopher could also be credited.

Rousseau strongly inspired the single most important philosophical figure of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, Immanuel Kant.  Except for Rousseau, the Counter-Enlightenment came solely from German philosophy of the latter 18th century and all of the 19th century.  Kant’s role cannot be overstated.  His philosophy lives today in the hand-me-down philosophies of the 20th century to the present, including postmodernism.  Note, however, that contemporary philosophers cannot think their way out of Kant and his descendants.  That fact exposes a huge chink, and a very real one, in their intellectual armor and augurs well for the future.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Both Rousseau and Kant wanted to destroy reason in order to make room for feelings; Kant specifically wanted to restore faith (an emotional belief in a God, for which there is no evidence).  Kant launched a completely irrational set of ideas which he cleverly clothed with the appearance of rationality.  German intellectuals, who had never been warm to Enlightenment ideas, bought Kant hook, line, and sinker.  Kant gratified their deepest anti-Enlightenment feelings and wishes.

Kant stated (but never proved) that one cannot know real reality through reason.  Reality, he said, can be known only highly indirectly by faith.  Reason can know only the world it creates in the human mind.  In short, reason, or mind, subjectively creates the phenomena that we seem to be aware of, but this is not reality, according to Kant.  Our minds make it all up, whole cloth.  Truth becomes what we agree to as being “true” (collective subjectivism)—you have heard it often in the form of something like, “20 million Frenchmen cannot be wrong.”  In short, what we “know,” is not real; what is “real,” we cannot know.  Kant destroyed reason to make room for emotions, whims, desires, wishes, and, of course, faith.  He did this because he wanted to believe.  From Kant to the present, this primacy of emotions dominates philosophy.  Kant came along at just the right time to provide just the rationale the anti-Enlightenment intellectuals needed; he gave them a weapon as well as an excuse.  Since no one on the other, pro-reason side fought back, in time the anti-reason crowd won out among intellectuals.

Kant begat Hegel, who got rid of reason to make room for a universe made up of contradictions, all in conflict, all striving to achieve oneness with God (the Absolute); Hegel and Kant begat Marx.  Schopenhauer enshrined a basal emotion he called "Will," "...a deeply irrational and conflictual Will, striving always and blindly toward nothing"  (Hicks page 54, 55).  Nietzsche enshrined power over men.  They changed thinking in the intellectuals who, in turn, changed the thinking of their populations.  Thus, they paved the way for Communism, Nazism, and all forms of socialism in the 20th century.  Just as Islam makes Muslims want Islam and jihad, these Counter-Enlightenment philosophers made people want Hitler, Stalin, and collectivism.  These same ideas gave birth to postmodernism many decades later, which explains why the thinking of so many of today’s intellectuals so closely resembles that of Islam, Hitler, and Stalin.

This toxic German philosophy began trickling into America starting as early as 1810.  By mid-century, young adults journeyed from America to Germany for intellectual and cultural “finishing” (pun intended).  They returned stuffed with Counter-Enlightenment philosophy.  In America as in Europe, there was no organized pro-reason philosophy to counter these toxic ideas.  The influence of Enlightenment ideas had been incorporated into the powerful dynamism of the Industrial Revolution in America; as it gathered steam, its progress slowed the growth of the influence of German philosophy until the end of the 19th century.  By then, and subsequently, German philosophy had gathered enough influence to dominate American philosophy.  For example, the American philosophy known as “Pragmatism” is fundamentally rehashed Kant and Hegel.  It died as a philosophical movement in the 20th century, but it survives in almost “pure culture” in today’s politicians.

The Counter-Enlightenment philosophical fundamentals had a political-social-economic child born of them, named “socialism.”  All Counter-Enlightenment thinking extolled some form of the “group” or “social aggregate” (the collective) in preference to the individual.  Kant extolled the human specie over the human being himself.  Hegel enshrined the State.  Marx enshrined the Masses.  Herder enshrined the Volk, while others enshrined religion.  In all cases in their thinking, the collective was always more important than the individual.  The role of the individual was reversed from that of the autonomous man in Enlightenment thinking to becoming a servant of the group, or state, or whatever social aggregate of whatever sort.  All Counter-Enlightenment thinking fully accepted the only ethics which could make socialism possible, namely altruism—the self-sacrifice of the individual in service to the collective.  “Altruism” came from a socialist 19th century philosopher, Auguste Comte.

Kant’s intellectual offspring marched through the 19th century and deep into the 20th century.  Like evil “Johnny Appleseeds,” they sowed destructive seeds of a metaphysics that replaced reality with an unknowable, preposterously imaginary “unreality,” which could be changed at will by the consciousnesses of people.  It replaced the objectivity of reason, which deals with matters of knowledge, with completely subjective, arbitrary, intuition which has no relationship with reality.  Knowledge, they believed, cannot exist.  Wishes and whim took the place of what reality is.  In place of rights and rational individualism, they extolled either religious or secular versions of anti-individualism and self-sacrificial service to the collective.  All of them united in hatred of capitalism.  They all wanted socialism instead.  Socialism was, and still is, their ideal.

When you rid yourself of reality and reason, you soon run out of the ability to think, as well as anything to think about seriously.  That happened to academic philosophy in the first 50 years of the 20th century.  It trivialized itself.  It got rid of the kind of thinking that began with philosophy in Ancient Greece.  As a result, nihilism took over—the hatred of values and those who hold values, and the wish for “everything to become nothing.”  Germany stepped up to the plate once more to provide the perfect philosopher:  Martin Heidegger.  It is hard to understand how such absurdity could actually become a philosophy that was taken seriously, but Heidegger found the way, and he set the stage for postmodernism.  His audiences wanted to believe him.

What finally tipped intellectuals over into postmodernism was the crisis of socialism.  Despite every prediction from Marx and similarly minded anti-capitalists, capitalism thrived, and more and more people, from the highest to the lowest socio-economic levels, benefited.  Capitalism (“a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned,” courtesy Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal) and individual freedom went hand-in-hand.  Their successes utterly frustrated and befuddled the intellectuals.  One of their last great hopes for the realization of socialism was the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Capitalism did not die; it came back better than ever.  Then National Socialism (Nazism) also totally failed, as did all other forms of fascism (fascism is a variety of socialism).  By the end of World War II, the U.S.S.R. was a social and economic basket case, and even the “red lovers” could not escape that truth.  At no time did the intellectuals ever question their own premises about socialism.  They wanted it, and that was enough.  When Stalin’s atrocities became public in the late 1950s, the Soviet Union died as an intellectual ideal, some 30 years before it died existentially.  It was unavoidable fact:  Socialism had failed everywhere it had been tried, without exception.  The closest they ever came to explaining the failure of socialism, and you hear this even today, is that socialism had never been properly implemented; it was the fault of the “socialists,” not socialism.

Did the intellectuals abandon socialism as their ideal?  Hardly.  They continued to worship it as postmodernists.  They did something inconceivable to rational men.  Since their original philosophy had failed to support socialism, they changed their philosophy so that the new one would support socialism (“Postmodernism is a result of using skeptical epistemology to justify the personal leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism,” Hicks, page 181).  You have to be totally divorced from reality and have no respect for reason to be so shamelessly arbitrary.  It is like watching the Super Bowl and changing the rules after the game has ended so that your team wins instead of losing.

Why would they do such a thing?  Oswald Spengler, a darling of the 20th century collectivists, nailed it:  “Socialism means power, power, and more power.”  (Hicks, p 128; emphasis mine)


cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

So then, what is postmodernism?


The leading philosophers of the postmodernism movement should be mentioned for completeness.  Three are French (Michel Foucault; Jacques Derrida; and Jean Francois Lyotard), and the other is American (Richard Rorty).  Dr. Hicks provides particulars, if anyone wants to know more about them.

Understanding any intellectual movement requires a specific type of analysis, and postmodernism is no different.  Dr. Hicks first provides the following preamble:

      Any intellectual movement is defined by its fundamental philosophical premises.  These premises state what it takes to be real, what it is to be human, what is valuable, and how knowledge is acquired.  That is, any intellectual movement has a metaphysics, a conception of human nature and values, and an epistemology.  (Hicks, pages 5,6)

He then explains postmodernism this way:

·         Metaphysics:  Postmodernism is anti-realist, meaning no one can speak meaningfully about an independently existing reality.  Postmodernism substitutes language for reality (“social-linguistic constructions”).

·         Epistemology:  Postmodernism states that reason or “any other method” cannot acquire objective knowledge of reality.  Subjective creations of consciousness must become accepted by others as knowledge.

·         Human Nature:  Postmodernism claims that individual identities come from “social-linguistic” groups, varying according to the influences of sex, race, ethnicity, etc.

·         Ethics and Politics:  Postmodernism holds that all of society is a seething cauldron of groups in conflict.  Postmodern ethics and politics require identification with and sympathy for these groups, which are perceived to be oppressed in the conflicts.  Because of all of the conflict, the only solution is the use of physical force by these oppressed groups:  homosexuals, women, blacks, those of other races, non-white males, Muslims, American Indians, liberals, the aged, children, the “poor,” etc.

All of postmodernism amounts to nothing but elaborations of arbitrariness, driven by feelings.  It contrasts with “modernism,” by which Dr. Hicks means reality, reason, human autonomy, individualism, and “liberal capitalism.”  These are the values of the Enlightenment and “neo-Enlightenment.”  Unfortunately, elements of these ideas exist largely in fragmented form today.

With postmodernism, language does not connect with reality.  Language is entirely a subjective tool, used to accomplish specific goals.  “…  [T]o most postmodernists, language is primarily a weapon.”  (Hicks, page 178, emphasis mine).

Postmodernists are not original.  The irrational seldom are.  Postmodernists are rewarmed Sophists from Ancient Greece of 2400 years ago:  “…  [W]ill and desire rule [over reason], society is a battle of competing wills, words are merely tools in the power struggle for dominance, and all is fair in love and war.”  (Hicks, pages 182, 183).

“Postmodernism is … first a political movement.”  (Hicks, page 186)  At root, it carries the spirit and influence of Marxism.  “ …  [E]verything is relative … nothing can be known … everything is chaos.”  (Hicks, page 189)  “ …  ltimately nothing matters.”  (192)  “Nihilism is close to the surface in the postmodern intellectual movement in a historically unprecedented way.”  (192)  Hatred for America and Americans unites postmodernists with jihadists, locking them together by their desire to destroy the West, America, and capitalism.  Every time we see news reports of anarchists (WTO, Seattle, 1999; Inauguration, 2005, and many, many other examples) destroying, attacking, and burning down research laboratories (E.L.F.), we see postmodernism in action.  To see who these are, consult David Horowitz’s new website, DiscoverTheNetwork (http://www.discoverthenetwork.com/).

Postmodernists revere Nietzsche, who wrote the soul and emotions of the postmodernist.  The Left feel weak compared to the capitalists, a combination of self-loathing and envy, which leads to their need to lash out destructively.  However, since they are weak, they mostly use words as weapons.  (Emphasis mine)  Hatred and nihilism define their chronic state.  “Everything is … gotcha2.”  (Hicks, page 1970).

Postmodernists use “deconstruction” as their favorite buzz-word.  “Deconstruction has the effect of leveling all meaning and value …” and “I cannot be special unless I destroy your achievement first.”  (Hicks, page 199).  Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello used words as weapons to destroy the relationship between Othello and Desdemona.  Postmodernism invented political correctness and multiculturalism, two of its most successful tools against their morally uncertain opposition.  When you hear radio talk show hosts say that the only news “good” to the Left is that which is bad for the rest of us, you are hearing the truth about postmodernist nihilism.  Says Dr. Hicks (page 200):

    The contemporary Enlightenment world prides itself on its commitment to equality and justice, its open-mindedness, its making opportunity available to all, and its achievements in science and technology.  The Enlightenment world is proud, confident, and knows it is the wave of the future.  This is unbearable to someone who is totally invested in an opposed and failed outlook.  That pride is what such a person wants to destroy.  The best target to attack is the Enlightenment’s sense of its own moral worth.  Attack it as sexist and racist, intolerably dogmatic, and cruelly exploitative.  Undermine its confidence in its reason, its science and technology.  The words do not even have to be true or consistent to do the necessary damage.

    And like Iago, postmodernism does not have to get the girl in the end.  Destroying Othello is enough.

          The art of today, whether in painting or the other formal esthetic disciplines, or throughout the entire entertainment industry of music and movies, has become a paean to postmodernism.  Rap music and movies devoid of plot but full of gratuitous violence and impulsivity reflect the influence of postmodernism.  None of us can afford to take postmodernism lightly.

            My complaints with this marvelous book by Dr. Hicks are few.  I wish he had been much more liberal with definitions.  He assumes common knowledge about terms whose definitions are unknown or unclear to most people, such as “reason,” or terms commonly used so loosely in the culture that one wonders exactly which of several possibilities the author meant, such as “liberalism” and “collectivism of the right” versus the left.  Some undefined terms tax the reader here and there when trying to figure out which meanings lead the author to some conclusions.

          Another complaint is how the book ends.  Dr. Hicks would have made his points clearer by citing myriad cultural examples to illustrate the tenets of postmodernism.  And, after what seemed like a perfunctory two paragraph summary conclusion, he abruptly ends the book, which left me wondering where the rest of the book may be obtained.

          Finally, Dr. Hicks incompletely addresses the future of contemporary philosophy and the neo-Enlightenment ideas which serve as postmodernism’s antidote.  He is currently writing about postmodernism and the arts; perhaps these and future works will take Explaining Postmodernism the full distance.  He is a talented thinker and writer, and is well worth reading.

          At the beginning of this essay-review, we raised a few questions:

·          Why are so many professors and universities so profoundly anti-American?

·          Where did “political correctness” and multiculturalism come from?

·          Why is there so much negativism, including anti-Americanism, in journalism?

·          Why are modern liberals the way they are?

·          What happened to America’s founding principles?

·          Is there any hope for the future of our country and Western civilization?


cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Explaining Postmodernism either answers, or makes it possible to answer, these and many others.  Certainly this reviewer looks forward to taking on some of these contemporary “conundrums,” now better armed by Dr. Hicks’ book.

          We have a long way to go to return reason to its proper role in human lives.  Such ideas take time to percolate into a culture and to effect change.  At least we have a full, reality-based, pro-reason, pro-individualism and rights, and pro-capitalism philosophy to use (Objectivism) and philosophers trained in it taking positions in universities.  This philosophy answers Kant, et al, resoundingly.

We must not flag, however, in our own efforts right here and now while waiting for new ideas to take hold throughout the culture.  We can use our own individual reason today and tomorrow to fully to set examples and to effect change.

One of the easiest ways for us to be effective is to begin the purge of the institutions of higher education and the teachers colleges of the postmodernists.  As alumni, we can exercise enormous influence over an alma mater.  Look what alumni and donors did to Hamilton College which wanted to host Ward Churchill.  Those successful enough to be big donors can do even more.  We can terminate the tenure process so that professors must demonstrate positive reasons for them to retain their positions.  We can also influence what we and our corporations donate to and endow.  It is horrifying to see lists of duped big donors supporting foundations like the Ford Foundation, which exist solely to fund postmodernists, other nihilists, and keep the tenured soul-destroyers funded as well as in business in universities.  These awful foundations also keep Leftist activist groups funded.

          Great efforts are afoot to right the ship of America, and these efforts are meeting with success.  The toxic Left are howling in pain and fright.  They do not like the sunshine exposing them.  They do not like the blogs, websites, and other modern media exposures, including talk radio, that they are getting.  Their rage belies deep fear and insecurity.  Their time is over.  They are out of gas, out of ideas, and now out of time.  They are running.  Let’s keep them running—until they are all gone.

[1]   From the book cover: Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College, Illinois.  A native of Toronto, Canada, he received his Ph.D. from Indiana University.  He is co-editor of Readings for Logical Analysis (W. W. Norton & Co.) and has published widely in academic journals and other publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Baltimore Sun.


cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Playing Us Like a Wurlitzer

 

          No, we do not have an Islamic mafia in America yet, to the best of my knowledge.  Furthermore, the comparison might be more accurately made to the Sturmabteilungen, Brown Shirts, rather than the families of La Cosa Nostra.  In fact, the two might emerge together as one.  For the moment, I will stick with Mafioso.

          Red flags pop up frequently now.  For example, the Council for Arab-Islamic Relations (CAIR) sues for any claim it can for defamation.  It is one of the most litigious groups in America.  It has learned to play the American legal system like a Wurlitzer to intimidate others in order to get its way.  It publishes pabulum about its peaceful intentions and the desire to serve as protectors of the poor, discriminated against, and oppressed Muslims in America.  The gullible believe this stuff.  Of course, CAIR is not alone.  There are many, hostile, anti-American Muslim groups in America whose sole goal is the destruction of America as we know it, and to erect an American Islamia in its place.

          Litigation and the threat of litigation take a lot of money.  Where do these anti-American groups get theirs?  Over and over, as we learn from publications in the public domain, Saudi Arabia funds groups like CAIR, as well as many others.  Saudi Arabia has oil from which it gets money to work its will.  Who else has substantial oil money?  Iran does, of course, and it is one of the two premier terrorist-sponsoring nations.  Which is the other terrorist-sponsoring nation?  Saudi Arabia.  All of this is common knowledge.

          The crude kind of physical jihad occurs mostly deep within Islamia today, in places such as Iraq, Lebanon, “Palestine,” Chechnya, Sudan, and so on.  This is the overt, or “blood jihad” of bombs, kidnappings, beheadings, murder, and destruction of infrastructure.  Other than sporadically, it has not been a big feature in the West since the events of 11 September 2001.

However, jihadists have not been inactive in the West, as we noted in a 2004 article, “Covert Jihad,” published on 6th Column Against Jihad (see archives section), “The overt war form of jihad is distracting us from the BIGGER jihad, the one that is much more effective for the enemy and much more final and lethal for us.”  This “covert jihad” has the potential to make great gains in the war of Islam versus America without firing a single shot.  This is the jihad engaged in by these Saudi Arabian-supported and Iranian-supported fifth column groups in America, and they will keep being covert and successful as long as they meet no resistance or quickly vanquish any resistance they encounter, as is happening here right now.

In “Covert Jihad,” we outlined seven steps essential to the success of the American jihad:

1.      Immigrate

2.      Do not assimilate

3.      Populate

4.      Convert

5.      Subvert

6.      Exploit Western values to Islamic ends

7.      Reach critical mass and take over

All of the first six steps act simultaneously, each meeting varying degrees of success compared to the others.  The “mafia” stage involves steps five and six.

          Seeds will not germinate unless conditions are right.  The “context” for the seed includes germinating medium, water, nutrients, protection, and temperature.  Each of these factors must be within a set range to enable the seed to be able to germinate and grow.  Gardeners lump these conditions under terms like “preparing the soil.”  In the wild, seeds have proper conditions much more rarely suitable and bad odds for germination.  However, gardeners can ensure germination every time because they control the conditions by “preparing the soil.”

          This analogy extends to the covert jihad as well.  People like Sami al-Arian of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad are fifth columnists as is his organization.  They prey principally on Muslims and wealthy non-Muslim American dupes.  Without another huge fifth column element, these more obvious Islamists would be like seeds in the wild, with some succeeding while others do not.

          However, others in America have been preparing the soil for the jihadists, and very successfully too.  Islamists would really only have had only to exploit the state of our culture, but they have had active help in the form of anti-American activists and their ideas emanating from American universities to pollute the culture.  This context has been detailed in “Deconstructing the Fifth Column Left” on 6th Column Against Jihad in the form of an essay-review of a brilliant book by philosopher Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism.

          “Postmodernism” is the name for the nihilistic, anti-American political activism coming from very foul philosophy in American and foreign universities.  The name “postmodernism” does NOT reflect “something later than” modernism.  It rejects “modernism,” which consists of reality, reason, objectivity, human freedom and self-determination, ethics of individualism, and the social-political-economic system of capitalism.

          Postmodernism is the bastard spawn of two centuries of foul philosophies beginning with Rousseau and Kant, extending into Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, the collapse of 20th century philosophy, and into Heidegger who paved the way for the current intellectual crowd calling themselves “postmodernists.”  To illustrate that philosophy is powerful and practical, note that this way of thinking affects almost 100% of our colleges and universities, their liberal arts departments, their administrations, and extends through their graduates into journalism, entertainment, politics, and, sadly, down to the working populace.  This is a major poison which has prepared the ground for the seeds of covert jihad.

          Some of the postmodern fifth columnists are active anti-Americans, and they make the news regularly by assaulting cameras and microphones with their vitriolic nihilism.  Postmodernism considers language to be a weapon and the postmodernists use extreme, bellicose language as their means to intimidate people and get their own way.  They have no problem calling the president of the United States an Adolf Hitler, for example.  Language is a weapon.  The language of Democrats in the senate of the United States and the Democrat Party has become a distillation of postmodernism.

          Two very serious products of postmodernism have been “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.”  These have percolated through all layers of American society and now utterly dominate primary and secondary schools.  Covert jihadists could not be happier, because both of these processes have made their subversion of America very easy, as we will show.  Those who are not anti-American activists but who have the disease of postmodernism have abandoned reason in favor of groupism, with its political correctness and multiculturalism.

          These people resist any criticism or objective evaluation of Islam and Muslims for any reason.  They seek to nullify American cultural traditions such as Christmas, Passover, Easter, etc., because they believe someone who is not Christian (or Jewish), might be “offended” in some way by those who follow dominant cultural observations.  It has reached such a monstrous level of absurdity that the Harvard student newspaper, Crimson, decries the entrepreneurial activities of a dorm cleaning service, started and run by students, since not only can some not afford it and might have their feelings hurt by the disparity of the rich versus the poor, but it bestows a low “social status” on the students performing the service.

          Thanks to postmodernism, we have a culture fragmenting along the lines of races, genders, ages, countries of origin, religions, gender orientations, degree of prosperity, types of work, and so on, ad infinitum.  Such pressure groups used to seek shelter in the Democrat Party, but now they have so much power that they have taken over the Democrat Party and function almost autonomously.  Muslim pressure groups are right in there, exploiting the new “unmelting” pot.

          Anyone with a group can caterwaul about anything, and the unsuspecting ballast, the passive postmodernists, ardently believe that they must be heard seriously.  Both the activists and the passivists morph the First Amendment to Constitution mean that everybody must pay to provide a platform for anyone from any of these pressure groups, however irrational they are.  The Islamic “pressure group business” could not ask for better working conditions.

 
cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

         The issues of political correctness and multiculturalism form a bridge between those who call themselves “liberal” and those who call themselves “conservative,” or Left and Right, politically speaking.  Each side responds characteristically to pressure.  The Left turns to groups, from lobby groups to the United Nations, because these groups make up the reality, truth, and morality to the Left.  The Right turn to religion.  Both processes, which substitute non-rational input in place of relying on reason, paralyze the culture and open the doors for the covert jihad to work in broad daylight.

          The Right live almost 100% on the assumption that RELIGION IS GOOD.  They believe it down to their toes, and they mean ALL religion because it comes from the One God who presents in many forms and goes by many names around the world.  In fact, they will and do argue that without religion and God, the world would be total chaos, and they generally point to the godless Left as examples.  They will not permit consideration of any alternative between God or no-God, Good and Evil, order or chaos, with no other ways possible.  Because of this point of view, they make the work of the covert jihadists unbelievably easy.

          Consider, for example, the current President of the United States, George W. Bush.  He is archetypically religious and possesses all of the unthinking rigidity that goes with this position.  As a result, he is the best friend the covert jihadists have.  He wages war on the overt jihad but is totally blind to the philosophy which makes possible both the overt and covert jihads:  Islam.  He and all of the other Rightists, or conservatives, twist their minds like pretzels to avoid any rational, objective knowledge of, understanding of, or pronouncements of truth about Islam.

          In fact, Pres. Bush has repeatedly characterized Islam as a “religion of peace,” that it is one of the “three great religions of the world,” and that it is “all good” because it is a religion.  To Mr. Bush and to all who believe as he does, only a small number of scoundrels, just a small percent of Muslims, have taken a “great religion of peace,” Islam, and “distorted” it to dark purposes.  Happy to exploit the president’s profound ignorance about Islam, Muslim cleric bigwigs have access to the White House, the military, the prisons, and gears of government.  In government today, Pres. Bush is not alone in militant ignorance and willful evasion; such fellow travelers form a legion.

          Not only do the Right follow political correctness and multiculturalism, but they militantly add the dimension of whitewashing Islam.  The postmodernist Left do not whitewash it; they egg it on because Islam is virulently anti-American.

         American culture is sick from bad philosophy working its will on Americans and their institutions.  Moral certainty has been abandoned by the Left and become scarce on the Right, unless it has something to do with religion.  Courts belong to the Left and are thoroughly postmodernist.  Journalists belong to the Left and have been deeply influenced by postmodernist thinking.  Politicians wallow in the uncertainty and look for short-range advantages that accrue them power.  The public education system, from K through 12, has been corrupted by products of teachers’ colleges utterly infested with seeds of postmodernism falling on intellectual soil prepared by American Pragmatism.

          How do Islamists evaluate American culture?  They view it as deliciously weak.  They have discovered that they can manipulate its institutions, particularly its legal system, and get what they want with minimal effort.  They have moved in on the universities, intimidating them into extremely easy submission to their Islamic radicalism.  In turn, universities compliantly brainwash the unformed minds entrusted to them and ferociously attack any who dare to step outside the prescribed box of “correct thinking.”  Politicians kiss the behinds of Muslim pressure group money bearers and compliantly favor Islamists at the expense of American citizens.  Journalists in general will not speak the truth about Islam—most have become “investigative-less” reporters.  Talk radio hosts, mostly Rightists, will permit no discussion about the facts of Islam or any caller criticisms of it.  Governmental agencies, such as the State Department, utterly twist in the wind to accommodate noisy Muslim pressure groups, and the White House and State Department do nothing about Saudi Arabia and Iran and their funding of the subversion of America.  The Border Patrol deny that our porous border is a problem and are almost willing to put out their own eyes rather than profile likely subversives that might be Muslims.  The FBI, under profoundly weak and politically correct leadership at the very top cannot find any al-Qaeda cells in America or identify anyone who is a danger to America if that person is Muslim.  The head of the Department of Transportation fires people who even suggest profiling.

          In the front lines of the threat from the covert jihad stand the American people.  Happily, a growing number are awakening to the dangers from Islam, but far too many carry out their daily lives uncritically under the sway of cultural influences from both the Left and Right.  The biggest fault of the American public is their inertia.  Too many show no interest in learning about Islam and discovering that they are facing peril.  Their ignorance is all the covert jihadists want, and they have it.

          [Anyone wanting the proper directions for understanding the truth about Islam may go to the Recommended page on our website, 6th Column Against Jihad to find books and websites which tell the truth.]

          The seeds of covert jihad cannot grow without some effort on their part, and they hold back no effort.  Their focus has been and probably will continue to be subversion through exploitation of weaknesses in our system.  Here are a couple of illustrations that make the points:

          First, an article from the Tennessean, Muslims reach settlement with Dell on prayer at work - Friday, 03/18/05.

31 employees will be reinstated, managers to get training

Muslim contract employees at the Dell Inc. plant in Nashville reached a settlement with the company on issues related to a dispute over prayer in the workplace, a national Islamic civil rights advocacy group announced yesterday in Washington.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the 31 Muslim employees, who left work last month in a disagreement over Islamic prayers, will be reinstated, receive back pay, and be granted religious accommodation.  Managers also will also receive additional training on existing religious accommodation policies and practices. 

There are a couple of levels of meaning to this newspaper report.  Had this been a simple political correctness cave-in, it would have nauseating.  However, it goes much farther beyond a “cave in” and is ominous for our country.  The very simple principle is separation of religion from commerce of any kind.  That means that people are free in this country to adopt any religion, but it is never more than an individual matter.  It is incumbent upon the individual to find ways to practice his religion that do not interfere with his contractual obligations, such as providing a day's work for a day's pay.  Islam, Christianity, Judaism, scientology, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.--you name it—should stay outside when the worker enters the job work area.  He can pick it up again after work.  It is not incumbent upon the employer to be "sensitive" to any religion for any reason at any time.  It is incumbent upon the employee not to inflict his religion on the employer.  Clearly, the employer has the right to set up prayer rooms and provide religious accommodations should he wish, but not the obligation to do so.

This ruling was meant to intimidate Dell and all of the other corporations in the area and as far and wide as possible.  It did just that.

But, there is something worse in this Dell settlement, much worse.  Note that CAIR is involved.  Muslim pressure groups, of which CAIR is just one, push around corporations, courts, television networks and production studios, politicians, journalists, and all others that have power and legal force behind them.  They are following a role-model familiar to most adult Americans.

Postmodernism gave America all sorts of “pressure groups” of fractionated Americans with fractionated names, like “African-Americans.”  Under the influence of postmodernism, certain groups of blacks became a “racial discrimination and civil rights” industry.  Their job was not to “right wrongs.”  They had no interest in getting rid of the “plantations” filling America, as they erroneously claimed.  They just wanted to change ownership of the plantations.  Liberal American government could not wait to throw billions of dollars and pass special privilege laws and regulations favoring these pressure groups.  These “uncivil rights groups” took federal largess and federal power to turn themselves into a tyranny, with the help of their actively and passively compliant black “subjects” who had been stuffed full of hate and an unending sense of entitlements.  Progress of black Americans stopped and regressed.  Only now do the best of them throw off the yoke of the civil rights industry and succeed on their own out of the grasp of the tyrants.  However, the tyrants and their compliant moochers make every effort to instill guilt into these men and women who dared to succeed.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

The lesson was not lost on Muslim pressure groups.  They had been doing much of this already in Europe, and Europe was much more easily cowed.  With the growing numbers and successes of influencing governments to favor Muslims over the indigenous populations, these pressure groups grew increasingly stridently nasty, and eventually openly hostile.  They now advocate hostile takeover of European governments by force while their gangs rape and pillage in European cities almost with impunity.

Well, stand by, because they are coming to America with the same acts.  Right now, they are working our laws and regulations to their advantage with great success.  The morally uncertain join the spineless and the philosophically impaired to give them their every demand.  With every success, Muslim pressure group power, daring, and stridency grows, mimicking the rise of organized crime in America.

The same process also took place in pre-Nazi Germany (see Exposing America’s Fifth Column:  Nazism, Communism, and Islam).

Muslim pressure groups are on our campuses.  They have their own schools and institutes.  They lobby our politicians.  They soft-soap our president, and they work tirelessly to gain advantage over us by legal and any other means they can get away with.  Opposition is either slight or non-existent.  When anything that could be construed as opposition appears, these pressure groups insult and threaten law suits, even imply future violence.  They are capitalizing on what they learned from postmodernism:  Language is a weapon.  With Saudi Arabian and Iranian money, they can sue anyone into bankruptcy.  Many Americans and American businesses fold in fright, at the mere thought of opposing them.

Were moral certainty about America and being American prevalent in the culture, Americans would not submit to this intimidation.  This is the escalating terrorism of the covert jihad, and it will not stop unless it is stopped.

At some point, these Muslim pressure groups will encounter opposition from the heartland of America.  When that happens, and their intimidation fails, threats of physical force and violence will follow inevitably.  Take another example, this time from the AIM Column - Federal Money Goes to Controversial Muslim Group - March 15, 2005, by Sherrie Gossett, March 15, 2005.

·          …A controversial Muslim group accused of having an association with an extreme form of Islam has also been getting federal funds.  The group, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), considers itself moderate and mainstream but has sponsored conferences in the past that included speakers known for violent anti-Jewish rhetoric.

·          ISNA describes itself as moderate in outlook but some journalists who have examined the organization contend that it is linked it to Wahhabism, the extreme form of radical Islam that gave rise to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda movement.

·          Mary Jacoby and Graham Brink, writing in the St. Petersburg Times, describe ISNA as "subsidized by the Saudi government" and the "main clearinghouse for Wahhabism in the U.S.”  The New York Times has described ISNA as the umbrella organization for 300 Muslim groups and about one-third of the mosques in the United States.

·          Sayyid M. Syeed, Secretary General of ISNA…Syeed was Director of Academic Outreach (1984-1994) at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and currently sits on the International Board of the institute which is located in Herndon, Virginia.

In part, this group has grown strong through bottomless Saudi funding.  It has numerous subgroups under its umbrella, most, if not all, of which are militantly Islamic.  It does not like the exposure to the disinfecting sunshine of truth.  In some unusual, even rare cases of journalistic courage, ISNA is finding unbending resistance, and it is not used to it.  But, it has a plan to deal with them.  Continuing from the AIM article:

·          Syeed told me, "You will be hurt, you will be pained by this if you continue to write such things.”  He closed the conversation with this comment, "I am sorry if I sound harsh.  But I stand by every word I said."

·          While Syeed terms AIM's coverage of Islamic radicalism "scandalous" and "criminal," it is the failure of many in the media to report such issues truthfully that is the real problem.  Reporters should not be intimidated from reporting the facts.

You can almost hear a caricatured German accent from a grade B movie involving Nazis, “Ve have our vays.”  If you look at the history of Islam and follow current events, and you will see the ways.

          Then to underscore his power: “Syeed emphasized that ISNA is a mainstream organization and he invited AIM to meet with them at their headquarters and to get involved. “  We would be very pleased to host you," he said, indicating individuals from various organizations have offered workshops at their conferences.

And, for the piece de resistance, he added, "We are only getting bigger," he said, "You have to work with us."

Subversives do not yet have to resort to mafia-like techniques beyond implied and explicit threats.  Too often, our government is on their side.

Physical force comes when power is sufficient, and they think they can get away with it against ordinary Americans.  If they get away with making us such “offers we cannot refuse,” they can move into overt jihad, like the Sturmabteilungen.

You do not make an enemy go away by acquiescing to him.  The school yard bully does not volunteer to give up his status, influence, and power, nor does the totalitarian dictator, including theocratic tyrants of Islam.  Capitulation is not a sign of strength.  Appeasement earns no positive entries in history textbooks, except those written by postmodernists.  Weakness, above all weakness with Islam, will not be read as some Christian “virtue” by Muslims.  Weakness will be read by them as our willingness to have our gooses killed and cooked.  And, if that happens, we will subside into dhimmitude and slide out of history as the greatest nation that might have been.

 

~~~~~

WELCOME THIS NEW MEMBER OF THE FIFTH COLUMN:  NATIONAL REVIEW

 

Welcome one of the newest members to America’s Unholy Alliance*, National Review, and its malleable editor, Rich Lowry.

As we pointed out in Playing Us Like a Wurlitzer, you can have membership in the jihad in two forms:  overt jihad and covert jihad.  Overt jihad members wreak physical havoc, while covert jihad members conduct “psy-ops.”  Going farther, the latter, covert jihad, goes on very actively in America today and recruits two types of members.  One type is active covert jihadists, while the other type is passively non-resistant.  The passive covert jihadists may not join directly but, rather, attain membership by what they do not do.  National Review is a passive type.

As well outlined on Jihad Watch in the waning days of March 2005, National Review earned its membership through spineless retreat.  To summarize briefly, the National Review Book Service offered a reprinted book from the early 20th century called The Life and Religion of Mohammed by a Catholic priest named J. L. Menezes.  The owner-publisher of Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer, had written a review which was used by the National Review Book Service.  The great “sin” of the book was that it told the truth about Muhammad, giving the very same information written by Muslims in holy Islamic documents, which are easily available these days to anyone who takes the time to read them.  Just as Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad’s first biographer did, Fr. Menezes recounts the behavior of a man whose behavior, according to Muslim holy documents, too much resembled that of Hitler and Genghis Khan.

That great “injustice collector” organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), found out that National Review was carrying the Menezes book with Spencer’s review, proclaimed it “anti-Muslim hate literature,” and incited its robotic followers to inundate National Review Book Service with complaints and to inundate Boeing, the airplane manufacturer, with disapproving communications about its advertising with National Review.  Why?  Because of two books carried by the National Review Book Service, both of which “slandered” Muhammad, according to CAIR.  As sure as night follows day, Boeing caved immediately to CAIR’s demands.  Shortly thereafter, National Review caved and removed the Menezes book from its sales.

Robert Spencer does a crackerjack job of documenting what Menezes wrote about Muhammad, and cites evidence from Islamic holy documents to support these statements.  As Mr. Spencer reports, Fr. Menezes was very pro-Muslim and simply used what the Islamic basic documents say about Muhammad to make the case that Muhammad was not a prophet of God.  Spencer’s articles on the 30th and 31st of March 2005 on Jihad Watch are very informative as is much of the related commentary from readers of Jihad Watch.

On 31 March 2005, the CAIR website offered the following articles:

·          National Review Removes Books Attacking Prophet Muhammad

·          National Review Silent on Anti-Muslim Hate

·          Ask National Review To Repudiate Anti-Muslim Hate

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

 On the same page were three more:

·         Thank Dell for accommodating Muslims religious rights

·         AMEX, Home Depot Withdraw from FL event linked to Modi

·         Thank State Department for denying a visa to Narendra Modi

We covered the Dell situation in Playing Us Like a Wurlitzer while Jihad Watch and Front Page Magazine cover the Modi situation.  Modi is from India and is not fond of Muslims, given what horrendous treatment Muslims have inflicted on India and Indians.

Editor Rich Lowry’s actions with regard to the Menezes book (and if he follows by removing the Trifkovic book which CAIR also complained about) are more important to an organization like CAIR than overt jihad.  Lowry is even more important than Dell, Boeing, AMEX, and Home Depot, all of whom have tucked their tails and retreated to their corners to quiver.  The importance of his capitulation and that of National Review are so important because of what both represent to groups like CAIR.

To many on the Right, National Review and Lowry represent the “GREAT CONSERVATIVE BULWARK” against all things anti-American, a reputation much relished by National Review.  Here in one organization is THE big voice of American conservatism, one which supposedly stands up for the “little people” in the red states and is bullish on God, patriotism, and Superman’s “American Way.”

However, that loud, blatant voice of American conservatism, National Review, caved without a fight, whimpering off to join Dell, Home Depot, and that tower of gelatin, Boeing.

Lowry and National Review are also the group that threw out Ann Coulter, one of the most worthwhile voices and writers on the Right, because she does not sugar-coat writings about the people she exposes to disinfecting sunlight.  After all, we must be nice, and never, never be extreme, even if we are right—let’s not be selfish, now.

So, let’s all welcome National Review and Editor Lowry to the Fifth Column.  As passive players, they won’t get front row seating, but, on the other hand, they won’t cause trouble.  That is all CAIR wants—for now--and that is what it got, without firing a single shot.

This is what is grievously wrong about much of the American Right today.  It has no more moral certainty than does the American Left.  It stands tall and strong for America, yes—until the first breeze comes along.

Modern conservatives made a huge error decades ago.  They turned from classic liberalism and its advocacy of reason, rights, freedom, and capitalism, to religion as their sole tool for thinking.  In doing so, they conceded the appearance of reason to their enemies on the Left (this so-called “scientific” socialism, etc.), even though the Left had abandoned reason two centuries ago and were never able to make socialism “scientific,” or make rational any of their positions.

National Review was founded by William F. Buckley, whom many conservatives have elevated to the status of a deity.  Buckley, more than almost anyone else, completely entrenched unquestioning faith as the full explanation for the nature of and existence of America, rather a psychological fusion of faith and state.  Rich Lowry succeeded Buckley, and has continued the same explanation for America.  National Review is pro-conservative, not pro-America, as it would have people believe.  It is aground on the rocks and shoals of its own making, and will not rise to the proper level of principled defense of America under its current leadership—as this example with CAIR illustrates.

You can just see folks at the National Review twisting in agony as those CAIR-instigated faxes rolled in. Muslims had gone public with the possibility that those at National Review were “politically incorrect” because they were criticizing another’s religion.  After all, say the Rightists, all religions are good and are above criticism.  Even the one that seeks to destroy us is immune from criticism, despite the fact that  it has destroyed millions, if not billions, of people over 14+ centuries.

Judging from what Robert Spencer wrote on Jihad Watch about Lowry’s comments, Lowry regards people like Robert Spencer as troublemakers on the Right, perhaps FAR Right.  Lowry did not use these words, but that is the impression I took away from Mr. Spencer’s comments.  Lowry also pushed the blame—yes, “blame”—for the Menezes book situation onto an editor who allegedly did not read the book in advance of putting it up for sale.

Meanwhile the beast in our midst has grown stronger.  CAIR relishes its victories and must be drunk with delight over the capitulation of National Review, that now defanged former bastion of the Right.  National Review has some very good writers, and they are still worth reading, but the magazine and the organization are morally weak.

These Muslim pressure groups care nothing for the truth.  The truth of Fr. Menezes’ remarks never entered into CAIR’s arguments against National Review and Boeing.  CAIR isn’t about truth.  CAIR is about intimidation.  Hitler would have been proud, since his SA used intimidation as well as more physical tactics for the recalcitrant.  Right now, America is not ready to accept Muslim pressure groups using raw physical force.  However, these capitulations to them are getting us ready, one company and organization at a time.

We have to hand it to CAIR, however, and to similar groups.  They studied the civil rights industry’s methods and adopted them whole cloth.  They have mastered intimidation.  We explain why the intimidation methods are so successful in contemporary culture in Playing Us Like a Wurlitzer.

We need to master the same techniques.  At the snap of a finger, obedient Muslims fax, email, telephone, send letters, and picket, in whatever numbers these pressure groups order.  In addition, these obedient Muslims send cash, loads of cash, to CAIR.  CAIR is also bankrolled by Saudi Arabia.  These unlimited funds are what make it so powerful, because it can sue them into bankruptcy.  It be easily damaged because it cannot be sued into oblivion because of the relatively unlimited funds.

The closing paragraph from our website article seems well worth repeating:

You do not make an enemy go away by acquiescing to him.  The school yard bully does not volunteer to give up his status, influence, and power, nor does the totalitarian dictator, including theocratic tyrants of Islam.  Capitulation is not a sign of strength.  Appeasement earns no positive entries in history textbooks, except those written by postmodernists.  Weakness, above all weakness with Islam, will not be read as some Christian “virtue” by Muslims.  Weakness will be read by them as our willingness to have our gooses killed and cooked.  And, if that happens, we will subside into dhimmitude and slide out of history as the greatest nation that might have been.

          It remains only for to wish National Review, Boeing, and all the rest, HAPPY DHIMMITUDE!

*  The “Unholy Alliance” refers to the title of David Horowitz’s latest book, The Unholy Alliance: The American Left and Radical Islam.

[Soldier4Christ]

The tenants of islam in no way resembles those of Christianity. Allah in no way resembles God.

The tenants of Christianity is love. In fact love is the primary commandment of Christianity. Love our brothers, love our neighbors and even to love of our enemies. Islam teaches hate, violence and to subjugate or kill others. Christianity teaches us to love all.

Do want to know what it is like to be able to experience that kind of love? Come to Jesus today, believe in Him the one true God.

Rom 1:16  For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.
Rom 1:17  For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.

Salvation, salvation from death under the law by God's perfect grace.

Rom 3:10  As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:
Rom 3:11  There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.
Rom 3:12  They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

Rom 3:23  For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

Rom 5:12  Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

Rom 6:23  For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Rom 1:18  For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

Rom 3:20  Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.

Rom 3:27  Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith.

Rom 5:8  But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Rom 5:9  Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.

Rom 2:4  Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?

Rom 3:22  Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:

Rom 3:28  Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.

Rom 10:9  That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

Rom 4:21  And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.

Rom 4:24  But for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead;

Rom 5:1  Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:

Rom 10:10  For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

Rom 10:13  For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.