The Left is Starting to Crack

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Ever since hijacked airliners made toxic dust of the World Trade Centre in New York, there has persisted an intellectual struggle in Europe and America the furiousness and range of which has very few historical parallels. As soon the smoke cleared from that gigantic crime scene (and after the criminal force behind the attack was exposed) a thousand journalists, philosophers, historians and artists set out feverishly to make sense of the event. In the blink of an eye, the global intelligentsia split down the middle into two haughtily confident factions; factions we will brand simply as the ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’.

According to the Left, 9/11 was a revenge attack for the depravities of American, British and Israeli foreign policy. In this sense, the attackers were little more than Quran-carrying Che Guevaras or Guy Fawkes’s; freedom fighters, essentially, who had been forced by cruel circumstance to choose a nasty response to past-nastiness. The Right saw things as differently as can be imagined. For them, the attacks were not revenge for anything, but simply the perpetuation of an ancient theological grudge-match between East and West. No moral case, they considered, could be made to justify the barbarism so photo-realistically witnessed.

We are now 14 years on from the attack on New York. In the intervening period, wars have been launched; numerous smaller-scale atrocities have been committed all over the globe; protest and counter-protest have gripped every Western capital; every thinking person has found themselves in some way drawn in. After all that – which set of arguments has won? Which narrative has triumphed? Or, if we allow that the debate still persists, who is winning?

If you caught me in a bad mood, I might tell you that the Left had won. For this contention I’d probably offer such evidence as the continuing Muslim immigration into the West, as well as the enduring taboo on blaspheming the holy figures of Islam.

But if you caught me in a calm, rational mood such as I find myself in today, I would likely decide the other way, and I’d be correct. The Left has lost the Islam debate and lost badly. Outside of the media crèche itself, the number of people still arguing for appeasement of Islam is infinitesimally small. Don’t believe me? Just look at the Guardian newspaper coverage of the Paris attacks of this month. Though the columns themselves were designed to promote ‘understanding’ and inter-communal ‘tolerance’, the comments made in reply to them exhibited frank disagreement, even mockery. The following comment is representative of the general trend:

“I detest Islamism. No-one is ever going to change my mind on that…The more Muslims we import into Europe the more our security services will be burdened. If the truth offends you, tough.”

Remind yourself that this is from the Guardian’s ‘comment is free’ website; a bastion of orthodox anti-imperialism and left-wing inflexibility. Most people registered to comment are Left-leaning in almost every other respect (take a look at the comments on welfare sanctions and climate change). The reorientation of such attitudes on an issue of this divisive nature is telling, shocking, encouraging.

Further evidence for this new and pleasing reality is found in online polls. Whenever a newspaper (whatever the stance of that newspaper) sets up a two-answer poll involving Islam, the anti-Islam option wins by a landslide. And not only is this trend ongoing in the general public. A similar process is underway in the intelligentsia itself. It is surely amazing from this historical distance to imagine an argument like the following being taken seriously:

“On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well…The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course… That they (the terrorists) waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint…They did not license themselves to “target innocent civilians.” There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . . Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved.”

This quote is taken from a lengthy essay entitled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” written by Native American professor Ward Churchill. At the time of its publication, this amoral screed encapsulated the mood and feelings of uncountable academics, both in the West and outside of it. Now, post-Iraq, post-7/7, post-Madrid and post-Hitchens, such views are weighed as wicked, childish, unbefitting of intelligent consideration.

Though the nightmare of Jihad is far from resolution, we must yield to optimism when reason allows for it. More and more people are waking up to our position. We are no longer ‘extremists’ lurking about on the half-lit fringe. We are pioneers. We are being followed.

D, LDN

Defending Materialism.

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America, America 911, American Liberty, BBC, Capitalism, cheeseburgers, Christianity, Christopher Caldwell, Civilisation, consumerism, decadence, Decadent Western World, Defend the modern world, Hollywood, Leftism, Materialism, materialistic, Muslims, products, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, rightism, supermarkets, United States

“Materialism – ma·te·ri·al·ism \mə-ˈtir-ē-ə-ˌli-zəm\. noun, a way of thinking that gives too much importance to material possessions rather than to spiritual or intellectual things.”

Far too often we are told by spiritual types that the Western world is ‘decadent’ or overly ‘materialistic’. Islamists especially delight in badmouthing our ‘self-indulgent’ way of life as soulless, meaningless and amoral, usually with specific reference to the UK and America.

It is high time someone shot back at this tired old critique. Materialism, properly considered, is wonderful. Consumerism is enlivening. Capitalism is ingenious. We should rejoice in these things, even as we preserve our higher beliefs. There is no contradiction to be found here, nor is there a choice to be made. Abundance and refinement can coexist. We know this because they have done for decades.

While it’s perfectly true that I sometimes enjoy leafing through Carlyle’s French Revolution or Huysmans’ À rebours, this is not to say that I don’t also value the cheeseburger or the Dyson Vac. Shopping centres mean more to me than opera houses. I find more worth in shiny electronic goods than in old, overrated paintings.

Being modern is something to be proud of. Technology separates us from the barbarian far more effectively than art or ‘ideas’ do. You can’t repel a Muslim with a sentiment, but you can make short work of him with a stinger missile.

Indeed, Muslims make themselves look even dumber than usual when they use the word ‘decadent’. Perhaps, my Muslim friends, if you spent a little less time indulging your own cultural biases, you might have developed the means to match our economies or resist our militaries. Is it not also decadent to spend every day reading the same book, or commentaries upon that book? It is certainly lazy. It is lazy (and obnoxiously arrogant) to presume you can get ahead in a world of infinite variety by stubbornly remaining the same.

As it turns out, our vulgar materialism, our worldliness, our ‘decadence’, our devotion to the modern and to the future has won through.

Hurrah for our side! 

Ramadan Mubarak to the losers.

D, LDN.

Russell Brand’s Childish Utopianism.

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Bill o'reilly, Christianity, Civilisation, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, Irish, Leftism, Lefty, london, politics, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Robin Williams, Russell Brand, Terrorism, Thomas Carlyle, Trews, YouTube

How far a society has degenerated can be gauged by looking at those it chooses to venerate. The country which in loftier times boasted of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens in its pulpit of social commentary, now has markedly lesser standards, and this descent corresponds necessarily to a decline in popular acuity.

That one of the most popular political thinkers of our day is a comedian should itself communicate the point. More disquieting still is the light load carried by the man in question. 

Once a lowly television presenter, Brand, 39, now communicates daily on his YouTube channel in the manner of an Eastern prophet. He calls this broadcast the ‘Trews’ (a portmanteau of Truth and News). At their peak, episodes can reach an audience of over 500,000 people. The other day I took to watching a few of these myself and so here are some thoughts.

Politically, Brand’s point of orientation seems to be an extreme form of universalism. He repeatedly calls nation-states ‘meaningless concepts’ and ‘arbitrary lines on a map’. All cultures are apparently equal to him, including those which violently condemn this very worldview. Immigration is never a crisis meanwhile, but simply a means the rich use to distract the poor from the imperatives of class warfare.

These are old ideas indeed, many of them soaked in old blood.

From Stalin’s nation-destroying grip on Eastern-Europe, through Mao’s war on China’s ancient diversity, universalism has been roundly discredited by every possible moral measure. ‘Cultural equality’ meanwhile is a plague of illogic directly responsible for the tensions of the modern world.

On economic affairs, Brand’s anti-corporatism is absolute. No enterprise can be successful without simultaneously ‘oppressing’ or ‘keeping down’ other elements. He communicates a kind of ‘socialism without the details’, knocking the system whilst refusing to endorse a specific party or movement and often calling into question the very notion of voting.

Of course, wherever there is Leftism of this potency, one will also find hypocrisy, and Brand provides no exception to this rule. span>

In a video boldly examining the ‘hidden’ agenda behind television commercials, Brand mocks the inclusion of Native Americans in Coca Cola’s notorious multi-lingual Star-Spangled Banner ad. “Don’t take the piss.” he barks “You stole their fucking country.”

But what is that strange word he uses here – ‘country’? It seems to me a euphemism for ‘nation’, something which – as Brand has already informed us – is nothing more than a ‘construct’ of the mind. By the same stroke then, no ill truly befell the Native Americans, and if the notion of a ‘border’ has always been a nefarious restriction on human liberty, Sitting Bull was simply being xenophobic in resisting the path of the Yankees.

Brand repeats the same mistake on the subject of Israel. During the Gaza war, Brand consistently sided with the distinctly un-universalistic claims of Palestinian nationalism; a tendency of thought quite obsessed with ‘borders’ and the ownership of land.

But this freewheeling hypocrisy is part of the warp and weft of utopian thinking. And utopian Brand decidedly is. In the course of his pontifications, he has gone so far as to call for ‘revolution’. He doesn’t explain exactly for what end this rebellion would be, but perhaps he doesn’t need to.  

A more sensible British comic, Robert Webb, bravely took issue with Russell’s childish incitement in the New Statesman. In a letter addressed to Brand, Webb wrote the following:

“I understand your ache for the luminous, for a connection beyond yourself. Russell, we all feel like that. Some find it in music or literature, some in the wonders of science and others in religion. But it isn’t available any more in revolution. We tried that again and again, and we know that it ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder. In brief, and I say this with the greatest respect, please read some fucking Orwell.”

A drug addict for most of his youth, Brand ascribes his newfound sobriety to the positive influence of Transcendental Meditation – a dippy, new-age excuse for light-headedness that became a hot product in Hollywood during the 1980s.

Perhaps political sobriety is a more difficult concept to master. Give him time.

D, LDN.