Suicidalism

A intriguing post at the Armed and Dangerous blog discusses a fusion of Marxist ideology and modern day Islamist thinking into something called Suicidalism. In the post, the basic tenets (memes) of suicidalism are listed:

• There is no truth, only competing agendas.
• All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
• There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
• The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
• Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
• The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
• For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
• When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

It should come as no surprise that these memes (attributable originally to none-other than Joseph Stalin) are a checklist for the angry-Left (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan) in the USA. In fact, others refer to this mindset as post-modern Leftism. Armed and Dangerous comments:

Another consequence of Stalin’s meme war is that today’s left-wing antiwar demonstrators wear kaffiyehs without any sense of how grotesque it is for ostensible Marxists to cuddle up to religious absolutists who want to restore the power relations of the 7th century CE. In Stalin’s hands, even Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon — it became increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive. The postmodern left is now defined not by what it’s for but by what it’s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I’m concerned about the historical parallels between of Islamism in the first decade of the 21st century and Nazism in the decade of the 1930s. I also worry that the Suicidalism meme espoused by the angry Left and often adopted (with subtlety) by the MSM will force us into isolationism and/or inaction and/or appeasement. Unfortunately, none of these will cause Islamosfascism to disappear, but they could ultimately lead to a reaction from the Right that is frightening. Again from Armed and Dangerous :

…if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking “crusader” cities, they’ll make crusaders out of the U.S., too. And this time, a West with a chauvinized America at its head would smite the Saracen with weapons that would destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass. The horror of our victory would echo for a thousand years.

I remain more optimistic than this. I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.

The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t hound the po-mo [post modern] Left and its useful idiots out of public life with attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do, either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our children, we’d better get to work.

Indeed, the angry-Left memes paralyze action and allow evil to grow. At the same time, should evil achieve its goals and hit us with a horrific attack (e.g., a nuclear weapon explodes in a major U.S. city), the far Right reaction (probably justified at that point) would take us all to a place that no one wants to visit.

Indeed, “we’d better get to work.”