Conned by The Left, again! (II)

In recent days there have finally been some queries about the weird Unholy Alliance of Convenience of radical Muslims, radical Enlighteners and radical environmentalists. Sometimes they aren't even that visibly radical, but go by epithets as Greens, Socialists, Social Democrats, Liberals, Christian Democrats, etc. Even compared with the situation quite recently, one or two years ago, presently re-visiting some European countries, is almost a surreal experience. I can attest to this happening in the Netherlands. The situation in the United Kingdom is pictured in this article in Opinion Journal (Wall Street Journal), "An Upside-Down World, The British far left makes common cause with Muslim reactionaries" by Nick Cohen.

"Not weird at all", says Dr Pat. "In fact, if you look at the underlying two ideologies, it makes perfect metaphysical, epistemological and ethical sense." I can heartily recommend reading Dr Pat's post entirely, but in the meantime let me borrow her chart for a moment:


It makes perfect sense. Since a far-left green party in The Netherlands declared some months ago, that it now too had embraced Liberalism, an ideology that till then to them had been Anathema and The Principal Free Market Enemy, I should have been forewarned. Indeed I was, but I didn't get the big picture, as per chart, which shows how Classical Liberalism has been perverted into a kind of Postmodern thinking, much akin to the collective, social étatism, accompanied by messianic zeal, that is characteristic of political Islam.

A quote from Dr Pat's post: Radical Islam's has "been successful precisely because they are in philosophical and ethical step with the political left ..."; "The identity politics of today's left is based on two quasi-religious and pseudo-intellectual tenets that conveniently enable and promote the Islamist agenda ... multiculturalism and political correctness ... exists to undermine Western culture at the expense of other cultures";

and

"Both intellectual strategies have been widely used by leftist intellectuals unable to abandon the socialist ideology ... In fact these two doctrines have been slowly and relentlessly absorbed at all levels of Western culture in the last several decades, clearing the way for a constant and steady undermining of Western values ... The process has accelerated since the end of the Cold War, and it is so insidious that most people don't even realize that objective reality and truth, as well as reason and logic have been replaced with the subjectivism and relativism of postmodern rhetoric".

We have seen in the first post about Tom Reiss' great historical work, "The Orientalist" that the engine of the Russian Revolution's philosophy of choice was Nihilism. It is no wonder Stuart Sim reacted to Paul Cliteur's accusation, as if stung by a giant Marxist bee: it reveals the mentality underlying all that nice left-leaning squasi-intellectual postmodern drivel. Sim may not see himself as a nihilist, but he probably has some problem looking objectively into the mirror. A nihilistic mind-set doesn't need to follow from a conscious decision. It is relativism, taken one step further, like an atheist world view leads to cynicism.

In the following flow chart Dr Pat shows us how the strategy to rescue Socialism has worked out over the years. It makes powerful reading:


The canon fodder of the Unholy Alliance of Convenience are the traditional Leftist masses, the dupes. They can be found amongst other places, on the Feminist Bloggers Network and write touching stuff like: "Sometimes people say "relativism" means there "is no center" but they are gravely mistaken, "relativism" means there are infinitely many centers. Each of us is our own center, and to say there is none is beyond misleading." What did I tell you about relativism producing all these pompous, egocentric, little Masters of their own empty and hollow Universes?

Dr Pat also helps answer a few of the other minor queries that still remained to be solved: the obsession with the trivial and the rise of the irrational.

The fashionable admiration for the irrational, i.e. superstitions and quack-isms, tree-hugging, paganism, earth motherism and mantics of all sorts and expressions - from tea leaves to bird entrails - is visible in Pat's first chart as Anti-Realism in the grid Postmodern Metaphysics.

Voilà, all mysteries solved, but one: the answer to the obsession with the trivial, the insignificant and the irrelevant. If a total irritant in my personal opinion, it is at the same time also the most intriguing of all the forces and cross currents presently at work: it may be a sort of subconscious, if inadequate Romanticism, or a form of escapism, an antidote to the bizarre reality of today's world: jihadism, the threat of terrorist attacks and the brewing Global War. I'd really like to know what you think!

If the last puts you down a bit, I'll promiss to come back with better news in the next couple of days.

To be continued with more surpising connections between radical Islam and the Postmoderns.