The Straight Red Line (5): Love of Islam, Loathing of Self

~ Continued from Part 4: the Founders ~

The touching words quoted yesterday (here in entirety) were uttered by the Subjectivist [1] champion of the Collectivist Counter-Enlightenment movement: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). I regret to say we have no winner of Hicks' groundbreaking tome "Explaining Postmodernism".

Rousseau set the tone of the premise of mankind basically being good but corrupted by his environment, that we have come to know so well in Leftist thinking. In Rousseau's vision the world's trouble is caused by civilization, Reason and its fruits, knowledge and science. He's often quoted as a philosopher of the Enlightenment, but it is quite clear he rebelled against all the tenets of individual Liberalism, Reason, secularism and limited government.

In Rousseau we find the very source of our trouble with Postmodernism, but also the answer to many a vexed question:

- "why does the Left ally itself with Radical Islam against the permissive Liberal society that is of their own making and of which they are the prime beneficiary?", and

- "why should Western civilization be considered so uniquely bad?" and related:

- "what's with the self-hatred", in these pages often termed "Down With Us", or Operation Western Auto-Destruct, so often confessed to by our Postmodern Multiculturalists and directed against white, rich, hetero-sexual, Christian men in particular and Western society in general.

Earlier I suggested to have discovered the source of self-loathing in the Positivism of Auguste Comte. But in Rousseau we have yet an earlier Ground Zero.

Disappointed Marxists often return to the grandfather of Collectivist Anti-Reason, but when the Leftist press recently sabled the film '300', about the three hundred Spartans that defeated the Persian Army in 480 Before Christ - driven by Pacifism and love of anything that doesn't answer to the white, male litany, in casu the Greeks - they forgot to check back on their Classics, the pure, emotional Rousseau.

As opposed to the degradation of Athenian decadent Civilization generated by Reason, Rousseau glorified the militaristic Spartans as pure, unspoiled, noble tribesmen - their callous practice of exposing babies to nature may have even inspired him to expose his own five children to the hardships of the Paris orphanage.

Because to Rousseau, the more advanced a civilization, the more corrupted and corrupting it is. As a paradigm of Rousseauian thought we can envisage the Noble Savage, or man's fall from Paradise: the snake of old was often used as a symbol of wisdom; read 'reason' for 'wisdom' (not to be confused!) and you have Rousseau in a nut-shell.

More of his ideas inspired by the image of noble savagery is the divorce of Eros and Agapi, so highly prized by contemporary man and woman; and a distaste for compassion with others which would only generate more decadent civilization: this is reminiscent of the view that drove the Russian Revolution: one cannot create a workers' Paradise with sentimentality, at which point usually the village headmaster was made an example of.

Rousseau also inspired in Marx the use of the Leftist dichotomy of the Oppressor versus the Oppressed; and seems to have been the source of Postmodern Fallacy Number One: the world as a pie, the view of the zero-sum game, where it is inappropriate and fatal.

Rousseau as the source of Western self-loathing can be found in the vision of the noble, primordial world that is destroyed by man's civilizing force: Reason, knowledge, science, technology, art, aesthetics, property, and economy; man not only destroyed this pristine environment (!), he also became soft, fat and lazy, and created a social conflict: a few winners on top and a whole lot of losers at the base of the pyramid of power.

It's this inequality that is so damning in Rousseau's erroneous total-sum game! Far from considering contemporary Western society an engine of equality and a creator of wealth, it is seen by the Rousseau followers as doomed, the epitome of social pathologies! Down With It ... à la Lanterne! Presently the problem is our destruction of the environment by technology: it doesn't save it, it despoils it.

The West prides itself for what it considers progress. But for anyone who has invested completely in a world view seen as evil, amoral and utterly failed, this gloating is unbearable. So the fight isn't over for the KGB's ideologically demoralised remnants. The capitalist world's moral values are attacked as utterly sexist, racist, dogmatic, authoritarian, cruel, uniquely civilized - uniquely bad!

If Reason makes no sense to what you're saying as Reality clearly shows otherwise, attack Reason as pernicious and superfluous, and persuade the world that Reality doesn't exist!

Rousseau as the source of the revulsion for civilization unmasks Fjordman's correspondent at the University of Helsinki for the Postmodern vile hypocrites that Multiculturalists at heart are: sending the message that retaining culture should be a human right, when in fact they mean to destroy anything that can remotely be considered a 'civilization', favouring instead the long-lost ideal: Marx' pseudo religious red paradise, or by default, Rousseau's wild tabula rasa of the tribal society, so pure and self-sacrificial, possibly Islamic (apparently not considered civil enough to be damned).

But then again, Postmoderns have a relation to language, that Muslims also have when lying to infidels: language, not as a means to transfer information, but as a means to a usually bloody end: it is about effectiveness. This is part of the confusion: to Postmoderns language is not about objective Truth, which to them doesn't exist any way. Therefore language isn't used as an instrument of precision, but as a propaganda tool. A word of advice: never, ever, take a Postmodern's words literally: what is being said habitually requires a good deal of deconstructing before its meaning can be discerned - which they will then go on to reject as non-existent.

To Rousseau religion was a imperative, as we have seen in yesterday's puzzle contest. He had the intention of cutting a few individual heads in the interest of society's stability as a whole. In Hicks' words: "... the state cannot ... pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or view religion as a matter of individual conscience. It absolutely must, therefore, reject dangerous notions of toleration and the separation of church and state. Further: so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate penalty is appropriate for disbelievers ..."

At which point we see the source of our Unholy Alliance of the Left and assertive Islam emerging on the horizon. As the cursed Western civilization was practically built by Christianity, this obviously rules it out. Now Islam on the other hand - due to the precise parallel characteristics of Collectivism, Anti-reason and Oppressor versus Oppressed - is the ideal candidate. The use of irrational terrorism is just an added attraction, as we shall see!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ayatolla Extraordinair, far from being the Left's Mister Nice Guy, also has the honour of being the source of political justification to irrational violence, committed by Jacobin thugs during the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror; of the horrors that Marxist dictators inflicted upon their own peoples; and of various Leftist terrorist groups who - from the 1960's onwards, when it began to dawn on them that with the passing of the 100 million victim mark - the Totalitarian game was up.

Most people, myself included, with the fall of the wall in 1989, made the mistake in taking for granted that Communism had conceded defeat. But the KGB's ideologically de-moral-ized, brainwashed crowd never gave up: they weren't programmed to pack it in. On the contrary! After their contributions to the permissive society to corrupt it even further, the West is currently witness to their collusion with the forces of Radical Islam.

I think we need to carefully consider the ominous words of one of the Four Horsemen of the Communist Apocalypse, Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfort School in 1974, after the 'failed revolutions' of 1967 and 1968: "It will be resurrected in the universities".

~ To be continued in Part 6, the Collective: ... we have seen that Syria/Lebanon and Iraq found themselves - as French colonies during World War II - on the side of Vichy and Nazi Germany ... ~