As I posted in Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, the War on Terror and the Culture War are parts of a Worldwide War among and between several ideologies, each with its own Utopia or at least its own “Best Way to Live”. America is the focus of this Ideological World War. Why are so many people here in denial about whether we are involved in a major world war? Why is the number of people on each side of the division so large? Even in World War II there were some people who were against the war; so, why aren’t the rest of us mobilized since 9/11 the way we were after Pearl Harbor? Why are serious warnings (which I have called Point Joes) downplayed and even ignored?
When it comes to earthquakes, tornadoes, major brush fires and so on, disasters that come on us suddenly, Americans are superb at rising to the occasion and doing what is needed. After 9/11, the country rallied, hot with determination. But slowly, over time, the Anti-American forces in our country and in the world have chilled that resolution. Tens of millions of Americans seem doubtful about what we should be doing, and a large number even deny that there is a legitimate War on Terror going on, not to mention a Culture War.
THE IDEOLOGICAL WORLD WAR: LEFTISTS
One of our Anti-American enemies in this War are Leftist Collectivist Utopians. These are ideologies such as versions of Social Welfare, Secular Progressives, different kinds of Marxism, Maoism, Liberation Theology, communitarians, the Shining Path, and so forth. They use whatever techniques are the most useful in the location they find themselves. Their armed warfare or just plain tyranny is being carried out in places like Africa, Central and South America. In places such as Europe, Australia, and in the United States, they are playing a much, much slower game of slowly infiltrating groups and causes, controlling education at all levels, controlling many government positions in local, state, and the federal House and Senate, and are heavily involved in judicial sectors at many levels. Their followers are also in the Main Stream Media, Hollywood, and other arenas that can be used to spread their claim over the largest area and include the most people possible.
The Left has been seriously trying for well over fifty years—with a good deal of success—to make the United States more and more like the other social welfare countries of the world, with PC, identity politics, diversity, secularism, and other chaotic values and lowered standards. Some even deny that excellence and beauty can exist, or they deny that there are some truths that are inviolate, or they claim a hatred of competition, of capitalism, of patriotism. Their loyalties are not to America, but rather to collectivist ideologies. At this point in time they have the methods, the candidates, and the funding to make a strong move now to capture the power of the White House along with the Congress.
It is interesting that on a poll two people may agree that the country is going in the wrong direction, and yet mean the opposite of each other. Both people who love and those who hate America can believe at the same time that the country is going in the wrong direction. If you want to go West, then East, South, and North are all wrong directions, though they are very different from each other.
Which brings me to the other major Anti-American enemy.
THE IDEOLOGICAL WORLD WAR: ISLAMOFASCISTS
Islamofascists come in several varieties, (and sometimes they even turn on one another in power struggles), but basically they are fighting against every other ideology. Their goal is to conquer as much territory and as many people as possible to make an Islamofascist theocratic Caliphate, an Empire, under a very strict Islamic Shari’a Law. Conquered people will have the choice to become Islamic, or to bow down to its rule, or to be murdered. Their form of warfare is terrorism against all who oppose them, and often against whatever target, Islamic or not, that they deem would yield the fear necessary to their jihad. They have fought slowly in the past, but they are in an all-out war mode now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are carrying out terrorist activities all over the world, because, as I wrote in World at War: In Depth Part One, the Western Industrial complex has produced the technology by which a group can carry out a worldwide war and they now also have the funding to make it happen.
PART OF THE ANSWER
Both the Leftists and the Islamofascists are battling to rule as much of the world as they can. The Leftists, knowing their views were not popular among the average American, have fought their Anti-American war in battles that were disguised as American, and have worked slowly to get to where they are now. (For example, through the ACLU.) The Islamofascists have worked slowly too, with terrorist attacks on occasion on embassies, ships, in kidnapping people, hijacking planes, or in spreading fear in countries that already have an Islamic population but which are not under the strict Shari’a moral rule the terrorists want.
But there is another factor at work here that is also different from the past. It used to be that any ideological movement grew by finding a core of true believers and then moving out in greater circles as the core made speeches and wrote pamphlets and books, etc. The people who joined later were partly true believers, but mostly sympathetic followers who weren’t part of the leadership. They didn’t know the details of what the battle was about, but still were willing to do what they could to help. Yet, any one ideological group had a limit to the size it could command in any one place.
For a while, I was puzzled as to why the numbers of people on the Left side of the Ideological War were so large, because I believe that most people who think they are on the Left would not necessarily have been there in the past. In interviews of “people in the street”, vast numbers of Americans are ignorant about history, about our heritage, about what the issues really are in an election. And even though the Left is international in reach, and has joined with some people in the Environmentalist Movement, the Peace Movement, and the Global Warming Movement, it still seemed to me that their numbers were surprising.
I knew that there were people on the Left like Mrs. Clinton and Harold Ickes and George Soros, and the professors David Horowitz writes about, who studied and read Leftist books and who knew what they were doing. And I could see the results of what they are doing, as people grew more and more doubtful about what we were doing in the war. I could see that the press was doing the same thing they did during Vietnam, but they were much better at it and were successful beyond belief at keeping anything good about the war out of the Main Stream Media, and waging a war of words and images of their own against President Bush. But I couldn’t see how they had so very many “useful idiot” followers helping them.
Then I heard an absolutely brilliant speech that was given by Evan Sayet on March 3, 2007 at the Heritage Foundation, on “How Modern Liberals Think”. (This pdf copy is a “must read”. Please. Get it. Read it.) Here is a taste (my emphasis):
[Look at the Leftist view in] John Lennon’s song “Imagine”: “Imagine there’s no countries.” Not imagine great countries, not imagine defeat the Nazis, but imagine no religions, and the key line is imagine a time when anything and everything that mankind values is devalued to the point where there’s nothing left to kill or die for. Obviously, this is not going to happen overnight. [. . .] In the meantime, everything that [Liberals] teach in our schools, everything they make into movies, the messages of the movies, the TV shows, the newspaper stories that they pick and how they spin them have but one criterion for truth, beauty, honesty, etc., and that is: Does it tear down what is good and elevate what is evil? Does it tear down what is right and elevate what is wrong? Does it tear down the behaviors that lead to success and elevate the ones that lead to failure so that there is nothing left to believe in? [. . .] Not everyone who voted for John Kerry and who fits that description is aware of the [Leftist] elite’s blueprint for utopia, and I don’t think some of them would support it if they were. What the elite have succeeded in doing through the institutions we’ve allowed them to control—and if we’re going to save America, we must take back the schools, the universities, the media, the entertainment industry—is indoctrinating, starting with the very young and going all the way up through college and beyond, [. . .]
After hearing the speech, I realized that my problem was that I saw the way an ideology gains followers in historic terms, as one mechanism, and it’s really two now days. The relationship between an ideology, a group of knowledgeable leaders, and their True Believers used to come about as a sort of winnowing process that collected together serious true believers and then grew over time from there, picking up followers here and there. At any given time in the past, theLeader/those-Led grouping was small, and usually gained power by some revolt or something like the Reichstag fire or The Big Lie combined with the willing group of Thugs who connect whenever people are seeking power and don’t care how they get it. Now, the Leftists have so conditioned the Main Stream Media, Hollywood, and the indoctrinated population (that they have trained in schools and colleges and universities), that that population believes that it is the Bush Administration who is waging a war based on lies and with a thuggish military.
The Leftists learned from the past, where gaining followers for an ideology produced only a limited number of true believers, and they took the time and effort to build up an education system that allowed them to indoctrinate a couple generations of children who are now adults and followers of those who indoctrinated them. While we were going about our lives, the Left very deliberately took over in the the Media and with the image-makers, and tore down great sections of the values and policies that made America great. They replaced them with the ideas of deliberately instilled ignorance, a sense of entitlement, victimhood, self-esteem based on nothing, and the notion that if something bothers them they have the right to stop it in its tracks. To paraphrase Evan Sayet, the Leftists tore down the good and replaced it with the evil; they tore down the right and elevated the wrong. They tore down the behaviors that led to success and elevated the ones that lead to failure. Already, there is nothing left to believe in for too many people.
WHY THE LACK OF VISION IN THE UNITED STATES (AND ELSEWHERE)
This is the crux of the whole matter. The Ideological World War is fundamentally aimed at keeping/changing as many people as possible into Leftist Collectivists or into Islamofascists. The leaders of the Left know what they are doing; their followers, as Evan Sayet points out, don’t, and they think what the Left has taught them to think in schools and universities and in the Media.
Because of the same technology that has made a world-wide war possible, and because of the way both enemies have taken over the educational facilities they need in order to promote their own point of view only, there are tens of millions of people who follow either the Left or the Islamofascists. Moreover, the leaders and followers of the Left so hate George W. Bush that they are hoping that the President loses against the terrorists so that the Left can get presidential power. This makes it essential for them to deliberately or subconsciously underestimate the nature of the Islamofascists in reporting and in image-making.
They think that when they take control of the presidency they will be able to handle the Islamofascists. One of the Left’s fondest illusions is that people can negotiate about anything. They overlook the fact that the terrorists want to convert or kill everyone they can, and are therefore incapable of negotiating for anything but something they see as in their favor in the (very) short run on their way to killing everyone who disagrees.
So Islamofascists and the Left have formed a strange alliance. The Left power structure wants the terrorists win in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this is perfect from the point of view of the Islamofascists. The Left is confident that it will win any war against the Islamofascists if it is forced into one, because contrary to what they claim, the Left is perfectly willing to destroy civilians and go all out to gain its victory, and when it has to it won’t fight in the more careful way that the American forces are at the moment. On their side, the Islamofascists want to encourage anything that weakens its enemies, and is cheering the Left on. The Islamofascists know full well that they will never negotiate, because they don’t have to, because Leftists, being human, are just as easily slaughtered as anyone else. The radical Jihadists can conquer a lot before they need to turn on the Leftists, thus the alliance. Stalin and Hitler did the same thing early in World War II.
The warnings that are big enough to come to our attention, such as 9/11 and the Supreme Court Kelo decision, warnings I call Point Joes, are about the Leftist Cultural War or the Islamofascist Terrorist War. This means that they must be downplayed in the Left’s Main Stream Media and educational systems (especially universities). The press can decide to ignore words such as “terrorist”, and to quickly “forget” the lessons we have learned. It is incredibly difficult for those of us who recognize the reality and importance of this great war we are in to offset the beating we are receiving from the other side. There are tens of millions of people who don’t know the details of the “inside story” and aren’t receiving information about it, and are thus even more vulnerable to the pressure to turn against the war in Iraq and in the world.
It is no longer a world in which an ideology commanded only a small group of true believers and a somewhat larger number of “useful idiots”. Today, the “useful idiots” are numbered in the tens of millions, and their numbers are increasing.
And they are truly clueless.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, The Virtuous Republic, Committees of Correspondence, DeMediacratic Nation, Maggie's Notebook, On the Horizon, The Pet Haven Blog, DragonLady's World, Webloggin, The Bullwinkle Blog, The Amboy Times, Leaning Straight Up, Conservative Cat, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, stikNstein... has no mercy, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, High Desert Wanderer, Right Voices, The Yankee Sailor, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
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