Many reactionaries and right liberals have remarked that the grand strategy of left liberalism with respect to Islam is to use it (along with mass immigration from other dysfunctional cultures) to sap the culture and morale of the West, and then turn and deprave the immigrants and Moslems with porn, consumerism, nihilism, atheism, scientism, libertinism, and so forth – i.e., to turn them into cynical liberals like themselves.
The right has also pointed out that once Sharia is imposed upon the West, liberals will be the first to feel its lash. As with the liberal campaign for abortion rights that cuts deepest into the biological reproduction of liberals themselves, the strategy is suicidal.
With the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Islam has made it crystal clear that the right is correct in this assessment. The attack on Charlie Hebdo is a frontal assault on the Cathedral of Moloch. It is a massacre of high-ranking prelates of that religion. Unlike 9/11, it cannot be quite characterized as an attack against capitalism or global finance. Nor can it be characterized as contra the military power of the West, or against Christianity, or colonialism, or imperialism, or any of the other bugbears of the left. No. It is an attack against the chattering classes themselves, specifically and only them – in Hollywood, the academy, and journalism.
And they cannot but know this, deep down.
It has to be a sobering moment for our rulers: they are naked, as they well know, and indeed prefer; and now they must see that the knives are out against their tender, unprotected flesh.
This will not, of course, prevent them from arguing publicly that the attack may be blamed on the nativist, reactionary right. Many of them, no doubt, will persist in their delusions at all costs. But quite a few, at the margins, must now be wondering whether they might not have got things dreadfully backward – whether they themselves are not after all the useful idiots.
The Orthosphere 
You’re right that this recent incident coupled with the Sony hack last month has sent shock waves through the entire super structure of Western liberalism. Whether that is necessarily a good thing remains to be seen. If liberalism does go “full Jacobin” on the Muslims, it will most certainly have to draw on the remnants of the society that are still in some sense “conservative.” That, I guess the real question – how will the right respond? I do hope it doesn’t make this into another crusade for liberty.
I see no way that we could honestly go to war with Islam without confronting the cognitive dissonance between libertarian freedom of religion and proscription of the practice of Islam as a fifth column threat to liberty in general. As the Moslems heat up our conflict with Islam, this dissonance is going to get more and more difficult for right liberals to ignore. So an all-out shooting war with Islam, which seems to be inevitable, sooner or later, is going to be an existential crisis for libertarianism: either freedom of religion is abandoned, or else freedom in general is surrendered to Sharia. My money is on the demise of freedom of religion. Not that it will be an easy process.
Unfortunately, your analysis is likely correct. And the media will help use the attack as a blanket impetus to go after anyone practicing religion (read: Christianity, Islam, and perhaps Ultra-Orthodox Judaism), particularly I think, in instituting Germany-style bans on religious education, homeschooling, the continuing end to giving adoptive children to religious families, etc.
I have already noticed that while the usual politically correct Islamophobia arguments are still apparent, there has been a change in tone, particularly in the UK where it appears media personalities are encouraging the mockery of religious people, even at the expense of Muslims. This is apparently now a sacred ‘right’. Of course it has been open season on Christians in that country for a while.
Will we soon see the Moderns throw their Trojan horse, Islam, out of their clown car?
This will definitely get the usual dumbed down ‘conservatives’ to rally to their banner without realizing they are being played. Obviously there is a wealth of documented evidence that this problem is entirely the fault of the secular leftists who will now decry Islam, but I just think the general public is so stupid they will dismiss it and say ‘policies change as the situation changes’.
Our aim is to have people realize that Islam is indeed a dark force, but one that is from our perspective almost animal and elemental in nature. It almost is without agency, and so the real culprits of atrocities in the West are those that have fed the fire, those that unlocked the cage, those that bought the wild dog into the nursery. Secular liberalism, Modernism, leftism.
The left is once again trying to play the right like idiots. I just hope Reactionaries are not the only ones smart enough to avoid this obvious trap, specifically set up to really finish the freedoms of Christian men for good, all in the name of a ‘separation of church and state.’
I’ll echo the late Jerry Falwell on that.
“The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”
And indeed it has.
I don’t see how this would be a problem for them. They’ll simply say “freedom of religion, within the limits of (libertarian) public order.” In other words, they’ll continue to blame “radical Islam,” to insist they’re only attacking “radical Islam,” etc.
Already I see Atheists painting all religions as being just as bad as Islam and likely supporting the persecution or suppression of all religions a state sanctioned and enforced Atheism.
The “right” will wheel Charlie Daniels out of whatever drunk tank he is in and have him sing a paen to fweedom and our military heros. Then the humanitarian bombing will commence, over the strenuous cheering of Bill Kristol and Co, orgastic that Muslims and not themselves receive the two minute hate.
No? Linked is reliable neocon poodle Victor Davis Hanson ramping up the stupid in the direction I mention. From Hanson’s point of view, the real problem is not that Christians no longer seek to punish blasphemy—in fact, that failure shows how awesome we are. Or how awesome he is. Or something. No, the real problem is that liberals are insufficiently enthusiastic about killing people opposed to liberalism. He also seems kind of regretful that we can’t go back in time and kill some intolerant Medieval Christians. You know, to prove how principled we are.
All the Jacobins have to do to get the enthusiastic support of these vermin is start killing ragheads wholesale. Thus is “the West” defended.
The “right” will wheel Charlie Daniels out of whatever drunk tank he is in and have him sing a paen to fweedom and our military heros
This line had me in stitches.
Yes, ISE, DrBill is good with images.
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…said Gimli. ‘If no land divided Isengard and Mordor, then they could fight while we watched and waited.’
‘The victor would emerge stronger than either, and free from doubt,’ said Gandalf. ‘But Isengard cannot fight Mordor, unless Saruman first obtains the Ring…
The question remains, then. Who is Mordor and who is Isengard here?
It has always seemed clear to me that Islam is Mordor, while liberalism is Saruman. The difference is that liberalism definitely has possession of the Ring.
Kristor, you forget one thing. Many Muslims who say they are devout and pious, see no problem with being a devout Muslim and drinking alcohol, watching porn, fornicating, or committing sodomy and pederasty. Case in point: the 9/11 bombers. They obviously believed in Islam and yet porn, alcohol and prostitutes were not really a big deal to them. Sexual morality for a Muslim is really for women not for men.
Either way, Islam will not slowed down by throwing Sexual libertinism at it.
All true. But these are oversights of the left in its grand strategy, not of the right.
True. But we have to realize that Muslims are here and won’t stop coming for some time. And we can’t ignore them(it’s not like they or the Left will let us).
So the way I see it, we should provoke them against the Left and prompt infighting amongst the Left. Using Muslims do destroy morale should not be left up to the Left, the Right can do it too.
Svar makes a good point, though Im not entirely sure how we can inject any influence there. What do you propose? I mean, the magazine at the heart of this attack just ran another print with Mohamed on it. The left at this point seem to be doing a find job of inviting terrorism upon themselves, all in the name of ‘free speech’, which they don’t really believe in as France just said it was cracking down on ‘hate speech’…. right after a free speech march!
I think the left underestimates the tribal nature of Islam, and this could be very dangerous for them.
Catholics should be looking to attract those disenchanted with both liberalism and Islam to our cause. Acting as foot soldiers for the liberal West (without any reciprocity) is hardly a beneficial arrangement.
arcidus – precisely. It must be stressed as Reactionaries of any denomination, we have absolutely no allegiance to secular Modern governments and should not aid in furthering their cause in any area, unless it in some way can further our cause even more.
You seem to have “left liberalism” confused with a villain from a James Bond film. Left liberalism is a very ill-defined and uncoordinated body of people and ideas and does not have a grand strategy, so you are elevating it beyond its station. There is nobody sitting in their island lair stroking a cat and plotting to wreak havoc by unleashing nihilism and scientism (which would seem incompatible with each other in any case).
Same with Islam, you may have noticed that there is far more energy spent by Moslems in fighting amongst themselves than in fighting the West.
Not entirely unexpected, a.morphous. Islamic countries Shiite/Sunni are in close proximity to each other and of course have a long history of almost continual bloodshed, whereas their violence against outside religions of foreign lands, while notable and significant, doesn’t have the same kind of constant tenacity as the battle for the successorship of Mohamed between these factions, each viewing the other one as a traitor rather than an enemy. It is also the case that Sunnis and Shiites have a few somewhat Traditional societies still in operation, meaning their religion is integrated into their government. So, Sunnis have a Shiite government to rail against, and Shiites have various Sunni governments to rail against.
On the flipside, there are no Christian governments beyond Vatican City. There are no ostensibly Buddhist governments either. Although I would recommend watching India, as with Hindu nationalism rising and a volatile Pakistan on the border, I would designate it as a possible flashpoint for the next big headline.
A.morphous, you raise an interesting question: does a grand strategy have to be consciously intended and centrally coordinated to qualify as such? I rather doubt it. It is after all informative for biologists to speak of the “strategy” of virii, or of parasites, that are not perhaps conscious at all, and have certainly no notion of the activities of their conspecifics. Virii and parasites are guided by the same invisible hand that generates orderly market phenomena. That hand is at work in any biological phenomenon.
It would seem to me then rather that grand strategy must be a category that is one way or another filled by any ordered system, that tends generally to produce consistent effects – that is, i.e., finally ordered; or, to be more precise and parsimonious, is just ordered, simpliciter. An ordered system has a grand strategy in virtue of its systemic orderliness. Or vice versa; same thing either way
Systems with a consiously intended and centrally coordinated grand strategy, then, would constitute but a small subset of the systems that have and manifest a grand strategy.
I’m sure that leftism seems ill-coordinated to leftists – traditionalism and reaction seem pretty uncoordinated to us reactionaries. But to us reactionaries, the coordination of the activities of leftists is positively spooky. They all do just what they are supposed to according to the grand strategy – or is it a narrative? – that we on the right can see so clearly at work in them, and they do it *without anyone having to tell them what to do.* Thus the trenchance, pertinence and utility – i.e., the truth – of “knee jerk liberal.” I would be surprised to hear that reactionaries seem uncoordinated and, er, amorphous to leftists. I bet that to a leftist we look like some sort of Borg, marching in lockstep.
An example: I don’t recall what the impetus was, but it was eerie when some months back, a bunch of good liberals changed their Facebook profile pictures to some variation of the rainbow flag, all at the same time. No one told them all to do it; there was no encoded message sent from Leftism, Inc., to all liberals in good standing. There was no central coordination at all—but they did it nonetheless.
@Wm. Lewis: that was not a rainbow flag, but rather a red ‘equal’ sign created by the ‘Human Rights Campaign’. An organization, by the way, that just saw one of its founders arrested for sex with an underage boy.
The left is like a living organism in many respects, some disgusting mass of tissue grotesquely squirming and wriggling around. When a noxious ooze is produced by one of its glands, it is delivered to all parts of the organism via arteries. Thus, the ‘blob’-like nature of liberalism and its inherent satanic groupthink that encourages the next big perversion and vice.
Kristor @ You are right to invoke Smith’s “invisible hand” because the undirected coordination of the market works in much the same way as the (somewhat less) undirected coordination of the political left. A mass of men can be coordinated when they act on a common principle, just as they can be coordinated when they act under orders. The principle of enlightened self interest gives rise to Smith’s invisible hand in the market, and the principle of equity gives rise to the invisible hand of leftism. Equality is the categorical imperative of leftism, notwithstanding the fact that some leftists are more equal than others.
One doesn’t get the same degree of coordination working in the other direction, since there are many possible hierarchies but only one possible equality.
I wrote about the “leftist hivemind” on C:tB some time ago, the relevant issue then being the Gabrielle GIffords shooting. Within hours, without any apparent coordination, all the lefties in America had reached the exact same conclusion: the attack was the result of the right-wing tea-party climate-of-hate, instigated by Sarah Palin’s map of U.S. House districts covered with bullseyes. That this narrative was BS didn’t matter: they all had the exact same thought, in more or less the exact same words, at the exact same time, and no one told them what to think. They just thought it spontaneously, simultaneously.
The Facebook red equals sign thing is a great illustration of it, too. We’re all free-thinkers, which is why we all look exactly alike!
So leftism is an ordered system whose goal is nihilism? OK. It brings to mind Jean Tinguely’s self-destructing artworks.
I’m not sure why the coordination of leftists, such as it is, should be any more surprising than any other coordination of people who believe similar things.
The reactionary right doesn’t appear very lockstep to me. There are at least three separate obvious factions that I’ve come across: the religious reactionaries (you guys), the rationalist ex-libertarian types, and the posturing junior Nietzsches who like to remind the moralistic left that it’s a rough and violent world. These are all very contradictory positions, and I’ve noticed people here being unable to settle on one — but you can’t serve Christ and Nietzsche at the same time no matter how clever you may be.
a.morphous @ One cannot serve both Christ and Nietzsche, but a Christian can learn a lot from that crazy old kraut. We can agree with almost everything he says about Christianity as a transvaluation of classical heroic values, demurring only at his assertion that this was a bad thing. And we are right there with him when he talks about the cultural consequence of the “death of God.” We deny that God has actually died, of course, but we do not deny that he has died so far as a great many people are concerned, or that the consequences of this widespread misapprehension are pretty much what the man with the soup strainer mustache said they would be.
I think that the coordination of liberal opinion results primarily from liberal principles, but they also have the advantage of being able to send their minions marching orders through the mass media. A tradcon or neoreactionary will have to do some hunting around on the internet if he wants to find out what his tribe is thinking about something like the Charlie Hebdo attack. A standard issue left-liberal just has to turn on the television.
A.morphous, I’m interested and pleased to hear that the right doesn’t look like a monolith to you. But then, you have taken the trouble to actually read around on the right, and I doubt that is so for very many other leftists; or people, for that matter. Not even very many right liberals even know that there is such a thing as reaction, or how it might differ from their own right liberalism/libertarianism.
I doubt that very many leftists consciously intend nihilism. Nihilism is indeed one of the final causes of leftism, but I think it arises in moderns as a side effect of the motion of leftist society toward its explicit ostensible goal, equality. But that’s a big topic.
a.morphous – no, we are not lockstep, but in the end we feel our view of Traditionalism wins out since it is the most honest and true to history. The secular cosmopolitan reactionaries, while very intelligent and insightful, are not so different from the fascists of Italy. They knew something was wrong in their society (it was Modern), but their response was disordered by virtue of the fact that Modern ideas had corrupted deeper levels of their thought. So while they justly rejected various aspects of the Modern world, they held onto some of the ones that it was important to reject.
Our view on the other hand, is not Modern in its origin, it traces its roots all the way back to De Maistre rather than a lengthy essay by an American computer programmer published in this century.
My hope at least, is that as time goes on, those neoreactionaries will return to this older strain of thought. Bear in mind the further east you go nowadays, the more religiously tinged Reactionary thought will become, and eventually the large segment of those secular reactionaries in places like California who have big qualms with decadence and sexual disintegration in particular will come to question the root of those beliefs and open their eyes to the truth of Traditional Christianity as the viable and correct path for overthrowing and replacing the current profane order.
Like the androsphere, secular neoreaction is incipiently orthodox. Truth is a strange attractor for virtuous minds, as Virtue is a strange attractor for those who recognize the Truth.
BRAVO, good sir!
A succinct and 100% accurate analysis of this event. The irony is that the writers of Hebdo, being self-declared leftists, voted for the leadership that allowed their killers into the country! But the Modern establishment doesn’t care if it loses a few of its own so long as the agenda continues. The agenda is paramount.
It is refreshing to now view these events the same way I view things like the Peshwar school attack, as being external to myself and not actually involving me or any kind of cultural affiliation I have. Sunni Muslim Jihadists murdering Modern elite leftists is like Sunni Muslim Jihadists murdering Shiites. Tragic the loss of life of course, but we can actually draw up an analysis with us as the opponents of both groups rather than in league with one of them, which I think makes the Reactionary view uniquely nuanced as one trawls through editorial after editorial saying the same things over and over.
The events unfolding in the weeks ahead will certainly be interesting. Notice that France has used this as an excuse to crack down on ‘hate speech’ and I have a feeling most of the targets of such a crackdown will not be Muslims. To be honest, I would not be surprised to see Le Pen thrown in jail. We saw what happened in Greece. What an excellent precursor to jailing your political opponents, eh?
Well, they’re giving her (Mme. LePen) all kinds of (unintentional) soft pitches: e.g. excluding LePen — who represents the one institutional voice that has consistently objected to the Muhammadization of France — from their “unity march.” That’s priceless political good fortune in that it reveals very vividly to the masses just how bizarro the French political mainstream is, and it moreover spares LePen from having to rub shoulders with the quislings who have caused the mess.
That is an excellent point.
True. I am also interested in the reports that state that even though many leaders attended, they held back and didn’t really ‘lead’ the march. I wonder why. Are they really trying to play a double game that is becoming increasingly untenable? I’d have thought they’d have decided on one way or the other by now.
The best evidence that the Charlie Hebdo attack is seen and understood by the establishment as an attack on the establishment is their willingness to vilify the Muslim attackers and defend their primarily-intended upper-crust white “Islamophobic” victims. That’s a total inversion of the usual leftist sensibility, so something is going on there.
Also relevant is the establishment suddenly flocking behind the banner of free speech. Since they all believe in free speech now, please can we maybe have some?
Haha, free speech is only for Modern sheep prof. As enemies of the state, we are entitled to nothing, least of all our own ‘radical!’ ideas.
As Henry Sumner Maine put it, democracy is just inverted monarchy. There is still the crime of Lése Magesté, only now it protects the dignity of The People. Of course in postmodern democracy, the face of The People is a social pariah, not a common man. If Aaron Copland was composing today, it would have been “Fanfare for the Social Pariah.”
Hey! You guys are not playing the game right! I’ll go over it again with you. You kill some brown people and the occasional redneck. We respond by letting the rednecks kill some different brown people. Then, we both get to fundraise off of vilifying the rednecks. Remember?
What do you mean you want to establish Sharia Law? Look, there aren’t even any press people here. It’s just us. Cut the crap. Oh! Perhaps you want me to share some more names from my fundraising list? I’ve got some lovely Hollywood and Wall St names.
Again with the Sharia Law. Look, you can’t shoot, blow up, or otherwise maim or kill the people we are trying to fundraise from. Understand? If they think you are trying to kill them, then they won’t give you as much money. It spoils the whole shizzle, the fear of imminent death thing. Get it now?
Oh for pity’s sake. Yeah, yeah, you’re coming for me. Whatever.
Gretchen! Get me Ralph Reed! At least he understands the language I’m speaking!
I’m not sure,but I think that anti-Traditional Liberalism is Mordor and Islam is Saruman.
Liberalism is at root contrary to the great chain of being. Islam, an Abrahamic tradition, is not.
Islam is a false and wicked teaching, “Abrahamic” only because they deceptively inserted themselves into the tradition by cobbling together Arabic tribalism and pagan practices with plagiarized Jewish and Christian elements.
Could such a “civilization” produce the likes of a Jalal Din Rumi?
Oh come now. You know the Paris attacks were the work of the Tea Party.