Today I attended a Q&A Wafa Sultan as part of a book signing for her new book, and I noticed that the common theme of virtually every question that was asked by the attendees could be summed up as, "What can we do to stop Islam?"There is of course no simple answer. Communism, the closest parallel to the current threat we face, attacked us at a military, political and cultural level.
Islam attacks us at a military, political, cultural and religious level-- making it a four part threat. And while the Soviet Union did finally collapse, looking at the state of freedom in America and Europe today, at a political environment that has dispensed with democracy in favor of judicial activism and class warfare politics that owe a good deal to the dictatorship of the proletariat-- the question of whether we defeated Communism, or Communism defeated us, remains open.
The Soviet Union proved unable to defeat us militarily, despite dedicating the bulk of its industrial capacity to building weapons, and successfully allying with much of the Third World to create an anti-Western world order in the U.N.
But culturally and politically, Communism did a great deal of damage in the West. More so than most people understand. The American and European of the year 2009 lives in a system whose political premises resemble those of the USSR more than they do his own country of 1909.
And this goes to show us that Communism accomplished far more through subversion and infiltration than nationalism and armed conquest. And the best proof of that is Eastern Europe, which was today is more honestly capitalistic than Western Europe which spent the last half century free of the Soviet boot.
Had Trotsky's way prevailed over that of his less visionary contemporaries, Communism might have triumphed as an international revolutionary movement, rather than failing as a Second World poorly industrialized armed camp.
And that is a scaled down version of the threat that we face with Islam today, backed by oil money from otherwise backward countries, polished by the disingenuous lies of a merchant culture and driven by a fanaticism that even few Communists could aspire to. And we have no better answers to the problem of what to do about a movement that subverts our society from within, than we did back then.
In her talk Wafa Sultan emphasized the importance of being informed about the real nature of Islam. And certainly the first stage of defense against cultural, political and religious threats-- which circulate by way of ideas, is to be informed.
But information itself is very much a subjective thing. It is possible to tell someone that Islam is currently involved in conflicts all over the world, that it is responsible for millions of deaths through acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
You can list all the objective facts about Islam, without in the least shaking his belief that Islam is all right based on episodes he's seen of Little Mosque on the Prairie or because Mohammed, the deli guy in the store under his office, is always friendly when he comes in for a sandwich.
For rational people the objective facts of the case may suffice, for most people they will not. We live in an age where objective reasoning has been destroyed in the First World through a process of careful cultural obliteration.
To tell someone that a million are dead in Darfur is to give him a meaningless statistic that is "awful", but not relatable. By contrast, to chronicle the story of a single orphan does far more than listing the millions dead and raped.
Islam attacks us at a military, political, cultural and religious level-- making it a four part threat. And while the Soviet Union did finally collapse, looking at the state of freedom in America and Europe today, at a political environment that has dispensed with democracy in favor of judicial activism and class warfare politics that owe a good deal to the dictatorship of the proletariat-- the question of whether we defeated Communism, or Communism defeated us, remains open.
The Soviet Union proved unable to defeat us militarily, despite dedicating the bulk of its industrial capacity to building weapons, and successfully allying with much of the Third World to create an anti-Western world order in the U.N.
But culturally and politically, Communism did a great deal of damage in the West. More so than most people understand. The American and European of the year 2009 lives in a system whose political premises resemble those of the USSR more than they do his own country of 1909.
And this goes to show us that Communism accomplished far more through subversion and infiltration than nationalism and armed conquest. And the best proof of that is Eastern Europe, which was today is more honestly capitalistic than Western Europe which spent the last half century free of the Soviet boot.
Had Trotsky's way prevailed over that of his less visionary contemporaries, Communism might have triumphed as an international revolutionary movement, rather than failing as a Second World poorly industrialized armed camp.
And that is a scaled down version of the threat that we face with Islam today, backed by oil money from otherwise backward countries, polished by the disingenuous lies of a merchant culture and driven by a fanaticism that even few Communists could aspire to. And we have no better answers to the problem of what to do about a movement that subverts our society from within, than we did back then.
In her talk Wafa Sultan emphasized the importance of being informed about the real nature of Islam. And certainly the first stage of defense against cultural, political and religious threats-- which circulate by way of ideas, is to be informed.
But information itself is very much a subjective thing. It is possible to tell someone that Islam is currently involved in conflicts all over the world, that it is responsible for millions of deaths through acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
You can list all the objective facts about Islam, without in the least shaking his belief that Islam is all right based on episodes he's seen of Little Mosque on the Prairie or because Mohammed, the deli guy in the store under his office, is always friendly when he comes in for a sandwich.
For rational people the objective facts of the case may suffice, for most people they will not. We live in an age where objective reasoning has been destroyed in the First World through a process of careful cultural obliteration.
To tell someone that a million are dead in Darfur is to give him a meaningless statistic that is "awful", but not relatable. By contrast, to chronicle the story of a single orphan does far more than listing the millions dead and raped.
h/t gramfan
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