A Call to Subversion

 
This blog has repeatedly asserted that the critical front in the Great Islamic Jihad is the struggle within the soul of the West. It is a bitter but non-violent civil war between those who would surrender to the deconstruction of Western culture and those who would resist it.

The fortunes of this war vary from country to country in the West. The reports by Fjordman and Rune suggest the inevitable conclusion that Scandinavia has all but lost the war. The combination of state-enforced political correctness and mass Muslim immigration is a lethal one, leaving Swedish civil society on the verge of collapse.

Britain threatens to tolerate itself out of existence, as chronicled repeatedly by Norman Geras. An Islamic radical like Sheikh Omar Bakri continues to preach violent jihad against the infidels, while he and his disciples enjoy the generous benefits of Britain’s welfare state.

In Australia, pastors are jailed for defaming Islam when they quote the Koran. The primary religious text of Islam is “defamatory” by its very nature, but it is apparently unwise for Australian citizens to point this fact out.

Oriana Fallaci has to stay out of her native Italy or risk jail time for printing her opinion of Islam. The Netherlands… Germany… France… Canada… Each is a front in the Great Jihad, and each is succumbing in its own way to the enemy tide.

Here in the USA we are not as badly off — in some cases the First Amendment still manages to protect the right to voice an opinion — but the forces of Multiculturalism and Political Correctness still tighten the screws on most sensible discourse. The situation is so severe that major national media do not dare to call this war what it is: the Third Wave of the Great Islamic Jihad.

How did we get to this sorry pass? What happened?

You can chalk it up to the victory of Soviet communism. Communism was defeated empirically, in the real world, by democratic capitalism. But in the marketplace of ideas — in the media and academia, among the mandarins of pop culture, and in the permanent federal bureaucracy — the Soviets won. Capitalism has to be tolerated, since the engine of modernity will not run without it, but it will never be respectable, and its associated virtues — hard work, thrift, religious values, and civic culture — have been permanently discredited.

Thank the KGB for its tireless work infiltrating and financing student radicals, black activists, labor unions, and any organization that sought to undermine traditional Western values. Thank the innumerable fellow travelers, the Marxist theoreticians and deconstructionists, who gladly drilled and dynamited and demolished until our common culture was a field of rubble. Thank the forces of leftist subversion who ate their way through the body politic like termites through an old stump.

The socialist left may be a spent force on the political scene, but its legacy is still with us. Each of us labors under a great burden of unexamined premises that inhibits honest discussion. To make a profit, to judge an idea on its merits, to observe real differences among people and groups — each of these actions carries the risk of elite disapproval. Each of us has witnessed the telltale glance over the shoulder and lowered voice whenever an un-PC thought is uttered.

This suppression of meaningful discussion has allowed the Great Jihad to enjoy success within our midst. Because dissent on such issues is not allowed, taxpayers in Britain have to fund Islamic education in the schools, and Swedish police are not allowed to release rape statistics based on the ethnicity of the perpetrators. Islam is a Religion of Peace, and scrutinizing its tenets and practices is — horror of horrors! — racism. Our toxic tolerance looks the other way while Muslim women are suppressed, straitjacketed, abused, and even killed, all in the name of the most noble of ideals.

So what can be done to hinder this suicidal juggernaut?

Since subversion brought on the current crisis, the time has come for counter-subversion. The duty of a warblogger, as I have said before, is to storm and occupy the national conversation. We have to subvert the dominant paradigm.

We will have to it with no help from the mainstream media, committed as they are to the PC worldview. And we will have to do it despite the Bush administration and our elected politicians, who seem constitutionally incapable of taking action without the approval of the New York Times and the network news. It will truly be a task for “the distributed intelligence of the Internet”.

We can begin by asking questions, dangerous, politically incorrect questions. We must ask them forcefully and repeatedly until they become part of the collective dialogue. Here are some examples, and you can add your own:

• Is Islam inherently dangerous, or just its most radical forms?
• Are journalists aiding and abetting our enemies in the way they cover stories and utilize terrorist sources?
• Is the UN part of the problem rather than part of the solution?
• Does the destruction of common values by a degraded popular culture play right into the hands of the Great Jihad?
• Why are we so reluctant to tackle the Saudi and Iranian problems?

To jump-start this conversation we have to be willing to ignore the nagging inner voice that tells us, You can’t say that! We have to inure ourselves to the label “racist”. We have to expect that we will be called “tools of the neocons”. We have to learn to brush away the insults.

If we want to succeed in this fight, we have to be subversive. And subversion is a thankless task.

It’s time to take back the culture.