Thursday, June 15, 2006

The New Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Islam, PC, Liberalism and Narcissm

Fjordman has written a excellent essay Political Correctness — The Revenge of Marxism on the Gates of Vienna, which does a really great job of popularizing William Lind's important work on the history of PC as cultural Marxism, and expanding on this and on a point repeatedly discussed at Gates of Vienna and elsewhere - that Islamism is merely an opportunistic infection of a diseased body politic.

However, Islam and political correctness/cultural Marxism is in turn part of a wider sickness in Western society. There are at least four layers to the disease :
  1. Islamism
  2. Political correctness (aka PC aka Cultural Marxism)
  3. Liberalism
  4. modernity induced Narcissm
As well as a number of enabling/aggravating factors
  1. the Mass media
  2. Globalisation / collusionsal selfinterested corporations
  3. collusionsal liberal elitist Governments
There is another layer of illness underlying PC, the illness that permits PC to flourish - the whole liberal anti-traditional anti-Christian mindset of the West. Fjordman has touched on this in the past, as has Brussels Journal's Paul Belien, but I notice commentators here and on LGF have mentioned other writers - Shelby Steele, Robert Spencer, Mark Steyn. Lawrence Auster on his excellent website , with impeccable logic and direct thinking at length demonstrates that even the aforementioned conservative writers have internalized liberal assumptions, and are in the end accordingly stumbling blindly.

The same can be said of Jyllandposten editor Flemming Rose (of Mohammed cartoon fame). Rose explains in Europe's Politics of Victimology that
Europe today finds itself trapped in a posture of moral relativism that is undermining its liberal values. An unholy three-cornered alliance between Middle East dictators, radical imams who live in Europe, and Europe's traditional left wing is enabling a politics of victimology.
So far so good, and most of the article is in the same vein. However he goes on to conclude :
What to do? Obviously, we can never return to the comfortable monocultures of old. A demographic revolution is changing the face, and look, of Europe. In an age of mass migration and the Internet, cheap air fares and cell phones everywhere, cultural pluralism is an irreversible fact, like it or not.
Irreversible ? Flemming has assumed a priori some of the liberal disease that he is writing against. He writes against the PC consciousness trap, in turn only to reveal inadvertently he is trapped in it himself.

But what of the roots of pathologic liberalism in western society? Shrinkwrapped has a reasonable explanation of the developmental roots in individual psychology that details why individuals in the modern western world are predisposed to narcisstic personality disorders, and how this translates into collective liberalism.

The main stream media? Like a mosquito carrying malaria, this is the vector that transmits PC to the vulnerable population. A population without a liberal bias would shrug off the nonsense - this is happening even today in Eastern Europe. The people there have been exposed to real Marxism, and seen hard times, and consequently have some measure of natural resistance to PC propaganda. I suspectthe MSMs predisposition to PC is also based in narcissm, but only more so than the rest of the population

However, the assault is unrelenting. In Latvia, a country awash with criminal problems, last week a man of African descent was assaulted by skinheads. No serious damage done - not even hospitalization However
the western infatuated media in Latvia has been absolutely awash with discussions/diatribes on the evil of Racism - first page news in the major papers! One assault with no harm and the media goes AWOL - ignoring very real and pressing problems of 2.3 million people to castigate the rest of the populace on their responsibilities to the 200 or so Africans in Latvia, and bemoaing the desperate lack of active anti-racism awareness in the country. Fortunatley the people are hardened by 50 years of real communism, are rightly suspicious and are not biting ... at least yet.

And the last? Collusion from unlikely sources - capatalists and liberalism infected governments. The elite of the corporate world have much to gain and little to lose from globalizatio. Perversly, the open borders and free movement of people is beloved of multiculturalism (one of PC's ugly stepchildren). The unholy alliance between corporate globalizationalists, cultural marxists (who may even campaign against globalization the rest of the time) and government shows up occasionaly, but the latest, most blatant and horrifying example of this phenomenon in the US is again shown by Lawrence Auster in the Nation Crusher .

1 comment:

John Sobieski said...

Well I am certainly glad to hear Eastern Eupope is not plagued with the ennui of Western Europe. Unfortunately there is a constant pressure that wears the citizens down to a nub. PC/MC is like Islam in that respect. That constant pawing and wearing down, it just scrapes away all rational thought.