By Edward Cline
Over the years I have read various collectivist utopian novels, particularly those that envisioned ideal communist or socialist societies, and dismissed them as unrealistic fables whose authors had an agenda other than projecting their politics, short-changing their readers on the political and economic facets and means of their tales. Among many such novels, Edward Bellamy’s talky Looking Backward: 2000-1887, published in 1888, was the best of a literally unbelievable lot. The most significant and ominous thing about Bellamy’s novel is that for many years it was a best-seller, trailing behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben Hur. It helped to popularize socialism in the U.S.
British Fabian socialist H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1933) is of the Marxist utopian genre, in which a clique of airmen takes over an anarchical world when governments have collapsed after a world war and plague, and is more optimistic than his dystopian novel, The Time Machine (1895). Although Wells predicted some events in Shape of Thingswith startling accuracy, such as WWII and the U.S.’s war with Japan, the novel is unique in that the airmen’s dictatorship eradicates all religions, including Islam, the latter apparently without much fuss.
According to Marxist doctrine, or at least Friedrich Engels’ version of it, socialism, once it has converted everyone into cooperative manqués, would eventually morph into a fully communist state, with the state itself “withering away,” shedding the apparatus of government as a snake sheds its skin. This would happen because society at that point would be driven unconsciously by some Hegelian historical necessity. And then, somehow, beggaring examination of any causo-connections, things would all work out effortlessly.
A Marxist utopia would be classless, of course, having in its aggressive socialist stage extinguished by fair means and foul “plutocrats” and the bourgeoisie. A purely Marxist society would be egalitarian – “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
If food is needed, it would be produced. Somehow. It would be distributed without error or mix-up, somehow. Truly communist farmers would automatically grow an abundance of consumables, and truly communist truckers would distribute them to magical food collection points (“markets” having been abolished).
If steel is needed, somehow it would be produced, and fashioned somehow into a vast catalogue of utilitarian objects. Everything needed for the comfort and leisure of men, from clothing, kitchen ware, power, machines, medical services and so on, would be available – somehow.
But, produced by whom? Well, by the people, naturally, who would automatically fulfill every need. If you’re an average citizen of the stateless republic, you will not need to be told to report to the local steel mill to help turn out ingots and pigs. There would be no state agency or planner overseeing these matters, because the state will have withered away. No one would direct labor to the right places. No one would need to redirect or redistribute capital, either, because that cursed vehicle of the old times, capital, would no longer exist. You would just know that you’re needed, somewhere, somehow.
In fact, money would not exist. Money implies trade, which will have been abolished, as well. Everyone will go around empty-handed, but lack for nothing. Food, clothing, and shelter are all provided to you – somehow.
So, off you trot to the steel mill. Do you know anything about producing steel? Do you have the technical knowledge and the skills to perform the task? Who knows how it happened, but you just have them. That’s the glory of stateless communism. You’re a universal adept. You can do anything the collective requires you to do.
In the former era of universal socialism, many men had to be cajoled or compelled to do things. In the perfect stateless state of communism, they do things “voluntarily,” without prompting. You whistle while you work, as does everyone else, content to work without compensation.
And I could only conclude, in those spare moments, that the perfect communist state must be a society of automatons, all programmed and driven by “historical necessity” and “dialectical materialism,” and that you, the citizen of this stateless society, are but an insensate cipher, a pawn of some power that magically causes all other men to “do the right thing” in frictionless amity. You are a humanoid ant, a manqué, unburdened by a volitional consciousness.
Now, no liberal/leftist/Progressive who can read STOP signs and refrain from seasoning his salads with rat poison believes down, down deep, in such Marxist hokum. No, such a utopia conveniently remains a cloudy, shimmering fantasy in their minds, absent of clear details and particulars, never to be attained. Much destruction must occur first, and that is the primary obsession of the liberal/leftist/Progressives today, to destroy what exists. Of course, those mystical powers of historical necessity need a little help from them. They revel in destruction. Destruction makes them feel useful.
And then came President Barack Hussein Obama. He is a walking vehicle of historical necessity. Or so he thinks, and so think all his supporters and the various claques of liberal/left/Progressives in government and the MSM and advocacy groups. Like everyone else, Obama is imbued with a volitional consciousness, and chooses to do what he does. Which, except when he is on a golf course, is destroy. His purported vision of a transformed America is as chimerical and fantastic as any other collectivist’s. Down, down deep, he knows this.
Today’s liberal/left/Progressives, one suspects, must necessarily dread the dawn of true communism. In such a state, they would have nothing to do. They would be unemployed.
Now, Islam subscribes to a similar fantasy, too, and likewise is minus a clear program of how such a society would actually function and survive. This is the global caliphate that will have brought “peace” to everyone – that is the meaning of Islam being a “religion of peace,” in the same way that the United Nations is touted as an “instrument of peace,” “peace” being something that destructive organization has never accomplished. All men, but most particularly Muslims, will exist in a state of blissful, conflict-free comity.
Non-Muslims will behave themselves and be content with their status as subjugated dhimmis and kaffirs, obedient to the Islamic State and deferential to Muslims in all instances and encounters. They willingly pay the jizya, the Islamic “protection” tax. This impost, if one examines its fundamental purpose, is a literal tax on your existence; non-payment of it will be against Sharia law and cause your subsequent and swift non-existence. It is based on the premise that a Muslim is a first cause, superior to non-believers, and that your existence, as a dhimmi, is dependent on his existence; a curious metaphysics of morals, not dissimilar from the Mafia brand.
Moreover, terrorism and violent jihad will cease in the global Islamic state; this is what tongue-in-cheek, taqiyya-skilled Muslims mean when they say they don’t condone terrorism.
And, as in the liberal/left/Progressive’s fantasy world, things will happen and work will be done and no one will want for anything. Somehow. But, there’s a catch. The liberal/left/Progressive dreams of a post-industrial world that has inherited the standard of living and technological marvels which the industrial, capitalist world made possible, but without any of the repellent social mechanisms, such as trade, property rights, individual rights, and so on.
Islam’s perfect world, on the other hand, tests the imagination. One can project little more than an oligarchy of caliphs and sultans and muftis living luxuriously on the labor of their submissive populations, and answering to some Grand Vizier or Mufti or Caliph. As with the Catholic Pope (who will no longer exist), he will be regarded as Allah’s supreme representative on earth. One can’t see in an Islamic global régime oil tankers, high-speed trains, literature other than Islamic literature, art, advances in medicine, or even skyscrapers, except for the bizarre white elephants erected in Saudi Arabia and the various fiefdoms on the Persian Gulf.
Perhaps those skyscrapers won’t even exist, for they were erected with Sunni oil money (international jizya), and they might be blasted to hot atoms by Iranian (Shi’ite) nuclear missiles.
Unlike the liberal/left/Progressive fantasy world, however, which is expected to exist in perpetuity, Islam proclaims that Allah at one point will call it a day and send in his Twelfth Imam or the Mahdi to announce the end of all things, and to cause the sun to rise in the West. There will be weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth as “good” Muslims are segregated from “bad” Muslims and all dhimmis and infidels are sent immediately to hell. No one will be “left behind” because the earth will cease to exist.
And that is the gist of the equally delusional Islamic notion of utopia.
The “totalities” of the liberal/left/Progressive notion of utopia and those of Islam are fundamentally, and incontrovertibly, totalitarian. There is no other way of looking at either projected utopia, or, at least, no other way of treating the transitional phase between now and the attainment of those utopias, which is socialism birthing a perpetual heaven on earth on the one hand, and religiously imposed collectivism and some equally ambiguous but temporary heaven on earth, on the other.
Why do Progressives, liberals, and leftists love Islam? Why are Islamists not wholly reciprocal in that love, and only grudgingly tolerate them? Why do Progressives, liberals, and leftists refuse to identify Islamic doctrine as the cause of terrorist attacks, and demonstrate in their denials contorted states of mind once only attributable to schizophrenics and the mentally ill with multiple personalities?
John Rossomando, in his IPT article of May 24th, “Media Analysts Dodge Jihad Connection in Boston, London,” cites numerous examples of the behavior of politicians, commentators and pundits and how they received the news of the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15th and the broad daylight murder of a British soldier in London on May 22nd. Even though the one killer had shouted “Alluha Akbar!” while killing British Army drummer Lee Rigby, and ranted about Islam on camera, they will not blame Islam.
Commentator Michelle Malkin [of Town Hall] was singled out in the Media Matters post for saying the videotaped attacker was “quoting chapter and verse, sura and verse, from the Quran the justification for beheading an innocent solider there, and of course they’ve targeted civilians as well.”…Michael Adebolajo said, “But we are forced by the Qur’an, in Sura At-Tawba, through many ayah in the Qu’ran, we must fight them as they fight us,” he says.
Media Matters also called Fox News “Islamophobic” in its coverage of the Lee Rigby murder. Media Matters is funded by billionaire George Soros, who has subsidized a number of anti-Western, anti-American Progressive and leftist blog sites that comport neatly with their Islamic counterparts, such as Al Jazeera.
The New York Times omitted reference to the attacker’s invocation of Allah, relegating it to page A7. ABC, NBC and CBS similarly omitted the Islamic reference.
Hours after Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s names became public [after the Boston bombing], The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber penned a column titled “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” in which she suggested pinning the Muslim label on them reduced them to being “caricatures” and “whitewashed” their humanity.
Rossomando notes in his article the history of how the MSM and others have shied away from blaming Islam for the terrorism, as well as statements by Islamic clerics who advocate the kind of jihad that Lee Rigby was the victim of.
By now, the reader may well have deduced for himself that the reason why the liberal/left/Progressives will not acknowledge that Islam is at the root of these terrorist attacks is that there is an unspoken, almost Freudian symbiosis felt by the liberal/left with Islam, that is, an unarticulated empathy for another totalitarian system. The Progressive Movement, spawned in the late 19th century, made great strides in the 20th with the steady passage of laws that increasingly robbed men of their freedom with arbitrary, fiat law and regulations, until today when there is hardly a human action or product that is not regulated or constrained. This “progress” covers a range of laws from the Income Tax Amendment to mandated nutritional information on food packaging and countless measures in between.
The Progressives – a.k.a. socialists – see Islam, with its head-to-foot regulation of Muslim behavior and existence, as a friend and ally that will help them to vanquish capitalism and Western civilization. That is their mutual end. “Moderate” Muslims assure us that Western precepts of law and freedom can be reconciled with Islam. They cannot. If Islam is doctrinally a totalitarian ideology, it cannot and will not be reconciled with individual rights. Capitalism and freedom do not sanction or advocate the forcible conquest of socialists and collectivists, unless the latter initiate force against the former. Islam and Progressivism do sanction and advocate the initiation of force.
Daniel Greenfield, in his May 24th FrontPage article, “Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out,” emphasized this point:
There is a characteristic feature to tyranny. It isn’t the scowling faces of armed guards or the rusting metal of barbed wire fences. It isn’t the black cars of the secret police or the prison camps surrounded by wastelands of snow.
The defining characteristic of tyranny is the diversion of power from the people to the unelected elite. The elite can claim to be inspired by Allah or Marx; it can act in the name of racial purity or universal workers compensation or both. The details don’t matter, because in all instances, tyranny derives its justification from the superiority of the rulers and the inferiority of the people.
Oleg Atbashian, in his May 23rd FrontPage article, “Inside Every Liberal Is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out,” a companion article to Daniel Greenfield’s, also notes the empathetic symbiosis between secular statism and Islamic statism:
Progressive Chauvinism is marked by a strong belief in the divine right of their kind to hold all key positions in society for society’s own sake, forcing the “lessers” to comply with superior progressive ways. Believing that their condescension and pity towards the lower beings are a sign of benevolence and compassion, they ignite with righteous anger whenever those ingrates dare be displeased with their enlightened dominion.
The chauvinist attitude, of course, is not limited to the left, but it is characteristic of any expansionist totalitarian ideology throughout history. A force that rivals Progressive Chauvinism in today’s world isIslamic Supremacism – also known to its victims as the “religion of peace.” The attitude is almost identical: in the book of Islamic Supremacism the meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to Islam.
Islamic Supremacists similarly dream of an ideal, egalitarian society of the future – a global caliphate that will govern over a peaceful world populated by a Muslim majority, while the remaining non-believers would be too intimidated to oppose their Muslim superiors and prefer to pay the jizya – a special Muslim tax on non-believers, or “protection money”- as a condition that they be left in peace.
There is no such thing as “moderate” socialism or Progressivism, either. “Moderate” Progressives are otherwise known as Republicans, who cannot but steadily give ground to the advancing, uncompromising, dyed-in-their-premises Progressives. These watered-down Progressives must yield ground to their more militant and consistent cousins because they cannot think of a single fundamental reason to hold it.
Young John F. Kennedy, touring Germany before WWII, expressed an admiration for the Nazi régime. Remember that “Nazi” was shorthand for “National Socialist.” The Daily Mail reported on a new book coming out that details JFK’s penchant for things totalitarian:
‘Fascism?’ wrote the youthful president-to-be in one. ‘The right thing for Germany.’ In another; ‘What are the evils of fascism compared to communism?’ And on August 21, 1937 – two years before the war that would claim 50 million lives broke out – he wrote: ‘The Germans really are too good – therefore people have ganged up on them to protect themselves.’
And in a line which seems directly plugged into the racial superiority line plugged by the Third Reich he wrote after travelling through the Rhineland: ‘The Nordic races certainly seem to be superior to the Romans.’
The future president’s praise is now embarrassing in hindsight – a few years later he fought in World War Two against the Nazis and his elder brother Lt. Joseph Patrick ‘Joe’ Kennedy, Jr. was killed.
And when he became President, JFK formally introduced Fascism, or National Socialism, into the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson, his successor in office, pulled an Otto von Bismarck on the country, and introduced the full-scale welfare state.
Clare Lopez, in her May 24th Gatestone Institute article, “The New, Improved Axis of Jihad,” ends her discussion of how the various jihadist and supremacist organizations have reformed for a more aggressive and organized offensive against the West:
Reportedly, more than 2,000 targets “including public places, government buildings and military installations” already have been selected and cased. Separate but parallel reporting indicates that the “go” order may already have been transmitted from Tehran to the al-Qa’eda and Hizballah cells inside the U.S., placing them essentially on autopilot status. Of course, all of Kahlili’s published warnings have been passed in full detail to U.S. security agencies, but the threat from this Axis of Jihad remains critical and poses a serious threat to America’s homeland security.
Effective measures from America’s national security leadership are urgently needed. Those measures must begin with an honest acknowledgement of the precepts and objectives of the enemy threat —that is, as they are derived from the doctrine, law, and scriptures of Islam—and should include a comprehensive strategic counterjihad plan as complete as the Axis of Jihad’s plan.
The “honest acknowledgement” Lopez refers to is an acknowledgement that Islam is an ideology whose doctrine, laws, and scriptures are as antithetical to freedom – and indeed to life – as were the doctrines, laws, and precepts of Nazism and Communism. But politically correct mindsets in government have not only emasculated any effective measures against the Islamic onslaught, but also have emboldened the killers. States that sponsor terrorism must be ended, and that includes Iran and Saudi Arabia. Until then, Americans and Westerners will be at the mercy of their killers.
Islamic “culture” is root and branch antithetical to freedom. It requires submission not only of one’s physical body, but of one’s mind. Secular totalitarians who have bothered to examine the character and tenets of Islam see this and appreciate it. One could say that our wannabe overseers are so jealous of the totalitarian nature of Islam that they wish it well, and are eager to ally itself with a system that ultimately must eradicate them, too, along with non-believers, recalcitrant infidels, and apostates.
It is a jealousy sired by envy, as well, of the thoroughness with which Islam converts individuals into obedient, selfless serfs in mind and body, something which liberal/left/Progressives have found difficult to achieve in their best Marxist and fascist indoctrination and propaganda efforts.
Independent posts op-ed about Gaza by extremist who supported Al Qaeda attacks on 9/11
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