Melanie Phillips is a British author of Jewish descent who has been speaking out against Leftist and Islamic totalitarianism for several decades now. Here’s the podcast of an interview she had last month with Roger Aronoff of Accuracy in Media. It starts off slowly but quickly gets most interesting! If you prefer, you can read the transcript of the interview.
In my view, she’s presenting an accurate analysis. The left, comprised of various ideologies such as socialism, fascism, communism, are all, operationally, the same.
They all operate in a ‘virtual’ world. That’s a world that you author all by yourself. An imaginary world…quite distinct from the Real World.
This virtual imaginary world is also, always, utopian.
The premise is always: IF we do such and such, THEN, everything/everyone will be perfect.
The ‘such and such’ rules of belief and behaviour are always universal; that is, everyone must fall under its rules. These rules can be beliefs (everyone must be Islamic, everyone must honour ‘allah’, everyone must accept gay marriage); behaviour (everyone must belong to a union; everyone must have health care insurance; everyone must..)
The assumption is, that IF these rules are followed, then, all grief, sadness, poverty – whatever the Ideology defines as ‘unwanted’ will disappear.
The naivete, arrogance, ignorance, of such a system – a belief in a Virtual Imaginary World, and a totalitarian insistence that it will only be ‘realized’ or actualized IF and Only If everyone follows this belief/behaviour…quite stunning in its stupidity.
So, with these basic axioms: an acceptance of an Imaginary World; a description of this world as utopian, i.e., ‘the best’; an acceptance that this Virtual World can be made Actual; a view that its actualization requires 100% of the population’s adherence;….well that leads always and only to: totalitarianism. Always.
That’s because – and it’s been pointed out many times by mathematicians and scientists, the Formal Idea can never, ever, be fully implemented. Ever hear of Godel?
Real life is never homogeneous; if it were, life actually couldn’t exist. There always has to be that capacity-to-adapt, i.e., change. Change emerges only within deviations from the norm. So, if you reject a people’s capacity to deviate from the norm, you’ve frozen them.
This happened in the West, during the late scholastic era, the inquisition era, the heretic era…when change was desperately needed but the Rulers, who felt their power threatened, did everything they could to prevent those deviations.
To prevent doubt, questions. The societies froze, and the result? Plagues, famines, wars – because they could not support the population with their old technology and ideas. They had to change.
Islam is in this medieval phase now. Can they change? A key problem is that, unlike the West in the medieval period, Islam’s Frozen State can be maintained because they have the technology of the West to use to maintain their populations. So, even though there hasn’t been a scientific idea from Islam for over 1500 years – they have oil (technology provided by the West) – and they can purchase: food, water, industrial technologies, cars..and guns. This reliance is a major problem.
The sophist left in our academies and government are maintained by unions – which set them up as an elite worker force, alienated from the Real World of the down-to-earth workers. So, they align themselves with other Virtual World proponents: Islamists, fascists, socialists, communists.
I still have faith that reality trumps the imaginary – but – it’s going to be a fight.
Excellent. Thanks.
ET, you’ve left some rather eloquent, brilliant comments before but I think this is your best one yet. Kudos!
The Utopian game as Melanie and ET point out is the “Virtual Reality World” of politics. The only problem is that this is not a computer game where if you eliminate all the non-conforming ‘opponents’ where ‘winning’ or utopia is achieved.
This is one of the reasons the Saudis have a deathly fear of the Dr. Ahmadinejad type of projection. Like Adolf’s fascism, only now racism is replaced by “Israelism”.
The Islamists are convinced that only if the “Great Satan” (US) and or “Little Satan” (Israel) are eliminated then there will be peace in the valley.
Melanie does a wonderful job of identifying the nexus of overlap between Islamism and extreme leftist secularism as perhaps best exemplified by the Chomsky left.
One should recognize the various streams of what one might idenify as ‘intellectual poison’ in the well…
Speaking of persecutions in an effort to root out nonconformists, Saul of Tarsus was on his way to Damascus…and you may well need a miracle too.
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Governments won’t do anything to confront creeping islam/sharia.
It will be left to individual ordinary people to do the task. How? I don’t know. We don’t have a choice – islam must go. How? Your call. But unless you get rid of islam in the West, we are doners sooner or later.
It’s not about radical islam, terrorism or whatever the MSM uses to label the ‘scariest’ part of it. It’s about the book of quran and its followers: the foundations of their set of beliefs is incompatible with our society to a degree where we are expendable on their way to caliphate.
Choose your sides, choose your doom.
I would only like to add to ET’s fabulous post the fact that there is the built in right to make your own choices. ‘Isms’ try to take this away by, as ET states, “IF we do such and such, THEN, everything/everyone will be perfect.”
The collective ‘ism’ WE knows better than any regular schmuck.
> Islam is in this medieval phase now. Can they change?
No, they can’t for many reasons.
Main one is that quran is an immutable last word of the divine being and Mohammed is the last prophet according to himself.
Another one is behavioural: even the ‘moderate’ muslims who due to their personality don’t give much about islam can one day meet a radical preacher who will finally convince them that wahabi (literal) interpretation of islam is the right one. And that’s then they ‘splode.
ET, thank you for your summary. Aaron, I disagree with your opinion that Muslims cannot change. I do not say it will be fast or easy, but let us not forget that Muslims are human beings and all human beings are capable of change. Christianity has changed drastically over time, even the composition of the Christian Bible has been changed more than once along with the interpretation of the scriptures. Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism have also evolved and changed over time, because people do change and adapt. As for Islam the change is more difficult for the reasons mentioned by ET along with the West carrying much of the blame. When we continue to reward through acceptance and recognition the Islamists instead of the Muslims seeking change, we do ourselves and them great harm.
Talk about speaking truth to power—and big time corruption: Melanie Phillips is an international treasure! I subscribe to her columns: altogether worthwhile, always. She’s a woman of amazing intelligence and integrity.
Her fine book, “The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power” is available, hard cover, at Amazon.com (forget .ca) for only $14.60! (I gave my original away—to a religious community: maximum exposure!—so I got another copy. For $14.60, I thought it was a paperback. Nope, it’s the hard cover.)
Thank God for Melanie Phillips: knowing there are people like her—and Kate and most of the others here—makes it easier to get up in the morning!
Amazon.ca has it for $19.12 and when you add another book at $20. you get free shipping. So you don’t need to forget Amazon.ca.
Alain,
You are another misunderstander of islam.
Read the quran and familiarize yourself with the concept of abrogation, when the later suras abrogate the earlier ones.
Also of help is the chronological order of the suras, which is different from the order in which they are listed.
You don’t undertstand that islam cannot change. This is a very dangerous confusion. I already explained why it can’t change and it went way over your head. I’ll repeat:
1. Quran is the ultimate immutable word of god.
2. Mohammed is the last prophet and a role model for the muslims.
Changing any part of islam requires changes in the quran, and changing quran is prohibited under the punishment of death.
Wishful thinking, Alain
I’ve followed her for the last few years and she has the ability to chop lefty’s into small pieces.
Islam is the left’s last chance to rule the planet using socialism/communism, they see Islam and the Islamofacists as their army. Europe has done everything it could to destroy their “White Culture” and has imported millions of people based on the left’s desire to replace white people did they stop to consider if the cultures were compatable no because that’s the point they’ll turn us against each other and the elites will sit on arrogant high playing with each ethnic group a game they haven’t named–Who’s the superior culture. Todate the Brits have given Islam and it’s followers superior rights to the majority and they admit they did so.
Alain – I think, with difficulty, that Muslims can change. They have a lot of problems with their having the capacity to change.
The first, of course, is that their Qur’an is deemed by them to be ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ so to speak. It’s viewed as the literal word of god. This is in contrast to the Judaic and Christian texts which do not presume, ever, to such an arrogant contact.
So – Muslims have set themselves up as slaves, enslaved by a text which they are forbidden to examine, interpret, question. This is, of course, the opposite of Being Human – for the essence of being human is the ‘desire to know’ (Aristotle) and this involves both exploration and the use of reason. Muslims are forbidden both actions.
However, if one looks at the Islamic nations in their economic and societal well-being, chinks in the cave appear. First, as a collectivist ideology, like all collectivist ideologies such as socialism, fascism, communism – it’s a two-class system. A small set of elite Rulers..and the mass of the population are Ruled. There is no middle class. This is a static, no-change, no-growth infrastructure. It has no capacity to adapt; because it is effectively frozen – devoted to the purity (freeze-dried) of its ideology.
As such a population continues in time, random events and people emerge – dissidents, diseases, catastrophes…none of which the Pure Ideology can deal with because Purity has no problems. So, this type of two-class system deals with these events in the only way it knows: by purification. It will try to slough off, aka get rid of, purge, murder, marginalize..dissidents, catastrophes. It starts to devour itself.
The middle class exists in a three class structure (the upper elite and lower are reduced in power and size). This must be the largest class. It is the class of individuals; you move into this class by virtue of your own capacities to make wealth, to make knowledge, to question, innovate etc. This is the free class. No two-class structure has a middle class.
Can the Islamic states allow a middle class? This is the key. Their ideology rejects the individual freedoms of such a class. But is their ability to purchase the innovations of the West, via their oil, enough to maintain their frozen status? I’m going to say: No. The oil runs out; energy sources are derived from other sources..and the Islamic states have nothing else to offer to the world. They will be unable to support their populations. That’s the economic problem.
Then, societally – the internet shows people the freedom of the individual. Can the Elite Rulers of Muslim society inhibit and repress their populations and prevent them from wanting this freedom? What do they have to offer in its place? Security? Less and less – because Iran, with its imperialist agenda – is moving into the Islamic world – and imperialism denies security.
The grave error of the postwar Europe was and is, multiculturalism. This enables immigrants from the Islamic states to move out of the tyranny and lack of security of the Islamic nations..into the freedom and security of the West. And yet, bring their frozen ideology with them, live within its perimeters, and yet, receive the rewards of innovative freedom provided by non-Muslims in the West. Their desire, misplaced and ignorant, to expand their ideology must be rejected and refused, completely and totally, by the West.
I think that the Islamic nations will begin a ME war – among themselves. The key problem, as noted, is Iran. Then, within this war, they’ll have to deal with their economic dependency on only one commodity: oil. This means that they’ll have to educate and free their population.
But a major task remains: the West must reject multiculturalism and reject ‘identity blocs’ of people who refuse to live within the common laws and behavioural rules of the West.
Further to ET’s analysis, I feel that the “left” and Islamism share a common thread – a belief in collectivism, that individuals cannot be allowed to think and act for themselves, or “order” breaks down.
Once we understand the idea and mentality of collectivism, that it’s greater “good” must prevail over inconvenient inconsistencies such as womens’ rights, for example, then we can see through their apparent contradictions.
Hitler may have have hated communists, but he loved the idea of collective and monolitic Aryan romanticism. That had to be defended, period. The resultant concentration camps and secret police are a natural result of collectivism, which is contradictory to natural freedom so must resort to authoritarianism and predictably, totalitarianism.
That is why, to them, global warming skepticism is dangerous, that is why Jack Layton thinks globalism and big banks and oil companies are dangerous, that is why they think criticizing Islamism is dangerous. Collectivism must always move forward and never retreat. Sound familiar?
The further down you go in the political food chain, the less important is the idea of collectivism. So, when democracy and capitalism meet collectivism and command economies, to borrow from Star Trek, freedom meets anti-freedom, with the resultant destruction.
Collectivists cannot, therefore, have common cause with grassroots democracy, and while jailing gays seems anathema to them, they are forced to look past it, to the utopianism of central control, with idealistic/ elitist personality cults in charge, rather than the great unwashed and their reality (relatively speaking) based lives.
A key point to consider also is that the self-appointed elites don’t have to deal with their intellectual inferiors, so accountability must be eliminated, lest their hypocrisy be exposed.
Collectivism is the great enemy of freedom going forward, whatever invevitable totalitarian form is takes.
Christianity is a religion based in reality. Incarnation is at its centre: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”
Christians are required to honour our “embodied-ness”, which includes both goodness and sin—for which we are to repent. We’re also to “love our neighbours as ourselves” and forgive trespasses. Our life in the here and now is not based on “I’m better than you” and punishing those who disagree with us. As far as I can see, Islam is based on entirely different premises in the here and now. So, I altogether agree with ET—and Melanie Phillips—who, like nearly everyone here, see multiculturalism as a Trojan Horse in the West. I wonder if we’ll ever learn . . .
The Qur’an contains and consists of the immutable words of the Muslim god. Immutable means unchangeable. Muslims are humans and of course can change but they cannot change the words, commands and demands of their god. They cannot change Islam they can only leave it and risk death. A potent tool in keeping the faithful/semi-faithful in silence and fear.
You have to leave your western mindset at the door when you look into its machinery. Scan the Qur’an some weekend when the weather is bad. It is terribly written, not chronological ( it is arranged by length of book)and not connected. Books 8 and 9 gives a concentrated set of rules for Muslims on how to treat non Muslims in war and truce (there is never to be peace between Muslims and non Muslims). Remember you are the unbeliever who is so constantly negatively referenced throughout. You also come to realize that Muslims are the first victims of Islam as they have to live as Muslims in a world where there is little trust between individuals even among the family. Where education has been officially fatwad away centuries ago in favor of memorization of the Qur’an in a language unlikely known to most followers. For Islam to thrive there has to be a host that it can parasitize, conquer and still leave enough alive to be tax slaves for the supremacist Muslims to live comfortably by. It is a fascinating “culture” and if you did not know better you could swear that Satan had a hand in creating the most perfect straight jacket for the soul in creation.
ET
It is good to see you use your strengths combined with a deeper understanding of Islam than you had some years back. Repudiated Hagarism is no more! ; )
So many good posts, so much to absorb.
I agree with those that say ET’s post @ 11:37 is one of finest ever and the one @ 2:11 is a great supplementary.
Shamrock said ‘the “left” and Islamism share a common thread – a belief in collectivism,’ exactly right, and by extension a disbelief in liberal democracy and individual freedom.
Thanks, Ken. I differ slightly from your point above: collectivists do not share a disbelief in democracy and freedom, they share a hostility. These ideas are a threat to collectivism and that is why it always degenerates to first authoritarianism and eventually totalitarianism.
Note the personality cults of the former Nazi Germany (where military were required to change their oath to Hitler personally, rather than the state), contemporary North Korea and tangentially, the cult of Goreism and global warming, which conveniently and predictably proscribes collective solutions to the “problem” of unorthodoxy (massive revenue diversion and draconian threat of jail to “obstructionists”).
blackbird – I’m not sure what you mean by ‘repudiated Hagarism’. I certainly never advocated a belief in the emergence of Islam as a Judaic messianic cult. Hagarism, is in my view, too speculative and ‘authored’ by various analysts to be a real explanation of what happened.
I remain quite loyal to my analysis of all three major religions as grounded in economic realities.
That is, Judaism is a tribal religion, supporting an economy based heavily around small scale horticulture (carried out primarily by women)and, isolate in itself. Self-sufficient. That’s a key point; self-sufficient.
There were at that time, a lot of tribal groups, with more mixed economies, with multiple agricultural ‘gods’. Judaism, I maintain, supported larger populations -than these economies.
Christianity emerged after the infrastructure of the Roman expansion developed: irrigation, roads, common currency. Christianity operates in a market economy and requires trade and people getting along [love thy neighbour]. Christianity united disparate tribes and peoples.
Islam, I maintain, emerged within a pastoral nomadic economy, based around herding of large animals – an economy that requires a large vacant land base for migration purposes. After all, it is beyond reason to accept that the deranged rambling of an obviously psychotic individual could form the basis of a collective ideology! There was something more going on – and I maintain that the land base of the pastoral economies was disappearing because of settlements from the expanding Christian and Judaic economies.
Islam, thus, is a militant, vicious and hostile ideology, a reaction to the expanding economy and settlements and land takeovers by others. It is focused on a tribalism that not merely refuses to mingle (similar to Judaism) but that insists on conquering and murdering and enslaving all others (Judaism doesn’t accept this!)..
So – I haven’t changed my view of Islam or its emergence.
> Judaism is a tribal religion, supporting an economy based heavily around small scale horticulture
You gotta be kidding. The promise of ownership of entire Earth and of the property of its non-Jewish population, made by Jehovah to Moses, hardly qualifies as small-scale.
aaron – small scale horticulture means local food production using, obviously, non-industrial technologies. It does not produce mass produce for trade. There might be some animal labour available but no other technologies of energy, eg, wind or water power.
As for the mythic tale, it remains mythic and allegorical. As I said, the Judaic horticulture was able to support increasing populations and needed to expand. This does not mean the entire earth – a scientic reality not known to this era.
Great post.
I’m somewhat surprised that Melaine Phillips didn’t point out that one thing the Left and Islam have in common is their utter distaste for and disdain of Christianity and Christians. Christianity, and its antecedent, Judaism, are responsible for our Western values, their tenets are the pillars of the freedoms we enjoy in our Western democracies.
It’s clear to me that the Islamists’ and the Left’s visceral hatred of practising Christians — and, of course, their utter antipathy toward Jews — is central to the alliance of the Left and Islam. Islamists (and Leftists) know that if they can undermine or destroy the Christian Church, they’ve got everything in the bag, because secular humanists and atheists in the West will never stand in the breach; they lack the backbone and the conviction because they’re relativists.
The good news is that although a Left/Islam alliance may drive the Christian Church underground — something that happened under Communism — it will never be able to destroy it: “And I [Jesus] say also unto you, that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).
ET: “I still have faith that reality trumps the imaginary – but – it’s going to be a fight.” It is a fight already, and I don’t see the conviction of secular humanists/atheists in the West willing to sacrifice their comforts and lifestyles to enter into the fight. They don’t recognize the threat Islam poses to the West, many of them thinking that “right-wing Christians” are a bigger one. That’s a huge problem. This fight started a long time ago and, unfortunately, in most Western governments, the media, and the majority of their populations, all I see is decadence and complacency.
What batb says. Thanks.
I watched a speech by Melanie Phillips last November.
You can see it on davidhorowitztv.com.
Poignant introduction by Jamie Glazov.