The left has a clearly defined set of responses to a terrorist attack. After all the hopes for a properly right wing terrorist have come to naught, it begins the long slow process of rolling back the laws and emotional attitudes stemming from the attack.
For it, terrorism, like anything else, either fits into its narrative or conflicts with it. The narrative defines the world, past, present and future, in terms of the political agenda of the left. An event that clashes with the agenda must have its meaning changed so that the power of the narrative is restored.
Most violent attacks, from a street mugging to September 11, cause people to seek out security by combating the attackers. The left's task is to shift the narrative so that people see it in an entirely different way. The perpetrators become the victims by the trick of transforming the real victims into the real perpetrators. The lesson shifts from going on the offense to learning not to give offense.
The process is gradual and the playbook is infinite. Weapons of mass distraction are brought out. New villains are introduced and the emotional resonance of the events is drowned in ridicule. The tones are also many, from urging everyone to let love defeat hate to displays of virulent hate against the people "truly" stirring up trouble, but they all share a common agenda. Only the tactics vary.
Unlike the right, the left is systematic. It studies structures and people and plots its lines of attack accordingly. It pits emotion against emotion and law against law. It waits for the initial shock to fade before launching its first wave of attacks over process.
The left's honest response, the one that shows up on its Twitter feeds and in posts on its own sites, is that the country is overreacting. Some leftists will even be bold enough to say that we had it coming. But its public response is more discreet. It exploits the grief for its own ends, diverting shocked city residents into interfaith memorials, some of which are progressive enough to include denunciations of American foreign policy and vigils for the dead on both sides.
But even here, the left generally restrains itself. It waits until the weeks or months have passed to begin deadening the emotion surrounding the event with sarcastic remarks and jokes until the sacred becomes fully profane. It waits somewhat less time to begin lecturing the country on how our foreign policy made them hate us, knowing that in a contest between the establishment's narrative of inexplicable Islamic radicalization for unknown reasons and their narrative of American evil, they have the upper hand because they provide a realistic motive and the establishment does not.
Still this too comes later. The left knows that there is a window on human emotion. There is a time when people need to mourn and a time when they will feel a diminishing outrage and even begin to agree with observations whose thrust is that the United States of America is the real terrorist. And so there are things that the left will say on DailyKos and then on Salon that it will not say on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times.
The editorials explaining how a lack of American support for Chechen independence led to the marathon massacre are coming. They just haven't splashed ashore in mainstream liberal newspapers yet. Timing is everything and the difference between the left of the counterculture and the left of the culture is that it knows what people will be willing to listen to and when. And it knows where to begin.
Against the horror of the bombing, the left juxtaposes the horror of police state. It pits the fear of terrorists depriving us of our lives and freedoms against the fear of the government doing the same. And considering the history of government abuses, it does not take long for this line of argument to make a compelling emotional dent in the responses of even many ordinary people to the attacks.
The left begins by raising all sorts of procedural questions about how law enforcement and the military are treating the enemy. It develops a burning conviction that our civil rights are the only thing about the country worth keeping. It hammers away at any law enforcement or military mistake, no matter how minor, and collects these together to amass a narrative of the police state.
At this stage the left puts on a show of maintaining its objectivity. It pretends that it is the principle that matters, not the perpetrator and most of those gullible people nodding along never notice that there is only one issue and two groups of perpetrators that this principle applies to: terrorists and leftist activists working in support of terrorists.
For months or even years, the left wraps itself in a Constitution that it does not believe in on behalf of those who want to abolish and destroy it.
The attacks on law enforcement and the military prove the left's core thesis that America is the oppressor and therefore deserving of terrorism. Whatever action, no matter how little, we take to defend ourselves proves that the terrorists were justified in attacking us. Even if all we do is lock up terrorists or shoot back at them when they shoot at us, the left will find enough grounds for indicting us as irredeemable monsters who deserve all that we have coming to us.
The left doesn't put it that way of course. It begins by asking us to believe that the terrorists are not attacking us, they are attacking our government, even if they keep murdering people who are by no means in the government. But once we have accepted the notion that the terrorists are justified in attacking our government, the left is then able to argue that we deserve to be attacked because living in a democracy, we elect our governments.
It's a neat trap that the left uses to turn questioning government policy into supporting terrorism.
That line of argument is cushioned at first. The left understands that arguments are won on emotion, not reason. It seeks out any family members of the victims who agree with its views and surrounds its spokesmen with them to give them moral sanction for their vileness. It emphasizes that understanding its theories is the only way to prevent another attack thereby making its negative tack seem positive.
And so the left moves from issues of process to polarity using our defense against terrorism to argue that the terrorists are only defending themselves against us. The arguments that seem initially untenable when the blood is still on the streets slowly sink in as baffled people try to come to terms with what happened.
All this is old hat for the left which has been excusing violence and revising history long before Islamic terrorism was an issue for anyone on this side of the Atlantic. Its tactics are polished and effective; though they would be far less so without the high ground of the media, the arts and the educational system, but the same could be said of any group. If David Icke had the unquestioning allegiance of 95 percent of media outlets and universities, most people would consider the existence of reptilians nothing more than common sense.
It is that very power which makes the narrative so insidious. The views of the streetcorner lunatic handing out pamphlets can be transformed in context without being transformed in content by the simple expedient of being read on the air in a sonorous voice by a news network anchor. But the greater insidiousness of the snake in the bloody garden comes from its ability to break up the narrative into stages to make it more palatable.
The left understands that it is working against natural emotions of loyalty and loss, and so it uses deception. It pretends to grieve, when it is sneering on the inside, and it pretends to want to help, when it is really seeking to destroy. It waits long enough to be able to pit the imaginary suffering of terrorists against the real suffering of their victims. It encourages its own brand of cynicism for the suffering of the victims and the heroism of their rescuers, while defending the sacred nature of the misfortune of its terrorists. It insists that its defense of terrorists in a time of terror invests it with a superior moral power and it uses that power to support terrorism.
For it, terrorism, like anything else, either fits into its narrative or conflicts with it. The narrative defines the world, past, present and future, in terms of the political agenda of the left. An event that clashes with the agenda must have its meaning changed so that the power of the narrative is restored. Most violent attacks, from a street mugging to September 11, cause people to seek out security by combating the attackers. The left's task is to shift the narrative so that people see it in an entirely different way. The perpetrators become the victims by the trick of transforming the real victims into the real perpetrators. The lesson shifts from going on the offense to learning not to give offense.
The process is gradual and the playbook is infinite. Weapons of mass distraction are brought out. New villains are introduced and the emotional resonance of the events is drowned in ridicule. The tones are also many, from urging everyone to let love defeat hate to displays of virulent hate against the people "truly" stirring up trouble, but they all share a common agenda. Only the tactics vary.
Unlike the right, the left is systematic. It studies structures and people and plots its lines of attack accordingly. It pits emotion against emotion and law against law. It waits for the initial shock to fade before launching its first wave of attacks over process.
The left's honest response, the one that shows up on its Twitter feeds and in posts on its own sites, is that the country is overreacting. Some leftists will even be bold enough to say that we had it coming. But its public response is more discreet. It exploits the grief for its own ends, diverting shocked city residents into interfaith memorials, some of which are progressive enough to include denunciations of American foreign policy and vigils for the dead on both sides.
But even here, the left generally restrains itself. It waits until the weeks or months have passed to begin deadening the emotion surrounding the event with sarcastic remarks and jokes until the sacred becomes fully profane. It waits somewhat less time to begin lecturing the country on how our foreign policy made them hate us, knowing that in a contest between the establishment's narrative of inexplicable Islamic radicalization for unknown reasons and their narrative of American evil, they have the upper hand because they provide a realistic motive and the establishment does not.
Still this too comes later. The left knows that there is a window on human emotion. There is a time when people need to mourn and a time when they will feel a diminishing outrage and even begin to agree with observations whose thrust is that the United States of America is the real terrorist. And so there are things that the left will say on DailyKos and then on Salon that it will not say on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times.
The editorials explaining how a lack of American support for Chechen independence led to the marathon massacre are coming. They just haven't splashed ashore in mainstream liberal newspapers yet. Timing is everything and the difference between the left of the counterculture and the left of the culture is that it knows what people will be willing to listen to and when. And it knows where to begin.
Against the horror of the bombing, the left juxtaposes the horror of police state. It pits the fear of terrorists depriving us of our lives and freedoms against the fear of the government doing the same. And considering the history of government abuses, it does not take long for this line of argument to make a compelling emotional dent in the responses of even many ordinary people to the attacks.
At this stage the left puts on a show of maintaining its objectivity. It pretends that it is the principle that matters, not the perpetrator and most of those gullible people nodding along never notice that there is only one issue and two groups of perpetrators that this principle applies to: terrorists and leftist activists working in support of terrorists.
For months or even years, the left wraps itself in a Constitution that it does not believe in on behalf of those who want to abolish and destroy it.
The attacks on law enforcement and the military prove the left's core thesis that America is the oppressor and therefore deserving of terrorism. Whatever action, no matter how little, we take to defend ourselves proves that the terrorists were justified in attacking us. Even if all we do is lock up terrorists or shoot back at them when they shoot at us, the left will find enough grounds for indicting us as irredeemable monsters who deserve all that we have coming to us.
The left doesn't put it that way of course. It begins by asking us to believe that the terrorists are not attacking us, they are attacking our government, even if they keep murdering people who are by no means in the government. But once we have accepted the notion that the terrorists are justified in attacking our government, the left is then able to argue that we deserve to be attacked because living in a democracy, we elect our governments.
It's a neat trap that the left uses to turn questioning government policy into supporting terrorism.
That line of argument is cushioned at first. The left understands that arguments are won on emotion, not reason. It seeks out any family members of the victims who agree with its views and surrounds its spokesmen with them to give them moral sanction for their vileness. It emphasizes that understanding its theories is the only way to prevent another attack thereby making its negative tack seem positive.
And so the left moves from issues of process to polarity using our defense against terrorism to argue that the terrorists are only defending themselves against us. The arguments that seem initially untenable when the blood is still on the streets slowly sink in as baffled people try to come to terms with what happened.
All this is old hat for the left which has been excusing violence and revising history long before Islamic terrorism was an issue for anyone on this side of the Atlantic. Its tactics are polished and effective; though they would be far less so without the high ground of the media, the arts and the educational system, but the same could be said of any group. If David Icke had the unquestioning allegiance of 95 percent of media outlets and universities, most people would consider the existence of reptilians nothing more than common sense.It is that very power which makes the narrative so insidious. The views of the streetcorner lunatic handing out pamphlets can be transformed in context without being transformed in content by the simple expedient of being read on the air in a sonorous voice by a news network anchor. But the greater insidiousness of the snake in the bloody garden comes from its ability to break up the narrative into stages to make it more palatable.
The left understands that it is working against natural emotions of loyalty and loss, and so it uses deception. It pretends to grieve, when it is sneering on the inside, and it pretends to want to help, when it is really seeking to destroy. It waits long enough to be able to pit the imaginary suffering of terrorists against the real suffering of their victims. It encourages its own brand of cynicism for the suffering of the victims and the heroism of their rescuers, while defending the sacred nature of the misfortune of its terrorists. It insists that its defense of terrorists in a time of terror invests it with a superior moral power and it uses that power to support terrorism.
Comments
Wow!
ReplyDeleteI have an image of you writing (yes, actually writing) that wielding your pen like a sword, slashing through their calculated lies.
I enjoy your style, I wish the subject matter wasn't so onerous.
Shouldn't the snake pictured be poisonous?
Mike
The left made a career out of defending various "victims" against the only set of villains it recognizes, namely people who don't accept the saintly status and supremacy of the left, people who are usually good, sane, and productive. It therefore has no choice but to turn the real villains into victims and to turn the victims into villains or find a way to forget about them if the latter task is too difficult.
ReplyDeleteYesterday the New York Times tried to blamed the "radicalization" of the man named after another Muslim who used to pile up tens of thousands of skulls into pyramids on not making the Olympic boxing team for the "unfair" reason of not being a citizen. Just another victim of the system doing what anyone would do under the circumstances. "Mr. Tsarnaev was devastated. He was not getting any younger. And he was more than a year away from being even eligible to apply for American citizenship" and naturally this victimization was too much and he had to blow off a little steam, so to speak.
In whose reality do people behave this way? When Hillary once mentioned the willing suspension of disbelief perhaps she really meant what the left is able to achieve day in and day out. The real question is how much does it narrative have to diverge from what people see with their own lying eyes before they stop believing it?
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteI often think you are too black-and-white in condemning only the "left." But not on this. I heard Bill Moyers show on PBS radio, and his guest was completely wrong about everything he said about the Boston bombing. I wondered who the guest was, since I didn't keep listening. Today channel surfing on tv, I saw the same opening portion of the show, and watched Glenn Greenwald articulate the same junk. For example, if it is a Muslim, the mainstream blames Islam but if not, it's a "one-off." Huh? Major Hassan has been treated as an individual for over 3 years since his terror attack on a US military base. And heinous as Tim McVeigh was, he didn't get his direction from the Christian pulpit.
Worse, Greenwald said the "single biggest" cause of terror is "blaming Islam" and conducting surveillance on mosques. Wow. Same kind of BS we've heard for years about all those "moderate Muslims" who we don't dare offend, or they will turn against us. But if that's the case, then they weren't "moderate" in the first place.
Great piece.
Mike, I'm a New Yorker. We have to tell poisonous people apart from non-poisonous people. Not snakes.
ReplyDeleteIgor, in the left's reality, every member of a minority group is one act of discrimination away from going black panther
Excellent article.
ReplyDeleteI watched your recent video and agree that conspiracy theories flourish when there is a lack of transparency. The problem I have with the Boston attack is that the information is too fragmented to dismiss or buy into any of the theories or narratives.
All I know is that there is something really off when Russia gives intel, even limited intel, to the US. I keep going back to the open mic incident between Obama and Medvedev asking Putin to hold off on doing something until Obama won the election.
This is Russia and the US. It's hard to accept either the US or Russia have decided to become partners in fighting terrorism. Russia and the US have been fighting proxy wars all over the globe. All I know is something is really off.
Keliata
The Left and the Leftist actually fit the definition of mental illness; the acute denial of reality that is the precondition for realizing any of the insane, delusional tyranny that is the Leftist agenda.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, the Leftist is generally intelligent enough to see that allowing your country to be defiled by millions of third-world savages is a very bad idea that will ruin your country. Other Leftists are in fact eager to ruin their country so that they can rebuild it along lines that favor a brutal, Left-wing tyranny. In either case, the Leftist MUST lie to us and possibly to himself about the nature of immigration into White countries by third-world savages.
I work for a major daily newspaper and most of those people are committed Leftists of the more cowardly sort. I see evidence that they understand the disaster that third-world immigration is and will always be, but they can't admit it. They can't admit it because some of them can't abandon the feeling of condescending moral superiority they feel when they champion our enemies. Others can't admit it because to admit the problem implies that we must begin to implement a solution; that is we must deport the vast majority of nonWhites in the U.S. and Europe whether they are here legally or not. We have no real choice, and it will happen.
But in the meantime, Leftist cowards and traitors must reassure us that, contrary to all evidence and common sense, that third-world savages will sooner, rather than later, become indistinguishable from Whites. We see this lie, this delusion, in all forms of mass media today.
This particular piece of lying propaganda also invokes the nonexistent "crisis" of "global warming." This hysterical nonsense is the same sort of insanity that causes a panic at Oberlin where a street loony wearing a blanket is equated to a full-scale invasion of several full-strength divisions of highly-trained, combat-ready KKK storm troopers.
Daniel, and justifiably so in their eyes.
ReplyDelete"Major Hassan has been treated as an individual for over 3 years since his terror attack on a US military base."
ReplyDeletePart but certainly not all of that stems from form of weapon used in a terrorist attack. If the weapon isn't a bomb or airplane flying into a building it's not an actual terrorist attack.
Guns? Nah. Bulldozers in Israel. Nope. No mass death camps but incremental attacks aimed at destroying a non-Muslim state and people that has the nerve to exist in a non-Muslim controlled region.
Another problem is that it's all to easy to point to one or two terrorists and ignore the fact that the Boston attack has all the earmarks of al qaeda, including the the racin laced letters sent to various people around the same time all of this is happening.
We saw tha tsame type of thing (anthrax and other supicious powders in 2001 too, but it's easier to put these things on the back burner and force feed Americans tripe about the brothers merely rogues operating in a vacuum with no material support from heavy hitting terrorist organizations.
Keliata
Regarding my previous comment about the US and Russia: I've been watching RT and their coverage of the Boston attacks.
ReplyDeleteAssuming the translations are accurate Putin seems much more transparent in a negative manner than Obama. Either Obama is in way over his head in dealing with someone like Putin or he is much like Putin but as this article implies sticking it to us in increments.
I don't know. Putin's famous three and four hour press conferences versus Obama and the left's bite sized press releases/statements make it more obvious. Russian people seem to be in a much better position to see what their leader is doing than Americans are with our leaders. The only difference being that Americans are in a better condition to turn things around than the Russians are.
Comparing the two countries in this way is interesting to me. I have no clue way but I keep thinking about the phrase about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer is drawing me to pay more attention to what's going on in Russia.
Keliata
You call out the left but you never offer no solution.
ReplyDeleteOrwell had it right: when one hampers one's nations defense, one necessarily aids the enemy. Your analysis presumes conscious knowledge of the treasonous intent behind the left's obfuscations; most lefties of my acquaintance seem to honestly believe the nonsense.
ReplyDeleteI often see facebook postings and sharings by lefties expressing an unctuous support for the troops. These people often have military relatives so I don't doubt their sincerity. They seem oblivious to the notion that a citizen who supports the troops wouldn't vote for a commander-in-chief despised by the majority of the military.
Much of the left's electoral muscle is simply deluded, successfully propagandized into a servile notion of citizenship by our educational, artistic, and journalistic institutions. I know no solution beyond firing most of the educational establishment. They aren't the saints they claim to be.
Anything but Islam as a root cause. Here is a gem
ReplyDelete"Well, the Islamophobes are running out of false leads to make their case for an Islamic revolution on our shores. Turns out the Chechens are not exactly enemies of the US. There are as many leads pointing to someone who was disenfranchised by his legal status and his inability to adjust to live in America and lashed out on his own, taking his kid brother down with him. The Peter King's and Fox Islamophobics who so very much wanted to make this a referendum on the Obama administration, will have to wait for the next political opportunity. " All comments on all MSM are variations on this theme.
"...defiled by millions of third-world savages is a very bad idea that will ruin your country...."
ReplyDeleteThere are many many people from developing countries are hard working and contribute to the US. Kindly don't lump them all the same.
Snakes are important to a garden. Far from being harmful they are helpful. Without them rodents would multiply and plants and crops would be destroyed. Without the snake the garden would be destroyed. They are a necessary part of nature's balance. Let us not demonize snakes in an argument of politics.
ReplyDeletehttp://askanaturalist.com/are-snakes-useful/
It has been mentioned before but the snake picture is all wrong. The one you have is sometimes called a "Garden Snake". I guess that is why you chose it. They are even considered benificial which isn't the kind of snake you want.
ReplyDeleteProbably shouldn't compare any snake to the left anyway, it insults the snake.
"The left knows that there is a window on human emotion."
ReplyDeleteIt's true that the emotional response to a horrible act may not last. Otherwise we cannot live our lives.
This is why, on principle, we must identify the outright lies and the more subtle falsehoods used by the Left to excuse the vicious tyrannical ideology of Islam.
For example, 'Islamophobia', the silly invective hurled at anyone who opposes Islam publicly.
Since when is it wrong to first identify the myriad evil acts committed by followers of Islam to enforce their religion on the world and second to protest the evil ideology which drives them to do so?
Islamophobia follows immediately, and properly, from rape-phobia, murder-phobia, and atrocity-phobia.
The ideology of Islam is an insult to decent people everywhere.
@VermontGuy - When you correct someone you should at least be right yourself. It is a Garter snake, not garden. A Garter snake is acctualy venomous, but humans are typically too big to have an affect on. They feed on rodents and their venom will paralyze a small field mouse.
ReplyDeleteThe devil is cunning and comes as a friend, but inside he is planning your destruction - a good description of the left.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that the right cannot concede on what the left gets right, and the left cannot concede on what the right gets right.
ReplyDeletePerpetuating this whole Dance Of The Damned is the willful obfuscation perpetuated by both sides to disguise the ultimate truth: It isn't 'left vs right.'
It's the STATE vs YOU.
The left simply has more to lose by letting that truth get out since they draw more power and money from a growing state. The right will sometimes admit that truth and then quickly demand more power for the state themselves.
The senseless worship of state is the religion of both sides. But thanks to voices like Ron Paul, the worm is turning ... and the change shall come as all change does: Slowly, then suddenly.
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