Sultan Knish
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 conflict 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 allies
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 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.
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