Monday, May 29, 2017

powerful words from Pepple the leftist

From a fascinating post by John Pepple, a self-identifying leftist who has made it his mission to critique leftism from the inside:

Now I want to talk about the left’s reaction to this phenomenon [i.e., the rise of the Islamic right]. It is most peculiar since one would expect that the rise of anything so hostile to leftism would be detected instantly by some leftist somewhere, who would raise the alarm and alert all the others. Instead, the left has totally ignored the rise of the Islamic right. They don’t even seem aware of it and instead talk about extremists or radicals, but never fundamentalists or Islamo-fascists or the Islamic right. Or they will deny that certain people who are obviously Muslim (like members of ISIS) are Muslim. However, they are quite ready to denounce anyone on the right in the West as Islamophobic. For the left, the real problem is the rise of Islamophobia, but as I pointed out recently, this is like worrying about Germanophobia in the 1930s, when the real worry was the rise of the Nazi party. Of course, no one back in the 1930s seems to have worried about Germanophobia, but it is also true that the left was much less anti-Nazi back then than its current rhetoric would indicate. In fact, they seemed rather confused about the movement and what to do about it, and even made a pact with the Nazis in 1939. Well, at least the left back then had an excuse since Nazism and fascism were new movements, while conservative Islam goes back centuries, so leftists today have no excuse for not understanding what is happening. Then again, I have already argued that the left is suicidal (here), and that is something involving unconscious forces I know nothing about. Perhaps the frenzy over trivial things like pronouns is some kind of deep awareness on the left’s part that there is trouble ahead, trouble that can be avoided for now by focusing on ever more extreme trivialities.

Related: this post from Jeff Hodges on Douglas Murray and why there's no mystery regarding Islamist intentions: "Islamists are very clear about what they want—we just aren't listening."



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