Some Sunday reading. Featuring: Nick vs. the state dicks; and Howard vs. the coward victim worshippers

Because the other side has given up on reason... what titles must we write in future....?

Nick at Ghostofaflea has some great lines:

...It is no business of the government to intervene in religious disagreements of this kind. Incitement to violence... actual violence... is another matter entirely. It is true any number of bigotries are tribalism dressed up in theological language. It is also true many take whatever their creed as justification for mayhem and slaughter from lone maniacs to psychopathic state-actors. But mere disagreement about the truth cannot be the province of the government, let alone rogue bureaucracies or criminal bureaucratic cliques acting with the power of the government. [I think Nick means this kind of thing]

My creed holds I must have the freedom to be wrong; to deny salvation itself. It holds that the nature of salvation is such that it may only be discovered and accepted as a free gift. My virtue cannot be legislated, let alone the fate of my soul.

Scientologists should be free to believe whatever outrageous UFO nonsense they wish. But I must be free to describe their UFO nonsense in those terms and be free to discourage the overly credulous from believing Scientological faith and practice where a high credit card limit may purchase their ersatz salvation. Once the government steps in to say that my disagreement may bring Scientology into hatred and contempt I can only reply, yes, that is the precise idea. There are many ideologies that should be brought into hatred and contempt, must be if liberty - civilization itself - is to survive. That our law is incapable of distinguishing between opposition to an ideology and incitement to violence against the con artists and rubes who advance it is to show not only badly written law but a Canadian Establishment that has lost the capacity for reason.
[...]
Ask yourself: What kind of "church" sues to prevent public discussion of its theology? What other cults use thought crime legislation to enforce opinions that cannot win converts by reason and example? What other ideologies dismiss disagreement as false consciousness and insist on the power to indoctrinate the children of their opponents?

Ghost of a flea: Operation: Cult Fiction

And in related news:

Perhaps in anticipation of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets of Paris and London and San Fransisco, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explains there is no timetable for withdrawal from the independent, United Nations recognized state of Georgia. Call me cynical but I suspect he need not have bothered. An alphabet soup of so called human rights organizations and so called anti-war activists seem utterly indifferent to reports of slave-taking "forced labour" and continuing Russian military operations in violation of an internationally brokered ceasefire.
[..]
Near uniformity in support of Russian imperialism in comments at The Toronto Star. Historical sidebar: Toronto citizens crowd the port to welcome President Jefferson Davis. More recent historical sidebar: Prime Minister Stephen Harper waves a piece of paper. That was a couple years ago and he is even more wrong now. Military force is the only thing that will resolve this dispute.

For those in need of some visual confirmations of the horrors of this war, from the p.o.v. of the Russian soldier and his desire to record images of burning bodies, check out this link (HT Michael Travis)

Finally, don't miss all the latest at Howard Rotberg's blog detailing his forthcoming trial against Canada's book monolith:

I have gone to some pains in recent postings to explain that I think that the young Palestinians who lied and lied some more about me are to be pitied. But the all too human tendency in this world, exacerbated by elements in our current culture, is always to blame somebody else for everything and shy away from taking personal responsibility for your actions.

What I am referring to is the way that the media who reported the incident and the corporate executives at Chapters in fact by their liberal inclinations for moral relativism and sympathy for the perceived underdog, actually encourage the Raneem Al-Halimis of this world to lie and to think they can get away with their lies.

Why? Because look how inadequate was the investigation by Chapters. Look how the PR Director, Ms. Gaulin, automatically assumed that the word of an 18 year old part time employee should be preferred to that of an author, a lawyer, an activist for race relations, and a developer of affordable housing in the very community in which he had been attacked, without proper protection by his hosts, and she did not take up my offer to talk to two reputabe professors in the audience for the whole lecture.

Look how the police were so fast in releasing the troublemakers, before they even completed their investigation by talking to me. Look at how easy it was for Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress to say he had "every confidence" in the Waterloo Police, without even taking the time with me to receive the sworn affidavits that I had.

In other words, the real blame extends through our media, our police, our cultural corporations like Chapters, the NGOs and even the Jewish NGOs! They are so eager, in their misconceived liberal sympathies for the "perceived victim" that they don't care if the perceived victim is victimizing others.

Now let's turn to the Israel-Palestinian problem. The United Nations treated the Palestinians unlike any other refugees, by creating United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. This perpetuated the problem, rather than attempting to solve it and created a whole class of people whose income and jobs depended on the perpetuation of the problem and not its solution.

I have written on this blog about one Western country's inappropriate reaction to Palestinian terrorism (Germany in the 1972 Olympics) and in fact the IOC's inappropriate reaction. In fact, I would argue that the West, particularly Europe has in fact encouraged a maximalist, rejectionist Palestinian leadership, beginning with the way that Yassr Arafat was so frequently feted and the way in which intellectuals continued with him the all too often intellectual love affair with totalitarians and men of violence.

Then, when Israel offered the overly generous settlement at Camp David, was the Western world there to counsel the Palestinians to accept it? No, in fact when the Palestinians chose to make a reaction not a diplomatic one, but one of the worst examples of killing innocent civilians in history - i.e. suicide bombings against civilians as part of a death cult, did the West penalize or even denounce the Palestinians for adopting this death cult, and turning their schools and media into brainwashing factories for suicide bombers?

No, in fact, as I show in my novel, the more violent and disfunctional the Palestinians became the more certain elements in the West, especially in Europe and especially in our universities, became pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. Even as the Palestinians rejected democracy by voting in a totalitarian Islamist killing machine, controlled by non Arabs in Iran, the West was still silent.

So do you see the metaphor? Sure the Palestinians were at fault in my case, just as they have been at fault in many cases of their conflict with a country that is trying to set up a state for them in the West Bank and Gaza.

But in both cases, we cannot only fault the poor mixed up people who have done the vile deeds. As my writing shows, again and again, it is we in the west, who are perpetuating and in fact deepening the problem by our morally corrupted responses.

So, Heather Reisman and Sorya Ingrid Gaulin at Chapters, you are a main part of the problem. What you have done to me is an interesting metaphor for what the western, educated world has done to the poor pitiful Palestinians, and their Jewish neighbours.

The Metaphor

Big Momma state is growing

Wolf Howling reports on a proposal in the UK to take some obese children away from their parents to be raised by the state. Socialized child rearing is of course a recurring theme in the history of the Utopian left. Still, to see that the past's hard-won lessons that the state cannot be anything but a terribly poor alternative, a desperate last resort, to the family as a locus of child rearing are not yet seriously common sense in what once claimed to be a leading nation is sad indeed. In the Brave New World, the psychopaths will all be thin... and they will not wear childish swastikas on their arms.

Welfare state socialism may have been the ruin of many British families, along perhaps with the success of capitalism in making food and other consumables very cheap. More of either won't solve today's problems; only a re-invigoration of civil society along with appropriate spiritual disciplines can to do the job...

----------------
Also at Wolf Howling: The American Pychological Association knows what you must think about global warming and is seeking ways to make you think it:

[...]By editing CNN and PBS news stories so that some saw a skeptic included in the report, others saw a story in which the skeptic was edited out and another group saw no video, Krosnick found that adding 45 seconds of a skeptic to one news story caused 11% of Americans to shift their opinions about the scientific consensus. Rather than 58% believing a perceived scientific agreement, inclusion of the skeptic caused the perceived amount of agreement to drop to 47%.

American Psychological Association leaders say they want to launch a national initiative specifically targeting behavior changes, including developing media messages that will help people reduce their carbon footprint and pay more attention to ways they can conserve. They want to work with other organizations and enlist congressional support to help fund the effort. . . .

The left is in near total control of academia and the MSM and they are now but a step away from complete control of the reigns of power in Washington. They are pushing the Fairness Doctrine to eliminate conservative opinion from the radio waves. As I blogged the other day, they are planning to criminalize policy differences, dreaming of show trials for the Bush Administration. And now they wish to insure that the U.S. no longer hears both sides of an argument. What has gone wrong in America? And what is wrong with these psychologists that they are so convinced of the truth of their position that they cannot see beyond that and even recognize the ramifications of what they are suggesting? What does it mean when they see their job as being the cynical manipulation of opinion?

A Covenant Thursday

If your not convinced that Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer was American you can meet us this evening at the Vancouver Public Library in the atrium outside Blenz coffee bar and explain me where I'm gone wrong in the head here. He seems to me to be a fine American, one I like immensely. Maybe you like him too, in which case you can join us for a brew and some chat. Or

If you're bookish, sit in and you can tell us about some fine writers and thinkers like Jonah Goldberg and Thomas Sowell. Join us at the Covenant Zone, we being the ones with blue scarves and Israeli flags on our caps. Let's find out how you feel about Section 13. How about Ezra Levant or Mark Steyn or the nearly worthless but not quite so Art Spiegelman? We meet at 7:00 and there's always much to talk about. We even talk about movies. Perhaps you've seen that latest foreign film, Fitna. Join us for a while under the lights.

And it is often light indeed. I, like Baring, am just loads of fun. The coffee's good, too.

Old Man Obama

While Gnosticism can, at times, have its creative side, when it comes to truly understanding the shared human source of our creativity, there's nothing new under the Gnostic Sun, not the least the desire of anxious youth to avoid facing certain humbling existential and human questions, preferring to think of themselves instead in the figure of a Sun King, as John Lennon once creatively imagined.

The power of Barack Obama's rhetoric, its ability to appear profound while saying little but "unite", "change", clearly appeals to the would-be uniters, the sun kings of latter days, as is now becoming all too apparent. One could snicker that Obama is simply telling the most guiltily race-conscious people in America that he is going to somehow free them from their guilt by constantly reminding them of the need for "change" and "unity". It's like the priest who keeps promising the forlorn that the Kingdom of God will appear on earth any day now.

But there is a larger point to be made: what Obama represents is a form of rhetoric that has for ages appealed to the young (and young-at-heart), including many happily race-conscious generations. In politics, there is always a divide, somewhere, and always a place for magicians who promise to overcome this hard reality. It's not that there aren't moments in political life when we can indeed overcome divisions; but these moments are always only temporary, as every new consensus gives way to new forms of difference: a consensus is something exchanged by people who have to be different to be engaged in human exchange, people who can never just all become the same thing and then freeze history in place. We are beings free to love and to resent any consensus; we can have no consensus, no shared new sign or idea, that is not already in the process of being exchanged, changed, eroded, reformed, etc. To be human is to exchange differences about what is only ultimately, i.e. originally, the same.

Joseph Knippenberg, writing about Dennis Hale's thoughts on the need for us to recognize the inevitability of division in politics sums up the question succinctly:

Hale makes the entirely commonsensical and grown-up point that choosing means dividing. Unity requires the overcoming or suppression of politics. Obama promises to build the kingdom on earth, which amounts to the overcoming of politics. But people who promise that usually end up trying to suppress politics.

If Obama were serious about unity, he'd be Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, or Mussolini. I credit him with not being altogether serious. He's merely, as Jonah G. would say, a liberal fascist.

I admit to rather liking that moniker, but at the end of the day, one has to face the reality that calling liberal fascists by their proper name is not a way to win them over to reality, as the outrage over Goldberg's book suggests.

As I say, it's not that unity is never possible; it's not that we can't all agree to change; it's just that if we are all to agree on change it has to be over a real promise that is truly open-ended, open to a further exchange of differences, open to new, if yet undeveloped, divisions. And if Obama presumes to represent such a promise, he needs to make clear how he can set up a new political dynamic, a new form of exchange, by bringing new ideas and realities into play in a way that widely raises excitement that a new game, a new challenge, is about to be unboxed and no one yet can know who will learn to master this game, since all players have reason to hope. That's a consensus: the start of an exciting game.

Since my colleagues here at Covenant Zone are frequently discussing how one can appeal to young people, this post began with the idea that I would put up some thoughtful comments from Knippenberg's colleague at NoLeftTurns, Julie Ponzi:

John McCain will not get the same kind of youth support that Barack Obama gets. Indeed, he ought not want to inspire that kind of reflexive, unthinking and insipid prostration.

But all young people are not twits. There is plenty to be tilled from the fertile garden of thinking and emerging-in-intelligence youth. John McCain can start by reminding us that he, too, was once young. He can talk about character in a way that inspires rather than chastises. His story is an inspiring one. He has not used it to as much good effect as he might--partly, I think, out of a sense of modesty and partly out of a (sensible) desire not to bring up the whole Vietnam debate and, thereby, hearken back to the debates of the 1960s (yet again). There is some danger in this, I admit. But the debate that Obama wants to engage is, for all his youth and inexperience, a very old one. This can be demonstrated. The truth is that Obama is nothing new under the sun. And he can be made to look very foolish for thinking that he is. Young people are always insecure about the possibility that they look foolish. Don't offend them by telling them that they are foolish--but point things out that lead them to this conclusion on their own.

There are things a septuagenarian can do to inspire young people. Two of them are NOT pandering to or ignoring them. Appeal to their minds and give them credit for having minds and then, perhaps, you may win their hearts. Such a strategy would do more than win McCain and the Republicans young voters. It would go a long way toward winning him all kinds of voters in general. For, in this need to have respect for our minds and in the desire not to appear as fools, we're all very young at heart.

Liberal Fascists fight back against free speech and real human rights: Write or call your MP this weekend or Monday morning!

After reading countless blogs and newspaper opinion pieces from all kinds of decent Canadians, condemning the Canadian Human Rights Commissions for going after Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant, and others exercising their right to free political speech; after reading about the corruption of all due legal processes at the Canadian Human Rights Commission, including, most shockingly, its enabling of investigators who publish hate speech on white racialist web sites all the better to make a case against these web sites for hate speech; after reading of how Liberal MP Keith Martin was going to introduce a motion in the House of Commons calling for a small reform to the Canadian Human Rights Act, removing one of the sections most offensive to free speech in Canada; I was at first shocked, and then reminded of the fanatically religious evil that freedom lovers are up against today, when I read the following headline in the Globe and Mail. 'White pride' website hails Victoria MP as hero. None of the above-mentioned concerns was given any coverage in this story. No, instead, it seems the mainstream media are willing to reduce this all to another question of human rights under attack by White Supremacists and their naive aiders and abettors.

The Canadian Press story, a more complete version of which appears here, by Joan Bryden is discussed by Ezra Levant:

Joan Bryden, Canadian Press's house Liberal, followed Kinsella's memo to the letter. She wrote that wire service's first story on the subject -- not about my interrogation, or about Maclean's, or the YouTube/undernews phenomenon, etc. Her focus was the reddest red herring Kinsella she could find: that, besides 5,000 blogs, dozens of columnists across the political spectrum and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association support Martin's amendment, a no-name white supremacist does too.

"The cases of Levant and Maclean's writer Mark Steyn have sparked much furious debate," wrote Bryden. Well, not enough of a debate for her to write about, though as a journalist her trade depends on freedom of speech. But when she could smear Martin's initiative by a tenuous association, well, that's a newspeg and a headline.

What will the Liberals do?

Bryden quotes a spokesman from Stephane Dion's office as saying the obvious. "This is not the position of the Liberal Party of Canada or the Liberal caucus or Mr. Dion," said spokeswoman Leslie Swartman. Of course not; it was a private member's motion.

But then Swartman went further: "We support the Canadian Human Rights Act and will not entertain changes to it such as this." That may or may not be true; I doubt the Liberal caucus or shadow cabinet has considered the matter. But even if it's true, it could also be said of 95% of private members' business. Bryden herself opines that Swartman's comments "suggested Martin will be asked to withdraw it."

That could be the suggestion. Or it could be Kinsella's Bryden's own troublemaking spin. Martin is clearly digging in -- he's seen the blogs and the wall-to-wall editorials on the one side and, uh, Kinsella on the other side, and he's done the political math. What will Stephane Dion's math be? Will he really risk losing yet another member of his caucus over a private member's motion, something designed to allow MPs to vent ideas outside the lines of their party? Kinsella wants a fight, for his own purposes. Does Dion? Does he want another mini civil war in the Liberal Party to fill the news for a week, as it did so devastatingly last November? And what will he do if other Liberals vote for Martin's motion? Kinsella's a "Kick-Ass" bomb-thrower. But does he know how to hold together a party, demoralized by opposition status, still split along leadership faultlines? Uh, no

What now?

Kinsella's excitement has sped things up. Bryden managed to find someone else to quote before MPs deserted for the weekend: a freshmen NDP MP says he's against the motion. Over the weekend, other MPs and staff will probably chew over the subject, and maybe even do some fact-finding on their own -- and these days, that usually means using Google. It's my guess that by Monday, there will be a lot more MPs with opinions on Martin's motion, and they, too, might see the incredibly disproportionate support for his amendment, across the ideological spectrum. I predict -- though it is a prediction fused with hope -- that next week MPs and even cabinet ministers weigh in on the subject, and that Martin's little private member's motion turns into something much bigger: the first honest, open debate on the Canadian Human Righs Act, well, ever.

Note that, other than Jason Kenney's skirmishing, no Conservatives have commented publicly on this matter. I think that must end next week, if only because the MSM now smells a partisan (or at least intra-Liberal) fight. Thanks to Martin, Kinsella and Bryden, the issue is now firmly associated with a visible minority Liberal MP whose human rights credentials are impeccable. What a perfect political setting for the Conservatives to enter the fray -- calmly, thoughtfully, as followers of Martin and not radical leaders, in a bi-partisan display of their true commitment to human rights: the fundamental human rights of freedom of thought, expression, religion and the press. Next week will be interesting.

Some of Levant's commenters are not so optimistic:

I wish I could agree with you Ezra, but my sense is, from what I've gathered from people I've been chatting up around The Hill, that the Conservative's really don't want to touch this issue with a fifty-thousand foot poll right now.

They maybe onside with you, and onside with us as a whole, but they're piss scared that with them running at 5 points behind the Liberal's in the polls, that this could easily be spun the wrong way in a clearly unsupportive media.

It wouldn't surprise me if the Toronto Star's headline sometime next week is: "RACIST GROUPS PRAISE ATTACK ON HUMAN RIGHTS LAWS".

If the Conservative's jump into the fray, that headline will rather be written: "RACIST GROUPS PRAISE CONSERVATIVE ATTEMPTS TO KILL HUMAN RIGHTS LEGISLATION".

Then of course, you'll have the additional gratuitous nonsense from the Liberals. I can already see it: "First you interfere with the AECL, and now you're interfering with Human Rights Tribunals!".

The Liberal's, lead by Scott Reid, Cherniak and company, will go out of their way to paint this as an alliance between Nazi groups and the Conservatives (we're already seeing that happening) and more Conservative interference in independent government bodies.

This whole thing could backfire huge.

I think we've already established where most of the media stands on this issue.
Mike Brock | Homepage | 02.02.08 - 2:40 am | #

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CBC radio news is going apoplectic on the story, and SERIOUSLY spinning it.

No mention of you, Steyn or Macleans, no mention of the hrcs at all, but they sure like talking about "white supremacists".

IOW, no surprises at all from the CBC.
djb | 02.02.08 - 7:11 am | #

In other words, It seems the MSM is gearing up to tell anyone who will listen that the many thousands of Canadians who have been expressing outrage in the blogs and newspapers of the lands are, knowingly or not, all in league with white supremacist neo-nazis. For daring to speak out against officialdom's take on "human rights" in the name of real human rights, we are to be plastered with the tired slander, evoking, but not explaining or validating, the fundamental revelation of the religion of White Guilt, i.e. Auschwitz. We've seen it all before a thousand times. The attempt by the left-liberal elite to avoid or end debate by using emotional name-calling, invoking false moral equivalences, refusing empirical distinctions or real and important differences, instead of facing up to the real issues in play. Keith Martin has put his name on the line in an attempt to have a real open public debate in this country. Now it's time to put yours on the line too. Now is the time to send an email or phone your MP, as well as the Prime Minister's Office. We have to let them know that there are a lot of people out there who really care about this issue.

Take a look at what MP Keith Martin wants to remove from the law, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act:

Hate messages

13. (1) It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.

Interpretation
(2) For greater certainty, subsection (1) applies in respect of a matter that is communicated by means of a computer or a group of interconnected or related computers, including the Internet, or any similar means of communication, but does not apply in respect of a matter that is communicated in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a broadcasting undertaking.

Interpretation
(3) For the purposes of this section, no owner or operator of a telecommunication undertaking communicates or causes to be communicated any matter described in subsection (1) by reason only that the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking owned or operated by that person are used by other persons for the transmission of that matter.

R.S., 1985, c. H-6, s. 13; 2001, c. 41, s. 88.

Now check out the definition of "discrimination" in the first part of the Act:

Prohibited grounds of discrimination

3. (1) For all purposes of this Act, the prohibited grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability and conviction for which a pardon has been granted

In other words, it is illegal in this country to expose a person to "hatred" or "contempt" for pretty much any reason you could imagine. Do you really want a small class of mutually-accrediting officials deciding what intellectual differentiation you make in discussing religion, or sexuality, or family life, or culture, is or is not discriminatory and likely to expose someone to "contempt"? Do you want the law dealing in such subjective terms, and thus able to create thought crimes, as they already have in their very selective applications? Do you really believe such a law can be applied without bringing our traditional ideals of a universally-applied rule of law into contempt? Can any group of "judges" not be corrupted by a need to become politically correct in order to know whom a citizen may criticize on the internet - say "white nationalists" or conservative Christians - and whom one cannot, e.g. certain Muslim organizations or values.

We have entered in this country a time of public insanity brought about by the dominant religion of our postmodern culture: a cult of non-discrimination, the Utopian belief that human beings can somehow share a political space without having to fight for or defend anything, without having any commonly validated, or even permitted, ideas about what is good and what evil, what forms of culture are superior to others, what is a mark of freedom and what of oppression, what is a more or less rational or productive resentment and what is delusional and destructive. Because to have any such ideas you have to be willing to discriminate against someone or some form of religion. You have to take a stand and be willing to deny the Utopian fantasy of a world without conflict. But this fantasy cannot ever come true; holding on to it can only erode the existing order and its means for rational negotiation of our differences in free-speaking and decentralized arenas. The fantasy can only either lead us back into a tribal jungle where people have to join gangs for protection and fight each other without the rule of law to help defer conflict; or, it can only lead us into some kind of totalitarian order where no one, save the officially-accredited Joan Brydens of the world, dare voice their opinion. I mean, there simply haven't been any other kinds of reports on the current "Human Rights" scandal in the Globe and Mail and many other Canadian papers.

We write about these themes often here. If you need more discussion or links, read this blog's archives for the last few weeks. But for me, now is not the time to try and recapitulate all the arguments. As the story quoted at the top of this post suggests, this is the weekend when politicians in Ottawa have to decide what position they're going to take on Keith Martin's motion, at least tentatively. SO, now is the time to get in contact with your MP and let the politicians know how you feel about the cult of non-discrimination. I will only leave you with one more link, to a video which is a very compelling and funny, not too complicated look at how our liberal culture has fallen into the Utopian nonsense of a cult of non-discrimination:


Technorati Tags: Joan Bryden, liberal fascism, free speech, Canadian Human Rights Act, Keith Martin, Ezra Levant, Warren Kinsella, Liberal Party of Canada

Liberal Fascism

I just listened to a podcast from a couple of weeks ago, Helen and Glen (the instapundit) Reynolds interviewing Jonah Goldberg, author of the new book, Liberal Fascism.

The title and cover of Liberal Fascism, featuring a smiley face with a Hitler moustache, are a little provocative. We often denounce the Left on this blog, but we also admit in our more private moments that the Left, which one might define as the critique of bourgeois norms, will always be with us (notwithstanding that the Left are now the bourgeois mainstream), that it will always have a role to play. This is to suggest that the problems with the Left today can be transcended in a renewed leftism that becomes again a productive part of the Western tradition, and not its most serious, variously deconstructing, nihilistic, Gnostic, enemy.

It sounds as if Goldberg's book provides a serious argument, grounded in intellectual history, for arguing that the contemporary American Left's preferred policies look very much like the Nazi party's socialist program, just without the Nazi's rabid antisemitism and racism; this is not to forget that today's left often practises (not always ignorantly) forms of antisemitism and paternalistic racism. Here is a review of the book by Charles Johnson (not the LGF guy), a book which apparently has the leftist blogosphere going nuts. There were reviews up at Amazon.com trashing the book before it even was released. How was that possible asks Charles Johnson? Well, because if you are a member of the Gnostic elect, you don't have to read dull-headed conservatives to know that you are in every way superior to them.

In the podcast, Goldberg agues that many on the American left are in a hurry to prove Francis Fukuyama right that we have reached the end of history. For the American left-liberal mainstream, "The end of history is a giant college campus [where room, board and education is provided for all], or, increasingly, Europe." Nostalgia for college life, and a resistance to accept hard worldly realities (of scarcities and necessary conflicts) beyond the ivory tower, motivates the Democratic machine, argues Goldberg. I appreciated Goldberg's admonition that we take the time to actually read Hillary Clinton, the most likely next leader of the "free" world: "Take Hillary Clinton seriously; read her book - her vision of the village [that it takes to raise a child] is profoundly totalitarian... smash the sanctity of the family... if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem... we have to get past partisan differences".

Such slogans are the essence of totalitarianism, the dream of Unity, according to Jonah Goldberg. And people keep falling for them, because the dream sounds so nice in its unreality. Have you noticed the slogan for this year's Beijing Olympics? “One World One Dream”. Scary, eh? There's no doubt in my mind that all humans are descendants of a common origin. But history and freedom, human survival, depends on an ongoing expansion of different dreams out of this single origin.

We cannot really transcend conflicts if we don't recognize and engage conflicts for what they are - real differences. And to transcend a conflict, you need parties to share in a variously promising, but under-defined, sign in which different kinds of dreamers can hope to find something. The successful new sign becomes a compact which promises to work for all parties signing the peace treaty. A peace treaty is not a slogan about Unity and World Peace but a way of insuring greater freedom and differences for all. In other words, we defer violence by renewing conflict in more complex, "peaceful" but still competitive, terms.

In the podcast, there is a discussion of the feminization of the left, which Goldberg argues is the greatest difference between today's left fascism and the Nazi variety. Jonah notes that "an unwanted hug is still an oppressive thing..." But, Hillary is not the only Democract using Gnostic-fascism symbolism.

As Goldberg notes, Barack Obama is also very big on this cult of Unity. Checking out the above-linked review, I found this quotation on the Charles Johnson's blog, from Prof. John J. Pitney:

There is nothing Satanic about Obama’s tactics. He and his team are just playing tough, old-fashioned politics. What’s offensive is his insistence that he’s above it all. His supporters are swooning over a halo that isn’t there.

The idea that we should want a political leader who will overcome differences, create unity instead of productive debate in humble recognition of the necessity of conflict, is the essence of totalitarianism.

Well, I'm sure there is still more room for books on what our Dag, penning his own work, calls "Velvet Fascism". The Gnostic dream world in which the left believes that every conservative is a closet or open fascist, just chomping at the bit to gas some group, as soon as the left loses power over them, needs to be revealed for what it is: the projection of a battle between "left" socialists and "right" socialists within the totalitarian mind itself. It has little to do with the ways of appreciating a free society that characterizes many North American conservatives.

See also Daniel Pipes
H/T Four Mass'keteers