I ENCOUNTERED A BRIGHT, articulate young man last night who fought in the Gulf War and is truly afraid, not just of the Islamic terrorists and the horrors they might inflict on our homeland, but of our own government and what he believes is its penchant for oil-harlotry, conspiracy, deception and capitalist exploitation. I met this man under ordinary circumstances – I had joined a group of new acquaintances to discuss a neighborhood renewal project – and I conversed with this young man, who is half my age, for nearly two hours after the group’s gathering ended. Call the young man Ned; bright though he is, he is nevertheless the product of public schools. He is thus hopelessly under-educated, and he has predictably fallen prey to all sorts of absurd leftist conspiracy theories – conspiracy theories that are virtually identical to those you heard from the hard-core Nazis of 70 years ago or read in the pages of der Voelkischer Beobachter over the imprimatur of Josef Goebbels and sometimes der Fuehrer himself.
To hear such dreck from someone my own age would have infuriated me, and I would have condemned the speaker forthwith. But because Ned is so much younger, because he is someone I will be associating with on a regular basis for the duration of this project, because it turns out we also share a deep love of and respect for dogs, most of all because his intent was never to be offensive, I did not denounce him. I sought simply to admit some daylight to his thinking by speaking of history both political and personal. “In all my years as a reporter,” I said at one point in our conversation, “I saw more times than I can count how perverse coincidence can create the appearance of conspiracy – and how real conspiracy can go undetected for years. I also saw how special interests can manipulate facts to create the illusion of conspiracy in service to their own goals. So even though I don’t doubt that there are conspiracies – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was surely the result of a conspiracy – I think conspiracies are relatively few and far between.”
But try as I might, I could not shake Ned’s curious belief we had somehow brought 9/11 on ourselves: that because the main assault was against the World Trade Center, it was somehow only about the stock market and oil-politics “and Wall Street and capitalism and all that,” not an attack on the United States per se but somehow a thrust against a global Big Business conspiracy gone somehow wrong, with the entire Bush family among the chief conspirators. Michael Moore and DemocraticUnderground and MoveOn.Org and all the other supposedly reliable sources had said that and if they were against the Bush family, Ned believed them. Ned will vote for John Kerry of course, and he says all the people he knows who are on active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan feel the same way and will vote accordingly.
I did not think to ask Ned when he was graduated from high school but doing a little mental arithmetic with the autobiographical facts he had related, I concluded he had gotten his diploma in 1989. He had gone to public schools on the East Coast, which means he was subject to doctrines of political correctness and informal experiments of forcible feminization – chiefly psychological castration disguised as “anti-violence conditioning” – probably from about Fourth Grade (1980-1981) on and certainly from Ninth Grade on (1985-1986). I do not know many males Ned’s age or younger, but nearly every one I have met seems to have been taught to at least distrust their own maleness if not to despise and reject it completely. And Ned’s education was completed five years before the feminization of the public schools (and the attendant imposition of zero tolerance measures) was made mandatory by federal law – one of the legacies of the Clinton Administration and its unabashed fondness for the tyrannies of political “correctness.”
In my day, boys grew up wild and free and tolerated even if not always loved. Hence it does not take any great leap of consciousness for me to understand how growing up in today’s harshly PC atmosphere or even the preliminary PC atmosphere of the ‘80s – in either case where boys and maleness are despised just as surely as blacks and Negritude were despised in the lynch-mob years before the Civil Rights Movement – how such an upbringing would make a man afraid: not only very afraid but permanently so.
While the doctrine of political “correctness” is infamous for zero-tolerance policies that have effectively nullified Fourth Amendment guarantees of due process (especially the requirement of proving criminal intent), PC’s glaring hypocrisies often go unreported. This is no doubt because of the doctrine’s history and socioeconomics: PC is the daughter of that brand of feminism I have rightfully labeled “matrifascism,” which has become the core ideology of the entire Left. PC fanatics dominate the public school systems that persecute hapless teenage boys for absent-mindedly leaving cased, unloaded hunting shotguns in the trunks of their automobiles, just as other zealots of the same lockstep ideology dominate the mass media that reports on these episodes and makes certain a “suitable” example is made of Johnny and that his fate spreads the “appropriate” measures of terror and paranoia.
After all, Johnny’s inadvertent gun-crime is an unpardonable offense – it is a GUN-crime – therefore (in feminist ideology) tantamount to a defiant brandishing of the (hated) penis, an atrocity to be avenged by maximum punishment. Never mind Johnny is an honor student and a basketball star who had absolutely no criminal record or outlaw intent. Never mind the bitter fact the gun-crime expulsion will cost Johnny his hard-earned college scholarship and any hope of ever receiving financial aid (which, because he comes from a relatively impoverished family, means he is excluded from college forever). Never mind the felony charges (which the matrifascist prosecutor gleefully insists on taking to trial) will almost certainly condemn Johnny to the agonizing depredations of an anal rape-house known as a jail or penitentiary, where a mere 24 hours of confinement too often multiplies into a sentence of death by AIDS. Never mind all this, especially the fact that Johnny’s life is now destroyed forever, which the PC media gleefully reports (or at least implies) in the hope terrifying the rest of us into giving up even more of our Constitutional rights and of course selling more newspapers or adding more audience in the bargain.
Doubt what I am saying? Read the grotesque and repugnant truths here and here.
What you don’t generally hear about – because the PC media almost always manages to suppress the story – is PC hypocrisy: when the curse of political “correctness” lets true criminals go free (which, bottom line, is what really cleared the way for 9/11).
And it is about to happen again, this time north of the border. Admittedly there is a certain poetic justice in Canada’s plight: Canada voted zero-tolerance feminarchy onto itself, and it did so by truly overwhelming margins. Feminarchy of course includes large doses of “multiculturalism” (note for example how Canada is busy nullifying all its civil liberties by sanctioning sharia) and “moral equivalence” (another term for PC hypocrisy). And a Muslim terrorist agitator loose in Canada is surely more of a threat to us here in the U.S. than he is to the disempowered, craven and willfully defenseless subjects of Sunera Thobani and her female-supremacist sisterhood. But – thank God – a few brave Canadians still refuse to live by the craven slogan, “Better Dhimmitude Than Death.” One of them is the Calgary Sun columnist Ezra Levant, who excoriates the feminarchy’s authorities for allowing Vancouver, B.C. Imam Younus Kathrada to spout – with seeming absolute impunity – malevolent calls for the extermination of all Jews and infidels. Here is Levant’s best graf:
Why hasn't Kathrada been charged with a hate crime? Why haven't he and his mosque been charged under Canada's new anti-terrorism laws for promoting and aiding terrorist groups like Hamas? (To date, not a single charge has been laid under this law.)
Levant concludes the reason is political “correctness”:
...ever since 9/11, liberals throughout the West have decided an anti-Arab backlash would be worse than Arab terrorism itself. So true risks like Kathrada are ignored, in the name of not making a fuss. The liberal thinking is that charging someone like Kathrada would only give a bad name to all Muslims.
The rest of Levant’s essay is available here. It is revealing three ways: it shows not all Canadians have bought into matrifascist multiculturalism, it suggests we still have a few allies north of the border, and it offers yet another indication of the magnitude of the Muslim threat. But I disagree that the authorities’ silence is merely about PC and “not making a fuss.” I think it has gone far beyond PC. I think the Canadian authorities doubt the very existence of the moderate Muslims they claim to protect. Thus I believe the Canadian authorities response is more like the terror of an unarmed human in the presence of a cougar or a grizzly who is a known man-eater. The human dare not move lest he be devoured. He dare not cry out lest he be attacked. He dare not make a fuss lest he discover that Kathrada speaks for the majority of Islam.
Does Kathrada so speak? I pray not. But I am not optimistic. I know too much history.
Which brings me back to Ned, for whom – I realize only now – I am writing this entire essay, still in the hope of perhaps admitting a bit more daylight into his intellectual life, of doing so without being too preachy about it, of showing Ned something of how we face enemies within who are as paralyzing (and thus ultimately as deadly) as our enemies without.
How dreadful it must be, to be a young man of today, pumped full to strangulation of self-doubt (if not self-hatred) by the PC conquerors of our own country, rejected by feminist women as hopelessly masculine, sneered at by traditionalist women as too feminized – allowed not even a niche of one’s own, much less a room or a house or a home. In the past, the fact we are all of us male and female despised as infidels by the most murderous enemy in human history would have been sufficient to minimize our differences and unite us in the face of the threat. But not anymore; the salvation of national unity is no longer available to Ned or indeed to any of us. There is too much suspicion, too much distrust bred by too many years of gender war and its attendant strife. Ned would never say so, not even to himself, but I am sure his vote for Kerry is determined as much by conditioned aversion to the genuine alpha male as it is by politics. I am sorry for Ned’s loss. I am sorry for his generation’s loss. I am sorry for my nation’s loss.
Verily, I fear for the Republic.
Posted by Loren at October 26, 2004 09:44 AM