Religious Wars, 21st Century Version: Not Exactly What You Might Think

If you ever want to get a lefty riled, just tell him that his or her watered-down version of Marxism is nothing more than a secular religion. You'll be lucky if you don't get assaulted on the spot, so touchy is the left about this issue.

Which leads to an interesting point taken up in today's Belmont Club. After discussing Afghan President Karzai's increasing difficulty with the Taliban, who keep popping up like the endless brooms in Disney's version of "The Sorceror's Apprentice," moves into territory we've tried to explore before in HazZzMat: the current religious wars, which have gotten far more serious, and ironic, than ever, since one of the warring religions—guess which one—won't fess up to its own supremicist intentions. Quoting from the UK Times, Belmont's Wretchard explores this interesting turn of events:

Recently the UK Times described the growing realization that terrorism was already in the UK; already a component of the landscape in part due to the collision between the "sacred space" of Islam and the secular space of post-modern Europe. The solution advocated by some to the problem is to make the secularism mandatory. Religion was to be banned from public life altogether and tolerated only if it consented to be a harmless superstition, remembered on occasions like Halloween or Friday the 13th.

Cute. We've seen this tried, particularly in France to some extent, but suppressing ALL religions in public is really a "cave," an attempt to sweep away the underlying cultural problem by fiat. Furthermore, just who is suppressing what? Wretchard quotes directly from the UK Times piece:

The only equitable answer, say the secularists, is to turn the way of France and America and cleanse public life of all contact with faith and superstition. ... Professor Richard Dawkins, champion of Darwinism, has been spurred by the rise of religious fundamentalists to write The God Delusion, an “attack on God in all his forms”. Dawkins wants to take religion not just out of the state but society — and his book has become a bestseller. “If this book works as I intend,” he writes in his preface, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” ...

Hmm. Just like a professor. Listen to your academic "betters" and all will be well. Except that if we follow the good professor's simplistic dictate, we'll have succeeded, Muslims included, in bowing to Dawkins' secular (and no doubt Marxist) religion of atheism, right? Which would suit the prof just fine.

Karen Armstrong, quoted in the 5th page of the UK Times article, notes this explicitly: "There have been five major missionary movements in the world — Christianity, Marxism, Islam, Buddhism and secularism. Secularism can be as lethal as any religion. Our society is very secular but, in the Middle East, where modernism is new, secularism is seen as lethal and invasive." Sayyid Qutb [an Islamist who, after visiting the U.S. in the 1940s, concluded that Islam would have to battle the West in order to survive.--W] would probably agree. Al-Qaeda's ideology was precisely a Muslim response to the perceived menace of secularism during its heyday in the late 1940s. Proposals by European "intellectuals" to banish Christianity and Islam would probably founder on the objection that the priests of one sect — namely Marxism and secularism — should not have the right to outlaw the votaries of other rites. In other words, any solution to remove "belief" from public life is itself be founded on a normative belief. But embracing this contradiction is easier than to accept the alternative proposition that politics and society have historically been not only about systems of belief but about the dominance of one system of belief over another. That all wars are ultimately wars of religion. Viewed in this way, the debate over banishing "religion" in Britain is really the old one of avoidance versus confrontation in another guise. We twist and turn in an effort to avoid the War, but attempts to define the War out of existence may ultimately be unsuccessful.

This of course, now comes round to one of HazZzMat's central premises: Infected by a subversive Gramscianism, the left in the West is using cultural and judicial institutions to manipulate Western traditions out of existence in a sort of bloodless coup, using as its most important tool, the manipulation of language itself to define the opposition out of existence. This, of course, has ranged in our times from relatively benign manifestations, like the improper use of the "unisex" pronoun "their" to capitulate to gender agitation while destroying grammar in the process; to more Byzantine strictures like banning the use of the "N" word by white people while permitting it for blacks.

Wretcherd here charts the trajectory of leftists who are taking language manipulation to a much higher level as a way to finesse the Global War on Terror out of existence by redefining terms. It's about what one might expect of the snarky so-called intellectuals who so thoroughly dominate Western academia. Comfortable in their armchair superiority, they are long on theory and very short on practical application of theory. From this position, the lazy left now proposes to outlaw all religions. In addition, as a special bonus instead of a second set of ginzu knives, the Dawkins proposal get rids of Christianity—ever annoying to atheists—by tarring it with the Islamofascist brush. By banishing all organized religion from the public sphere, these armchair faux working-class heroes of the West will thus win the War on Terror (which they don't recognize) and wipe out the bedrock Western culture, all the while basking in the glory of being the New Redeemers. They envision winning the conflict against the Islamofascists by defining them, and all other religions, out of existence and making their own the Religion of the State, which of course will wither away. You may think this is a stretch. But tortured logic like this is so is much of what the Marxists do to undermine our culture, which is why no one follows the bouncing ball until it's too late. It's just too complicated and exhausting to try to understand the dialectic.

Wretchard sums it up quite well, although we are going to help him a bit with a pronoun reference that may not be clear on first reading:

After Sayyid Qutb was scandalized by Harry Truman's America he was later brutalized by Gamal Abdel Nasser's prisons. It may have been the low cut dresses of American women that first planted the seed which was to grow into al-Qaeda's ideology but it was the blood shed by Marxist torturers that watered it. Qutb and later Osama bin Laden saw Marxism and secularism as agencies of the Devil; but to destroy them it was first necessary to destroy the world's system administrator: the USA. One of the real ironies of the War on Terror is that the most hated targets of al-Qaeda, the culturally liberal — the gays, feminists, entertainers, civil libertarians, artists and novelists — are [the United States'] most vocal critics. It is only slowly dawning on al-Qaeda's pet hates [ —the culturally liberal— ] that the Global Jihad is exactly about them and their whole belief system. Salman Rushdie knows it; Sayyid Qutb knew it. Some parts of Europe are beginning to know it; most will never admit it even to the second the blade is drawn across their throats. But the second greatest irony that the surviving non-Muslim believers in Europe — the Christians, Buddhists and Jews — have not only had to bear the intellectual brunt of defending liberalism up to now, but are now being asked to give up the public profession of their own faith in order to preserve it.

As Wretchard accurately notes, this is perhaps the greatest intellectual irony of our time. As I have often told Hate Amerikkka First liberals (i.e., leftists), who foolishly engage me in battle on this issue: Don't bitch at me. If the Islamofascists ever get hold of us, the first throats to be slit will be yours. I am at least a monotheist. You don't believe in God at all. In the hierarchy of Islamofascist hatred, you, the true infidels, are at the top of the hit list. So don't blame me or Chimpy BushMcHitler. We already told you. But you never listen.