Dinesh D'Souza: Enemy in the Wrong Place

Much has been made over the last week or so of Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. D'Souza's thesis is fairly simple, according to Dean Barnett, the once and future Soxblog, who is currently lending a healthy assist at Hugh Hewitt's blog. Dean quotes D'Souza:

“I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world.”

Wonker's read enough negative views of this book from lefties and centrists that he's refrained from shelling out for this tome, the latest from a pretty well-respected young conservative lion. But Dean's comments here distill the basis of the issue: it's wrongheaded oversimplification of a complex issue:

First, if the book’s principal theory gains any traction it would be destructive. If conservatives decide that liberals are the reason we were attacked and why we’re hated, it won’t do anything for domestic unity. D’Souza’s theory in this regard is not only misguided, it is offensive. Liberals won’t have to bother to caricaturize D’Souza’s argument. He did that himself.

Second, and this is also no small thing, it’s not liberals’ fault. Radical Islam hates a respectable Church-going Presbyterian family man every bit as much as it hates a spoiled libertine like Paris Hilton. As far as radical Islam is concerned, the two are in the same basic class; they’re both infidels. Short of conversion or surrender, there is nothing our society can do to appease radical Islam.

Dean is correct on both counts. But then he, himself, stumbles in his conclusion:

One of the most distressing aspects of our domestic debate the past five years is the way our government and our intellectuals have so thoroughly failed to grasp the tenets of Radical Islam. It is dispiriting to see D’Souza stumble so badly, and distressing to think that he is selling the theories of this book as a de facto spokesman for America’s conservatives.

We'll get back to Dean's comment in a minute. Meanwhile, let's rewind the tape. (Or do we need a new metaphor today in this age of the DVD?)

D'Souza is precisely wrong in his thesis. The fundamental nature of his error is as astounding as it is destructive for cultural warriors such as Wonker, who's never had the luxury of being supported by a think tank. In point of fact, liberalism, Western decadence, including the West's flaccid social norms and wilful ignorance of its own Judaeo-Christian cultural roots, are and have been a convenient excuse for the Islamofascists to wage continuous jihad against the "infidel." Western decadence has been and remains just a red herring that the Islamofascists use to stir up the impoverished masses and provide a pseudo-religious rationalization for destroying the West and particularly America.

What we are dealing with here is what we've always dealt with when it comes to dealing with tinhorn dictators or those who would become tinhorn dictators. At their core, all they are interested in is power and domination over others, for whom they have the utmost contempt. Religion, socialism, communism—you name it—are always the outward rationalizations for the seething inward hate that drives would-be world conquerors in their endless drive to slaughter perceived enemies (anyone besides themselves, as Stalin ultimately proved) and remake society into a utopia that somehow enriches them and their sycophants while leaving everyone else either dead or worse off than they were before their liberation.

But a would-be tyrant can't broadcast his real intentions to the world. This would interfere with recruiting propaganda and would expose him to the world as the fraud he really is. So the tyrant must always cloak his radical ambitions in a pure-white utopian garment. In this, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro, Chavez, and, of course, Bin Laden and the likes of Hezbollah are all united in the end. Under the cloak of religion and moral purity, they murder, slaughter, and pillage until no effective resistance is left.

The constant denunciation of Western decadence and the West's alleged oppression of the third-world masses is the cloak behind which Al Qaeda and its fellow ideologues hide, much as Industrial Revolution-style capitalism served as the smokescreen obscuring the true intentions of mass-murdering communists like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

Dictators and would-be dictators such as these are trapped in an endless do-loop of arrested male adolescence with all its mindless rage and confused sexuality. Power for them is, at its core, extraordinarily Freudian, a means to the end of avenging themselves upon all authority figures that may have offended or actually hurt them in the past. They are smart enough to realize this stuff won't sell, even to a largely uneducated populace, so they manufacture a new backstory, recruit armies of likeminded, muderous adolescents, and have at it.

Which brings us back to D'Souza's fundamental and very damaging error. He is quite simply confusing an outward symptom of Islamofascism, its alleged grievance against Western (liberal) culture with the disease itself which is unbridled, murderous fury against a world the Islamofascists cannot control. It is a tribute to the effectiveness of Islamofascist propaganda that D'Souza should fall into this trap. But, given the amount of time he's had to research this issue, let alone the monetary support he's obviously received, one wonders how such a genuinely bright conservative light could have failed so completely to grasp the obvious.

Dean, too, has missed an important point, however, as he wonders aloud how conservative intellectuals can "fail to grasp" the totalitarian aims of the Islamofascists. While correctly exposing D'Souza's highly-flawed argument, he, too, hangs up on the Islamofascists, who, paradoxically, are the wrong target here.

What conservatives have failed to grasp, are failing to grasp, and seem determined to continue to fail to grasp is the left's true "guilt" for 9/11. The left did not cause 9/11, as D'Souza theorizes. That point of view is simply asinine. But what the left actually accomplished is far more insidious. By weakening our educational system and the objectivity of our courts over the past half century; by transforming the goal of civil rights and equality for all into institutionalized, race-based class struggle; by dominating nearly every outlet for information and by turning most into socialist propaganda mills; by employing the ACLU to rip religious underpinnings out from under American culture and jurisprudence; and, lately, by undermining objective science itself by means of advocacy groups ranging from Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to the so-called Union of Concerned Scientists, American and Western socialists and Marxists not only left our society vulnerable to being blindsided by an enemy it chose not to see. They further hamper us in achieving victory against this enemy because they actively and continuously undermine our ability to mount a sustained, unified response.

Thus, leftist culture did not cause 9/11. Rather, it left us vulnerable to 9/11, provided the Islamofascists with an excuse for 9/11. Further, the left undermines our ability to defeat the Islamofascists post-9/11 because, as an active 5th column, it wants the West, and Amerikkka in particular, to go down to defeat, and will embrace any enemy that will assist them in this endeavor.

D'Souza's absolute failure to distinguish between cause and effect is the fatal flaw in an already weak argument. Making matters worse, his intellectual error is so easy to attack and dismiss that otherwise underequipped liberal propagandists—who could never win a truly objective debate—will have an easy field day. How a conservative could leave himself so vulnerable to a counterattack is simply beyond this writer.

D'Souza' sloppy and rushed semi-scholarship has disastrously muffed a golden opportunity to re-define the culture war in this country and focus conservatives on the best line of counter-attack. His flawed argument has effectively ceded propaganda ground to the left. While his treatise may not be fatal to those of us trying to wage a counterinsurgency in the culture wars, it has probably now set us back 10 years since it diverts attention away from where the real battle for hearts and minds is occurring: right here in this country. America's 5th columnists continue to inflict blow after blow on our cultural and religious strengths, tearing us apart as a country precisely when we need to be unified. Why was this book rushed into publication? Did Doubleday even bother to give this book to an editor or a fact-checker? We may never know.

Radical Islam is not the issue we need to address here. We need to focus on and eliminate the seditionists in this country who, having led to our vulnerability in 9/11, are now softening us up for defeat on a grander scale than has yet been imagined.

Had we remained unified as a country and ignored the propagandists, Iraq would arguably be in better shape and we'd already be addressing the issues of Syria and Iran. But now our 5th columnists are trying to re-create the Vietnam experience in Iraq and are getting ever closer to their goal. The left, through the MSM, persists in giving hope, aid, and comfort to the enemy. And the jihadists in Iraq are enthusiastically returning the favor, re-creating visions a Vietnam-style "quagmire" by slaughtering Iraqis and GI's as a backdrop to Bush's 2007 State of the Union speech. Don't doubt it. Islamofascists love to watch CNN, drawing strength and comfort from each anti-American diatribe, leading to more attacks.

Today, virtually everything in Washington and the Middle East is a deteriorating mess, and we can chalk this state up largely to "liberal activists" (aka socialists), their stooges in the Democrat Party, and their lackeys in the MSM who do their best to portray our own President as the enemy, and celebrate Islamofascists as the aggreived minority (class struggle) rather than the mass-murderers they are.

D'Souza's book is an unmitigated disaster for those of us who are serious about the culture wars. It was rushed to publication to make a big splash, and it did: the wrong kind of splash. It will be tough to recover from the fallout of this debacle. Hopefully, this blog entry will help, at least a little. Dinesh, it's tough enough fighting a legion of enemies on the Gramscian left whose repulsive efforts are further magnified by glowing 24/7 coverage in the MSM. But it's almost impossible to vanquish them when your own supposed friends stream onto the battlefied only to open up a second front against you.