by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n I<\/span>\u2019ve been reading one of the great works of recent history, Robert Conquest\u2019s\u00a0Reflections on a Ravaged Century.<\/i>\u00a0His chapter on \u201cSoviet Myths and the Western Mind\u201d is particularly fascinating, and ripe with parallels to our own battles today against Islamic jihad.<\/p>\n As Conquest documents, many Western intellectuals and academics were delusional about the reality of the communist threat. For a host of reasons \u2014 a quasi-religious faith in utopian socialism, neurotic hatred of their own culture, vulnerability to an ideology that dressed itself in scientific garb, an adolescent romance with revolution, and sheer ignorance of the facts \u2014 many professors, pundits, politicians, and religious leaders refused to believe that Soviet leaders meant what they said about revolution and subversion.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Communist Party,\u201d Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko wrote in his book\u00a0The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union<\/i>, \u201csubordinates all its theoretical and practical activity in the sphere of foreign relations to the tasks of strengthening the position of socialism, and the interests of further developing and deepening the world revolutionary process.\u201d Yet despite such clear-cut expressions of the desire for world domination and the spread of communism \u2014 expressed not just in words but in deeds \u2014 for decades in the West many explained away this motive and attributed Soviet behavior to anything and everything other than what communists themselves had been saying going all the way back to Marx.<\/p>\n Thus throughout the Cold War, the Western resolve to resist Soviet expansionism was undercut by \u201cpeace\u201d movements, nuclear disarmament movements, calls for d\u00e9tente and \u201cdialogue,\u201d and claims of moral equivalence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n \u201cT<\/span>his misunderstanding of a major force on the world scene,\u201d Conquest concludes, \u201ccould have proved disastrous in the period between the end of World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As it was, its influence made the pursuit of a rational foreign policy difficult. It hardly needs saying that we must do our best to avoid, or prevent, anything resembling a repetition \u2014 in fact that the lesson should be learned.\u201d<\/p>\n Alas the lesson has not been learned. As we fight what Norman Podhoretz calls World War IV, the same refusal to take seriously the motives of the enemy, and the same bad Western habit of indulging our own superstitions at the expense of a clear understanding of the enemy, are compromising our actions and policies.<\/p>\n For centuries now the jihadists have been telling us that they hate the infidel West because it stands in the way of fulfilling Allah\u2019s mandate \u201cto fight all men until they say \u2018There is no god but Allah.\u2019\u201d Last year a letter surfaced from Al Qaeda\u2019s second-ranking leader Ayman al Zawahri, in which the current jihadist terror in Iraq was cast as part of the long war between the \u201ctrue faith\u201d and \u201catheism\u201d and \u201cpolytheism,\u201d the latter Islamic code for Christianity. \u00a0\u201cThe victory of Islam,\u201d Zawahri wrote, \u201cwill never take place until a Muslim state is established in the manner of the Prophet in the heart of the Islamic world . . . . The goal in this age is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet.\u201d<\/p>\n Zawahiri, moreover, is entirely consistent with a long line of jihadist theoreticians whose writings on jihad had little to do with local events. The Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Iranian Islamic Republic that today represents the most important and powerful state sponsor of jihad, wrote in 1942, \u201cThose who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation.\u201d<\/p>\n Rather than a modern distortion, Khomeini\u2019s thinking was in line with earlier Islamic scholars like Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406): \u201c\u2018In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.\u2019\u201d Or Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328): \u201c\u2018Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God\u2019s entirely and God\u2019s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Likewise Muslim Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb rooted his own jihadist thinking in Islamic tradition by referencing the eighth-century writer Ibn Qayyim: \u201cThis legal formulation [regarding the relationship of Muslims to other groups] is based on the principle that Islam \u2014 that is, submission to God \u2014 is a universal message with which the whole of mankind should accept or make peace. No political system or material power should put hindrances in the way of preaching Islam.\u201d And if such \u201chindrances\u201d exist, Islam then \u201chas no recourse but to remove them by force.\u201d<\/p>\n D<\/span>espite this centuries-long, consistent expression of jiahdist doctrine, many in the West continue to dismiss it as an aberration or a deformation of Islam, and to look for other economic or political causes. Just as Sovietophiles during the Cold War dismissed Soviet expansionism as an understandable response to Western aggression or a traditional Russian anxiety over its long western border, so too today jihadist aggression is waved away as a natural reaction to neo-colonialist sins or autocrats at home or lack of economic development or even sexual frustration \u2014 indeed, anything and everything\u00a0except<\/i>\u00a0what the jihadists plainly tell us is motivating them, and what millions of Muslims around the world who support the jihadists clearly understand to be the spiritual imperatives for jihadist violence.<\/p>\n Conquest shrewdly links to Freudianism this strange Western habit of thinking that people are incapable of knowing their own minds and saying what they mean. Like Marxism, this materialist explanation for behavior dismissed conscious motives as so much camouflage or rationalizations for deeper, unconscious causes. \u201cAnd both doctrines provided,\u201d Conquest writes, \u201cseparately or together, that built-in proof that disagreement was due to prejudices predictably embedded in the opponent\u2019s mind by forces understood by the elect.\u201d Likewise with many of today\u2019s commentators who ignore conscious motives: these \u201celect\u201d know that such spiritual beliefs are mere illusions masking some deeper psychic dysfunction or compensating for some environmental cause. And they display the same elitist disdain for those who prefer to take seriously what the jihadists tell us, scorning them instead as intellectually unsophisticated or in thrall to various neuroses such as bigotry.<\/p>\n Other parallels between Cold War Sovietophiles and today\u2019s rationalizers for jihad present themselves. The academic establishment for most of the Cold War was predisposed to leftist ideology, and so seemed \u201cnotably prejudiced against realities and persuaded by smoke and mirrors,\u201d as Conquest puts it. A wave of revisionism in the eighties attempted to explain away the horrors of Soviet communism, a change noted with approval in Moscow. As late as 1990, at the Soviet Union\u2019s last hour, a Soviet professor could write in\u00a0Pravda<\/i>, \u201cAnti-Sovietism has begun to disappear from the works of contemporary Sovietologists.\u201d<\/p>\n So too today, when some of the most blatant apologizers for jihad are found among the academic ranks of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. Their perspective can be gleaned from the titles of the talks at their upcoming annual conference: “Anxious for Armageddon: Christian Zionism and U.S. Policy in the Middle East”; “Bad Fences for Bad Neighbors: The Divisive Process of the Israel-Palestine Border”; “A Tale of Two Walled Cities: Jerusalem and Johannesburg.” You get the picture: terrorism is all about Western sins, particularly those of Israel, and has nothing to do with spiritual motives \u2014 unless those are the neurotic ravings of Christian fundamentalists.<\/p>\n A<\/span>nother similarity is the bizarre double standard that many Westerners use when judging the West. This too recalls the behavior of Cold War appeasers, who strained mightily the Western gnat while swallowing whole herds of communist camels. Puffed up with pretensions of being independent thinkers beyond the parochial prejudices of the average oaf who loves his own country, they betrayed their own principles by dismissing the overwhelming evidence of communist tyranny and failure. As such they were, Conquest puts it, \u201ctraitors to the human mind, to thought itself.\u201d<\/p>\n We see the same pathological double standard everywhere today. Western \u201cinsults\u201d to Islam \u2014 which most of the time are, as in the cartoon controversy or the Pope\u2019s recent remarks, exercises in the precious Western value of free speech \u2014 are decried by apologists. Yet the rankest anti-Semitic and anti-Christian slander in Muslim lands, most of it emanating from government-sanctioned media or the religious establishment, are mostly ignored. A punk who rolls a pig\u2019s head into a mosque gets much more attention and condemnation than a Muslim who shoots a pregnant Jewish woman or who rams his car into \u201cinfidels.\u201d The genocide in Darfur \u2014 a race- and faith-based persecution \u2014 is never linked to Islam, and the Muslim world is rarely called to account for their total silence about this human catastrophe.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the American attempt to create freedom and democracy for Muslims in Iraq is condemned as vicious imperialist aggression. Such critics may think that their willingness to ignore the blatant sins of the \u201cother\u201d even as they use a microscope to find the sins of their own culture is a sign of intellectual sophistication. But in actual fact it is, as with the earlier apologists for communist tyranny, a \u201cmorbid affliction,\u201d to use Conquest\u2019s phrase \u2014 and a sign of Western spiritual corruption in the eyes of the jihadist enemy.<\/p>\n Rather than the dubious comparison of jihadists to fascists recently popular with some commentators, we should instead look to the war against communism for insights into our present crisis. Not because the jihadists are like communists in their ideology, but because the cultural pathologies that endangered the struggle against Soviet tyranny have not disappeared and are today compromising the war against jihad. As with the Cold War, winning this current struggle will require that we see the enemy and his motivations clearly and not dismiss them on the basis of our own prejudices and superstitions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Conquest reveals Western “traitors to the human mind.” by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers I\u2019ve been reading one of the great works of recent history, Robert Conquest\u2019s\u00a0Reflections on a Ravaged Century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,766],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1rg","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1232,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/policies-based-on-illusion\/","url_meta":{"origin":5534,"position":0},"title":"Policies Based on Illusion","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 28, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal The great historian of Soviet Russia, Robert Conquest, once wrote something about the dangers of na\u00efve diplomacy that I\u2019m reminded of daily. \u201cWe are still faced with the absolutely crucial problem of making the intellectual and imaginative effort\u00a0not\u00a0to project our ideas of common sense\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1024,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/on-ewald-stadler-another-european-who-gets-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":5534,"position":1},"title":"On Ewald Stadler: Another European Who Gets Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 18, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce s. Thornton RightNetworks.com Those of us who are hard on Europeans for their cringing appeasement of Muslim aggression need to acknowledge and support the brave few who speak out against it. The late Oriana Fallaci challenged her fellow Europeans to recognize the threat that unassimilated Muslim immigrants and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7926,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/still-getting-jihadism-wrong\/","url_meta":{"origin":5534,"position":2},"title":"Still Getting Jihadism Wrong","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 15, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine President Obama\u2019s recent claim that Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam was nothing new. Since 9\/11, we have heard from both ends of the political spectrum that jihadist terror has material causes and psychological conditions created by social, political, or economic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/hg.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":907,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iran-senses-western-weakness\/","url_meta":{"origin":5534,"position":3},"title":"Iran Senses Western Weakness","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 15, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine As the clock ticks closer to a nuclear-armed Iran, the Western powers are girding their loins for \u2014 more talks. Actually, they\u2019re getting ready to talk to Iran about the\u00a0conditions\u00a0for talking some more. EU foreign policy head Catherine Ashton announced that the \u201cP5 +\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iran"","block_context":{"text":"Iran","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iran\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":936,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/koran-burning-and-destructive-double-standards\/","url_meta":{"origin":5534,"position":4},"title":"Koran Burning and Destructive Double Standards","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The riots and violence in Afghanistan over some accidentally burned Korans are following a script that by now is all too drearily familiar. As we have seen over the years with the riots over the Mohammed cartoons, Pope Benedict\u2019s comments about violence in Islam,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1159,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/whitewashing-islam-who-controls-the-past-controls-the-future\/","url_meta":{"origin":5534,"position":5},"title":"Whitewashing Islam: “Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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