It’s a puzzlement: Why do leftists tolerate radical
Islam? Begging the question: What does the man who
Newsweek’s cover declared is “the first gay president” think is
going to happen once sharia comes to his zip code?
Great minds are flummoxed by the attraction of two seeming
political opposites. Even the late, brilliant cynic Christopher
Hitchens was surprised and stunned by the blasé 1989 response of
his leftist then-pals to the Salman Rushdie fatwa. Lesser minds on
the left try to justify the wacky attraction by viewing global
jihad as primarily a violent spasm of the economically exploited.
If not brothers, these Islamists must at least be their
cousins in arms. University leftists comfortably ignore
that “religious” motivation of fatwas, sharia, or honor killings
because, in their world, everyone who’s educated knows that
religion doesn’t exist.
No fan of the left, Newt Gingrich offers an alternate
psychiatric solution, suggesting that the current president “has
almost a psychological need to be totally blind to the realities of
Islamic extremism…. as though he has a desperate need to believe in
something which is totally false.”
For those still not satisfied with an understanding of the
leftist/Islamist cohabitation, dozens of alternative theories have
sprung up (see hashtags “secret Muslim”, “Saudi money,” “Indonesian
birth certificate”). Irrespective of whether any or all are true,
these storylines have been unflinchingly driven against media
ridicule and elite indifference by people trying to solve the
Islam/leftism riddle. They look for that one hidden secret that
will explain it all, much like the last page of an Agatha Christie
story.
In the midst of our existential battle of civilizations, these
conventional assessments of the Islam/Left dynamic are worse than
facile or inadequate — they are dangerous. To make progress and
crash flawed paradigms, we are well-served by the terminology if
not the insight of one of the sixties’ less-heralded geopolitical
strategists. We need to place both leftism and Islamism in a
superset best called “KAOS”.
Why KAOS? Readers of a certain age will remember Get
Smart, a '60s sitcom send-up of the cold war spy thrillers.
Maxwell Smart was the American agent who assessed all threats to
the country by unerringly telling his chief, “I think that KAOS is
behind this.” And, unerringly, he was right. Only a higher theory
such as KAOS explains why two systems — mortal enemies by
conventional metrics — can be working in covert tandem, often
intuitively, with no strategic plan.
KAOS is neither an ideology nor a religion. It is a pagan — or
at best pan-phenomenalistic liberation movement that seeks to
release themselves and everyone else from the bonds of time,
physics, and biology. As two congruent, malignant light beams
refracting off reality at different angles, they measure success by
their intellectual and physical deconstruction of Western
Civilization.
Stripping away the flamboyant dross of “Allahu Akbar” and
“power to the people,” it becomes clear that all KAOS shares the
same vital principals:
• Surrender to passion
KAOS is a cover for lusts. Passion rules the left, underlined by
their affection for the color red. Cyclically, they mass and charge
the barricades to lust, namely: family, religion, and the free
market economy. Islamist lusts are served by defining their
cravings as divine will. We all know how when a “religious”
terrorist yields to the temptations of the flesh, it is termed
“incongruous” or “schizophrenic.” But that misses the point: in
their zeal to slaughter, they eroticize violence and feed the same
obsessions they seek in the strip clubs.
• Situational morality
To live in KAOS is to celebrate moral nullification. By
releasing morality from its (Western) mooring, KAOS disqualifies
failure. In prison, Islam offers a narrative to the felon that
renders penitence and rehabilitation inoperative. And Marx says
that if laws are tools of the ruling class, then breaking them is
okay. Protections such as private property, voting, and citizenship
are to be enforced only to the extent that they advance a known
agenda.
• An attack on meaning
They’ll tell you that it’s all about a great, far off goal —
but their behavior betrays their eschatology. There is never a
meaningful arc of progress. Their goals are a sham — their
interest is in an eternal present. Their perceived triumph comes
from merely participating in this never-ending struggle. See H.R.
Clinton’s senior thesis “There Is Only the Fight.” Or the German
book called “My Struggle” that ignited a war.
In the ahistorical environment of KAOS, there is no cause and
effect — none of the empirical reasoning upon which Western
Civilization rests. For us, “meaning” derives from our axiom of an
ordered, non-random, time-based universe. Everything is built on
that — from the patriarch Abraham discovering monotheism to Isaac
Newton discovering science. In KAOS, meaning as we know it
is an uninteresting and useless construct.
They are Western Civilization’s Lex Luther — an enemy of
near-equal genius committed to a polar opposite set of principals
and outcomes. Defeating them requires one core insight into the
paradox: KAOS, the avatars of randomness, lust and nihilism, are
ultimately a rational — even ordered — lot. They are as
predictable as the natural urges that enslave them.
We have their number. All we need now is a shoe phone.
