In American Betrayal, Diana West exposes the role that name-calling plays in inhibiting, even shutting down, critical thinking about vital subjects. Her words are worth quoting at length, given the relevance of our conditioned reflex both to criticism of Islam and how we’ve been conditioned to disarm before the Communist threat (present as well as past).
She had been reading Bat Ye’or’s investigations into the decades-long self-subjugation of the West to Islam, including The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: from Jihad to Dhimmitude, and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide–all of which debunk the proposition “Islam is peace.” No, West learned . . .
Islam is slavery (Sudan). Islam is forced conversion (Egypt). Islam is child rape (Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, South Yorkshire, too). Islam is pillage (Somalia). Islam is religious cleansing (Iraq). Islam is death for apostasy (Swat Valley, Harvard University, too.[1] Islam is censorship (everywhere). Islam is conquest (Cyprus, Israel, Kosovo, Philippines, the 751 government-ID’s no-go zones of France.[2] Such fact-based observations, of course, trigger chares of that sin of sins—“Islamophobia” (“racism” being its domestic twin)—but does mere name-calling (“Islamophobe”) make these serious crimes and their real victims go away?
In our world, yes. Over nearly a century of Big Lies we have learned to discount fact and disable logic. As in a frustration dream, the crimes, the victims, and their suffering vanish in today’s magic word, “Islamophobia.” What remains—slanderous allegations of “prejudice,” permanent brands of “bias”—triggers the revulsion reflex in the postmodern brain, still programmed to be vigilant against racism, lynch mobs, the KKK, and the like. Extant or not, functional or not, these usually faux stimuli create outrage Islam exploits as “Islamophobia.” Have you left no sense of decency?
The italicized question is, of course, Army counsel Joseph N. Welch’s grandstanding outburst at Senator Joseph McCarthy’s inquiry into the hooks Communists had into Welch’s client. West then connects the two clear and present dangers and our unpreparedness to meet either:
This pattern is very old. In pre-McCarthy times, the all-powerful word that stopped the logic process cold was “Red-Baiter.” In 1938, J. B. Matthews, a truth teller who would later work for Senator McCarthy and would himself be publicly neutralized (slimed) for this same “crime,” described “Red-baiting” as “the best trick ever invented, short of a firing squad, for making short work of anybody who dares to object to communist theories and practices. If he is not effectively silenced, he is at least thoroughly discredited among the vast flock of citizens who enjoy thinking of themselves as liberals.”
Substitute “Islamophobia” for “Red-baiting” and the statement describes the fail-safe technique that has kept the facts of jihad—the consequences of jihad—under official wraps since 9/11, silencing and discrediting anybody who dares to object to Islamic “theories and practices.”[3]
This pattern informs “responsible” (i.e., elite-approved) reaction to any suggestion that power-wielders organize, conspire, to promote a “narrative” against the truth. The party line is pushed against the interest that ordinary folk, whom the elites deem ignorant brats, might have in the truth.
The pundits quickly dismiss such suggestions as “conspiracies theories” and their purveyors “conspiracy theorists.” If the label sticks, it’s “game over.” It’s applied so often and reflexively by so many, one is tempted to attribute it to a conspiracy. (In many cases, one would be right.)
Even by raising this as a topic, one invites this charge, thereby committing an unforced error in the war of “narratives.” One then becomes the target of propaganda aimed at diverting attention from an investigation’s yield, rather than weighing the evidence for and against it.
Three dozen years earlier, Murray N. Rothbard analyzed kindred smears.
Anytime that a hard-nosed analysis is put forth of who our rulers are, of how their political and economic interests interlock, it is invariably denounced by Establishment liberals and conservatives (and even by many libertarians) as a “conspiracy theory of history,” “paranoid,” “economic determinist,” and even “Marxist.” These smear labels are applied across the board, even though such realistic analyses can be, and have been, made from any and all parts of the economic spectrum, from the John Birch Society to the Communist Party. The most common label is “conspiracy theorist,” almost always leveled as a hostile epithet rather than adopted by the “conspiracy theorist” himself.
It is no wonder that usually these realistic analyses are spelled out by various “extremists” who are outside the Establishment consensus. For it is vital to the continued rule of the State apparatus that it have legitimacy and even sanctity in the eyes of the public, and it is vital to that sanctity that our politicians and bureaucrats be deemed to be disembodied spirits solely devoted to the “public good.” Once let the cat out of the bag that these spirits are all too often grounded in the solid earth of advancing a set of economic interests through use of the State, and the basic mystique of government begins to collapse.
Let us take an easy example. Suppose we find that Congress has passed a law raising the steel tariff or imposing import quotas on steel? Surely only a moron will fail to realize that the tariff or quota was passed at the behest of lobbyists from the domestic steel industry, anxious to keep out efficient foreign competitors. No one would level a charge of “conspiracy theorist” against such a conclusion. But what the conspiracy theorist is doing is simply to extend his analysis to more complex measures of government: say, to public works projects, the establishment of the ICC, the creation of the Federal Reserve System, or the entry of the United States into a war. In each of these cases, the conspiracy theorist asks himself the question cui bono? Who benefits from this measure? If he finds that Measure A benefits X and Y, his next step is to investigate the hypothesis: did X and Y in fact lobby or exert pressure for the passage of Measure A? In short, did X and Y realize that they would benefit and act accordingly?
Far from being a paranoid or a determinist, the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Hence, if a steel tariff is passed, he assumes that the steel industry lobbied for it; if a public works project is created, he hypothesizes that it was promoted by an alliance of construction firms and unions who enjoyed public works contracts, and bureaucrats who expanded their jobs and incomes. It is the opponents of “conspiracy” analysis who profess to believe that all events — at least in government —are random and unplanned, and that therefore people do not engage in purposive choice and planning.
There are, of course, good conspiracy analysts and bad conspiracy analysts, just as there are good and bad historians or practitioners of any discipline. The bad conspiracy analyst tends to make two kinds of mistakes, which indeed leave him open to the Establishment charge of “paranoia.” First, he stops with the cui bono; if measure A benefits X and Y, he simply concludes that therefore X and Y were responsible. He fails to realize that this is just a hypothesis, and must be verified by finding out whether or not X and Y really did so.[4]
Establishment pundits blur this distinction. They care only whether a case against “X and Y,” their protectees, is plausible enough, researched enough to stir interest in what is obscured by the curtains they intend to keep undrawn. And so they sic the smear dog—“Red-baiter!” “Conspiracy theorist!” “Islamophobe!”—on courageous truth-tellers who are inclined to implicate the consent-manufacturers in the evil laid bare.[5]
After God establishes his Kingdom, He will temporarily lift His restraints to test all who dwell on the earth. Inaugurating the Day of the Lord, this demarcating event will come “like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). Rulers will then “take counsel together”—conspire!—against the Lord and His Christ (Psalm 2.2) It is a small matter for them to conspire against us in this dispensation of grace.
Notes
[1] Diana West, “Shariah Goes to Harvard,” Washington Times, April 24, 2009.
[2] https://sig.ville.gouv.fr/atlas/ZUS
[3] Diana West, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, St. Martin’s Press, 2013, 342-343.
[4] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited,” Reason, April 1977, 39-40.
[5] Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon, 1988, rev. ed. 2002.