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It's Official: Left-Islamist Alliance Against the West

by Christopher Chantrill
August 21, 2005 at 5:36 pm

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SO THE HARD left and the Islamists have established a coordinating committee, according to Douglas Davis of the London Spectator. In Britain

The steering committee of the Marxist–Islamist alliance consists of 33 members — 18 from myriad hard-Left groups, three from the radical wing of the Labour party, eight from the ranks of the radical Islamists and four leftist ecologists (also known as ‘Watermelons’ —green outside, red inside). The chairman is Andrew Murray, a leading light in the British Communist party; co-chair is Muhammad Aslam Ijaz, of the London Council of Mosques.

In other words, the war on terror is to be a continuation of the old war, the war between capitalism and its various discontents that was waged throughout most of the twentieth century. Norman Podhoretz is right. This is World War IV.

But few people want to admit it. Ever since the Enlightenment people have believed that war would soon become the aberration and peaceful cooperation the norm. Even though the Enlightenment culminated in the warlike and unpeaceful French Revolution, this idea seems to be dying a very slow death. And it is not just utopian socialists that believe in it. Conservatives, ancient and modern, believe in the power of the rule of law and right reason to corral the Bull of Heaven, and the left still believes in the revolution that will end all oppression and usher in an age of peace and justice. Surely, war is going out and peace is coming in.

That was what people thought at the turn of the twentieth century in the run-up to World War I, and again in the 1930s during the appeasement of Hitler’s Germany. They believed it even as the titanic struggle between capitalism and communism that we call the Cold War raged around them. And they believed it during the Islamist raids of the 1990s: the first World Trade Center bombing, the Khobar Towers bombing, the USS Cole bombing, the East African embassy bombings, and, for the conspiracy-minded, the Oklahoma City bombing and Flight 800. The “why do they hate us” crowd are still at it. We all need to believe in a rosy future purged of struggle and strife.

When Lee Harris interpreted the war against terror as a moment in the confict between the western “team” and the “eternal gang of ruthless men” in Civilization and its Enemies his argument seemed overdrawn, for it scorned the idea of perpetual peace and interpreted the human condition as an eternal conflict. But events support his analysis. The punctuations of the terrorists in exhibitionist bombings, the bombastic declarations of the Daily Kos that “we will be ruthless” against George W. Bush, the now formalized coalition between the hard left and the Islamicist raiders are sending us a message. The war against the western team continues.

The team concept goes all the way back to the Greek farmers, the hoplites who first fought as disciplined heavy infantry in shock battle. When combined with Alexander’s Companion heavy cavalry the team army routed the Persian Empire, and it has been just about unbeatable ever since. From time to time the eternal gang of ruthless men has succeeded in harnessing the western team to assist their ganglike predations, most notably when the Nazis used the German army, the team built up by Scharnhorst, Moltke, and Seekt, to lay waste to Europe. Fortunately the ruthless men fail to understand that the team army is but a part of the integrated western team concept. It is the relentless power of citified western teams measured against tribal gangs—in economic, political, religious, and cultural affairs—that provides the motive power for the world-beating western team army.

Our western media do not understand the importance of the team concept either. They have been raised to a faith in creativity and a belief in the transforming power of the creative artist to break the constricting bonds of narrow middle-class conformity. They love the rebellious outrages of the terrorist gangs because they are directed against the same object as their own rage, the western middle-class team.

Still, the formal coalition between the hard left and the Islamists is a shock. It is difficult to believe that the secular left could really find common cause with religious fundamentalists of any stripe. But we should remember our history. In World War I, progressive souls sympathized with the German effort to humble the capitalist nation of shopkeepers. In World War II, progressives were indifferent to the fate of the European democracies until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. In World War III they actively cheered for the Soviets although they denied the right of anyone to complain about it.

It makes complete sense that the left’s first act in the twenty-first century should be to form a coalition with a new anti-western force. The war against democratic capitalism continues.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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