Followers

03 June 2012

Radicals Justify Their Evil by Invoking Their Presumed Moral Superiority

Radicals Justify Their Evil by Invoking Their Presumed Moral Superiority


Radicals Justify Their Evil by Invoking Their Presumed Moral Superiority

Posted on | June 1, 2012 | 34 Comments and 69 Reactions
“This could happen to you. It could happen in a context utterly unrelated to politics as you understand them. . . . Crazy stalking can happen to anyone for any reason.”
– Popehat, “Brett Kimberlin and Aaron Worthing: Censorship And Retaliation Through Lawfare”
FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
In my Thursday account of the connections between Neal Rauhauser and Brett Kimberlin, I noted that within half an hour of Judge C.J. Vaughey’s ruling in Tuesday’s Maryland court hearing — which resulted in the arrest of Aaron Walker — a photo image of the ruling was Tweeted by @AnonyOps. This is a Twitter account “Rauhauser is suspected of using,” I reported, and @AnonyOps subsequently denied this suspicion.
Very well, then — yet we have no explanation of how @AnonyOps obtained that photo first, and this still demonstrates a connection that seems more than coincidental. Selah.
Not content merely to deny being Rauhauser, however, @AnonyOps then put up a blog post denouncing Aaron Walker as “Islamophobic” and calling me a ”white supremacist.”
Such accusations, you see, are part of the belief system by which the far Left justifies its lawless radicalism: Because their enemies are all, in one way or another, guilty of political ThoughtCrimes (a category that the Left is always willing to expand and re-define as necessary), the Left need not be scrupulous as to the means by which it advances its goals.
If you buy into the premises of their argument, then the conclusion logically follows that any outcome other than the complete triumph of the Left — the extermination of all resistance — is unacceptable, and whatever foul, unjust and illegal actions are necessary to accomplish that triumph can be justified.
Thus, the infamous radical slogan, “By Any Means Necessary,” which is ultimately a totalitarian formula. David Horowitz, who saw through the Left’s amoral nihilism, once mentioned the humorous sign that a Berkeley businessman put in his shop window after radicals gained control of that city’s municipal government: “That which is not mandatory is prohibited.”
This is the ambition of the Total State – to control every word, action and belief of its subjects — and the proclamations of altruistic purpose by which the Left justifies that ambition must be recognized as excuses and pretexts. The ostensible and publicly declared goals of radicals vary, but never their methods.
“In obtaining and securing their power, the Assembly proceeds upon principles the most opposite to those which appear to direct them in the use of it. An observation on this difference will let us into the true spirit of their conduct. Everything which they have done, or continue to do, in order to obtain and keep their power, is by the most common arts. They proceed exactly as their ancestors of ambition have done before them. Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and violences, you can find nothing at all that is new. They follow precedents and examples with the punctilious exactness of a pleader. They never depart an iota from the authentic formulas of tyranny and usurpation. But in all the regulations relative to the public good, the spirit has been the very reverse of this. There they commit the whole to the mercy of untried speculations; they abandon the dearest interests of the public to those loose theories, to which none of them would choose to trust the slightest of his private concerns. They make this difference, because in their desire of obtaining and securing power they are thoroughly in earnest; there they travel in the beaten road. The public interests, because about them they have no real solicitude, they abandon wholly to chance: I say to chance, because their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their tendency beneficial.”
– Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
The tendencies that Burke observed in the French Revolution might easily be discerned in events nearer and more recent. The “artifices, frauds, and violences” of the contemporary Left in America are tediously familiar, and the “loose theories” to which they would “abandon the dearest interests of the public” have not gained any additional credibility by the passage of more than two centuries.
Understanding the logic of radicalism, and examining at close range the tactical application of this logic, we know the Left’s opponents cannot win by playing according to the Left’s rules.
@AnonyOps presumes that it is sufficient to cite Aaron Walker’s writings about Islam as proof of Walker’s moral inferiority — for this sort of politicized “morality” is the only standard the Left recognizes — and the argument is over: Everyone must choose between either endorsing “Islamophobia” or else assenting to Walker’s destruction as a fate he justly deserves. The traveler is waylaid on the road to Jericho and who will dare come to his assistance?
The anonymous accuser wishes to intimidate Walker’s would-be allies by making them fear that if they defend him, they’ll be targeted with guilt-by-association smears. But how stupid does @AnonyOps think we are? If the entirety of the Left’s opposition can be condemned as “racists, homophobes, hatemongers, and bigots,” then what have we to fear from such accusations?
America is still a free country, liberty is not yet dead, and innocent citizens need not tremble at imprecations from @AnonyOps, who speaks on behalf of an international criminal conspiracy — which is what “Anonymous” is. There was  a huge bust last July, former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown got raided by the FBI in March, and several members of the “LulzSec” cell are now under federal indictment.
The proud boasting of @AnonyOps is ill-advised, considering that the feds may come knocking at his door any minute. There is an ongoing investigation and, while I have no specific reason to believe that @AnonyOps is complicit in any actual felonies, he is almost certainly under surveillance by the FBI’s Cyber Crime Unit. Perhaps @AnonyOps should ask Brett “Not a Racist” Kimberlin what federal prison is like.
– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown


UPDATE (Smitty): Welcome, Instapundit readers!
UPDATE II (RSM): Linked by The Lonely Conservative, That Mr. G Guy, Doug Hagin at Daley Gator, Dyspepsia Generation and The Camp of the Saints — thanks!
As to Bill Quick’s concerns that the Right might sometimes be guilty of bringing a knife to the Left’s gunfight — well, yes, often this is a problem. The Republican Party has a few too many people enslaved by the Culture of Niceness, as we might call it. Some people cannot distinguish between “niceness” — a superficial adherence to the rules of social etiquette — and the fundamental principles of morality. Conflating the two things results in a sort of polite savagery.
That is perhaps a discussion we can take up later, when we are not in the heat of battle. My point is that honorable causes cannot be advanced by dishonorable means, and the Left’s constant accusations that the Right is motivated by bad faith — that conservatives are all about greed and hate and war, etc. — constitute a pre-emptive excuse for the Left’s own wickedness. The Left does not hesitate to lie or cheat because they have convinced themselves that their Cause imparts to them a mantle of moral superiority that frees them from any obligation to respect the law or to obey ordinary codes of morality.
Ted Kennedy was an obnoxious drunken fool, and yet a hero to the Left. Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.
Point out that the Occupy encampments are full of monstrous criminality, and the Left eloquently replies: RAAAAACIST!
THE KIMBERLIN FILES:
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)