Friday, August 11, 2017

Real-Problemerism pierces through to the two Mainstreams

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Some of my readers, particularly those who haven't read much else I've written, would immediately say "Huh?" to my title.

Real-Problemerism pierces through to the two Mainstreams

I admit that "Real-Problemerism" is a cumbersome coinage; but I only use it because I can't find a good alternative, other than conspiracy theory.  I hesitate to use the latter because it has a tendency to lurch off the rails into unwanted territory.  At any rate, the "real problem" to which my coinage alludes is the belief that behind the problem of Islam lies a deeper, "real" problem -- some Dastardly Cabal of Evil Leftists (and/or a host of other supposed synonyms, including "Globalists" and "cultural Marxists" and "Gramscians" and.... etc.).

(The "two Mainstreams" to which I refer are the broad Western mainstream and the considerably smaller Counter-Jihad Mainstream.)

So this episode of it that pierced through to the two Mainstreams was reported the other day on Jihad Watch:

READ the memo on globalism and Islamic infiltration that led McMaster to fire its author from NSC 

Typically, Robert Spencer seems to be playing a game where he sorta kinda is supporting what he's reporting (that the memo tells the truth) and yet he's neutral about it.

The memo by Rich Higgins, a staffer of Trump's National Security Council, is a fascinating read.  As I kept penetrating into it by my reading, I experienced myself feeling increasingly dismayed by the Real Problemer tonality of it.  I also found it eerily rational sounding in a Breivikian sort of way. 

Typically, most of the Jihad Watchers were reflexively approving.  One reader, however, had a nicely scathing dressing-down of the whole "memo":

Quote:

billybob says August 11, 2017 at 3:24 pm

The article was a fascinating read. Though I have previously encountered echos of this dystopian vision many times before, this was the first time I have sat down and read an entire essay on it from end to end.

As I read, it was easy to map onto it many things that I have observed over the past few years. If someone said to me “It looks as if…”, or “It’s like…” and pick any of the observations from the above article, it would be a valid observation. But to put this all together as it is presented is a full-blown, mad gone totally bonkers conspiracy theory. It posits that certain adversaries are working in concert to implement some Cultural Marxist agenda. Who exactly are these “Adversaries”? Going back through the article we can determine exactly who the Enemy is…

the hard left
they
The establishment those that benefit
this cabal those from within
the “deep state”
The Opposition ([not] limited to Marxists)
Globalists and islamists
Global Corporatists & Bankers
Democratic Leadership
the Republican Establishment
islamists
the left aligned with islamist organizations
The economic drivers behind the Marxist and Islamist ideologues
Urban Real Estate
International Banking
certain business cartels in league with cultural Marxists/corporatists/islamists

We are told that “some benefit from it while others are captured by it; including “deep state” actors, globalists, bankers, islamists, and establishment Republicans”.

What I would like to know is how do all these diverse groups coordinate their actions? Where do they all meet and how often? How is the organization structured and financed? Who is in control of this nefarious subversive group? How does one apply for membership? Are there dividends paid out to members? …and finally, how did they bring down the World Trade Centre?

See what I mean? When you pick it apart, it is, thankfully, just another wild conspiracy theory from the Truthers, the kind of thing that you might find on InfoWars. No wonder this cuck was fired!

Unquote.

Naturally, when one Jihad Watcher (whose name I've never seen before -- "WorkingClassPost") objected without really offering any counter-argument -- one of the "Rabbit Pack", one "gravenimage", cheerled him on with an "Agreed", also without offering a shred of a reason why she disagrees with billybob. 

More broadly, if we widen our unduly narrow focus impressed upon us by the likes of Rich Higgins and so many of the Real Problemers in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, this "real problem" as framed so antiseptically by Higgins rather dissolves when reading just one of thousands of works analyzing the West in the past two to three hundred years.  For example,

"Anatole France and Modernist Catholicism", by Herbert L. Stewart, in The American Journal of Theology, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan., 1920), pp. 30-45.

Available in pdf format (though the reader may have to go through a hoop or two of registration, but not any appreciable pains).

This work, among thousands of others (for another example, the observations of Heinrich Heine of his surrounding Western culture in the 19th century), would disabuse any but the most resolutely illiterate of the Real Problemer implication that it is not a vast, amorphous socio-cultural phenomenon afoot here, but rather only some Machiavellian manipulation of the West by a shadowy cabal.

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