PrintAugust 3, 2010
Europe's Lynch Mob Mentality
John Cleese is one of the great comedians, though his work is uneven. You can see his recent gags on YouTube, where he goes from very funny to obnoxiously hateful. That happens when he talks about American football. We don't really use our feet on the football often enough to justify the word "foot-ball," says Mr. Cleese. Well, whatever.
Comedians have to be good at faking emotions, but Cleese's feelings are not faked. If you watch carefully, you can see that he is expressing real rage and hatred in his rant about football. Cleese used to put on exaggerated emotions that looked funny because they were so over the top. Not anymore. This is real, hot rage. I am sorry to see it.
But now we see it from other celebrities, and anti-American hatred is spilling over into bad old-fashioned anti-Semitism -- and privately, surely into anti-black racism, anti-woman rants, the whole lot. That is why Obama can talk about blacks as "mongrels" on television and why gangsta rappers thrive on the n-word -- given their tiny vocabularies, most don't have much choice. It's why Oliver Stone can say vile things about Jews in public, and even why fellow Hollywood sociopath Mel Gibson does that, too, to a cop. Whoopi Goldberg can rationalize child rape, and even Meryl Streep, who seemed at one time to be the modern Kathryn Hepburn, is now merrily descending into the gutter. It is simply amazing.
Comedians get a lot of latitude, and different people laugh at different gags. It's not Mr. Cleese's jokes that I care about. It's his foaming-at-the-mouth rage when he talks about America. It looks like he recorded this video at the height of Europe's lynch mob rage against George W. Bush. Cleese used to play a furiously over-controlled English upper-class character. Today, he has become the man he used to laugh at. He is not a happy man.
Hatred of America is very common in Britain. Famous British novelists -- Graham Greene, John Le Carré -- who are hard Leftists really suffer from their own boiling rage. Hatred runs through their otherwise fine work. Once you pay attention, you can see it like a blood-red welt smeared across the page.
I remember a tour guide some years ago in Britain, a woman old enough to remember World War Two. She was passionate in her defense of America, which was coming under attack in the Euromedia. I've met other Europeans who feel that way; like American conservatives, they hold their tongues, but they are bubbling away all the same. Europe is in bitter conflict with itself.
Anti-Americanism is a mob phenomenon, like so much in contemporary Europe, stirred up by an endless, daily, obsessive supply of media smears, mostly false, absurd, or dubious. The website Davidsmedienkritik tracks this foaming-at-the-mouth rage in Germany, where it is eerily common.
Anti-American rage is whipped up by the Euromedia, of course, and they are run by the Eurocracy, so we know where it's coming from. We can even guess at the motivation -- after all, America is the only safe target available today. Europeans can't insult the Russians because they are still scared of Moscow. They can't criticize Muslims for fear of being stabbed or head-chopped by some kid on the street. They cannot criticize people who are lazy, who exploit the welfare system, druggies, Islamic fascists, radical leftists, criminals, sexually destructive people, or anyone else. The Nanny State has made itself the guardian of all those pitiable folk, and it will not tolerate a word of criticism. It is a kind of reign of terror -- an upside-down Victorian morality, but just as intolerant.
...Except for attacking Israel, that is, which is just as safe a target as America. If you insult a Muslim teenager who wants to pick your pockets, you might get stabbed. But it's fine to sneer at Israel because the Mossad is not going to come after you. They have other things to worry about. As a result, all the instruments of social control -- teachers, cops, politicians, media -- have turned tail in the most cowardly fashion. Cowardice is the reigning creed in Europe today. It is a poor substitute for Christianity.
Euromediots insist that attacking Israel is fine because that's not anti-Semitic, but that is a distinction without a difference. The Left in Europe has recruited radical leftist Jews to serve as fronts for anti-Israel agitprop, just as Obama has done with J Street. But of course, those genetic Jews are not Jews in the sense of feeling any real attachment to their people. They are leftist ideologues, like Leon Trotsky. They have found a secular religion, and they don't care whom they shoot as long as it promotes the agenda. In a very important sense, they are un-Jewish -- not because they are irreligious, but because they are hostile to the welfare of their own people. And the un-Jewish left peddles the bizarre notion that Israel doesn't allow for rational criticism of its policies. Go to Israel, and all you hear is political criticism. The Knesset sounds like a wrestling ring. Free speech is all over the place.
People like Chomsky truly hate Israel with a dreadfully emotional hatred. It doesn't look healthy. But it is enthusiastically applauded on the Left. Chomsky has made his leftist career out of it...which tells us all we need to know.
We know this is how they operate. It's only our ongoing sense of decency that keeps us thinking, Oh, no they can't be doing that shabby trick again! Outraging decency is their specialty; they have to get more and more extreme. They compete to be nastier and more indecent than the next rad-lib. Screaming chimps act just like that when bachelor clans see each other. The Klan must have been like that.
Well, they've been doing it since Marx, and they still are stuck on it, like a Tourette's patient. We can spot the same moves with monotonous regularity. "There they go again," as Ronald Reagan said on a memorable occasion. Well, there they do go again. It's always a false front, it's always a lie, it's always calculated to disturb normal, decent people. That's the meaning of "agitprop." It comes down to a compulsive, in-your-face betrayal of normal and decent human values. Obama has this little tic with one of his fingers, as video recorded in the Hillary debate, and the others seem to be just like that, except they can't stop that little tic from going off on its own.
These nasty habits aren't accidental. They plan them, as we can see from the Journolist e-mails, or the CRU Hadley emails. They are gaming decent people the way they know will upset their victims to the max. It's been practiced on their parents, I suppose.
Anti-Semitism and race-baiting come down to emotional displacement. It doesn't matter who the scapegoat is. It is just an explosion of that boiling inner rage, the kind that has been learned and practiced for years and years. That is why indecent hatred of America instantly raises the question of whom else the hater hates. They just have a need to throw vile public insults regardless of the target. This is why the Left is so good at switching targets from day to day. Today it's Trig Palin; tomorrow it might be the Pope. Then it might be the Jews, the white, the blacks, on and on. Once you start the mob psychology, you don't know where it's going to stop.
Europeans vent against America because they are envious, because they still are Euro-imperialists, and because they have a craving to feel superior to others. It's all part of their well-known sophistication.
The word "scapegoat" comes, of course, from the Hebrew Bible, in an ancient ritual where a sacrificial goat was symbolically burdened with the sins of the community and driven off a cliff. The death of the goat was a symbolic purification, and undoing of sin. Guilt sacrifices are extremely common in the ancient world, and when it comes to basic emotions, we haven't changed one little bit.
Emotionally, we still seek scapegoats -- unless we have somehow learned to control our own blaming reflexes. This is where we come back to civilized behavior. Civilization is the ability to control our own destructive impulses, all the passions that reduce us to spitting cats. Civilized behavior should be the highest goal in raising a child. As I look at young people around me, I think we have utterly failed to teach them the most important thing.
In the U.S. and Europe, the word "racist" has now been twisted into its opposite. It is routinely used to bully decent people. It is a mob tactic.
Alinsky's Rules for Radicals recommends scapegoating as a power tactic -- in the same way Alinsky's own parents were scapegoated by mobs back in Russia. In old Russia and Poland, the Jews were constant victims, but scapegoating knows no boundaries. The Russian army is still notorious today for scapegoating new recruits.
Europe's tantrums don't look attractive. They are disgusting in the light of Europe's long history of mob politics -- Catholics against Protestants, French against the Germans, and almost everybody against the Jews or the gypsies, or any available victims. Blue-eyed angels would be scapegoated if they were a safe group to rage at.
For decades after Hitler, Europeans behaved as if they understood all that very profoundly. I think they did understand. Post-war West Germany was a decent place.
But starting in 1968, the radical Left took over, just as it did here. Euroradicals and U.S. radicals are clones. From Alinsky and his kind, they learned to become more primitive, more enraged, less civilized. They are now in power.
Modern Eurosocialism is a huge civilizational failure. The reason is easy to see. Like Obama, Europe's political class is always looking for somebody else to blame. That is immature and regressive. But it's not just emotional immaturity, because Eurosocialists manipulate public blame for political power, just as Otto von Bismarck did. Scapegoating is how they squeeze higher taxes out of the productive people to feed their Machine, which never stops asking for more.
Eurosocialism has become a giant clone of its own worst members. That is a pathology, and it needs a cure. If Obama has his way, we will end up like them.
Let's not do that.
