PrintApril 5, 2011
The Lazy Left Settles
I have two liberal friends who love Amerindian peoples enough to go to sweat lodge retreats and medicine rituals. They passionately argue on behalf of Native Americans, and are dead set against Western culture. Naturally they are liberals --- and no, they aren't willing to give their homes back to the nearest Native American tribe to make up for our past sins.
My friends are "settlers" who live in denial of their own family history. Their self-righteous cant on behalf of Siberian settlers in America -- also known as "Native" Americans -- is strictly limited to loud talk.
It's slightly maddening to see the fat and lazy hypocrisy of liberals about any serious issue, from the Cambodian genocide (it was Nixon's fault) to the New York Times' betrayal of CIA agents (Bush's fault!), all the way to the survival of Israel. It's a sort of projective test of how honest liberals are, and how much they shut their minds to people who cannot live fat and lazy lives, protected by invisible cops and soldiers to defend their woefully ignorant way of life.
The left's hypocrisy about Israel has gone far out of sane limits, but we get so used to the propaganda that we forget there are real people who have to live with the results. When three Israeli children and their parents were stabbed to death by Arabs a few weeks ago, the media barely took notice. Reuters and AP called the victims "settlers," implying they were invaders killed by the native Palestinians in heroic defense of their homeland. But "Palestine" is the Roman name for the land previously called Israel or Judah by people who lived there. "Palestinian" is the Latin version of the Semitic word "Philistines," the peoples who lived where Lebanon is now. The Philistines are believed to be the "sea peoples" who invaded that land during the time of the Hittites, and who "settled" there. Today's "Palestinians" have no known relationship to "Philistines," and didn't know that they were Palestinians until their political elites made the story up.
Borders and peoples are in constant motion, as any historical map will tell you. There are no permanent natives, even in Africa, which has the most genetic variability of any continent in the world, along with constant tribal migrations from one part to another. In Africa every tribal group consists of "settlers."
Human beings are basically quarrelsome nomads; during most of our history we have been hunters and gatherers, like the Inuit until recently, and the San people of South Africa. Humans "settle" from time to time and then move on again. Fifty-three million Muslims have "settled" in Europe in the last few decades, but the media never call them "settlers." It's the people who criticize hostile immigrant groups who are the racists, according to the left.
You see, some people have the right to "settle" anywhere they like, and other people don't. It's just what the White House said last week about Libya, "We don't make decisions about questions like intervention based on consistency or precedent."
"No consistency or precedent." Yup. Sounds like the same folks.
I keep thinking about leftist propaganda as a kind of mass pathology. All psychopathologies have to meet at least one of two defining criteria. One is the risk of doing harm to oneself or others. The second criterion has to do with reality-testing. The two go together, of course, because if you distort reality badly enough, you can harm yourself and others and still think that you're doing good. The Arizona killer Jared Loughner was a typical paranoid psychotic, who killed people because he was convinced they were evil. The media never tell you that, because the left needs to blame it on the usual scapegoats, but psychiatrists and clinical psychologists knew that instantly, because Loughner fit the whole symptom checklist to a T.
If Freud were alive today he might conclude that the left unconsciously wants to do harm, even while celebrating their own compassion. Why else would every liberal education fad end up harming young people? We have had a whole century of hot new fads in education, and they keep failing the very kids they are supposed to help. That pattern applies to so many "benevolent" campaigns of the left that we just have to wonder what's really going on in their minds.
Liberals have a compulsive loathing for America, Israel, and Western political values. But healthy people don't engage in endless, compulsive self-loathing. Self-criticism becomes harmful when it goes way out of proportion. It becomes a kind of mental tic, like the compulsive self-cutting that some teenagers can't control.
In Obama's case, of course, his apologies for America are not really self-loathing, because no one is more in love with himself than our Current Occupant. Obama is to do 90 minutes at the gym each day, and I would guess that he spends a lot of time in front of those big gym mirrors. It's like the old Feiffer cartoon about a young woman who rejects all her romantic prospects, only to go home, look in the mirror, and saying, "Now you I could like!"
Liberal self-loathing is aimed at everybody except liberals. The United States saved the civilized world three separate times in the 20th century. The French and Germans are now insisting that we must rescue their cookies (and oil) in the Arab world. Given such facts, what does it mean for liberals to obsessively despise their own country?
Self-hatred is a depressive thinking style. Our pathogenic media spread self-hatred all over the Western world, in Europe as well as America. Young radical Muslims in Britain pick up on liberal self-hatred from the BBC, which seems prove their imams' wildest rants about the horrible West. As a result, when young Muslims in Britain see British soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan, they just don't get it. Why are those lily white Europeans always killing Muslims?
In reality, of course, the Western world keeps coming to the rescue. There would be no oil in Saudi Arabia and Libya without Rockefeller and Standard Oil. There would be no Suez canal, and the Arab world would still be run by the Ottoman Empire without Western models and aid.
Americans are all the direct beneficiaries of generations who acted just like Israeli "settlers." Yes, we have become fat, lazy, and self-indulgent, while being taught to despise people who are the most like our own grandfathers and grandmothers. You can thank the left for that.
All of us are "settlers." How did America get where it was? Mexico? Brazil? The biggest economy in Africa, South Africa? The modernizing and democratic culture of modern India?
In the last 500 years it's been the "settlers" who have advanced human welfare at great pain and sacrifice to themselves. When we call ourselves a "nation of immigrants," as Obama loves to, he might just as well call us "a nation of settlers."
So-called "native Americans" are settlers from Siberia over the last 12,000 years, and some perhaps from Polynesia. They were nomadic warriors, who constantly fought each other, and when they won a battle, they often "settled" in newly conquered territory, generally after killing the men and kidnapping the women to serve as slaves. The left notoriously celebrates "noble savages," as Rousseau called them. Just as depressed people always fail by their own perfect ideals, no humans can ever live up to liberal fantasies about noble savages.
Muslims now form majorities in parts of London and Birmingham, Paris and Rotterdam: 53 million "settlers" from the tribal lands of Pakistan. There would be nothing wrong with that if devout Muslims were willing to live in peace with others. But Islam is a warrior faith, made up by a desert pirate chief in 7th century Arabia. This is not a secret. It's not "racism." No, it's just another totalitarian ideology. If you're not willing to live by Western standards of tolerance and freedom you are simply as incompatible as the Nazis and Stalinist Communists. You are a danger to the rest of us.
Before the British voters threw him out last year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown was asked a simple question about immigration by a nice old lady in London. Brown smiled at her in a particularly slimy fashion before he got back into his shiny Bentley, where he was heard to call her "a bigoted woman."
In Europe those who question mass immigration are racists. In America those who question tens of million of illegals coming here are also "racists." But in Israel it's the immigrants themselves who are accused of "racism."
So who is a racist now? The settler or the nativist?
Nobody is allowed to ask questions about Obama's missing long-form birth certificate for fear of being trashed by the left as an evil racist. But Obama might just be a "settler," like Aunt Zeituni. Obama, Sr. did not "settle" much longer in Hawaii than he needed to impregnate Stanley Ann Dunham, who was a "settler" from Kansas. Both of them left Hawaii right away, and Obama was sent back from Indonesia several years later to "settle" again back in Honolulu.
The liberal theology of "settlers" and "natives" becomes complicated so quickly that the left has discovered an easy way to tell who's who. If you're a leftist you can't be a "settler." You have to be an "undocumented immigrant." If you're not a leftist, you're a "settler," a "racist," and a free target for a media assault.
